Chapter 4 - Forty-Three Seconds to Breathe
The red LED numerals inside the open vault door flashed forty-one, forty, thirty-nine in the dim light of the ruined twelfth-floor library.
"Hold your breath and get down against the floorboards right now, it is concentrated halon mixed with carbon monoxide and a secondary thermite igniter in the ceiling ducts," Vincent Russo roared as he pulled the collar of his suit jacket over his nose and mouth.
The killer in the gray coat had not just come up to Floor Twelve last night to steal Dante’s pier deeds.
Knowing that Sophie had spotted him in the elevator and would tell Dante where he went, the arsonist and his accomplice inside the hotel had rigged the sealed twelfth floor into an identical forty-three-second death trap—designed to incinerate Dante Moretti, his security chief, and the only witness on the exact anniversary floor where Dante’s wife had died!
At thirty-two seconds, a blinding orange spark hissed inside the upper ventilation shaft as the chemical accelerant primed for ignition.
The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the twelfth-floor stone terrace were made of half-inch-thick laminated hurricane glass that not even a standard nine-millimeter bullet would shatter cleanly on the first shot.
Dante did not panic or waste a second firing blindly at the glass.
Instead, he grabbed a hundred-pound solid bronze bust from the library pedestal with both hands, muscles straining beneath his charcoal suit, and hurled it like a battering ram straight through the center corner of the terrace window where the structural frame was weakest!
The bronze statue punched a spiderwebbed crater through the hurricane laminate at eighteen seconds, and Vincent followed instantly by kicking the cracked pane outward with both heavy boots until the glass gave way into the pouring Manhattan rain.
Dante scooped me up around the waist with one arm, carried me out onto the narrow wet limestone ledge twelve stories above Fifty-Fourth Street, and pulled Vincent through the jagged frame behind us with four seconds left on the clock!
"Cover your head," Dante barked as he shielded my body against the exterior brick balustrade with his own broad back.
A muffled, superheated concussion blew the remaining library windows outward in a roar of orange chemical flame and black smoke, showering the rain-swept stone ledge with glass shards before the automatic exterior fire shutters slammed down to contain the blast inside the sealed room.
Coughing rain and smoke from my lungs on the narrow stone cornice, I looked up into Dante’s soot-streaked face inches from mine as his arm held me pinned safely against the stone wall.
"He left Marcus’s burned restaurant tag on the vault floor before he set that trap, which means the man in the gray coat knew I would come up here with you," I gasped over the wailing hotel fire sirens beginning to echo from the street below.
"Which means whoever is feeding him live information is watching the mezzanine security cameras from inside the hotel right now," Dante said, his dark eyes turning to pure black ice as both he and Vincent thought of the same name at the exact same second: Caleb Ross!
We scrambled down the iron exterior maintenance ladder onto the tenth-floor service balcony, kicked open the stairwell door, and sprinted down eight flights of concrete stairs straight back toward the second-floor mezzanine office where we had left Sophie inside the reinforced safe room.
"Vincent, call the lobby desk on the hardline radio and seal every exit door in the building immediately," Dante commanded as he took the steps three at a time.
"The internal security radio frequencies are being jammed by a commercial signal blocker in the basement, Boss," Vincent shouted back as we burst through the mezzanine fire door into Dante’s outer office suite.
The smell of ozone and burnt wiring hung thick in the hallway outside Dante’s marble desk.
When we rushed into the inner safe room, the heavy steel-core door was standing wide open—unlocked from the outside using the hotel’s master general-manager emergency override key—and Officer Claudia lay unconscious on the carpet with two brass taser darts embedded in the shoulder of her jacket.
Sophie’s coloring book lay open on the table beside a half-eaten plate of strawberry pancakes, and my six-year-old daughter was gone!
I let out a cry that tore at my throat and bolted out onto the mezzanine balcony overlooking the main lobby just as General Manager Caleb Ross stepped calmly out of the front desk office below, flanked by two uniformed NYPD officers and a woman in a navy blazer carrying a stamped manila folder.
"Caleb, where is my daughter, what did you do with Sophie," I screamed down from the balcony rail as Dante and Vincent raced down the grand marble staircase with their hands inside their suit jackets.
Caleb looked up at us from the center of the marble lobby with a look of practiced, bureaucratic sympathy while holding up a yellow carbon-copy legal form in front of the two police officers.
"I am sorry it had to come to this, Marissa, and I assure you I tried to protect your job for weeks, but after the twelfth-floor fire alarm went off ten minutes ago, an anonymous safety complaint reached the New York Administration for Children’s Services reporting an unattended six-year-old child hidden illegally inside our commercial basement," Caleb announced loud enough for the entire lobby and the police body cameras to record.
"Because the mother was unreachable in an unauthorized restricted zone during a fire emergency, two city child-welfare caseworkers presented an emergency protective removal order at the service entrance five minutes ago and took Sophie Lane into temporary municipal custody at the Manhattan Family Court shelter," Caleb said smoothly.
I snatched the yellow carbon-copy receipt from the female clerk’s hand at the bottom of the stairs, my eyes scanning the stamped authorization box at the bottom of the page, and a scream of pure terror caught in my throat.
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"Dante, look at the city agency seal and the badge number on this form," I cried out as I shoved the paper in front of him.
"My late sister worked for Manhattan Children’s Services for ten years—real city caseworker badge numbers only have five digits and they never transport children without a uniformed NYPD juvenile officer in the van, which means those weren’t social workers at all, and Caleb just handed my little girl directly to the man in the gray coat!"
