In the Shadow of Pride Book 4

by Nancy C. Weeks

  “Get out of my chair.” Mac set his coffee down, moved toward the door, and pointed to the letters printed on the glass. “My name, my desk, my chair.”

  Jason gave his brother a good stare and let out a laugh as he rose and dropped into one of the two side chairs.

  “What the hell got up your butt on this bright sunny morning? After a successful bust, you’re usually in a better mood.” Jason flipped the photos in the folder. “You had way too much fun without me.” He tossed the file toward the center of the desk.

  “Fun? The whole damn thing was hell the instant Lexie and Gabriel walked into the lobby. Doesn’t anyone in this office get the danger they were in? The danger we put them in?”

  “You didn’t put them there. We can’t control every little detail.” He raised his hand when Mac started to interrupt. “Lexie and Gabriel are fine. Rico must be smiling like a loon behind the pearly gates. He drilled that move into her, and she pulled it off like a pro.”

  “But she’s not a pro, Jason. She’s a single mother with a little kid to take care of. She should’ve let us do our job.”

  Mac dropped into his chair and swirled it around to the window. The sun rose above the horizon, spreading rays of deep orange and reds across the sky. A slight haze sticking close to the ground would burn off in an hour as the temperature rose into the low eighties. It was too nice a day to be this tense, but Mac couldn’t shake the feeling of dread the instant Lexie walked into the middle of his sting operation.

  “That’s not what’s bothering you.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Jason scrunched down and lifted his leg onto the desk. “What’s going on with you and Lexie? You have been at each other’s throats since the day you met. I have never seen a woman rile you like she does. And the way you bark at her, that’s just not like you. You’re the nicest of all the McNeils, including Emma.”

  “Lexie just… she’s so…”

  “She’s under your skin, Mac, and it’s time you figure out why. It’s been two years since Rico died. Just ask her out already.”

  “Ask her out! Are you crazy? We’ll tear each other to shreds before the appetizer arrives.”

  “Yeah, and why is that?”

  “Shut up, Jason, and get your feet off my desk.”

  He shoved Jason’s shoes to the floor. The coffee took that moment to slide down into his stomach and mix with the acid. If Mac dared reach for a Tums in his desk, Jason would double over and laugh himself sick. “And get out of my office. Aren’t you supposed to be on leave this week helping Sarah with the babies? Go do that.”

  “What are you two sniping at each other for now? Can’t I leave you alone for a second without you going at each other?” Sarah McNeil said from the doorway.

  Jason’s facial features transformed from a smirk to sheer pleasure when his eyes landed on his wife. Then something close to panic replaced the pleasure, and he shot from the chair, sending it to the floor. “Sarah, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Are the babies okay?”

  She reached up on her toes and kissed her husband’s lips as her hand caressed his chest. “Relax. I was called in. They wanted me so badly, they let me bring the twins with me.”

  Mac moved from behind his desk and hugged his sister-in-law before asking, “Who called you in?”

  “That would be me,” Joe Díaz said from the doorway. The head of their division held an infant carrier in each hand. Both newborns were fast asleep. “I called Sarah. You’re going to need her.”

  Sarah was a genius with numbers. If Díaz dragged her off maternity leave and allowed something so unorthodox as bringing Mac’s three-week-old niece and nephew into the building, then something really ugly had happened.

  “I figured it would be easier on Sarah to have the twins close.” A light blush crawled up his boss’s neck. “If this is too tiring, we can figure out something else.”

  “Jason’s parents are flying in tomorrow to meet the twins. This will work fine for today,” Sarah said with a smile.

  Jason reached for his daughter’s carrier with one hand and his wife’s hand with his other. “Sir, what’s going on?”

  “How about you get settled and I’ll brief everyone in the conference room in five minutes?”

  Mac took his nephew’s carrier from his boss and headed toward the conference room, nodding to his team to follow.

  Sarah and Jason put the babies on two chairs between them. The tension in the room was palpable. Mac’s team was being very respectful of their unusual sleeping guests, or everyone was reacting to the same dread that gripped Mac the instant Sarah stepped into his office.

  Díaz cleared his throat. “We got a call about an hour ago that Karnes Aerial Testing Facility had a break-in early this morning. An unmanned aerial system was stolen right out of its hangar.”

  “Someone stole a drone?” Mac masked his facial features. At least now there was motive for the dread that took root in his gut.

  Díaz slipped a flash drive into a laptop and projected the surveillance footage on the large screen. “A team of five men drove through the gates of the facility, and with an active security keycard, parked their vehicle near the drone.”

  On the screen, video of a truck pulling a flatbed trailer disappeared into the doors of a hanger.

  “They somehow hacked into the security system and replaced the feed with footage from an hour earlier. That’s all we got. One thing we know is that this crew was meticulous. They knew what they were looking for, where to find it, and were in and out before the guard on duty could check the unusual entry at the gate. With the cameras down, we have nothing except the make of the vehicle. The roads outside the facility are unpaved and branch out in a couple of directions until they intersect farm-to-market roads. We can’t track the truck because there aren’t cameras in that isolated area until we get closer to Austin’s city limits.”

