Chapter 7 - The Siege of the South Loop
The hours that followed were the longest of my life.
I locked myself and Finn inside the reinforced panic room behind the library, playing endless rounds of Go Fish and reading picture books while the muffled, distant sounds of helicopters circled overhead. Finn sensed my anxiety, but my enforced calm kept him from panicking.
“Is Dad going to be okay?” he asked around two o'clock in the afternoon, looking up at me with his mother’s large, expressive eyes.
“Your dad is the strongest person I know, buddy,” I told him, smoothing his hair back. “He’s going to make sure we’re safe.”
At three-thirty, the encrypted communications panel on the panic room wall chimed.
I pressed the speaker button with a trembling finger. “Marcus?”
“Harper, open the door,” Marcus’s voice crackled through the static, sounding exhausted but triumphant. “It’s over.”
Ten minutes later, I unlocked the heavy steel door and stepped out into the library.
The mansion was quiet, but the air felt lighter, as if a toxic cloud that had hung over the estate for months had finally blown away. Marcus was standing by the desk, his clothes dust-stained and his shoulder bandaged where a grazing round had caught him, but he was grinning.
“Where is Victor?” I demanded immediately.
“He’s wrapping things up downtown,” Marcus said, handing me a heavy manila folder. “Vance’s safehouse was raided about an hour ago. We didn't just find Arthur Pendelton—we found Vance’s master computer server containing encrypted recordings of every bribe, extortion threat, and fabricated indictment he’s orchestrated over the last five years.”
I opened the folder. Inside were digital flash drives, signed confessions from Arthur Pendelton, and a legal affidavit bearing the signature of a federal judge who had already initiated emergency proceedings to quash my federal subpoena and clear my name of any wrongdoing.
“And Vance?” I asked.
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“Federal Internal Affairs and a clean detachment of U.S. Marshals picked him up at his office thirty minutes ago,” Marcus said with satisfaction. “His career is over. He’ll spend the rest of his natural life in a maximum-security federal penitentiary.”
A massive wave of relief washed over me, so powerful my knees buckled. I sank into the nearest leather armchair, burying my face in my hands as the last fourteen months of terror, isolation, and survival finally broke apart.
