Chapter 11 - The Freight Line into the Stockyards
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"They have spotters with binoculars and thermal drones watching every street and alley within six blocks of 43rd and Racine," Damon said ten minutes later as their three armored SUVs sped south down the Edens Expressway toward the heart of the city, flanked by two unmarked utility vans packed with sixteen of Damon’s veteran former-military port security contractors.
Inside the command SUV, Evelyn sat beside Julian, dressed in a heavy black wool coat over a lightweight ballistic vest Damon had insisted she wear, studying the nineteenth-century rail and sewer grid maps of the Union Stockyards on Julian’s wide-screen tablet.
"If even two vehicles turn onto Exchange Avenue toward Warehouse 9," Julian agreed, zooming in on the satellite view of the abandoned thirty-acre brick meatpacking complex, "Marc Conti’s lookouts on the roof of the old cold-storage tower will spot us half a mile away, execute Dad, and blow the warehouse when we breach the doors."
"Who said anything about driving down Exchange Avenue?" Evelyn asked calmly, tapping her manicured fingernail against the rusted iron freight spur line that curved straight off the main CSX rail corridor along 40th Street and ran directly through the center of the cavernous ground floor of Warehouse 9—the old indoor refrigerated beef-loading siding!
Damon looked down at the map, his dark eyes lighting up with fierce admiration. "The Union Stockyard rail spur! Half a mile east at the Halsted switching yard, Sal’s brother Tony is the yardmaster for the short-line diesel switcher that pushes empty refrigerated boxcars into the storage sidings every afternoon at three-fifteen!"
"Marc Conti’s lookouts from Montreal are watching for black SUVs and SWAT vans on the streets," Lucas grinned savagely from the front passenger seat, racking the bolt on a suppressed Heckler & Koch HK416 assault carbine. "They won't look twice at a slow-moving rusted freight locomotive pushing three empty yellow Union Pacific reefer cars down the siding track into the loading shed—until twenty guns roll out the side doors right inside the building!"
"Wait—what about the C4 charges Valerie threatened to detonate if they hear gunfire?" Julian asked sharply. "If Marc Conti has a wireless radio detonator on the support columns—"
"Then we send in the one person Valerie expects to see walk through the front door with the share certificates to keep her eyes—and her detonator—focused on the center of the floor while the train rolls into the rear loading bay," Evelyn said.
All three of her sons froze simultaneously.
"No," Julian, Damon, and Lucas said in unison.
"Absolutely not, Ma," Damon growled, his jaw setting into the exact stubborn block of granite she had spent twenty-eight years dealing with. "You are not walking through the front door of a warehouse full of Montreal gunmen and Luan Krasniqi’s traitors! Julian and I will walk in the front while Lucas takes the train!"
"If Julian and Damon walk through the front door without me, Valerie knows instantly that I didn't sign the bearer-share transfer certificates—because under the 1994 trust charter, the physical bearer shares in the vault require my wet-ink signature in person before a notary!" Evelyn countered with icy precision, looking each of her three sons straight in the eye. "Valerie is arrogant, greedy, and thinks that because I didn't let you hit her in the ballroom last night, I’m a polite, fragile society wife who will hand over four hundred million dollars to stop a scandal."
Evelyn reached into her leather handbag and pulled out the compact, ivory-gripped Beretta Tomcat .32 that her father Don Lorenzo had given her on her twenty-first birthday—sliding it into the concealed velvet slit pocket inside the right cuff of her cashmere coat.
"Julian walks in the front door with me carrying the leather briefcase," Evelyn ordered, her tone leaving zero room for debate. "Damon and Lucas come through the rear rail bay inside Boxcar One at 3:18 PM sharp—the exact minute the diesel engine’s horn blows at the 43rd Street crossing to cover the sound of the breach. Nobody fires a shot until Julian’s portable military ECM jammer inside the briefcase kills their wireless detonator frequencies. Understood?"
For three seconds, the three most dangerous young men in Chicago stared at the fifty-two-year-old woman sitting across from them—and every one of them realized why their grandfather Lorenzo had trusted his daughter with the crown over every man in Illinois.
"The jammer inside my briefcase has a forty-foot kill radius on all RF and cellular detonator bands," Julian said quietly, checking the battery charge on the compact black electronic countermeasure unit fitted inside the false bottom of his leather attaché case. "Stay six inches behind my left shoulder, Mom. The second the train horn blows, drop flat behind the concrete loading dock."
At 3:10 PM, under a low, lead-gray December sky spitting freezing sleet, a single black Maybach—driven by Julian alone, with Evelyn seated in the passenger side—rolled slowly through the rusted iron gates of the abandoned Union Stockyards on Exchange Avenue.
Perched on the catwalk of the six-story brick cold-storage tower above Warehouse 9, two of Marc Conti’s Montreal snipers tracked the lone vehicle through their high-powered scopes.
"Just the old lady and the oldest brother in one car, Marc," the spotter crackled in French over the warehouse radio. "No tail on the street. Only the afternoon rail switcher shunting empty boxcars down the back track."
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Inside the freezing, echoing cavern of Warehouse 9, Valerie Vane smiled cruelly, lowering her radio and looking at a bloodied, furious Arthur Sterling bound to the iron column ten feet away.
"See that, Arthur?" Valerie mocked softly, cocking her pistol as the warehouse’s front pedestrian door creaked open. "Your wife didn't come here for you—she came here to buy back her own skin."