  “Is that where I come in?” Sarah asked as she peered at the screen. “You want me to narrow down your search radius?”

  Díaz nodded. “I need you to do your magic, Sarah.”

  “It isn’t magic, Joe. It’s mathematics,” she murmured as she lifted the lid of her laptop. “If you don’t mind, I’ll set up in here.” She repositioned a light blanket over her son.

  “Anything you can do to help us will be greatly appreciated.” He handed Mac the file. “I want everyone from the head honcho at Karnes to the janitorial services picked over with a fine-tooth comb. The drone wasn’t armed when it left the facility, but it was fully operational.”

  “Who else knows about this, sir?”

  “The guard and a couple of top-level managers at Karnes. I don’t need to tell you how vital it is that we find that drone, and fast. Whoever took it didn’t do so to take footage of their beachfront. This is domestic terrorism. Do what you have to do to get the drone before there is an attack on United States soil.”

  Díaz’s deputy charged into the conference room. “There is something you need to see, Joe.” He switched off the surveillance footage and turned on the local Austin morning news. The flat screen filled with a scene of a plantation-style estate engulfed in flames. Fire trucks and emergency vehicles crowded the well-manicured lawn. Firefighters aimed hose nozzles at a large, black hole where the front door once stood.

  “What am I looking at?” Mac asked.

  “That’s Senator Ramirez’s home. One of his neighbors witnessed some type of aerial vehicle fly over his property, then hover for a few seconds in the middle of the senator’s front lawn before it fired a small missile right through the front door.”

  “Who was in the house?” Díaz slammed his fisted hands at his waist, his attention focused on the news footage. “Senator Ramirez has a wife and four kids.”

  “Too soon for details.”

  “The drone taken from Karnes has the ability to strike with that kind of precision. It could hit a vase sitting on the mantel or the toilet paper roll by the commode. This isn’t an accident,” Sarah said.
>
  The room grew still as everyone watched a gurney appear from the house and set in an ambulance. Mac turned to Sarah. “Is there any way to track that drone?”

  “Yes. Drones have communication systems that run over the network. It’ll take time, but I can track it.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Get the guys in here who designed the drone and created the control system. I needed them an hour ago.”

  Hell, an hour ago, Mac thought he needed a good night’s sleep and a diversion to get Lexie’s kiss out of his head. Well, he got his diversion. As for the kiss, it was still there, front and center.

  Mac paced outside the conference door as he lightly bounced his tiny niece over his forearm. Abigail Hanna McNeil had colic. Sarah blamed herself, even charting her recent meal down to the last spice. If anyone could use data to defeat colic, it was Sarah. She tried to calm Abby down, but after watching her walk the halls for half an hour, Mac took his turn.

  He scanned the deserted work area and let out a loud sigh. “How can a baby with the sweetest face in the world make grown men and women run for the hills? You have your father’s temper, my Abby girl,” he whispered, and kissed the back of her head just as his brother came out of the elevator.

  “What’s going on?” Jason asked, reaching for his daughter. “Her face is beet red. Colic again?”

  “Burped up the big one a couple of minutes ago. I think she’s feeling better.”

  “We need to talk. Why don’t you put Abby in her carrier?”

  “She’s fine here.” Mac didn’t want to put her down. “Tell me what you have.”

  Jason leaned against one of the deserted desks, his eyes on Sarah. “Where is everyone?”

  “My guess, the conference room on the top floor.”

  Jason smiled down at his daughter and ran a hand over her tiny head. “Chicken shits. So, we got Ramirez’s wife and kids settled in the safe house. Thank God they were on their way to school. There are enough men covering Senator Ramirez’s hospital room to take over a small country.”

  “How is he doing?”

  “He took in a lot of smoke, and they’re keeping him for observation.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “I had a couple of minutes before his doctors cleared the room, but he wasn’t much help. One moment he was putting on his suit jacket and the next his kitchen exploded around him.”

  “Does he have any clue why he was targeted?”

  “No, and he can’t believe anything he is working on would trigger this type of attack, either.”

  “What’s he working on?”

  “Senator Ramirez doesn’t believe we need to throw money at our border problems. He argues that we have created a Berlin Wall that only separates two culturally united people.” Jason stretched his shoulders and neck before he continued. “Ramirez gave a speech last week where he suggested that crime will be reduced dramatically and add trillions of dollars to the economy if we permit people to move freely between the US and Mexico’s borders.”

  “A position like that could really piss off a few folks. Let’s start there. Contact his staff and see what kind of hate mail he has received over the last few weeks.”

  “Already done. Someone on the team is going through them now.”

  Sarah stuck her head out of the conference room. “Jason, take Abby. Mac, get in here. I found something, and I really don’t want you holding my baby girl when you hear it.”

  Mac cradled his niece against his chest and followed his sister-in-law into the room. “That’s a little melodramatic.”

  “Seriously, Jason, take Abby.” Sarah ran her fingers across the keys and an image of the front of the senator’s home came up onto the screen. Jason reached for his daughter, and this time, Mac eased her out of his arms.

