Chapter 6 - The Interrogation by the Fountain
The rain over Astor Street had turned to sleet by 5:30 AM, coating the bronze fountain in the center of the courtyard in a delicate, glassy skin of gray ice.
Thomas Sterling sat on the cold stone coping of the fountain basin, his expensive charcoal overcoat soaked through with freezing water, his hands zip-tied tightly behind his back with reinforced industrial polymer. His left trouser leg had been sliced open by Carmine’s field shears, revealing a crude, bloody pressure dressing wrapped around his knee where a 5.56mm round had shattered the patella.
His silver hair was plastered to his forehead, his face pale as lard, but the cold, bureaucratic arrogance that had carried him through thirty years of Washington politics had not entirely deserted him.
"You're making a catastrophic mistake, Romano," Sterling rasped through chattering teeth, looking up at the four armed men standing around him in the courtyard. "I am the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. My motorcade was logged leaving O'Hare by the regional dispatch center. If I am not at the federal building on Dearborn Street by eight o'clock, two battalions of federal marshals will dismantle this house brick by brick."
Vincent stood five feet away, an umbrella held over his head by Marco, an unlit cigar between his teeth, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his dark overcoat. He didn't answer. He simply looked at the heavy oak doors of the mansion as they swung open.
Beatrice walked down the granite steps.
She had discarded the bloody apron and the torn uniform completely. She wore a dark navy wool coat that Vincent had ordered from an all-night luxury tailor on Michigan Avenue, tailored wide across her broad shoulders, falling straight to her ankles with the heavy, unbending authority of an admiral's bridge coat. Her hair was pulled back into a neat, severe chignon, her face washed clean, her hazel eyes completely devoid of mercy.
In her right hand, she carried the slim, black titanium drive.
Sterling froze.
The breath caught in his throat with a wet, rattling gasp that sounded like a dying pump. His pale eyes widened, staring at the woman descending the stairs as if he were watching a corpse climb out of an open grave in broad daylight.
"Beatrice," Sterling whispered, his voice cracking into a thin, dry wheeze.
"Deputy Director Sterling," she said, stopping three feet in front of him on the wet flagstones. Her voice was not loud, but it carried through the courtyard with the terrifying, resonant clarity of a judge reading a death warrant. "You look cold. The water in the Potomac was colder three years ago when your private contractor ran my car off the bridge on the George Washington Parkway."
Sterling’s mouth opened and closed twice, like a landed fish suffocating on gravel. "You... you were supposed to be in that apartment. The fire marshal certified the remains."
"The fire marshal was an associate of Grigori Ivanov's distribution network in Baltimore," Beatrice replied, stepping closer until her shadow enveloped the wounded official completely. "He took two hundred thousand dollars to misidentify a Jane Doe from the county morgue. You should have checked the dental work yourself, Thomas. You always were lazy with the field logistics."
She held up the black titanium drive, turning it slowly between her fingers so the cold morning light caught the engraved serial number on the casing.
"Do you recognize the hash key on this drive?" she asked softly.
Sterling’s eyes darted frantically from the drive to Vincent, then back to Beatrice. The arrogance finally peeled away from his features, leaving behind the twitching, pathetic terror of a bureaucrat who had just realized that the shredded documents had been taped back together.
"The... the Nicosia files," Sterling stammered, his body shivering violently in the freezing sleet.
"The Nicosia files," Beatrice agreed, nodding once. "The Zurich ledgers. The signed protocols with the Odessa syndicates. And the audio recording of you instructing Grigori Ivanov to execute the Romano family at the Wellington steakhouse last night."
She leaned down, her face twelve inches from his, her voice dropping into a lethal, venomous murmur that only he and Vincent could hear above the wind off the lake.
"You had my handler murdered in his driveway in Arlington, Thomas," she whispered. "He had three grandchildren. You put two rounds in the back of his head because he wouldn't sign the routing clearance for twelve containers of precursor chemicals. You burned my life to the ground. You forced me to spend thirty-six months hiding in the shadows of this city, scrubbing toilets and carrying grease trays for men who called me a cow."
She straightened her back, towering over him like an iron monument.
"And now, you are going to sign the full, unredacted confession I prepared for you in the library," Beatrice said. "Or I will hand this titanium drive directly to the investigative desk of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Inspector General of the Department of Justice before the sun clears the water."
"They won't believe you!" Sterling snarled, a desperate, hysterical defiance flaring in his eyes. "You're a rogue analyst with a psychiatric file! I had you flagged for paranoid schizophrenia six months before the fire!"
Vincent stepped forward then.
He did not draw his weapon. He simply reached down, his long, scarred fingers closing around the lapels of Sterling’s wet cashmere coat, and hauled the two-hundred-pound federal official off the stone basin with a single, terrifying heave of his broad shoulders. He slammed Sterling against the brick wall of the carriage house, his face an inch from the older man’s nose.
"They won't need to believe her, Thomas," Vincent whispered, his voice a low, vibrating growl that made the hair on the back of Carmine’s neck stand up across the courtyard. "Because the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois is currently sitting in my private study on the second floor, drinking my twenty-five-year-old bourbon, reading through the wiretap transcripts Dr. Hall provided forty minutes ago."
Sterling went completely limp in Vincent’s grip. The color drained from his lips, leaving them a dull, bruised blue.
"The U.S. Attorney..." Sterling choked out.
"He was very interested to learn that his own phone had been tapped by your private office for three years," Vincent purred, his fingers tightening on the coat until the wool seams groaned. "He is currently drafting an emergency arrest warrant under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, accompanied by sixteen counts of federal capital murder. You aren't leaving this city in a government jet, Thomas. You're leaving it in a transport van heading for the federal metropolitan correctional center on Clark Street."
Vincent dropped him. Sterling struck the wet flagstones with a heavy, uncoordinated thud, sobbing into his zip-tied hands—a broken, pathetic traitor stripped of his title, his power, and his freedom by the very woman he had dismissed as a dead ghost.
Vincent turned away from the heap of wet cashmere, his dark eyes finding Beatrice standing in the center of the courtyard.
The sleet was melting in her dark hair, sparkling like tiny diamonds across her curls. She stood tall, formidable, and entirely whole, the three years of humiliation burned away by the cold, clean fire of justice.
Vincent walked over to her, his hand reaching out to gently touch the sleeve of her dark navy coat.
"It's finished, Doctor," Vincent murmured, his voice softer than anyone in the Romano family had ever heard it.
May you like
Beatrice looked at the broken man weeping against the brick wall, then up into the dark eyes of the Chicago mafia boss who had stood between her and the abyss.
"No, Mr. Romano," she said, a faint, iron smile finally touching the corners of her mouth. "The translation is finished. Now we have to clean up the room."
