Chapter 5
The tremors racked through her system. It was all she could do to not bawl. In a way she was glad Devlin was here. His presence enabled her to have a modicum of control. She couldn’t remember another time in her life when she’d been at the edge quite like this. And she wanted to crawl away and hide. But there was no hiding from this.
And still there was Colleen. Beautiful, friendly, outgoing Colleen. Not only was Colleen a friend, she was also her assistant. And she’d been instrumental in getting Bristol’s timeline together. What would she do now?
She had Sandra on loan for the training session, as she’d worked with her several times before, but that wasn’t the same thing as having Collen. Not that Sandra wasn’t good, but she didn’t have the same drive or meticulous attention to detail that Colleen had. And, of course, Sandra worked for Brent. Sandra was young. She hadn’t yet matured into understanding how important every aspect of the job was. She was still about having a good time, not necessarily a long one.
Bristol shook her head; she was lost. “I need to get home as soon as possible.”
“When is your flight booked?”
“Tomorrow at noon,” she said. She shifted so she could lie down on the bed and allow her trembling limbs to relax. She knew it would be a good thirty to sixty minutes before the tension vibrating up and down her back would ease. “But I can’t wait. Not after today. I’ve lost too much—my prototype, special parts, more time, … Colleen.” She turned her distraught gaze to him. “Yet, if I leave early, they’ll say I look guilty, won’t they?”
He frowned. “I wouldn’t worry about what they say. You have a job, contract, and a deadline. And a huge mess on your hands. You have to handle all that, and you need to pull it together.” He reached out and grasped her hand in his. “You want me to see if I can get your flight changed?”
“I don’t think they’ll let you,” she said. “It was a military flight arranged by the company.”
“Did you ever consider that, because you didn’t want to come, maybe the company actually had something to do with the theft?”
Her eyes flew open wide, and she studied Devlin in confusion. “But how would that help them? If I don’t supply the drones actively working, then I’m in breach of my contract, and they don’t get their product.”
“I wondered about that too.” He settled back, pulled up one leg and ran his hands around it as he thought. “Any chance he had somebody else on the hook for these drones? Maybe someone ENFAQ has invested in? If they can get rid of you—and even better, completely trash your reputation at the same time—then the new company could jump in, grab the contract, and this person—yes, maybe that’s Brent—gets a big chunk of money.”
She sat up slowly and stared at him in horror. “I don’t like the way your mind works,” she whispered. “That would be just too…”
“Realistic?” He shot her a sideways glance. “In my line of work I see some of the worst things people can do to each other almost every day of the year. Nothing surprises me. But power, love, money, and sex are the rulers of almost everyone’s actions.” Devlin waved at the open tent flap. “No love is lost between you and Brent. As you hold all the power, he’s helpless and will hate that. If he can make money another way, and at the same time destroy you, well, you have almost a perfect set of motives right there.”
She flopped back down on the bed and groaned, closing her eyes. “You can add sex to that too.” She felt him give her a startled glance but didn’t open her eyes. “No, we weren’t lovers, but he damn well tried hard. I kept refusing him.”
“Why?”
She snorted and looked at Devlin. “Because I wasn’t attracted to him. Because he was pushy as hell. And he’s one of those guys who thinks sex is the way to control a woman. And when I go to bed with a man, I do it because that’s who I want to be with at that moment. Not for any other reason.”
He grinned at her. “Good. Glad to hear it,” he said cheerfully. “We agree on that point.”
She frowned at him. “Why do I think that is like a tick box in your head?”
“Because it is. Now we can move on to the next.” He patted her knee and stood. “And that wasn’t meant as a patronizing pat, by the way. I was checking to see if the tremors in your legs had calmed down.”
“It was pretty bad, wasn’t it?” she confessed. “I’m not used to justifying my actions or defending myself like that.”
“Yes, it was pretty bad, but even though you were nervous, you handled yourself really well while being questioned. You stuck to your guns and logically defended yourself.”
She nodded. “But still, there’s that sense of what if they come back? What if somebody else …” She hopped to her feet. “I have to pack. I need to get going. I must get the hell out of here.” She looked around, then threw up her hands. “There’s nothing salvageable from the work tent. I barely have anything left to pack.”
Devlin grabbed her shoulders and gently made her sit back down again. “Stop. Did all the drone elements go into the work tent, or did you have anything stored somewhere else?”
She stared up at him, her gaze huge. “It was all in there, except my personal bag and the training materials. Everything else is back in my home lab.”
“Where?”
“California.”
“Then you need to get back there before that goes too. You should go home, sort this out.”
“Before that goes too,” she whispered, now fully aware of what Devlin was telling her. She had to remain calm. She took a deep breath and straightened again. “You’re right. I’ll see if I can get an earlier flight home.”
He shook his head, pulling out his phone. “Let me talk to Mason. If anybody can pull some strings to get you home faster, it’d be him.”
She waited—patiently she hoped—as he quickly brought up Mason’s line. She was still afraid of looking guilty, like she was running away. And, if the MPs got wind of it, they wouldn’t let her go. She felt like she was trapped here—on a military base in the middle of nowhere. Not exactly someplace where she could turn around and catch a commercial flight home. She could travel to the closest city, which she thought was Mosul, like that was a safe place to go. Hell, anywhere off base would be a nightmare. She’d come over on a military flight, and she’d expected to go home on one.
