Chapter 118 - The Raid on LaSalle
Midnight struck from the bell tower of Old St. Patrick's Church as the winter blizzard reached its zenith.
LaSalle Street was a canyon of wind and blinding white snow, completely devoid of traffic. The towering neoclassical facades of Chicago's financial district loomed like ancient, frozen monuments to corporate greed.
At the base of the LaSalle Trust Building—the forty-story granite monolith that housed Thomas Vance’s newly hijacked headquarters—two private security guards stood inside the revolving glass doors, their tactical shotguns resting against the polished marble reception desk.
Suddenly, the security console erupted in a cacophony of alarms.
Every fire suppression valve in the lower three parking levels tripped simultaneously. The main high-voltage circuit breakers in the basement groaned under an intentional three-hundred-percent power surge, blowing the central transformers and plunging the entire forty-story skyscraper into total darkness.
The emergency generators kicked in with a low, vibrating roar, but before the security guards could reach for their radio transceivers, the glass revolving doors shattered inward.
Marcus Vance was through the breach first, a heavy 12-gauge beanbag shotgun leveled at the lead guard's chest.
*THWACK.*
The impact lifted the two-hundred-pound guard off his feet, driving the air from his lungs as he crashed backward onto the marble floor. The second guard reached for his sidearm, but Marcus closed the distance in a flash, slamming his forearm across the man's throat and sweeping his legs out from under him with clinical, military brutality.
"Clear!" Marcus barked into his throat mic.
I stepped through the shattered glass, flanked by Beatrice and Eleanor. Eleanor was clutching Marcus's spare tactical radio, her knuckles white, her breath hitching with every step.
"Elevators are dead," I said, glancing at the unlit indicator panel. "Thomas is on the thirty-eighth floor in the executive boardroom. He won't use the stairs with his hip. He’ll be barricaded in the master vault suite."
"Julian," Beatrice called out, pointing toward the secondary security terminal behind the desk. "The private freight lift—it’s running on an isolated hydraulic loop powered by the roof generators. It’s descending right now."
We drew back into the shadows of the marble pillars, our weapons raised.
The heavy steel doors of the freight elevator parted with a slow, agonizing groan.
Standing inside, illuminated by the red emergency ceiling bulb, was not Thomas Vance.
It was Specimen 02.
He had abandoned his medical shroud. He wore a tailored three-piece charcoal suit identical to the one I had worn to my rehearsal dinner. His face, though bruised and bearing the stitched laceration across his nose where I had broken it in Switzerland, was composed with an arrogant, serene symmetry that was sickening to behold.
Behind him, sitting in an executive leather chair with her hands taped to the armrests, was seven-year-old Clara.
May you like
A heavy Kevlar vest was strapped around her small chest, wired to an electronic receiver blinking with a steady, crimson rhythm.
"You really shouldn't have come back to Chicago, Julian," the duplicate said, stepping out of the elevator cabin, his hands held casually in his trouser pockets. "You could have lived out your days in South America on whatever scrap of bullion you hid in Vaduz. But like all weak men, you suffer from the biological disease of sentimentality."
