Chapter 9 - The Sanctuary in Oak Brook
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Instead of taking them back to the downtown penthouse or to his Lake Forest estate—both of which Victor Vance’s men knew intimately—Roman directed the medical van twenty miles west into the wooded hills of Oak Brook, passing through the unmarked stone gates of a private, high-security surgical convalescent villa hidden behind ten acres of pine forest.
It was the private facility Roman had built six years ago to care for his late mother during her final months of illness—equipped with a full hospital-grade ICU suite, backup generators, and guarded by twelve former military contractors who reported exclusively to Dr. Rossini and Matteo, completely off the syndicate’s books.
By one o’clock in the morning, Chloe was settled safely into the warm, sunlit ground-floor ICU suite under the supervision of a pediatric cardiac nurse from Dr. Rossini’s staff, her vitals completely stable and her valve surgery already arranged to be performed right there in the villa’s sterile surgical theater on Friday morning by the chief surgeon Dr. Rossini had privately retained.
Upstairs in the villa’s wood-paneled library, where a fire crackled in the stone hearth, Tessa stood wrapped in a soft cream wool sweater one of the nurses had lent her, holding a mug of hot tea between her palms as Roman slid the black titanium thumb drive from Chloe’s teddy bear into an air-gapped laptop on the desk.
Matteo stood behind Roman’s left shoulder, a bandage taped across the side of his neck, his jaw tight as the encrypted folders clicked open on the screen.
"Your father was thorough, Tessa," Roman said quietly, clicking open the first folder containing high-resolution ground-penetrating radar scans of Foundation Caisson #4 at the Wacker Drive tower site, alongside time-stamped night-vision photographs Frank Cole had taken with a telephoto lens from the adjacent bridge deck at 2:00 AM on August 14th.
On the screen, clear as daylight in green thermal and infrared detail, stood Arthur Sterling, Alderman Victor Vance, and two construction foremen standing over the open sixty-foot concrete pit of Pier 4—watching as two men lowered a bound, gagged man wearing a torn dark suit into the wet cement alongside three stainless-steel chemical drums!
"That’s Assistant U.S. Attorney David Miller," Matteo breathed, pointing to the bound man’s face in the zoomed-in photograph. "The feds thought he skipped the country after taking a payoff! Victor and Sterling buried him alive in forty tons of quick-set concrete!"
"Wait—what are the three stainless-steel drums they buried right next to him?" Tessa asked, leaning over the desk beside Roman and pointing to the hazardous-material serial numbers stamped on the steel barrels in the photo. "My father wrote those serial numbers down on the back of the radar scan!"
Roman typed the serial numbers into the offline database archive on his second laptop.
For five seconds, the search bar spun—and then a red-flagged customs manifest from the Port of Montreal popped up on the screen.
Roman’s gunmetal eyes went completely flat.
"Those aren't chemical waste drums," Roman said, his voice dropping an octave. "That’s two hundred kilos of pure, uncut carfentanil that went missing from a Canadian federal evidence seizure in July. I banned synthetic opioids from Chicago five years ago under penalty of death—and when AUSA Miller found out Arthur Sterling was using his construction cranes at the river dock to smuggle carfentanil into the city with my cousin Victor’s protection, they murdered Miller and entombed both him and the reserve drums inside the foundation pier of the casino tower until construction finished!"
Tessa stared at the screen in horror. "Two hundred kilos of carfentanil... that’s enough to kill half the state!"
"And if they win the casino license on Friday and finish enclosing the lower sub-basement vault next month," Roman said grimly, "Victor uses the hundreds of millions in narcotics cash to buy off the New York families, assassinates me, and takes over the entire Midwest."
Suddenly, the encrypted satellite phone in Matteo’s pocket vibrated.
Matteo answered, listened for ten seconds, and slowly lowered the phone, looking from Roman to Tessa with a grim expression.
"Victor knows he missed you at Mercy General, Boss," Matteo said. "Thirty minutes ago, Victor called an emergency sit-down of all eight Chicago syndicate captains and the Commission elders for noon tomorrow at the Aurelia Club downtown. He told the captains that you went crazy tonight over a twenty-three-year-old waitress, attacked Arthur Sterling at a public dinner, and murdered two of Victor’s made South Side soldiers at Mercy General to stop them from turning over proof that you killed AUSA Miller!"
Tessa’s breath caught. "He’s flipping the exact crime onto you before you can show the captains this drive!"
"And if I walk into the Aurelia Club tomorrow at noon with a thumb drive from a city building inspector," Roman said, his dark eyes calculating five moves ahead, "Victor will replicate the exact lie Salvatore tried in Boston—he’ll claim I doctored the photos after shooting his men, and half the captains on the South Side who want a piece of that carfentanil money will back his play and open fire in the room."
"Then don't show the captains a photograph," Tessa said suddenly, her hazel eyes locking onto the architectural blueprints of the Wacker Drive tower on the laptop screen. "Show them what’s inside the concrete."
May you like
Roman turned his head slowly to look at her. "Pier 4 is under forty feet of reinforced concrete in the middle of downtown Wacker Drive, Tessa."
"No, it isn't," Tessa said rapidly, tapping her father’s blue structural note in the corner of the blueprint. "Look at why my father refused to sign the safety waiver! He wrote right here: 'Pour on Caisson 4 created a hollow thermal void along the lower river-wall retaining bulkhead due to the steel drums.' You don't have to drill down through forty feet of concrete from the street—the outer side of Caisson 4 sits only eight inches behind the brick inspection wall of the old 1906 Chicago Freight Tunnel running directly underneath the riverwalk!"
