The most feared mafia boss in Chicago came home three hours early

The laboratory inside Silo No. 4 smelled of ozone, shattered glass, and the cold, wet breath of the lake wind rushing through the broken observation window seventy feet above the floor.

Dr. Julian Vance was scrambling across the vinyl floor on his hands and knees, his white lab coat soaked in the amber saline solution that was dripping from the shattered conduit of cylinder ten. His manicured fingers were clawing toward the side pocket of an overturned emergency kit where a stainless-steel four-shot Derringer lay half-hidden beneath a pile of sterile gauze pads.

THUD.

Dante’s heavy combat boot came down flat against Vance’s right wrist with the concussive, crushing force of a five-hundred-pound pile driver.

CRACK.

The delicate carpal bones in the doctor’s hand splintered with a sound like dry kindling snapping under an iron wheel.

Vance did not scream; the air left his lungs in a single, high-pitched whistle of absolute, agonizing shock as Dante ground the sole of his boot into the joint, kicking the small pistol thirty feet across the floor toward the drainage trough.

"Don't touch the floor, doctor," Dante growled, leaning down until the double muzzle of his twelve-gauge Benelli was pressed directly against the bridge of Vance’s aristocratic nose. "You might track something dirty into the tanks."

I did not drop Marco Moretti.

I held the eighty-year-old Senator by his cashmere lapels, his feet dangling four inches above the footrests of his wheelchair, his mouth working silently like a carp pulled from the muddy bottom of the Calumet River.

"Alejandro..." Marco panted, his breath smelling of stale peppermint, nitroglycerin tablets, and forty years of unpunished treachery. "Listen to me... we are of the same house. The Moretti name... if you destroy this facility, the Outfit loses its federal protection! The Southern District of New York has three grand juries waiting for my subpoena! I am the only shield between you and thirty years in a federal penitentiary at Marion!"

"I don't need a shield, Uncle," I whispered, my eyes unblinking, cold as the ice on the pier outside.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the ruggedized Panasonic tablet, and laid it on the armrest of his wheelchair.

On the screen, playing in a continuous, high-definition four-channel loop, was the uncompressed video feed from the digital memory core of the research vessel Chesapeake Explorer, which had just been boarded and secured by sixteen of my private freight operators from the Kenosha local.

The screen displayed forty-two gigabytes of unredacted digital manifests:

Wire transfers from the private legislative accounts of the Senate Armed Services Committee to offshore holding trusts in Vaduz, Liechtenstein.

Biological purchase orders signed by Dr. Julian Vance for synthetic gestational incubators manufactured in Shenzhen.

And the final, unedited death certificate of Sofia Moretti, dated three weeks after her funeral in Lake Forest, signed by Marco Moretti himself as the legal guardian of the four surviving experimental cohorts.

"Sofia didn't die of cancer, Marco," I said, leaning in until my forehead touched his trembling, powdered temple. "And you didn't build an army to protect the Outfit."

I turned the tablet so he could see the final line of the master contract with the Department of Defense:

PROJECT CERBERUS: TERMINAL REDISTRIBUTION CLAUSE

UPON COMMENCEMENT OF COHORT FIVE:

PRIMARY SUBJECT ALEJANDRO MORETTI TO BE LIQUIDATED VIA CONTROLLED PULMONARY EMBOLISM.

ASSETS CONSOLIDATED UNDER SENATORIAL CONSERVATORSHIP.

"You wanted my gaming routes, Marco," I said softly. "You wanted my docks. You wanted the eighty million dollars in cash my father left in the limestone vaults of Lake Como. And you thought that if you grew four copies of my face in a glass jar, the Commission would never notice that the man sitting in the Don’s chair had stopped giving orders."

"Alejandro... please," Marco sobbed, his eyes rolling back in his head as his heart began to flutter in an irregular, dangerous tachycardia. "I am your uncle... I carried you on my shoulders at the feast of San Gennaro in nineteen eighty-nine... I bought you your first pony..."

"My father bought that pony, Marco," I said.

"And my father," I continued, reaching down to the floor to pick up the ivory-handled walking stick that had belonged to old Antonio Moretti, "told me that when an old dog gets the rabies... you don't take him to the church to be blessed."

I snapped the heavy walking stick across my knee with a single, concussive CRACK.

The polished ivory head dropped into the drainage trough, floating for a second in the amber saline before sinking to the bottom.

I lowered Marco back into his wheelchair.

I did not strike him. I did not draw my blade.

I reached over to the central communications console of the laboratory, flipped the red toggle switch that controlled the primary emergency siren for the harbor of Kenosha, and picked up the public address microphone.

"This is Alejandro Moretti," I said, my voice echoing across the sixty-foot research ship, across the concrete piers, and through the emergency radio speakers of every municipal police cruiser within five miles of the waterfront.

"The Kenosha Municipal Grain Terminal is currently under private maritime quarantine. There is a United States Senator sitting in the third-floor laboratory of Silo Four who wishes to make a full, voluntary confession to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Public Corruption Task Force regarding eighteen counts of capital treason and human experimentation."

I dropped the microphone.

I turned to Dante.