Chapter 4 - The Secret Dossier
By dawn, William was seated in his private security briefing room. Across the steel table sat Marcus and an independent cyber-forensics expert named Vance, whose fingers flew across a portable console.
“Explain it to me in plain English, Vance,” William commanded, his hands locked tightly together on the table.
Vance pushed a sleek tablet toward William. The screen displayed a heavily redacted government document stamped with a red banner: RESTRICTED ACCESS – LEVEL 5 CLEARANCE.
“Mr. Mercer, the girl you met yesterday—Lily—isn't a runaway from a local shelter,” Vance said grimly. “She’s been flagged by federal intelligence agencies for over two years. Not because she’s a criminal, but because of what she can do.”
William stared at the screen. Below a grainy, black-and-white photograph of Lily was a series of medical notes compiled by military doctors and bio-researchers at an undisclosed facility in Maryland.
Subject exhibits anomalous bio-electric cellular regeneration properties. Contact-based neural stimulation observed in terminal paralysis cases. Subject demonstrates localized electromagnetic disruption during periods of emotional focus.
William looked up slowly. “Are you telling me... she’s an experiment?”
“Worse,” Vance said. “She’s a survivor. Three years ago, a clandestine government-backed biotech firm called Aegis Bio-Tech discovered her abilities in a rural clinic in Ohio. They tried to harness her cellular properties for military field-medicine applications—specifically, reversing spinal injuries in wounded combat soldiers.”
“They tried to exploit a child,” William snarled, his voice dropping into a deadly register.
“They tried, and failed,” Vance corrected. “Lily’s biology rejected their extraction protocols. When the project was shut down due to ethical violations by a whistleblower, the facility was abruptly closed, and the remaining subjects were scheduled for ‘re-housing’—corporate speak for being locked away in a permanent black-site research lab in New Jersey.”
William stood up so fast his chair tipped over backward.
“Get the Gulfstream prepped,” William ordered, grabbing his wool coat from the back of the chair. “Where is the black site?”
“Sir, you can’t just storm a federal-contracted Aegis facility,” Marcus warned, standing up to block his path. “They have private security, federal jurisdiction, and lawyers who can bury Mercer Arc in injunctions before we even cross the state line.”
William stopped. He turned around, his dark eyes burning with an intensity that made even his most trusted operatives step back.
“Marcus, listen to me very carefully,” William said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Yesterday, a little girl walked into my life, looked at my paralyzed son, and gave him back his future. Aegis Bio-Tech is currently holding her in a cage to harvest her blood like laboratory livestock.”
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William reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out his phone, dialing a direct, unlisted number that connected straight to the office of the United States Attorney General.
“I am not going to storm them, Marcus,” William continued, pressing the phone to his ear as the line began to ring. “I am going to buy them. And if they refuse to sell... I am going to obliterate every single asset they own before breakfast.”
