Chapter 6 - The Pursuit through the CatacombsNoah tackled Daniel to the floor just as a suppressed bullet punched a neat, smoking hole into the concrete wall right where Daniel’s head had been a second before.
"Move! Move!" Noah shouted, pulling Daniel up by his arm and dragging him toward the back service elevators.
"The elevators won't work during a fire alarm!" Daniel yelled over the screaming sirens.
"Then we take the stairs down to the sub-basement!"
They slammed through the heavy metal fire door, tumbling down the concrete steps into the damp, subterranean depths of the old building. The precinct was built over a historic network of 19th-century utility tunnels and drainage catacombs—a maze of forgotten brick arches, rusted pipes, and pitch-black corridors that few people ever entered.
Footsteps echoed heavily behind them. Vance was descending the stairs with terrifying speed, his leather shoes clicking rhythmically against the concrete steps.
"Why is he doing this?" Daniel panted, his lungs burning as they sprinted down a long, dimly lit brick tunnel. "If Claire is alive, the whole scheme failed! Why keep hunting us?"
"Because Claire knows where they stored the original research data," Noah called back, flashing a small beam from his smartphone to guide their way. "The forty million isn't about money, Daniel. It's about the bio-synthetic patent Claire developed before she 'died.' It can manipulate human cellular regeneration—or stop a heart completely without leaving a trace."
Daniel stumbled over a rusted pipe, catching himself against a damp brick wall. The revelation hit him like a physical blow. Claire hadn't just been poisoned by accident; she had been targeted by a rogue faction within the medical research board that wanted absolute control over her life-extending technology.
And they had used Daniel's own medical signature to legitimize her murder.
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Suddenly, the tunnel ahead ended in a massive, locked iron gate. A dead end.
"Damn it!" Noah cursed, shining his light across the heavy padlock. "We're trapped."
