Chapter 17 - The Trap at Pier 90
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Ten minutes later, while Arthur was safely back upstairs in the fortified twenty-fourth-floor suite sipping hot tea with Nurse Francesca and surrounded by eight of Dante’s heavies who had arrived to lock down the entire floor, Lucian stood in the downstairs service pantry looking down at the surviving kidnapper zip-tied to a steel pipe.
In the kidnapper’s pocket, Lucian had found a burning satellite phone and two boarding passes for a Panamanian-flagged cargo freighter, the MV Vesuvio, currently berthed at Pier 90 on the Hudson River, scheduled to cast off for Marseille at twelve-thirty.
And waiting aboard the MV Vesuvio to receive his hostages—having quietly slipped into New York harbor aboard the diplomatic vessel forty-eight hours earlier to watch the fall of the Bellini empire in person—was Don Raffaele Costa himself.
Lucian checked his watch. 11:15 AM.
"Costa doesn't know his men failed here at the Carlyle yet because their cell jammer in the alley is still running," Dante said grimly, holding the kidnapper’s encrypted satellite phone. "The van driver in the alley is already taken care of—my men swapped into the front seats."
"If we call Agent Miller and send the Coast Guard to Pier 90 right now," Lucian said, his eyes cold and calculating, "Costa claims sovereign cargo immunity on a Panamanian hull, dumps his phones in the Hudson, and flies back to Naples tonight with a slap on the wrist—only to send another hit squad after Elena and her father next month."
Elena stepped into the pantry doorway, her expression set like flint. Having seen her frail sixty-eight-year-old father dragged down a concrete stairwell at gunpoint had burned away the last trace of hesitation inside her.
"Then we don't call the Coast Guard until after Costa steps off the gangway onto US soil," Elena said quietly.
Lucian turned to look at her. "Costa won't step one foot off that Panamanian deck unless he sees the ambulance van pull onto Pier 90 with hostages inside."
"So give him the ambulance van," Elena said, picking up the white medical lab coat and blue scrub cap off the unconscious team leader on the floor. "The satellite text on Donovan’s screen said Costa wants 'the old professor and the girl who read the contract' brought to the ship at noon so he can force you to sign over the Red Hook leases. Put two of Dante’s men in the front of the van, put one of your older guards in a wheelchair in the back with a blanket over his head pretending to be my father—and I walk down the ramp in the back of the van with my hands tied."
"Absolutely not," Lucian snapped instantly, the temperature in the pantry dropping twenty degrees. "You are not walking within five hundred yards of Raffaele Costa as bait. Forget it, Elena."
"Lucian, listen to me!" She stepped right up to his chest, laying both hands flat against his charcoal vest so he had to look down at her. "Raffaele Costa has never seen my face on video, tearing up his Genoa deal—Sabatini did! The only way Costa steps off that ship onto the pier where you and the feds have jurisdiction is if he hears a woman speaking fluent Neapolitan dialect from the back of that van demanding to negotiate for her father’s life! None of your guards can fake a female voice in Vomero dialect!"
"If something goes wrong on that pier—"
"Nothing will go wrong because you will be lying under the stretcher in the back of that ambulance with an assault rifle in your hands!" Elena countered fiercely, her hazel eyes blazing into his. "I trusted you in the stairwell, and I trusted you with my father’s life. Now trust me to finish this so my dad never has to look over his shoulder again!"
For five agonizing seconds, Lucian stared down at the woman who had walked into his life forty-eight hours ago with a coffee pot and was now standing toe-to-toe with him planning the takedown of the most ruthless Camorra boss in Europe.
Slowly, Lucian reached out, gripped the back of her neck, and pulled her mouth to his in a hard, breathless kiss.
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"You stay flat on the floor of the van until the rear doors open," Lucian commanded against her lips, his voice a dark vow. "And the second Costa’s second boot touches the concrete of Pier 90, you dive behind the steel wheel well. Understood?"
"Understood," she whispered.
