Silent Moves Bound In Shadows 02

Vivienne

We've been hold up in the bunker for hours and this time it's slowly sending me insane.

It's only been a few days since I had my meeting with Damian and Mira has already managed to get so much intel on the job.

When I got the text to meet her down here I hadn't imaged the sheer volume of what she had uncovered in such a short amount of time. But as I walked into the room this morning, my jaw nearly hit the floor. This women never ceases to amaze me with the skills she has. I don't know how I would be able to do what I do with her.

The bunker is the complete opposite of Eclipse. Steel walls with low lightning creating a cold, almost militarist atmosphere. It's as far removed from the sleek luxury and elegance of the club upstairs you could possible get. When I had the bunker built, I had never really intended for us to spend as long as we did down here. Maybe only a few hours here or there during a mission or an interrogation. So I never tried to make the place that inviting.

We've done out best over the years to make it a little more welcoming though by adding in some better lighting, hanging some art around the walls. There were even a few plants dotting the corners of the room and on a couple of shelves. They don't look very healthy at the moment and I make a mental note to get some new ones to replace these ones as soon as possible.

On each of the nine monitors lining the wall in the front of the room is a live feed from inside the Morello's estate and the various establishments they own. One one showing a different member of the organizations inner circle. Including Salvatore Russo. My target. His feed has been rather boring apparently. He hasn't left the Morello estate in days.

On the computer monitors on Mira's desk I can see lines and lines of what appear to be text message or other forms of communication.

Before I have a chance to ask her what she's reading, she turns her chair to face, a smile spreading across her face.

"I suppose if he hasn't moved in a few days, you know exactly where your going when the time comes." She does her best to sound like she's making a joke, but I can still hear the worry in her voice.

She's not entirely wrong, but the thought of having to break into and out of the Morello estate sends a shiver down my spine. Having him, and the entire inner circle for that matter, staying at their estate will make it easy to find him. But the estate, the Crescent we've learnt they've named it from our research, is going to be nearly impossible to get into undetected.

The estate itself is on the outskirts of town, isolated from society with the nearest neighbor about fifteen miles away. It's surrounded by a large ten-foot concrete wall lined with cameras at regular intervals and with only one main entrance in or out. The entrance appearing to be manned twenty four/seven with at least half a dozen armed guards. They also appear to have a regular patrols of guards and dogs that walk the internal and external permitter of the property.

Which Mira tells me is new.

The place seems to be guarded better than most prisons. Or at least the one upstate anyway, Mira managed to help me get in and out of there undetected in a matter of hours.

The Morellos were relentless. Over the years, I'd been watching them slowly rise to power. I'd seen them destroy families who dared challenge their authority.

They didn't forgive mistakes, didn't forget betrayals, and they made examples out of anyone who defied them.

I could handle danger, but going after a Morello under these circumstances felt like I was walking into the lions den.

The central building of the estate sits far enough onto the property that even if I managed to get onto the grounds, I'd have to make it nearly a mile just to get into the structure. And from the satellite images that Mira was showing me of the grounds, it appears that not only are they full of out buildings, pools and gardens, but their also covered in surveillance tech. Motion sensors and cameras being the main ones she mentioned but did say it was likely there was plenty more we couldn't see.

She said she they must be closed circuit and only accessible to view on their property because she hasn't been able to get into any of them yet. Just another obstacle we'll have to work out how to get around.

I let out a small laugh at the situation, unable to help myself. "I guess you're right."

We both knew going into this it was going to be hard. Getting to the inner circle of a powerful crime organization and family like the Morello's is never easy. If it were, they wouldn't have held control of half of Ravenwood for this long.

Along with being able to get the location of all the key members, Mira was also about to get some intel on operations they've been running lately. Most of it appearing to be their regular drug shipments, weapons shipments and distributing drugs to their dealers. Some jobs on the other hand, seem to be a little more serious.

"What's their goal?" Mira says vaguely while she squints at the screen, continuing to scan through the thousands of messages she has open in front of her.

"It looks like they're starting a war. Clearly they think Damian's client is going to prison, and they want more control."

I've had my suspicions that some kind of war was coming. I've taken on so many contracts for mid-level targets in the last month as Nyx that it was a little obvious both sides were trying to thin the heard before a war started. It happened a couple of times over the last few years, and it always starts the same way.

We sit in a comfortable silence beside each other, scrolling through the thousands of messages sent between members of the Morello organization. How exactly Mira got access to them, I'll never understand. But she did, and it couldn't be more useful right now.

from reading through a lot of them, it's clear that the Morello's are far more powerful that I always thought. Especially given the number of dealers and suppliers they've either been flipping to work for them or taking out of the picture the last few weeks. If they keep going at this pace, not only will they be the biggest weapons supplier to the underworld here, but they'll also run the biggest drug empire.

They have a way to go before they get to that point, but they are getting there. And that thought scares the hell out of me.

I swear I'm starting to see double when I catch Mira nearly fall out of her chair from the corner of my eye.

"Fuck," she whispers under her breath.

"What is it?" I ask as I roll my chair towards her so I can see what she was just reading.

"I think they know about the hit." She points towards her screen where she has a series of messages open between Salvatore and who I assume is the person that handles the Morello's security.

My eyes scan over the dozens of messages until I see it. Right there in black and white the hits going out tonight. I check the date stamp on the message and think back to when Mira received the message via our encrypted email and yep, the same date.

"Well shit, that explains their heightened security." I mumble more to myself than anything. "How did they find out? And it still doesn't explain why they've increased their activity so much."

"No idea, maybe we need to look into Damian and his client? Maybe one of them is compromised?" Mira ponders the thoughts for a moment before tapping away on her keyboard.

Has Damian been compromised? Have we?

I banish the thought from my head before I can let it take root. Now isn't the time for this line of thinking and before I even have a second to contemplate the thoughts and what she's doing, one of the monitors on the far wall changes to a video of an office building. One that I assume is where Damian must work given the sign behind the desk.

After tapping away at a few more buttons, the video starts playing at a faster speed than I can take anything in before she turns towards me.

As I sit there and watch her tap away, I feeling a flicker of frustration start to build within me. Damian assured us he wasn't be tracked or monitored. That he'd done this before and knew how to keep this sort of thing hidden away from prying eyes.

Until we work out how they found out about a potential hit on one of their own, I might have to start monitoring Damian myself. Make sure there won't be any other surprises along the way.

I've work too hard to build a reputation for being the best assassin in Ravenwood and the surrounding cities. I can't risk it all now. Not because some mob lawyer's decided to put a hit out on one of his enemies.

"That will take a little while to run," Mira's voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts as she starts explaining what she's doing. "It will loop through each of the cameras in and around his office the night we got the message. If the facial recognition picks up any known associate from Morello's crew, we'll know how they found out."

We spend the next couple of hours letting the program run while we talk through any way we can pull this job off. Trying to find if there's any way we can coax Salvatore out of hiding or get me into the house.

We manage to come up with a number of potential plans, but none of them ease that gut feeling I have that this is going to go very, very badly.