Chapter 9 - The Anatomy of a Sale
The contents of the briefcase exploded across the metal table and the floor in a chaotic shower of paper, digital drives, and photographic prints.
Dante did not look at the currency. He didn't care about the bundles of non-sequential hundred-dollar bills banded in bank wrappers.
His eyes locked onto a single, heavy legal document bound in blue cardstock that fell face-up on the table before him.
It was an acquisition charter, prepared under the jurisdiction of the Cook County Superior Court in Illinois.
Dante picked it up with two fingers.
The document was an irrevocable power of attorney and asset transfer agreement, transferring eighty percent of the Moretti Reserve’s commercial real estate holdings, along with the deep-water shipping berths on the Red Hook waterfront, to an anonymous corporate entity registered in Delaware: The North Lake Logistics Consortium.
The signature line for the grantee bore the signature of an underboss from the Chicago Outfit.
And the signature authorizing the transfer on behalf of the Moretti estate—dated for Monday morning at nine o’clock—was signed in black fountain pen:
Marcus Delacroix, Executor.
Dante’s jaw tightened until the bone seemed ready to shear through his skin.
The plot was breathtaking in its corporate arrogance. Delacroix was not planning an assassination; he was planning a legal coup. By using Simon Vance to extract the historic manifests from Vault 12, Delacroix was obtaining the blackmail files necessary to force the municipal authorities to ratify the transfer.
And the analog wiretap on Floor Ten? It was meant to monitor Dante’s movements tonight, ensuring that when the Chicago crew intercepted the Albany convoy, Dante would be drawn out of the city to manage the crisis while Delacroix executed the transfer in a closed courtroom on Monday.
"He promised me three million dollars," Simon Vance whispered, his knees trembling so violently that his shins knocked against the legs of the metal table. "He told me you would never look at Floor Twelve until the quarterly audit in January. He said... he said you were a brute who only understood guns and street corners."
Dante slowly lowered the blue document onto the table.
He looked at Simon Vance—at the wire-rimmed glasses, the gray coat, the thin, pathetic trembling frame of a man who had sold thirty years of family honor for a wire transfer to a Swiss account.
"Delacroix was wrong about two things, Simon," Dante said, his voice dropping into a register that made the room spin.
Vance looked up, tears of pure, unadulterated terror welling in his watery eyes. "What... what was he wrong about?"
"He thought I only understood guns," Dante murmured softly.
He raised his right arm, the black Staccato nine-millimeter rising with mechanical, fluid grace until the bore was centered precisely between Vance's eyes.
"And he forgot," Dante added, "that children see everything."
May you like
Pfft.
The sound of the suppressed shot was barely louder than the click of a ballpoint pen.
