Chapter 6 - Blood on the Velvet Rug
On the plush Persian rug of the mezzanine suite, Evan Hale writhed in agony with both hands pressed around the silver letter opener protruding from his right collarbone, his bespoke white tuxedo shirt turning bright crimson as the roar of Julian Bellmont’s helicopter faded over the downtown rooftops.
I did not hesitate for a single second despite everything Evan had done to me over the past four months; dropping to my knees beside him in my crimson velvet gown, I snatched two linen napkins from the bar cart and applied direct, crushing pressure around the base of the blade to keep his subclavian artery from bleeding out before the paramedics arrived.
Evan stared up at my face with tears streaming down his pale cheeks, grabbing my wrist with his bloodstained left hand as he sobbed that he was sorry, that seeing me walk into the ballroom looking like a goddess with Adrian had broken him inside, and that the moment he tried to refuse to hand over the RSA keyfob in the suite, Paige herself had driven the silver blade into his shoulder before her father and Julian forced her into the chopper.
I looked down into the terrified eyes of the man I had loved and carried on my back for seven years, feeling zero satisfaction in his misery, only a clean, final detachment as I told him calmly that I was only keeping him alive so he could sit in a federal witness chair and spend the next twenty years paying back the employees he had betrayed.
Standing over us while his security chief handed Evan off to the arriving trauma team, Adrian looked down at the torn velvet pocket of Evan’s tuxedo jacket and asked how we could stop Julian and Arthur Whitmore from clearing the forty-million-dollar wire at eleven o’clock now that they possessed the physical RSA rolling-code keyfob.
Rising to my feet and wiping Evan’s blood from my palms with a damp towel, I looked at the antique grandfather clock in the corner showing ten-twenty-two and smiled with cold, mathematical precision.
I explained to Adrian that when I had originally designed Hale Holdings’ dual-custody clearinghouse protocol five years ago, I knew Evan was careless enough to lose his keychain at a country club bar—so I had programmed the titanium keyfob he wore around his neck as a Secondary Slave Token that could only initiate a wire above ten million dollars if it was physically paired within three feet of the Master Administrative Cryptographic Card inside the subterranean clearinghouse server room beneath the Detroit River tunnel.
And for the past five years, that Master Administrative Card had never been in Evan’s possession at all; it was sewn into the leather lining of the vintage Coach briefcase that was currently sitting in the trunk of Adrian’s armored Maybach downstairs.
Julian Bellmont and Arthur Whitmore had not fled to the airport in that helicopter; they had flown eight blocks south to the roof of the Detroit Maritime Clearinghouse Building on Griswold Street, where they had bribed the night watch commander to let them patch directly into the subterranean trunk line before the eleven o’clock cutoff.
Twenty minutes later, Adrian, Marcus Vance, and I bypassed the locked street-level lobby of the Griswold Street building by entering through the abandoned nineteen-twenties riverfront freight tramway that connected Bellmont Group’s dock warehouse directly to the clearinghouse sub-basement forty feet below the waterline.
Walking swiftly down the echoing concrete vault corridor with the Master Card in my clutch and Adrian’s nine-millimeter pistol held ready at his side, we pushed through the heavy steel blast doors of the central server hall at ten-fifty-one—only to have six blinding halogen floodlights snap on from the elevated catwalk above the mainframes.
Surrounding the central clearinghouse terminal on the floor below were eight heavily armed cartel mercenaries carrying automatic rifles with red laser sights that instantly painted my crimson gown and Adrian’s chest.
Stepping out from behind the main armored server rack was Julian Bellmont, his handsome face twisted into a sneer of sibling hatred as he stood beside grey-haired banker Arthur Whitmore and a trembling, tear-streaked Paige, whose white silk dress was still spattered with Evan’s blood.
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Julian laughed coldly as two gunmen confiscated Adrian’s pistol and Marcus’s weapon, telling his older brother that he had known all along Evan’s keyfob was only half of the lock—and that he had staged the scene at the Fox Theatre specifically to lure the brilliant Natalie straight into this underground vault with the Master Card in her hand.
Yet as Arthur Whitmore snatched the leather card from my fingers and jammed it into the terminal alongside Evan’s bloodstained keyfob, Julian stepped down the metal stairs toward me, looked closely at my face under the harsh white lights, and revealed a truth that made my breath stop dead in my throat: Julian and Arthur had not chosen Hale Holdings at random for this forty-million-dollar frame-up, because twenty-two years ago, my late father, Thomas Brooks, had been the lead federal forensic auditor who uncovered the original Bellmont-Whitmore dock syndicate right before his car was forced off the Ambassador Bridge into the icy river—and tonight, I was going to die in the exact same water after unlocking the vault my father had died trying to seal.
