Chapter 54 - The Council of the Caduceus
They fled through the villa’s underground maintenance tunnel, an old emergency exit carved into the bedrock beneath Mount Pilatus, emerging half a mile away inside a disused boat garage on the lake’s edge. Karl had pre-positioned an unmarked, twin-engine matte-black interceptor craft inside the slipway.
As Karl fired up the silent electric impellers, the craft glided smoothly onto the black waters of Lake Lucerne, keeping beneath the misty overhang of the cliffs.
Behind them, a blinding flash of orange illuminated the night sky. The villa exploded in a rolling fireball, the concussion wave rippling across the surface of the lake and rocking their boat.
Veta watched the flames reflect in the water, her hands tightly gripping Elena’s leather journal. "They destroyed our home. Again."
"A house is just wood and stone, Veta," David said, wrapping his arm around her shoulders. "They can burn every wall we ever built, but they cannot kill what we know."
Karl kept his eyes locked on the navigational radar. "David, the encrypted drive finished decoding while we were running. Look at the corporate register."
David opened his ruggedized laptop. The decrypted files from Elena’s drive revealed the identity of the Caduceus Initiative’s executive board. It wasn't just shadowy offshore entities.
Prominently displayed at the top of the executive hierarchy was Lord Richard Sterling, an internationally revered philanthropist, chairman of Sterling-BioTech, and one of the primary donors to the international court system that had prosecuted David’s former in-laws weeks prior.
David let out a harsh, bitter laugh. "Sterling was the one who funded the legal defense fund for my ex-wife and her brother. The public thought it was a rogue legal PAC. It wasn't. Sterling was trying to keep them quiet, hoping they’d take the fall for destroying my prototype so no one would look deeper into why my ventilator design was dangerous to him."
"And that's not all," Karl added, his jaw tight. "Elena's notes say the synthesis core—the only laboratory with the exact molecular printers capable of creating the permanent biological antidote to the peptide in Veta’s blood—is located inside Sterling’s flagship medical research compound in Geneva."
Veta looked up at David. "Can we cure it, Dad? Completely?"
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David looked down into his daughter's hopeful eyes. "Yes. We aren't running anymore. We’re going to Geneva. And we are going to dismantle Richard Sterling’s empire piece by piece."
***
