Chapter 13 - The Black Market Broker
The blood on Sarah's living room rug was still tacky, suggesting she had been violently taken within the last hour.
Ethan knelt beside the crimson stain, his trained eyes scanning the chaotic destruction of the small apartment.
There were heavy boot prints near the shattered glass door, indicating at least two large men had dragged her out.
Apex BioGen knew their patient zero had survived, and they were actively cleaning up all the loose ends of their failed experiment.
David aggressively typed on his laptop, tapping into the city's traffic camera network to scan for fleeing vehicles.
He found a black, unmarked van speeding away from Sarah's street exactly forty-five minutes prior.
Ethan realized that if the syndicate had Sarah, they would inevitably come for Claire to finish what Julian had started.
He immediately called the heavily armed private security firm he had hired to guard his new beach house.
He ordered them to lock down the perimeter and shoot anyone who stepped onto the property without extreme prejudice.
He needed to find the head of the snake, the central broker who had facilitated Julian's connection to the Swiss laboratory.
David managed to decrypt the final layer of Julian's financial records, uncovering a massive offshore wire transfer.
The money had bounced through three shell companies before landing in an account owned by a man named Marcus Vance.
Marcus was Julian's estranged older brother, a notorious black-market medical broker operating out of Miami.
He specialized in selling stolen transplant organs, illegal experimental drugs, and apparently, weaponized genetic code.
Ethan booked two first-class tickets on the next commercial flight to Florida, packing his surgical kit with a dark new purpose.
He called Claire from the airport terminal, hating the sound of his own voice as he fed her another massive lie.
He claimed there was an emergency medical board hearing in Atlanta regarding his license, and he would be gone for two days.
Claire sounded disappointed but entirely supportive, urging him to win his case and come home to her quickly.
Ethan hung up the phone, the crushing weight of his deception threatening to break his absolute resolve.
He boarded the flight with David, spending the two-hour journey studying the blueprints of Marcus Vance’s Miami nightclub.
The club was a heavily fortified front for his black-market operations, protected by armed mercenaries and biometric security doors.
Ethan was not a soldier, but he possessed an intimate, terrifying knowledge of the human body's vulnerabilities.
He filled a set of surgical syringes with concentrated potassium chloride and a highly potent paralytic agent.
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He was prepared to abandon every oath he had ever taken as a doctor to extract the truth from Marcus Vance.
The plane touched down in the humid Miami heat, and Ethan's eyes hardened into cold, unforgiving steel.
