Chapter 5 - Four Deadbolts on Dorchester
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"Stop the car two blocks before the bridge," Jade said, her voice tight as she pushed Enzo’s hand away from her neck. "I have to go to my apartment."
Enzo leaned back against the leather headrest, studying her face as if she had just announced she wanted to swim back to Russia. "Did you hit your head when we went behind the fridge? If Viktor’s team tracked you to The Rusty Anchor, his second unit was sitting outside your building on Dorchester Avenue thirty minutes ago. Walking into that apartment is suicide."
"I don't care if the whole Russian army is sitting on my stoop!" Jade snapped, her eyes flashing green fire in the dim cabin. "There is something hidden inside the wall behind my radiator that cannot fall into Viktor Volkov’s hands—or the cops' hands when they raid the place at sunrise!"
Enzo went very still. His gaze narrowed, locking onto her with cold, predatory calculation.
"So you weren't just an eight-year-old kid who only knew how to use a knife," Enzo said softly. "You walked out of that burning compound in 2008 carrying something that belonged to Grigori Volkov. What is it?"
"If I tell you, you had better not need me alive anymore," Jade shot back. "And I’m not stupid enough to give away my only leverage while sitting in the back of a mobster’s truck. Either you let me out at the corner to get it myself, or you help me get in the back way through the roof."
Up in the front passenger seat, Rocco turned his head, glaring back at her while cradling his blistered, coffee-burned right hand against his chest. "Boss, let me go up the fire escape and grab whatever’s behind the radiator while you lock this wildcat in the trunk—"
"If Rocco steps onto my fire escape without knowing where the tripwire is on the third-floor window sash," Jade said coolly, looking straight at the scarred enforcer, "the claymore mine I rigged out of nails and black powder inside the air-conditioning unit will blow him into the street."
Rocco’s mouth snapped shut.
Enzo let out a low, genuine chuckle—a dark, rumbling sound that sent an involuntary shiver down Jade’s spine.
"Luca," Enzo told his driver, "cut the headlights and pull into the service alley behind Dorchester Avenue. Rocco, stay with the car and watch the street. She and I are going up the roof."
Three minutes later, the armored Escalade glided silently to a halt behind a row of wet brick triple-deckers three blocks from the water.
Just as Enzo had predicted, parked halfway down the front street with its parking lights off was a black Mercedes G-Wagon with tinted New Jersey plates—and flickering through the curtains of Jade’s third-floor studio window were the narrow blue beams of two tactical flashlights.
Viktor’s men had already picked her four brass deadbolts and were tearing her tiny apartment apart looking for what she had hidden!
Moving like two shadows through the pouring rain, Jade and Enzo climbed the iron service ladder of the adjoining dry-cleaning building, crossed the flat tar-and-gravel roof, and stepped quietly over the three-foot brick parapet onto the roof of Jade’s tenement.
Enzo moved in complete silence despite his size, his custom suppressed SIG Sauer drawn in his right hand. He glanced sideways at Jade as she knelt beside the rusted roof skylight directly above the third-floor hallway.
With a hairpin pulled from her damp hair, Jade slipped the interior latch of the skylight without making a single click, eased the glass frame open six inches, and peered down into the narrow, unlit hallway outside Apartment 3B.
One massive Russian guard in a black ballistic vest was standing outside her splintered front door with a suppressed submachine gun slung over his chest, smoking an unlit cigarette while two other men inside her studio slashed open her mattress and ripped up floorboards.
"Nothing under the floorboards or inside the freezer, Anton," one of the men inside called out in Russian. "Check the radiator pipes by the bathroom."
Jade’s eyes met Enzo’s in the dark rain. If they pried the cast-iron radiator away from the plaster wall in the bathroom, they would find the false brick in thirty seconds.
Enzo held up three fingers, then pointed down directly at the guard standing beneath the skylight, then pointed to himself.
Before Jade could even nod, Enzo gripped the iron rim of the open skylight with both hands, swung his legs silently through the opening, and dropped twelve feet straight down onto the hallway guard’s shoulders like a falling gargoyle!
Enzo’s knees drove the Russian face-first into the hallway carpet while Enzo’s forearm locked around the man’s throat in a lethal rear-naked choke, snapping the guard’s neck in three seconds flat without a single gunshot or shout alerting the two men inside the room!
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Jade dropped down through the skylight right behind him, landing lightly on the balls of her feet like a cat, her Glock 43 raised in both hands as she crept to the splintered doorframe of her studio.
Inside her tiny bathroom, the two Russians had just wedged a steel pry-bar behind the cast-iron radiator.
