Chapter 4 - The Cleaners
By 4:30 a.m., the study had become a war room.
Marco Russo entered the room, his white shirt rolled up to his forearms, smelling of cold rain and cigarette smoke. He stopped dead when he saw Hannah standing beside the holographic tactical map projected onto Vincent’s desk, sipping black coffee.
"Boss," Marco said, eyeing Hannah with deep suspicion. "The two men from the nursery... they won't be talking anymore. But we ran the serial numbers on their submachine guns. Stolen from a National Guard armory in Pennsylvania three months ago. Handled through a shell company registered in Queens."
"Which shell company, Marco?" Vincent asked without looking up from the laptop.
"A-One Freight Logistics," Marco answered.
Vincent closed his eyes for two seconds. A-One Freight was Salvatore Vane’s primary distribution hub for counterfeit luxury goods.
"Daniel?" Vincent asked.
"Concussion. Three cracked ribs. He’ll live," Marco said. "He took a baton to the back of the skull. They knew our blind spots, Vincent. They walked right past the motion sensors on the north lawn. Someone fed them the patrol rotations."
"Someone did," Vincent said grimly. He gestured toward Hannah. "Marco, you remember Miss Mercer."
Marco frowned. "The nanny? Boss, why is she still in here? We need to get her and the kids to the safehouse in the Catskills."
"Miss Mercer is no longer the nanny," Vincent replied. "Or rather, she is the only person currently authorized to be within arm’s reach of my children. Miss Mercer, tell Marco what you found on the breacher's communications rig."
Hannah set her coffee mug down without a sound. "They weren't using encrypted radios. They used burner satellite phones with pre-programmed distress pings. At 3:15 a.m., when the entry team failed to check in, a ping was sent to an IP address located less than two miles from this gate."
Marco blinked, stunned by her tactical vocabulary. "What? Who are you?"
"That doesn't matter," Vincent cut in sharply. "What matters is that Salvatore is sitting two miles away, waiting to hear that Emma and Noah are in his custody so he can demand my resignation from the Commission."
"Salvatore?" Marco’s face drained of color. "Boss... Sal has been with us since your father ran the docks."
"Sal was with us when Claire died," Vincent said, his voice dropping to an icy whisper. "He sat in the front pew at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He held my hand and cried."
Hannah stepped forward, pulling up a street map of northern New Jersey on Vincent’s terminal. "If Salvatore is the primary contractor, he won't wait long. When his extraction team fails to return, he will assume one of two things: either they botched the entry and were captured, or Vincent has already mobilized the harbor families. His only play now is escalation. He will try to wipe the estate before dawn."
Marco looked from the map to Vincent, his hand instinctively resting on his holstered pistol. "We have twenty men on site. If Sal brings his crews from Brooklyn, we’re outnumbered three to one."
"Then we don't fight here," Hannah said.
Both mafia men turned to look at her.
"This house is compromised," Hannah continued, her tone brisk and authoritative. "The architectural schematics have been leaked. Fighting here risks structural collapse, crossfire into the children's quarters, and collateral containment failure. We move the children."
"To the Catskills?" Marco asked.
"No," Hannah said. "The Catskills is an obvious safehouse. It's listed under the family holdings. We move them somewhere no one in the Moretti syndicate would ever look."
Vincent looked at her, his dark eyes searching hers. "Where?"
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"My territory," Hannah said simply. "A decommissioned Coast Guard monitoring station on Staten Island. Off the grid. No digital footprint. And fortified enough to hold off a battalion."
***
