Chapter 13 - The Montreal Sluice
Tuesday morning arrived under a suffocating blanket of freezing Quebec fog.
At 4:45 a.m., the cobblestone streets of Old Montreal were deserted, glistening like wet slate under the dim, yellow streetlamps.
A faded white linen van bearing the logo of Sainte-Madeleine Commercial Laundry rumbled down Rue Saint-Paul, its worn suspension squeaking over the uneven stones.
Behind the steering wheel sat Mave, wearing a white cotton driver’s coat and a dark wool watch cap pulled low over her braided hair.
Beside her in the passenger seat, hunched low beneath the dashboard, sat Dominic Rossy.
He wore black tactical wool, a heavy suppressed Sig Sauer P226 secured to his chest rig, and a pair of thin leather gloves.
In the back of the van, buried beneath stacks of heavy canvas laundry hampers filled with hotel tablecloths, lay Silvio and two elite Rossy enforcers.
Up ahead through the gloom loomed the massive wrought-iron gates of the Valenti estate.
The compound was a converted nineteenth-century maritime customs fortress, with stone walls three feet thick and narrow, barred windows that looked out over the freezing waters of the Saint Lawrence.
Two guards in heavy down parkas, carrying Israeli-made Galil carbines beneath their coats, stepped out of the heated stone gatehouse.
They held up orange traffic wands, signaling the van to halt at the barrier.
Dominic’s hand slid to the grip of his pistol.
“Easy, Dominic,” Mave whispered in English without moving her head.
“Let me do the talking.”
She rolled down the driver’s window as the older of the two guards approached the cab.
The guard had a jagged scar across his chin and eyes that had seen forty years of gangland brutality.
He leaned down, shining a heavy Maglite flashlight directly into Mave’s face.
Instead of shrinking from the beam, Mave squinted with genuine, irritated familiarity.
Before the guard could speak, Mave fired off a barrage of rapid-fire, heavily accented Quebecois working-class French, laced with the specific, colorful blasphemies unique to the Montreal dockyards.
She complained loudly about the van’s busted heater, cursed the freezing slush on the Jacques Cartier Bridge, and claimed the regular driver, Sister Beatrice, was bedridden with the flu.
The guard blinked, lowering the flashlight slightly, taken aback by the sheer fluency and uninhibited vitriol of the delivery.
He responded in a gruff, suspicious tone, asking why the delivery was fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.
Without missing a beat, Mave shifted her speech pattern.
She dropped into a low, intimate Sicilian dialect—the very dialect spoken by the older Valenti generation—and casually referenced Henri Valenti’s nephew, who ran the illicit sports betting parlor on Saint Laurent Boulevard.
She told the guard that if the linen was late for the Don’s eight-o'clock breakfast meeting, she would personally tell the Don that his gatekeeper was too busy picking his nose in the cold to open the latch.
The guard’s scowl evaporated.
A raspy, gap-toothed chuckle broke through his beard.
He patted the van’s side door with his gloved palm, convinced that this sharp-tongued local woman was exactly who she claimed to be.
He turned toward the gatehouse and waved his arm.
The heavy iron gates groaned open on their hydraulic hinges.
Mave shifted the van into gear, easing the vehicle through the gateway into the cobblestone courtyard.
Dominic exhaled a long, quiet breath from beneath the dashboard.
“That guard was ready to pull the pin on an alarm,” Dominic whispered, shaking his head.
“He would have,” Mave replied coolly as she guided the van toward the rear delivery ramp.
“In Montreal, if you speak Parisian French, they shoot you.”
“If you speak standard Italian, they lock the gate.”
“You have to sound like you grew up stealing copper pipes out of the East End.”
She backed the van smoothly against the steel loading dock at the rear of the fortress.
She killed the engine and the headlights, plunging the delivery bay into shadow.
Dominic sat up, drawing his suppressed Sig Sauer and checking his tactical timer.
“05:02 a.m.,” Dominic said.
“Valenti’s private guard force shifts rotations at 05:15.”
“That gives us thirteen minutes to clear the service lift and reach the fourth-floor residence before the secondary sentries man the hallways.”
Silvio and the two enforcers emerged from beneath the linen hampers, their suppressed weapons held tight against their shoulders.
Mave led the way out of the van’s rear doors.
She carried no rifle; she carried her trusted suppressed Glock 19 and an old brass key ring she had pocketed from the maintenance office five years earlier.
They reached the heavy iron service door marked ENTRÉE DU PERSONNEL.
Mave inserted a long, notched skeleton key into the antique lock, turning it with two precise, mechanical clicks.
The heavy door swung inward without a squeak.
They slipped inside the dark, cavernous warmth of the estate’s ground-floor banquet kitchen.
The air smelled of roasted garlic, rosemary, and the rich, sweet scent of espresso grounds.
Two prep cooks in white aprons were chopping vegetables at a massive butcher-block island, their backs turned toward the door.
Dominic and Silvio moved with the silent lethality of panthers.
Before the cooks could turn, Dominic clamped a gloved hand over the first man’s mouth, driving a sleeper hold into the carotid artery until the cook went limp.
Silvio took down the second cook with identical efficiency, lowering both men gently to the tiled floor behind the prep counters.
“Service lift is around the corner,” Mave whispered, pointing down a narrow stone corridor lined with vintage wine racks.
They moved down the hall, their rubber-soled boots making zero sound against the terracotta tiles.
They reached the antique brass elevator cage.
Instead of pulling the call lever—which would ring a mechanical bell in the fourth-floor security room—Mave pointed up the shaft.
The steel counterweight cables hung in the open shaft, running parallel to an emergency maintenance ladder bolted to the brickwork.
“The elevator motor has an acoustic sensor on the fourth floor,” Mave warned.
“If the cage moves before 6:00 a.m., it triggers an indicator light on the Don’s personal desk.”
“We climb,” Dominic agreed without hesitation.
They ascended the iron ladder through the pitch-black shaft, four stories straight up through the drafty stone heart of the fortress.
Their breath rose in pale plumes in the cold air, their muscles burning from the climb, but nobody made a sound.
At the fourth-floor landing, Dominic carefully pried open the outer elevator door with a tactical wedge.
He peered through the gap.
The fourth-floor hallway was lavishly decorated with Persian runners, oil paintings of Sicilian countryside estates, and heavy bronze wall sconces.
Standing outside the double oak doors of Henri Valenti’s private study were two personal bodyguards.
Both were massive men in dark suits, holding Uzi submachine guns across their chests, looking bored as they waited for the morning shift change.
Dominic looked at Mave.
She nodded once.
Dominic slipped through the elevator opening, followed instantly by Silvio.
Pfft. Pfft.
Pfft. Pfft.
Four suppressed gunshots hissed through the carpeted hallway.
May you like
Both bodyguards collapsed into the heavy runners, their weapons muffled by the thick wool before they could hit the floor.
Dominic stepped over the bodies, grabbed the brass handle of the double oak doors, and kicked the lock open with a single, thunderous blow.
