Chapter 11 - Eight Inches of Brick
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At 3:45 AM, forty feet beneath the icy black currents of the Chicago River, the forgotten 1906 coal freight tunnel was a tomb of dripping limestone, rusted narrow-gauge rail tracks, and pitch-black silence.
Dressed in a heavy black waterproof tactical jacket, rubberized boots, and a Kevlar vest that Roman had personally buckled around her torso before they left the basement vault of his riverboat casino at Kinzie Street, Tessa walked between Roman and Matteo, holding a waterproof tablet displaying her father’s radar overlay in her left hand while a red LED headlamp cut through the mist.
Behind them walked four of Roman’s most trusted structural union ironworkers carrying a hydraulic water-cooled diamond ring saw and pneumatic jacks.
"Stop here," Tessa whispered as they reached a curving brick archway stamped with a faded cast-iron plaque reading WACKER / STATE — SEC 14B.
Every ten seconds, a low, rhythmic vibration hummed through the soles of their boots as night-shift freight trains and street traffic rolled across the double-deck bridge levels far above their heads.
Tessa stepped up to the damp, century-old red brick wall on the south side of the six-foot-wide tunnel. Here, raw gray cement slurry had oozed through the mortar seams three months ago when Arthur Sterling’s crew had poured the sixty-foot caisson shaft on the other side of the bricks.
She held her father’s thermal density chart up beside the mortar joints, counting seven courses up from the rusted iron rail tracks and measuring thirty-six inches to the right of the main cast-iron river flood bulkhead.
"Look at the weeping mortar right here," Tessa said, taking a piece of yellow lumber chalk from her pocket and drawing a three-foot-by-three-foot square on the damp brick. "To the left of this iron rib is the main load-bearing steel rebar cage—if you touch that, the river bulkhead cracks. Inside this yellow square is pure unreinforced patch cement that Victor’s men dumped in at two in the morning to cover the drums. Eight inches deep, and you’ll hit the hollow pocket."
Roman stepped up beside her, shining his tactical beam across her yellow chalk lines, then nodded to the lead ironworker. "Set the hydraulic rigs. Twenty minutes."
With a muffled, water-cooled hiss, the diamond-tipped circular blade bit into the century-old brick and gray cement.
True to Frank Cole’s exact measurements, at seven and a half inches, the diamond blade punched straight through into an air pocket—releasing a foul rush of trapped stale air and stagnant water!
The ironworkers hooked two steel winch chains into the cut block and pulled the three-hundred-pound square of brick backward onto the tunnel floor with a dull thud.
Roman shone his high-lumen flashlight into the dark cavity inside the foundation pier.
Gleaming inside the hollow void of the concrete shaft were the three stainless-steel hazardous-material drums bearing the serial numbers from the Port of Montreal—and wedged directly above them in the hardened gray stone was the preserved dark wool sleeve of Assistant U.S. Attorney David Miller’s suit jacket, with his gold federal prosecutor’s badge still pinned to his inside lapel and a gold monogrammed cufflink reading V.V. (Victor Vance) trapped in the hardened slurry six inches below his hand!
"Got it," Matteo breathed, snapping high-resolution forensic photographs with a timestamped camera before the ironworkers slid hydraulic straps around the three two-hundred-kilo carfentanil drums to winch them out into the tunnel cart. "With Miller’s badge and Victor’s cufflink in the stone, Victor is dead to rights in front of the Commission."
Wait.
As the third heavy steel drum slid out of the cavity onto the rail cart, Tessa’s eyes caught a tiny blinking green fiber-optic light attached to a thin copper wire that had been mortared into the back of the concrete cavity behind the third drum!
"Don't pull that third drum clear!" Tessa gasped, grabbing Roman’s arm. "Look behind the barrel—that’s a seismic tilt-switch wired to a waterproof transmitter!"
Roman’s eyes narrowed instantly as he shone his beam onto the tiny green LED blinking inside the hole.
"Victor didn't just bury the carfentanil down here to hide it," Roman realized in a flash of cold steel. "Victor knew about the 1906 freight tunnel! That’s how his men brought the drums in on Sunday night without using the street cranes—and he wired a tamper sensor behind the barrels so he’d know the second anyone found his stash!"
And the moment that third barrel had shifted two inches forward on the winch strap, the green LED had turned solid red!
From two hundred yards back down the dark curve of the tunnel—not toward the casino exit, but from the south branch junction under LaSalle Street where Victor’s crew had their own secret manhole entrance—came the metallic clatter of a heavy iron floodgate opening and the echoing shout of eight armed men running down the tracks with night-vision rifles!
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Even worse: above the roar of approaching boots came the unmistakable, deafening groan of a giant electric winch turning the wheel on the Chicago River Flood Bulkhead at the LaSalle junction!
"Victor’s men aren't just coming to shoot it out!" Tessa cried as a two-foot wall of freezing, black river water came surging around the curve of the brick tunnel floor with the roar of a freight train! "They’re opening the river intake valve at LaSalle to drown the whole section and wash the bodies into the main stem!"
