Chapter 13
Bristol had her father’s bathrobe belt wrapped around her hands in the middle of the driveway, staring at the damaged gate. Her mind couldn’t quite compute the evidence in front of her. She wanted to believe her father had left on his own. But no way could he damage the gate. Not unless he had taken a vehicle. She spun and stared at the garage, her mind mentally cataloguing the vehicles there. He had a classic he liked to drive in good weather. But he was also protective of that baby. It was hard to imagine he could have damaged the gate with the classic car. But she had to check and make sure. She raced to the second garage on the far side.
Actually it was a three-car garage but with only one vehicle inside. She punched in her security code and went in the side door. The ’69 Mustang was still here.
“Oh, dear God.” She stepped back out, locked it up and pulled out her phone. No way could he have left on his own. Not unless the intruder had raced out, damaging the gate, and her father had seen the opening and walked out. That was just too much of a coincidence. Talk about a comedy of errors.
“Who are you calling?” Tesla asked, racing toward her.
“The police. I don’t know who else to call.” She raised her ravaged gaze to her friend. “Dad’s gone. There’s no sign of him, and the gate’s been damaged. We have an intruder in the other garage. Devlin’s holding him. I want to torture him to tell me where my father is. He says he doesn’t know. But I don’t believe him.” She cried, “I just want whatever information he has.”
“Let’s check the security cams first.”
Bristol stared at her in shock. “Oh, my God! What’s wrong with me? I’m not even thinking straight.” She had trouble putting her phone in her pocket with her shaking hands. “I have to get a hold of myself so I can help him.”
“We’ll find him. Come on. Let’s get to the security camera feed.”
With Tesla at her side, they raced to the security room. The one she hadn’t even shown the others. Of course Tesla knew about it. Bristol quickly unlocked the room, which was barely big enough for all the computer equipment, and stepped inside. The others—except for Devlin, still with the intruder in the garage—had followed and gathered around her.
Once Harrison saw this, he whistled and said, “If you know what you’re doing, great. If you don’t, let me.”
She turned to look at him in confusion.
His voice gentle, he said, “Bristol, let me handle this.”
Tesla gently propelled Bristol out of the small room so Harrison could enter. He sat down at the security camera feed, and within seconds, had the front gate brought up. “You recognize this vehicle?”
Bristol neared to stare at the TV monitor and shook her head. “Black sedan, smoked windows. But no.”
Rhodes, standing out in the hallway, said, “I’m already running the license plate.”
She nodded. “You guys know what to do with this. I haven’t a clue. Please help me get my father back. I presume the same people who did this were sabotaging my work. Just one more distraction to stop me from getting ahead.”
The others froze for a second, contemplating it.
Corey said, “It makes the most sense. We just can’t stop looking at other options.”
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Bristol asked.
Ice shook her head. “Not yet. We will once we know something.”
“How do we track the vehicle? How do we find out who the hell is doing this and where they’ve taken my father?”
“They had the security code for the gate,” Harrison said.
“What?” She watched as he replayed the video, showing where the black car drove up, punched in a number and the gate opened.
“No way should they know that. I just reset it when I got home.”
“It’s easy enough. They took out your system, and they changed the code themselves.”
“But I have a special override.”
She watched in shock as her father was led through the front door and into the back of the car, losing his bathrobe belt in the process.
As the black car sped toward the gate, it started to close. The driver sped up, made it through, but the gate crunched the back end of his car.
Harrison looked at her. “Is that your override protection?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a rebound call. If after a certain time, I don’t punch another number the gate automatically closes and locks.”
“Nice.” He nodded in approval.
She shook her head. “But useless. They still got out. They weren’t supposed to.”
“And that means they knew exactly where your father was, got him out and took off before the override. That doesn’t mean they knew about it, they just happened to get lucky. They weren’t here”—he checked the monitors—“even five minutes.”
She sighed. “And the override is set for five.”
“I presume then,” Tesla said, “the asshole Devlin’s holding in the garage knew where your father was. Maybe even helped move him toward the front door so he could be picked up faster.”
“That is the most likely scenario.” Harrison quickly ripped through a series of other cameras and said, “They came in the front door, and look here.”
He pointed to two people walking down the front hall they’d all entered the day before. There she saw her father coming around the corner and yes, a gloved hand on his shoulder. Her father was grabbed roughly, confusion on his face, fear in his eyes, as they moved him when he protested. One of the men bent, picked him up and ran out the front door.
“A snatch and grab. Inside intel. And they were gone.”
“And the plates are coming up stolen.”
“Of course. They knew they’d be inside the compound, and the license plate would be easily seen. They’ll ditch the car as fast as possible because it’s got obvious damage from the gate.”
Bristol leaned back against the doorjamb and sagged. “Oh, my God! My poor father.”
Tesla squeezed her shoulder. “We’ll get him back. Stay strong.”
She nodded, reaching up to rub her temple. “Satellite would track that, wouldn’t it? Could it have seen them as they drove away?”
Harrison turned to stare at her. “You have satellite?” he asked incredulously.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t.” She straightened in shock. “But I might have something better. I have to go to the lab. Now.”
