Chapter 15 - The Raid on Crown Plaza
By midnight, a ferocious blizzard had enveloped Manhattan, howling through the concrete canyons and blinding the streetlights with swirling white sheets of ice.
Fifty stories above the frozen city, Lawrence Thorne stood by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of his Crown Plaza penthouse, swirling a snifter of twenty-five-year-old single malt scotch. On the mahogany desk behind him lay an open velvet case containing Jorge Castellanos’s bronze anchor watch, ticking steadily in the quiet room.
Thorne was unraveling. Victoria Sterling had gone into hiding, Judge Vance was in federal custody singing like a canary to save himself from a twenty-year sentence, and the New York media was already catching wind of the bribery scandal.
"Fools," Thorne snarled into his encrypted satellite phone. "All of them! Send my jet to Teterboro. Mobilize the private tactical security team to escort me out of the building. We’re moving to the Bahamas residence tonight."
"Mr. Thorne, sir," the voice of his head of security crackled over the intercom, filled with static and panic. "The freight elevators just died. All power to the sub-basement has been cut."
"What are you talking about? Switch to auxiliary generators!"
"The generators have been sabotaged! Someone severed the main fuel lines in the maintenance tunnel—"
The radio went dead with a loud pop of electrical static.
Suddenly, the sleek recessed lighting in the penthouse flickered and died, plunging the vast apartment into darkness, illuminated only by the faint, eerie glow of the blizzard outside.
From the executive private elevator shaft at the back of the room came the shriek of twisting metal. The heavy stainless-steel doors were pried apart with hydraulic force, clattering open against the wall.
Stepping through the opening into the penthouse was not a team of federal agents, nor mob assassins in pinstripes.
It was Frank Brennan and six hulking union dockworkers, wearing their heavy yellow work coats, tool belts, and hard hats. Behind them, stepping out with quiet, terrifying majesty, was Dante Moretti.
Thorne stumbled backward, dropping his crystal glass, which shattered against the Italian marble floor. He scrambled toward his desk, reaching frantically for the drawer where he kept a pearl-handled revolver.
Before his fingers could touch the wood, Frank Brennan’s massive iron hand clamped down onto Thorne’s collar, lifting the multi-millionaire CEO clear off his feet and slamming him against the floor.
"Don't touch that desk, you dog," Frank growled, his eye blazing with vengeance. "You aren't fit to breathe the air in this room."
Dante walked slowly across the marble, his polished shoes crunching over the shards of broken crystal. He stopped beside the desk, his eyes falling immediately onto the velvet box. He reached out with gloved hands and picked up Jorge’s anchor watch, feeling the heavy, honest weight of the metal.
"You stole a dead man’s pride, Lawrence," Dante said softly, slipping the watch safely into his inner pocket. "You thought because you lived fifty stories above the pavement, you were God."
Thorne gasped for breath on the floor, his face bruised and pale, his designer suit torn. "Moretti... listen to me! I can give you fifty million! A hundred million! I can transfer the entire corporate bond portfolio to your Swiss accounts! Just let me get to the airport!"
"Your money is worthless," Dante replied coldly. "Frank, do we have the server drive?"
One of the dockworkers held up a black military-grade hard drive extracted from the wall safe behind the desk. "Got everything, Don Moretti. Every payment to Victor Romano, the blueprint overrides for Pier 7, and the signed authorization order to disable the crane’s secondary brakes on the night Jorge died."
Thorne’s eyes went wide with despair. "You can't prove that in court... you can't!"
"We don't need a court, Lawrence," Dante said, stepping closer and looking down at him with utter contempt. "The Commission held an emergency vote tonight. Carlotti, Morello, and all five families have revoked your corporate protection. And Frank Brennan here has twenty thousand union workers outside waiting to see who murdered their brother."
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Thorne began to weep hysterically, his arrogance evaporating like water on hot iron. "Please... Dante... don't kill me! Please!"
"I’m not going to kill you," Dante said, turning his back on the broken billionaire. "I am a man of my word. You are going to walk down every single flight of stairs in this building. Frank and his men will escort you straight to the New York City Police Headquarters at One Police Plaza. You will confess to the murder of Jorge Castellanos on live television. And then, you will spend the rest of your miserable life in a maximum-security cell, watching Jorge’s wife and daughter run the harbor you tried to steal."
