Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven: Emilio
The joint operation launches on a Tuesday because the universe has a sense of humor and Tuesdays are apparently when big things happen.
The first Tuesday, Savannah overheard a conversation at a waterfront club.
The second Tuesday, I sat in a surveillance van and photographed Vidal boarding the Meridian Star.
The third Tuesday, I'm standing in the compound garage at midnight with six Bonaccorso soldiers, four Castillo soldiers, and Carmelo.
The Castillo soldiers look at us the way we look at them, with the specific distrust of men who have spent years trying to kill each other and are now supposed to stand shoulder to shoulder because Kreiss made both families look stupid.
Nobody's happy about it. Nobody's supposed to be.
The alliance is a tool, not a friendship, and the tool gets put away when the job is done.
Leone runs the briefing from the war room via comms. Claudio is there with him, monitoring the operation.
He’s the more openly vicious out of the two of us, but apparently Leone wanted to make sure the compound was covered while we were gone.
Alexandra is tracking the financial accounts in real time in case Kreiss tries to move money during the raid.
Savannah is in my room. I told her to stay there, and for once she didn't argue, which either means she trusts me or she's planning something I'll find out about later. She kissed me before I left. Not the hard, hungry kiss from last night. A short one with her hand on my jaw, her eyes on mine.
"Come back," she said.
"I always come back."
"You've known me for two weeks. We don't have an always yet."
"Then I'm starting one."
She let go of my jaw and stepped back while I walked out and the door closed behind me. I haven't stopped thinking about it since, which is exactly the kind of distraction Leone warned me about and exactly the kind of motivation I need.
The marina operation goes first. Two teams, one Bonaccorso, one Castillo, approaching from opposite ends of the dock. The Meridian Star is in its berth. Lights on below deck, signalling that the Tuesday handoff is in progress.
I lead the Bonaccorso team from the north approach.
A Castillo lieutenant named Dario leads the south.
We've met once, for fifteen minutes, in a parking lot behind Marcello's, and the entirety of our relationship consists of him saying don't fuck this up and me saying same to you and both of us meaning it.
The approach is clean. We move along the dock in two columns, boots quiet against the wet wood, guns up, comms open.
The marina is empty this time of night. A few boats with deck lights on, a security booth with a guard who Carmelo already handled on the perimeter, and the Meridian Star at the far end, engine idling, cabin windows glowing.
"In position," Dario says through the comm.
"Copy. On my count… three, two, one."
Both teams hit the boat at the same time. North and south boarding, men on deck in under four seconds. The two handoff operatives are at the cabin table with a briefcase open between them and the look on their faces when armed men pour through both doors would be hilarious if not for the situation.
They don't fight. One reaches for a weapon under the table and Carmelo puts a boot on his wrist before the hand gets there. The other raises his hands and starts talking in a language I don't understand.
Doesn't matter. We're not here for conversation.
Vidal isn't on the boat. The usual Tuesday pattern had him arriving at ten-forty, but it's eleven-fifteen and the sedan that usually brings him hasn't appeared. Either the pattern broke, or someone warned him.
I click the comm. "Vidal's a no-show."
Leone's voice comes back calm. "Proceed with the extraction. Bring the two operatives and everything in that briefcase. We'll find Vidal separately."
We zip-tie these two, bag the briefcase, and clear the boat in under three minutes. The Castillo team secures the rest and Dario's voice comes through the comm with a single word. "Clean."
The operatives go into separate vehicles. Bonaccorso takes one, Castillo takes the other. The briefcase comes with me.
In the SUV, I open it and inside is not what I expected.
Not paper intelligence, not financial documents, not the hard-copy briefing materials the Tuesday handoffs were supposed to contain.
Instead there are four phones, three USB drives, and a printed manifest with names and dates and locations that takes me about ten seconds of reading to understand.
It's the real transport manifest. Names of women and girls with ages listed beside them, the youngest fourteen, the oldest thirty-one.
Pickup locations all over Eastern Europe.
Transfer points through Turkey and Greece.
Arrival dates at the Apex Meridian Holdings facility, and distribution routes going outward from the facility to destinations that are listed only as codes I can't read.
I close the briefcase. My hands are stable but the thing happening in my chest isn't. It's the feeling I get before I hurt someone.
The cold thing, the still thing, the part of me that Claudio has too but wears differently.
In Claudio it looks like nothing, a blank face, an empty room.
In me it looks like the grin disappearing and the energy dropping to zero and everyone around me understanding that the man they're sitting with has stopped being charming and started being dangerous.
I call Leone because this can’t be said over the comms. "We need to move on Kreiss tonight."
"The plan was to interrogate the operatives first and build the approach."
"The plan changed. I've got a transport manifest in this briefcase with names and ages and a schedule that shows the next shipment arriving at the facility in four days.
Fourteen-year-old girls, Leone. We don't have time to build an approach.
We know where Kreiss is. Vidal's safe house address is in the Maryland documents. We go tonight."
I can hear him breathing, hear the chatter quieting around him, and Claudio's voice murmuring something I can't make out.
"Hold," Leone says.
I hold. The SUV idles and Carmelo sits beside me looking at the briefcase the way he looks at everything, without visible emotion, but his hand is on his knife, and his thumb is moving along the handle back and forth. I recognize what it is because Savannah does the same thing with her bottle cap.
A grounding gesture… even Carmelo needs one tonight.
Leone comes back. "Castillo team is in. Dario is redirecting men to your position while he takes his operative back to their compound. You take the safehouse… and Emilio? Kreiss doesn't leave alive."
"Understood."
