Chapter 8 - The Midnight Ambush
Across the street in his car, Marcus’s phone buzzed. It was an encrypted call.
"Dr. Johnson?" a sharp, authoritative female voice asked.
"This is Marcus. Detective Vance?"
"Elena Vance, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Special Crimes Unit," the voice replied. "Maya Lin just delivered your mass spectrometry data and the surveillance footage to my personal terminal. Marcus... what you’ve uncovered reaches into the state legislature. We’ve been tracking a ring of unregistered high-wealth private adoptions for two years, but we could never find the extraction facility."
"It’s not an extraction facility—it’s Mercy Memorial Hospital itself," Marcus said urgently. "Sterling owns the fourth floor. And Darius told me the location of their primary lab before they silenced him: Sub-Level Three."
"Sub-Level Three is officially listed as an abandoned civil defense fallout bunker from the 1960s," Detective Vance stated. "The hospital blueprints show the elevator bypasses it entirely."
"Then there has to be a service access through the old boiler rooms," Marcus said. "Elena, they are moving the five pregnant nurses out tonight at 8:00 p.m. on a private bus, and they’re moving Darius out right now at 7:00 p.m. through the rear loading dock. If we don’t hit them immediately, we will lose all physical evidence."
"I have a tactical team mobilizing four blocks away," Detective Vance declared. "Meet me at the east maintenance entrance in ten minutes. Marcus—do not go in alone."
May you like
"I'm already moving," Marcus replied, grabbing his heavy-duty medical kit, an iron wrench from his trunk, and his phone.
The storm had intensified, lightning splitting the dark Atlanta sky into jagged shards of silver. Marcus slipped through the hospital’s perimeter fence, bypassing the main lobby, and approached the rusted iron doors of the old maintenance bay.
