The Athena Project

CHAPTER 8

The library was on the palazzo’s third floor. The marble floors were covered with expensive Persian carpets. The walls were lined with ornately carved mahogany bookcases. A gilded chandelier hung in the center of the room and the ceiling boasted a bright blue fresco with rosy-cheeked cherubs peeking out from behind puffy white clouds. For a man as gauche as Bianchi, the room was incredibly elegant.

“So,” he said, draining the last few drops from his champagne glass. “Who would like some more?”

Chewing pensively on her bottom lip as if she was thinking better of it, Casey finally raised her glass and said, “I’ll have some.”

“Excellent,” he replied. He had no idea that both women had been covertly dumping out here and there as much of their champagne as they could.

Casey walked around the room admiring the books as she scanned for the security cameras she knew he had. “You have quite a beautiful collection,” she said, running her fingers over the leather-bound volumes.

“I like beautiful things,” said Bianchi as he produced a bottle of champagne from a minibar hidden behind a row of faux book spines.

“Is that Dom Perignon?” Casey asked, placing her hand on her hip and cocking her head sideways.

Bianchi smiled. “Indeed it is. It’s a very special bottle that I’ve been saving for a very special occasion.”

“I’ve never seen one that color before,” said Casey.

“Or that size,” added Cooper, who came over to get a better look.

“It’s very rare,” said Bianchi. “It is called Dom Perignon White Gold. The bottle, known as a Jeroboam, contains three liters and is-”

“Completely made out of white gold?” interrupted Casey.

The man nodded. “Like I said, I like beautiful things. I also like celebrating special occasions.”

With that, the arms dealer popped off the cork and the women squealed with feigned delight as Bianchi raced to capture the overflowing champagne in their glasses. The drug was already making him a bit sloppy, and he spilled some over the top of the bar and onto the carpet.

Passing out the glasses, he said, “Here’s to beautiful things.”

Casey caught Cooper’s eye and knew what she was thinking. The guy was a pig. But they were professionals and they weren’t going to screw this up.

Setting his glass down, Bianchi reached for a remote, punched a button, and music began to pour from hidden speakers somewhere in the walls. He grabbed Cooper and pulled her into the center of the room to dance.

Pressing himself against her, he ran his hands up and down her dress and over the contours of her body.

“What about your other guests?” Cooper asked, trying to create a little daylight between them.

Bianchi scoffed. “Boring. All of them. They only come to eat my food and drink my wine. This is where the real party is.”

“You can say that again,” said Casey as she dropped another capsule she had plucked from her dress into the man’s glass.

“Come dance with us,” he said, looking up and waving Casey over. “We don’t want to leave anyone out.” He was beginning to slur his words.

Casey smiled and brought him his glass of champagne. He took another long drink, set the glass down, and then pulled Casey toward him so he could run his hands up and down her body as well.

She was about to reach for his glass and encourage him to have a bit more when the door of the library was thrown open and three of Bianchi’s security detail rushed in. They were more thorough and more protective than had been expected. In Italian, they told their boss that they had backed up the security tapes to see when the women he was now alone with in his library had arrived, and with whom. There was just one problem. They couldn’t find them. The women hadn’t come through the front door like everyone else. The first time the cameras had any record of them was when they appeared in a hallway near the stairs down to the boat garage.

Uh, oh, thought Casey.

Bianchi was so out of it, he stepped forward and shoved the two women behind him to protect them from his own security people. He definitely wasn’t thinking very clearly. He was furious that he’d managed to get two gorgeous ladies upstairs, had opened a forty-thousand-dollar bottle of champagne, and now his security team was destroying the mood.

For their part, Casey and Cooper didn’t waste any time. Staying behind Bianchi so they could use him for cover, they moved in perfect unison as they drew their weapons from their garter holsters at exactly the same moment.

The standoff lasted for less than a second. When one of Bianchi’s men reached for his gun, Cooper fired and put two rounds into where his throat met the top of his chest.

One of the other men went for his weapon and Casey took him out with two shots to the head. The third security man bolted from the room.

“We’re blown,” said Casey over her earpiece.

“What happened?” asked Ericsson.

“No time to explain. We need to get out of here now,” replied Casey as she kicked Bianchi in the back of the knee, buckled his legs, and sent him down to the carpet.

Cooper rushed to the door of the library, counted to three, and then peeked out. The manuever was met with a hail of automatic-weapons fire from the hallway.

She pulled her head back inside just as the rounds tore up the doorframe above her.

“How many?” asked Casey as she made Bianchi lie down, face-first on the floor.

“At least one with more coming up the stairs.”

“Lock the door!”

Cooper pulled one of the dead security men out of the way so she could close the library door. After locking it, she slid one of the room’s heavy leather couches in front of it and jammed the two security officers between its legs to make it harder to open.

Once again, Casey scanned the walls and ceilings. “I think we’re being watched.”

“I figured as much,” replied Cooper. “There’s no way we’re getting down to the boat garage. What’s Plan B?”

“I’m working on it.”

Hearing shouts from the hallway, Cooper said, “You’d better work fast.”

Casey had Cooper watch Bianchi as she walked over and opened a pair of French doors overlooking the canal. There was a wrought-iron railing with a polished brass cap that came up about waist high.

Megan Rhodes’s voice came over their earpieces. “We’ve got trouble at the front door. The security team has weapons drawn and they’re trying to get an angle on the window you just opened.”

Casey stepped back and cursed.

“What do you want me to do, boss?”

Just then Cooper said, “It just got very quiet in the hallway. I think they’re getting ready to hit the room.”

“They won’t risk killing Bianchi,” answered Casey.

Cooper drew her teammate’s attention to the fact that Bianchi was lying prone on the floor and that the two of them were standing up. “If he’s got cameras in here, then they know exactly where we’re standing and where to shoot.”

She was right. “Drag him over here,” said Casey, who then turned her attention back to her other two teammates outside. “We’re going to need a hot extraction in thirty seconds.”

“Roger that,” said Ericsson.

Casey added, “Long-distance assistance is authorized.”

“Roger that,” replied Rhodes as she adjusted her rifle and placed the crosshairs over the head of her first target.

Cooper looked at Casey. “And how are we getting downstairs in thirty seconds?”

Casey looked past her and out toward the canal. “When life shuts a door, it often opens a window.”

“Gretch, we’re three stories up. It’s going to be like hitting concrete for him.”

“Then we’d better make sure he’s got the wind knocked out of him so he doesn’t aspirate any canal water,” replied Casey as she backed Bianchi up and propped him against the railing.

Fearing for their boss’s life, the security operatives in the hallway decided to move. As Casey stepped away from Bianchi, the library door was splintered with bullets.

“Extraction in ten seconds,” Ericsson said over the radio.

“Tango one is down,” said Rhodes, followed by, “Tango two is down.”

It took Cooper only a fraction of a second to realize what Casey had planned as she leaned back and kicked Bianchi in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him and toppling him over the railing.

Before the arms dealer had even hit the water, both Casey and Cooper had jumped out the window after him.