Chapter 36 - The Cage Beneath the Stone
The air grew progressively colder as I descended the wooden basement stairs. The stone walls were weeping condensation, slick with black mold. At the base of the stairs, the cellar opened into an expansive subterranean chamber that had once been an old root cellar during the nineteenth century.
Now, it looked like a clandestine surgical suite.
Fluorescent light strips hummed overhead, flickering against the damp fieldstone walls. In the center of the room sat a modular, soundproof containment cube constructed of reinforced Plexiglas and anodized steel. Thick black power cables snaked across the concrete floor toward a military-spec battery inverter humming in the corner.
Inside the glass cube was a hospital bed.
And lying in that bed, surrounded by intravenous drips, an automated ventilator, and a pulse oximeter that beeped in steady, rhythmic intervals, was a woman.
I stopped breathing.
She had Claire’s face. Claire’s dark hair, spread out across the pillow like spilled ink. Claire’s delicate collarbones, her slight arch in her left eyebrow.
But her wrists were secured to the steel bedrails with heavy leather restraints.
"You really shouldn't have come here, David," a voice said from the shadow behind the steel support column.
Claire stepped out, holding a freshly brewed cup of black coffee in one hand, her silenced SIG Sauer resting loosely in the other. She looked completely relaxed, as if we were standing in our kitchen in Westchester on a Sunday morning.
"Who is she, Claire?" My voice cracked, raw with a fury so violent my vision blurred at the edges. "Who is lying in that bed?"
"That’s Claire Carter," she answered casually, taking a sip from the porcelain mug. "The real one. The one whose name is on the marriage license. The one who inherited twelve percent of the Hale Industrial holdings when her grandfather passed away."
I stared at the woman in the glass cube, then back at the woman holding the gun.
"Then who the hell are you?"
The woman smiled. It was the same chilling, beautiful expression she had worn at Warehouse Nine.
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"My name is Vanessa," she said softly. "And you, David, were the most convenient idiot this state ever produced."
***
