Chapter 5 - THE CONFRONTATION IN TETERBORO
By five in the morning, the squall had blown itself out over Long Island Sound, leaving the city washed in a pale, bone-white mist that clung to the asphalt like steam.
The private hangar at Teterboro Airport was cold, vast, and smelled of jet-A fuel, hydraulic fluid, and wet concrete. In the center of the bay sat a sleek, white Gulfstream G550, its boarding stairs lowered, its twin Rolls-Royce engines cold and silent under the mercury-vapor lights.
A blue sedan with tinted windows sat near the taxiway doors.
Beside it, handcuffed to an iron stanchion supporting the hangar’s overhead crane, sat Liam Foster.
His bespoke tuxedo was ruined.
The faille silk lapels were torn at the left shoulder; his white wing-collar shirt was open at the throat, missing three mother-of-pearl buttons, revealing skin that was mottled with purple bruises where Marco’s associates had persuaded him to sit down. His hair was wild, plastered to his forehead with sweat and cold grease. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, darting around the empty hangar with the frantic, jerky movements of a trapped rat.
Twenty feet away, sitting on an overturned plastic equipment crate, Samantha Pierce was weeping into her hands.
Her plum-colored bridesmaid dress was smeared with black engine oil; her mascara had run down her cheeks in two greasy, black channels that looked like war paint. Her four-hundred-dollar satin shoes lay discarded in the oily puddle near the landing gear.
The small pedestrian door in the hangar’s south wall clicked open.
Dominic Russo walked through.
He wore his charcoal topcoat over his suit, his hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, his black leather gloves smooth and immaculate. Behind him walked Chloe.
She had refused the wheelchair Dr. Mercer had left.
She wore a heavy dark wool coat that Hilda had found for her, the sleeves turned back twice at the wrists, and a pair of flat leather boots that accommodated the bandages on her shins. She walked with a limp, her right heel dragging slightly, but her head was up. Her hair, washed of the salon spray and dried by the hearth fire, hung down her back in dark, heavy waves.
In her right hand, she carried the cream calfskin folio from the Bellmont library.
When Liam saw her, his breath came out in a ragged, whistling sob that sounded like air escaping a punctured tire.
“Chloe!”
He lurched forward against the stanchion, the steel handcuffs biting into his wrists with a sharp, metallic clink.
“Chloe, thank God! Tell them! Tell these animals who you are! They grabbed me outside the hotel! They’ve been holding us in a basement for five hours! They’re insane, Chloe! They’re mobsters! They think—they think I took something from them!”
Chloe stopped five feet from him.
She didn't speak. She looked at him with those low-tide green eyes—not with rage, not with the screaming hysteria he had anticipated, but with that terrifying, flat curiosity Arthur had used when inspecting a cracked cylinder head.
“Chloe, please!” Liam’s voice climbed into an ear-splitting falsetto. “I did it for us! You don't know the pressure I was under at Vance & Foster! The senior partners—they were going to freeze me out! They were going to leave me with nothing! I was trying to secure our future! We could have been in Argentina by breakfast! We could have had five million dollars! We could have built a life where nobody could touch us!”
“With Samantha?” Chloe said.
The word was very quiet. It dropped into the hangar like a steel washer falling onto concrete.
Liam froze.
His mouth remained open, his tongue visible between his teeth, dry and white. He flicked his eyes toward Samantha, who had stopped crying and was staring at the floor between her bare feet, her shoulders hunched as if waiting for a whip to land.
“Chloe...” Liam stammered, his eyes darting toward Dominic, who stood three paces behind her, silent as a granite headstone. “That... that was nothing. Samantha was just—she helped with the offshore filings. She knew the banking contacts in George Town. It was purely transactional, I swear to God! I love you, Chloe! Arthur knew I loved you! Arthur told me on his deathbed to take care of you!”
Chloe stepped forward.
She did not flinch as Liam reached out with his handcuffed hands, his fingers clawing at the hem of her wool coat.
She raised the cream folio.
With her left hand, she pulled out page two—the Garamond-printed consent form with the Delaware registration number. She held it two inches before his bloodshot eyes.
“My father,” Chloe said, her voice dropping into a register so cold that Liam’s fingers dropped away from her coat, “never broke a strike. He never stole a dollar from a ship’s mess. And he never used another man’s name to hide his own cowardice.”
She took the heavy sheet of paper in both hands.
Rrrr-ip.
She tore it down the center, right through the words OSPREY HOLDINGS, LLC.
She tore it again.
Rrrr-ip.
She dropped the four pieces into Liam’s lap. They fluttered down onto his grease-stained trousers like four square flakes of dirty snow.
“You’re not an investment manager, Liam,” Chloe said. “You’re just a thief who couldn't even manage to steal from the right man.”
She turned her back on him.
“Chloe! Chloe, don't leave me with them!” Liam screamed, thrashing against the iron stanchion until the steel groaned against its floor bolts. “Dominic! Mr. Russo! Take the money! The five million is in the Cayman omnibus! You have the codes! Just let me go to the airport! I’ll leave the country! You’ll never see me again! I swear on my mother’s life!”
Dominic did not look at him.
He looked at Marco, who stood by the taxiway doors with a heavy brass key in his hand.
“Marco,” Dominic said.
“Yes, boss?”
“Call Detective Miller at the Manhattan District Attorney’s financial crimes bureau,” Dominic said, his tone carrying no more emotion than if he were ordering a sandwich from a deli. “Tell him we have an anonymous tip regarding the five million dollars that went missing from the Vance & Foster pension reserve last week. Deliver Mr. Foster and Miss Pierce to the precinct steps in the back of an unplated van. Include the Cayman account numbers, the Delaware registration documents, and the surveillance footage from the Bellmont library.”
Liam’s jaw dropped. “The... the DA? You’re turning me over to the police?”
Dominic paused at the pedestrian door. He turned his head slightly, his river-water eyes meeting Liam’s for the first and only time that morning.
“You thought I was an animal, Mr. Foster,” Dominic said softly. “You thought you could steal five million dollars from me, and the worst thing that would happen to you was a bullet in an alley.”
A faint, terrible smile touched the corners of Dominic’s mouth.
“A bullet is over in thirty milliseconds. In the state penitentiary at Wallkill, a former hedge-fund partner who stole the municipal workers' pension reserve will spend twelve years explaining to three hundred men with shanks why their mothers can't afford their insulin.”
May you like
He pushed the door open.
“Enjoy your breakfast, Mr. Foster.”
