Chapter 11 - The Cleaner from Washington
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Up on the third floor, Clara woke with a start as the piercing red strobe of the estate’s perimeter breach alarm began flashing silently above the bedroom doorway.
She threw back the down quilt, her bare feet hitting the hardwood floor just as Lorenzo burst into the suite, followed closely by Vittorio Drago and his four capos.
"What’s happening?" Clara asked, immediately reaching for Lily, who was coloring at the low mahogany table by the window.
"The men who bought my father’s soul twenty-eight years ago just showed up to collect the receipts," Lorenzo said grimly, tossing Clara a fresh pair of dark jeans, leather boots, and a Kevlar vest while pulling up the exterior camera feeds on the wall monitor.
On the screen, six unmarked black Chevrolet Suburbans with tinted government plates had just rammed straight through the outer wrought-iron gates at sixty miles an hour.
Stepping out of the lead vehicle weren't uniformed FBI agents with arrest warrants. They were twenty men in unmarked black tactical gear, wearing night-vision goggles and carrying suppressed Heckler & Koch assault rifles—a deniable black-ops wetwork team sent by Deputy Director Vance Harlan to sanitize the estate, burn the ledgers, and leave no living witnesses.
"They jammed the local police frequencies and cut the main power grid from the road," Drago’s head capo reported, peering through binoculars from the north window as the mansion’s backup diesel generators kicked on with a low hum. "And they’ve got a second team moving toward the boathouse on the river!"
"They think we’re trapped inside the main house," Lorenzo said, strapping the steel ammunition box containing his mother’s ledgers into a heavy leather courier pack and slinging it over his shoulder. "How many men do we have left on the grounds?"
"Four of mine up here, two of yours at the conservatory, and Rico in the kitchen," Vittorio Drago said, checking the chamber of his Colt .45. "Seven guns against twenty military contractors."
"We don't need to fight twenty men on the lawn," Clara spoke up suddenly, stepping forward as she zipped the ballistic vest over her sweater. "We use the third wall."
Both Lorenzo and Vittorio turned to look at her.
"What third wall?" Lorenzo asked.
"When I was locked in that blue cellar for three days," Clara said rapidly, her mind sharp and clear as adrenaline surged through her veins, "I didn't just find the loose stones where your mother hid the locket. While I was feeling along the floor in the dark for water drips, I felt cold river air coming up through a stone drainage grate beneath the antique sewing machine."
Lorenzo’s eyes narrowed. "The cellar sits on solid bedrock fifty feet above the Hudson."
"No, it doesn't," Clara countered. "Your grandfather built the chimney shaft during Prohibition to move liquor—how do you think the bootleggers brought the boats in from the Hudson River without being seen from the lawn? There’s a storm-drain culvert running directly under the sub-cellar floor that empties into the old stone icehouse half a mile downriver, outside the estate fence!"
A slow, fierce smile broke across Lorenzo’s face. He reached out and gripped the back of Clara’s neck with one hand, pressing a hard, proud kiss to her forehead that sent a jolt of warmth straight to her toes even as gunfire erupted downstairs.
"Six years I thought you were just keeping the books and ordering groceries," Lorenzo murmured. "Remind me to double your salary if we survive the next twenty minutes."
Down on the first floor, the heavy oak front doors blew inward under the concussion of a C4 breaching charge.
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"Down the chimney shaft!" Lorenzo commanded, swinging open the hidden cedar panel inside the master wardrobe. "Drago, your two fastest men go down first to receive Lily and Clara at the bottom! Wait—not the wine tunnel exit! There’s a mid-level maintenance hatch halfway down the brick shaft that opens directly into the west cellar laundry chute!"
As black-clad mercenaries stormed up the grand marble staircase firing suppressed bursts into the second-floor gallery, Clara strapped Lily tightly against her chest in a heavy canvas sling made from a knotted bedsheet, allowing her to keep both hands free on the iron rungs as she climbed into the dark vertical shaft.
