Chapter 6 - THE UNCLEANZ
The blast wave threw Peter backward into a stack of metal storage shelves. Sparks, blinding white phosphorus light, and a physical wall of acoustic energy slammed into his ears, leaving a high-pitched, roaring ringing in his brain.
Through the haze of white smoke, Peter saw dark shapes pouring down the bunker stairs—four tactical operatives in unmarked grey body armor, equipped with night-vision gear and automatic carbines.
"Target confirmed! Take the female alive! Kill the secondary!" a synthesized voice barked over a tactical radio.
Lily had reacted faster than humanly possible. The moment the flashbang had hit the concrete floor, she had thrown herself behind a heavy steel workbench. Even through the blinding smoke, her SIG Sauer barked three times.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The lead operative stumbled, a bullet piercing his throat right above his vest collar. He dropped his rifle, clutching his neck as blood spattered across the concrete.
"Suppressing fire!" another voice screamed.
A hail of high-caliber submachine gun fire chewed through the wooden dining table, shredding Andrew’s journals into a cloud of fluttering, white confetti paper. Forty years of pain, forty years of meticulously written sacrifice, destroyed in three seconds of automatic fire.
"Lily! The back!" Peter screamed, his ears ringing so violently he could barely hear his own voice. He scrambled on his belly across the blood-slick floor, grabbing his fallen Colt .45. He fired blind around the corner of a steel filing cabinet, forcing the advancing team to take cover behind the bunker’s concrete support pillars.
Lily grabbed Peter by the collar, dragging him backward through a narrow steel hatch at the rear of the living area. "Move, you idiot! Move!"
She slammed the hatch door shut and spun a massive iron wheel lock into place just as a torrent of bullets slammed against the thick outer steel plate.
They were in a narrow, damp drainage tunnel that sloped steeply upward through the cliffside rocks. Water cascaded down the rough-hewn stone walls, soaking them to the skin.
"Who are they?" Peter gasped, leaning against the cold rock face, coughing up gunsmoke. "Mob? FBI?"
"Neither," Lily spat, checking her magazine. She had two rounds left. "That’s Vanguard Tactical. A private military company owned by Senator Robert Vance."
Peter froze, wiping blood and ash from his forehead. "Vance? Clara’s maiden name was Vance. Andrew said she was an orphan..."
"She wasn't an orphan," Lily said, her voice dropping into a dark, venomous tone as they hurried up the dark tunnel. "Robert Vance isn't her brother. He’s her ex-husband. The man she was married to before she met your uncle Andrew."
Peter felt as though the earth were sliding out from under his feet. Every layer of this tragedy uncovered another, deeper level of deception. "What?"
"My mother wasn't just an accountant who stole mob money, Peter," Lily said, guiding him up a rusted metal ladder leading to the surface. "In the seventies, she was married to Vance when he was a rising defense contractor. She discovered that Vance was selling classified military intelligence to foreign cartels and laundering the proceeds through the Gambino family. When she tried to go to the Feds, Vance framed her. She fled, changed her identity, met Andrew in New York, and tried to start a real life."
"And Andrew... Andrew was just a cover?" Peter asked, his voice breaking.
"At first, yes," Lily said, reaching the top of the ladder and pushing open a concealed wooden trapdoor disguised as a storm cellar in an old boat barn above the cliffs. "She used Andrew’s clean reputation to hide. But then she had us. She loved Andrew, Peter. I know she did. But Vance found her in 1986. He gave her a choice: fake her death and leave Andrew behind, or Vance would slaughter Andrew, Thomas, and me in front of her."
Peter climbed out into the howling wind of the Maine coast. The storm was at its peak now, giant grey waves crashing against the jagged rocks below the barn.
"So she left Andrew in that house to protect him," Peter said, understanding the sickening geometry of the trap at last. "She let him believe she ran away with $40,000, while Vance kept her in a gold-plated cage for thirty years."
"She died six months ago in a private clinic in Virginia," Lily said, looking out at the dark ocean, her face pale under the moonlight. "Vance kept her sedated for decades to ensure she never released the decryption keys to his offshore assets. But before she died, she got a message out to me. She told me the keys were hidden in the house in New York."
"The keys aren't in the house," Peter said softly.
Lily turned to him, her eyes sharp. "What do you mean?"
Peter pulled the blackened, star-patterned steel key out of his pocket and held it up. "Andrew had the key. But he didn't have the encryption code. The code wasn't written down in his journals, Lily. The code is in Thomas’s green toy dinosaur."
Lily gasped, her hand flying to her mouth. "The green dinosaur... with the cracked eye."
"When the police found the car on the bridge in 1986," Peter said, remembering Andrew’s opening words, "the dinosaur was on the floorboard with one leg snapped off. Andrew had it. He glued the leg back on. He kept it in Thomas’s bedroom for forty years."
"Vance’s men didn't break into the house to kill Andrew," Lily realized, her voice trembling. "They were looking for the dinosaur. If they find it, they control Vance’s entire empire—and they can eradicate every trace of our family forever."
Peter looked back toward the burning bunker entrance down the cliff. Headlights were flashing through the pine trees near the road—more black SUVs were pulling up to seal off the peninsula.
"They don't have it," Peter said, a cold, dark resolve settling over him.
"How do you know?"
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Peter reached into his leather coat pocket and pulled out the small, green plastic dinosaur with the single cracked eye and the crude line of dried yellow glue around its left rear leg. He had grabbed it off Thomas’s dresser seconds before he jumped out of the bedroom window in New York.
"Because Andrew didn't just preserve those rooms out of grief," Peter said, looking Lily dead in the eye. "He preserved them because he was guarding the evidence until you came back."
