Chapter 13 - The Laboratory Beneath the Lake
Conrad Adler’s laboratory stood beneath an artificial lake on his former estate.
The visible boathouse concealed an elevator.
David had helped design the underground structure.
Hailey remembered the tone sequence again.
Three high notes.
Two low notes.
One high note.
The numbers that followed formed the elevator code.
Detective Brooks prepared a tactical team.
I was told to remain at the hospital.
Hailey refused.
“Maya trusted me.”
“You just had surgery.”
“I don’t need to go inside.”
“But I know how Mark thinks.”
She was right.
She had spent years studying him without realizing it.
Mark always created two explanations.
One for strangers.
One for family.
He hid the truth between them.
We traveled in a protected command vehicle.
Police entered through the boathouse.
The underground laboratory contained seven patient rooms.
Six were empty.
Maya lay inside the seventh.
She was conscious but connected to a machine that circulated her blood through a filtering system.
Voss stood beside her.
He held a surgical instrument.
Mark watched from behind a glass wall.
“Hailey,” he said through the intercom.
“I knew you would come.”
She pressed the communication button.
“Let Maya go.”
“She came voluntarily.”
“She came because you lied.”
“All medicine begins with hope.”
“This began with children who could not understand what you were doing.”
Mark’s expression tightened.
“You sound like David.”
“Good.”
The word struck him harder than anger.
Detective Brooks’s team moved toward the control room.
Mark sealed the doors.
Water began pouring through the outer chamber.
He had connected the laboratory to the lake.
“If you arrest us, everyone below this level drowns.”
Voss stared at him.
“You said the flood system was disabled.”
Mark smiled.
May you like
“You believed me.”
For the first time, the brothers understood that Mark intended to leave everyone behind.
