Chapter 44 - The Broken Alibi
Julian gave us everything: the courier’s contact number, the frequency of the burner phone he had been given, and the docking slip number at the Navy Yard.
"What are you going to do with me?" Julian whimpered, his hands shaking as Liam zip-tied his wrists with plastic flex-cuffs.
"You’re going into federal protective custody," Marcus said coldly. "Not because you deserve protection, but because you are our star witness against Henrik Voss and Helios Biologics. You will sit in an interrogation room with the United States Attorney and you will confess every penny you took, every document you touched, and every lie you were told."
"Sarah, please..." Julian pleaded, looking up at me with raw desperation. "Tell him not to let them kill me."
I paused at the door, looking back at the man I had once thought I would spend my life with.
"You chose this path the day you let your mother kick me onto the street for twenty-four hundred dollars in back rent," I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion. "You let greed make your choices then. You let greed make your choices now. Be grateful Marcus is letting you live to testify."
We left him with two armed guards and returned to the command van.
It was 1:45 PM. The deadline was shrinking. The World Health Regulatory Council was convening an emergency tribunal in Geneva at 8:00 PM Central European Time—2:00 PM New York time—to vote on the worldwide revocation of our patents. We had exactly fifteen minutes before the international embargo came down on our clinical work.
Marcus pulled out a satellite radio transmitter and handed me a secure headset.
"The terminal at headquarters is locked down," Marcus said, "but we don't need to be inside the building to link the consortium nodes. Arthur Sterling managed to reroute the primary server bypass through the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s marine communications array."
"Which means," I realized, "the server uplink that can clear our name is located within five hundred yards of the ship where Eleanor is being held."
May you like
"We hit two birds with one stone," Marcus said grimly. "We board the *Proteus*, extract Eleanor, and transmit the uncorrupted data to the international council directly from Helios’s own pirate transmission mast."
***
