Chapter 6 - THE PHOTOGRAPH
The smell of rotten eggs hit the back of my throat immediately.
Toby started coughing, burying his face into my shoulder.
“Cover his mouth!” Luca yelled, already moving.
I pulled the thick apron over Toby’s face, holding him tight against my chest beneath the desk. Mrs. Gable was gasping, clutching her throat on the floor nearby.
“Mrs. Gable, stay low! The gas rises!” I screamed, my own voice sounding thin and raspy.
Luca didn’t waste time on the locked oak doors. He knew they were reinforced steel beneath the wood. He grabbed a heavy bronze statue of a rearing horse from his bookshelf.
He ran to the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the courtyard.
He swung the bronze horse with brutal force.
CLANG.
The statue bounced off the glass. Bulletproof.
“Damn it,” Luca coughed, his eyes watering.
The room was filling with the white, hazy gas. My head was already spinning. The edges of my vision were going dark.
“Luca…” I choked out.
He dropped the statue. He looked frantically around the room. His eyes landed on the massive stone fireplace.
“Rachel!” he shouted. “The chimney!”
He ran to the fireplace, dropped to his knees, and reached up into the dark, sooty flue. He yanked a heavy iron lever.
The flue opened with a shower of black dust.
Immediately, a draft of cold, fresh air rushed down the chimney.
“Bring them here!” Luca ordered.
I dragged Toby across the floor. My limbs felt like lead. Luca grabbed Mrs. Gable by the collar of her coat and pulled her to the hearth.
We huddled inside the massive stone fireplace, pressing our faces upward toward the draft of fresh air coming down from the roof.
I took deep, greedy breaths. Toby whimpered, his small hands clinging to my neck.
“Are we going to die, Mommy?” he whispered.
“No, baby. I promise,” I gasped.
Luca was beside me, his breathing heavy. His suit was covered in soot, his eyes red and furious.
“Three minutes,” Luca muttered, checking his steel dive watch. “He said he’d open the door in three minutes. He expects us to be unconscious.”
“He’s going to take Toby,” I cried, terror gripping my heart.
“He’s not taking anyone.”
Luca pulled his Sig Sauer from his waistband. He checked the magazine.
“When the door opens, stay in the fireplace,” Luca ordered. “Don’t make a sound.”
We waited in the soot and the dark. The hiss of the gas continued to fill the room. The red emergency lights made the study look like the inside of a furnace.
Click.
The heavy deadbolt of the study door slid back.
The door pushed open.
A figure in a dark suit wearing a black gas mask stepped into the room. Thomas.
He held a suppressed pistol in his right hand.
Through the haze, Thomas looked toward the desk. He didn’t see us.
He took two steps into the room.
Luca stepped out of the fireplace like a shadow.
He didn’t shout. He didn’t hesitate.
Luca swung the heavy iron fireplace poker he had grabbed from the hearth.
It struck Thomas’s gun hand with a sickening crunch of bone.
Thomas roared in pain, dropping the pistol.
Before Thomas could recover, Luca drove his knee into Thomas’s stomach, grabbed the edge of his gas mask, and ripped it off his face.
Thomas staggered backward, gasping the poisoned air.
Luca leveled his gun at Thomas’s head.
“Move, and I’ll put a bullet through your eye,” Luca snarled.
Thomas held up his uninjured hand, coughing violently.
Luca reached out, grabbed Thomas by the collar, and dragged him toward the open door, throwing him out into the clear air of the hallway.
“Out! Now!” Luca yelled at me.
I scrambled out of the fireplace, carrying Toby, pulling Mrs. Gable with my free hand. We spilled into the hallway, collapsing onto the marble floor, gulping in the clean air.
Luca stood over Thomas, the gun still aimed perfectly at his forehead.
Thomas was on his knees, clutching his broken hand, coughing up soot and saliva.
“You betrayed my family,” Luca said, his voice cold enough to freeze water. “For a retirement fund.”
Thomas looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, but there was a twisted smile on his face.
“You think this is about money?” Thomas gasped.
He reached into his jacket with his good hand.
Luca tensed, ready to fire.
But Thomas didn’t pull out a weapon. He pulled out a photograph.
He tossed it onto the marble floor. It slid and stopped near my knees.
I looked down.
It was a picture of a car wreck. A silver sedan wrapped around a concrete pillar. It was raining.
It was the crash that killed my husband, David.
“Pick it up, Rachel,” Thomas wheezed.
My hands trembled as I picked up the photo.
“Look closely at the driver’s side window,” Thomas said, coughing again.
I brought the photo closer to my face.
Through the shattered glass of the wrecked car, in the glare of the streetlights, I could see David’s face. He was slumped over the wheel.
But he wasn’t alone.
Standing just outside the window, looking down at David’s dying body, was a man in a dark raincoat.
The man was holding a heavy wrench.
I stared at the face of the man in the raincoat.
It wasn’t Patrick.
It was Thomas.
“You…” I whispered, the horror rising in my throat like bile. “You killed him. It wasn’t a hit-and-run.”
“He was trying to lock me out of the east wing security grid,” Thomas sneered. “He figured out I was skimming from the port accounts. I couldn’t let him tell your father, Luca.”
Luca’s face contorted with absolute rage. He pressed the barrel of his gun directly against Thomas’s forehead.
“Give me one reason not to kill you right now,” Luca whispered.
Thomas smiled, his teeth stained with blood.
“Because I don’t have the blueprints, Luca,” Thomas said.
Luca froze. “What?”
“Patrick didn’t have them either. They were never in the vault.”
Thomas looked directly at me.
“David took the real blueprints out of the vault the day before I killed him,” Thomas said. “He hid them. And I know exactly where they are.”
Thomas reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, familiar object.
It was a delicate, silver rosary.
My rosary. The one I kept on my nightstand at my apartment.
“Your neighbor Mrs. Gable didn’t just watch your kid, Rachel,” Thomas smiled wickedly.
I turned in horror to look at Mrs. Gable.
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The sweet, elderly woman was standing up slowly. She wasn’t crying anymore.
And in her hand, she was holding a snub-nosed revolver, pointed directly at my son’s head.
