Chapter 9 - The Catacomb of Greed
The heavy kevlar of Roman’s ballistic vest absorbed the impact of Anthony’s bullet, but the blunt force knocked the wind from his lungs.
Victoria reacted with terrifying speed.
She drew her Glock and fired three rapid rounds directly into the shoulder and arm of Anthony DeLuca.
Anthony screamed in pain, dropping his revolver as he spun into the open rear cabin of the center Escalade.
"Drive! Drive!" Anthony howled at his personal chauffeur.
The heavy SUV reversed violently, tires shrieking against the wet asphalt, smoke billowing from the wheel wells as the driver slammed the transmission into forward gear.
Charles Kane did not panic.
With the ruthless instinct of a predator who had survived decades in the European underworld, Charles threw a smoke canister from his trench coat onto the ground.
A thick, blinding white cloud of chemical obscurant enveloped the tarmac.
Charles lunged toward the lead Escalade, diving into the passenger side just as the vehicle accelerated through the airport’s chain-link security perimeter.
"They're running for the highway!" Marcus roared, returning fire as the third Escalade provided covering fire before following its companions.
Roman caught his breath, his eyes locking onto Victoria through the smoke.
"Are you hit?" he demanded, his voice thick with adrenaline.
"I'm fine," she said, her eyes blazing with cold determination.
"They're taking the North Las Vegas expressway toward the Strip."
"They’re heading for Bellagio Heights," Roman said, racking the charging handle of his carbine.
"The master transfer executes at six AM from the penthouse server room."
"They have forty minutes to manually verify the upload before the banking window closes."
Victoria sprinted toward the lead armored Suburban of their convoy.
"Then we finish this inside our resort."
Three minutes later, six high-performance vehicles were tearing south along Interstate 15 at one hundred and twenty miles per hour.
The Las Vegas Strip glowed in the distance like an oasis of incandescent gold against the predawn desert blackness.
The twin towers of Bellagio Heights loomed over the horizon—a sixty-story monument of reflective glass, steel, and unpoured concrete that had sat dormant for two years.
Ahead of them, the two escaping Escalades weaved through sparse early-morning commercial traffic, red taillights streaking across the wet lanes.
Anthony’s driver was reckless, clipping a concrete construction barrier as they took the private exit for Bellagio Heights Boulevard.
The lead Escalade crashed through the temporary wooden barricades guarding the construction entrance of the resort, skidding across the gravel staging area and coming to a violent stop beside the freight loading docks.
Roman’s convoy swept into the perimeter seconds later, boxing the entrance in a tactical horseshoe formation.
Victoria jumped from the vehicle before it had fully stopped, her sidearm raised.
The driver of the first Escalade lay slumped over the steering wheel, unconscious from the collision.
The passenger door was hanging open.
A trail of dark blood led across the concrete loading bay toward the subterranean freight elevator.
"Anthony is bleeding heavily," Victoria observed, shining her tactical light on the crimson droplets.
"Charles will sacrifice him the second he becomes useless," Roman said, stepping beside her with his assault rifle raised.
They entered the cavernous subterranean belly of Bellagio Heights.
The tower was half-finished: exposed utility conduits hung from the twenty-foot ceilings like steel vines, and raw concrete dust coated the floor.
The freight elevator indicator above the hoistway showed that the car was ascending toward the fifty-fourth floor—the executive penthouse level.
"They cut the elevator power relay behind them," Marcus reported, checking the control panel with an electrician's meter.
"It will take fifteen minutes to bypass the circuit."
Victoria looked toward the emergency fire stairwell.
"We don't have fifteen minutes."
"The sixty floors are connected by the central utility core," Roman said, his tactical mind dissecting the building’s construction blueprints.
"There is a high-speed construction hoist on the exterior of the south tower used for moving steel girders."
"It runs on an independent generator."
Victoria looked at him without hesitation.
"Let's ride the cage."
They sprinted through the south corridor to the exterior hoist.
The platform was a skeletal steel cage suspended by heavy industrial cables against the open glass facade of the skyscraper.
Marcus keyed the generator ignition, and the electric winches screamed to life.
The platform jerked upward, rocketing along the exterior guide rails into the desert sky.
The city of Las Vegas opened up beneath them in a dizzying panorama of neon lights and sprawling suburban grids.
The rain lashed against their faces, the cold wind whipping Victoria’s hair as the altimeter climbed past five hundred feet... eight hundred feet... one thousand feet.
