UAVs capable of making an hourlong flight. He also wanted them equipped with some kind of self-destruct application.
Mina was good at playing stupid, but she wasn’t stupid. She understood that Gallegos’s principals intended to use the UAVs to smuggle illicit cargo-drugs most likely-from somewhere in northern Mexico to predetermined landing areas in the United States well north of the last Border Patrol checkpoints. If each drone was capable of carrying a valuable ten-kilogram payload, she was a little puzzled by the need for a self-destruct mechanism, but she had agreed that any UAVs they sold would be so equipped.
“What about Richard Lowensdale?” Mina asked Mark casually. “Maybe we could bring him in on a consulting basis.”
Mark let his breath out. “I never liked Richard,” he said. “I’m not sure he can be trusted.”
“Yes, but he’s a good engineer, and he knows the product,” Mina said.
“But how the hell are we going to pay him?”
“Let me see what I can do,” Mina said. “Maybe I can get him to defer payment until after he gets us up and running. To bring him on board, though, I’ll have to go see him. We can’t risk sending him an e-mail about any of this. I don’t want to put anything in writing.”
“Yes, definitely,” Mark agreed. “Nothing in writing.”
He stood up and stretched. “I’m going to go home and shower. It was hot as hell out there today, but by now the ATVers are all showing up for their long weekend. I was glad to come back to town.”
Once Mark left, a worried Mina paced the small confines of her office. If the feds could pull a wrecked 747 out of the ocean and reassemble it, they could do the same thing to a drone that had gone down in the Salton Sea. All the parts, even the smallest integrated circuits, had source codes that would come straight back to Rutherford and to her. There were laws, federal laws, against selling supposedly scrapped equipment to unauthorized purchasers. Enrique Gallegos was definitely not authorized. Mina wanted to be rich again-she liked being rich-but she most definitely didn’t want to go to jail.
Two nights later, she sat in a darkened bar in the Morongo Casino outside Palm Springs. She sipped a tonic with lime and waited for Enrique to pull himself away from the baccarat table. The casino was far enough out of the way for Mina to meet him there without raising any San Diego eyebrows.
“Is there a problem?” he asked.
She nodded. “My husband is hung up on the idea of blowing up the hardware,” she said. “It’s possible, of course, but in order to make sure it works, we’d have to take another drone out of our inventory. And there’s always the very real danger of an event like that leaving a debris trail. We’ll need to do a test run.”
“What are you saying?”
“If you want us to use two UAVs-one for us to blow up and the other for you to own-then you’ll need to pay us in advance for two UAVs.”
Enrique lifted his glass to his lips. “Sounds expensive,” he said. “I don’t know if I can make that work.”
“We’re the ones taking all the risks,” Mina said. “If we get caught, Mark and I could end up in jail for a very long time.”
That’s what Mina said, even though she had already decided that she would disappear long before any possible fallout hit. She’d be gone; the money would be gone; and Mark-poor old Mark-would be the one left holding the bag.
Without another word, Gallegos stood up and walked away. He didn’t say he’d be back, but Mina was sure he would be, and she was right. He returned twenty minutes later.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll buy two of them up front.”
Mina was impressed. Twenty minutes wasn’t very long to get the go-ahead on that kind of expenditure. Whoever was behind this was someone with very deep pockets.
“We’ve already paid a quarter of that amount as an advance on the other drone, with another quarter due after a successful demo and the remainder on delivery,” Gallegos continued. “We’ll buy the second one at half price on the same terms-a quarter now and the rest on completion of a successful demonstration.”
“Seventy-five percent, not fifty,” Mina said. “And I’m going to need that first quarter up front in cash. I need operating capital.”
8
Barstow, California
Valerie Gastellum Sandoz, Brenda’s older sister, was the member of the family drafted by their mother to make the seven-and-a-half-hour, almost four-hundred-mile trip from San Francisco to Barstow in order to bail Brenda out of jail. She’d had to use one of her precious vacation days. So when it came time to sign Brenda out of the jail, Valerie was not a happy camper.
She and Brenda were sisters; they had never been pals. Brenda had been the golden child, from grade school on. She had been an exemplary student, a cheerleader, a star, while Valerie merely plugged along in the background. Val had been a late bloomer who married for the first time at age thirty-seven. While her younger sibling had embarked on her high-flying broadcasting career, Valerie had labored away in school, changing majors several times before finally settling in to become an architect. She had worked her way up from several lowly drafting positions until she landed herself a decent position in a commercial architectural firm in the Bay Area.
Now that their situations were reversed, with Valerie in the catbird seat and Brenda on her uppers, Valerie was not amused by her younger sister’s plight, and she wasn’t very sympathetic either.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Valerie demanded as they headed west on California Highway 58. “Mom’s been frantic. Where the hell have you been all this time?”
“I went to Sedona,” Brenda answered. “I went to see a friend from L.A., Ali Reynolds. I thought she might help me, but she didn’t. She’s becoming a cop.”
“Too bad she didn’t arrest you before you wrecked your damned car. Did you talk to the insurance adjuster?”
Brenda shook her head. She didn’t want to say there was no insurance adjuster. Her auto insurance had been canceled two months ago, after her second DUI. Not canceled really, but they had raised the premium so much that she couldn’t afford the payments. Her insurance stopped when the premiums stopped. The remains of her wrecked car had been towed to the impound lot and they were going to stay there.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” Brenda said contritely sometime later.
“If it had been up to me, I would have left you to rot in jail or else walk home,” Valerie continued. “Mom has been beyond upset. You were gone for a week and a half. Did it ever cross your mind that she was worried? Would it have killed you to take out your cell phone and call her?”
There was nothing Brenda could say in response to Val’s tirade. Before the wreck she hadn’t wanted to call and hadn’t answered her mother’s calls. Since the wreck her phone had been MIA and was probably even now toasting its circuit boards in the impound lot. As for her other reason for not calling? Telling Val that she’d been hospitalized for four days with DTs didn’t seem to strike just the right note. Besides, Val was on a roll. She wasn’t interested in any response.
“The only reason I agreed to come get you is that I was afraid Mom would try to do it on her own. She can’t drive anymore. At least, with her macular degeneration, she
Brenda said nothing. Had she been drinking, she would have fought back. But if being sober meant sitting there and having to take this kind of bitching out, she didn’t think it was worth it.
“With three DUIs, you are
Brenda nodded. That pretty much went without saying. Besides, the cops had just confiscated her driver’s
