Chapter 31 : DISMANTLING FRANK — PART 3
The accounting firm's security was a joke compared to the construction subsidiary.
Two cameras, both fixed-angle, both positioned to cover the lobby and the parking lot — nothing on the side entrance, nothing on the stairwell, nothing on the third floor where Frank Bertinelli's financial records lived inside a server room protected by a keycard reader that Helena had cloned three days ago using a card she'd lifted from a firm employee at a bar. The extraction had taken her forty seconds and two gin and tonics, and she'd returned the card to the man's jacket pocket before his third drink arrived.
We went in at 1:00 AM through the side entrance. Helena's cloned keycard bypassed the door's magnetic lock. Stealth Trained guided my feet up the stairwell — the concrete steps had a resonance profile I'd mapped during a daytime walkthrough posing as a potential client — and Helena moved behind me with the weightless silence of someone who'd been trained to clear rooms by people whose mistakes were measured in body counts.
The third floor was dark. The firm closed at six on weekdays and didn't staff weekends, which gave us a window wide enough to drive a truck through. The server room's keycard reader accepted the clone. The door opened with a pneumatic whisper.
Inside: three server racks, two filing cabinets, a printer, and a shredder that had been running recently — the bin was full of confetti strips that spoke to Frank's accelerating paranoia. He was destroying records now, trying to outrun the audit trail his daughter and a warehouse clerk were building behind him.
I plugged in the USB — not the original from the QC infiltration, but a dedicated extraction drive loaded with a script tuned for accounting databases. The download would take eleven minutes. I set the timer on the phone and started on the filing cabinets.
Helena worked the second cabinet. We'd developed a rhythm over three operations — wordless efficiency, each person covering their section, the kind of operational shorthand that came from repetition and trust. She handed me folders. I photographed the contents. She replaced them. The contradictions I planted were subtle — transposed digits in tax ID numbers, modified dates on quarterly filings, the kind of errors an IRS auditor would flag as suspicious and a Bertinelli accountant would struggle to explain.
[GLADES INTELLIGENCE: 64% COMPLETE. BERTINELLI FINANCIAL NETWORK — COMPREHENSIVE DATA ACQUIRED.]
Eleven minutes. The USB drive finished. I disconnected, verified the file integrity on the phone's screen, and pocketed the drive.
"Done. Let's go."
Helena was at the accountant's desk. The main desk, the one with the leather chair and the framed photo of the accountant's family and the Montblanc pen set that cost more than Charles Weston's monthly rent.
She had the crossbow.
The weapon had been in the car — left behind, per our agreement. No weapons inside. The operations were intelligence work, not combat. Clean in, clean out, no signatures, no traces, nothing that said this was personal instead of this was professional.
Helena drove the bolt through the leather chair's headrest. The impact was loud — a sharp crack of the crosshead punching through upholstery and wood — and pinned to the bolt's shaft was a photograph of Frank Bertinelli, torn from a company directory, his face centered in the frame like a target.
"Helena."
"He needs to know."
"He needs to not know. That was the entire—"
"He needs to know someone is coming. That it's not random. That it's not business. That it's personal." She turned to me. The crossbow hung at her side, discharged, and her eyes had the hard brightness of someone who'd been patient for longer than patience was designed to last. "Your way works. The records, the planted errors, the audit triggers — it's brilliant and it's working and I've done it your way for three operations. But my father kills people, Charles. He killed Michael. He killed Gino. He fires employees for discrepancies he planted and thinks he's untouchable because no one has ever looked him in the eye and said I'm coming for you."
"That bolt tells him who. He'll connect it to you within—"
"Let him. I'm done hiding from my own father."
The argument died in my throat. Not because Helena was right — the bolt was an operational catastrophe, a signature that would narrow Frank's investigation from unknown enemy to family with crossbow training, and Helena was the only Bertinelli who'd ever touched a crossbow. But because PER 11 could read the need behind the decision, the way her jaw was set and her breathing was controlled and her hands were steady in a way that said this wasn't impulsive — it was deliberate. She'd chosen this before we entered the building. The bolt had been in her jacket, not the car. She'd planned it.
The accounting firm's walls pressed in. The shredder bin full of confetti. The bolt through the leather chair. A daughter announcing herself to the father she intended to destroy.
"Okay."
Helena's eyes shifted. Surprise — a flicker, there and gone, replaced by something warmer. She'd expected an argument. She'd expected me to press the strategic case, to lecture about operational security, to be the project manager who prioritized the plan over the person.
"Okay?"
"It's done. We adapt." I pulled the USB from my pocket, held it up. "These records still work. The audit still triggers. Your father knows someone's coming — that means he'll make mistakes faster. We use that."
I didn't believe it. The bolt was a mistake. But the alternative — fighting Helena over something she'd already done, fracturing the partnership in a server room at 1:00 AM — was worse.
We exited through the stairwell. Helena went first. I followed, and the crossbow bolt stayed behind, a declaration of war driven into dead leather by a woman whose patience had reached its breaking point twelve seconds before mine had.
---
The drive back was quiet. Helena at the wheel, jaw set, eyes on the road. The city slid past the windows in a blur of amber streetlights and dark buildings, the particular emptiness of a February night in Starling City where the cold kept everyone indoors and the streets belonged to the people who chose to be in them.
I looked at my hands. Steady. The split lip from the construction subsidiary fight — weeks ago now, healed to a thin line Marcus had noticed and not asked about — pulled when I pressed my mouth together. The accountant's office had been an eleven-minute operation. Clean, fast, professional. Everything except the thirty seconds that would undo weeks of careful work.
Helena parked at the safehouse. Engine off. The leather seats ticked as they cooled.
"You're angry."
"I'm adapting."
"That's the same thing with you. You go quiet and you start planning and the planning is your version of angry."
She was right. The project manager's anger was a spreadsheet — costs calculated, contingencies drafted, the emotional content compressed into action items because feeling the anger wasn't useful but channeling it was.
"Your father will have a name inside forty-eight hours. Helena Bertinelli with a crossbow. His daughter. The only person who'd make it personal."
"Forty-eight hours is generous. I give it twenty-four."
She got out of the car. I got out. The safehouse stairs were familiar now — three flights, seventeen steps each, the banister on the second landing that wobbled when you gripped it too hard. I knew this building the way I knew the gym and the warehouse and the apartment, through repetition and the accumulation of small physical truths.
The evidence wall inside — the butcher paper web of names and shell companies — stared at us from across the room. Helena's crossbow bolt wasn't on the wall, but it might as well have been. A new thread, connecting her name to her father's operation in a way that couldn't be unwoven.
"I'll monitor the scanner. If Frank puts out a bounty or contacts law enforcement, we'll know."
Helena set the crossbow on the table. Looked at it. Looked at me.
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For saying okay instead of telling me I was wrong." She paused. "I know it was wrong. Strategically. I don't care."
She walked to the cot and lay down with her back to the room. The conversation was over in the way Helena ended conversations — not with a conclusion but with a wall.
I sat at the table with the USB drive and the accountant's records and the knowledge that Helena Bertinelli had just fired a signal flare from inside a burning building, and the people looking up were not the kind who brought water.
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