Chapter 4 - BENEATH THE CITY
The Sterling family had built freight tunnels beneath several old Manhattan properties decades earlier.
Most had been sealed.
One remained.
Beneath St. Jude's Medical Center.
Richard's hospital.
Of course.
We entered through an abandoned loading dock.
Julian insisted on coming.
I insisted on monitoring him.
Neither of us won.
Maybe that was becoming our arrangement.
In the tunnels we found boxes.
Not weapons.
Medical files.
Thousands.
Patients from hospitals across the Northeast.
Their blood samples.
Genetic profiles.
Insurance histories.
Clinical trial data.
Helix Meridian had been using vulnerable patients as an invisible research population.
People who thought they were receiving ordinary care had become data points.
Eli was one.
Julian sat heavily against the wall.
“This moved through my ports.”
“You didn't know.”
“That doesn't make it disappear.”
No excuses.
I looked at him differently after that.
We found Eli in a locked room.
I ran.
He looked thinner than when I'd seen him two days earlier.
But alive.
“Maya?”
I hugged him so hard he complained.
Good.
Complaining meant Eli.
Then the door slammed.
Mercer's voice came through a speaker.
“You always were predictable.”
Gas began entering through ceiling vents.
I smelled it first.
Not because I was superhuman.
Because I had spent years learning what environments should and shouldn't smell like.
“Cover your face.”
Julian found the ventilation housing by following the airflow.
Knox broke the grate.
We crawled through a maintenance duct.
Mercer escaped.
Again.
But this time he left behind something worse.
A video.
Richard sitting at a desk.
“If you're watching this, Julian, you've discovered enough to misunderstand everything.”
The screen changed.
Newark warehouse footage.
Richard wasn't the man who started the fire.
Claire was.
She appeared on camera entering the warehouse twenty minutes before the explosion.
Julian froze.
Claire stared at herself on screen.
“No.”
The footage showed her carrying a case.
Leaving without it.
Timestamp visible.
Julian whispered:
“Claire?”
She shook her head.
“I was never there.”
The video looked real.
But I had learned something from my own forged signature.
Evidence can lie.
We examined the footage frame by frame.
Then I saw it.
Claire wore a wedding ring.
Wrong hand.
Mirrored footage.
Then another flaw.
Her gait.
Claire had fractured her right ankle skiing that winter.
The woman in the footage had no limp.
Someone had manufactured the recording.
“Richard wants you to distrust each other,” I said.
Julian looked at his sister.
Then took her hand.
“I don't.”
That was the moment Mercer's strategy began failing.
Because secrets only work when people prefer suspicion to conversation.
We stopped doing that.
And finally, we found the name of the person above Richard Mercer.
Because Richard wasn't the owner of Helix Meridian.
He was medical director.
The controlling investor was hidden behind a holding company.
Knox uncovered the beneficial owner at 3:17 a.m.
Julian read the name.
Then sat down.
Claire whispered:
“That can't be.”
I looked between them.
“Who is it?”
Julian answered.
May you like
“Our mother.”
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