J. Jance - Fatal Error

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.”

Which, Richard thought, is exactly what I programmed it to do: take off, fly flawlessly for a while, and then drop out of the sky for no apparent reason.

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.

He had hoped things would be different with Mina, but the flirting had come to naught. Later, when he’d been given his pink slip, rather than facing up to his own shortcomings, Richard had convinced himself that was why he’d been let go-because Mark had somehow caught on to what Mina was thinking. That was the real reason Richard had dropped that little programming bomb into the Rutherford works. It was the best way for him to even the score. And now, months later, when they finally knew they had a problem, not only did they not know he was responsible for their difficulty, they had come to him to fix it. How wonderful was that?

Richard wanted to leap off the couch and dance a little jig. Instead, he sighed and shook his head as though he were allowing himself to be persuaded entirely against his will.

“All right,” he said resignedly. “What do you need and when?”

“I need to fly a ten-kilo payload, one hundred or so miles, to predetermined coordinates.”

Richard had been wondering about the end user. Mina’s statement provided the answer. After all, this was California. Other businesses might be struggling to survive, but the illegal drug industry was still booming. Richard wanted Mina to verify it, though. He wanted her to understand he wasn’t as dumb as she thought he was.

“I suppose that means we’re dealing with one of the drug cartels,” Richard said.

Mina looked him square in the eye and didn’t deny it, and she didn’t object to his use of the word we either. In fact, she used the same word herself.

“We’ll make a lot of money,” she said.

“Who’s we?”

“All of us-you, me, Mark. How long do you think it’ll take to troubleshoot the problem?”

The real answer was about two minutes, but he didn’t tell her that. She wouldn’t pay for two minutes.

“I don’t know how you expect me to do that,” he said. “I don’t have any of the code, and even if I did, finding something like this won’t be easy.”