Fatal Error

7

San Diego, California September

On Friday afternoon, Mark Blaylock made his way through the deserted administrative offices of Rutherford International. They had finally let Mina’s secretary go, so now it was just the two of them. They’d hung on to the office space in hopes that things would turn around, but that wasn’t happening. They had gotten a hell of a deal by paying the lease in advance, but time was up. The landlord had someone who was interested in moving in.

Renters for the warehouse/manufacturing spaces in the office park complex were few and far between at the moment, so he was letting them hang on to their storage space at a greatly reduced rent. That gave Mark and Mina a place to store the office equipment and furniture they had been unable to unload. How much longer they’d be able to manage even that paltry amount of space was a question for which Mark had no easy answer.

Mark slammed open the door to his wife’s office, then he went inside and collapsed into the nearest chair.

“How’d it go?” Mina asked.

Mark shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s something wrong with the controls. The drone flew fine for a while, like there was nothing at all the matter with it. I was putting it through its paces and it was perfect, but when I tried to land it, everything went to hell.”

“It crashed?” Mina asked.

“I’ll say,” Mark said with a nod. “And I don’t know why-no idea.”

“What about the wreckage?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” Mark said. “That’s the only good thing about all this. It went into the water. No one will ever find it.”

The water in this instance was the Salton Sea, near Mark’s rustic cabin. It was possible that someday if the lake dried up, someone might find the wreckage, but it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

“Good,” Mina said.

That was all she said. She could have said a lot more. When Mark had insisted on doing the test run himself, she had worried about how capable he was, but right then there really wasn’t anyone else to do the critical flight. They’d let everyone go, and Mina sure as hell couldn’t fly one of the damned things herself. When Mark said he could do it-that it was “dead simple”-she had believed him. Evidently she’d been wrong about that, but playing the blame game wasn’t going to serve any purpose. Ermina Blaylock was nothing if not absolutely practical.

“What can we do to fix this?”

“I’m no engineer,” Mark said, shaking his head. “And I don’t have the technical skills to sort it out. We need help, Mina, and we need it fast. If we’re going to make this deal work, we’re going to have to bring back someone from engineering.”

That was a risk and they both knew it. When the military contract went away, they had bought up an entire warehouse of UAVs as scrap and for pennies on the dollar with the understanding that the UAVs would all be destroyed. Rutherford International had been paid a princely sum to make sure they were. The powers that be were concerned that if one of the UAVs happened to fall into the wrong hands, people unfriendly to the United States might manage to reverse engineer the product and come up with a workable drone design of their own.

Together Mark and Mina had falsified records showing the scrapped UAVs had all been destroyed and a helpful inspector had signed off on the paperwork. Now after months of putting out discreet feelers, Mina had finally stumbled across a potential customer, one Enrique Gallegos, who wanted to buy several working UAVs, for which he was prepared to pay an astonishing amount of money into a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. Before anything could happen, however, Mark and Mina needed to put on a successful demo flight. Mina was grateful that Enrique Gallegos hadn’t been on hand to witness this afternoon’s show-and-tell disaster.

It was easy to see that once they made the sale to Gallegos, they’d be financially whole again, but all of that depended on their having a working product. Right now they didn’t.

“We need it to work,” Mark said desperately, giving voice to what Mina herself already knew to be true. “We’re going down for the third time.”

Mina couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the man. She slept easily each night while he lay awake trying to find a way around their disastrous cash flow problems. Gallegos had been very specific in his request. He needed his 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.”

All of which means they really want this, Mina told herself.

“Seventy-five percent, not fifty,” Mina said. “And I’m going to need that first quarter up front in cash. I need operating capital.”

And running money.