Chapter 5 - The Council at the Long Island Estate
By 8:00 PM, the grand ballroom of the Romano estate was sealed under maximum tier-one combat readiness.
Outside, a cold November rain lashed against the sixty-foot architectural glass windows, but inside, the room blazed with the light of three towering crystal chandeliers.
Sitting around the forty-foot mahogany table were the sixty senior caporegimes, union directors, and port authorities who governed the five boroughs of New York and the maritime corridors of New Jersey.
Alessandro Romano sat at the head of the table in an impeccably tailored three-piece charcoal suit, his posture radiating the absolute, terrifying majesty of an undisputed king.
Standing at his right hand was Frank Callahan; to his left stood Dr. Sarah Lin and Special Agent Raymond Callahan of the FBI’s Organized Crime Strike Force.
I sat at the elevated family dais at the front of the room, dressed in an elegant dark emerald wool power dress Mrs. Gable had tailored for me at dawn. Beside me sat four-year-old Lily, dressed in a pretty white linen dress, eating strawberries from a silver bowl and coloring peacefully in her book.
Frank Callahan slammed a thick, red-embossed evidentiary portfolio onto the center of the table with a concussive thud.
"Gentlemen," Frank announced, his voice cutting through the hall like a tempered broadsword. "For the past six months, Marcus Vance of Boston has been executing an internal infiltration campaign against House Romano, utilizing our former estate administrator, Thomas Reed, as an operational mole."
Frank connected his tablet to the seventy-foot digital display wall.
The massive screens illuminated instantly in four-K clarity, playing Thomas Reed's unedited, sworn video confession, followed by the decrypted wiretap recordings between Vance and his mercenary commanders:
Marcus Vance: "The bleeder valve is set on Romano's Maybach. Once Alessandro goes over the bridge into the river, our crews seize the Brooklyn container berths before the Romano captains can organize a succession council. Wipe out the staff. Leave no witnesses."
The ballroom erupted into deafening, chaotic fury.
Caporegimes jumped to their feet, slamming their fists onto the mahogany, demanding immediate, total retaliation against the Boston syndicate.
Alessandro raised a single finger.
The entire sixty-man assembly fell into an immediate, absolute silence.
May you like
Alessandro leaned forward, his slate-gray eyes locking onto the leaders of his empire with sovereign authority.
"We do not fight Marcus Vance with chaos," Alessandro declared, his baritone resonating off the gilded cornices. "We fight him with absolute, synchronized annihilation."
