Chapter 11 - Into the Fire
"Mama!" Elena screamed, throwing herself against the steel wall of the bunker as she stared at the monitor. "Mr. Duca, please! That’s my mother! She has a bad heart, she came to check on us because the phones were dead!"
On Camera 14, Matteo’s black armored Suburban skidded to a halt by the burning garden gate.
Instead of driving past the old woman, Matteo saw the terrified look on Elena’s face through the gate’s intercom camera—and realized instantly who the old woman was.
Two of his remaining gunmen jumped out of the SUV, grabbed sixty-year-old Lucia by the coat, and threw her into the back seat before the truck tore off down the private wooded road leading toward the Hudson River boat dock.
My intercom speaker crackled to life with Matteo’s voice from the SUV’s satellite phone.
"Change of plans, Duca!" Matteo barked over the roar of his engine. "If I can't have the Zurich accounts, I'll take the fifty million in bearer bonds and uncut diamonds sitting in your basement vault! Bring them to Pier 4 on the river in ten minutes—alone—or I throw the maid’s mother and your darling ex-fiancée into the Hudson with anchor chains around their necks!"
The line went dead.
In the bunker, Elena collapsed to her knees, weeping so hard she couldn't breathe. Little Mia ran to her mother, patting her cheeks frantically with both tiny hands.
"Don't cry, Mommy! Uncle Lorenzo is strong! Uncle Lorenzo will get Abuela back!" Mia cried, turning her big, tear-filled brown eyes up toward me with absolute, unshakeable faith.
I stood still for three seconds, looking at that three-year-old girl and her mother.
In my world—the cold, calculating world of billionaire syndicates and old-money empires—nobody traded fifty million dollars in untraceable bearer bonds for a housekeeper’s elderly mother. Any advisor on earth would tell me to wait for the police and write the old woman off as collateral damage.
I turned to my mother on the gurney.
Isabella Duca didn't hesitate for a heartbeat. She reached down, pulled the titanium master key chain from around her neck, and tossed it into my hand.
"Open the secondary safe, Lorenzo," my mother said fiercely. "Take every single diamond and bond we have. That family risked their lives to save ours—you bring that child’s grandmother back to this house without a scratch on her, or don't come back at all."
"Count on it, Ma," I said, walking straight to the inner vault wall and spinning the combination dial.
In ninety seconds, I stuffed fifty million dollars' worth of bearer bonds and three velvet pouches of Antwerp diamonds into a black leather duffel bag.
Before I zipped it shut, I reached into the tactical drawer beside the weapons rack and dropped a microscopic military GPS transponder into the lining of the velvet diamond pouch—and strapped a secondary sub-compact Glock 43 inside the small of my back beneath my torn suit jacket.
"Marco, stay sealed inside this bunker until the FBI secures the lawn," I ordered my guard as I keyed the vault door release. "Hand the Vance family over to the federal prosecutor with the video of Julian poisoning my mother’s IV and the recording of Arthur admitting to forging her death certificate."
"Wait, Lorenzo!" Julian Vance sobbed from his handcuffs against the pillar. "We'll get life in federal prison!"
"Be grateful you're going to a federal prison, Julian," I said coldly without looking back. "If you stayed in my basement another hour, there wouldn't be enough left of you to bury."
As the heavy steel vault door swung open into the smoke-filled basement tunnel, Elena ran up behind me and grabbed my bloodstained sleeve.
"Mr. Duca," she whispered, her eyes red and desperate. "He’s going to kill you the second you hand him that bag. Don't go alone."
I looked down at her trembling hands on my arm, then gently covered her fingers with mine.
"He thinks I'm going alone because he thinks I value money the way he does," I said softly. "Stay with Mia and my mother. I'll be back in twenty minutes."
I sprinted up the cellar stairs through the burning conservatory, linked up with Rocco in the smoke-shrouded courtyard, and jumped behind the wheel of my armored Matte-Black Mercedes G-Wagon while Rocco climbed into the rear cargo compartment under a black kevlar tarp with a suppressed sniper rifle.
When I burst through the back estate woods onto the deserted concrete pier overlooking the foggy Hudson River, Matteo’s black SUV was parked right at the edge of the wooden dock beside a twin-engine cigarette speedboat.
May you like
Matteo stood on the dock holding his gold Desert Eagle to Lucia’s gray head—while two feet away, Sofia stood on the edge of the pier with her wrists bound in duct tape, her face bruised and bleeding, screaming my name as Matteo’s men tied a fifty-pound iron boat anchor around her ankles.
---
