Chapter 32 - The Deposition at Red Hook
By Tuesday morning, the celebration on the Blue Ridge had dissolved into an international legal siege.
While Ethan remained at the estate to oversee the infusion protocols for forty-two new pediatric patients, Arthur, Julian, and I sat in a private conference room on the fifth floor of the United States Maritime Administration building in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Through the plate-glass window, the grey, churning waters of New York Harbor stretched out toward the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge under a driving spring rain. Tugboats churned through the whitecaps, their horns sounding low, mournful warnings across the bay.
Across the long walnut conference table sat Marcus Vance.
He did not look like his father, Robert. He had none of the old man’s blustering, red-faced arrogance. Marcus was lean, sharp, and wore an unstructured black wool suit over a charcoal cashmere turtleneck, his dark hair cropped short, his hands manicured, his eyes carrying the predatory, cold detachment of a private equity partner who had spent a decade restructuring distressed sovereign debt in London and Singapore.
Beside him sat two senior maritime arbitration attorneys from London, their briefcases open, surrounded by stacks of admiralty salvage manifests.
"You're wasting your time, Mrs. Hart," Marcus spoke, his voice quiet, cultivated, with a faint British cadence from twelve years in Oxford and the City of London. "My father was an amateur who tried to shake down an American medical foundation with a forty-year-old carbon copy of a domestic deed. He deserved to go to prison for his stupidity."
Arthur did not blink. "Your father is a convicted felon, Marcus. And under the federal criminal forfeiture decree entered in Manhattan, any asset, derivative, or commercial opportunity generated from his prior corporate holdings belongs to the victim restitution fund."
Marcus smiled—a small, clinical curve of his lips that held no warmth whatsoever.
"I didn't inherit Aegis Meridian from my father, Arthur. I inherited it through the collateral lineage of the original 1974 partnership charter. When your grandfather Victor Vance died, his residual salvage options in Southeast Asia were never probated in Virginia. They were assigned to an unlisted maritime trust in Singapore under the authority of the British Crown Colonies."
He tapped a leather-bound document resting on the table.
"Under the Convention on the Law of the Sea, salvage operations conducted in international waters outside the territorial limits of the Philippines belong exclusively to the salvor who registers the arrest of the wreck. We registered the arrest of the Corregidor with the Admiralty Court in London two weeks ago. The salvage decree is absolute."
"The hull was in Philippine territorial waters, Marcus," Julian countered sharply, leaning forward, his jaw tight. "Twelve miles off the coast of Bataan. That falls under the sovereign heritage jurisdiction of the National Museum in Manila."
Marcus pushed a single, certified paper across the table toward Julian.
"The Philippine government signed a bilateral maritime development waiver on Friday, Julian," Marcus said smoothly. "In exchange for twenty-five million dollars in port modernization grants, they surrendered all cultural and biological claims to the contents of Cargo Bay Two."
He looked at me, his pale gray eyes—the exact shade of my father’s—locking onto mine with unyielding, mathematical precision.
"Canister Three is currently aboard a temperature-controlled transport vessel heading toward international waters, Elena. Within forty-eight hours, it docks at a private research facility in Southampton. We have already synthesized the primordial nucleotide sequence. We don't need your Virginia well water. We don't need your open-source covenant. And we certainly don't need your moral permission."
"What do you want, Marcus?" I asked, my voice low, resonant, and entirely stripped of fear.
Marcus leaned back in his leather chair, lacing his fingers together over his knee.
"I want the global commercial licensing rights to the solid-tumor vector—the Third Protocol your husband developed last month," Marcus said, every word dropping like an iron weight onto the table. "You keep your free pediatric clinics in West Virginia. You keep your little community pods in Kenya and Brazil. But the private markets in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia belong to Aegis Meridian."
May you like
He leaned in, his smile vanishing, replaced by pure, predatory leverage.
"Sign the global commercial partition agreement by Friday at noon, Elena... or we release the unpurified primordial sequence onto the open international market. Let every third-tier pharmaceutical lab in Mumbai and Shanghai synthesize their own bootleg versions without your quality controls. Let's see how many children die of acute cytokine storms when your open-source dream turns into a global regulatory nightmare."
