Chapter 7 - The Nurse’s Prescription
The silence in the sub-basement vault was absolute, broken only by the rhythmic, mocking blink-blink of the red LED light on the laptop screen.
Gabriel’s finger curved around the trigger of his Beretta. He knew as well as Victor did that if he fired, Victor’s men would turn him and Sal into swiss cheese before they hit the floor.
“You’re too late, Victor,” Gabriel said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “The physical ledger is already in our possession. The original records are out of your reach.”
Victor chuckled—a dry, raspy sound that lacked any warmth. “The physical ledger? Gabriel, my boy, no court in the state of Illinois will admit a water-damaged diary written in eighty-one as evidence of modern corporate fraud. But the digital records on that laptop? The ones linking your signature to the current shell accounts? Those will put you away for ninety years.”
He reached into his pocket, his thumb resting on a small remote fob.
“Say goodbye to the empire, Gabriel.”
Before Victor could click the button, Leah Mercer did something nobody in the room anticipated.
She didn't scream. She didn't duck.
She reached into her windbreaker pocket, pulled out a heavy stainless-steel surgical clamp she had forgotten was still there from her shift at Mercy General, and hurled it with all her might directly at the blinking red light of the laptop.
Clang!
The heavy metal clamp struck the keyboard with shattering force, smashing the screen into a spiderweb of black LCD crystals and severing the internal Wi-Fi antenna with a sharp electrical snap.
The red LED light went dead.
Victor’s smile vanished instantly. His face went gray with sudden, murderous rage. “Shoot them! Shoot them all!”
The Bellandi enforcer raised his rifle—
But Sal moved faster than humanly possible. He lunged sideways, driving his knife deep into the enforcer’s shoulder while Gabriel fired two rapid shots into the concrete floor between Victor’s feet, sending sparks and stone chips flying into the air.
“Drop the remote, Victor!” Gabriel roared, closing the distance in two strides and slamming the older man hard against the damp brick wall of the corridor.
The remote fob slipped from Victor’s fingers, clattering against the concrete floor.
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Sal kicked it down the hall toward the elevator shaft just as sirens began to wail far above them in the streets of downtown Chicago—not police sirens, but the heavy, low-frequency sirens of federal marshals executing a search warrant based on the encrypted flash drive Leah had plugged into the precinct server fifteen minutes before they arrived at the bank.
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