Gilded cage

Evelyn's lace underwear was stuck in the lower right corner of the security camera as Daniel's mechanical index finger tapped the safe dial. In infrared night vision, the criss-crossing scars on her back resemble the thorn totem on the Rothschild family crest - a pattern her father drew on mist glass on his deathbed on a ventilator.

"It's time for you to take your medicine." The housekeeper's hand was shaking as she held the tray, and the sound of pills hitting the China bowl coincided with the last three seconds of the EKG of the family doctor who was silenced last week. Daniel's hand as he turned the dial suddenly stopped. He smelled the lily of the valley perfume Evelyn had applied to the handle, the same batch of aphrodisiac left on his bedroom pillow.

The moment the safe popped open, the storm outside the bulletproof glass curtain wall suddenly turned. The 12 cyanide reagent tubes glow with a mother-of-pearl color in blue light, exactly the same frequency as Evelyn's pupils change color when they are in love. The pupil of Daniel's prosthetic eye constricts, and the retinal projection reveals a picture of her in the gallery dressing room three hours earlier: the edge of her ankle stockings, the tiny transmitter transmitting encrypted data to the FBI server.

"Father said poison and women were to be locked in bulletproof containers." He holds the tube up to the security camera and brushes his fingertips over the Rothschild emblem on the top of the tube. "Too bad he didn't teach me how to handle a female animal that can open a cage on its own."

As Evelyn wrote her seventh scarlet letter on the mirror in the dressing room, she felt the vibration of the lining of her suit. This is the discharge of tiny electrodes she has sewn into the lining of Daniel's collar - sending pulses to a receiver she has implanted behind her ear whenever his heart beats more than 120 times. The frequency of the sting right now suggests he's standing in front of the safe remembering the serpentine tattoo on her hip.

"Are you sure you want this one?" The clerk pointed to the rickety silk tie on her chest. "A lady cut her artery last week with a fishbone brace from this." Evelyn smiles as she slips the blood-soaked swab into her pocket, stolen from Lucas' DNA database, enough to make the police suspect another serial rape and murder.

The locker room exhaust fan suddenly reversed. Evelyn counts the knock on the air duct, a warning sent by Lucas in Morse code. When she unzipped the dress, the laser transmitter hidden in the breast pad burned in the mirror: **17:03 evacuation ** - the same time Daniel gave his father a daily sedative.

In the underground ward of the Rothschild estate, ripples in the ECG monitor suddenly become straight lines. Rothschild Sr's bluish lips parted to reveal the sores spelling "SOS" on his tongue. The thyroxine injection Evelyn had given him last week was taking effect, and the old man's twigged fingers were twitching at the Last Supper replica on the wall -- the money bag in Judas's hand held the detonator switch.

Evelyn unbuckles her corset just as Daniel inserts the cyanide tube into the pen. He licked the neurotoxin at the tip of the pen and watched her in front of the mirror imitating a ballet arabesque pose. The action exposed the scar on her right shoulder, and the ultraviolet lens revealed the coordinates he had carved into the metal: 40°42'46" north latitude, 74°00'21" West longitude - the exact coordinates of Manhattan above their heads.

"This is the end of the game." He pressed the tip of his pen against Evelyn's pulsating carotid artery on the screen. "When you stole the Inferno from my study, didn't you realize that each page contained just enough cyanide to kill the corresponding number of sinners?"

The bottom compartment of the safe pops open, and the yellowed surveillance tape is labeled "1997.6.12B". Daniel's robotic prosthesis caresses an image of Evelyn's fifth birthday party, pausing for a moment as her father sneaks a reagent tube into the cake layer. The holographic projector operates in a rainstorm, and a stereogram of the chemical plant's structure is suspended in the hospital room, showing that Evelyn's mother's fallen window is connected to the underground pipe that leads to the Rothschild estate.

When Evelyn broke the dressing room light bulb, all the alarms on the estate went off at the same time. She crawls along air ducts, latex skin coated with lubricant from the latest radar cloaking material developed by Colombian drug cartels. At the fork of the pipe, she saw the arrow her mother had drawn with lipstick 15 years earlier, next to the "experimental E-09" from Daniel's childhood.

Evelyn was listening to the study downstairs with a stethoscope when Lucas's breath suddenly hit the back of her neck. The agent's canine teeth bite the microchip implanted in her earlobe: "You deliberately let Daniel find out about the FBI's tracking program to force him to initiate a final cleansing plan?"

Under their feet came the roar of hydraulic power. Evelyn tore off a latex mask during the shock to reveal a bionic skin graft on the right side of her face - underneath which was a retinal scan copied from Daniel's safe. With Lucas's gun pressed to her temple, she projected a candid photo of the old man's tongue on the wall: "Guess how the little animal who used to tweeze his work ID in the chemical plant's ventilation ducts is now feeding his vegetated father?"

The gas filling the basement made everyone's pupils constrict. Evelyn had switched out the central air conditioning filter three days earlier, releasing diluted sarin gas. She watched Lucas cover his mouth and nose with his tie, the indigo silk that Daniel had given her as a "token of love," soaked in mercury compound enough to induce acute kidney failure.

"You know what the perfect cage is?" She pushes Lucas into the explosion-proof elevator and presses a button that takes her to three floors below. "It's the prey's own bones that grow by biting into their chains."

Before the elevator doors closed, Evelyn threw in a Zippo lighter that ignited the gas. Lucas crashes through the mirrored wall in the blast and discovers a hidden room full of security screens behind it. Each image shows Evelyn from a different Angle: flirting in an art gallery, changing in a dressing room, dissecting her own clone in a morgue...

The most central screen suddenly lights up, showing a picture of the chemical plant control room from twenty years ago: Daniel, a boy in a protective suit, is crying at the operating table, and behind him, a doctor holding a syringe, has the same gray-green eyes as Lucas.