Chapter 16 - The Plaza Hotel Crash
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At noon the next day—Saturday—the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue was packed to capacity with three hundred journalists, party donors, and live network satellite trucks parked along Central Park South.
On the raised velvet stage, beneath a twenty-foot banner reading INTEGRITY & JUSTICE: SENATOR ARTHUR STERLING FOR ATTORNEY GENERAL, the silver-haired former federal judge stood at the podium flanked by his campaign staff.
Standing just inside the backstage velvet curtain, wearing an earpiece and scanning the crowd with cold, hawkish eyes, was Deputy Director Vance Harlan of the Department of Justice.
Harlan’s black-ops team had reported back from the Hudson Valley at dawn: the Bellini mansion and boathouse had burned to the waterline, Genevieve Bellini’s body had been recovered in the basement rubble, and no trace of the 1998 ledgers had been found in the ashes. As far as Harlan and Sterling knew, the thirty-year secret of Salvatore Bellini’s bribes had gone to the bottom of the Hudson River along with Lorenzo Bellini.
"For thirty years on the federal bench and in the United States Senate," Senator Sterling boomed into the microphones as camera flashes popped across the ballroom, "I have stood by one simple rule: nobody is above the law, and no syndicate in New York can buy the silence of the American justice system!"
Applause rippled across the white-tablecloth tables.
At the back of the ballroom, near the service pantry doors leading to the audiovisual control booth, a waitress in the Plaza’s crisp black-and-white uniform pushed a silver dessert cart past two Secret Service and hotel security guards, keeping her head bowed politely.
Nobody looked twice at a maid pushing a pastry cart. Clara Santoro had spent six years perfecting the art of being invisible to powerful men.
Inside the silver warming drawer beneath the pastries wasn't dessert—it was a digital media converter wired directly into the ballroom’s master HDMI projection splitter, which two of Vittorio Drago’s union stagehands had quietly spliced into the wall box twenty minutes earlier.
And stepping out of the private VIP elevator on the mezzanine balcony directly above the press pit, dressed in an immaculate three-piece charcoal Tom Ford suit with a white silk pocket square and a faint burn scar along his cheekbone, was Lorenzo Bellini—flanked on his right by Don Vittorio Drago in a black pinstripe suit.
Down by the backstage curtain, Vance Harlan glanced up toward the mezzanine balcony—and went as white as a sheet, his hand lunging inside his suit jacket as he saw two dead men standing in front of three hundred live television cameras.
Before Harlan could bark an order into his wrist mic, Clara pressed the PLAY button inside the silver pastry cart.
Behind Senator Sterling on the stage, the twenty-foot high-definition LED campaign screen suddenly flickered, cutting off the graphic of the American flag.
In its place appeared grainy, time-stamped June 1998 video footage of the Bellini estate library—showing a younger Arthur Sterling and Vance Harlan clinking crystal glasses with Salvatore Bellini while counting out stacks of Swiss bearer bond certificates and laughing as Salvatore handed Harlan a target list of rival Brooklyn prosecutors and mob bosses to eliminate!
"To a thirty-year partnership, Salvatore," Arthur Sterling’s recorded voice boomed crystal-clear through the Plaza ballroom’s surround-sound speakers. "As long as the Geneva wire clears on the first of the month, the Justice Department belongs to the Bellini family!"
A collective gasp from three hundred reporters sucked the air out of the Grand Ballroom. Live red lights on twenty network television cameras zoomed straight in on the giant screen—broadcasting the footage live to millions of screens from Manhattan to Capitol Hill!
"Turn it off! Cut the power in the booth!" Senator Sterling shrieked from the podium, his face purple with apoplexy as flashbulbs exploded in a blinding frenzy.
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Simultaneously, the simultaneous email blast Clara had triggered from the converter sent high-resolution PDF scans of every Geneva wire transfer from the 1998 ledgers directly to the cellphones of every investigative journalist in the room!
Backstage, Deputy Director Vance Harlan realized his career—and his life—was over. Blind with rage, he yanked a suppressed SIG Sauer from his shoulder holster, spotted Clara standing by the open audiovisual panel at the back of the room, and sprinted down the side aisle behind the velvet draperies to put a bullet in her head before escaping through the kitchen!
