Chapter 59 - The Altar of Manhattan
The silence on the pier stretched until the only sound left was the drip of condensation falling from the towering concrete silos above us.
Sterling stared at the black notebook in my hand. His political veneer—the smooth, patrician calm that had carried him through thirty years of high-stakes corruption—finally cracked.
"The code," Sterling said, his voice dropping into a harsh, dangerous whisper. "Give me the sequence, Sarah, and I put both of you on a boat to Montreal tonight. You have my word as a gentleman."
"Your word wasn't worth the lead they put in my father's back," I said.
Behind him, my mother moved.
Though she looked frail, thirty years of confinement hadn't broken the Vance blood in her veins. She didn't scream, and she didn't panic. With a sudden, explosive motion, she kicked the metal folding chair into the shins of the guard standing to her right.
The guard yelled, stumbling backward on the wet gravel.
"Down, Clara!" I shouted.
I drew the Glock from beneath my denim coat in one fluid, practiced motion.
The second guard went for his sidearm, but I fired two rounds into the engine block of the nearest SUV. The crack of the 9mm shattered the fog, the radiator spewing a violent cloud of scalding white steam into the guards' faces.
Sterling lunged forward, his cashmere coat flapping, his fingers clawing for the optical scanner on the hood.
"Kill them both!" Sterling screamed, his composure entirely gone. "Get the box!"
A shot echoed from the perimeter—not my gun, not Sterling’s guards.
High up on the rusted gantry crane overlooking the canal, a muzzle flash cut through the mist. The guard who had been recovering from Clara’s kick dropped to the asphalt with a dull thud, a clean hole through his shoulder.
Frank. The old bastard had dragged himself out of the van after all.
The remaining guard scrambled behind the second SUV, firing wildly into the fog toward the crane.
I sprinted across the open ground, caught my mother by the arm, and pulled her behind the heavy concrete footing of the grain elevator. Her hand was ice cold, but her grip on my wrist was like iron.
"Sarah," she breathed, her face inches from mine, tears cutting clean lines through the soot and age on her skin. "Your eyes... God, you have his eyes."
"We have to move, Mom," I said, the word feeling strange, terrifying, and sacred on my tongue for the first time in thirty years. "The van is three blocks down."
"The scanner, Sarah!" she whispered urgently, her fingers tightening on my coat. "Marcus didn't put the trigger in the vault! The trigger is in the machine itself! If Sterling takes that scanner across the bridge, the internal battery will detonate the secondary charge inside the housing!"
My heart stopped.
I looked back through the drifting steam. Sterling had hauled the heavy steel case off the hood and was dragging it toward the open passenger door of the surviving SUV, his driver slamming the vehicle into reverse.
Marcus Vance hadn't just built a flood trap. He had booby-trapped the device thirty years ago, knowing that whoever stole it would carry their own destruction with them.
"Frank!" I yelled into the damp air, hoping the old driver could hear me over the wind. "Don't shoot the car! Let it go!"
The SUV roared to life, its tires screeching against the wet pavement, throwing gravel into the black water of the canal as it tore away toward the Gowanus Expressway ramp.
Sterling was gone. The scanner was gone.
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And in my hand, still clutched tightly against my ribs, was the black leather notebook containing the real names of every man who had built their fortunes on my father's grave.
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