Chapter 53 - The Miami Disruption
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Three months later.
The warm, salty breeze of the Atlantic Ocean swept across the deck of my private yacht anchored off the coast of Miami. The European integration had been flawless. Revenue was up four hundred percent, and my enemies were either dead or working for me.
I sat in a lounge chair, wearing a white silk sundress, sipping a glass of iced tea. Cooper lay at my feet, basking lazily in the Florida sun.
Elias walked onto the deck, holding a secure encrypted tablet. His face was grim, casting a dark shadow over my perfect afternoon.
"I thought I said no business on Sundays, Elias," I murmured, not taking my eyes off the horizon.
"You're going to want to see this, Boss," Elias said, handing me the tablet. "We have a disruption at the Port of Miami. One of our primary shipping containers from Marseille was intercepted last night."
I sat up, my relaxed demeanor instantly vanishing. "Intercepted by whom? The DEA? The Coast Guard?"
"Neither," Elias grunted, his jaw tight. "That's the problem."
I tapped the screen, pulling up the security footage from the docks. At 2:00 AM, a team of six men dressed in all black had infiltrated the heavily guarded port. They moved with terrifying precision, disabling the cameras, neutralizing our guards with non-lethal tranquilizers, and opening the container holding twenty million dollars in untraceable bearer bonds.
But they didn't steal the money.
Instead, the footage showed their leader taking a can of red spray paint and drawing a massive, intricate symbol on the side of the shipping container before vanishing into the night.
"What is that symbol?" I asked, zooming in on the red paint. It looked like a dragon coiled around a lotus flower.
"I ran it through the Syndicate databases," Elias said quietly. "It belongs to the Kurokawa Clan. The Yakuza. They control the entire Pacific Rim underworld."
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I handed the tablet back to him, my eyes narrowing. "The Yakuza doesn't operate in Miami. We have a treaty with them. The Pacific is theirs, the Atlantic is ours."
"Someone just broke the treaty," Elias noted. "They didn't take the money. They left a message. They are challenging the new Sovereign."
