Chapter 7 - The Confrontation on Thirty-Three
The executive lounge on the thirty-third floor was a vast, sunken room featuring dark mahogany walls, velvet sofas, a grand quartz bar, and a panoramic glass wall overlooking the dark waters of the East River.
The backup emergency generators had kicked in, casting a dim, reddish security light across the room.
Sitting on a high leather barstool near the quartz counter was Dominic Vane.
Dominic was forty-two, stylish, wearing a tailored light grey suit, a silk pocket square, and gold-framed glasses. He was drinking a glass of twenty-year-old Scotch, holding a sleek silver tablet in his left hand.
Standing beside him were four heavy Ironclad mercenaries armed with assault rifles.
Sitting on a velvet sofa near the window, her hands bound behind her back with plastic zip-ties, was Elena—Bastion’s private estate attorney. Her hair was disheveled, a line of blood running from her lip.
The heavy double glass doors at the top of the lounge steps slid open.
Bastion Mercer stepped into the red emergency light.
He was covered in rain, dust, and dark blood across his left sleeve. He held his heavy black handgun at his side, his silver eyes fixed on Dominic with the cold, absolute finality of an executioner.
Behind him, holding a dark tactical laptop she had salvaged from the library server rack, walked Beatrice Abbott.
Dominic didn't jump. He didn't reach for a gun. He slowly set his glass of Scotch down on the quartz counter, taking a quiet sip before turning his barstool to face them.
"You always were impossible to kill, Bastion," Dominic said smoothly, his voice pleasant, polite, and entirely devoid of fear. "I told the Marseilles team six times that three men wouldn't be enough for you. But they insisted on standard tactical deployment."
Bastion stopped at the top of the carpeted steps, twenty feet from his oldest friend.
"Eighteen years, Dominic," Bastion said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. "I pulled you out of the docks in Brooklyn when you were twenty years old. I gave you twenty percent of Mercer Logistics. I made you a wealthy man."
"You made me a manager, Bastion!" Dominic snapped, his polite veneer suddenly cracking, revealing a deep, festering well of bitter, ugly hatred. "You made me the guy who sits in board meetings while you play the dark king of Manhattan! I built the Rotterdam routing! I set up the union payoffs in Newark! And every time a shipping magnate or a politician walked into this building, they asked for Bastion Mercer!"
Dominic pointed his finger at Bastion, his face contorting with rage.
"Forty million dollars," Dominic sneered. "It took me eighteen months to move it out from under your nose. I owned the union heads in Newark. I owned the customs inspectors in Jersey. Tomorrow morning at six AM, the entire port of New York shuts down under a federal injunction I signed under your corporate authority."
"And the company?" Beatrice stepped forward, her voice ringing out through the quiet, red-lit lounge like a silver bell. "What happens to Mercer Logistics when the federal injunction hits?"
Dominic looked at Beatrice, his eyes sweeping over her curving figure, her dusty blazer, and her calm grey eyes.
"Ah," Dominic smirked. "The forensic accountant. The woman who couldn't leave well enough alone. If you had just submitted a clean report on Friday, Miss Abbott, you would have received a five-hundred-thousand-dollar consultation bonus from an anonymous trust in Panama."
"I don't take bribes from men who wear cheap pocket squares, Mr. Vane," Beatrice said flatly. "And your Panama trust was frozen twenty minutes ago."
Dominic’s smirk instantly vanished. "What?"
Beatrice opened her tactical laptop, holding it up so the red security light reflected off the screen.
"When the main power went down in the library," Beatrice explained, her voice cool, steady, and filled with sharp, triumphant precision, "I didn't stop the trace. I routed the final beneficiary decryption through a satellite relay connected directly to the Federal Reserve’s financial crimes network."
She tapped a key on her laptop.
"Your forty-million-dollar war chest in Cyprus? Frozen. Your twenty-three shell corporations in Delaware? Subpoenaed. Your ghost key access log? Transmitted directly to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York."
Dominic stood up from his barstool, his face turning an ash-grey pale. "You... you couldn't have... the system was offline!"
"The hotel system was offline," Beatrice said, taking a slow, confident step down the carpeted stairs beside Bastion. "My brain wasn't. You cloned Bastion’s phone, Dominic. But you forgot that every time you accessed the Acheron account, your tablet recorded an IP timestamp matched to your private residential fiber network in Brooklyn."
Dominic stared at her in pure, unadulterated horror. He looked at the four Ironclad mercenaries standing around him.
"Kill them!" Dominic screamed, his voice cracking violently. "Kill them both right now!"
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The four mercenaries raised their rifles.
Before they could pull their triggers, the massive floor-to-ceiling glass wall overlooking the East River shattered inward in a blinding, deafening explosion of safety glass and high-decibel flashbangs.
