Chapter 14 - Blood on the Scheldt
The water of the Scheldt River was black as crude oil and cold enough to stop a man's heart in three minutes.
Sebastian shoved Norah into the low cockpit of an industrial maintenance launch tied beneath the pier timbers, untied the heavy mooring rope with one hand, and dropped beside her just as a spray of automatic rounds pulverized the wooden pilings above them.
"Can you pilot one of these?" Norah gasped, ducking as wood splinters showered her hair.
"It has a throttle and a rudder," Sebastian grunted, smashing the glass housing over the console and hot-wiring the ignition with the tip of his combat knife. The diesel engine coughed once, spewed a cloud of black exhaust, and roared to life.
He slammed the throttle forward. The blunt-nosed boat surged out from under the docks, cutting through the chop of the harbor into the dense, sheltering bank of fog.
Behind them, two high-speed patrol craft swung away from the main pier, their searchlights sweeping the gray waves, hunting for their wake.
Norah knelt on the vibrating deck plates, opening the leather manifest they had pulled from the box. The pages were yellowed and fragile, covered in Vittorio Romano's sprawling, aristocratic handwriting. She used her inspection pen to read the faded ink.
"Sebastian," she said, her voice cutting through the thrum of the diesel. "This isn't an inventory of stolen goods."
Sebastian kept one hand on the wheel, scanning the murky waters ahead for channel buoys while keeping his sidearm ready. "What is it?"
"It’s a corporate registry," she said, turning the pages rapidly. "Vaneck didn't just fence Vittorio's items. They were laundering money through private European banks to buy up municipal bonds in Chicago. Sebastian... your father didn't run a crime syndicate. He was buying the city's debt to keep the international cartels *out*."
Sebastian’s jaw tightened, the muscle ticking against his skin. "My father was an extortionist and a smuggler."
"No," Norah insisted, her eyes flashing up at him. "Read this entry from October 1991. 'Paid to Samuel Vance: eighty thousand dollars to construct the Master Cipher. To protect the municipal holdings from Vaneck’s syndicate in the event of my death.' Your father knew Vaneck was going to kill him. He locked Chicago’s entire infrastructure portfolio inside a vault that could only be accessed with two keys."
"The signet ring," Sebastian realized, his gaze dropping to the black diamond band resting on the console beside the compass.
"And the Vance family seal," Norah whispered, touching the small silver locket she had worn around her neck since she was twelve years old—the locket her grandfather had told her never to remove.
Suddenly, a blinding white light pinned their boat against the water.
A massive harbor tugboat, retrofitted with steel armor plates, surged out of the fog directly into their path, cutting off their escape toward the open North Sea. High above on the bridge wing stood an elderly man with silver hair swept back from a face carved by age and arrogance, leaning over the rail with a walking stick in one hand.
Henrik Vaneck.
"Thirty years, Sebastian," Vaneck’s voice drifted down, magnified by the tug's PA system. "Your father was a sentimental fool. He thought jewels were for beauty. He never understood that the only true stone is the one that buys men's souls."
From the decks of the tug, four gunmen raised their rifles, leveling them directly at Norah.
"Cut the engine, boy," Vaneck shouted. "Or I feed Samuel Vance's granddaughter to the channel turbines."
Sebastian looked at the guns trained on Norah. He looked at the black diamond ring on the console.
For the first time since she had met him, Norah saw something raw and human fracture the icy surface of Sebastian Romano’s eyes.
May you like
He pulled back the throttle, and the engine died into the churning silence of the sea.
***
