Chapter 26 : DISMANTLING FRANK — PART 1
Fourteen minutes. In and out.
The Bertinelli shipping office occupied the second floor of a waterfront warehouse that smelled like diesel fuel and the particular brine of a port facility that had been operational longer than anyone working there had been alive. Two night-shift guards: one in the ground-floor security booth watching cameras, one doing hourly rounds upstairs. Helena had provided the guard schedule, the camera angles, the alarm codes, and the location of the second-floor safe — information harvested from a childhood spent in buildings just like this one, watching her father's men operate with the casual efficiency of people running a business that happened to break federal law.
We parked Helena's Audi four blocks south and approached on foot. Dark clothes, gloves, the balaclavas she'd produced from the trunk with the practiced ease of a woman whose wardrobe included operational categories. The night was cold enough that the balaclavas served double duty.
Helena went first. The ground-floor security booth had a window facing the parking lot and a blind spot facing the stairwell door — a design flaw her father's security team had never corrected because they'd never expected the threat to come from inside the family. Helena reached the stairwell in eight seconds, moving with the fluid silence of someone whose combat training made my Stealth Trained look like a child playing hide-and-seek.
The upstairs guard was on his phone. Helena took him from behind — the same efficient chokehold from the laundromat, arm around the throat, controlled pressure, unconscious in ten seconds. She zip-tied his wrists and ankles, gagged him with a cloth from her pocket, and propped him against the wall with a professionalism that said this wasn't the first time she'd incapacitated someone who worked for her father.
No killing. That was my rule, stated in the planning session with the flat certainty of a man who'd died four times and understood the difference between unconscious and dead in a way Helena couldn't. She'd accepted it without argument, which was itself a divergence from the canon Helena who'd killed a Bertinelli associate in the show's version of this arc.
"Details rot. People hold."
Helena's psychology was intact. Her capacity for violence was unchanged. But the direction of that violence — the target selection, the restraint — had shifted because someone had given her an alternative before the rage consumed the strategy. The show's Helena had never been offered a partnership that respected her agency. This Helena had, and the difference was measured in zip ties instead of crossbow bolts.
The office door was locked. A commercial-grade deadbolt, same as the laundromat. I'd been drilling the lockpicking every evening for two weeks — the padlock at home, the practice lock Marcus had lent me when I told him I was "interested in security work," and the desk drawers at the warehouse that had increasingly sophisticated mechanisms.
[LOCKPICKING: TRAINING HOURS LOGGED. BASIC → APPROACHING TRAINED THRESHOLD.]
The picks went in. Tension wrench, feel the pins, light touch. The first pin set. Second. Third. The fourth resisted — too much torque again, the same mistake from the laundromat. I backed off. Lighter. The pin found its shelf.
The cylinder turned.
"Getting faster," Helena said from behind me. Not a compliment — an observation. Helena didn't compliment. She assessed.
The safe was behind the desk, concealed in the floor under a section of removable carpet. Helena knew the combination — four numbers her father had used for every safe since she was twelve, because Frank Bertinelli was meticulous about many things and terrible about others, and password hygiene was in the second category.
Inside: three ring binders of shipping ledgers, two USB drives, and a cash box with approximately forty thousand dollars in mixed bills.
"Don't touch the cash."
Helena's hand had been reaching. She pulled it back.
"It's traceable?"
"Serial numbers. Frank logs high-denomination bills through the counting machines. We take the cash, he knows exactly who has it within a week."
She looked at the cash the way a person looks at a fire they want to touch.
"The records are worth more than forty thousand dollars to him. Believe me."
I photographed every page. The phone's camera was better than the original prepaid — the replacement had a functioning flash and enough resolution to capture the accounting entries legibly. Page by page, binder by binder, the customs fraud documentation that showed exactly how Frank Bertinelli imported illegal goods through legitimate shipping channels, underpaid tariffs on commercial merchandise, and overbilled insurance on cargo that either didn't exist or had been deliberately undervalued.
Then the planted error. One decimal point, moved one position to the right, on page forty-seven of the second binder. A billing entry of $12,450.00 became $124,500.00 — a tenfold discrepancy that would leap off the page during the next internal audit. Frank's accountants would find it. Frank would assume theft. And the paranoia would begin.
I replaced the binders. Closed the safe. Reset the carpet. Helena re-locked the office door from the outside — she had a key, which simplified the exit considerably.
The downstairs guard hadn't moved from his booth. We exited through the stairwell and out a side door that Helena had propped with a folded business card during the approach — a trick she'd learned from someone, and the card was from a restaurant that had closed two years ago, which meant it couldn't be traced.
Four blocks to the Audi. Fourteen minutes total.
[HEROIC ACT: DISRUPTION OF CRIMINAL FINANCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE. +12 CP. TOTAL: 75 CP.]
I pulled the balaclava off and breathed the January air, cold and clean, the lungs expanding fully for the first time in fourteen minutes because breathing in a balaclava during an infiltration was an experience that tested the limits of Endurance 8.
Helena pulled hers off too. Her hair fell around her face, dark against the streetlight, and for a moment — a brief, stupid, entirely unhelpful moment — the project manager part of my brain went offline and the human part noticed that Helena Bertinelli with windblown hair and operational adrenaline in her eyes was a problem he hadn't planned for.
"Fourteen minutes." She checked the clock on the dash. "That's not bad."
"We should put it on a plaque."
The corner of her mouth moved. The almost-smile. I was starting to collect those the way I collected Death Echo data — each one catalogued, timestamped, filed under evidence that Helena Bertinelli is capable of something other than controlled fury.
She drove. I rode. The silence between us was the comfortable kind — the aftermath of shared competence, two people who'd done something difficult together and were still processing the satisfaction of having done it well.
Frank Bertinelli would find the discrepancy within a week. The paranoia would begin. And the next three employees he fired on suspicion of theft would be innocent, which would fracture the loyalty of his remaining people and make the next operation easier.
The machine was starting to break.
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