Chapter 17 - The Federal Raid
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Dante sat up against the headboard instantly, the gentle warmth in his dark eyes hardening back into the razor-sharp focus of a syndicate commander at war.
"Which agent on the Task Force?" Dante asked into the intercom, reaching for his trousers at the foot of the bed while Tessa sat up beside him, clutching the black silk sheet to her chest as her heart began to race.
"Special Agent Richard Vance," Nico replied grimly from downstairs. "According to Corrado’s private wire logs, Vance has been taking half a million a year from the Rossi family in Brooklyn to target rival New England crews. When Sofia and Corrado didn't report back to Brooklyn by midnight last night, Don Rossi triggered their dead-man’s switch. Vance is leading a joint tactical team to the Financial District vault right now to seize our hard drives before we can move them."
"If Vance gets his hands on the physical server drives inside the downtown vault," Dante murmured, buttoning a crisp black dress shirt over his chest, "he won't even bother taking them to a federal grand jury. He’ll hand our port security codes and payroll rosters straight to Don Rossi’s hit squads in Brooklyn by noon."
Tessa threw off the covers and pulled on her cashmere robe, walking quickly over to him as he strapped his twin shoulder holsters over his shirt.
"Dante, if it’s a setup by Don Rossi and a crooked federal agent, walking into the downtown bank right now is an ambush!" Tessa said, gripping his lapels with both hands. "They want you out in the open away from the estate’s security grid!"
Dante looked down into her worried hazel eyes and cupped the back of her neck with one warm palm, pulling her close for a deep, reassuring kiss.
"And if I stay locked behind these gates while Rossi takes the harbor servers, we’ll have five hundred Brooklyn gunmen laying siege to this house by tomorrow night," Dante said softly against her forehead. "I’m taking two armored SUVs and twelve men through the private underground garage of the bank tower. I’ll purge the vault drives myself and be back before lunch. Nico is leaving thirty soldiers on the estate perimeter, and the house will stay on full steel-shutter lockdown until my car clears the front gate."
"Come back to us," Tessa whispered fiercely, refusing to let go of his shirt for one more second. "Leo and I aren't losing you on the day we finally got you back."
"Nothing in Boston is strong enough to keep me away from this bed tonight, tesoro," Dante promised, kissing her lips once more before striding out of the bedroom.
From the second-floor nursery window ten minutes later, holding Leo in her arms, Tessa watched the two matte-black armored Suburbans roll out through the iron gates of the compound and disappear down the winding wooded road toward downtown Boston.
For the first forty minutes, everything on the estate remained dead quiet.
The heavy steel storm shutters remained lowered over all the ground-floor windows, and twenty armed guards patrolled the gardens and the front gatehouse in pairs.
Then, at precisely 9:15 AM, Tessa walked down to the kitchen to warm a bottle of milk—and heard the television mounted above the security desk in the front hall blare with a breaking news alert from downtown Boston:
“—massive multi-vehicle explosion and gunfire reported inside the underground parking tunnel beneath the Financial District Reserve Tower! Police and federal agents have cordoned off six city blocks around Congress Street as dark smoke billows from the ramp—”
The porcelain baby bottle slipped straight from Tessa’s fingers and shattered across the kitchen tiles.
She ran out into the front hall where Marco, the young captain Nico had left in charge of the estate’s thirty guards, was frantically shouting into his encrypted radio.
"I can't reach Nico or the Boss's car!" Marco barked, his face pale as the radio spat static. "Someone detonated a magnetic thermite charge on the ceiling of the bank tunnel to collapse the concrete ramp right behind their SUVs! They’re pinned down underground with no cell signal!"
"Take ten men in the reserve trucks and go pull them out of that tunnel right now!" one of the senior lieutenants shouted by the front door.
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"Wait—no!" Tessa cried out, her instincts screaming as she remembered how Uncle Corrado and Sofia had operated the day before. "Don't empty the house! Why would they blow the tunnel ramp to trap Dante underground instead of killing him?! Because they aren't trying to kill him downtown—they’re keeping him trapped down there so he can't come back here!"
Before the words even finished leaving her mouth, a deafening BOOM shook the rear foundation of the manor house—not from the front iron gates, but from the private subterranean boat tunnel down on the lakefront behind the estate.
