Chapter 8 - The Garage With No Cameras
Adrian’s father, Judge Thomas Cross, had retired from the state bench but still carried himself like a man who expected every room to fall silent when he entered. Richard stood beside him in a charcoal overcoat, holding a leather folder.
“We need to talk,” the judge said through the door. “This can end quietly.”
Nora reached for her phone. Adrian caught her hand.
“If they see Luis, he’s finished,” he whispered. “There’s a back stair.”
They escaped down the service stairs while Adrian’s father continued knocking. On the street, Nora’s Range Rover was gone. In its place sat a city tow truck with a note under the wiper: YOUR CAR IS SAFE. YOUR PEOPLE ARE NOT.
They took a cab to Vale Automotive’s old garage, a concrete building behind a row of warehouses. The company had closed it after moving the engineering team to a glass tower downtown, but the security gate still accepted an old maintenance code Luis remembered.
Inside, the air smelled of rubber and cold metal. The prototype Ethan had driven was gone, but its testing bay remained, marked with a yellow outline on the floor. Luis knelt by a wall cabinet and removed a false back panel.
“There was a second control module,” he said. “Ethan told me he kept a spare because he didn’t trust the new firmware.”
Nora searched the cabinet. Behind a coil of wiring, she found a black metal box no bigger than a paperback. A strip of tape across it carried Ethan’s handwriting: IF THE REPORT SAYS I WAS CARELESS, CHECK THIS FIRST.
She had just lifted it when the garage doors slammed shut.
Red emergency lights flashed overhead. A mechanical hum started, followed by the hiss of the ventilation system shutting down.
“They’re locking us in,” Adrian said.
A voice crackled over the old speaker system. “Leave the module on the floor and walk to the center of the bay. You have sixty seconds.”
Luis looked at the ceiling vents. “They’re pumping in exhaust.”
Nora’s pulse kicked. She could smell it already—sharp, bitter, wrong.
Adrian grabbed a tire iron and smashed the nearest control panel. Sparks burst across his sleeve. The door remained sealed.
Nora looked at the black module in her hands, then at the narrow inspection pit beneath the old lift.
May you like
“Get down,” she ordered.
They dropped into the pit just as the overhead lights went out, and above them someone began pouring gasoline across the garage floor.
