* * *
Kat buried her face in the pillow and sobbed. Just hearing Dillon’s voice had ripped her emotions to shreds. What a fool I am. How could I have been so stupid? She had asked herself that question a million times since fleeing from the church. And still, she had no good answer.
What in the world had made her think she had the nerve to ask for Dillon’s help? He’d said barely a dozen words after realizing who was calling, but she’d heard the pain in his voice anyway. Obviously, he’d been shocked, but he hadn’t reacted negatively. On the contrary, Dillon had sounded more stunned than angry and had put up a good front. Too good. Maybe that was what had crumbled her resolve. He didn’t deserve to have her open old wounds and possibly inflict new ones.
She pounded her fists on the bed. She was the one who should suffer, not him. Two years ago, she’d screwed up and hurt both of them.
Oh God, if she could just turn back time. That might be a great line for a song, but in reality, it didn’t happen. She heaved a deep breath and rolled over.
Glancing at the clock, she swore. She needed to catch a few hours sleep before she had to get up for work. She’d dropped Skye at her parents’ house before dinnertime as usual and then come home to go to bed, but her brain refused to turn off. Worries about her daughter, her finances, and her job had kept her awake until she’d given in to the misguided impulse to call Dillon again.
Her body clock was so messed up that sleeping at all was practically a miracle. She grabbed a couple hours here and there to supplement the too-few hours she slept before going to work each night. But the effort often seemed counterproductive. She didn’t dare take any kind of sleeping pill because she needed to be able to wake up if Skye cried or her parents called. And she always needed to be on her game at the plant. Especially lately.
Her constant exhaustion was the only factor helping her get to sleep at times like this. She threw off the sheet, turned onto her stomach, and closed her eyes. Taking slow, deep breaths, she focused on her happy place—her daughter’s face. Finally, her worries subsided, and fatigue won.
Sometime later, she awoke with a start, dragged from sleep by the ringing cell phone. Skye? Always her first thought. Groggily, she reached for the phone on the nightstand and slapped it against her ear. “H’lo.”
“What the hell do you want from me?”
Chapter 4
Expecting to hear her mother’s voice, Kat did a double take at the sound of a man on the phone. A voice that wasn’t her dad’s either. She shook her head to clear the fog of sleep. Then her eyes opened wide. Dillon? My Dillon. Oh God.
“Kat? Are you there? What the hell’s going on?” Dillon demanded. “Why have you been calling me?”
Now wide awake, she noticed the slight slurring of his speech and the anger within it. He’d been drinking, and he was pissed. Not the condition she wanted him in if she regained the courage to ask for his help.
“Yes, I’m here, Dillon.”
He went silent, but she could still hear his uneven breathing. Did her voice have the same effect on him as his had on her?
“I…I didn’t expect you to call back,” she said softly, gently, hoping to get him talking again.
“Answer my questions.”
He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. He was still as intense and focused as always. Well, damn. She couldn’t just blurt out the “what” and “why” to answer his questions. Could she? No, of course not. Better to calm him down first. “Are you…all right?”
“Don’t mess with me, Kat. What do you want?”
She cringed but then bristled. “Who says I want anything? Maybe I just need to be sure you’re all right.”
“Bullshit. If you didn’t care two years ago, you sure as hell don’t care now.”
I did care, and I do. More than you’ll ever know. Tears stung her eyes as she struggled to keep it together.
“Spill it or I’m outta here. And I won’t answer or call again,” he warned.
Well, shit. Now or never. “I need your help.” She threw the words out there. They hung like a bad odor in the silence that followed.
“You what?” he sneered.
“I have a problem, and I need your help,” she repeated.
He barked a harsh laugh. “So ask your…your husband or boyfriend, not the guy you played for a fool.”
Her heart squeezed. “I-I didn’t play you, and you’re no fool.”
“I must be or I wouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Does that mean you hate me, Dillon?”
He huffed. “Not as much as I used to.”
His words were like daggers impaling her heart. Her throat tightened. “Well, that’s a huge relief, but it confirms what I said earlier: Calling you was a mistake.” She forced herself to give up. “I hope someday you can forgive me. And I hope you won’t let your hate keep you from moving on. Have a nice life, Dillon. Bye-o.” Her voice cracked on the last word.
“Kat, wait!” He sighed. “Please.”
She did and held her breath. Only one other time had waiting been so agonizing, and then she’d been staring at a plastic stick.
“Last chance, Katriona. Why are you asking me instead of…someone else?”
Because I trust you. Because I still love you. She rolled her eyes even as tears threatened. No, confessing her love would never work. “Because of your qualifications.”
“My qualifications.” He said it like a cussword. And like he was disappointed.
She frowned, puzzled.
“Which of my many qualifications do you need to fix your problem?”
Had he just given her a ray of hope? She crossed her fingers. “Your computer skills.”
“Shit,” he muttered. “There are hundreds of computer fix-it companies in the Bay area. Call one of those geek shops if you’re having trouble with your laptop.”
