chapter forty.

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Warning: This Chapter Contains Content Under The Umbrella Theme of War, Violence, Injury and Death- It Is Intended For Mature Readers

Reese POV:

In chess, checkmate is a move that makes it impossible for your opponent to win.

It's a clear victory. A move that leaves your opponent with no more options, therefore making it impossible for them to generate a countermove that won't result in you getting their king and consequently ending the game. It's inescapable, indefensible, and so inevitably final, the term is consistently used to describe oher kinds of final victories. Take politics for example, a campaign that berates the opposition's reputation, leading to a victory in the polls could be called a checkmate. A series of responses and facts acting as the final nail in the coffin that wraps up an election, could be called a checkmate. The takedown of a leader through any means necessary in order to win power, a checkmate.

Checkmate doesn't just mean that you have simply cornered the enemy king, it's a declaration that the enemy king is yours.

Three empires, eighty armed soldiers, six semi-trucks en-route, 1.3 billion dollars, and the death of an heir residing on a throne covered in civilian and enemy blood alike.

This was our checkmate.

At 2:30am the Autonomous Port of Paris was harrowingly still. Resting quietly on the Seine River in France, the port facilitated goods along over three hundred miles of navigable routes. It was a state public institution that transported over eighty-eight million tons of supplies a year. By having numerous major multimodal platforms, it made it so that it could house up to five transport modes at all times. The maritime, road and rail, two oil pipelines and what was now about to be the French empire's achilles heel, the waterway.

The waterway led to the epicenter of the port, something the French called 'Conex.' Conex was a place where cargo containers stacked up one on top of another by the hundreds. Heavy machinery and cranes towered over the domain, beautifully illuminating the skyline with blazing lights that could be seen from miles away, so when ships docked at night they could identify where to drop the anchors and unload their shipping containers. Conex's container storage didn't concern us, what did was that Conex didn't just accommodate cargo ships; the site stored a massive one hundred and fifty million dollar mega-yacht registered under the Baudelaire name.

The yacht rested casually on the side, making sure the armed guards could hide behind its inactivity during the daytime. It didn't just surpass some of the smaller cargo ships in size, it passed them in worth. The price tag that shone from the sparkling fiberglass walls was a gross misrepresentation of how much the entirety of the vessel and the goods on board were actually worth.

We estimated long ago that an approximate twenty tons of cocaine was situated on that very yacht. That was 1.3 billion dollars just sitting in storage waiting to be distributed across France. 1.3 billion dollars that we wanted in our pockets. 1.3 billion dollars that if taken, would rip the French empire right out from under their own feet.

When running a business and in life itself, it's important to give credit where credit is due. The gesture keeps you humble, modest, but most importantly, it keeps you competitive. It didn't matter how much any of us hated to admit it, the French using the waterway as an instrument of business they could pull into play whenever they needed was a move smarter than any of us thought they were capable of generating. They may have had to spend a lot of their money in order to rent a spot on the Port of Paris, but their vessel was basically a warehouse that could move.

It escaped the eyes of the law, it was essentially more easier to guard than a regular storage unit, but above all, no one would question loud semi-trucks constantly moving in and out of a place where cargo was readily held and transported. It was a perfect front that hid a multi-million dollar narcotics empire. An empire, if everything went according to plan, that was, unfortunately for them and fortunately for us, going to be wiped out in a span of one hour.

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