Chapter 9 - The Catwalk Under the Pier
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"They’ll have thermite charges on the main third-floor stairwell door in thirty seconds," Enzo said, walking over to the massive exposed-brick fireplace in the corner of the penthouse living room.
Instead of heading for the hallway, he reached inside the dark cast-iron firebox, pulled an iron ash-dump lever twice, and swung the entire back brick panel of the hearth inward on greased steel hinges—revealing a narrow vertical maintenance ladder that ran straight down inside the building’s five-foot-thick structural masonry pier column, bypassing all three floors completely.
Above them, at the main penthouse elevator doors, a blinding white shower of three-thousand-degree thermite sparks hissed through the steel seam as Volkov’s breachers began melting the biometric locks.
"Before we go down," Enzo said, pulling two military-grade claymore mines and a remote clacker out of the hearth weapons cache, "since you like claymores on window sashes, let’s leave Rocco a housewarming gift by the elevator."
Working together with silent, deadly synchronicity that felt like they had been fighting side-by-side for ten years instead of two hours, Jade set the two directional mines behind the velvet sofa facing the elevator doors while Enzo opened the valves on the kitchen’s six-burner commercial gas range, filling the upper ceiling pocket of the penthouse with raw natural gas.
"Down the shaft—go!"
Jade swung onto the iron rungs inside the brick column, sliding her boots down the side rails in a controlled tactical descent with the M4 slung tight across her back, while Enzo dropped right above her and bolted the three-inch steel firebox plate shut from the inside.
Ten seconds later, as they reached the sub-pier level forty feet below—where the freezing black water of Boston Harbor sloshed against barnacle-encrusted granite pilings beneath the concrete warehouse floor—a muffled, titanic BOOM shook the entire building overhead!
Volkov’s breachers had burned through the elevator door with their thermite torch—and ignited the natural gas and the claymores simultaneously, turning the entire third-floor penthouse into a roaring furnace that wiped out the six-man Russian breach team in a single heartbeat!
"That takes care of the roof team," Enzo whispered darkly in the damp gloom beneath the pier, clicking on a narrow red beam on his rifle barrel.
Directly above their heads, through the six-inch drainage grates set into the concrete slab of the ground-floor warehouse garage, they could hear shouting in Russian and Italian as Viktor Volkov, Rocco, and the remaining twenty men scrambled toward the central stairwell thinking Enzo and Jade were burning alive upstairs.
Wait—standing right above Drainage Grate #4 in the center of the garage bay were four unmarked black Mercedes SUVs, and leaning against the fender of the command vehicle, holding a satellite phone while his burned right hand hung in a sling, was Rocco—standing right beside a tall, skeletal man in a black mink-lined trench coat with half of his left cheek scarred by twenty-year-old burn tissue!
Jade’s breath froze in her throat as she peered up through the iron slats of the grate five feet below the SUV’s tires.
That man in the mink-lined coat wasn't Viktor Volkov.
Wait—nineteen years ago in the Catskills, when eight-year-old Anya had thrown a pan of boiling kerosene into the face of the monster who ran the Red Sparrow house and locked the study door from the outside while the barracks burned... she had heard him screaming in the flames and believed for eighteen years that Grigori Volkov had died in that fire!
Her fingers clamped like steel claws onto Enzo’s bicep in the dark.
"Enzo," Jade whispered, her voice shaking for the first time all night with a horror that came straight from her childhood nightmares. "Look at the burn scars on the left side of that man’s face."
Enzo squinted up through the grate. "Viktor doesn't have burn scars."
"Because that isn't Viktor!" Jade breathed, cold sweat breaking out across her skin. "Viktor died in the fire eighteen years ago and they switched their dental records so the FBI would close the file! That man standing right above us is Grigori Volkov—he survived the fire!"
And Grigori Volkov wasn't looking for the black ledger just to protect Salvatore Bellini.
For eighteen years, the sadist who had tortured her every day of her childhood had been alive, mutilated, and hunting the little girl who had burned his face off!
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Above them on the concrete floor, Grigori Volkov suddenly stopped talking, his scarred, lipless mouth twisting as he looked down at the wet footprints Luca had left near the harbor boat slip at the end of the garage before Rocco had shot the loyal driver earlier.
"They didn't stay in the penthouse," Grigori rasped in Russian, pointing his gold-plated Stechkin automatic pistol toward the maintenance grate in the floor. "Number Nine always goes under the floorboards when she sets a fire! Clear the grates!"
