Chapter 465 - 216: The Severed Snakehead
In the living room of Rosa Apartments, Barney was pacing back and forth in the cramped room.
His footsteps were heavy, making the old wooden floorboards emit an unnerving CREAK.
Two people were sitting in the corner of the room.
Ben and Chloe.
The two college students were currently sitting on the sofa.
Their faces were a mixture of nervousness and excitement.
For these kids from the Ivory Tower, everything that had happened in the past few days felt like a thrilling spy movie.
They were taking part in history, protecting a hero who was fighting against the system.
But Barney didn’t think this was a movie.
This was deadly reality.
Barney raised his wrist and glanced at his badly worn Casio watch.
11:45 PM.
"Damn it."
Barney cursed under his breath.
According to the plan, the contact responsible for the pickup should have sent the signal two hours ago.
The plan was to hide Luigi in the cramped sleeper cab behind the driver’s seat, covered by a few pieces of dirty laundry.
Then, he would drive north along the small road by the river to an abandoned pier on the upper Allegheny River.
A speedboat would be waiting there. Once they were on it, the rest would be easy.
But now, the phone remained silent.
"Uncle Barney, do you think something went wrong?" Ben couldn’t help but ask, his voice trembling slightly.
"Shut up."
Barney cut him off gruffly.
He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He was about to light one, but glanced at the enclosed space and irritably shoved it back.
"In their line of work, no news is good news. Maybe the roads are slick, or maybe they ran into a random checkpoint. We’ll wait a little longer."
That’s what Barney said, but inwardly, he was worried sick.
The driver was a veteran. With twenty years on the road, he could navigate Pittsburgh with his eyes closed.
Unless he’d run into something unavoidable.
Just then, the phone in the middle of the table suddenly started to vibrate.
In the silent room, the BUZZING sound was like a clap of thunder.
Ben and Chloe shot upright.
Barney’s heart leaped as well.
He took a deep breath, reached out his large, calloused hand, and grabbed the phone.
An unfamiliar number pulsed on the screen.
’This isn’t the contact. He knew the contact’s number by heart. This number...’
Barney’s pupils constricted slightly as he pressed the answer key.
He didn’t speak, just pressed the receiver to his ear and waited for the voice on the other end.
Quick, suppressed breathing.
"Barney?"
A young man’s voice, laced with extreme tension, came through.
"It’s me. It’s Kevin."
Barney let out a breath of relief, but his heart immediately leaped back into his throat.
Kevin was a young patrol officer at the Pittsburgh Branch.
The kid had grown up in the South District. His father and Barney had been coworkers in the same workshop.
Barney had watched him grow up, from a kid running around everywhere to a man in a police uniform.
Kevin’s family wasn’t well-off. It was Barney who had helped chip in for his police academy tuition back in the day.
Even though the kid had become a cop, at heart, he was still the son of a working-class man.
He often came by the Union for a couple of drinks after his shift, complaining to Barney about all the bureaucracy at the station.
A call from Kevin at a time like this was definitely not a social call.
"What’s wrong?" Barney lowered his voice. "Why are you calling me?"
"Uncle Barney, Luigi... Luigi’s been caught."
Those words instantly extinguished all of Barney’s lingering hope.
"What did you say?"
Barney’s voice turned ice-cold.
"Caught? Who caught him? The FBI? State police?"
His mind raced.
Although quite a few people knew Luigi was with them, only a very small handful knew his hiding place and today’s escape plan.
Besides Rosa, there was only him and these students.
If Luigi was caught, that meant...
’A mole?’
Barney whipped his head around, his fierce eyes locking onto Ben and Chloe on the sofa.
The two students, terrified by his sudden murderous glare, trembled uncontrollably.
"Did one of us sell him out?"
Barney roared into the phone.
"No, it wasn’t a mole."
Kevin explained hurriedly from the other end of the line.
"No one sold him out, Barney. It was just... just damn bad luck."
"What do you mean?"
"It was an accident."
Kevin swallowed, trying to make his voice clearer.
"This afternoon, a patrol car from the branch was cruising along the bank of the Allegheny River. It’s a remote spot, usually just young couples looking for privacy or homeless people."
Kevin’s voice was hushed, almost a whisper.
"The patrolmen spotted a suspicious figure near the abandoned pier and got out of their car to question him."
"But the guy just took off running."
"The cops thought they’d run into a drug dealer or an illegal immigrant, so they gave chase and took him down with a taser."
"It was only when they got him back to the branch that they realized he was Luigi Randall."
Listening to this absurd sequence of events, Barney froze on the spot.
An accident.
It was actually an accident.
"The chief was at the branch at the time. When he saw Luigi, his face went pale. He immediately ordered a lockdown of the entire branch, confiscated everyone’s phones, and cut off all external network access."
