Chapter 6 - The Underground Pit Bay
My blood turned to ice behind the velvet stage curtains as Brielle’s terrified confession hit me with the force of a physical blow.
My nineteen-year-old younger brother Noah had been born with a severe congenital spinal and respiratory condition that required continuous care at the Lakeview Specialty Clinic in Evanston—a facility whose medical trust I had funded with every dollar of my pre-marital engineering income.
"Why would Viktor Kovacs’s men bring Noah’s medical van to McCormick Place tonight," I demanded, grabbing Brielle by the shoulders of her gold dress and pinning her against the backstage brick wall.
"Because when Matteo tore up the twelve-million-dollar sponsorship contract in your driveway last night, Kovacs realized Chase had no way to pay off his eight-million-dollar race-fixing debt by midnight," Brielle sobbed as black mascara ran down her cheeks.
"Kovacs’s men locked your brother’s van inside the subterranean loading bay directly beneath this stage twenty minutes ago, and they told Chase that unless Matteo signs over the twenty-million-dollar DeSantis port freight contract in the next ten minutes, they will detonate the C4 inside the silver prototype car right over the primary support column holding up the floor above Noah’s van."
I looked out through the curtain gap toward the ballroom stage, where Chase had bolted down the back service stairs the instant Matteo announced the seizure of his company, while the silver prototype exhibition car was already rolling up the indoor stadium ramp twenty yards away.
Through the tinted windshield of the approaching silver car, I saw that Eli DeSantis was not inside—instead, a bound-and-gagged convention security guard was zip-tied to the steering wheel while the car drove itself up the incline on remote autopilot.
"Matteo, clear the ballroom floor immediately, there is a bomb inside that car," I shouted as I burst back onto the main platform.
Matteo reacted in half a heartbeat, barking an evacuation order into the microphone that sent the twelve hundred guests surging safely through the wide north concourse exits behind a wall of DeSantis security guards while Luca ran up the stage steps holding Danny Vance’s decryption dongle from Union Station.
"Vivian, get out through the north doors with Eli right now," Matteo commanded as he grabbed my hand.
"No, Matteo, the remote autopilot and the C4 relay on that car are being transmitted from the master telemetry server inside the Whitaker Motorsports command trailer down in the underground loading bay—and the only person on earth who knows the nine-digit rolling encryption code to sever that radio link and stop the drivetrain before it hits the stage pillar is me," I told him fiercely as I snatched Danny’s dongle from Luca’s hand.
Kicking off my high heels, I sprinted barefoot down the concrete subterranean service ramp with Matteo and Luca running stride for stride beside me with their nine-millimeter pistols drawn.
Down in the cavernous concrete loading bay beneath the convention hall, the air smelled of raw racing fuel and hot rubber.
Parked beside the main structural concrete columns at the far end of the bay was the forty-foot black Whitaker Motorsports command trailer—and parked directly beside its rear ramp was the white Lakeview medical van with my brother Noah’s nurse tied up in the front passenger seat.
Standing between the medical van and the trailer doors were Chase Whitaker and three heavily armed mercenaries in black leather jackets working for Viktor Kovacs.
"Sign over the port freight bearer contract right now, DeSantis, or Kovacs’s men blow the car upstairs and bring this whole concrete ceiling down on Noah’s van," Chase screamed, his white dinner jacket stained with sweat and oil as one of the gunmen held a submachine gun near his ribs while another aimed a remote transmitter toward the ceiling.
While Matteo and Luca opened fire from behind an armored concrete pillar forty feet away to draw the mercenaries’ eyes across the pit lane, I dropped to my knees behind a stack of Michelin tire crates and slipped through the eighteen-inch mechanic’s crawl-hatch beneath the belly of the forty-foot command trailer.
I had designed this mobile engineering trailer myself two years ago, and I knew the crawl-hatch opened directly beneath the master server desk in the front nose cone.
Pulling myself up into the dark server room, I jammed Danny Vance’s Union Station dongle into the primary USB port, typed in the nine-digit hospital admission code from Chase’s 2024 recovery, and executed an immediate frequency-jamming purge that severed Kovacs’s remote C4 link and shut down the silver car’s engine upstairs twenty feet short of the stage pillar.
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At that exact second, the exterior steel doors of the trailer slammed shut with a heavy metallic clang as Chase realized someone was inside the server room and threw the external padlock bolt from the outside.
Through the reinforced porthole window of the locked trailer, I watched in horror as Chase—desperate to erase the 2024 crash files and prove his loyalty to Kovacs—grabbed two five-gallon red jugs of high-octane racing methanol from the pit cart, splashed the clear fuel across the exterior aluminum walls and tires of the trailer, and threw a lit road flare straight onto the puddle beneath my feet.
