Chapter 11
He held her gaze for a long moment.
He saw in her face what he had seen in the faces of three men he had worked with over fifteen years, two of whom were dead. He understood that she was telling him the truth, and that no answer he gave her would change it.
“Get your coat.”
She went.
Three minutes later they were in the back of a black sedan with Luca at the wheel. The street lamps smeared past the windows. The city at that hour had the hollow, bright quality of a stage before the actors came on.
Dante reached under the seat in front of him and withdrew a small object wrapped in a cloth napkin.
He unwrapped it. A compact pistol. Six rounds.
He placed it in Anna’s palm.
“The safety is here. The slide is here. Pointed at nothing you do not intend to kill. Do you know how to use this?”
“Ethan taught me the week before he died. He said it was only a precaution.”
“Good.”
He closed her fingers around it.
“Only if there is no other choice. You go to Sophie. You get her out. Luca and I take the room. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
The sedan turned onto Northern Avenue.
The warehouse rose ahead of them, dark against the harbor sky, with a single yellow light burning behind one upper window.
Two stories of corrugated steel and old brick, built in the 1920s, used for the storage of something indifferent since the 1970s. The ground floor was dark.
Marco Bellini had entered through the loading bay at six fifty-two.
He was alone. He carried the yellow coat under one arm.
He walked across the empty concrete floor of the lower level, past rows of covered pallets, and climbed the steel staircase at the back wall. His footsteps rang.
The upper floor opened into a single long room.
Overhead fluorescents, half of them dead, buzzed with the hollow sound of warehouse lighting.
In the far corner, bolted to the concrete, stood a wooden chair.
Sophie Carter sat on the chair.
Her wrists were tied in front of her with the same strip of cloth that had been in the video. Her blue coat was dirty at the hem. Penny lay on the floor at her feet, face down, exactly as before.
Sophie’s eyes were red. She was no longer crying out loud. She was doing the small, shuddering breath of a child who had cried until she could not cry anymore.
Six men stood around the room in loose positions. Three near the chair. Two near the office door at the south wall. One at the top of the staircase Marco had just climbed.
All six were armed.
None of them looked at Sophie.
Adrien Cross stood by the long industrial window with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the harbor. He turned when Marco came up the stairs.
“You brought the coat.”
“I brought the coat.”
“Give it here.”
Marco crossed the room and handed it over. Adrien took the coat, held it to his nose for a moment as if sampling something, and tossed it onto a crate.
“The mother will be hysterical. She will deliver the archive. I give it twelve hours.”
“Twelve hours is too long, Marco.”
“Dante is slower than he looks. He wants a negotiation. He thinks I am opening a line to Victor.”
“I am not interested in what Dante wants.”
Adrien turned fully. His face in the yellow light was gray and old and very tired.
“The child is a liability. The mother is a liability. The drive is a liability. I want all three ended tonight. Clean. The mother in a car accident on Route 2. The child in a river. The drive in a furnace.”
Marco glanced at the chair in the corner.
Sophie had not looked up.
She did not understand the words. She understood the tone — which was the tone adults used in dark rooms when the person in the small chair was not supposed to leave.
“End it, Adrien.”
“End it tonight. Gently, if you can.”
“Not here.”
“We end it here.”
The door to the east stairwell, at the north end of the room, opened without a sound.
Luca came through first — low and fast, pistol already raised.
The man at the top of the back staircase had his eyes on Marco and never saw him. Luca shot him twice in the chest. The sound was enormous in the room, a thunderclap that bent the air.
The second man, by the office door, turned. Luca shot him through the throat.
The remaining four spun. Adrien flinched violently and dropped behind the crate with the yellow coat.
One of the three men by the chair fired wildly toward the stairwell door. The bullet struck the frame above Dante’s head as he came through behind Luca. Luca put a round through that man’s thigh, and he went down screaming ten feet from the chair.
Below them, boots on the steel staircase. Shouting. Raphael and two others were coming up from the loading bay.
Anna was behind Dante. He had put her there and he was keeping her there — one hand pressed back against her shoulder, pinning her into the doorway while the room opened.
The last man by the office door ran for the back wall, found no door, and dropped his weapon with his hands rising. The sixth man, the one nearest the chair, saw Raphael’s team come up the staircase behind him, and laid his weapon on the floor, and himself after it.
The fifth man stood very still beside the chair, one hand resting on his pistol, not drawing.
Marco Bellini turned slowly from where he stood by Adrien’s crate.
May you like
His hand moved toward his hip.
It stopped halfway there.