“It’s not my laptop. It’s the computers at work.”
“Your employer should have great IT people.”
Dillon was right, even though he must be thinking of her old employer, Avila Canyon. But old or new, she couldn’t take her problem to the in-house techies.
“Of course. But I’m not sure…” She hesitated. How much should she tell him if he hadn’t committed to helping her?
“Not sure…?” he prompted.
She gulped. At least he sounded interested. Slightly. “Not sure…who I can trust.”
Her admission was met with silence. She could practically hear the gears whirring in his brilliant mind.
“Ah,” he finally said. “This is about my computer skills as an FBI agent.”
“A little bit.”
“Since this involves the computer system at the Avila Canyon plant, I suggest you call another one of the old gang in the San Francisco office.”
“I already did,” she admitted.
“Oh, I see. I’m your last choice,” he grumbled.
She sat up in bed and turned on the lamp with trembling fingers. Apparently, they were actually going to have a conversation. “No. I called the San Francisco office looking for you first because you wouldn’t answer your phone. But the operator said you didn’t work there anymore. So I asked for Steve, Kevin, and Jeff. None of them wanted to talk to me either.” She sighed. “Besides, it’s not Avila Canyon. Like you, I have a new job.”
“Really. Where?”
“DBNPP.”
“Excuse me?”
“Diablo Beach Nuclear Power Plant.”
He hissed something under his breath she couldn’t understand.
“It’s in San Diego County, on the coast north of Oceanside, next to Camp Pendleton,” she explained.
“I know where it is.” His voice sounded even more strained, if that was possible.
“Really? I didn’t, until I applied for the job.” She paused. “Are you still with the Bureau?”
“Yeah. Let’s get back to your computer problem. What’s wrong—specifically?”
“Does this mean you�
��re going to help me?”
* * *
The Corona buzz Dillon had going when he drunk-dialed Kat had faded. Well, it wasn’t exactly a drunk-dial because he had all his faculties about him, knew damn well what he was doing, and why. He just didn’t know what he was going to say until she answered.
And now the conversation had taken off as he’d never expected. Holy hell, they were actually talking—something they hadn’t done since the night before their aborted wedding. And he’d been handling himself pretty damn well until she dropped the bombshell about Diablo Beach. That nuclear power plant was only about twenty miles north of where he lived. Jesus H. Christ. Kat probably lived somewhere in North County. Like he did. They might even be neighbors in Carlsbad. Holy shit. No way could he let her discover that. It was bad enough he knew it.
He shook his head and tuned back in to what she was saying.
“I’m relatively new at this job, and I can’t afford to lose it. When I tried to discuss this with my boss, he blew me off. But I can’t get past the feeling that something’s really wrong.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t have enough experience to understand the differences between an operating plant and a nonoperating one going through decommissioning.”
“Is he right?”
“Of course not,” she said indignantly. “Obviously, the work is different, but certain systems and safeguards have to be maintained.”
“Understood. Just to be clear, I assume ‘decommissioning’ is a fancy word for shutting down.”
“Actually, it’s a lot more than just shutting down the reactors and steam generators. That’s already been done. Decommissioning includes massive dismantling, transferring the nuclear fuel into long-term dry cask storage, and tons of other technical stuff. It’ll probably be close to twenty years before the land can be given back to the Navy.”
“Twenty years. Damn. So what was it your boss thought you were too naïve to understand?”
She sighed. “The radioactive material has all been removed from the reactors. From Unit One, a long time ago. And from Units Two and Three after the shutdown in 2013. Most of the nuclear material is now stored in the spent fuel pools, which are enclosed steel-lined concrete pools. An ocean-water cooling system maintains the temperatures within the pools at safe levels.”
“Okay, so before you go all Fukushima on me, what’s your beef with what’s going on? Is the pool boy not doing a good job cleaning the pools and monitoring the chemicals? Is he getting fresh with the female employees?”
“This isn’t a joke, Dillon.”
“Okay. But if your experienced boss isn’t worried, why not just let it go?”
“Are you familiar with the term ‘China Syndrome’?”
“Like in that old, classic movie?”
“Yes. Another term for a meltdown. And it’s what happened to some degree in real life at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.”
A slow burn started in his gut. “And…?”
“And if the cooling system in the spent fuel pools at Diablo Beach should malfunction, we…could…have a China Syndrome event. A meltdown.”
The burn spread to his chest. “Aren’t there all kinds of backup systems?”
“Sure. And they’re adequate for coolant disruption caused by a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami.”
Fuck. “I hear a great big ‘but’ coming.”
“But…I think someone has hacked into the Diablo Beach computer system and is working to sabotage the entire cooling system, backups and all.”
Chapter 5
“What makes you think that?” Dillon asked, skepticism tainting his tone.
Good question. One she’d been asking herself repeatedly. Why couldn’t she accept her boss’s opinion? Asad Farook had decades of experience. If he wasn’t worried, why was she? If he saw nothing sinister in the fluctuations, why was she seeing criminal minds?
