plenty of time to board her plane.
9
Grass Valley, California September
Richard Lowensdale was busy chatting with Lynn Martinson that Saturday morning, trying to prop her up in the face of that day’s so-called family meeting, which was part of her son Lucas’s incarceration process. Lynn, her ex-husband, the ex’s new wife, the druggie sixteen-year-old, Lucas’s court-appointed attorney, and his counselor would all be in attendance. Lynn was expecting the session to be one of blame-game finger-pointing, and Lynn’s devoted listener, Richard Lewis, allowed as how that would probably be true.
He read Lynn’s messages and sent back what he hoped sounded like sympathetic one-word comments- encouraging words, as it were. The truth is, committee meetings of any kind bored the hell out of him, so listening to Lynn going on and on about a meeting that was going to take place half a continent away was not high on Richard’s agenda. The more she blathered on about her problems, the more he knew it was time to take her off his list. She just wasn’t fun anymore, and any woman who wasn’t fun wasn’t worth having around.
So when there was an early-morning doorbell ring at his front door-a totally unexpected doorbell ring-Richard was grateful for the interruption and was glad to tell Lynn someone was there, that he had to go to the door.
Richard was smart enough about home security to have a CCTV camera on his front porch, one with a video feed that went directly into his computer. Before leaving his desk, he switched over to that screen and was pleased to see Mina Blaylock-the beautiful Mina-waiting there for him to open the door. He wasn’t surprised to see her. He knew exactly why she had come and what she would need. The only thing that did surprise him was how long it had taken for her to show up on his doorstep.
As he started toward the door, however, he looked around the room and had a glimpse of how bad it was. The house was a mess. When his mother and Ron had lived here, you could have eaten off the floor. Now you couldn’t eat off the dining room table. For one thing, Richard had turned that into his primary assembly station for model airplanes. His own collection, layered with dust, covered the bookshelves where his mother had once kept her collection of murder mysteries. Those had been banished to the trash heap at the bottom of the basement stairs.
There were plenty of people who wanted to fly model airplanes but didn’t have brains enough to put them together properly. In addition to building his own planes, he made several hundred bucks a month on the side by doing the assembly work for those dunderheads. They sent him their kits and their money; he sent them their planes.
Doing that, however, meant he needed packing material. That was also in the dining room. The packing station was his mother’s old buffet, where instead of good china, packing boxes and tape and shipping labels held sway. To the side of the buffet, on the floor, a huge plastic bag spilled a scatter of foam peanuts in every direction.
Richard spent most of his waking hours either working at the dining room table or at his computer at the far end of the small living room. Over time, there had come to be trails from the computer station and the dining room table that led through the debris field to other rooms in the house-the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. Most of the time he didn’t worry about any of this.
The string of women he romanced over his VoIP connection had no idea how dirty his house was or how long it had been since he’d had a haircut-or a shower. The delivery guys who handed him packages or dropped them on the front porch or picked up the outgoing ones didn’t mind how Richard or his house looked. It wasn’t their business, and it wasn’t their problem.
Now, though, with Mina standing out on the front porch, Richard realized how the house would look through her eyes-how he would look-and he was embarrassed. He spent a few minutes clearing a spot on the couch so she’d have a place to sit down. Finally, when she rang the doorbell again, Richard made his way to the door.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Hello, Richard,” Mina said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” he said. “What brings you to these parts?”
He pushed open the screen door. Mina looked great, but then she always looked great. He often wondered why she put up with Mark. He seemed so. . well. . ordinary. Boring and old. Mark had to be pushing sixty, probably twice Mina’s age.
Richard led her through the entry and into the living room. He gestured her to a place on the couch while he resumed his place on the chair in front of the computer. On the screen, Lynn Martinson was leaving him a long text message. More whining, no doubt.
“I need some help,” Mina said, then she corrected that statement. “We need some help.”
Clearing a path through the mess on the floor, Richard rolled his desk chair closer to the couch. “With what?” he asked.
That was disingenuous. Richard knew exactly what Mina needed help with-a problem with the drone guidance system. The reason Richard knew all about that problem and how to fix it was that the problem was his own creation. One of his last acts when leaving Rutherford International was a bit of “gotcha” sabotage. He had inserted the problem, a single set of rogue commands, buried deep in the thousands of commands it took to run the supposedly scrapped drone and make it work on GPS coordinates.
Richard knew that a sharp programmer might be able to locate and fix the problem, but a search like that would take time and money-lots of money. He also understood why it had taken so long for the problem to come to light. That had to do with the fact that no one had bothered to do a drone test flight for well over a year. No test flights meant that RI had no customers.
If Mark and Mina knew about the problem now, that meant they had needed and tested a working model-for someone. A customer of some kind must have come out of the woodwork. Richard knew it sure as hell wasn’t the military, because as far as they knew the drones were history. Besides, if it had been someone on the up-and-up, Mina wouldn’t have come skulking up here unannounced to ask Richard for help.
As far as Richard was concerned, a customer who was interested in staying under the radar was very good news. It meant money was in play-lots of money, for the Blaylocks and, if Richard played his cards right, for him as well.
“What do you think is the problem?” he asked.
Mina shrugged. “I have no idea,” she said. “Neither does Mark. We need someone who can troubleshoot for us. We’re not in any condition to start bringing people back on a permanent basis,” she added, “but since you’re so familiar with the project, we were hoping you’d agree to come on board on a consulting basis.”
“What happened?” Richard asked.
“We put a drone up in the air, or rather, Mark put it up in the air. He’s flown them before with no trouble, but this time it crashed and burned.”
Richard let the silence between them stretch for some time before he shook his head. “I just don’t see how I can do it, Mina,” he said reluctantly. “Not after what I hoped would happen between us. There’s too much history. Just seeing you again is enough to break my heart.”
Lying to someone’s face was a lot more difficult than telling lies over the phone, but between the last time Richard had seen Mina and now, he’d had a whole lot more practice in the art of prevarication. And he had to admit that she was a pretty capable liar herself. Ignoring the mess around her, she watched him with a kind of almost breathless, bright-eyed attention. That was how she made men sit up and take notice.
“I’m so sorry, Richard,” she said. “Please understand. I had to let you go along with everyone else. Otherwise Mark would have figured it out.”
For months after Richard went to work at Rutherford, Mina had flirted with him shamelessly and hinted that she was interested in having a little fling with him. That was all that happened in the end-flirting. In actual fact, he’d hardly ever gotten to first base with any real women. They scared the hell out of him. Richard talked a good game, but when it was time to deliver the goods, he always came up short.
