Chapter 5 - The Velvet Trap
The South Loop office was dead by three in the morning.
The yellow crime scene tape fluttered lazily in the rain-chilled wind coming off Lake Michigan. Two Chicago Police cruisers sat near the main lobby entrance, their bubble lights flashing in silent rhythm against the wet asphalt, but the officers inside were asleep or deliberately looking the other way.
Giovanni’s Escalade pulled into the blind alley behind the warehouse annex, its lights extinguished.
Dante turned from the front passenger seat. “Perimeter is clear, boss. Vance’s private entrance through the freight bay hasn't been breached by the precinct boys yet. Looks like Callahan’s people told the cops to hold the perimeter until daylight.”
“They’re waiting for the federal warrant to take the servers,” Giovanni said. He was wearing an all-black tactical sweater that accentuated the breadth of his shoulders, his long coat replaced by an unbranded ballistic vest. He turned to Chiara. “Ten minutes. We go in, you retrieve the drive, we leave. Do not wander. Do not touch anything except the desk.”
Chiara nodded. She had been provided with a dark wool trench coat over her knit dress, cinched tightly at her waist with a broad leather belt. She felt absurd—like a civilian dressed as an operative—but the cold weight of the reality outside the car left no room for vanity.
“I know exactly where it is,” she said.
Giovanni reached out and slipped an earpiece into her left ear, his knuckles grazing the sensitive skin below her earlobe. “Stay on this channel. If I say drop, you drop flat. Understood?”
“Understood.”
They moved like smoke.
Dante picked the lock on the freight bay side-door in less than eight seconds. The warehouse inside smelled of damp cardboard, diesel fuel, and the faint, bitter tang of the gunsmoke that had hung in the air from two hours earlier.
Chiara followed Giovanni’s broad back through the labyrinth of stacked shipping pallets. He moved with an eerie, predatory grace, completely silent despite his size, his firearm held low and ready.
They reached the second-floor mezzanine where the administrative offices were housed. The fluorescent lights that had buzzed earlier were dead now, shot out or switched off at the breaker. Only the red emergency exit signs cast a bloody glow across the open expanse of cubicles.
Chiara’s desk was exactly as she had left it. Her cold coffee cup sat beside the dead monitor; her scattered paperclips gleamed like tiny silver bones on the carpet.
Giovanni held up a closed fist. They froze.
He listened to the silence of the building for three long breaths, then pointed toward Julian Vance’s corner office.
The heavy mahogany door had been kicked off its latch. Papers were strewn across the hardwood floor like fallen leaves—invoices, personnel files, shipping manifests. The wall safe behind the framed portrait of the Port Authority board had been cut open with a rotary torch, its steel door hanging limply on ruined hinges.
“They’ve already tossed the room,” Chiara whispered, a surge of panic tightening her chest. “They got it.”
“Look closer,” Giovanni said, stepping over a pile of ledgers. “Amateurs tossed this. They were looking for cash or hard copy ledgers. A forensic thief doesn't leave the wall safe charred like that; they use the override code Callahan holds.”
Chiara moved toward Vance’s massive walnut desk. The drawers had been yanked out and their contents dumped onto the rug: dry pens, sticky notes, unopened mints, and a broken humidor.
She knelt beside the third drawer, which lay upside down on the floor. Her hands were steady now; the arithmetic had taken over.
“Julian was paranoid,” she murmured, flipping the heavy wooden drawer over. “He bought this desk at an estate auction from an old maritime lawyer. He showed it off to me during my first week because he thought he was clever.”
She slid her fingers along the rear dovetail joint, pressing into a tiny imperfection in the dark varnish. A faint click echoed in the quiet room.
A false bottom, less than half an inch thick, popped open from the underside of the drawer.
Inside lay a heavy, matte-black steel flash drive with five rotating numbered rings.
“Got it,” Chiara breathed, her fingers closing over the cold metal.
“Smart girl,” Giovanni murmured behind her.
Before Chiara could rise, the beam of a high-intensity tactical flashlight cut through the blinds of the corner window, blinding them both.
“Down!” Giovanni roared.
A deafening volley of automatic gunfire shattered the glass. Shards rained down on Chiara as Giovanni’s body slammed over hers, driving her flat against the carpet beneath the heavy knee-hole of the desk.
The impact knocked the breath from her lungs. Giovanni was a wall of muscle and Kevlar, completely shielding her from the hail of lead ripping through the walnut paneling above their heads. The noise was apocalyptic—the roar of submachine guns, the screech of tearing metal, the smell of burning wood and ozone.
Chiara squeezed her eyes shut, her fingers clutching the flash drive against her chest like a talisman. Above her, she could hear Giovanni grunting with exertion as he returned fire from a secondary weapon, his arm braced over the desk edge.
“Dante!” Giovanni shouted into his throat mic, his voice cutting through the din with chilling composure. “Two shooters on the catwalk above the packaging line! Flush them!”
A moment later, the distinct, heavier rhythm of Dante’s assault rifle barked from the warehouse floor below. A high-pitched scream cut through the darkness, followed by the heavy, sickening wet thud of a body falling forty feet from the catwalk onto the concrete.
The gunfire ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
The silence that followed was suffocating, filled only with the hiss of a ruptured water pipe down the hall and the sound of heavy, ragged breathing.
Giovanni shifted his weight. He didn't get up immediately. He remained propped above her, his face inches from hers, his dark eyes scanning her features in the dim red emergency light.
There was a smear of soot on his cheekbone, and a thin line of blood ran from a glass scratch near his hairline.
“Are you hit?” he demanded, his voice rough and breathless.
“No,” she whispered, her hands trembling as she looked up at him. She was entirely pinned beneath him, her hips locked under the weight of his thighs, her chest rising and falling against his tactical vest.
He looked down at the way she fit beneath him, his expression darkening with something far more dangerous than the men with the guns outside.
His hand reached down, his fingers curling around hers, prying open her fist until he saw the steel cylinder of the flash drive.
“Good,” he said, his thumb brushing over her knuckles, tracing the same path her paper cut had taken hours ago. “Because we are going to a party tomorrow night, Chiara.”
She blinked, confused by the sudden change in topic. “A party?”
“Senator Callahan is hosting his annual midsummer gala at the Drake Hotel,” Giovanni said, rising slowly and pulling her to her feet with effortless power. He brushed the glass dust from the shoulders of her coat with deliberate, lingering strokes. “He thinks he just cleaned his house. He thinks Julian Vance was his only liability.”
Giovanni looked down at her, his eyes blazing with an icy, unforgiving fire.
“Tomorrow, we walk into his ballroom. You are going to wear something that makes every man in Chicago look at you, and while they’re looking, you are going to use this key to bleed his private server dry.”
Chiara looked down at the flash drive in her palm, then back at the man who had just taken a bullet for her.
May you like
The invisible girl was dead. And the woman standing in the ruins was about to set fire to the city.
***