She bolted from the room, ran back down the hallway to the elevator and dashed to her lab. She forgot the security code, having to enter it twice she was so frantic.
“Easy, Bristol. Just calm down. This isn’t helping anything,” Tesla told her.
Bristol reached up, smashed the doorframe, the frustration eating at her. She took a deep breath and then tried again. This time the light switched from red to green, and the door unlocked. She walked inside, headed for a cupboard on the far side and pulled out her baby. “You’ve never seen this before. I would really appreciate it if you don’t tell anybody about it.”
They gathered around her, like kids in a candy store. She opened the box and pulled out what appeared to be a common everyday swallow. But it was a mechanical one.
“Oh, my,” Ice said in awe. “Is that what I think it is?”
“It’s actually more than you think it is.”
She brought up her laptop, quickly accessed the server and typed in the code she needed. She plugged the swallow into her USB cable and downloaded the coordinates she needed it to follow. She started the GPS tracker, double-checked it was at full power and said, “I don’t know for how long this can run. It’ll depend on the wind conditions. But I need somebody on the ground right now to follow it.”
“How can anyone follow the swallow?” Ryder asked. “It’s damn near impossible to see.”
She looked up at him, her eyes hard, her gaze almost dark and said, “Exactly.” She pivoted the laptop so they could see the beeping that showed the location it was at. “I set the coordinates for my father’s implant. And just like the drones that follow me overhead,” she said, “this is geared to find him. And it will give us the GPS directions as it travels.”
A moment of silence passed as everybody inhaled that information, then a fervent whisper came from Ice. “Oh, my God. That’s so damn perfect.”
“Shit. Did you actually build that?” Harrison asked, right before his phone rang.
She nodded, snatched up the swallow and laptop, and ran up the stairs. “I have three of them.”
She raced out the front door and did something that made the others wince. She took the swallow and threw it high into the sky as far as she could. The swallow hovered above for the first second. A series of low clicks and taps followed, then it shot off into the sky. “Go, go, go.”
She searched the crowd. “Devlin?”
He was at her side instantly. “What did I miss?”
“I’ll explain as we go.” She tossed him her car keys, not bothering to ask what else he had gotten from the intruder. She trusted he was secure regardless. “We need to go, and now.” He raced to her car. She hopped into the passenger side, calling out to the others. “We’ll need backup.”
“We’ve got it.”
She saw Easton and Ryder run to the jeep. She had no idea about the others. Devlin was already maneuvering her car around the busted gate.
As they shot off down the street, he asked, “Where to?”
“Head toward San Diego. Take the highway. I’ll tell you when to get off.”
“I’m at least ten minutes getting to the highway.”
“Hopefully you won’t be,” she said. “We may not have that long.” She appreciated his foot-to-the-floorboard technique as the car zoomed ahead. “If you don’t know where you’re going, just tell me.”
“I’m familiar with the area.” He shaved off three minutes while she tracked the signal heading straight toward the city. “You want to explain what the hell we’re doing?”
She gave him the short version. Tapping the monitor screen, she said, “This is the swallow. It’s tracking and gaining proximity to my father.”
“What’s the distance?”
“Half a mile. It has a burst in the first thirty seconds as it reaches out for the signal. After that the distance is shortened. If I could figure out a way to keep up the power during all this, I could probably extend the distance.” She felt his stare. But ignored it. She just kept talking. “I think there’s a lot of usability for something like this.”
“You think?” He shook his head. “This is huge.”
“Well, not really. The swallow has to be able to track something. In this case, both my father and I have embedded chips.” She pointed to her forearm at a spot just before her elbow. “We had them implanted a long time ago. That was my father’s security precaution when I was just a toddler. But they are old. He built a tracker, but never bothered to update it, and thirty years of change in technology is a lot. But he never thought his daughter would be creating something to keep him safe.” Her voice turned bitter at the end. “I should’ve kept him safe.”
“You’re doing what you can. It’s a hell of a lot more than most people have. A method to track their loved ones.”
She settled back into her seat. “I should be able to track more than just that. Wait ’til you see what I can find out about his vitals.”
*
Devlin was grateful that Harrison and Rhodes had arrived when they did to look after the intruder and also to give him a quick update on Bristol’s whereabouts. Devlin told them the little bit the guy had shared but left them free to get more. As he ran from the garage, he heard the intruder cry out, “No! I don’t know anything.”
“Well, these two will figure out if you do or not,” Devlin called back.
Once he joined Bristol, the two of them were in her vehicle within seconds, driving after her father.
He was still wrapping his mind around the idea she’d built a drone to track her father. One she could change the code in to track something completely different when needed. The applications were endless. And hers resembled a swallow, but it could be any shape. She presently tracked her father’s vitals to see if he was alive and how he was doing.
Kudos to her and her father. Devlin and his team had come up against ID chips on kids of wealthy families but those were specific microchips for tracking and modern tech devices. Her father had been way ahead of the game decades earlier. Talk about being beyond Devlin’s capabilities. He shook his head. “What you’ve done is fantastic.”
“It would be if it worked,” she snapped. “But so far every damn thing I’m doing has failed.”
