Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (9 page)

18

The Everglades, Florida, USA

1:31 a.m.

Jenna watched Carlos’s face as he contemplated the gate blocking their path. “It’s about six miles down that road,” she said. “Sure you don’t want to come back and try this during the day?”

He gave her a patronizing smile, leaned forward and whispered something in Raul’s ear. The younger brother reached under his jacket and took out a pistol. He waggled it under Jenna’s nose. “Oh, look! We brought the key,
chica
.”

She stared at the weapon, more angry than surprised. She hadn’t realized that the brothers were carrying guns, though in hindsight, she realized she should have expected it.
No matter
, she thought.
A lot of people with guns have failed to kill me tonight. It doesn’t change what I have to do
.

Raul got out and walked up to the barrier. He looked around, as if making sure that they were as alone as they seemed to be, then aimed the gun and pulled the trigger. The loud report sent a pressure wave rippling through the interior of the car. They were well away from inhabited areas, so there was little chance of the shot being heard. Even if it was, the locals might assume that it was one of their good ol’ boy neighbors out poaching. The broken padlock fell to the ground at Raul’s feet. He kicked it out of the way, then swung the gate open and returned to the car.

A concrete road waited beyond the gate. It was wide enough to allow two vehicles to pass, but encroaching vegetation had shrunk the passable space down to one lane. Raul steered the rental car down the middle, proceeding slowly to avoid storm debris and other obstacles. More than once, Jenna glimpsed movement in the shadows, as large animals ducked away from the headlights. Intersecting roads hinted at human activity, but most were overgrown. Jenna knew from her brief glimpse of the satellite map that these roads led to empty lots and abandoned buildings.

“How much farther?” Carlos asked after about fifteen minutes.

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Jenna retorted, but then to avoid any repercussions, added, “It shouldn’t be much further. The road goes straight for a while, then makes a hard left turn. Just follow the pavement.”

They arrived at the turn less than a minute later. It was the first significant deviation from the straight line they had been following since leaving the main highway. A dilapidated concrete building stood at the corner, and Raul slowed the car. “Is that it?”

Jenna stared at the half-ruined structure for a moment. She didn’t actually need to take the brothers to the exact place indicated by Noah’s coordinates. She just needed a place where she could slip free of their control and escape. On the other hand, if she had to run, she might not get another chance to retrieve Noah’s fire alarm.

“No,” she said. “That’s not it. Keep going.”

A mile and a half later, she saw another building, a sheet-metal structure, several stories high, with a large square opening, like a garage door, at the southern end. “That’s the place.”

Raul pulled to a stop fifty feet from the opening. He shut off the engine, but left the lights on, illuminating the interior and revealing another identical opening on the opposite side.

Carlos stared at her for several seconds, as if searching for some hint of treachery. “Your old man put the money in there?”

She nodded. “This is the place.”

Carlos got out and then motioned for Jenna to do the same. “All right, little girl. It’s show time. Lead the way.”

Jenna complied, careful not to seem too eager or too reluctant, though in truth, she felt a lot of both. She wanted to see what Noah had left behind, to learn the truth about her father, and perhaps discover why someone wanted him—and her—dead. She was also anxious about the imminent showdown with the Villegas brothers. She didn’t know exactly how it was going to play out, and that scared her a little. It was also exhilarating. She felt like a volcano, desperate to erupt before the pressure blew her apart.

The headlights illuminated the area closest to the large door, leaving the rest shrouded in darkness. Carlos and Raul both used their cell phones as flashlights, casting the beams into the shadowy corners. There was debris on the floor, and pieces of metal and construction material was scattered everywhere, but the building was mostly an empty shell.

“What is this?” Raul asked, shining his light up at the cavernous ceiling. There were holes in the roof, where sheets of metal had been torn away. “An airplane hangar?”

Jenna did not know if it was a rhetorical question, but she decided to treat it as one. She saw no benefit in revealing what she knew about this place. When she had entered the coordinates into Carlos’s phone, one of the search results had triggered a memory about an obscure bit of South Florida history that she had learned and never forgotten.

