Chapter 20 - The Call from Pekin Federal
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"Get your phone out right now, Julian!" Evelyn cried, stumbling to her feet inside the bank vault as twenty-eight years of stolen motherhood hit her like a physical blow to the heart. "Call our federal defense attorneys in Springfield! If Ricky is sitting in USP Pekin thinking Luan Krasniqi’s cousins are hunting him—"
"Wait—we don't have cell reception forty feet underground inside the vault cage!" Julian grabbed the heavy leather folder containing the 1998 birth certificates and DNA heel-print cards from Box 001, hit the electric release buzzer for the vault manager, and sprinted with his mother out of the steel cage toward the private elevator leading up to the LaSalle Street lobby.
As the elevator doors slid open on the ground floor and five bars of cellular signal hit Julian’s encrypted phone, the device didn't just chime—it erupted with four missed priority alerts from Damon, Lucas, and the estate gatehouse in Lake Forest!
Before Julian could dial Damon back, Evelyn’s phone rang in her hand.
It wasn't Damon.
The caller ID flashed: ARTHUR (CARRIAGE HOUSE).
Evelyn swiped to answer as she and Julian burst through the revolving glass doors onto LaSalle Street toward their waiting Maybach. "Arthur! Arthur, thank God—we just opened my father’s Box 001 at the bank! You have to listen to me—Ricky Vane isn't Victor’s son—!"
From the other end of the phone came not the quiet sound of the Lake Forest garden, but the low roar of a highway engine and the sound of a gunshot echoing through a car window!
"I already know, Evie!" Arthur’s voice came roaring over the line as tires screeched violently in the background. "Damon and I are on I-55 twenty miles outside Pekin right now!"
Evelyn froze on the steps of the bank, her hand clamping onto Julian’s arm. "You and Damon are outside the prison in Pekin?! How did you know?!"
"Because at eight o’clock this morning, a federal prison transport van carrying Ricky Vane from USP Pekin to the courthouse in Peoria for a medical hearing was ambushed at a railroad crossing by four black SUVs!" Arthur shouted over the roar of Damon’s armored G-Wagon hitting a hundred and ten miles an hour down the interstate. "They killed two federal marshals, left Valerie behind in the women’s unit, and took Ricky alive!"
"Who took him?!" Julian demanded into the speakerphone as they dove into the back of their Maybach and ordered the driver straight toward the downtown helipad. "The Albanians?!"
"Not the Albanians!" Damon’s voice cut in grimly from the driver’s seat alongside his father. "Before they grabbed Ricky out of the prison van, the hit squad left a white silk scarf with a Montreal postmark tied to the steering wheel—and ten minutes ago, they sent a photo of Ricky’s birth certificate from 1998 to Dad’s phone!"
Evelyn’s blood turned to absolute ice in her veins.
If Marc Conti had died in the Stockyards warehouse ten months ago, and Claire Vane had died two years ago... who in Montreal already had the second copy of Twin B’s 1998 birth certificate and knew that Ricky Vane was actually Richard Sterling?!
"Wait—another text just came through to my phone from the kidnappers' satellite number!" Arthur barked over the speaker.
There was a two-second pause on the line—and when Arthur spoke again, his voice sounded as though he had just seen a ghost walk out of Lake Michigan after twenty-eight years:
"Evie..." Arthur whispered, his voice shaking in disbelief. "The woman who just called from the transport ambush... she didn't speak with a French accent. And she just used the personal radio cipher your father Lorenzo used in 1998."
"What are you saying, Arthur?!" Evelyn cried as their car raced toward the river helipad.
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"Your father didn't bury your stepmother Camilla after a boating accident in 1998 because she was an FBI informant, Evelyn," Arthur breathed into the phone as a black helicopter rose from the cornfields ahead of their truck on I-55. "Camilla faked her death with the Feds twenty-eight years ago—and she’s been running the Montreal syndicate the entire time. She just said if you and your three sons want to meet the fourth brother she stole from your hospital bed, we have until midnight to bring Box 001 to the old border pier in Detroit... or she sends Ricky back to us in four pieces, one for each of us."
In the back of the speeding Maybach, Julian looked down at the bottom of the steel drawer liner he had carried out of Box 001—where, tucked beneath the velvet pad, sat a single 1998 micro-cassette tape labeled in Camilla Conti’s handwriting: THE REAL FATHER OF TWIN B.
