Chapter 8 - The Hidden Snake: Victor Vance’s Desperate Plot for Revenge
Deep in the industrial slums of South Chicago, hidden inside a dilapidated auto repair shop that served as a secondary safehouse, a man named Victor Vance paced back and forth across the greasy concrete floor.
Victor had spent twelve years serving as Salvatore Barone’s chief financial officer and primary enforcer—the man who handled the dirty cash, bribed the city judges, and oversaw the offshore accounts in the Caymans.
When the federal marshals raided the Barone headquarters that morning, Victor had slipped out through the subterranean loading docks just two minutes before the front doors were breached, carrying a single duffel bag stuffed with two million dollars in untraceable bearer bonds.
Now, watching the news coverage of his syndicate’s total annihilation on a small, flickering television screen, Victor’s face was twisted in a mask of homicidal rage.
“Adrian Vitali… and that worthless decoy daughter,” Victor snarled, slamming his fist against a metal workbench so hard a wrench bounced off and clattered onto the floor. “They think they’ve won. They think they can wipe out forty years of Barone power overnight.”
He grabbed his encrypted satellite phone off the desk, dialing a private number that connected directly to three remaining syndicate hitmen who had managed to evade the FBI sweep.
“Listen to me very carefully,” Victor said into the speaker the moment the call was answered. “The Vitalis think they’re celebrating their victory at that Lake Forest estate right now. But we are going to crash their private celebration.”
“What’s the play, Victor?” a gruff voice asked from the other end of the line.
“We don’t hit the front gates—too heavily fortified,” Victor instructed maliciously. “We use the old drainage tunnel that runs beneath the estate’s private conservatory. It empties right into the botanical gardens behind the master wing. We go in heavy with automatic weapons, we eliminate Adrian and his new bride, and we take every bearer bond in their private safe before catching a flight out of O’Hare.”
“Consider it done,” the hitman grunted before disconnecting the call.
Victor threw the phone onto the desk, a sick, victorious smile spreading across his face.
He didn't care about Salvatore anymore; he only cared about reclaiming his stolen fortune and making sure the Vitali name went down in blood and fire.
May you like
What Victor didn’t know, however, was that Adrian Vitali’s counter-intelligence network monitored every single encrypted frequency in the Midwest underworld.
Within ninety seconds of Victor hanging up his satellite phone, a complete transcript of his entire conversation was sitting on Adrian’s private tablet in the Lake Forest conservatory.
Related Stories
