Chapter 3 - Ghosts of Blackridge
The flight from Briar County to the private airstrip outside Madison took less than forty minutes, but to me, it felt like traveling through a time warp. A secondary transport brought us through the thick forest of oak and hemlock that masked the perimeter of Blackridge Performance.
The facility looked like a sleeping industrial beast against the winter sky. Massive red-brick smokestacks from the old foundry reached into the falling snow, surrounded by razor-wire fences and modern security cameras glowing with dull infrared lights. Vance Tactical patrol trucks circled the outer gravel roads, their headlights cutting through the swirling blizzard.
Vivian led me through the tree line toward an abandoned stone pumping station half-buried in a snowdrift. One of her security men, a silent operator named Harris, used a hydraulic pry bar to wedge open a heavy iron grate hidden under rotting timber.
""Down here,"" Vivian whispered.
We descended an iron spiral staircase into the damp, cold belly of the earth. The air smelled of stagnant groundwater, motor oil, and rusted metal. We moved through a narrow concrete tunnel, our tactical flashlights illuminating cracked walls covered in calcified mineral streaks.
Every step pulled an old memory out of the dark. I remembered walking these halls at dawn with a hot thermos of black coffee, eager to spend fourteen hours testing dual-overhead-cam configurations. I remembered Claire waiting for me in the parking lot in her beat-up Civic, smiling through the windshield because we were young, broke, and convinced the future was wide open before us.
""We’re entering the lower maintenance corridor beneath Vault Three,"" Harris announced quietly, checking a digital thermal scanner. ""Thermal cameras show two armed guards on the upper catwalk. None on the ground floor. The shift rotation occurs in seven minutes.""
We ascended a vertical steel ladder into an auxiliary electrical closet. Harris bypassed the magnetic latch with an electronic bypass tool, and the heavy door slipped open with a faint hiss.
There it was.
Vault Three was vast, cavernous, and bathed in the pale amber glow of low-voltage emergency lighting. In the center of the polished concrete floor, resting on a brushed-aluminum turntable, sat the 1967 Ashford Coronado.
The car was breathtaking. Finished in deep midnight blue with sweeping aerodynamic curves that predated modern hypercars by half a century, it looked like an aristocratic fighter jet on wheels. The low-slung chassis, handcrafted aluminum hood, and custom Borrani wire wheels were preserved in museum-grade perfection.
I stood there for a second, my chest tight. ""It looks just like the day they unveiled the clay mock-up.""
""Don't get sentimental yet, Evan,"" Vivian murmured, stepping up beside me. ""We have thirty-nine minutes before the Vance patrol cycles back to this quadrant. Harris, kill the regional camera feed.""
Harris jacked a handheld module into the wall-mounted junction box. The overhead amber lights flickered once and settled into a dim blue hue as the localized closed-circuit television feed went into an automated loop.
I didn't waste another second. I unrolled my grandfather's leather tool wrap on the edge of the display plinth. The steel wrenches and brass drift punches clinked softly in the stillness.
I walked to the front quarter panel of the Coronado, popped the custom titanium hood latches, and lifted the massive single-piece cowl.
Beneath lay a work of mechanical art: a quad-cam V12 engine with twelve individual velocity stacks polished like mirrors. But my eyes immediately locked onto the base of the firewall, tucked behind the rear cylinder head of the right-side bank.
There was the brass fitting.
And on the outer rim of the mounting shim, catching the reflection of my flashlight, were eleven precise diagonal crosshatch marks.
My breath hitched. Seeing it in a photograph was one thing. Seeing it in the flesh—stamped onto an irreplaceable national treasure—felt like looking into an open grave.
""Hand me the 10mm flare nut wrench and the brass retaining pick,"" I told Vivian.
May you like
""Can you extract it?"" she asked, her voice trembling slightly.
""I can,"" I said, leaning over the fender. ""But the moment I crack this seal, the car's internal telemetry might log the pressure differential. If Preston has a remote monitor on this fuel cell, he'll know someone is inside the vault before we even get the drive out.""
