Chapter 35
I showed my driver’s license to the elderly clerk in the front office, who checked his computer and nodded without asking for a signature.
“Unit four-eight is in the third corridor,” he said, his voice dry. “Drive all the way to the back. No security cameras down that lane.”
I parked my car near the rusted metal fire door and walked down the concrete hallway.
The air was thick with the smell of damp cardboard, old grease, and cold concrete.
Unit 408 was at the very end of the hall, its blue metal door scratched and dented near the bottom.
I inserted the brass key into the heavy padlock.
The lock turned with a clean, sharp click, the internal tumblers well-greased despite the age of the facility.
I pulled the metal door upward. It slid into the ceiling with a loud, rattling roar that echoed off the concrete walls.
The interior of the unit was small, perhaps six feet wide and ten feet deep.
Against the back wall stood a single set of grey industrial shelves.
Three cardboard banker boxes were stacked on the middle shelf, each sealed with heavy packing tape that had yellowed with age.
Each box had a single horizontal red stripe painted across the front.
I walked inside, my footsteps sounding hollow on the bare floor.
On top of the first box lay a small, black plastic case no larger than a paperback book.
I popped the plastic latches on the case.
Inside was a heavy, olive-drab satellite phone with a thick rubber antenna and a small LCD screen.
The battery indicator in the corner of the screen showed a full charge.
Next to the phone was a small white index card with a sequence of numbers written in the same blue block-printed handwriting.
The dust on the plastic case was thin, unlike the thick layer of grey grime that covered the top of the cardboard boxes.
I pulled the lid off the first box.
Inside were neat rows of green hanging folders, each one labeled with the names of Vance Defense Solutions contracts dating back to nineteen ninety-five.
Among them were the original testing reports for the ceramic body armor plates, the ones Maya Ellis had described to me.
I picked up one of the reports. The cover page was marked with a red classification stamp, but the pages beneath were filled with technical data showing the high failure rate of the silica alloy.
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At the bottom of the last page, my father’s signature was written in blue ink.
He had known about the defect before his helicopter went down.
