Chapter 3 - The Setup at Pier Nine
The color drained so completely from Evan Hale’s face that he actually had to grip the back of a leather boardroom chair to keep his knees from buckling onto the carpet.
He stared at Adrian in raw, suffocating terror, his voice cracking like a teenage boy’s as he swore that Arthur Whitmore had told him the Rotterdam containers only held grey-market European insulin and surgical lasers meant to pay off Hale Holdings’ third-quarter debt.
Beside him, Paige began to hyperventilate, clawing at the diamond tennis bracelet on her wrist as she screamed that her father would never deal in cartel explosives and that someone must have switched the bill of lading in Antwerp.
I watched the two of them crumble under the fluorescent lights, realizing with chilling clarity that Evan was too much of a coward to orchestrate a cartel arms drop—which meant whoever was pulling Arthur Whitmore’s strings had intended for both me and Evan to go down in flames while simultaneously framing Adrian Bellmont’s port terminal for hosting a terrorist cache.
Adrian did not waste another breath listening to Evan’s whining excuses.
He ordered Marcus Vance to escort the Homeland Security special agents up to the main conference room via the service stairwell, hand them the boardroom’s high-definition audio confession along with Paige’s rose-gold tablet, and detain Evan and Paige as material suspects in the murder of the federal customs supervisor.
As Evan screamed my name down the hallway, begging me to tell the agents that he had been tricked while Paige wept hysterically as her white silk dress brushed against the floor, Adrian guided me through a concealed mahogany wall panel behind his desk that led to his private executive elevator.
Inside the quiet, mirrored elevator cab plunging forty stories straight down into the subterranean VIP vault garage, the sheer adrenaline of the morning finally caught up with me, and my breath hitched slightly as the floor numbers blurred past.
Adrian stepped squarely in front of me inside the small space, not crowding me, yet standing close enough that the clean, masculine scent of cedarwood and dark espresso radiating from his skin surrounded me completely.
He reached out with one large, warm hand and tucked a loose strand of dark hair behind my ear, his thumb brushing gently across my cheek where the scar cut through his eyebrow gave his gaze a fierce, unyielding gravity.
He told me in a low, gravelly voice that he owed me an apology for kissing me without asking upstairs, before adding without a shred of hesitation that he was not sorry it happened—because he had spent the past eleven weeks sitting across audit tables from me trying to find a single reason not to pull me into his arms, and watching Evan try to make me feel small had burned through the last of his restraint.
My heart hammered against my ribs as I looked up into his slate-gray eyes, realizing that the most feared man in Michigan was looking at me—curves, sharp tongue, thirty-six years and all—as if I were the only woman on the planet worth burning a city down to keep.
When the elevator doors slid open inside the private garage beside his armored matte-black Maybach, I told him breathlessly that while my forged signature on the Pier Nine manifest had been disproven, the original master algorithm I had written to track Arthur Whitmore’s hidden shell accounts was sitting on an encrypted hard drive inside my townhouse in Corktown.
If Whitmore’s true syndicate partners realized Evan and Paige had been arrested at Bellmont Tower, they would send a cleanup crew to my house within the hour to destroy every scrap of paper linking them to the Rotterdam shipment.
Fifteen minutes later, Adrian’s armored Maybach glided to a silent stop behind my historic brick townhouse on Lafayette Boulevard while two of his security guards swept the narrow alley behind the garden gate.
Keeping me behind his broad shoulders with a matte-black nine-millimeter Heckler and Koch pistol drawn seamlessly from beneath his suit jacket, Adrian walked up my front limestone steps and stopped dead when he saw the heavy brass deadbolt of my front door hanging crookedly inside a splintered mahogany frame.
Someone had already breached the house less than five minutes before we arrived.
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Stepping cautiously into the sunlit foyer over a pile of shattered hallway porcelain, we saw that the heavy steel wall safe behind my oil paintings had been ripped completely out of the plaster with hydraulic wedges, and lying in the center of the hardwood floor was a bloodstained white cashmere scarf stamped with the monogram of Arthur Whitmore’s private country club.
Before I could take another step toward my downstairs study to check on my desktop server tower, Adrian’s eyes snapped toward the faint, high-pitched electronic whine echoing from beneath my mahogany desk—where four bricks of military-grade C-4 identical to the shipment at Pier Nine were wired to a pressure trigger and a red digital mercury countdown reading four seconds to zero.