“My gut,” she said after a thoughtful pause.
He snorted.
“Oh? So it’s okay for you, the big, bad FBI agent, to trust your gut, but I can’t.”
“‘Big, bad’? As in ‘blow your house down’ or ‘what big eyes you have’?”
Her throat tightened. They used to joke about him resembling a wolf with his unruly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and intense concentration. Among other things. His possessiveness and protectiveness reminded her of the alpha with his mate in a wolf pack. And yet, he could be tender and loving.
“Kat?”
“Um, I don’t have any proof that anyone’s doing anything wrong. But these errors—if that’s what they are—shouldn’t be happening.”
“What kind of errors?” He was back to all business.
“The temperature in the pools. It shouldn’t vary that much. And it should definitely show up in the reports, but it doesn’t.”
“Explain.”
“I’ve witnessed the temperature jump or drop when I’m at work, but the changes don’t show up on the daily reports when I review them the next day.”
“Do you have to adjust something to fix the fluctuations?”
“No, they always self-correct. Pretty fast really. If I wasn’t watching the gauges closely, it’d be easy to miss.” She hesitated. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was testing how to switch off all the cooling systems, but they haven’t figured out how to bypass the gauges. The other thing I don’t understand is why the alarm doesn’t go off.”
“Alarm?”
“Yes, there are built-in, audible alarms to warn operators of problems.”
“In case an operator falls asleep on the job?”
She bristled. “An operator would never be so negligent, but it’s still possible to miss something—more so at an operating plant when tons of stuff is going on. But even though Diablo Beach is shutdown, the alarms haven’t been deactivated. At least, they’re not supposed to be off.” She cocked her head. “Unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless someone has access to them in the computer system and can turn them on and off at will.”
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Someone wants to screw around with the pool water but doesn’t want anyone to notice. So he turns off the alarms and hopes his manipulations are so quick that no one sees the actual, real-time temperature change on the monitoring equipment. Still, why doesn’t it all show up in the reports?”
“I don’t know. Unless the person knows how to override the data going into the reports.”
“Wouldn’t that be pretty tricky?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yeah. I mean, if it were someone in house, he’d have to have a high enough authorization level. But I guess a hacker would figure out how to get around all of that, right?”
“It’d have to be a really good hacker because the data would most likely feed directly into the reports with no manual manipulation. How long has this been going on?”
“About a month.”
Her alarm clock buzzed.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I have to get ready for work.”
He paused. “You work at night?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
So I can have a few hours to play with my baby daughter during the day. Well, no, she couldn’t tell him that. “I’m the newbie. I get the shit hours.”
He laughed, a real honest-to-goodness laugh. She smiled. He’d always been so intense that a laugh was a truly rare and precious thing.
“Does this mean you’ll help me, Dillon?”
“No,” he said emphatically and then exhaled. “I really don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Her hopes deflated, along with some dreams.
“But, if you’d like, I can…uh…make a few phone calls and maybe find…someone in the San Diego office who’d at least talk to you.”
Self-doubt chipped away at her confidence. “I don’t kno
w. Dealing with a total stranger would be more difficult. He or she might not believe me because I don’t have any kind of concrete evidence. And I can’t lose my job.”
“An agent might be able to advise you on how to obtain evidence.”
“Yeah. But what if I’m wrong about the whole thing? I’ll feel like a fool.”
“Understood. But more importantly…what if you’re right?”
* * *
Dillon’s heart pounded like he’d run a marathon. At top speed. But what the hell? He’d just had a phone conversation with a woman. Of course, the woman was Kat. And admittedly, she was—no, had been—the love of his life. But she’d also shattered his heart two years ago. Not only had she never given him an explanation, she’d never even said good-bye. So why had talking to her just now sent his pulse into overdrive?
He grimaced. Saying he didn’t hate her as much as he used to was a lie. In truth, he’d never hated her. Although she’d cut him to the bone, he always believed that her leaving was his fault. In some way. He didn’t know how, but he had some pretty strong ideas. And deep in his heart, he knew he had to be the reason.
Self-blame was an all-too-familiar emotion in his life for him not to recognize it. Growing up in foster care, being dumped in one home after another and never being adopted, a kid soon realized that something was wrong with him, that he was unlovable. If he made the mistake of getting attached to anyone—foster parents, social workers, other kids—inevitably, they let him down, betrayed his trust and affection. So he’d learned to protect himself from people, from emotions, from the world.
By the time he hit puberty, Dillon had built such thick walls around his heart that he hardly noticed as the foster parents changed on the conveyor belt of his life. Self-sufficient became his motto. He didn’t need—or want—anyone close to him.
Katriona MacKenzie had changed all that. Or so he’d thought.
But in the end, she’d been like all the others. Betrayed him. Hurt him.
So why did a simple phone conversation rattle him like this?
He glanced down at his swollen package. Traitor. Unfortunately, Kat still affected him physically as well as emotionally. He shoved his fingers through his hair in frustration.
Wanted (FBI Heat Book 3) Page 3