Chapter 5 - The Interrogation of the Strike Team
By 4:00 AM, the master wing had been secured. Viktor and his reinforcement team blasted through the side maintenance hatch, capturing the two surviving operatives alive. The wounded man whose shoulder had been crushed by the steel shutter was being patched up by the estate doctor in the adjoining bathroom, while the other sat bound to a heavy dining chair in the center of the bedroom.
Marcus stood over the captive, his face a mask of cold fury. He ripped the ballistic mask off the operative's face, revealing a man in his late thirties with a jagged scar running from his jawline to his ear—a known enforcer from the Veretti syndicate.
"Salvatore’s lapdog," Marcus said softly, resting the barrel of his gun against the man's forehead. "You thought you could walk into my house and take my son?"
The enforcer spat a glob of blood onto the Persian rug. He chuckled weakly. "You can kill me, Falcone, but you can't stop what's coming. The council has already voted. You broke the blood pact by hiding an heir outside the syndicate’s registry. The estate is surrounded. Even now, your financial accounts are being systematically frozen by the global clearinghouses."
Marcus didn't blink. "My accounts are diversified across twenty offshore jurisdictions. It would take a week to freeze a fraction of my capital."
"Not when your own chief legal counsel is the one executing the transfer orders," the enforcer grinned maliciously.
Marcus’s expression hardened. He looked across the room at Viktor. "Get me the legal director on the encrypted line. Now."
Viktor hurried to the console, tapping furiously on the keyboard. After a tense thirty seconds, he shook his head grimly. "Boss, the lines are dead. The mainframe in the west wing is routing all external traffic through an unknown proxy server in Zurich. We’ve been locked out of our own banking network."
The betrayal ran deeper than Isabella. The entire legal and financial infrastructure of the Falcone empire was being systematically dismantled from the inside out while they fought off assassins in the master suite.
Lucia, standing quietly by the doorway with her mother’s hand resting protectively on her shoulder, looked up at Marcus. "Sir... my uncle works at the telephone exchange downtown. He says big computers always leave a trail in the basement wires where the old cables are."
Marcus looked down at the little girl, stunned for a second by her clarity amidst the chaos. He crouched down beside her. "What did you say, Lucia?"
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"When the storm knocked out our phone lines last winter, my uncle showed me how the old copper lines bypass the digital boxes," she explained earnestly. "If they are using the big computers in the basement to steal your money, they have to plug into the old junction box behind the wine cellar."
Marcus stood up slowly, a grim smile touching the corner of his mouth. He looked at Viktor. "Get a tactical team down to the wine cellar immediately. Cut the analog override lines before they can finish the transfer."
