Chapter 15 - The Ambush in the Cavern
"Don't move, Nicholas," I gasped, instinctively stepping in front of him, but Nicholas’s heavy arm caught my shoulder, pulling me behind his frame despite the red targeting lasers dancing over his throat and heart.
"Victoria," Nicholas’s voice sounded like two boulders grinding together. "Lower the weapons. You step outside this vault and federal marshals will have you surrounded before your cutter clears the harbor channel."
Victoria let out a melodic, mocking laugh that echoed off the damp brick vaulting.
"Federal marshals?" she smiled, taking an elegant sip of champagne. "My dear, naive boy. Who do you think financed the campaign of the U.S. Attorney who signed Simon’s search warrants? Who do you think purchased the municipal debt of the Boston Port Authority through shell trusts in Luxembourg? You won a battle in a municipal courtroom, Nicholas. But the global syndicate doesn't care about your little court orders."
She set the champagne glass down with a delicate *clink* on the steel table and picked up a thick legal binder stamped with gold foil.
"This," Victoria said, holding up the binder, "is the master bearer bond portfolio of Trust 44. Worth precisely three hundred and forty million dollars. In 1992, your father and my father didn't hide this money to protect the city. They hid it because they were preparing to flee when the federal government initiated Operation Harbor Clean."
"You're lying," I shouted, my voice trembling with fury. "My grandfather loved this city! He spent his entire life building the free libraries and the longshoreman trusts!"
"Your grandfather was an arrogant old sentimentalist who went soft in his old age!" Victoria snapped, her patrician mask cracking with sudden, venomous hatred. "He decided at the eleventh hour that the Carter bloodline should live like common civil servants! He disinherited me—his own daughter!—and left the entire maritime legacy in trust for a sniveling little bookworm who spent her Saturdays dusting archives while I was forced into exile in Geneva!"
"He saw what you were," Nicholas said coldly, not flinching an inch despite the laser sight flickering across his forehead. "He saw that you were empty inside. A parasite that consumes everything it touches."
Victoria’s eyes narrowed into slits of ice.
"Say what you like, Falcone. But here is the reality of your evening: in five minutes, these gentlemen will scuttle that cutter with sixty barrels of marine accelerant. The explosion will collapse Pier 44, destabilize the North End tunnel infrastructure, and ignite the fuel depots at the commercial terminal."
My stomach dropped into a bottomless void. "There are hundreds of longshoremen working the night shift at the commercial terminal right now!"
"Collateral damage," Victoria said dismissively. "And when the smoke clears, the federal investigation will find the bodies of Elena Carter and Nicholas Falcone in this vault, surrounded by the charred remnants of Trust 44’s bearer bonds. The public will believe Nicholas embezzled the funds, murdered the Carter heiress in a desperate dispute over the loot, and blew the docks to conceal his crime. My offshore syndicate will step in as the receiver of the port assets by tomorrow afternoon."
She cocked the hammer of her pistol.
"Goodbye, Elena. You should have stayed in the library."
Before she could pull the trigger, a thunderous, ferocious roar exploded from the stairs behind us.
A golden blur launched through the damp air like an artillery shell.
Barnaby.
The seventy-pound retriever slammed directly into the nearest tactical gunman with the full force of his muscular body, his jaws clamping down on the man’s gun arm with a savage, protective fury that sent the mercenary crashing over the catwalk railing into the dark waters below.
"Take cover!" Nicholas roared.
May you like
In a fraction of a second, Nicholas drew his concealed weapon, grabbed my arm, and threw us both behind a three-ton cast-iron winch assembly just as a deafening burst of automatic gunfire tore through the air where we had been standing.
***