"I’m calling you now on an old phone I had stashed in a toilet tank, on the pretext of a bathroom break."
"Uncle Barney, this thing is huge. I don’t know what to do."
"Damn it!"
Barney slammed his fist into the wall.
Plaster crumbled and fell.
"Where is he? What’s his situation now?" Barney yelled into the phone.
"In an interrogation room at the branch," Kevin replied. "The chief is reporting to his superiors right now."
"Uncle Barney, someone’s coming. I can’t talk anymore. I have to go."
Kevin hung up.
Barney stood rooted to the spot, his chest heaving.
From the fragments of Barney’s side of the conversation, Ben and Chloe had already guessed what happened.
"He was caught?" Ben jumped to his feet, his face pale. "Luigi was caught? What do we do now? We’re finished!"
"Calm down!"
Barney glared at him.
"He may have been caught, but he’s still in the hands of the Pittsburgh police."
As he said this, a crazy idea popped into Barney’s head.
"Should we go rescue him?"
Chloe suddenly spoke up.
This girl, who usually seemed so quiet and demure, now had a dangerous glint in her eyes.
"We have thousands of students! And the Union! If we just send a message in the group chat, we can gather hundreds of people in half an hour!"
"Let’s go surround the Pittsburgh Branch!"
Chloe grew more and more excited as she spoke.
"We’ll force them to release him! We’ll say it’s political persecution! If there are enough of us, the police won’t dare to open fire!"
Barney looked at the girl.
She reminded him of his younger self.
Back then, he had also believed in strength in numbers, believed that if you just dared to charge, there wasn’t an iron gate you couldn’t break down.
He even subconsciously reached for his waist, where he kept a wrench tucked.
With a single phone call, hundreds of workers from the South District would grab their tools, jump in their trucks, and charge the Pittsburgh Branch.
They could tear that damn police station to the ground.
As long as they could get Luigi out...
"No."
Barney shook his head violently, forcing the tempting idea out of his mind.
"Have you thought about the consequences? Storming a police station is a rioting charge. Your lives would be ruined. Luigi might still have a chance to defend himself in court, but if we do this, he really will become a terrorist."
"Then what do we do?" Ben asked desperately. "Just watch them take him away?"
Barney didn’t answer.
He was thinking about something else.
A detail he had overlooked earlier, but which now seemed incredibly strange.
He walked to the window and pushed it open a crack.
The city was quiet.
Too quiet.
Logically, catching Luigi Randall—America’s most wanted man, the assassin who killed the CEO of a healthcare giant—was a massive achievement.
The chief should have already contacted all the media outlets, preparing to hold a press conference and take all the credit for himself.
Sirens should be blaring all over the city.
But there was nothing.
The police station was like a deep well, having swallowed this earth-shattering news, along with Luigi himself.
Barney muttered to himself, "Why? Why is it so quiet? Why is there no news?"
’The only explanation is that someone is suppressing the news. Someone issued a gag order the moment that cop reported it to his superior. Who has that kind of power? Who is at the very top? Someone the police chief has to obey and report to? In Pittsburgh, there’s only one person. The Mayor. Leo Wallace.’
A glint appeared in Barney’s eyes.
’Is he helping us?’
The moment the thought occurred, Barney’s heart began to race.
If it really was Leo who suppressed the news, then it meant the Mayor hadn’t given up on Luigi.
It meant Leo was still trying to figure something out.
But there was also another possibility.
Maybe they were suppressing the news not to save him.
But to make a deal.
Luigi was now a massive bargaining chip.
For Leo, handing Luigi over to Philadelphia would be fulfilling his legal duty.
But if he kept Luigi in his own hands, he would have a trump card to negotiate with Washington, with the Department of Justice, and even with the capitalists who wanted Luigi dead.
An assassin under his control was far more valuable than a prisoner in a Federation prison.
’What is he really plotting?’
A chill ran down Barney’s spine.
He didn’t know what kind of man Leo Wallace had become.
Would the Mayor who dared to sell the port to Morganfield for 500 million US Dollars sell Luigi off for an even greater profit?
Barney couldn’t take that gamble.
He had to find out.
"You two, stay here and don’t move."
Barney turned and gave the order to Ben and Chloe.
"Turn off your phones, take out the SIM cards. No one contacts the outside world."
Barney turned his head to look at Rosa, who had been making the sign of the cross on her chest and praying to a portrait of the Holy Mother Mary ever since the call began.
"Rosa, you watch these two kids."
With that, Barney grabbed the keys from the table.
"Barney, where are you going?"
"I’m going to confirm something."
Barney pulled open the door and walked out into the darkness.