Chapter 4 - The University Vault
By four in the morning, the rain had turned into a thick blanket of freezing fog that smothered the historic limestone arches of the University of Chicago campus.
Victor had moved Kiara and her mother into an armored penthouse suite at the Drake Hotel under the protection of twenty vetted guards, but Kiara had refused to stay behind. She stood now in the basement of the university’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, her soaked sweater replaced by one of Victor’s spare cashmere coats that drowned her petite frame.
Dante stood guard at the heavy oak doors of the archive, an automatic rifle concealed beneath his trench coat, while Victor illuminated the narrow aisles of steel shelving with a tactical flashlight.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the charter back at the penthouse?” Kiara demanded quietly, her voice echoing off thousands of ancient, leather-bound volumes. She pulled out a heavy drawer marked Special Collections: Byzantine and Medieval Cryptography. “You let me believe this was just about an internal corporate embezzlement.”
“Because until I saw the men at your mother’s house, I didn't know how deep the rot went,” Victor replied, keeping his voice steady as he watched the perimeter. “My father was a brutal man, Miss Hayes. He did unspeakable things to consolidate power in this city. But he never broke his word to an ally. When William disappeared, my father told me William had betrayed us for twenty million dollars. I hated your father my entire youth because I believed he was the coward who almost bankrupted my family.”
Kiara pulled a thick, velvet-bound folio from the shelf. It was a fourteenth-century Latin manuscript on ecclesiastical tax records—the exact volume her father had checked out thirty years ago and never returned to the general circulation.
“My father wasn't a coward,” she said fiercely, her fingers tracing the faded gold foil on the spine. “He was an idealist who realized too late that he was designing weapons for sociopaths. When he saw what your father did to the docks in ninety-eight, he couldn't live with himself. He didn't steal the money to get rich. He froze the funds in escrow so neither the Rinaldis nor the Morettis could use them to buy off city hall.”
She opened the folio. Inside, the pages had been hollowed out to hold a slim, brass-bound iron cylinder covered in five concentric rotating rings of engraved Greek and Latin characters.
Victor stepped closer, the beam of his light fixing onto the device. “A cryptex.”
“My dad was obsessed with mechanical puzzles,” Kiara said, her breath catching in her throat as she stared at the device she hadn't seen since she was ten years old. “He told me that if anything ever happened to him, I was never to touch this unless a man with a cross-shaped scar on his wrist asked for it.”
Victor stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes widened, fixing on the faded white scar on his left forearm. “What?”
“He said,” Kiara whispered, looking up into Victor’s stunned face, “that Anthony Rinaldi had a son who still had a soul. And that one day, that son would realize his father had built a kingdom of lies.”
Before Victor could answer, the glass transom above the heavy library doors exploded inward in a shower of deadly shards.
Dante dropped to one knee, firing three rapid shots through the shattered doorway as automatic gunfire tore through the ancient bookshelves, sending centuries of priceless parchment exploding into a blizzard of shredded paper.
“Ambush!” Dante roared, diving behind a solid marble display case. “They’re inside the perimeter! Black tactical suits, heavy armor—they aren’t syndicate hitmen, Boss! They’re private military contractors!”
Victor threw his arm around Kiara’s shoulders, violently slamming her to the floor beneath a heavy oak reading desk as high-caliber rounds punched through the wood inches above their heads. Splinters rained down on them like shrapnel.
“Keep your head down!” Victor ordered, pulling a flashbang from his tactical belt and flicking the safety pin with his teeth.
Kiara clutched the iron cylinder to her chest, her heart hammering violently against her ribs. “How did they find us so fast? Nobody knew we were coming here!”
“Someone inside our own network has a live satellite uplink,” Victor snarled, his eyes blazing with ferocious battle instinct. “Dante, cover the west exit! On three!”
Victor hurled the flashbang through the doorway. An ear-shattering detonation rattled the foundation of the century-old building, followed immediately by blinding magnesium light and the screams of disoriented mercenaries.
Victor leaned out from behind the desk, firing four calculated shots that dropped two armed men in the hallway. Dante followed up with a controlled burst from his rifle, clearing the immediate corridor.
“Move! Now!” Victor commanded, grabbing Kiara by the hand and yanking her toward the private emergency fire exit that led into the underground steam tunnels connecting the campus buildings.
As they burst into the sweltering, pipe-lined subterranean tunnel, Dante slammed the heavy iron fire door behind them and dropped the reinforced deadbolt. A fraction of a second later, heavy sledgehammers began pounding against the outside of the steel.
“That door won’t hold for more than ninety seconds,” Dante panted, blood trickling down his cheek from a glass cut. “Where to, Boss?”
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Victor looked at Kiara. She was pale, covered in dust and sweat, clutching the iron cylinder like it was her only lifeline. Yet, when she met his gaze, there was no panic in her eyes. There was only pure, unyielding resolve.
“The river terminal,” Kiara said, wiping a streak of black soot from her cheek. “The Friday deadline wasn’t a hit on you, Victor. It was an activation date. The final ledger in this cylinder unlocks the master server at the terminal’s private data center. If we don’t get there before three in the morning, the entire system self-purges, and the truth about your father and mine dies forever.”
