Chapter 13 - Smoke on the Forty-Second Floor
"He's burning the physical ledgers!" I gasped, pointing at the small LCD monitor above the elevator doors.
"He has Adrian's secondary security fob," Ricardo growled. He didn't panic; the fog that had dulled him for three years was gone, replaced by the ruthless focus that had built Vance Logistics into a four-billion-dollar shipping empire before his wife died.
He punched the button for the 41st floor—the general legal and accounting level, which didn't require biometric clearance—and grabbed the emergency fire phone inside the cab to alert the night lobby guard.
"Mara, stay in the elevator when the doors open on forty-one and ride it straight back down to the lobby," Ricardo ordered as the numbers climbed rapidly. "Meet the fire trucks and the police."
"What about Elena?" Mara demanded.
"I know which files in that vault have the Cayman routing numbers," I said, kicking off my heels so I could run in my flat socks on the marble. "If the fire sprinklers go off on forty-two, the water won't destroy the waterproof bond folders—only fire will."
The doors chimed open on the 41st floor. Ricardo and I bolted out of the cab and hit the heavy steel door of the internal fire stairwell at a dead sprint, taking the concrete steps two at a time up to forty-two.
Before Ricardo could yank the heavy door open, I grabbed his sleeve.
"Wait," I whispered breathlessly. "Look through the wire-glass window."
Through the narrow rectangular glass, orange flames were already licking up the mahogany walls of Ricardo’s corner office at the far end of the floor. The smoke detectors began to shriek—a deafening, rhythmic strobe of white light and piercing alarms—as the overhead Halon and sprinkler systems hissed to life.
The man in the grey raincoat was jogging straight toward our stairwell door, carrying a black external server blade under his left arm.
Ricardo stepped back into the blind spot behind the heavy steel door.
The moment the man shoved the crash bar open and stepped onto the concrete landing, Ricardo drove his healthy shoulder straight into the man's chest, slamming him back against the iron handrail.
The server blade clattered down the concrete steps. I dove for it, snatching it up before it could crack on the lower landing.
Above me, the man in the raincoat pulled a collapsible steel baton from his belt and swung it fiercely at Ricardo’s injured ribs. Ricardo grunted in pain, dropping to one knee, before catching the man’s wrist and twisting him over his hip onto the stairs.
"Elena, the vault!" Ricardo shouted as he locked his forearm around the man's neck on the landing. "The combination is Vianey’s birthday—twice!"
I pulled my sweater up over my nose and mouth and ran out onto the 42nd floor.
Freezing water rained down from the ceiling sprinklers, turning the thick smoke into a stinging grey fog. I ran past the rows of executive desks and burst into Ricardo’s burning corner office.
The flames were eating the curtains and the leather desk chair, fed by the chemical accelerant piled right inside the recessed floor safe.
I grabbed the heavy wool throw rug in front of the sofa, soaked now from the sprinklers, and threw it directly over the mouth of the floor safe, stomping down on the edges until the flames suffocated under the wet wool.
Coughing violently as the acrid smoke burned my lungs, I dropped to my knees, peeled back the smoking rug, and reached inside the blistering steel cavity with my sleeves pulled over my hands.
Three thick red leather binders sat at the bottom, charred around the edges but intact.
May you like
I pulled them out against my chest. As the top binder fell open in my lap, a loose certified document slipped out onto the wet carpet—not from July of this year, but from three years ago.
It was a private mechanic's inspection report on Clara Vance’s Mercedes—dated two days after the fatal brake failure that killed her. And signed at the bottom by Adrian Vance.