In the early 1960s, as America and the Soviet Union raced to conquer space, a company called Aerojet had spent $150 million to build a solid-fuel rocket testing facility in the Everglades, just outside Homestead. But NASA decided to use liquid-fueled rockets in the Apollo program, and that, along with a waning interest in the Space Race—once Neil Armstrong planted the Stars and Stripes on lunar soil—had resulted in Aerojet closing the plant before the decade’s end. They abandoned it entirely, leaving the derelict structures, many still filled with specialized equipment for producing and testing solid rocket fuel, like the ruins and relics of a forgotten civilization. One particular relic that was mentioned in news reports and documentaries about the Aerojet facility, was the AJ 260-2 rocket motor body, which had been used to test the fuel mixtures.

The rocket motor, one of the largest of its kind ever, was too large to move by truck or train. A canal had been dug so that the rocket could be floated to the facility on a barge, where it was lowered into the silo with a crane. The silo had to be open to the air for test fires, but covered the rest of the time, so the engineers had designed the enormous shed to be movable. The rocket motor was just a metal cylinder—a fuel tank without any hardware to create ignition. For the tests, it had to first be filled with the rubbery, solid rocket fuel, and then fitted with a cone-shaped rocket nozzle, placed atop the motor, so that its explosive energy would blast into the sky. According to one documentary Jenna had watched, the glow of the third and final test in 1967 had been visible from Key West. At sixty feet in length and more than twenty feet in diameter, it was too large to be removed from the site, so for more than forty-five years, it had sat idle in this enormous structure, or more precisely, under it. The rocket motor still rested in a silo, covered over with plates of welded metal, directly beneath where Jenna now walked.

It was not the rocket motor that had captured Jenna’s attention, though. It was the silo. Fifty feet wide. One hundred-eighty feet
deep
. It was the only place anywhere near the coordinates Noah had left where the third number in the message made any sense.

25.321304 -80.557173 (-80)

‘Minus eighty’ had to mean eighty feet
down
. Noah had left his fire alarm in the silo, probably somewhere under the rocket motor.

Carlos gave Jenna a look that was both impatient and suspicious. “Well?”

Jenna stomped a foot on the floor. The metal plate beneath her made a hollow sound, and the vibration made her captor jump back in surprise. “It’s under here.”

“Under?” He turned his light onto the welded plates, and his inspection showed where many of them had rusted completely through.

Jenna inched closer to the walls where the floor was bare concrete. The metal plates were covering the silo opening, and if Noah had left something eighty feet below, then there had to be access. Her eagerness to discover exactly what it was her father had hidden overrode her anxiety regarding her present situation. Freeing herself from Carlos and Raul was still high on her list of priorities, but figuring out who was trying to kill her—who
did
kill Noah—was still at the top of that list.

She crept around the floor’s edge, skirting the metal plates and inspecting the seams of each to see if all of them had been welded shut. After five minutes, she came upon a section that was covered by a thick metal grate. She peeked through and could just make out a large cylindrical object. She knelt, threaded her fingers through the grate and tried to lift. It gave just enough for her to know that it wasn’t welded in place, but it was too heavy for her to lift alone.

“Help me,” she called out, and when neither brother moved to assist her, she added, “Do you want the money or not?”

Raul looked to his brother as if checking for permission, and then moved to help Jenna. Like her, he attempted to lift the grate up, but even with their combined strength, it refused to yield.

Carlos regarded Jenna suspiciously. “That thing hasn’t been moved in years, little girl. I think you’re jerking us around.”

Jenna was inclined to agree with the first assertion. Unfortunately, it didn’t support her claim that Noah had recently hidden money here. But she felt certain that this was the place. “Just help us lift it. Or better yet, find something we can use as a lever.” She glanced around the debris strewn floor, looking for something sturdy enough to fit the bill.

“Raul,” Carlos said, his tone still dubious. “Get a tire iron from the car.”

