Chapter 20 - The Voice in the Dark
The armored Maybach tore through the rain-slicked streets of Manhattan at eighty miles an hour, police sirens clearing the way ahead.
Emily sat in the back seat, her crimson gown rumpled, clutching her phone to her ear.
"Cole! Answer me! Cole!" she screamed into the receiver.
Static hissed through the line, followed by the faint sound of gunfire and a flatline medical alarm.
"Cole!"
The car screeched to a halt outside the private VIP pavilion of Mount Sinai Hospital.
Emily threw the door open before the vehicle had even completely stopped, sprinting through the heavy emergency room doors in her high heels.
The hospital corridor on the eighth floor was a scene of utter carnage.
Two private security guards lay unconscious near the nursing station.
The heavy glass doors of Richard Harrison’s intensive care suite were shattered into thousands of crystal shards across the linoleum floor.
"Grandfather!" Emily cried, stumbling through the broken glass into the room.
Richard Harrison was sitting upright in the hospital bed, his chest heaving, holding a smoking revolver in his shaking hands.
On the floor beside his bed lay an assassin dressed in an orderly’s uniform, disarmed and groaning in agony with a bullet wound in his shoulder.
Cole stood near the shattered window, his sidearm drawn, his face covered in fresh abrasions.
"Emily!" Richard gasped, his voice raspy and weak as he dropped the revolver onto the white sheets. "You're safe... thank God, you're safe..."
Emily threw her arms around the old man, burying her face into his hospital gown as hot tears finally broke through her defenses.
"I thought I lost you," she sobbed. "I thought she took you too."
"She couldn't take me down fifty years ago," Richard wheezed, patting her hair with a trembling, weathered hand. "She won't take me down today."
Cole knelt beside the wounded assassin on the floor, ripping the tactical radio and satellite phone from the man's utility belt.
"He was sent to finish the job while Victoria kept you distracted at the gala," Cole reported, his breathing heavy. "The local police just confirmed Victoria Sterling has been formally booked at the federal detention center."
A heavy, fragile silence settled over the ruined hospital room.
The nightmare was finally over.
Julian Vance was in prison.
Victoria Sterling was locked behind federal bars.
The Harrison dynasty was secure.
Then, the satellite phone on the assassin's belt began to vibrate violently.
The screen lit up with an unlisted international satellite frequency.
Cole reached for it, but Richard caught his wrist with sudden, desperate strength.
"Don't touch it, Cole," Richard whispered, his eyes wide with an emotion Emily had never seen in her grandfather's face before.
It wasn't anger. It wasn't defiance.
It was pure, unadulterated terror.
"Grandfather?" Emily asked, bewildered. "What is it?"
"Leave it, Emily," Richard pleaded, his voice cracking with sheer panic. "Don't answer that phone. I beg you."
Emily looked at her grandfather's trembling face, then down at the buzzing phone on the bloody floor.
The caller ID flashed a single phrase: *PROJECT CLARA — SECURE UPLINK.*
Emily's heart stopped.
Ignoring Richard’s desperate cry, Emily knelt down and picked up the cold satellite device.
She slid the green icon across the glass and lifted the phone to her ear.
"Hello?" Emily whispered, her voice barely a breath.
Silence stretched across the satellite connection for three agonizing seconds.
Then, through the speaker, came the soft, trembling sound of a woman weeping.
A woman whose voice was identical to the recordings Emily had listened to every night of her childhood.
"Emily?" the voice whispered through the static, fragile and breathless. "My darling girl... is that really you? Don't trust Richard. Run. He never buried me."
May you like
The line went dead.
Emily lowered the phone from her ear, the room spinning around her into total darkness, as she turned her horrified eyes toward the old man in the hospital bed.
