Chapter 9 - The Traitor at the Board Table
Standing under the harsh fluorescent bulb of the clinic generator shed while the police dragged a handcuffed Brielle Kovacs out to a squad 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 destroy Chase so you could avenge your brother Eli," I asked in a voice as cold and 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, volcanic stillness of a man who had just discovered a knife 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, unblinking truth.
He tapped the last four digits of the authorization code on the Zurich screen: 09-D-S.
"Every executive treasury transfer inside DeSantis Logistics carries the personal cryptographic suffix of the board officer who approved it, and Code Zero-Nine belongs to my cousin Dario DeSantis—the Vice President of our Great Lakes Port Division," Matteo said in a voice that made the rain 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 tomorrow 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 silk bathrobe under a camel coat and a nervous, oily smile, completely unaware that Luca and two former federal forensic auditors had already confiscated his office hard drive twenty minutes earlier.
"Matteo, cousin, what is so urgent at midnight that it couldn’t wait until breakfast," Dario asked before his eyes landed on me sitting at the head of the table with Brielle’s satellite phone resting in front of my folded hands.
Matteo walked silently behind Dario’s chair, locked the heavy mahogany doors, and dropped the printed Zurich wire confirmation onto the table alongside Dario’s decrypted computer log.
"Six months ago, you wired five hundred thousand dollars from our port maintenance reserve to Viktor Kovacs’s niece in Zurich so she could seduce Chase Whitaker, hook him on fixed-race gambling debts, and force him to sign over the Whitaker automotive transport licenses to Kovacs’s cartel," Matteo said quietly.
Dario’s face turned the sickly gray color of wet ash as he tried to stand up from his chair, only for Matteo’s heavy hand to clamp down on his shoulder like an iron vise and force him back into his seat.
"Why did you help Viktor Kovacs target Chase Whitaker’s wife, Dario, and why were you the one who paid a private photographer six weeks ago to take pictures of Vivian leaving this building with me at midnight and send them to Chase’s phone," Matteo demanded, his voice dropping into a lethal whisper an inch from his cousin’s ear.
Terrified of the man standing behind him, Dario broke down in less than ten seconds, sweating profusely as he pointed a shaking finger at the folders on the table.
"Kovacs promised me thirty percent of the Chicago port smuggling revenue if you were removed as CEO by the family trust next month, Matteo," Dario sobbed in panic.
"And when Vivian came here six weeks ago pitching that twelve-million-dollar sponsorship, I knew from her engineering files that she was smart enough to uncover our fake freight invoices inside Whitaker Motorsports within a week—so I sent those midnight photos to Chase 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 in the downstairs lobby, my personal cell phone rang on the boardroom table at five-thirty in the morning with a frantic incoming call from a blocked number.
It was Chase Whitaker.
His voice was ragged, manic, and echoing inside a massive metal hangar over the high-pitched whine of a warming race-car engine.
"Vivian, do not hang up or you will never clear your name with the federal bank examiners at nine o’clock this morning," Chase shouted desperately over the phone.
"After Brielle was arrested at the clinic last night, Viktor Kovacs put a two-million-dollar contract on my head because he thinks I helped you and Matteo blow up his Escalade—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-point-five-million-dollar Baron loan!"
"Turn yourself in to the state police, Chase, it is over," I told him coldly.
"Not without my buyout money it isn’t—if you and Matteo do not bring the 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, hand the feds a backdated server log framing you for the race-fixing ring, and fly to Caracas before sunrise!"
Forty-five minutes later, as the gray November dawn broke over the rain-slicked asphalt of the private Joliet testing 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.
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Suddenly, the white race car’s engine roared to eight thousand RPM 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 double-homicide crash on Matteo’s newly seized racetrack and frame Matteo and me for murdering the state’s star witness!
