Chapter 9 - The Cartel's Ultimatum
The acrid smell of explosives choked the air in the server room. The red laser sights danced across our chests, a terrifying promise of immediate death.
Carlo Rossi stood in the doorway, looking entirely unbothered by the chaos. He surveyed the room, his cold eyes lingering on the destroyed computer terminal, the weeping housekeeper on the floor, and the two brothers bleeding in the dark.
"You promised me the drive, Christopher," Rossi said softly, leaning on his cane. "You assured me it was corrupted, and you were simply retrieving the physical hardware to destroy it."
Christopher pushed himself up from the floor, clutching his bleeding hand, trying to salvage the rapidly disintegrating situation.
"I have it, Carlo," Christopher lied, his voice strained but arrogant. He pointed toward me. "My wife managed to salvage some fragmented data, but I stopped the upload before it could transmit to the federal servers. The drive is secure."
Answer One, Open Two. Christopher lied to Rossi to maintain his value, knowing the data was fully decrypted and ready to upload if the power returned. But if Rossi had a team of mercenaries, why didn't he just kill everyone in the room and take the drive himself? And how could we possibly escape a windowless room surrounded by heavily armed men?
"Is that so?" Rossi asked, arching an elegant eyebrow. He turned his gaze to me. "Mrs. Marino. Your husband has a rather spectacular history of lying to save his own skin. Tell me, did you upload the files?"
I stared at the cartel boss, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. If I said yes, he would kill me instantly out of fury. If I said no, he would kill me because I was a liability who had seen the data.
I looked at the dead computer screen, then down at the small, metal hard drive still clutched tightly in my sweaty palm.
"No," I answered, my voice remarkably steady despite the terror freezing my veins. "The power cut out before the transmission finalized. The data is still on this drive."
I held the small metal rectangle up in the beam of the tactical flashlights.
Rossi smiled, a genuine, terrifying expression of victory.
"Excellent," Rossi murmured. "Bring it to me, my dear. And perhaps I will allow you and your brother to walk out of this building alive."
"Don't do it, Sarah," Agent Miller warned in a harsh whisper, her gun still raised, though she knew firing it would be suicide. "If he gets that drive, he owns the Midwest forever. Thousands of people will die."
"If I don't give it to him, we die right now," I countered softly.
I slowly stepped forward, moving away from the safety of the server racks. My pregnant belly made my movements awkward, amplifying the sheer vulnerability of my position.
I walked toward the doorway, the red laser sights tracking my every step.
Christopher watched me, a mix of relief and calculating greed in his eyes. He thought he had won. He thought I was sacrificing the evidence to save him.
I reached Rossi. He extended a gloved hand, waiting for the drive.
I didn't hand it to him.
I looked past him, down the dark corridor of the office building.
"You told me the truth lies where the light dies, Mr. Rossi," I said quietly, referencing the cryptic note Elena had left behind.
Rossi frowned, confused by the sudden shift in conversation. "What?"
I didn't wait for him to process the words.
I didn't hand him the drive. I threw it.
I threw it as hard as I could, not toward Rossi, but directly into the open, grated floor vent located just outside the server room door—the main intake shaft for the building's massive HVAC system.
The small metal drive slipped through the grate and plummeted into the darkness, clattering against the metal ductwork as it fell dozens of stories down into the bowels of the skyscraper.
"NO!" Rossi roared, the polished facade shattering completely.
The mercenaries instinctively raised their weapons, preparing to fire.
But the distraction was all we needed.
"Now, Dominic!" I screamed, dropping to the floor and covering my head.
Dominic hadn't been idle while Christopher negotiated. He had crept toward the emergency backup battery array powering the room's localized fire suppression system.
He ripped the heavy red handle down.
The room didn't flood with water. This was a server room. It flooded with Halon gas.
A deafening hiss erupted from the ceiling vents as thick, white, oxygen-depleting gas poured into the confined space.
The mercenaries panicked, coughing violently, their vision instantly obscured by the dense white fog. The laser sights scattered wildly as they lost their targets.
"Hold your breath and run!" Miller yelled, grabbing my arm and hauling me to my feet.
We didn't run toward the door where Rossi's men were choking. We ran toward the heavy, reinforced glass window overlooking the downtown street, three stories below.
Owen was already there. He had picked up a heavy, steel server rack shelf and was smashing it brutally against the reinforced glass.
The glass cracked, spiderwebbed, and finally gave way with a loud, satisfying crash, raining down onto the pavement below.
"The fire escape!" Owen shouted, pointing to the rusted metal stairs just outside the window.
He climbed through the broken frame, reaching back to help me. I scrambled over the jagged glass, terrified, my heavy belly scraping against the sill.
Miller and Maria followed quickly, bursting out into the cold, rainy night air, gasping for the oxygen the Halon gas had stolen from the room.
I looked back through the window.
Dominic wasn't following us.
He was standing in the thick white gas, aiming his shotgun directly at Christopher, who was struggling to crawl toward the door.
"Dominic, come on!" I screamed over the wind.
Dominic looked at me through the shattered window. He offered a grim, tragic smile.
"I'm not leaving without my brother," Dominic yelled back.
He turned and racked the shotgun, disappearing into the white fog toward Christopher and the recovering cartel mercenaries.
"We have to go!" Miller insisted, grabbing my hand and practically dragging me down the rusted, slick fire escape stairs.
We descended rapidly, the sounds of muffled gunfire echoing from the server room above us.
We hit the wet pavement of the alleyway, sprinting toward the busy main street a block away.
We burst out into the chaotic, neon-lit traffic of downtown Chicago. The rain was pouring, washing away the blood and soot covering our clothes.
We flagged down a passing taxi, piling into the back seat, breathless and trembling.
"Where to?" the confused driver asked, looking at our disheveled state in the rearview mirror.
I looked at Miller, then at Owen, and finally at Maria, who was weeping silently for the daughter she now knew was gone.
The empire was in ruins. The ledgers were lost in the ductwork of a skyscraper. My husband was likely dead in a server room alongside his brother.
May you like
But we were alive.
"Take us to the FBI field office," I told the driver, leaning back against the vinyl seat, closing my eyes. "I have a story to tell."
