18
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.