Chapter 8 - The Hunt on Michigan Avenue
The rain turned into a torrential downpour as our black SUV cut through the deserted streets of downtown Chicago. The clock on the dashboard read 04:15 AM.
We weren't heading straight into Luca’s trap at Navy Pier. Walking through the front door of an enemy stronghold was suicide. Instead, we hunted the architects of the coup on their own ground.
Our first target was Victor Ramos, the corrupt Deputy Police Chief who had ordered the city’s dispatchers to ignore all 911 calls originating from Ashford House during the midnight assault.
Ramos lived in a luxury penthouse overlooking Millennium Park. He assumed he was completely insulated from the underworld violence he facilitated from behind his mahogany desk.
He was wrong.
Claire bypassed the building’s electronic security in the underground parking garage in less than two minutes, disabling the elevator cameras and granting us direct access to the private penthouse floor.
When the private elevator doors chimed open inside Ramos’s marble foyer, the Deputy Chief was sitting in his silk bathrobe, pouring a glass of twenty-year-old scotch while watching the breaking news report of the “mysterious gas explosion” at Ashford House.
Before he could set his glass down, I crossed the room, grabbed him by the throat, and slammed him onto his glass coffee table, shattering it into a thousand jagged pieces.
Ramos shrieked in terror, staring up at my blood-stained face as if he were looking at a ghost returned from the grave. “Vale! You... you’re supposed to be dead!”
“I get that a lot tonight,” I said coldly, pressing the muzzle of my suppressed .45 under his chin.
Claire stepped into the living room, carrying Ramos’s open laptop from the study desk. Her fingers flew across the keyboard.
“He just received a wire transfer of two million dollars from a Vanguard Defense offshore account in the Cayman Islands,” Claire announced, showing me the glowing screen. “And here is the operational map for Navy Pier.”
She zoomed in on the blueprints. “Sterling has twenty-four private military contractors stationed inside Pier Shed 4. They’ve set up perimeter claymores, sniper overwatch on the roof cranes, and Luca Vance is holding court in the administrative offices on the second tier.”
Ramos was hyperventilating, tears and snot running down his face. “Marcus, please! Luca told me you were already dead in Miami! He said if I didn't hold back the precinct cars, Sterling’s men would butcher my family!”
I leaned in close to Ramos’s ear. “Did you think about my daughters when you held back the sirens, Victor?”
“Please—”
I didn't pull the trigger. I took his laptop, smashed his communications phone under my heel, and struck him across the temple with the heavy steel frame of my pistol, knocking him cold.
“We let the feds deal with the badge when the dust settles,” I said to Claire. “Right now, we have an appointment at the pier.”
Claire looked at the blueprints on the tablet screen, analyzing the entry vectors with lethal clarity.
“The roof access via the gantry cranes is their blind spot,” Claire said, pointing to the structural schematics. “They expect you to drive a convoy through the main gates or attempt a waterborne assault from the lake. They don’t expect two operators to drop in through the skylights.”
I looked at the former combat medic. In the dim glow of the tablet, her face was fierce, beautiful, and completely terrifying.
“You’ve done high-altitude urban breaches before?” I asked.
May you like
“More times than I care to count,” she replied, loading fresh armor-piercing rounds into her HK416. “Let’s show Walter Sterling what happens when he brings a war to my home.”
***
