“Please mister, buy this painting so we can buy bread,” three dirty triplets begged. The billionaire mafia boss stared at the canvas, his heart stopping. The woman painted on it was the wife he mourned for years. With shaking hands, he pulled out a black card and whispered, “Take me to her.”

at the Seaport District smelled of low tide, rotting kelp, and rusted iron. The abandoned warehouse was a cathedral of shadows. I walked through the massive steel doors carrying a titanium Halliburton briefcase. The wind howled through the broken skylights, masking the hum of the FBI surveillance vans parked three blocks away.

Victor Moretti stepped continue reading …