Chapter 9 - The Montreal Gambit
The border crossing at Champlain, New York, was shrouded in a blinding autumn sleet that turned the highway into a sheet of black glass.
A nondescript gray commercial van with commercial plates for a medical laundry supply company pulled up to the Canadian commercial inspection station.
Damon Cole sat in the passenger seat, dressed in a standard dark blue utility jacket, his hair slicked back beneath a woolen watch cap.
Beside him sat Ivy, wearing heavy spectacles and a clipboard resting against her knees, her demeanor resembling a bored logistics clerk.
In the back of the van, hidden beneath two metric tons of industrial hospital linens, Rocco Salerno lay flat on his back, his stitched arm cradled against a suppressed rifle.
The Canadian border officer tapped his flashlight against the driver’s side glass, his breath pluming in the freezing sub-zero air.
"Manifest and commercial transit permit," the officer demanded in flat, bilingual French, his eyes skimming over the muddy chassis.
Ivy leaned across the console, rolling down the window two inches, offering a stack of stamped customs documents and a bright, polite smile.
"Morning, officer," she spoke in the rapid, nasal French of rural Quebec, altering her accent completely from the harsh harbor patter of Marseille.
"We’re running the sterile linen exchange for the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal—the laundry boilers in Plattsburgh broke down yesterday."
The officer took the manifests, shining his flashlight across the blue ink stamps that had been produced three hours earlier in an Albany print shop.
"You're running late for the morning delivery window, mademoiselle," the guard noted, his thumb flicking through the pages.
"The weather on the 87 was absolute hell, sir," Ivy replied with an exasperated sigh that sounded entirely genuine.
"If the surgical wards run out of clean drapes by noon, the director will have my head on a platter."
The guard glanced into the back of the van, the flashlight beam sweeping across the neat, towering stacks of plastic-wrapped hospital sheets.
He didn't see the false floorboards three inches beneath the laundry, nor the three cases of military-grade explosives resting against the chassis rails.
He handed the clipboard back through the window, stepping back into the heated warmth of his guard shack.
"Drive safe. Roads are freezing over near Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu."
"Thank you, officer. Stay warm," Ivy said, rolling up the window as Damon eased the van into gear and crossed the line into Canadian territory.
Ten miles past the border, Damon allowed himself a low, ragged exhale, his knuckles relaxing slightly on the steering wheel.
"Your accents are going to give me a heart attack, Ivy," Damon remarked, though his voice carried the distinct warmth of admiration.
"Preston Wade would have tried to speak Parisian French and we would be in handcuffs in an interrogation room right now," Ivy said, tossing the clipboard onto the floor.
From the back of the van, Rocco’s voice echoed through the partition with a sharp, sarcastic snort.
"Can we drive faster? These hospital sheets smell like bleach and my stitches are throbbing like a bass guitar."
"Shut up, Rocco," Damon said without malice, checking his rearview mirrors to ensure no customs interceptors were tailing them through the sleet.
By midday, the gray industrial sprawl of Montreal rose through the freezing fog along the St. Lawrence River.
The target was a massive, weathered concrete grain elevator complex near the Port of Montreal, operating under the front name Laurentian Maritime Logistics.
This was the primary distribution nexus for Nikolai Borodin’s northern supply chain, the conduit through which Russian narcotics entered the American market.
More importantly, it was the headquarters of Lucian Delacroix, the Corsican syndicate lieutenant who had carried out the contract on the Bar des Flots four years ago.
Damon parked the van behind an abandoned rail shed three hundred yards from the perimeter fence of the terminal.
Through high-powered binoculars, Ivy watched the security patrols circling the concrete grain silos.
Six men carrying assault rifles patrolled the perimeter, wearing heavy thermal parkas marked with the insignia of a private security contractor.
Parked beside the main office trailer was a black Maybach with diplomatic consulate plates from the Russian Federation.
"Borodin is inside," Ivy said, lowering the glasses, her voice turning as sharp and cold as the sleet hitting the windshield.
"He flew up from New York on a private charter out of Teterboro this morning," Damon confirmed, checking his satellite phone for the encrypted data feed from Albany.
"He thinks he’s safe behind Canadian borders while the Southern District finishes dismantling my network in New York."
"He doesn't know Jean-Paul Faucher landed twenty men at the docks in Quebec City at dawn," Ivy said, a dark gleam lighting up her brown eyes.
"Faucher's boys have already seized the outer tugboats," Damon said, turning to look at her. "The harbor is closed from the water side."
"Then we cut off the land route," Rocco said, racking the bolt of his suppressed rifle as he kicked open the rear van door from the inside.
Ivy reached into the back, pulling out a tactical vest, slipping it over her sweater, and securing the nickel-plated pistol into the chest holster.
"Lucian Delacroix stays alive until I speak to him, Damon," she said, her voice dropping into an unyielding, territorial growl.
"I want him to know who set the fire before we put him in the river."
Damon looked at her, reached out, and pulled her toward him by the strap of her tactical vest, his forehead resting against hers for a brief, intense second.
"Delacroix is yours, Ivy," Damon whispered, his breath warm against her lips. "I’ll handle the Russian."
They moved through the freezing sleet like three hunting cats, cutting through the perimeter chain-link fence behind the shadow of a derailed grain car.
The snow deadened the sound of their boots against the gravel, the biting wind drowning out the soft mechanical clicks of their weapons.
Two guards smoking beneath the concrete awning of the elevator never heard the suppressed shots that took them down into the slush.
Rocco dragged the bodies behind the rusted machinery, while Damon and Ivy breached the side entrance of the central grain terminal with a hydraulic wedge.
The interior of the facility smelled of dry wheat dust, machine oil, and stale cigarette smoke, the cavernous space echoing with the humming of industrial blowers.
Above them, on an iron catwalk suspended forty feet above the concrete grain pits, two voices were arguing violently in a mixture of Russian and French.
Ivy looked up through the iron grid work, her eyes instantly identifying the scarred, narrow face of Lucian Delacroix.
He looked older, his hair graying at the temples, but the cruel, downturned mouth was identical to the face she had seen through the burning windows of her father's tavern.
Beside him stood Nikolai Borodin, his head bandaged from the Newark shootout, his massive fist slamming against the safety railing.
"The Americans aren't dead, Lucian!" Borodin bellowed in broken French. "The safehouse in the Pine Barrens was empty! Cole vanished from the river!"
"Cole is finished," Delacroix dismissed him with a flick of his manicured fingers. "The federal prosecutors have seized his accounts. He has no money, no soldiers, and no harbor."
"He has the girl," Borodin roared, his voice echoing off the corrugated iron walls. "And the girl has the devil’s own tongue!"
Ivy stepped out from beneath the shadow of the elevator silo, walking into the center of the illuminated concrete floor.
"You should have listened to the Russian, Lucian," she called out, her voice ringing clear, sharp, and terrifyingly calm through the vast, empty terminal.
The two men on the catwalk froze, their heads jerking downward toward the solitary figure standing beneath the hanging halogen work lights.
Delacroix squinted through the dust, his brow furrowing with confusion. "Who the hell are you?"
Ivy reached up, pulled off her spectacles, and looked up at him with eyes that had waited four years for this single, frozen second.
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"My name is Ivy Marlowe," she said in the harsh, biting dialect of Cassis.
"And you owe my father three hundred thousand euros for the liquor you burned in his cellar."
