Chapter 9 - The Midnight Boardroom
Standing under the harsh fluorescent bulb of the clinic generator shed while the police dragged a handcuffed Brielle out to a patrol car, I turned the glowing screen of her Zurich banking portal straight toward Matteo’s face.
I did not flinch, and I did not step back, even though we were standing alone in the shadow of the brick wall and the five-hundred-thousand-dollar wire that had paid a cartel operative to destroy my marriage bore the corporate routing code of DeSantis Logistics.
"Tell me right now, Matteo, before I take another step with you tonight: did you pay Viktor Kovacs’s niece five hundred thousand dollars six months ago to infiltrate my house and ruin Chase so you could avenge your brother Eli," I asked in a voice as steady as surgical steel.
Matteo looked down at the twelve-digit treasury authorization code on the screen, and the expression that crossed his scarred face was not guilt—it was the terrifying stillness of a man who had just discovered a blade in his own back.
"If I had wanted Chase Whitaker dead or bankrupt for what he did to Eli, Vivian, I would not have paid a twenty-six-year-old girl to sleep with him for four months—I would have walked into his garage in broad daylight and broken his spine with my own two hands," Matteo said, his dark eyes locking onto mine with absolute truth.
He tapped the last four digits of the authorization code at the bottom of the Zurich screen.
"Every executive treasury transfer inside DeSantis Logistics carries the personal cryptographic code of the board officer who approved it, and this code belongs to my cousin Dario DeSantis—the Vice President of our Great Lakes Port Division," Matteo said in a voice that made the storm outside sound quiet.
We drove back down the expressway to the fiftieth floor of DeSantis Tower at midnight, where Matteo summoned his cousin Dario to an emergency boardroom meeting under the pretense of signing the morning press release for the Whitaker Motorsports foreclosure.
Forty-two-year-old Dario DeSantis walked into the obsidian boardroom at twelve-thirty in the morning wearing a camel overcoat and a nervous smile, completely unaware that Luca and two forensic auditors had already confiscated his office hard drive twenty minutes earlier.
Matteo walked silently behind Dario’s chair, locked the heavy mahogany doors, and dropped the printed Zurich wire confirmation onto the table in front of him.
"Six months ago, you wired five hundred thousand dollars from our port reserve to Viktor Kovacs’s niece in Zurich so she could seduce Chase Whitaker, trap him in fixed-race gambling debts, and force him to hand over his automotive transport licenses to Kovacs’s cartel," Matteo said quietly.
Dario’s face turned the color of wet ash as he tried to stand up, only for Matteo’s heavy hand to clamp down on his shoulder like an iron vise and force him back into his leather seat.
"Kovacs promised me thirty percent of the Chicago port revenue if you were removed as chief executive next month, Matteo," Dario sobbed in sheer terror as he pointed at the files.
"And when Vivian came here six weeks ago pitching that twelve-million-dollar sponsorship, I knew from her engineering background that she would uncover our fake freight invoices inside Whitaker Motorsports within a week—so I paid a photographer to take those midnight pictures of the two of you outside this building and told Brielle to push Chase into throwing Vivian out on the street before Friday’s default."
Before Matteo could hand his traitorous cousin over to the federal marshals waiting downstairs, my cell phone rang on the boardroom table at five-thirty in the morning with a frantic call from a blocked number.
It was Chase Whitaker, his voice ragged and echoing inside a metal hangar over the whine of a warming race-car engine.
"Vivian, do not hang up—after Brielle was arrested at the clinic last night, Viktor Kovacs put a contract on my head, and right now I am at our private testing oval in Joliet holding the only original wet-ink notarized confession proving Brielle’s uncle forged your signature on the four-million-dollar Baron loan," Chase shouted desperately.
"If you and Matteo do not bring twelve million dollars in unregistered DeSantis bearer bonds to the Joliet pit wall by six-thirty this morning without a single cop behind you, I am going to burn your exoneration papers and fly to South America before sunrise."
Forty-five minutes later, as the gray dawn broke over the rain-slicked asphalt of the private Joliet speedway, Matteo and I pulled onto the empty pit lane inside his Maybach and saw Chase’s backup white stock car idling at the far end of the half-mile front straightaway.
May you like
Suddenly, the white race car’s engine roared to eight thousand revolutions per minute on an external remote-control servo, launching the car down the straightaway directly toward the solid concrete pit-wall barrier at a hundred and forty miles per hour while Chase stood on the roof of the control tower five hundred yards away boarding a waiting private helicopter.
And as the speeding driverless race car rocketed past the two-hundred-yard marker under Matteo’s binoculars, my blood froze in horror: strapped and gagged inside the passenger seat of the runaway car was Brielle Sutton—whom Chase’s corrupt bail bondsman had bailed out of the Evanston precinct an hour ago so Chase could stage a fiery crash on Matteo’s newly seized racetrack and frame Matteo and me for murdering the state’s star witness.
