Chapter 7 - The Vault on Lexington
Dante reacted in less than half a heartbeat before the sniper on the Queens rooftop across the street could squeeze the trigger.
He lunged sideways across the narrow bedroom, tackling me down behind the solid cast-iron radiator beneath the window frame a split second before a heavy armor-piercing round punched through the glass pane and obliterated the wooden mirror above my dresser in a shower of silvered splinters!
"Stay flat on the floorboards and keep your head down," Dante commanded against my ear, shielding my body completely with his own weight as a second suppressed rifle shot chewed into the plaster wall two feet above us.
Down on the street below, Vincent Russo and Dante’s two close-protection operatives opened fire with automatic weapons toward the opposite tenement roof, laying down a devastating curtain of suppressing fire that forced the rooftop gunman to abandon his bipod and flee across the tar paper.
Keeping me tucked tightly beneath his arm behind a ballistic kevlar blanket his second guard carried up the stairs, Dante rushed me down the back service fire escape through the courtyard alley and straight into the waiting armored Escalade.
"Caleb Ross did not just help Arthur Pendelton plant the thermite bombs that killed your wife and my husband, Dante—he and Deputy Mayor Sterling have been planning to wipe out your family and seize the Moretti piers for three years," I said breathlessly as the Escalade roared back onto the Queensboro Bridge toward Manhattan.
"And now that Caleb is out of that police cruiser and standing on that tugboat at Pier Ninety with Pendelton and Sterling’s mercenaries, they have no intention of letting you or Sophie walk off that pier alive once you hand over the Pier Seven bearer deeds and Box Four-Zero-Three," Dante replied, his voice cold and razor-sharp as he checked the time on the dashboard clock.
We had eighteen minutes left before the thirty-minute deadline expired at Pier Ninety.
"We are not going to Pier Ninety empty-handed, and we are not walking into their crosshairs the way they expect," Dante told Vincent as the Escalade plunged down the concrete ramp into the subterranean parking garage of the Lexington Private Depository on Forty-Eighth Street.
Because the depository was partially owned by Dante’s banking trust, the vault director met us at the subterranean elevator doors with a biometric bypass tablet and escorted us straight into the titanium safe-deposit chamber without thirty seconds of delay.
I stepped up to Box Four-Zero-Three on the lower wall, inserted the flat brass key from Marcus’s charred neck chain into the customer lock while the director turned the guard key, and pulled out the heavy steel drawer.
Inside lay a thick, fireproof leather binder wrapped in butcher’s twine that Marcus had placed in the vault at four o’clock on the afternoon he died.
When Dante and I untied the twine on the examination table, we found forty pages of original wet-ink chemical purchase invoices, offshore wire receipts from the Cayman Islands, and signed harbor-lease kickback contracts stolen directly from Deputy Mayor Richard Sterling’s private briefcase when Sterling dined at Cena D’Oro!
Even more shocking, taped to the inside cover of Marcus’s binder was the original blueprint of a custom dual-relay forty-three-second chemical detonator designed by Arthur Pendelton—showing that Pendelton always wired a hidden blue grounding bypass loop beneath the battery casing so he could disarm his own bombs if he ever got trapped inside a target building!
"Marcus didn’t just film their meeting through the pantry door—when Deputy Mayor Sterling went to the restroom at the restaurant two years ago, Marcus swapped Sterling’s leather ledger binder with a stack of blank menus and locked the real evidence in this vault so they could never erase their trail," I whispered, my chest swelling with fierce pride and heartbreak for the brave man my husband had been.
Suddenly, the tactical radio scanner sitting inside Vincent’s breast pocket crackled with a faint, rapid three-click burst of static on Channel Nine—the short-range emergency maintenance frequency used exclusively by the walkie-talkies inside The Moretti Reserve!
"Wait a second, Boss, why is one of our internal hotel maintenance radios transmitting a carrier signal from three miles away on the Hudson River," Vincent asked as he pulled the handheld unit from his vest and boosted the receiver gain.
Through the hiss of rain and river static, a tiny, unmistakable six-year-old voice whispered straight into the microphone from inside a locked boat cabin.
"Mommy, Mister Moretti, if you can hear me on the magic talkie box I took from the mean man’s coat in the van, I used my blue crayon to jam the shiny lock on the round bathroom door so the gray man cannot get in here," Sophie’s brave little voice whispered over the airwaves!
My hands flew to my mouth as tears of overwhelming relief and terror spilled down my face.
"Sophie, baby, Mommy and Mister Moretti are right here, do not say anything loud enough for the men outside the door to hear you," I whispered urgently into the handset after Dante showed me which button to hold.
"Okay, Mommy, I am hiding under the sink like hide-and-seek, and through the round glass window I can see a big white circle on the boat wall that says The Sea Star and a big green number four on the wooden dock," Sophie whispered softly before clicking the radio off just as heavy footsteps sounded outside her cabin door.
Vincent slammed his fist onto the console in triumph as he pulled up the satellite harbor chart of the Hudson River piers.
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"They are not at the abandoned coal terminal at Pier Ninety at all—that was another forty-three-second thermite ambush set to blow you and Marissa to pieces the second you walked onto the dock," Vincent roared.
"Berth Four is half a mile south at the active commercial tugboat slip at Pier Eighty-Four, and the tugboat Sea Star is warming up its diesel engines right now to take the little girl out into international waters!"
