Chapter 6 - The Trap Snaps Shut
By dawn, the rain had cleared, leaving the streets of Chicago bathed in a pale, freezing November sunlight.
I sat inside Victor’s private town car parked two blocks away from the international terminal at O'Hare.
My hair was freshly styled, my broken heel replaced by elegant designer boots, and my hands rested calmly in my lap.
Through high-powered binoculars, Victor’s associate pointed out Richard pacing nervously near the curbside check-in.
He was wearing his best Italian overcoat, checking his gold wristwatch every thirty seconds with frantic, jerky motions.
Ten minutes later, a yellow taxi pulled up, and Elena stepped out, dragging two oversized Louis Vuitton suitcases behind her.
She looked pale, her expensive makeup doing little to hide the purple bags beneath her eyes from a sleepless night of terror.
Richard rushed toward her, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward the automated ticket kiosks inside the terminal doors.
"They're printing boarding passes," the driver said quietly into his earpiece.
"Let them get all the way to the gate," Victor’s voice came through the car speakers from his office downtown.
"Hope is the sweetest poison before the fall."
I watched my husband of seven years smile at another woman, kissing her cheek as they cleared the priority security line.
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He genuinely believed he was about to board a flight to Switzerland to live like royalty on stolen blood money.
He had no idea that ten minutes earlier, I had pressed my thumb against a biometric scanner in a downtown vault, locking every foreign account forever.
