Chapter 8 - VAULT 714 AT PIER 14
Three minutes later, with four of Luca’s armed dockmen stationed inside Apartment 1B to guard the hallway, Daniel pulled the Range Rover right up to the steel security bollard of Pier 14.
My father sat in the front passenger seat with his portable five-pound travel oxygen pack slung over his shoulder, refusing point-blank to stay behind when we only needed him to walk ten feet from the car door to the exterior gatehouse control booth.
“Look at the loading apron by the water,” Daniel muttered, pointing through the rain at two black Suburbans and a heavy utility van parked beside the subterranean maintenance ramp of the towering concrete terminal building.
Two of Uncle Dante’s lookouts stood under the corrugated metal awning at the top of the ramp—until six of Luca’s veteran dockworkers stepped out from behind a stack of forty-foot steel shipping containers with heavy wrenches and zip-ties, disarming both men silently in less than ten seconds.
My father stepped out of the Range Rover into the rain, walked straight into the glass-walled security booth he had commanded eleven years earlier, and swiped his faded 2015 supervisor card through the steel master panel on the wall.
Instantly, the digital schematic screen above the desk lit up green: SUB-BASEMENT VAULT LEVEL — OVERRIDE ACCEPTED. OUTER BLAST SHUTTER UNLOCKED.
“You’ve got four minutes before the NYPD Harbor unit cruisers hit the main gate on Vernon Boulevard, Luca,” my father said over the booth intercom, his fingers poised over a row of heavy red hydraulic switches. “They’re down in the old tide-bunker at the bottom of the ramp. Go!”
Luca, Daniel, and I hurried down the concrete maintenance stairs into the sub-basement level beneath the pier pilings, where the rhythmic slap of the East River echoed against the three-foot-thick waterproof foundation walls.
At the end of the fluorescent-lit corridor, heavy blue sparks and clouds of white acrid smoke were pouring out of the reinforced vault room.
Inside stood sixty-four-year-old Dante Moretti—still wearing his black velvet tuxedo jacket from Luca’s engagement dinner with a silk pocket square neatly folded over his chest—alongside Vanessa’s father, Donato Bellini, and Dr. Harris, who was holding a leather medical bag by the door!
And kneeling in front of a massive circular steel floor-chest marked VAULT 714 was a welder in a protective mask, trying vainly to cut through four inches of manganese-alloy bank steel with an oxygen-acetylene torch!
“Shut off the torch,” Luca said, stepping into the vault doorway with his Beretta leveled squarely at his uncle’s heart while Daniel covered Donato Bellini’s bodyguard on the left.
The welder immediately killed the blue flame and dropped the torch onto the concrete floor, raising his gloved hands.
Dante Moretti turned around slowly.
For a man caught red-handed in the basement of the pier where he had tried to murder his own brother’s best friend eleven years ago, Luca’s uncle didn’t cower. Instead, he looked past Luca’s gun at me—standing alive and steady behind Luca’s shoulder in his nephew’s black trench coat—and let out a quiet, bitter sigh, shooting a murderous glare at Dr. Harris.
“Half a million dollars I paid you, Harris,” Dante said coldly to the trembling physician, “and you couldn’t even put enough digitalis on a bandage to stop a ninety-pound housemaid.”
“She took the bandage off!” Dr. Harris stammered, backing against the concrete wall and dropping his medical bag. “I didn’t want any part of killing a girl, Dante! You told me if I didn’t sign the incapacity papers for Luca tonight and silence the maid, you’d turn my clinic records over to the federal prosecutor!”
“You tried to kill an innocent woman in my house, Dante,” Luca said, his voice shaking with a cold, lethal fury that made the sub-basement air feel ten degrees colder. “After you locked Marco Santoro and Arthur Parker inside a burning building on this exact pier eleven years ago, killed my sister Elena when she found out, and spent a decade pretending to mourn my father at Sunday dinner!”
“Your father was living in the past, Luca!” Dante snarled, his patrician mask finally shattering as he stepped forward, gesturing wildly at the concrete walls around us. “Lorenzo wanted to turn the Moretti syndicate into a legitimate union stevedore charity! He was going to hand the shipping lanes over to a board of trustees and leave me with a five-percent pension after I spent thirty years keeping the unions in line! Donato Bellini offered us forty million dollars a year in clean overseas logistics if we merged the docks—and your stubborn father was going to throw it all away because of his conscience!”
“And Elena?” Luca whispered, his knuckles turning white around the grip of his gun. “My twenty-four-year-old sister was pregnant with her first child, Dante. You told me she lost control of her car on the Amalfi drive in the rain.”
Donato Bellini shifted uncomfortably beside the vault, glancing toward the corridor exit. “Look, Luca, Elena had gotten hold of the Pier 14 wire transfers from Marco. Nobody wanted her hurt, it was Enzo who followed her car—”
“And her son survived,” I said clearly from behind Luca, pulling the two tarnished brass 714 keys and Lorenzo Moretti’s gold pocket watch out of my coat pocket and holding them up under the fluorescent lights. “Just like Marco Santoro survived. And just like my father survived.”
Dante’s eyes locked onto the two brass keys in my hand—the key from his brother’s watch, and the matching key from Marco Santoro’s neck.
“You don’t need a blowtorch when you didn’t murder the men who held the keys, Uncle Dante,” Luca said.
Keeping his eyes on his uncle, Luca took the two brass keys from my palm, knelt beside the circular steel floor-vault—where the welder’s torch had barely scorched the outer paint—inserted both keys into the twin brass keyholes twelve inches apart, and turned them simultaneously.
With a heavy, oiled clunk of counterweights, the four-inch steel lid swung upward on its hydraulic hinge.
Inside, sealed in a dry vacuum canister, lay three items: the original unedited digital security hard drive from the Pier 14 gatehouse cameras on November 14, 2015; a signed bank ledger showing five million dollars wired from Donato Bellini to Dante Moretti’s Cayman account forty-eight hours before the fire; and a notarized 2015 revision to Lorenzo Moretti’s will—stripping Dante Moretti of every single share in the company and naming Arthur Parker and Marco Santoro as lifetime pensioned trustees of the East River Port Authority!
Dante lunged desperately toward the open vault chest—at the exact same moment Donato Bellini’s bodyguard reached under his coat for a concealed revolver.
Luca didn’t even have to pull the trigger.
Above our heads, a loud alarm bell clanged twice—and my father pressed the red hydraulic test switch in the gatehouse booth upstairs!
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With a deafening roar of pressurized river water, the overhead fire-suppression deluge nozzles directly above Dante, Donato Bellini, and his bodyguard blasted three hundred gallons of ice-cold East River water per minute straight down onto their heads, knocking the gunman flat onto his back on the slick concrete as the heavy outer steel blast shutter dropped halfway down the doorframe to trap them inside the flooded alcove!
Thirty seconds later, four NYPD Harbor Patrol officers and two federal marshals came running down the concrete ramp—guided straight to the vault door by my grinning father at the top of the stairs.
