Chapter 5 - The Confession in the Abattoir
The meatpacking plant in Sector 2 had been disused for a decade, its rusted steel hooks hanging from overhead rails like iron skeletons. Rain drummed relentlessly against the corrugated tin roof as Marco and his men threw Dr. Pierce onto a metal chair in the center of the concrete floor.
Dr. Pierce’s expensive tweed jacket was torn, his glasses hanging crookedly off one ear, his face pale with raw terror.
I stepped out from the shadows, the heels of my leather boots echoing against the wet floor. I held a pair of heavy surgical bone cutters in my right hand, swinging them casually back and forth.
"Mr. Moretti!" Pierce shrieked, squirming against the heavy ropes binding him to the chair. "What is the meaning of this?! I am a respected physician! I have been treating your son with the utmost care!"
"Dr. Pierce," I said smoothly, pulling up a wooden crate and sitting directly in front of him. "Do you know what I love about medicine? It’s so precise. A millimeter to the left, a patient lives. A millimeter to the right, they bleed to death in seconds."
I raised the heavy bone cutters and rested the sharp steel blades against his left pinky finger.
"No! Please! I swear I did nothing wrong!" Pierce screamed, sweating profusely.
"Julian paid you three million dollars into a Swiss bank account on the fifth of last month," I said, my voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. "You falsified Matteo’s cardiac panels. You replaced his therapeutic saline drips with low-dose glycoside solution. And fifteen minutes ago, you were carrying a case containing the medical records meant to be incinerated."
Pierce gasped, his eyes wide with horror as he realized his cover was completely blown.
"He threatened my family, Mr. Moretti!" Pierce wept, his self-control crumbling completely. "Julian said if I didn't cooperate, he would kill my daughters! I had no choice! He was the one who supplied the drug!"
"Where did he get it?" I demanded, squeezing the handles of the bone cutters just enough to pinch the skin.
"From a pharmaceutical laboratory in Zurich!" Pierce sobbed. "A chemist named Richter! Julian paid him to synthesize five liters of the compound. There is only one batch of the neutralizing enzyme in existence! It’s stored in a cryo-container inside Vault 12 at the docks!"
"How does the vault open?"
"It’s a dual-biometric scanner!" Pierce confessed frantically. "It requires Julian's retina scan AND a private sixteen-digit master code that changes every midnight! If you try to force the steel door without entering the active daily code, an incendiary thermite charge inside the locking mechanism ignites automatically! It burns at four thousand degrees! It will melt the cryo-vials into ash in five seconds!"
I stared at the terrified physician. Sofia’s letter had been right. Julian had built an unbreachable fortress around the cure to ensure that even if I discovered his betrayal, I could never save Matteo without his direct cooperation.
"Is there any other copy of the code?" I asked.
"No! Julian keeps the active daily code on a hardware security token attached to his watch strap!" Pierce wept. "He never takes it off!"
I stood up slowly, laying the bone cutters back on the metal table. I looked at Marco.
"Keep him alive until tomorrow night," I ordered. "If my son survives, Dr. Pierce goes to prison for life. If my son dies... give Dr. Pierce to the dogs."
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"Understood, Don Luca," Marco replied grimly.
I walked out into the pouring Chicago rain, pulling my coat collar up against the freezing wind. The pieces were all on the board. Twenty-four hours remained before midnight tomorrow. Twenty-four hours to pull off a flawless tactical strike against my own second-in-command, retrieve the antidote, and save my boy.
