Chapter 10 - The Fall of the House of Delacroix
The rain had finally cleared, leaving New Orleans under a low, bruised-purple sky that smelled of sulfur, ozone, and wet asphalt.
The cotton warehouse on Magazine Street sat silent as a tomb. Cormac had cleared the lower floors an hour before dawn; the antique galleries and coffee shops that occupied the street level were shuttered, their iron security accordions padlocked.
Inside the fourth-floor executive office, the exposed brick walls caught the dying light of the afternoon.
Wren sat at Cormac’s massive desk, three monitors arranged before her, displaying live feeds from the internal security network and the external street cameras. The brass compass sat beside her right hand, its needle pointing true north.
Beside her, Cormac stood at the floor-to-ceiling window, a heavy semi-automatic rifle resting diagonally across his chest on a tactical sling. He was not looking at the river today; he was looking down into the narrow alleyway that separated the warehouse from an adjacent brick foundry.
“Two black SUVs entering the alley,” Wren said into her headset. Her voice was pure data, devoid of fear. “They’re bypassing the front loading bay. They’re heading for the old coal chute under the western foundation wall.”
*“We see them,”* Teague’s voice crackled through her earpiece from his position on the second-floor mezzanine. *“Cole has four men carrying heavy Pelican cases. Those are the demolition charges.”*
“Listen to me, Teague,” Wren commanded, zooming in on the blueprint overlay on her center screen. “The coal chute is framed with ten-inch timber headers backed by reinforced limestone. It can withstand twenty pounds of directional blast without transferring the shock to the main piers. But column four—the cast-iron vertical post right beside the chute door—is unbraced. If they attach a charge to column four, the western wall drops forty feet.”
*“Understood. Where do we funnel them?”*
“Force them into the boiler vault,” Wren said, her finger tracing the path on the screen. “The vault has eighteen-inch unreinforced brick walls. If the charges detonate in there, the blast wave will travel upward through the abandoned flue and vent harmlessly through the roof without compromising a single load-bearing member.”
*“Moving to engage,”* Teague replied.
A heartbeat later, the heavy, hollow rattle of automatic gunfire erupted from the basement level.
Wren flinched once, then forced her hands flat against the mahogany desktop. Through the video feed, she saw flashes of muzzle fire illuminating the dark, damp brick of the lower corridor. Cormac did not move from the window. He stood motionless, his silhouette cut against the purple sky, waiting for the inflection point.
“Cole is breaking through,” Wren said, watching a thermal camera feed from the lower stairwell. “Two of his men are down, but Cole and another shooter have reached the service elevator shaft. They’re coming up, Cormac. They aren't trying to drop the building from the bottom anymore.”
“They’re coming for the ledger,” Cormac said calmly.
He turned from the window. He did not run. He walked to the heavy oak double doors of the office, checked the heavy steel slide-bolts, and engaged them with a solid, definitive *thunk*.
He walked back to the desk, stopped beside Wren’s chair, and laid a black semi-automatic pistol on the blotter in front of her.
“If the door opens and it isn't me or Teague,” he said, looking down into her eyes, “you empty that magazine into the center of the opening. Do not hesitate. Do not calculate.”
“I don't miss at ten feet,” Wren said, her fingers resting lightly against the cold checkered grip of the pistol.
“I know you don't.”
The service elevator down the hall arrived with a heavy mechanical clang.
Heavy, hurried combat boots hit the hardwood floor of the corridor outside. Then came the sound of a heavy shoulder slamming against the double oak doors. The wood groaned, but Cormac’s locks—machined from two-inch solid billet steel—did not yield.
“Vale!” Vance Cole’s voice roared through the wood, rough, frantic, shredded by desperation. “Open the goddamn doors! We have fifty pounds of composition B on this frame! We’ll blow the whole floor into the Mississippi!”
Cormac raised his rifle, seating the stock firmly into the pocket of his right shoulder. He did not raise his voice.
“You’re standing on a two-inch heart-pine subfloor over thirty feet of empty air, Vance,” Cormac said, his tone as conversational as if he were discussing shipping manifests over lunch. “What did you anchor your charges to?”
Silence fell in the hallway for half a second.
Wren looked at her screen, her eyes widening. “The subfloor,” she whispered. “The load tolerance in that hallway was reduced when the old freight hoist was removed in 1984.”
“Shoot the floor joists,” Wren said to Cormac.
Cormac did not ask for clarification. He dropped the rifle’s muzzle twenty degrees, aimed directly through the lower panels of the oak door at an angle toward the corridor floor, and pulled the trigger.
*Thut-thut-thut-thut-thut.*
Five high-caliber rounds punched through the heavy wood, tracking a clean diagonal line across the floorboards on the other side.
A sharp, structural crack echoed through the building—the sound of an overloaded pine joist snapping under the combined weight of two armed men and fifty pounds of military equipment.
A scream of sheer, vertical terror followed.
Through the gaps in the splintered wood, Wren heard the heavy collapse of timber, followed by the terrifying, whistling rush of air as the entire sixteen-foot section of hallway floor gave way, plunging Vance Cole and his remaining operative three stories straight down into the abandoned cotton baling pit below.
The impact was distant, dull, and final.
Then came the silence. Complete, absolute, New Orleans silence—broken only by the distant hum of a tugboat horn on the river and the steady, rhythmic ticking of the antique clock on the office wall.
Cormac lowered his rifle.
He reached down, picked up the brass compass from the desk, turned it once in his palm, and slipped it into his trouser pocket. Then he looked down at Wren.
May you like
“Calculations verified,” he said softly.
***
