Chapter 9 - The Ice on Pier Seven
“You think uploading a video to the press saves you, Daniel?” Marcus Reed snarled through the reinforced server-room intercom, holding his phone pressed against the bullet-resistant glass so Daniel and Elena could see eight-year-old Maya crying inside the back of the speeding black van.
“Victor Vance knew the blueprint of your hidden penthouse studio because he supervised the security remodel two years ago—and right now, my men have the old man and the little girl locked inside an armored transport parked at the edge of the Navy Pier Seven industrial slip!”
Beside Daniel, Elena gripped the steel edge of the server console so hard her nails tore, her entire body shaking as she stared at the screen where her terrified daughter was pressing her small hands against the rear window of the van.
“Please, Marcus, let my baby and my father go!” Elena cried into the intercom microphone, tears pouring down her pale cheeks.
“I’ll stay right here and tell the police I stole the chip—I’ll sign whatever confession you want, just don’t hurt my little girl!”
“Nobody wants your confession anymore, maid,” Chairman Arthur Sterling said coldly, stepping up beside Marcus in the smoky corridor outside the vault.
“Daniel, you have exactly twenty-five minutes to drive down to Pier Seven alone, hand over the physical 2018 memory chip from your brother’s lab, hand back the Aegis-Nine prototype case, and sign the irrevocable offshore bearer transfer of your fifty-one-percent voting shares—or at five o’clock sharp, my men put a brick on the accelerator of that van and send both the old man and the child straight off the pier into thirty feet of freezing Lake Michigan water!”
With that, Marcus, Victoria, Arthur, and Deputy Secretary Vance sprinted into the private executive helipad elevator before Detective Miller’s tactical police units reached the tenth floor of the building.
Elena nearly collapsed to her knees as the screen went dark, sobbing Maya’s name in sheer, raw agony.
Daniel dropped down in front of her, framing her tear-stained face firmly in both of his hands until her terrified brown eyes locked onto his.
“Listen to me, Elena—look into my eyes right now,” Daniel commanded fiercely, his voice trembling with an oath that came from the deepest part of his soul.
“Eight years ago, these monsters locked a door and took my brother’s life while I wasn’t there to stop them—I swear to you on everything I am that I will put my own body at the bottom of that lake before I let a single hair on Maya’s or your father’s head be touched!”
Twenty minutes later, at 4:52 a.m., a howling lakefront blizzard whipped whiteout sheets of snow across the abandoned concrete loading apron of Navy Pier Seven.
Parked ten feet from the unguarded edge of the icy pier, with its engine idling in neutral over the churning black water of Lake Michigan, sat the black armored van, surrounded by six heavily armed mercenaries while Marcus Reed and Arthur Sterling waited beside an idling twin-engine helicopter on the adjacent barge pad.
Daniel walked out alone across the ice-covered concrete under the blinding glare of the van’s high beams, holding the silver Aegis-Nine case in his left hand and the signed share-transfer portfolio in his right.
“Stop right there and toss the case and the memory chip onto the ice, Daniel!” Marcus shouted over the roar of the helicopter rotors and the freezing wind.
“Open the rear doors of the van first so I can see that Maya and Roberto are alive and unharmed,” Daniel shouted back, stopping fifteen feet from the van while subtly glancing down at the rusted iron municipal steam-tunnel grating directly beneath the rear tires of the vehicle.
Marcus sneered and signaled one of his guards to unbolt the rear armored doors of the van for five seconds.
Inside the cargo bay, Roberto was bound to the wheel-well rail and eight-year-old Maya sat huddled on the floor in Daniel’s oversized cashmere coat—yet the instant Maya saw Daniel standing in the snow, her eyes dropped silently to the iron floor drain between her feet, where a narrow maintenance grate built into the chassis above the municipal steam tunnel had just been unscrewed from below!
While Daniel stepped forward and deliberately dropped the silver Aegis-Nine case so that it slid across the ice toward Marcus’s feet—drawing the eyes of every single gunman toward the fifty-million-dollar prize—Elena reached up from the freezing steam tunnel she and her father had maintained years ago, slipped Roberto and Maya silently through the wide undercarriage service hatch into the warm concrete conduit below, and hooked a heavy steel tow cable from the pier’s electric cargo winch directly onto the rear axle of the van!
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“We have the chip and the drive—shove the van into the lake and shoot him!” Arthur Sterling roared as Marcus scooped up the silver case.
The lead mercenary reached through the driver’s window and slammed the gearshift into drive so the van would plunge over the edge of the pier—only for the fifty-ton electric dock winch Elena triggered from the tunnel to yank the van violently backward at forty miles an hour, crushing the four mercenaries’ weapons carts and knocking Marcus and Arthur flat onto the ice just as six armored FBI Hostage Rescue SWAT trucks and two police helicopters converged on the pier with blinding spotlights!
