Chapter 16 - The Longest Mile
"Miller, give me your helicopter!" I barked at the FBI commander the second I heard Sister Agnes’s frantic voice over the phone. "My mother is going into cardiac arrest from the paralytic withdrawal!"
Agent Miller took one look at my pale, blood-streaked face and Dr. Moretti standing beside me, and pointed immediately toward the FBI Bell 412 helicopter hovering fifty feet above the river bank.
"Get them on the bird! Tell the pilot to land directly on the Duca front lawn!" Miller shouted into his radio.
Three minutes later, Dr. Moretti and I were strapped into the back of the roaring chopper as it banked hard over the Hudson River tree line toward my burning estate.
Despite the concussion on his forehead, eighty-year-old Dr. Moretti was already tearing open the helicopter’s emergency medical kit with steady, practiced hands.
"Explain it to me, Moretti!" I shouted over the deafening chop of the rotor blades, holding a pressure bandage against my left bicep. "We disconnected Julian Vance’s tainted IV bag three hours ago! She was speaking and moving her arms in the bunker! Why is she crashing now?"
"Rebound autonomic storm!" Moretti yelled back, drawing two ampoules of atropine and calcium gluconate into syringes. "Sofia and Julian kept your mother under continuous low-dose tetrodotoxin blockade for ninety days! When the toxin finally cleared her peripheral nerve receptors ten minutes ago, her sympathetic nervous system flooded her heart with adrenaline all at once! If I don't stabilize her heart rhythm in the next four minutes, her myocardium will fibrillate!"
I looked out the helicopter window as we crested the ridge above my fifty-acre estate.
Thick black smoke was still billowing from the gutted ruins of the east wing conservatory where Matteo’s men had set fires before fleeing, surrounded by four fire engines and a dozen state police cars.
As the helicopter touched down on the scorched grass of the front lawn before the rotors even slowed, I kicked the side door open, lifted Dr. Moretti down onto the turf so he wouldn't trip, and sprinted beside him through the shattered front doors of the mansion and down the hidden cellar stairs.
Inside the subterranean panic room, the heavy steel vault door stood wide open.
My mother was lying flat on the gurney, gasping violently for breath, her skin gray and clammy as the bedside cardiac monitor shrieked with a heart rate of 195 beats per minute.
Elena was holding an oxygen mask over my mother’s face while Sister Agnes performed chest compressions between spasms, and in the corner of the bunker, little Mia was kneeling by the bed with her tiny hands clasped together, whispering a prayer her mother had taught her.
"Out of the way, Agnes!" Dr. Moretti commanded, dropping to his knees beside the gurney and plunging the stabilization needle directly into my mother’s central line.
I stood at the foot of the bed, dripping wet with Hudson River water and my own blood, gripping the chrome rail so hard my knuckles turned white.
For ten agonizing seconds, the cardiac monitor flatlined into a long, terrifying tone as the drug reset the electrical pathways of her heart.
Elena buried her face in her hands. Mia whimpered, reaching out to grab the hem of my wet trousers.
I scooped Mia up with my good right arm, holding her tight against my chest as I stared at the green line on the monitor, silently begging God not to take the only parent I had left after everything we had survived today.
"Come on, Isabella," Dr. Moretti whispered fiercely, pressing his stethoscope to her chest. "You didn't survive three months in the dark to lose now. Breathe for me."
Beep.
A single green spike jumped across the black screen.
Beep... Beep... Beep.
The heart rate settled steady at 78 beats per minute.
Color slowly returned to my mother’s cheeks, and her chest rose and fell in a deep, natural, unobstructed breath under the oxygen mask.
Dr. Moretti slumped back against the bunker wall, letting out a long, shaky sigh as he wiped the sweat from his bruised forehead. "She’s out of danger, Lorenzo. The toxin is completely flushed from her heart. Once we get her to St. Jude’s ICU for forty-eight hours of physical rehab, she’s going to walk out on her own two feet."
Everyone in the bunker let out a collective cry of relief—and right then, my mother opened her eyes, looked past the oxygen mask straight at Elena and her mother Lucia standing safely in the doorway, and raised a trembling finger toward the mahogany desk in my study upstairs.
May you like
"Lorenzo," my mother whispered weakly through the mask. "Before you take me to the hospital... go up to your study and open the hidden compartment behind your father's portrait. There is a blue velvet box inside that Sofia was trying to find for three months—and you need to see what is inside it before the federal agents clear the second floor."
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