Chapter 17 - The Syndicate of Sterile Hands
Ryan Vance began to weep—not with remorse, but with the pathetic, self-pitying terror of a man who had realized that his wealth could not buy him an extra breath.
"It wasn't me, Claire!" Ryan sobbed, his chest heaving painfully against the broken ribs beneath his medical gown. "It was my father! It started forty years ago with the Vance Foundation! We were just the distributors!"
"Distributors of what, Ryan?" Claire demanded, pressing the gun harder against the tube, crimping the flow of fluid. The intravenous pump began to beep shrilly in alarm.
"Organs! Bone marrow! Stem cells from undocumented pregnancies!" Ryan blurted out, terror stripping away every shred of his arrogance. "The board members... state supreme court judges, senators, pharmaceutical titans... they all suffer from hereditary degenerative illnesses! St. Jude's was never a hospital! It was an elite biological reservoir! My father built it so our family would always have access to donors!"
"And what was Arthur?" Claire’s voice was deadly calm, though her heart was hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. "Why my son?"
"Because your family... your maternal bloodline has the HLA-null gene!" Ryan wheezed, spit flying from his lips. "It's the rarest immune-neutral genotype on the planet! Arthur’s marrow can be transplanted into *any* patient without graft-versus-host rejection! Do you have any idea what that’s worth on the global black market? Five hundred million dollars! A pharmaceutical conglomerate in Zurich offered to buy Arthur’s genetic rights before he was even born!"
The sheer monstrosity of it washed over Claire, not as shock, but as a burning, purifying fire. Her child had not been targeted by accident. She had not been courted by Ryan Vance out of love. Her entire marriage—from their first meeting at that charity gala in Boston, to their wedding in Martha's Vineyard, to the nursery they had painted yellow—had been a calculated genetic acquisition.
"You married me for a harvest," Claire said, her voice dropping into a register that made Ryan’s sobbing freeze in his throat.
"I was going to keep you comfortable!" Ryan pleaded, tears washing track marks through the sweat on his face. "After the delivery... Evelyn was supposed to declare the baby stillborn. We were going to give you a massive trust fund, set you up in a villa in Southern France! You never would have had to work again! You would have lived like royalty!"
"While you farmed my baby in a basement?"
"He wouldn't have felt anything!" Ryan screamed. "They would have kept him sedated!"
A heavy shadow fell across the operating room threshold behind Claire.
"That's quite enough pillow talk, Mr. Vance," a deep, cultured voice echoed through the sterile room.
Claire spun around, her weapon coming up instantly.
Standing in the doorway was not a hired thug or a mercenary. It was an elderly man in a bespoke gray three-piece suit, leaning on a silver-topped walking cane. His hair was pure snow-white, his features aristocratically carved, his pale blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles holding the chilling calm of a man who had authorized atrocities with a stroke of a pen.
Dr. Jonathan Sterling, Chairman Emeritus of St. Jude’s Board of Governors.
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And Margaret Sterling’s estranged older brother.
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