He knew the reality, however. He couldn’t give her enough assurances to convince her what a hell of a job she was doing. But those on the outside knew. He wondered if these people ever reached a state of perfection, those with minds that could conjure up ideas and create them. Were they ever satisfied with their products?
He’d once asked Tesla why she wouldn’t stop tweaking the code on her programs. “Why not just build a new one?”
She had laughed and said, “I am. But so many things could be done to improve it that, as I learn something new, I feel compelled to backtrack. At some point the old system becomes faulty. Just too many upgrades and changes in patches. The new software hopefully will be ready to slide in over the top.” She shook her head. “But at this point I can be tweaking and planning for the next upgrade.”
He imagined that was very similar to what Bristol went through on a regular basis. As he thought about the drones she was building, he knew they were actually light years ahead of the others, and that the military would really want them. But he had to stop Brent and this company. Devlin understood the middlemen were making money off people like Bristol. But it was damn time for her to step up and the world to recognize that she did this. And she didn’t need Brent.
Devlin’s contacts didn’t include anybody that high up in the military. But certainly a lot of people were around who did know such valuable people. Tesla’s father had a lot of connections. So did Mason. For that matter, so did Levi. Hell, a lot of former military personnel were in their worlds. Surely somebody knew somebody. If they could get Bristol to connect directly with the military, she could dump the middlemen.
With the work he had seen of hers already, he knew she’d make a killing.
“He’s still alive,” she said in a hard, thin voice. “But his heart rate is erratic and slowing.”
“Slowing? I thought it would be faster from the stress and fear.”
“I’m afraid they’ve given him a sedative.” She lifted her head and gazed at him.
He glanced at her, but from the almost blank look in her eyes, he figured she saw something she wasn’t telling him about.
“He becomes quite irrational when he’s upset. He’ll lash out, hit, walk away, cry, and yell. He won’t understand, he’ll be upset and won’t be afraid to let anybody know.”
He understood. “It must’ve been a very difficult few years for you.”
“Much harder for him. He just didn’t understand. And no way could I make it any clearer to him.” She started clicking on the keyboard. “I’m getting the coordinates now. It appears they’ve turned off the highway.”
He looked for the exits. “Left or right?”
“Stay in the right lane,” she said. “I need to see what turnoff they took.”
He waited.
Finally she said, “Take the East exit.”
“The sign for it just whipped past. It’s right here,” he said. “They can’t be too far ahead of us then.”
“In a way just barely enough for me to track the swallow,” she admitted. “If they were already at their location, we could map a route. But instead I’m waiting for the location to show up and figure where that is exactly as I don’t have the GPS on Google Maps. I’m taking the coordinates, typing them in and finding locations.”
“Something you can integrate later?”
“Yes, definitely. I’ve never actually had a chance to run this program, so I had no idea what was required.”
He could almost hear the wheels of her brain turning, figuring out a better method. He saw the aerial view on the laptop. And, of course, that didn’t lock on street signs.
He slowed, took the turn, ran the car around the corner and checked behind to see that the other two vehicles were following. Then he merged into the new street, drove down it for another couple miles, and pulled up to a stop light. “Anything new?”
“They’re taking a turn, just blocks up,” she said. Her voice was distracted. Her fingers busy.
He pulled out his phone and called Ryder, quickly relaying the updates. He said, “I’m leaving the phone open on the seat between us. As she gives us instructions, you’ll hear them too.”
Ryder said, “Sounds good.”
“Take a left,” Bristol said.
He pulled up to the fourth block and put on his left turn signal. When there was an opening, he took it onto the side street. They were in a half-business, half-residential district. Lots of suburban businesses on the bottom and apartments on the top. As he drove down the side street, the apartments gave way to small houses and condo complexes.
“The signal stopped.”
He glanced at her, startled. “Have you lost it?”
“No, as in the vehicle has stopped, and so has the swallow. And my father is up ahead.”
Ryder’s voice came through the phone on the seat between them. “How far ahead?”
“Four, three, two,” she counted the blocks. Devlin slowed the car at the next intersection. “The block ahead of us?”
“Yes.”
He studied the street. No sign of the car. Large properties were here, separated by fences high with cedar hedges. Not much visibility. He wouldn’t see the car until he drove in. “Can you see how far down?”
She said, “Turn the corner here, park on the side. I can find the swallow.”
Doing as instructed, Devlin pulled forward, took the left corner and parked around the far side.
She hopped out, remote in her hand, and set up a signal. She turned in a circle and tracked it. “Second house from the corner.”
Ryder said, “We’ll take a walk, one in front, the other in back. We’ll check out the house from here.”
Devlin grabbed the phone. “Right. I’m here with her. You guys stay out of sight.”
She said, “I want to go into the house.”
He shook his head. “You did what you needed to get us here. Your job’s done. Let us take over.”
She opened her mouth, snapped it shut, stared for a long moment, and then nodded. “Let’s hope you do a better job at recovering my father than I did at keeping him safe.”
Devlin shook his head. “We’re so having a talk about that. But later. Right now this is all about finding your father.”