Chapter 3 - The Driver’s Ledger
The rain had thickened into a heavy, blinding curtain as Adrian walked across the gravel parking lot toward the idling sedan. Lucas Reed stood under the black umbrella, snapping to attention and pulling the rear passenger door open with a practiced, deferential smile.
“Heading back to the docks, boss?” Lucas asked, holding the umbrella high to shield Adrian from the downpour.
Adrian paused by the open door, his coat damp, his face unreadable. He looked at Lucas—the man whose father had served the Moretti family for thirty years, the boy Adrian had bailed out of trouble at twenty-one, the lieutenant who had sat at his dining table every Christmas.
“Take the bridge route, Lucas,” Adrian said quietly, stepping into the back seat. “I want to inspect Warehouse 14 before the evening crew clocks in.”
“Right away, sir,” Lucas said, closing the door and jogging around to the driver’s seat.
As the car accelerated onto the rain-slicked boulevard, Adrian rested his hands on his knees. In his right pocket, his thumb traced the edge of his encrypted satellite phone. With three silent taps, he sent a blind directive to Marco, his head of counter-surveillance: “Freeze the Newark manifests. Reroute Ship 7 to Brooklyn Pier 3. Detain the gray van outside Rose’s Diner.”
Through the rearview mirror, Adrian watched Lucas’s eyes. The driver’s gaze flicked nervously toward the center console every two miles. Lucas checked his side mirrors with the frantic rhythm of a man expecting a shadow to appear behind him.
“You look tired, Lucas,” Adrian remarked casually, leaning back against the leather headrest.
Lucas forced a chuckle, his fingers tightening on the leather steering wheel. “Just a long week, boss. Managing the manifests for Newark has been a headache with customs tightening inspections.”
“It’s a heavy burden,” Adrian agreed softly. “Carrying keys to things worth millions. A man could get tempted to make a copy.”
Lucas’s foot twitched on the accelerator. The sedan lurched forward by half a second before he caught himself. “Never, Mr. Moretti. You know my loyalty.”
“I thought I did,” Adrian said.
He leaned forward, reached between the front bucket seats, and picked up Lucas’s personal smartphone from the charging pad.
“Boss?” Lucas gasped, his eyes darting from the road to the mirror in sudden, naked panic.
Adrian unlocked the device with Lucas’s thumbprint before the driver could pull his hand away. He swiped open the encrypted messaging application. There, timestamped forty minutes earlier while Adrian had been eating apple pie, were nine high-resolution photographs of the green crate manifests, sent to an unlisted IP address with a single text: “Moretti is at the diner. Newark is wide open for the 6:00 AM raid.”
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The car swerved as Lucas realized the truth had been stripped bare.
“Pull over into the maintenance bay, Lucas,” Adrian commanded. The voice was neither angry nor loud; it was cold as a freshly dug grave. “Before you make me crash this car.”
