The rainstorm smashed against the stained glass of St. John's Cathedral, and Lila's fill light cast ghostly patches of light across the gothic dome. She pointed her cell phone at the three-meter-high rose ice sculpture on the altar, where a mist of dry ice dyed pink was oozing out of the heart of the flower: "Look babies, it's frozen with leftover champagne from my wedding ..."
The pop-up screen was suddenly filled with "Bottom right corner!" As Lila turns her head, her Gucci heels kick over the backup power cord. The moment darkness descended, emergency lights illuminated the never-before-noticed side door behind her - the morgue access to the church hospital.
"Equipment failure be right back!" She fumbled to turn off the live feed, only to realize that the viewer count was skyrocketing at a rate of thousands per second. Through the night-vision mode, three million people saw the metal door behind her slowly slide open and a gurney covered in white cloth rolled out in the cold air.
"Is this a neat session?" Lila's Dior jacket hooked onto the gurney's guardrail, revealing the green and purple body of the pregnant woman under the ripped-off white cloth. The blue diamond wedding ring on the corpse's ring finger suddenly reflects the live fill light, projecting the Benson family crest on the wall.
Lila's cell phone falls into the bottom of the gurney as she screams. In the elevated view, the pregnant woman's puffy face takes up the entire screen, her blistered lips slightly parted to reveal a bar code laser-engraved on her tongue. The pop-up detectives quickly take a screenshot to decode it - the dark web link that jumps up is a photo of Benson Sr. holding the baby in the maternity ward, taken on the very day of Jared's birthday.
On the 72nd floor of the Fifth Avenue skyscraper, Jared rips off his Armani tie and a crystal ashtray accumulates cigar corpses. The paternity report on the computer screen stings like a verdict: "99.99% probability that Sample A (old Benson's ashes) and Sample B (embryo from the corpse of a pregnant woman at the church) are compatible with paternity."
"That bitch is carrying the old man's seed!" The whiskey bottle slammed into the LCD screen, amber liquid running down the words "illegitimate child entitled to inherit 45% of shares." He suddenly froze - the strangulation marks on the neck of the pregnant woman's body were exactly the same as the one he'd used to strangle the call girl in Miami Beach three years earlier.
The Beretta in the safe suddenly became hot. When the encrypted cell phone lit up with a text message from an unfamiliar number, "You killed your own brother," lightning happened to strike outside the floor-to-ceiling window. In that second of bleak white light, Jared saw 'Murderer' written in Russian in fluorescent paint on the glass facade of the building across the street - the language of his mother's hometown.
Violet's apartment wafts with bitter peach aromatherapy, and ten surveillance screens flicker blue in the rainstorm. She shakes a sample of embryonic tissue in a test tube, humming the French lullaby that was Amber's favorite when she was alive. The phone was connecting to some plastic surgeon's encrypted channel, "How long will it take to put the baby skeleton I want you to remake from the dead man's rib cartilage into old Benson's family crypt?"
Helicopters roared by outside the window, searchlights sweeping over the ultrasound photo she'd taped to the glass-an image of the church's pregnant woman's aborted fetus, photoshopped with Benson Sr.'s hawkish nose. When Ethan's hacking program tried for the third time to hack into her cloud drive, Violet smiled and hit the self-destruct button. All the fake DNA data began to be automatically uploaded to the major media outlets, interspersed with the real sperm sample numbers that Benson Sr. had kept at his private clinic.
Ethan rips off his acid-scorched lab coat as the chromosome comparison chart is distorting under the microscope. The embryonic cells he'd stolen from the church morgue three hours ago were now revealing the startling truth: the barcodes corresponded not to Benson Sr. at all, but to the Wall Street fixer who'd disappeared twenty years ago-his biological father.
The freezer suddenly cuts out and alarms, and Ethan turns his head to see Violet's projection on the fogged glass. She holds up a 1998 issue of The Sun with a sneak peek of his mother with Benson Sr. on the front page, but replaced with that pregnant woman using AI face-swapping technology: 'Surprise? You're the 'bastard'."
The moment the backup power kicks in, Ethan's pupils reflect the eerie changes in the embryo's culture fluid - cells that were dead are dividing, as if unseen hands are manipulating the genetic chain. When he finally deciphers the Morse code in the barcode, he gets a string of latitude and longitude: coordinates pointing to the wreckage of a yacht at the bottom of the Hudson River.
The sound of fingernails scratching metal resounds from the church's underground morgue during the storm's most frenzied moments. Old Tom, the janitor, takes his third swig of whiskey and finally carries his bat towards the source of the sound. The night-vision monitor showed freezer #3 vibrating, pink ice crystals oozing from the cracks in the door.
"Hell no. ..." He had just pulled the cabinet door open when the pregnant woman's bruised hand suddenly grabbed his wrist. The corpse's open eyeballs were covered in cataracts, and her blistered vocal cords emitted a mechanically synthesized electronic voice: "Tell Jared that his brother came to play with him." Deep in the freezer, codes written in placental blood are melting, the last firewall to the Benson Group's Swiss accounts.
As sirens blared down Fifth Avenue, Lila's live feed was still on autoplay. The scene was frozen on the eerie gesture of a pregnant woman's right pinky finger-a code word unique to the old Benson mistresses, a gesture Violet had practiced in the mirror three thousand four hundred times while rehabbing at the plastic surgery hospital.
(End of chapter)
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The Rose Garden's midnight live broadcast reveals a shocking murder scene when three million viewers witness Lila "pushing down a pregnant woman" and Violet is using the dead man's fingerprints to unlock the estate's vault. And Ethan's cloned serum, extracted from embryonic cells, is about to unravel the most extravagant revenge in human history ...