Chapter 8 - The Contents of the Briefcase
The man did not jump. He did not scream.
He froze with his back turned to the door, a thick manila folder held midway between an open steel safe and his brown leather briefcase resting on a folding metal table.
Through the reflection in the tempered glass of the document scanner, he saw Dante Moretti standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the cold light of the corridor, flanked by five armed men whose weapons were already leveled at his spinal column.
Slowly, methodically, the man in the gray coat set the folder down onto the table.
He did not reach for a weapon. He was not a hitman; he was an technician, an auditor of blood money who knew that in the presence of Dante Moretti, a sudden movement was simply an informal request to be buried in the foundations of an unfinished pier.
He turned around.
Up close, beneath the sterile LED light of the vault, the man looked older than forty. His skin had the sickly, grayish-yellow pallor of someone who spent his life in windowless basement offices; his wire-rimmed spectacles sat crooked on his sharp nose, magnifying pale, watery blue eyes that twitched with nervous calculation. His fingers, clad in thin gray cotton gloves, trembled slightly against the buttons of his coat.
"Don Moretti," the man said. His voice was thin, reedy, carrying the clipped, academic cadence of a New England corporate clerk.
Dante did not step into the room. He stood in the threshold, his gun resting at his side, his slate-gray eyes sweeping over the scene with the detached, terrifying scrutiny of an executioner inspecting the scaffold.
He saw the open safe: Vault 12, the personal repository of Don Vittorio’s private correspondence with the municipal maritime commissions from nineteen-ninety to two-thousand-ten.
He saw the portable high-speed scanner humming on the metal table, its digital counter reading four hundred and twelve pages uploaded to an encrypted remote server.
And he saw the brown leather briefcase.
"Who are you?" Dante asked softly.
The question had the density of lead.
The man swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing behind his frayed woolen tie. "My name is Simon Vance. I am a forensic accounting specialist retained by the legal firm of Delacroix & Sterling."
"You're a thief, Simon," Dante murmured, stepping across the threshold onto the cold floor of the vault.
The sound of his shoes was the only noise in the room.
"Mr. Delacroix informed me that these documents were subject to an internal administrative audit authorized by the family trust," Vance stammered, his hands coming up in a defensive, pleading gesture. "I was told... I was given the security clearance codes! I entered through the executive elevators with authorized biometric credentials!"
Dante stopped two feet from the metal table.
May you like
He reached out his left hand, his calloused, tattooed fingers taking hold of the heavy brass latch of the brown leather briefcase.
With a sharp, violent snap of his wrist, Dante inverted the briefcase.
