Chapter 5 - THE HIDDEN BUNKER
The G-Wagon raced down the Interstate 5 corridor, weaving through midnight traffic at eighty miles per hour. In the back seat, Noah had finally stopped crying, though he was still trembling violently, curled up under a spare wool blanket Daniel had handed him.
“Are you okay, buddy?” Daniel asked, glancing back through the rearview mirror.
Noah peeked out from under the blanket, his dark, soulful eyes—so identical to his father Andrew's—studying Daniel with cautious skepticism. “Are you... are you going to hurt my mom?”
“Never,” Daniel said firmly, his voice softening. “I'm your uncle Daniel. And your mom is safe at the hospital. We’re going to go somewhere secure right now where nobody can ever touch you again.”
“Dad said bad people were looking for us,” Noah whispered.
Daniel gripped the steering wheel tighter. Andrew was alive. He had to be. If Maria knew where he was hiding, they needed to find him before Vanessa’s syndicate finished hunting down every last member of the family.
Instead of returning to the Beverly Hills mansion—which was undoubtedly compromised and monitored by Vanessa’s security feeds—Daniel steered the vehicle toward the Santa Monica mountains, heading deep into an old private property his grandfather had purchased in the 1970s.
It was an old Cold War-era subterranean bunker built into the side of a secluded canyon, fully equipped with independent power generators, satellite communications, and a secure server room. Only Daniel and his late father knew the access codes.
Thirty minutes later, the G-Wagon rolled past a rusted iron security gate hidden beneath overgrown ivy, descending a steep concrete ramp into a subterranean garage.
Daniel parked the vehicle, carried the exhausted boy inside, and locked the massive steel blast doors behind them.
The bunker was dusty, smelling faintly of old concrete and canned rations, but the emergency lights flickered on automatically as Daniel swiped his thumb across the biometric wall scanner.
“This is our home for the next twenty-four hours,” Daniel told Noah, setting him down on a comfortable leather sofa in the main living quarters. “Stay here, watch whatever is on the monitor, and don't open this door for anyone except me or your mother.”
Daniel walked over to the secure communication terminal, booted up the mainframe, and routed an encrypted, zero-trace satellite call directly to a burner phone he had left hidden in Maria’s hospital room.
It rang three times before a weak, raspy voice answered.
“Hello?”
“Maria, it's Daniel. I have Noah. We're safe in the Santa Monica bunker.”
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A ragged sob of pure relief echoed through the speaker. “Thank God... oh, thank God.”
“Now it's time to finish this,” Daniel said, his eyes narrowing as he pulled up the Whitmore Holdings central database files on the main monitor. “You told me Andrew is still alive. It's time for him to stop hiding. Tell me how to reach my brother.”