Roman stood at the edge of the platform, his back to the drop, his body shielding Victoria from the crosswind.
His eyes never left hers.
"When this is over, Victoria," Roman said over the howl of the wind and the screech of the steel cables, "our families will know everything."
"I don't care about the families anymore, Roman," Victoria said, her voice cutting through the gale with absolute clarity.
"The families were a lie invented by two monsters to justify thirty years of theft."
"I only care about finishing what our fathers started."
Roman reached out, his gloved hand closing over hers on the railing.
"We finish it together."
The hoist slammed to a halt at the fifty-fourth floor with a violent metallic shudder.
The construction floor was an open expanse of raw concrete, glass curtain walls, and temporary fluorescent work lights swinging in the draft.
At the far end of the floor, illuminated by the blue glow of twenty rack-mounted blade servers, was the private executive data center.
A trail of smeared blood led straight through the glass entrance doors of the server vault.
Victoria raised her weapon.
Roman kicked the glass door open, moving into the room in a fluid tactical sweep.
Inside, surrounded by humming computer cabinets and fiber-optic conduits, sat Anthony DeLuca.
He was slumped against a server rack, his face ashen, his gray hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.
His right sleeve was soaked in dark blood from Victoria’s earlier shots.
In his left hand, he held a heavy tactical combat knife, his breathing coming in shallow, agonizing gasps.
Beside him stood the master terminal workstation.
The computer screen displayed a glowing progress bar:
OFFSHORE LIQUIDATION SCRIPT: 84% COMPLETE.
ESTIMATED TIME TO EXECUTION: 04 MINUTES, 12 SECONDS.
Charles Kane was standing behind the terminal, his fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard with frantic, cold precision.
When the door shattered, Charles did not flinch.
He pressed a final keystroke and slowly turned around.
In his right hand was a sleek carbon-fiber semi-automatic pistol, aimed directly at Victoria’s heart.
"You are remarkably persistent, Victoria," Charles murmured, his voice echoing off the server enclosures.
"A trait you unfortunately inherited from your stubborn father."
Roman leveled his carbine directly at Charles’s forehead.
"Step away from the terminal, Charles."
"Or I will paint this entire server rack with your brain matter."
Charles Kane smiled a thin, contemptuous smile.
"If you shoot me, Roman, the encryption fails to decrypt, and the entire Bellagio Heights asset pool automatically liquidates into an unrecoverable blind account in the Cook Islands."
"Both your corporate empires will be bankrupt before the sun crests the Sunrise Mountain."
"You lose everything."
Victoria lowered her weapon by two inches, taking a single, measured step forward.
"We already lost everything twenty-five years ago, Charles."
"The only question left is whether you want to die alone, or if you want Anthony to know the truth before I put you in the ground."
Anthony coughed from the floor, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the concrete.
"What... what truth?" Anthony rasped, his eyes rolling toward his co-conspirator.
Victoria looked down at the bleeding DeLuca patriarch with pure, unadulterated pity.
"Show him the file, Roman."
Roman reached into his inner pocket, pulled out the micro-cassette recorder retrieved from Box 408, and tossed it onto the concrete between Anthony’s boots.
"Press play, Uncle."
Anthony’s trembling fingers found the plastic toggle.
The tape hissed to life in the quiet server room.
The voice of Charles Kane filled the space, speaking to a private Swiss banker in Zurich three weeks before his fake plane crash in 2008:
"Anthony DeLuca is an illiterate enforcer with an oversized ego."
"Once the Long Beach diversion yields two hundred million, I have no intention of splitting the final distribution."
"I have already prepared the secondary transfer protocols."
"The moment the DeLuca family signs the merger agreements, Anthony's accounts will be drained to zero, and his name will be submitted to the Department of Justice as the sole mastermind of the Silver Crest laundering network."
Anthony DeLuca froze.
The color completely drained from his face, replaced by a gray, hollow shock that made his entire body tremble.
He turned his head slowly, looking up at Charles Kane with eyes that held thirty years of shattered delusion.
"You... you were going to hand me to the feds?"
Charles did not look at him.
His cold aristocratic eyes remained locked on Victoria and Roman.
"Business, Anthony," Charles whispered with chilling disdain.
May you like
"You were always just the hired muscle."
Anthony let out a roar of primal, wounded fury and lunged from the floor like a dying animal, driving his combat knife straight toward Charles Kane’s throat.
