idea.”
Miles frowned. “You sure? He’s well-connected and could grease the skids for us getting information.”
“We can handle this on our own.”
Sherman Locke was a two-star general in the Air Force, an enlisted man who had worked his way up through Officer Candidate School. When Locke’s mother had left them when he was four, his maternal grandmother had raised Locke and his newborn sister. Their father had been a stern disciplinarian, and nothing Locke did ever seemed to be good enough. He was once grounded for three months for getting a B in high school, the only time it happened.
Locke never considered the Air Force Academy an option because his poor eyesight at the time — since corrected by laser surgery — meant he was ineligible for pilot training. Instead, he wanted to go to West Point. The General, as Locke called his father, wouldn’t support his application. The General never would tell Locke why, but he guessed it was because his father didn’t think he was tough enough for it. In defiance, when Locke matriculated at MIT, he immediately enrolled in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps over his father’s objections.
From that point on, Locke made sure to make his own way, both in the military and in private life. Getting help from his father was anathema. Their relationship had been cool ever since, even when Karen tried to mediate and bring them back together. Then she died, and the wall between them went up again.
Miles obviously didn’t think Locke was making the right call. Locke could see it on his face, but he couldn’t think of anything that would change his mind.
“All right,” Miles said after a pause. “It’s your decision. You’re keeping Dr. Kenner with you at all times? She seems to be critical to this whole thing.”
“She’s in my office now. I don’t plan to let her out of my sight.”
“Ask her in here,” Miles said. After Locke made the call, Miles said, “What’s your next step?”
“After we stop off at the computer shack to talk to Aiden, I’m going to take Dilara over to the Coleman offices and see if we can’t find out the connection there.”
A knock at the door. This time, Miles changed his voice to a pleasant invitation. “Please come in.”
Dilara came in without hesitation. Even though Locke had never told her about Miles’ condition, she didn’t show the slightest amazement at the sight of him sitting in his wheelchair three-feet above the floor. She walked right over to him with her hand outstretched.
“Nice to meet you, Dr. Benson,” she said.
“Your photos don’t do you justice, Dr. Kenner. And please call me Miles.”
“Thank you, Miles. And I’m Dilara. I assume you’ve heard my story.”
“Yes. Tyler says you’ve been through a lot in the last few days.”
“Let’s see. I had an old family friend die in my arms, I was run off the road, I survived a helicopter crash in the open ocean, and I was nearly blown up. So that would be yes. But at least I got some new clothes out of it. Oh, and I’m still alive.” Miles smiled at Locke as if to say he was right. She
“Tyler thinks there’s much more to uncover here,” Miles said. “He has Gordian’s full resources to pursue this.”
“Thank you for your help.”
“Well, this isn’t just out of the goodness of my heart. Scotia One has already talked to me about replacing the lifeboat he blew up, so I want to know who to bill. The contract for investigating the Hayden crash will cover part of the expense. But most of all, I’m an old soldier, and I tend to take it personally when someone tries to kill one of my own.”
“I do, too,” Locke said. He stood. “Shall we go see what Aiden can tell us?”
“Keep your eyes open out there,” Miles said.
“Don’t worry,” Locke said. “Dilara can handle herself.”
“I know. She’s not the one I was talking to.”
Howard Olsen stood 50 feet from the Gordian building’s entrance, hovering at a bus stop to avoid suspicion. Since he hadn’t known how Tyler Locke was arriving in Seattle, the best place to intercept his targets was at the company headquarters, and his plan had been correct. He’d seen Locke and Dilara Kenner arrive in a red sports car 30 minutes ago, but the garage gate had prevented him from following them in and finishing the job right then and there.
He’d scouted the building thoroughly, but there was no way for him to get in undetected without more advance work. His next opportunity would be to tail them when they drove out of the building. His partner, Cates, was waiting in a car around the corner. There was no place to park within view of the garage exit, so Olsen would call Cates when he spotted Locke’s car emerging. Then it would be a simple matter of following them and waiting until they stopped at a light. Olsen and Cates would pull up next to them and spray them with the two MP-5 submachine guns that were in the car. They’d be dead before they knew what was happening.
TWENTY
The computer shack, like the rest of Gordian, was not what Dilara had been expecting. She thought it would be some drab box filled with cluttered computer equipment and wires all over the place. Instead, she found a sleek high-tech center that could have served as the bridge of a futuristic starship. Colorful flat panels sat on ergonomically-correct desks spaced at discreet distances around the room. Through a huge window at the opposite end, she could see an entire wall covered with a screen the size of the Jumbotron at a football stadium.
Everything she saw continued to confound what she thought she knew about engineers. Tyler Locke was this swashbuckling adventurer, his company was on the cutting edge of technology, and every person she met defied the nerd stereotype. She had been taken aback seeing Miles Benson’s wheelchair solidly perched on two wheels, but she thought she hid it well.
“That’s our pre-visualization facility,” Locke said, pointing at the Jumbotron. Two men slumped on a couch, wildly swinging controllers and blasting away at life-sized aliens in some videogame. “Before we go to work on a difficult project, we like to storyboard scenarios or display engineering schematics. When the pre-viz isn’t in use, we let our guys blow off steam with it.”
Other than the two game players, only one person was in the computer shack, typing at a computer.
“It’s Monday,” Dilara said. “Where is everyone?”
“Could be a meeting going on, but most of our engineers don’t have regular hours, so work weeks are relative. We’re driven more by deadlines and when the clients need to see us. Sometimes this room will be packed on a Saturday night if we’re finishing up a project.”
The room’s lone occupant, a shaggy-haired man in his twenties, peered intently at a monitor while his hands flew over the keyboard like a virtuoso playing a Beethoven sonata. His back was to them, and he was so focused on the computer that he didn’t seem to notice them.
“He hates to be surprised,” Locke said with a grin. The man at the computer didn’t flinch and kept typing. Locke went over to the man and stood directly behind him. He raised his hands as if he were going to grab the man’s shoulders.
“It won’t work, Tyler,” the man said in an Irish brogue without stopping what he was doing. “I noticed you and that fine lady when you entered. You can’t sneak up on me when there are twenty monitors in the room reflecting your every move.”
He spun around in his chair and popped to his feet. He shook hands with Locke and then began to use sign language. That’s why he hadn’t turned around when they were speaking. The man was deaf.
Locke smirked and replied both in sign language and verbally. “Yes, I will introduce you, and no, she is not interested in that.” The man, who had a handsome face and thick eyebrows that overpowered his wire-framed glasses, smiled at her roguishly. Whatever he had said, she didn’t get the sense that Locke would tell her.
“Dilara,” Locke said still looking at the man, “this is our resident computer data recovery expert, Aiden MacKenna. As you can see, he is deaf, and he has a wicked sense of humor. I’m signing to him as a courtesy, but he can read lips, and his glasses display a tiny text translation of your spoken words.”