She heard Devlin talking to Mason. She zinged her gaze to him and listened in. He was being incredibly helpful. She needed that. Hell, she needed him too. A feeling she had trouble reconciling with the rest of her life. She had never leaned on anyone. Was it so wrong right now?
“Mason, she needs to be home and sort this out. All the materials she had in the tent are totally unsalvageable. I don’t know if you heard what happened at the meeting today.” Devlin nodded. “Yeah, word travels fast, doesn’t it? Then you understand she has to get back home and get to work, otherwise she loses everything. And that’s probably what the motive behind this is. Somebody sabotaged her entire life in one swoop. But she needs to do what she can to pull forward.” Devlin listened to something else Mason said, then nodded. “Yes. Is there any chance she can pull out of here tonight? Like within the next couple hours would be great. She needs to get stateside and regroup.”
He ended the call and turned to face her. “Mason is minutes away. Give him a chance to see what he can do, and he’ll get back to us.”
She nodded, her smile bright. “Thank God.”
*
Devlin watched as she lifted a shaky hand to brush the hair off her forehead. It was short and blonde. Efficient. Businesslike, just as she was. But he could see she was still trembling. She’d been put through an ordeal. He didn’t think she should go home alone, much less remain that way. “Do you have family you can stay with? I’m not sure you should be alone.”
“I’ll be in my lab full-time for the next ten days,” she said. “Even then, I have no hope in hell of meeting the requirements of my contract.”
“What if you had help?”
“Only somebody who knew how to handle hardware could help me. I don’t have time to train anybody. And I’ll be completely whacked out just doing the software changes, dependent upon whether I can get all the supplies. But I did order an extra load, just in case. We had problems with some of the plastics cracking before.”
“If I could line up a couple people, would you see if they’d work for you?”
She raised her gaze and stared at him wide-eyed. “You know any IT people?”
“We all know some.” He smiled. “It’s a matter of finding the right ones.”
“The other thing would be the security issue.”
“What if they were former SEALs?”
She frowned at him. “Who do you have in mind?”
He grinned. “Harrison and Rhodes are both damn good with hardware. Harrison’s a whiz, and Rhodes isn’t far behind. They’re also damn good with software.”
She shook her head. “Those names mean nothing to me.”
“No, but they might in the future. They were SEALs and currently work for another SEAL friend of ours at Legendary Security. They deal with a lot of hardware.”
“I’m not in any position to say no,” she said slowly. “Certainly if they’re in a security company, they’d be bondable. It depends what skills they have, if they’re available, and if I can afford them,” she confessed.
He nodded. “I know most of the guys who work there,” Devlin said. “We might make something happen here.” He stopped and looked at her. “How many men would you actually need?”
“As many capable hands as I could possibly get.”
He pursed his lips and thought about that. “Well then, I’ll see what we can do.”
He strode over to the tent to take a look outside. He didn’t want anybody else listening in on this conversation. He didn’t trust her boss, at the very least. The last thing he wanted anybody in the company to understand was that there was any hope in hell of her pulling off her contract. And, on that note, he realized her tent could’ve been bugged. “Shit.”
“Shit? What do you mean by that?” she asked in alarm.
He shook his head. “I just realized I assumed this was a safe place to talk, and that’s not a good thing to do.”
He pulled out his phone and sent a text to Ryder.
Do you have a bug detector to check Bristol’s quarters?
Ryder replied,
I’ll grab one and be there in a few minutes.
Devlin put away his phone and said, “My buddy’s coming. We’ll check it out to make sure.”
She just sat here with her mouth open, then said, “Oh, my God.”
He nodded and held his finger up to his lips. “We may have already blown this. But let’s check it out. We’ll be as safe as we can from here on out.”
Ryder walked in only minutes later. He took one look at Bristol sitting cross-legged on the bed and smiled. “Ma’am.” He tipped his fingers to his head on the imaginary hat he always wore when he was off duty.
She smiled up at him. But it was tremulous and shaky.
Ryder handed the tester to Devlin. “Do you want to do the honors, or shall I?”
“Just push the Down button.”
Ryder turned it on. But the button was green, and it didn’t flash. Ryder slowly searched the room. “It’s clear.”
Devlin nodded. “Good. I wish we could get into the work tent to see if one had been there. But it’s likely to have been burned to a crisp too. If it had been functioning, it certainly isn’t now.”
“And the problem with that is, we don’t know if someone gleaned any information before the fire took place.” Ryder turned to look at Bristol. “Ma’am, any idea if you were discussing anything important prior to the fire?”
She stared at him with a glazed look. “Honestly? I don’t remember very much from before the fire at all. It’s like there’s now my life before and after.” She shook her head. “We were talking about the drones. We’ve had an odd problem with them, but I didn’t have time to dig into it to. I was forced to come here.”
Bristol waved her hand around the base. “Earlier Colleen said something about it being possessed. That was her word.”
She slowly got to her feet. “That’s it. One or two of the drones might still be in the training areas. I have to go see. Sandra was supposed to clean up and take everything back to the tent, but maybe she didn’t get that far.” Bristol rushed out of the tent.
Devlin pointed to the tester in Ryder’s hands. “Keep that handy.” And Devlin bolted after her.