Chapter 26 - The Gallery of Stolen Faces
The interceptor hit the churning swells at forty knots, launching Mark into bone-jarring descents that threatened to tear the vessel apart. Salt spray stung his exposed skin like needles of ice, but Mark’s hands were glued to the helm, using the monstrous waves to hide his low radar profile.
As he closed within three hundred yards of the towering, black-hulled mega-yacht, the ship looked less like a luxury vessel and more like a floating naval fortress. Searchlights swept the churning water, slicing through the gray rain.
Mark killed the interceptor’s engines, letting the boat’s momentum carry it into the blind spot created by the yacht’s massive stern propulsion wake. Grabbing a pneumatic grapple gun and slinging the MP5 across his chest, Mark leaped onto the bow of the interceptor just as a thirty-foot swell lifted it toward the yacht's lower swim platform.
He jumped.
His boots slammed onto the slick teak grating of the stern. The interceptor dropped twenty feet into the trough behind him and was instantly swallowed by the sea. There was no going back.
Using the pneumatic grapple, Mark ascended to the service gangway on the port side, bypassing the locked biometric hatches using the titanium keycard he took from Brenda. The electronic lock chirped green. Mark slipped inside, stepping from the roaring chaos of the North Atlantic into the surreal, climate-controlled silence of the yacht’s lower deck.
The air smelled sickeningly familiar: isopropyl alcohol, ozone, and the faint, sweet scent of gardenias—the exact chemical signature of Arthur Vance’s subterranean glass room.
Mark moved down the pristine, white-paneled corridor with his suppressed weapon raised, his boots leaving wet, crimson-tinted footprints on the polished marble. He passed through double hermetic doors into what should have been the ship's cargo hold.
Instead, it was a nightmare made of glass and steel.
Stretching before him were two parallel rows of pressurized glass cylinders, each filled with pale, amber preservation fluid. Inside each tube hung the suspended body of a young girl—each one bearing the exact facial structure, cheekbones, and golden-brown hair of Lily.
Some were infants. Some were toddlers. Some were frozen at the age of six, their eyes closed in artificial stasis, monitors displaying flatlined vital statistics.
Mark stopped in his tracks, his heart freezing in his chest. The scope of Montgomery's madness was laid bare before him. Lily wasn't just a daughter. She was the singular survivor of an industrialized assembly line of clones, harvested and discarded in Montgomery's psychopathic quest to cheat mortality.
"Chilling, isn't it?" a calm voice resonated through the hidden ceiling speakers.
Mark spun, raising his weapon, his eyes scanning every angle of the high-tech morgue.
"They were all imperfect iterations," Sterling Montgomery’s cultured voice continued over the intercom. "Genetic dead-ends. Brittle bones, organ failure, fragile minds. But Lily... Lily was immaculate. And you, Mark... you kept her safe from the elements until the harvest was ready."
"Where is she, you son of a bitch?!" Mark roared, his voice bouncing violently against the glass cylinders.
May you like
"Top deck. The observation salon," Montgomery replied with an amused chuckle. "Come and see what your devotion has wrought. But hurry, Mark... the procedure has already begun."
***
