J. Jance - Fatal Error

But even with all those things going for him, Ali had been immune to his entreaties for several reasons, one of which was their similarly checkered marital pasts. Ali had lost her first husband to cancer. Her second husband, Paul Grayson, who had cheated on her repeatedly, had been a terrible mistake. B.’s wife had divorced him and was already remarried to someone B. had once regarded as a good friend. In other words, they’d both been burned on the happily-ever-after score, and that meant that more than a bit of wariness was well in order.

For Ali, though, the biggest stumbling block had been and continued to be B.’s age. It didn’t help that there was now a specific epithet-“cougar”-for a woman in her situation, an older woman involved with a younger man. It was worrisome to Ali that B. was fifteen years younger than she was. She didn’t like thinking about the fact that B. was closer in age to Chris and Athena and to most of Ali’s police academy classmates than he was to Ali herself.

In a weak moment, she had finally let down her defenses enough to succumb to his charms, and now she was glad she had. She enjoyed spending time with him. They were having fun; they were devoted to one another, but they also weren’t in any hurry to take the relationship to another level. On the other hand, Ali was occasionally troubled by the questioning looks that were leveled at them when they were out together in public.

Ali drove up the driveway from Manzanita Hills Road to her remodeled house. By the time she finished parking in the garage, Leland Brooks appeared in the kitchen doorway to collect her luggage.

“Oh, my,” he said, peering at her face. “It looks like you ended up in a pub fight and lost.”

“You’re right,” Ali said. “I did lose, but it happened in the academy gym, not in a bar.”

“If you say so, madam,” he said. “And, if you don’t mind my asking, how does the other fellow look?”

“I’m sorry to say he’s fine,” Ali said.

“So most likely you’ll be dining at home this weekend?”

Leland’s question made Ali smile. It was a very nice way of saying she looked like crap. It also meant that he was back to his old mind-reading tricks.

“Yes, please,” she said.

“I’ll probably need to go out and find some more food, then,” he said. “I was under the impression that you and Mr. Simpson would be going out a good deal of the time, but apparently that’s not in anyone’s best interest.”

“Thank you, Leland,” Ali said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Initially Ali had wondered about the advisability of keeping Leland around after the demise of his previous employer, who had also been the previous owner of Ali’s home. He was a godsend.

B. arrived in time for dinner at eight. Afterward, they sat outside on the patio and watched as a late-summer thunderstorm rumbled away off in the west without ever dropping any rain on Sedona proper. They talked about lots of things including Brenda Riley’s visit and Ali’s encounter with Jose Reyes.

“So nobody at the academy is giving you a free ride,” B. said. “Have your parents seen your shiner yet?”

Ali shook her head.

“No guts, no glory,” he said. “We’d better go have breakfast at the Sugarloaf tomorrow morning and give your mother a shot at you. Otherwise you’re never going to hear the end of it, and neither will I. Now what say we go to bed?”

They went to bed early but not necessarily to sleep. When Ali woke up the next morning, B. was sitting in the love seat, shuffling through a set of papers. A tray with a pot of coffee and two cups sat on the side table.

Ali scrambled out of bed, pulled on a robe, and poured herself a cup of coffee. She would have sat down on the love seat, but the spot next to B. was already occupied by Sam. Rather than move Samantha, Ali went back and perched on the end of the bed.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The background check you ordered,” B. replied.

“It’s already here?”

“Stu’s been a busy little bee. And he gets things done. He must have dropped it off last night. Leland found it just inside the gate when he went down this morning to collect the newspaper. From the looks of this, your friend’s ex-boyfriend is a pretty interesting character.”

With that, B. handed Ali the first of several pages.

“But wait,” Ali said as soon as she read the top line of the header. “This is about somebody named Richard Lowensdale. I’m sure Brenda told me Richard’s last name was Lattimer.”

“That may be what he told her,” B. corrected, “but if you keep reading, you’ll learn that Richard Lattimer is a figment of someone’s imagination. Richard Lowensdale is the guy who was raised in Grass Valley, California, and worked for Rutherford International in San Diego. As far as Stu can discover, Richard Lattimer doesn’t exist.”

Continuing to read the report, Ali was appalled. “It looks like everything Richard Lowensdale told Brenda is a lie.”

“Pretty much,” B. agreed.

Yes, Richard had worked for a defense contractor, but as a minor player, not a big one. It turned out that Rutherford International was a small, minority-owned company with a niche market that supplied drone controllers. Lowensdale had a degree in electrical engineering from UCLA, but his career wasn’t exactly stellar. For one thing, he had spent time bouncing from one employer to another. For another, Stuart Ramey’s search of various databases revealed no patents issued in his name and no scientific papers listing him as author. His only listed hobby included a lifelong interest in model airplanes-remote-control model airplanes.

“Model planes,” B commented. “That fits.”

“What fits?” asked Ali.

“He’s worked on drones. UAVs. Unmanned aerial vehicles-like the ones our troops are using in the Middle East.”

“Aren’t those a lot bigger?” Ali asked. “Like Piper Cubs?”

“Some are,” B. agreed. “The ones they’re using in Afghanistan, the Predators that fire the big missiles, are about that big, but the ones Rutherford was working on are much smaller. The most they could possibly carry would be a forty-pound payload, and some not even that much.”

“So what’s the big deal then?” Ali asked.

“There’s an even smaller variety that’s about the size of those remote-control helicopters that were such a hit at Christmas a couple of years ago. They can look in a window of a building and take out a single target sitting in the room without damaging anyone else.”

“So there’s less chance of collateral damage,” Ali said.

“Exactly,” B. agreed. “They cost a lot less because of size. They can go places where it would be too dangerous to have a piloted aircraft. Regardless of size, drones are relatively silent. They fly low enough to avoid radar detection. They can do precision targeting, and if you release enough of them at once, you can create a swarm.

“Think about it. If you have a single offensive weapon flying at any given target, chances are you’ve got a missile defense of some sort that has a good chance of taking that one missile transport device down. If you’ve got several hundred tiny drones heading in all at the same time, defenders can probably take out some, but not all of them.”

“Like trying to chase off a swarm of killer bees with a fly swatter.”

“Exactly.”

“So Lowensdale worked for Rutherford and then he stopped,” Ali said. “How come?”

“Because the bottom dropped out of the drone market,” B. explained. “For a long time it looked like Rutherford was going to snag one of the big cushy military contracts. When that didn’t happen, when those opportunities went away, so did most of Rutherford’s employees, including Richard. The only people left working there are the owner and her husband, Ermina and Mark Blaylock and maybe a secretary. Definitely a skeleton crew.”