"Hey." A pause. "Don't make it quick."
"Copy," I say as the line goes dead.
Kreiss's safehouse is a row house in East Baltimore. Brick, three stories, narrow, squeezed between a laundromat and a vacant lot.
We go in at two in the morning. Ten men, Bonaccorso and Castillo mixed, all ready for whatever is behind that door.
It goes down on the first kick. The hallway is dimly lit and narrow and smells like cigars, the roof and walls yellowing from someone smoking inside.
A man at the bottom of the stairs reaches for a gun and I put two rounds in his chest before his hand gets to the holster.
He drops and we step over him and move up.
Second floor. Two rooms. One empty, one occupied by a man sleeping on a cot with a laptop open beside him.
He wakes to the sound of boots and doesn't get to sit up before one of my men puts him on the floor and zip-ties his hands.
The laptop goes into a bag as I look around in disgust. Garbage is piled around the room with full ashtrays, a smoke burning in the corner of one.
The carpet has browning piss stains, and the scent almost knocks me flat on my ass.
I leave and head up to the third floor. One door that’s locked. I kick it and it holds, so I kick it again and the frame splinters and the door breaks. Werner Kreiss is standing in the middle of a room that looks nothing like the rest of the house.
Clean desk with two monitors. A shredder running, eating documents as fast as the machine can pull them through.
A go-bag on the floor, packed and ready.
He was leaving. Tonight, maybe tomorrow.
The consolidation Alexandra tracked was exactly what she suspected, an exit strategy.
Kreiss was pulling his money out, ready to disappear somewhere we couldn’t track, and we caught him somewhere between step nine and step ten of his get-away plan.
Not today, fucker. Not fucking today.
He's smaller than I expected. Five-ten, thin, gray hair, glasses.
He could be an accountant or a professor or someone's disappointing uncle.
Nothing about his appearance suggests that he's been running a trafficking pipeline through two mafia territories for two years and destroying the lives of women and children to do it.
He looks at me, then at the gun in my hand, and at the men behind me.
"DiAngelo," he says. He knows my name. Of course he does. He's had people inside our compound for years. "Your boss sent the loud one.”
"Shut up until I tell you to speak." I step into the room. "Turn off the shredder."
He doesn't move, so I shoot it. The machine sparks and dies and the half-eaten document hanging from its teeth flutters to the floor.
"The operation is over, Kreiss. The marina, the Meridian Star, the facility, the pipeline. We know what you've been moving, and we know where it goes and in four days there will be nobody left alive who works for you."
"You don't know who I work for."
"I know enough."
"You know nothing." He says it without anger, but with the tired patience of a man explaining long division to a child.
"I'm one node in a network older than your family and mine combined.
You can kill me, and someone replaces me within the week.
You can burn the facility, and another one opens within the month.
The infrastructure isn't a building or a boat or a man.
It's a system, and systems don't die because you shoot their middle management. "
"Maybe not, but I sure as fuck will feel better when middle management dies, with all due disre-fucking-spect."
He looks at me for a long time. Then he reaches for the go-bag, slow, one hand visible, the other moving toward the zipper. I know what's in the bag before he opens it. There's always a gun in the go-bag, because that's the rule for men who know they're living on borrowed time.
He's fast for his age. The gun clears the bag, and his hand comes up and I'm already firing.
Two rounds center mass. He staggers, hits the desk, knocks one of the monitors to the floor.
The gun drops from his hand. He slides down the front of the desk and sits on the floor with his back against it and his shirt turning red and his glasses crooked on his face.
I crouch in front of him. Up close he looks even older, wrinkles embedded in his skin, mottled red marks spreading out from his nose and up his cheekbones. He’s an ugly son-of-a-bitch, but his appearance will soon be improved with a neat little hole through his skull.
"Who do you work for?" I ask.
He smiles. "The same people who will come for you when they find out what you did tonight. Bigger than you, DiAngelo. Bigger than the Bonaccorsos and the Castillos put together. You killed one man. There are thousands."
"I only need to kill one to send a message." Levelling the gun at his forehead, I pull the trigger, relishing the way his head kicks back before coming forward again.
He dies looking at me. The light goes out of his eyes much quicker than I’d have liked, but skinning him alive would take too much time and a bullet is twenty-five cents.
I stand and dust my hands off on my pants. "The hard drives," I say. "The laptops, files, anything and everything, into the bag.”
My men work. Carmelo supervises. Dario's team secures the perimeter and reports the street clear. I stand in the middle of Kreiss's room and look at the monitors, the desk, the go-bag, the dead man on the floor who told me I killed one and there are thousands.
He wasn't wrong.
The hard drives and the laptop and the unshredded documents will go back to Alexandra and Charlotte and they'll find what Kreiss was connected to.
The money will lead somewhere above him, somewhere bigger, somewhere the names Custodian and Foundry and Westpoint appear in contexts that none of us understand yet.
We killed the handler. We burned the cell. The pipeline stops here, at least this branch of it, at least for now. The women and girls on that transport manifest, the ones scheduled to arrive in four days, they won't arrive. Not at that facility. Not through that route. That's real. That matters.
But Kreiss was right about one thing. He was middle management, and the people above him don't stop because you kill their employees.
I take one last look at the body on the floor and walk out of the room and down the stairs and out into the Baltimore night where the air is cold and the dog is still barking two blocks over and ten men from two families that have been trying to destroy each other for two years stand on a quiet street and share a silence that means more than any alliance agreement ever could.
Carmelo walks up beside me with a shit-eating grin on his face. "Done," he says.
I clap him on the back and take a picture of Kreiss before heading down the stairs.