Chapter 6 - The Locked Trailer in the Underground Bay
My blood turned to ice water behind the velvet stage curtains as Brielle’s words hit me with the force of a sledgehammer.
My nineteen-year-old younger brother Noah had been born with a severe congenital spinal and respiratory condition that required round-the-clock care at the Lakeview Specialty Clinic in Evanston—a facility whose medical trust I had funded with every penny of my pre-marital consulting income.
"What are you talking about, Brielle, why would my brother Noah’s medical transport van be anywhere near McCormick Place tonight," I demanded, grabbing the front of her gold sequined dress and slamming her back against the brick stage wall.
"Because Chase needed eight million dollars by midnight tonight to pay off Viktor Kovacs’s gambling syndicate after Chase intentionally threw three mid-season qualifying races to cover his stock losses," Brielle babbled in sheer terror, tears smearing her heavy black mascara.
"When Matteo tore up the twelve-million-dollar sponsorship contract in your driveway last night, Kovacs’s men realized Chase had no way to pay them today—so an hour ago they intercepted Noah’s private medical transport van on its way back from his physical therapy appointment at Northwestern, parked the van inside the subterranean loading bay beneath this stage, and 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 exhibition car directly beneath the concrete support beam holding up Noah’s van!"
I looked out through the gap in the curtains toward the stage, where Chase had suddenly bolted down the back service stairs in a blind panic the moment Matteo announced the seizure of his company, while the silver prototype exhibition car was already idling at the mouth of the ramp twenty yards away!
Wait a second—Eli DeSantis was not sitting inside the silver prototype car as it rolled toward the stage curtain!
Through the tinted windshield of the moving silver car, I saw that the driver’s helmet was strapped onto a terrified, bound-and-gagged security guard from the convention hall whose hands were zip-tied to the steering wheel while the car was being driven remotely via autopilot toward the center of the ballroom floor!
"Matteo, clear the stage and stop that car before it crosses the ramp threshold," I screamed as I burst back through the velvet curtains onto the platform.
Matteo spun around instantly, his eyes locking onto the zip-tied guard behind the windshield of the silver car rolling up the incline thirty feet away, while his security chief Luca sprinted into the hall holding Danny Vance’s decryption dongle from Union Station.
"Everyone out of the ballroom toward the north concourse doors right now, this is not a drill," Matteo roared into the live microphone, his commanding presence sending the twelve hundred guests surging rapidly toward the wide emergency exits behind a wall of DeSantis security personnel.
"Vivian, get out the north doors with Eli," Matteo barked as he grabbed a heavy steel crowd-control barrier to wedge beneath the tires of the approaching car.
"No, Matteo, a steel barrier won’t stop an eight-hundred-horsepower drivetrain on remote throttle, and my brother Noah’s medical van is parked directly beneath the east subterranean loading dock where Kovacs’s men are transmitting the signal," I shouted as I snatched my leather laptop satchel off the podium table.
"Kovacs hijacked the prototype’s internal ECU autopilot using the backdoor frequency from Chase’s command trailer downstairs—and the only way to sever the remote C4 relay and shut down that drivetrain before it reaches the stage pillar is for me to plug Danny’s dongle straight into the master telemetry server inside the Whitaker Motorsports trailer in the underground bay!"
Without waiting for permission, I kicked off my crimson high heels and 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 smell of raw racing fuel and hot tire rubber hung thick in the air.
Parked beside the main structural concrete columns at the far end of the bay was the gleaming black forty-foot Whitaker Motorsports command trailer—and parked directly beside its rear hydraulic ramp was the white Lakeview Specialty Clinic 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.
"Give them the port freight bearer contract right now, DeSantis, or Kovacs blows the car upstairs and takes this whole ceiling down on Noah’s van," Chase screamed, his white dinner jacket stained with grease and sweat as one of Kovacs’s gunmen held a suppressed submachine gun six inches from Chase’s ribs while a second mercenary aimed a remote detonator box toward the ceiling.
"You brought gambling cartel killers to my brother’s bedside because you were too cowardly to admit you fixed your own races, Chase," I called out clearly as Matteo and Luca took cover behind an armored concrete pillar forty feet away.
While Matteo and Luca drew the mercenaries’ eyes across the open concrete lane, I dropped to my knees behind a row of stacked Michelin tire crates and slipped through the narrow eighteen-inch mechanic’s crawl-hatch beneath the belly of the forty-foot Whitaker command trailer!
I had designed the layout of this mobile engineering trailer myself two years ago, and I knew that the crawl-hatch led directly up through the floor panel beneath the master telemetry server desk.
Pushing the aluminum floor grate aside inside the dark, air-conditioned trailer, I pulled myself up to the glowing server console, jammed Danny Vance’s Union Station dongle into the primary USB port, and typed in the nine-digit neurological rehabilitation code I had created during Chase’s hospital stay.
Instantly, the master telemetry firewall unlocked across the triple monitors, displaying the live remote radio link controlling both the silver exhibition car upstairs and the secondary relay wired to the C4 charge!
With my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard, I executed a hard frequency-jamming purge that severed Kovacs’s remote detonator link and engaged the prototype car’s emergency fuel cut-off upstairs—stopping the silver car dead on the ramp twenty feet short of the ballroom stage!
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At that exact second, the exterior steel doors of the trailer slammed shut with a heavy metallic clang as Chase Whitaker 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 prove his loyalty to Kovacs’s gunmen and erase the server evidence of Eli’s 2024 crash forever—grabbed two five-gallon red jugs of high-octane racing methanol from the pit cart, splashed the clear fuel all over the exterior aluminum walls and tires of the trailer, and threw a lit road flare straight onto the puddle at my feet!
