Chapter 5 - The Ambush in the Pantry
The ground floor smelled of cold damp stone, old silver, and the sweet, buttery scent of the brioche Grace had baked on Thursday morning.
The crimson beam of my weapon light swept across the black-and-white marble floor of the grand entrance hall. The front double doors were still bolted from the inside, their heavy brass bars in place. That meant the strike team hadn't come through the street entrance. They had come through the old coal tunnels that connected the Duca cellars to the Boston drainage network beneath Mount Vernon Street.
I moved down the central hallway, keeping my back to the wood-paneled walls, my shoes silent against the runner.
As I approached the kitchen archway, I heard it: the slow, deliberate crunch of rubber-soled combat boots stepping over broken porcelain.
Two men.
They were moving through the pantry corridor, speaking in low, clipped murmurs through throat microphones.
"...target's vehicle is in the courtyard," a voice whispered in a flat, Midwestern military accent. "Thermal scanner shows two heat signatures on the second floor, one moving through the third-floor library. Clear the ground level first. Place the secondary charge against the central load-bearing brick pier."
"What about the kids?" a second voice asked, rough and impatient. "Vance said the maid had two brats in the basement quarters."
"Burn them with the rest of the garbage," the first voice replied cold-bloodedly. "No witnesses. Contract pays an extra fifty grand per confirmed casualty."
Every nerve in my body turned to liquid fire.
I didn't wait for them to clear the doorway.
I dropped to one knee, rounded the doorframe, and brought the Walther up with both hands.
THWIP. THWIP.
The suppressed shots were barely louder than a pneumatic stapler.
The first contractor—a six-foot-two operator wearing night-vision goggles, a black tactical vest, and an unbranded submachine gun—took two nine-millimeter hollow points directly through the center of his chest rig, puncturing the ceramic trauma plate and severing his ascending aorta. He collapsed onto the kitchen tiles like a sack of wet concrete without making a sound.
The second man reacted with lightning speed, dropping to his side and spraying a burst of suppressed nine-millimeter fire toward the archway.
CH-CH-CH-CH-CH-CH.
Drywall, lath, and antique pine splintered into thousands of flying shards around my face. A round grazed the meat of my left shoulder, tearing through my wool jacket and searing the skin like an open flame.
I didn't retreat.
I rolled across the doorway into the kitchen, using the massive stainless-steel commercial prep island as cover. The contractor was scrambling to reload his submachine gun behind the walk-in refrigerator door.
I didn't give him the three seconds he needed.
I vaulted over the prep island, cleared the stainless-steel counter with a single, fluid thrust of my boots, and slammed my entire two-hundred-pound frame into the refrigerator door, driving the heavy steel edge directly into the contractor’s face.
CRACK.
The sound of his nasal bone shattering against the steel echoed through the kitchen. He dropped his weapon, staggering backward with his hands flying to his ruined face, screaming through a mask of blood.
I caught him by the tactical collar of his vest, spun him around, and drove the barrel of my Walther deep into the soft hollow behind his right ear.
"Where is Councilman Vance?" I whispered into his ear, my voice so cold, so devoid of human mercy that the man’s violent thrashing stopped instantly.
"Go to hell, Duca," he gurgled through a mouthful of blood and shattered teeth.
I didn't argue with him. I grabbed his broken left index finger and bent it backward until the joint snapped like a dry pine twig.
SNAP.
The man let out a muffled, strangled shriek of pure agony, his knees buckling under him.
"Berth 42!" he sobbed, tears and blood pouring down his tactical balaclava. "He’s at the port administration building! With Sterling! They have sixty men securing the shipping containers! The detonator for the basement charges is on a five-minute delay on the kitchen counter!"
My eyes snapped to the granite prep table twenty feet away.
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Sitting beside the coffee maker was an olive-drab plastic Pelican case, its lid open, revealing a digital timer counting down in bright red LED digits:
01:42... 01:41... 01:40...
