Chapter 6 - The Safehouse in the WoodsThe sun was just beginning to bleed its pale, bruised light over the jagged shoreline of Lake Huron when I cut the engines of the Black Widow.
We had traveled over two hundred miles north, hugging the Canadian coast under the cover of darkness, utilizing dead zones in maritime radar that only smugglers and syndicate capos knew existed. My safehouse—a heavily fortified timber lodge nestled deep within the dense pine forests of the Bruce Peninsula—waited for us at the end of a hidden gravel track.
I cut the lights and drifted the boat into the private stone slip beneath the boathouse.
“We’re here,” I announced, turning around to check on our passengers.
The four boys were fast asleep, curled up together on the plush leather upholstery of the cabin like a pile of exhausted puppies. Only Mateo stirred, rubbing his eyes with small fists, looking up at me with sleepy, trusting confusion.
Elena looked exhausted, her clothes stained and wrinkled, but her eyes were alert.
“They’ll track the boat,” Elena whispered, stepping up onto the dock. “Marcus has satellite imagery and coastal spotters. We can’t stay here long.”
“We’re not staying,” I replied, scooping Mateo up into my arms again while signaling the other three boys to follow. “This is just a pit stop to rearm, patch up, and establish secure comms. My private jet is hangared at a private airstrip forty miles inland. From there, we fly straight to Zurich.”
Elena stopped dead in her tracks on the wooden dock.
“Zurich? Alejandro, are you insane? That’s Marcus’s home turf! That’s where he keeps his primary security forces and his private Swiss bank accounts! Walking into Zurich is walking directly into the lion’s den!”
“No, Elena,” I said, my voice cold and flat as I carried Mateo toward the heavy timber doors of the lodge. “That’s walking into the kitchen while the chef isn't paying attention. If Sofia is alive and locked away in one of his facilities, then Zurich is exactly where we’ll find her. And once I have my wife back… I’m going to have a very polite conversation with my former mentor about family values.”
Inside the lodge, the air was dry and smelled of cedarwood and gun oil. I deposited the boys in the master bedroom, instructing them to stay put while I fired up the secure military-grade satellite terminal hidden behind the stone fireplace.
The screen flickered to life, bathing my face in an eerie green glow. I punched in my encrypted encryption keys, routing my connection through five different proxy servers in Eastern Europe before accessing the global intelligence database maintained by my European contacts.
Loading…
Access Granted. Welcome, Moretti, A.
I bypassed the standard criminal registries and dived straight into international corporate real estate holdings tied to Marcus Vance’s shell companies.
Ten minutes of frantic data-mining yielded a blinking red coordinate on the outskirts of Zurich—a sprawling, subterranean medical research facility registered under a phantom biomedical front called Aegis Genentech.
And right there, on the personnel manifest of the facility’s secure wing:
Patient 404: Vance, S.
She was alive.
My chest tightened with a complex mixture of rage, relief, and burning hunger for vengeance. Marcus hadn't just lied to me; he had imprisoned his own daughter for five years because she refused to let him turn her children into pawns in his criminal empire.
Bzzzt!
The satellite terminal suddenly flashed red. A high-pitched alarm wailed from the console.
Warning: Signal triangulated. Trace in progress from Geneva, Switzerland.
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“Damn it!” I slammed my fist against the desk. Marcus’s firewall had flagged my access attempt. They knew exactly where I was pinging from.
“Alejandro!” Elena shouted from the hallway, bursting into the room with a rifle in her hands. “We’ve got movement in the trees! Black SUVs just turned onto the access road!”
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