Chapter 6 - The Pier 14 Trap
By Tuesday evening, the trap was fully baited. The rumors had spread precisely as intended through the city’s underground network: Leo Romano was ambushed at his estate, sustained a gunshot wound to the abdomen, and was currently hiding out at an abandoned shipping facility on Pier 14 with only a skeleton crew of loyal guards.
From the command center, I watched the live satellite feed of the harbor. Silas, my operative from Europe, sat beside me, his long fingers typing rapidly on a custom tracking interface.
"The Moretti family took the bait hook, line, and sinker," Silas reported, pointing to a convoy of four black utility vans moving along the industrial highway toward the pier. "That's Vincent Moretti himself in the lead vehicle. He wants the glory of delivering the final blow personally."
"Good," I said, rising from my chair. "Let's give him his audience."
I drove to the harbor myself, accompanied by thirty of my most elite security operators. We didn't approach the warehouse directly; instead, we took up positions within the shipping containers that flanked the main entrance, creating a perfect kill box.
The Moretti vans arrived, their headlights turning off as they rolled onto the gravel lot of the pier. A dozen armed men slipped out of the vehicles, moving with tactical precision toward the rusted side doors of the warehouse. Vincent Moretti, a heavy-set man with an expensive fur-collared coat, walked in the center of the formation, a silver-plated desert eagle drawn in his hand.
They breached the door, throwing flashbang grenades into the empty space inside. The dull thuds echoed across the water.
"Go," I commanded into my radio.
Instantly, the heavy steel roll-down doors of the warehouse slammed shut from the outside, triggered by our remote override system. The building was a reinforced concrete bunker, originally built to store military explosives during the mid-twentieth century. There were no windows, and the walls were three feet thick.
The Moretti men inside were trapped like rats in a box.
I walked up to the exterior control panel, accompanied by Silas and Frank. I activated the internal intercom system, my voice broadcasting loudly through the speakers inside the warehouse where Vincent and his men were currently scrambling in a panic.
"Vincent," I said into the microphone. "Welcome to Chicago."
“Romano!” Vincent’s voice screamed back through the return audio, filled with sudden, suffocating realization. “You son of a bitch! Open the doors! We can negotiate! We can split the New York lines!”
"There is no negotiation for treason, Vincent," I replied calmly. "You corrupted my men, you violated my home, and you threatened the people under my roof. The penalty for that isn't a percentage of the market. It's liquidation."
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I didn't waste time on a dramatic monologue. I nodded to Frank, who turned the main valve on the exterior industrial gas line connected to the building's old heating system. We didn't use fire; we used a specialized, non-flammable suppressant gas that would simply deplete the oxygen levels within the sealed room over the course of ten minutes, causing them to slip into unconsciousness without a single shot fired.
It was clean, efficient, and left no messy crime scene for the local authorities to investigate. By midnight, the Moretti threat to Chicago had been systematically erased from the ledger.