The younger brother moved off without question, leaving Carlos and Jenna alone. Jenna measured the distance between herself and him, calculating her odds of taking him on one-on-one. He was bigger but she had years of training in unarmed combat, and she would have the element of surprise on her side. He had a gun, but as Noah had often told her, people with guns had a tendency to put too much faith in them. If she charged, he might waste precious seconds trying to draw the gun and aim it, time in which she would be able to close the distance and punch him in the throat.

But not quite enough time
, she thought. Carlos, consciously or not, had kept a good stand-off distance. That was another thing Noah always complained about when watching action movies. When someone—a cop maybe—held a prisoner at gunpoint, they would always get right up in their face. It was dramatic as hell, but Noah always scoffed and talked about how easy it would be to disarm the gunman in that situation.

It was funny how all those little things Noah had said and done over the years, things which she had never thought twice about, now made sense. All that time, Noah had been teaching her, passing along his accumulated wisdom, preparing her for…

For this?

He must have known a threat like this might someday materialize, and while he had chosen not to reveal the truth about himself to her, he had taken steps to ensure that she would be prepared. He had trained her, mind and body, to deal with whatever happened. That was why, even though her muscles ached, her empty stomach rumbled and her head throbbed, she did not feel afraid.

Raul came back with a short lug wrench, tipped with a chisel point at one end for popping off hubcaps. It was not long enough to provide much leverage, but Raul was able to work it into a seam and managed to lift the grate and jam the pry bar under it.

“See,” Jenna said, pointing triumphantly.

Carlos looked unimpressed, but joined in. The three of them succeeded in pushing the grate aside a full eighteen inches. He then shone his light down into the hole. Jenna looked in and saw the smooth concrete walls that curved in either direction to form a wide circle, and at the center of the circle, the enormous white cylinder of the rocket motor. A line of hooplike protrusions—curved pieces of rebar, each about the size of a horseshoe—were set in the concrete wall at one-foot intervals, forming an access ladder.

She was itching to descend into the silo, to seek out its hidden depths and whatever it was that Noah had left here, but she waited for Carlos to give her the go-ahead. She did not want to let either of them go down the ladder, but neither did she want to seem too eager to do so herself. If either one of them did decide to explore the silo, she decided that would be her cue to strike.

“Okay, little girl,” Carlos said, gesturing at the opening. “This is your show. Go get it.”

19

2:03 a.m.

Jenna dropped onto the floor, swung her legs out into empty space, and twisted around until she felt a steel rung underfoot. She tested it. After forty-five years of exposure to the tropical Everglades air, the steel could have been as rusted as the metal plates covering the silo. The first rung felt solid underfoot. She stepped down to the next and tested it the same way. Just as she was about to take the step that would plunge her into the darkness below, she raised her eyes to Carlos.

“I’m going to need a light.”

He frowned then looked at his phone for a moment before handing it over. “No bars out here, so don’t bother trying to call for help.”

In truth, the idea had not even occurred to her. “I just need to see what I’m doing.”

She turned the bright LED down into the depths of the silo. Far below her feet, at the base of the rocket, was a platform made of the same metal grating. The distance seemed about right for Noah’s ‘minus eighty.’ She slipped the phone into the back pocket of her jeans and started down again.

The round mouth of the silo, dimly lit to begin with, shrank to a spot that glowed about as brightly as the luminescent numbers on a wristwatch—enough to be seen, but not enough to illuminate anything. She didn’t need light for the descent, though. She could see everything in her mind’s eye, and she knew exactly where she was in relation to the platform. She had, without even thinking about it, calculated the number of rungs. She ticked them off in her head as she went down, testing each hold before trusting it with her weight. After several minutes, she reached a foot out behind her to find the platform.

She was less certain about its stability, but there were no creaks or groans. With one hand on a rung, she lowered her other foot down and stood there for a moment.

“Okay, Noah. I’m here,” she murmured. “What am I supposed to do now?”

She took out the phone. It had timed out and gone dark, but she found the button to wake it up and was gratified to see that there was no password lock. That would come in handy if she needed to use the phone after…

First things first
.

