Chapter 5 - The Tunnel of Ghosts
The air inside the escape tunnel was thick with the smell of wet earth, moss, and river water. Elena led the four boys into the darkness, holding Mateo’s hand tightly while Gianni brought up the rear with his weapon trained on the narrow opening behind them.
I stood at the entrance of the passage, watching the red glow on the cellar door expand into a blinding shower of white-hot sparks. The steel was beginning to melt.
"Go, Gianni," I commanded quietly without turning my head. "Get them to the safehouse in Cicero. Tell Marco to assemble the full family council. Tell them the boss is coming home."
"Boss," Gianni hesitated, his hand on my shoulder. "Let me stay with you. You can't take twelve of Dante's elite operators alone in a enclosed space."
"I am not alone, Gianni," I said, my eyes fixed on the melting steel hinge. "I have twenty years of ghosts standing behind me. Now move!"
Gianni swallowed hard, nodded once, and disappeared into the damp darkness of the tunnel, pulling the heavy oak barrel mechanism back into place behind him. The stone wall sealed with a heavy, definitive click, leaving me alone in the dim light of the cellar.
Five minutes later, the upper hinge of the steel vault door gave way with a screech of torn metal. The door tilted forward, crashing onto the stone floor with a thunderous bang that echoed through the subterranean chamber.
Smoke poured through the opening, followed instantly by three tactical stun grenades.
They exploded in a blinding flash of white light and deafening sound, but I was already crouching behind a three-inch-thick granite counter on the far side of the room, my eyes closed, my ears covered.
As soon as the flashes subsided, four men in black tactical gear surged through the breach, their submachine guns raised.
I did not offer them a chance to surrender.
I rose from behind the granite counter and emptied the entire magazine of my right-hand pistol into the first two operators. The heavy caliber rounds shattered their body armor at close range, dropping them instantly onto the wet floor. The third man swung his barrel toward me, but I stepped inside his guard, caught his wrist with my left hand, and drove the barrel of my gun directly under his Kevlar helmet.
I pulled the trigger once.
The fourth man backed away toward the breached doorway, shouting into his radio collar. "FALL BACK! HE'S IN THE CELLAR! HE'S—"
I fired two rounds through the smoke, catching him in the center of his chest. He collapsed backward through the ruined vault entrance.
Silence descended on the wine cellar once more, broken only by the steady dripping of water from the ceiling and the hissing of the cooling melted steel on the floor.
I ejected the empty magazines from both handguns, letting them drop to the stone, and slapped two fresh, twenty-round clips into the handles.
"Alejandro!" Dante’s voice called out from the hallway beyond the vault. He sounded amused now—the tone of a man watching a doomed animal struggle in a trap. "Impressive! Very impressive! But you're missing the larger picture, my friend!"
"The only picture I care about is the one in my pocket, Dante!" I shouted back, stepping out from behind the counter and moving toward the doorway.
"Do you really think Victor Rostova is doing this for money?" Dante laughed softly from the shadows of the corridor. "Old man Victor has six months to live! He’s dying of bone cancer, Alejandro! He doesn't give a damn about the Chicago territories! He wants those four boys because they are the only clean genetic material left in his line! He’s built an entire private estate in the upper peninsula of Michigan—a fortress where those boys will be raised away from the world, under the care of his personal tutors and doctors!"
"Over my dead body," I growled, stepping through the ruined door into the service corridor.
"That can be arranged!" Dante’s voice came from above.
I looked up just in time to see a heavy iron security grate drop from the ceiling of the corridor, slamming down between me and the main basement stairs, trapping me in the lower passage.
At the same time, the faint scent of sweet almonds began to fill the narrow concrete hallway.
Gas.
Dante wasn't trying to shoot me anymore. He was trying to neutralize me silently while his remaining team swept the estate for secondary exit routes.
I pulled my silk handkerchief from my pocket, soaked it with water from a broken pipe near the wall, and pressed it tightly against my nose and mouth. I turned back toward the wine cellar, sprinted to the hidden barrel entrance, and engaged the manual release mechanism.
The stone barrel wall swung open three inches. I slipped through into the dark tunnel, pulled the release lever from the interior, and listened as the heavy stone sealed itself shut behind me, cutting off the gas and the sound of Dante’s voice completely.
I was in total darkness now.
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I reached into my pocket, pulled out my silver lighter, and struck the flint. A small, golden flame flickered to life, illuminating the rough-hewn limestone walls of the old Prohibition tunnel.
I turned and began to run down the dark, damp slope, following the faint footprints of four small pairs of blue sneakers left in the wet mud.
