Chapter 9 - The Descent into the Salt
Dante did not call for backup. In the underworld of New York, when an infection reaches the marrow of your own house, involving your soldiers before you know the identity of the traitor is an act of suicide. If one of his captains had sold the keys to the foundation, bringing those same captains into the tunnel would guarantee a bullet in the back of his neck.
"Bruno," Dante hissed, tapping his own thigh twice. "Kill."
The Cane Corso did not bark. He lowered his ears, his body flattening into an aerodynamic missile of black muscle, and descended the stone stairs into the dark like a ghost slipping through water.
Dante followed two paces behind, his bare feet gripping the slick, slime-covered steps with savage balance, the weapon-light extinguished now to prevent giving away his point of origin. He moved in absolute, pitch-black darkness, guided only by the sound of Bruno’s claws on the wet stone and the rhythmic breathing of his own chest.
The stairs descended forty feet through the bedrock bluff, terminating in the River Vault.
Constructed during Prohibition as a wet-dock for rum-running speedboats, the vault was a cavernous subterranean cavern half-submerged in the tidal waters of the Hudson River. High arched masonry supports held up the stone terrace above, while below, a narrow wooden slipway bordered a deep, black pool of water that connected directly to the open river through a submerged iron sluice gate.
The ambient light here was gray and ghostly, filtered through the iron bars of the exterior water gate from the distant sodium lamps of the northern railway across the river.
In the center of the wooden slipway, illuminated by the pale gray reflection of the water, a figure stood.
He was dressed in dark, form-fitting tactical clothing—a lightweight maritime drysuit, silent neoprene booties, and an unzipped utility vest. A heavy tactical pack sat on the dock beside him, next to an underwater propulsion unit and a diving rebreather. In his hands, he held a compact, suppressed submachine gun—a German MP7—pointed directly at the stone archway of the stairs.
The man was not an anonymous hitman.
As the gray light caught his profile, Dante stopped on the bottom step, his weapon rising into the gloom.
The intruder was Thomas Vance.
At forty-two, Vance was not a rogue mercenary; he was the head of Dante’s private estate security, a former federal tactical operator who had worked for the Moretti family for eight years. He was the man Dante had trusted to design the perimeter cameras, the man who held the master overrides for the gatehouse, the man who had sat at Dante’s kitchen table two nights ago drinking Dante’s wine.
Vance did not look panicked. He stood with his feet shoulder-width apart, the barrel of the MP7 steady as an anvil, his face covered in a light sheen of sweat beneath his graying stubble.
"I wondered if the dog would smell the grease on the hinge," Vance said, his voice flat, conversational, and completely stripped of the deference he had shown for eight years. "Old Bernardo built those counterweights well, but fifty years in the damp makes the brass squeak. I had to grease the gears three times this month."
Dante stepped off the stone stair onto the wet wooden planking of the slipway, his bare feet sinking slightly into the mossy timber.
"You touched the girl's window, Thomas," Dante said.
His voice was so quiet, so devoid of inflection, that it was nearly swallowed by the lap of the river water against the stones.
"The girl was an anomaly," Vance replied, his finger resting lightly on the trigger shoe of the submachine gun. "She woke up every time I bypassed the foundation. Children have sensitive auditory registers. I tried to condition her to ignore the sound. A tap every three nights... make her think it was a branch in the wind. She wasn't supposed to scream tonight."
"Who bought you, Thomas?" Dante asked, taking half a step forward onto the wood.
May you like
Bruno was standing at Dante’s left knee, his yellow eyes burning through the gray gloom, his lips curled back in absolute, silent readiness.
Vance offered a cold, humorless smile. "Nobody bought me, Dante. I work for the Department of Justice. Special Operations Division. Organized Crime Strike Force."