She used the screen’s brightness to survey the area. The rocket motor was just behind her, its rounded end perched atop a solid concrete pedestal at the center of the metal grating. The silo continued down into the shadowy unknown, but Jenna knew that what she wanted would be found right here. She waved the light around, painting the area into her mental image but also looking for anything that seemed out of place.

She focused on recesses and niches hidden in shadow. Noah would not have left his cache out in the open. As inaccessible as the silo’s bottom was, there was nothing to stop a thrill-seeking urban explorer from making the descent. Noah would have recognized that possibility. After a few moments of searching, she spied something just above the inverted dome of the rocket motor.

It was a metal box, about the size of the aluminum lunch-boxes that some of her schoolmates carried. Most kids who brought lunch from home used collapsible insulated bags, but a few liked the kitschy appeal of having a metal box painted with images from cartoon shows.
My Little Pony
.
Hello Kitty
. Things she had never been interested in. This box was an undecorated gun-metal gray. She rapped her knuckles on it. Solid as a bank vault. She held the light closer and saw where the box had been spot-welded to the rocket. She also saw that it was secured with a three-digit roller combination lock.

It was suddenly all very real now. Noah had been here, standing right where she now stood.

When did he do this?
It had to have been many years ago, probably on a day when she was in school and there were no charters on the schedule. She recalled that, among his many tools for boat maintenance, Noah had a miniature acetylene blow torch. He sometimes used it to braze pieces of copper tubing. He would have used the torch to cut through the grate above, and then made the same descent she had. It would have taken only a few minutes to weld the box in place.

“Okay,” she said aloud, as if speaking to her father’s ghost. “What’s the magic number?” She cycled through birthdays: hers, Mercy’s and Noah’s late November birthday. A four-digit combo was out.
What else?

He had left it with Mercy. Could it be an important date that only the two of them shared? If that was the case, her only option would be a brute force attack, trying successive combinations until she finally hit on the correct one. If she started at all zeros and the number was in the 900s it would take her close to an hour.
It might not even be a date
.

Think
. Noah wanted the right person to open this if the need arose. He left precise coordinates so it could be found in case of emergency…

“Duh!” She quickly set the combination to 9-1-1 and heard an internal mechanism click. The box opened to reveal a small leather-bound notebook inside a large Ziploc bag, and nothing else.

Jenna opened the bag and then the book. She thumbed through it, instantly recognizing Noah’s precise printed letters. It was a journal. She didn’t read any of it. There would be time for that later.

The book was too large to fit in a pocket, so she put it back in the bag, stuffed it into the waistband of her jeans at the small of her back and covered it with her T-shirt. She drew a deep breath and mentally centered herself, putting her dojo habits to use in the real world. She moved to the steel rungs and began climbing.

The ascent went quickly, partly because she did not take the time to test her footholds, but also because the impending confrontation, like the last day of summer vacation, was something she dreaded. It was the exact opposite of the old saying about watched pots never boiling.

She maintained her calm focus by counting down the rungs. When she got to fifteen, she could see the faces of her tormentors, silhouetted in the ambient light, staring down at her. When she got to eight, Carlos called out.

“Unless you’ve got a wad of ten thousand dollar bills in your pocket,” he said in a low menacing tone, “I think I’m about to be very disappointed.”

She climbed a couple of rungs higher before giving the answer she had mentally rehearsed. “The money isn’t here. It’s in a bank account. Cayman Islands.” She thought that sounded pretty plausible. “My dad hid the account number here. I’ve got it now.”

Carlos did not look convinced. “Give it to me.”

She reached into a pocket and found the strip of paper on which Noah had written the coordinates for the silo. It was still damp from her plunge into Boca Chica Channel but she succeeded in taking it out intact. She waved it for Carlos to see. Then, she took another step and held it up like an offering.

Carlos reached out to snatch the paper from her fingers, but as he did, she let go of it and encircled his wrist with her hand. His face registered surprise, but she only caught a glimpse as she yanked down hard on his arm.

As he started to fall toward her, she let go and pressed herself flat against the smooth concrete wall. There was a tug of friction as his body slid past hers, but she held on tightly, and an instant later, Carlos was gone.