The purge was not limited to this city. It rolled from the top echelon down to the lowest rungs, as long as you carried Francinetti in name and blood.
Doors were kicked in. People were gunned down in hallways and stairwells. Not even the children were spared.
Some were taken by police with warrants held up like scripture. The next day, they were found dead in their cells.
Cyanide, they said. An accident, they said.
A head struck the wall too hard, they said, as if a skull could split itself out of boredom.
Then the story changed again. Anarchists, they claimed, with bombs stitched into their bodies, a neat new label for the masses.
By the hour, the people involved erased all traces of Francinetti.
Overseas, bodies turned up too, in alleys and hotel bathrooms and roadside ditches. No one was spared.
At Francinetti's First Steel Mill, the wreckage was already being lifted, piece by piece, like a funeral conducted with cranes.
The official line was renovation. Men with clean boots and cleaner smiles showed permits for the disassembly while a concerned crowd demanded to know what was happening.
One man studied the papers too long. For him, it was too complete. Dates aligned too perfectly. Stamps too crisp.
Every signature sat exactly where a politician would want it, and nowhere else.
His name was Dominique Pacifico, the lead investigating agent on the human trafficking case that had gnawed at him for ten years.
A decade of listening and watching and waiting, a decade of building a tower of evidence.
Now he stood in the dust and noise and felt hollow.
Dominique took out a cigarette and lit it. His hands shook. He tried to pretend they did not.
He lit it and drew the smoke too fast, coughing hard enough that his eyes watered.
Then he wedged the cigarette into a crack in the brick and watched it burn down, half spent, upright like a little candle.
A candle for the ones he had condemned.
Dominique thumbed his badge and felt grime that was not there, or maybe it was.
Dirty. Corrupted. Too deep water for one man to clean with bare hands.
A few blocks away, the men who had just slaughtered the Francinetti gave speeches.
They praised the Francinetti. They praised the sacrifices. They spoke of support for Francinetti.
"The Francinetti Familia had been your support for generations, however, they wanted to give the people this opportunity."
Dominique stepped away before his face betrayed him. He kept moving until the applause became a distant, tinny thing, until he could breathe without tasting bile.
He took refuge inside a hotel lobby. He did not know German well, but he knew enough to manage.
"One room. Now," Dominique said.
The female attendant smiled politely and took in his peculiar fashion, not German, not Euro. America.
"Would you like to avail our masseuse serv..."
"I said one fucking room! Jesus! Can't you understand?"
The staff said no more and handed him the key.
Inside was a radio. Dominique turned it as high as it would go, trying to drown out the lies of justification pouring into his ears.
But Dominique wasn't the only person who had felt the world is being played by a master puppeteer.
In a room where the windows had been made to look blind, another man peered through a telescope that had been set into the wall itself, the glass and tube hidden like a secret wound.
He felt the same sickness Dominique did, though he named it differently.
Disgust, yes. At them. At himself more.
He did not know, he told himself. He did not know.
He tightened that lie until it cut. His fist clenched, knuckles whitening, and the betrayal of his own blood sat in his throat like a stone.
He was no Francinetti. He came from a stronger breed.
House Rothgen, the men who rose from gunpowder and guns themselves.
Marcus had come back thinking he was supplying his future father in law to destroy their enemies.
Instead, he had armed the wrong branch of the tree. Don Lorenzo's direct cousin, smiling in private, sharpening knives in the dark.
The letter Marcus received called them gifts. Surprise supplies by the ton.
In that business, nobody said no to a surprise like that.
Marcus even pushed the shipments through air mail. He even threw in a plane of his own.
Now Marcus Rothgen stood with hands that felt too heavy to lift, as if the blood on them had thickened into chains.
He had been trained in medicine, espionage, martial combat, and the business of dealing arms.
Skills meant to keep him ahead of danger, not to hand it to the ones he wanted close.
He told himself he was here to brag. To act tough. To look cool, like he always had. As if nothing had changed.
Then propose. Take her away if the Francinetti Familia tried to stop him, drag Serafina out with him if he had to.
Marcus threw back another shot of cheap liquor, the umpteenth.
Bottles lay emptied on the floor like spent shells.
"Fuck."
Marcus kicked the bottles away. Glass skittered across the room.
The anger stayed trapped in him. He tore at the bed's foam with both hands, ripping it open while he strangled the roar in his chest.
Anger and love made a haze in his mind, and the alcohol made it thicker.
In that murk, something impulsive surfaced. A one in a million gamble, the kind men take when they cannot stand still with themselves any longer.
Who down there was still alive.
Marcus plunged his head into the basin of freezing water.
The shock stole his breath, cleared his eyes, left him blinking hard.
He came up dripping and gasping, and the plan was still there.
He rushed downstairs. His men waited in disguise, faces plain, hands ready, the sort of loyal that asked no questions until after.
"Get me a truck. Purchase a scrap yard that's fairly close. Make sure no one catches wind of it."
They nodded. They moved. No hesitation, just obedience.
Marcus watched them go, and in the back of his mind the plan tightened into shape.
They rode with the rest of the scrap buyers, tucked into the slow river of trucks and men who smelled of sweat, oil, and old pennies.
Letting scrappers in was part of the cover up. If the gates were barred too tight, the people who lived off the steel would start smelling a secret.
In this day and age, aliens were the sort of thing the government was said to hide.
People would get curious. People would notice who was missing.
Marcus kept his head down and his eyes busy.
A large thin blanket lay across his arms, wrapped the way a man might carry a bandana or a rag, nothing that invited questions.
Under it, weight. Shape. Hope. He listened more than he watched.
He wanted a sound. A call. A peep. Anything.
He knew there had been a base under the mill. He had seen enough over the years, heard enough in half spoken conversations, to know the Francinettis did not build only upward.
They dug deep. But it had been three days since the demolition. If anyone was alive down there, thirst would be chewing their tongue to leather.
Blood would have run out, or clotted wrong, or turned black inside them.
He had watched through the telescope for hours.
A dozen of his men had watched too, taking turns until their eyes burned.
No movement. No crawl. No figure stumbling into the open like a ghost.
So he tried to think like a survivor. If you lived through an explosion, where would you hide.
Where would you take cover when the world came down.
He moved first toward the machines, where steel was thick and meant to endure.
Blast furnaces in particular. Great hulks of iron that had swallowed ore and spit out heat.
Men looped ropes around twisted sections and pulled, grunting in time.
Metal groaned. Dust rose. Nothing gave the way Marcus needed.
He checked one furnace. Nothing.
Another. Still nothing. Marcus kept going anyway.
He did not give up because giving up meant he had come here for nothing.
He circled a heap where the metal had collapsed in a way that looked wrong.
His eyes caught on a shape half buried in dust and bent plate.
A deformed half cylinder.
Marcus stepped close, heart thudding once, hard. He slid the blanket aside just enough to free his grip.
The sledgehammer came up, and when it came down, the steel answered.
Not with the ring of ordinary steel. Not with the dull complaint of scrap.
It tolled. He struck again, lighter, listening. Then he changed the rhythm.
A tap. A pause. Two taps. A pause. A pattern only two people knew.
He held his breath after the last tap, as if even air might drown the reply.
Marcus put his ears on the bell. He slapped himself hard as his ears rang from all that drinking and lack of sleep.
"Come on. Come on. Come on."