  “Okay, Sarah, you have my attention. What did you find?”

  “I have the drone, or at least I tracked it until it stopped transmitting.” Sarah pulled out a chair and stepped to the side. “You’re hovering over me, Mac. Sit.”

  He dropped into the chair. Finding the drone should have lowered his stress level, but from the expression on Sarah’s face, it spiked to a new high. “So, you found the drone, but…”

  “It stopped transmitting a signal to the control base.”

  “Control base? Are you saying you tracked the drone back to the person who launched it, and they are communicating with each other?”

  “The drone is using an encrypted GPS navigation system just like your smartphone. When you use your GPS to find a new address, you are allowing the system to know where you are by continually signaling your location to a satellite so that it can give directions to your desired destination. Our drone’s programming does the same thing on a variant schedule.”

  Mac’s head throbbed, a normal when his sister-in-law tried to dumb things down for him, and he remained clueless. “Maybe try again.”

  “It’s been programmed to let the control base know where it is in case it veers off course. It’s like a checks-and-balances system. The drone lets the control center know its location, and the center can alter the drone’s path if need be.”

  “Okay, that makes sense. So, when should you get another signal?”

  “I don’t know. Our little team of thieves may not have been aware of the program until it sent out the signal. They have probably deactivated it by shutting down the drone, but just receiving that tiny crumb gave us a lot of information.”

  Jason sat next to his wife, the baby still in his arms. “Like what?”

  “As soon as I received the drone’s signal, I coded a trajectory equation that would backtrack and determine where it originated.” Sarah brought up a map of Austin onto the screen. “I lost the drone here,” she said, indicating a point south of the city. She traced the line. “This is the path it took.” A line connected that location to Senator Ramirez’s home and ended downtown.

  “Is that Zilker Park?” Jason asked.

  Sarah nodded. “It was early enough there would be few people around. I don’t believe our thieves would have wanted an audience watching them launch a drone.”

  “If that is where it was launched, is that where it returned?” Mac asked.

  “That’s where the drone took off, but it didn’t return to that location. Your technical team used the park’s cameras and spotted the truck and trailer parked in the back lot. The drone isn’t there.”

  Mac was missing something, and it pissed him off. “It took off there, not launched. What did you mean by that?”

  “You understand you don’t have to even be in the same country as the drone to launch it, right?”

  Sarah shifted so she could face Mac. Eye-to-eye was never a good thing when she was in this mood. “Do you want to know how I located the launch site?”

  “Did you break any laws?”

  A touch a color rose in her cheeks. “Maybe a couple. How technical do you want me to be?”

  “Bare bones, only what I need to know.” Mac drew his spine straight, when every nerve in his body ached to move.

  Sarah brought up another image on her laptop and projected it to the screen. “The drone was launched from the building where it was designed and built, Roland Innovative Technology. It’s being controlled from a workstation in their research and development department.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. What would be their motive? People are already afraid of the idea of unmanned vehicles flying loose above their heads.”

  “Yeah, that was my thought, too,” she said, fidgeting with her wedding ring. “But I’m not wrong.”

  “That I’m sure of, Sarah. So, you traced the IP address?”

  “Yes, but this is the part you aren’t going to like.” Without glancing at the screen, she clicked a key on her laptop again. An employee identification card for Lexie Trevena filled the screen.

  Mac shot out of his chair. “If this is some kind of a joke, I’m not laughing.”

  “You’re wrong
this time, sweetheart,” Jason said. “There is no way Lexie would do something like this. You have the wrong computer.”

  “No, Jason. I don’t. What we don’t know yet is if she launched the drone herself or if someone close to her had access to her workstation.”

  Her dark brown eyes peered at Mac, making him want to squirm.

  “As you said, there has to be some sort of motive.” Sarah’s voice came out in a whisper.

  Mac’s mind was a jumbled mess of questions, but one stood out and he would not like the answer. Taking in a breath, he kept his voice low and asked, “Did you discover a motive?”

  “A week ago, Lexie applied for a $50,000 loan. The bank denied the loan the day of the sting operation. Late last night, a deposit of that amount appeared in her account.”

  Jason turned in his chair. “What do you want to do?”

  “What I have to do. My damn job,” Mac said, yanking his coat off the back of his chair. “And to think she hates me for Rico’s death. There’s going to be a whole new definition of hate when I arrest her for domestic terrorism.”

  Five

  One day, all of this will all seem like child’s play. Just not today. Lexie nervously twisted her hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, securing it in a clip as she studied the five other occupants in the room. Her co-workers were busy at their desk. They grasped what was expected of them, and went about their day being part of the changing world. Lexie sat under a dark cloud of ineptness, wondering too often why they hired her.

  For the last five months, she had read the design specification a dozen times. Why was an error message still displayed on the new navigational program? What was she missing?

  It didn’t help that her mother’s enraged voice lived with her daily. You may be book smart, but when it comes to real life, you have the IQ of a doorknob.

  She stopped listening to her mother years ago. Despite that, she was clueless at converting all that knowledge floating around inside her head into practical applications.