by Beverly Long
The knowledge that he was also worried someone might be close terrified her, but she swallowed hard, determined to stay calm. Her wailing in fear wouldn’t help anything.
He went out the door first. The snow was coming down hard, practically sideways. It would be very difficult for anyone to see them, even if they were close. That knowledge helped her to keep moving, one foot in front of the other. The air smelled of smoke but there was no visible fire, making Chandler think that Ethan had probably been right and the fire hadn’t spread.
He hugged the side of the cabin and she sensed, rather than saw, his progress. She stayed behind him and practically ran into the truck before she saw it. He opened the passenger-side door. “Get in,” he whispered.
She slid onto the seat, pushing several folded newspapers out of the way, and almost yelped when Molly jumped in and over her, taking the middle of the seat.
“I’ll take those now,” he said, reaching for the tote and the box. She handed them over and heard a scrape behind her as he put the items in the back of the open truck bed. When he got in the driver’s side, she realized that he’d put his duffel bag and backpack in the back, too. And the rifle. He’d kept the handgun and the ammunition and he placed both of them under his seat.
“Doing okay?” he asked.
Hell, no.
“I’m good,” she said. “Will your things be okay in the back? Nothing will fly out?”
“Not at the speed we’ll be traveling. It’ll be okay once we’re on the highway, too. I strapped everything down.” He started the truck and she heard him unzip his jacket. Then the towel that he’d had around his neck, which was still mostly dry because he’d protected it from the snow, was in her lap. “Dry off,” he said. “Then you may want to use it on Molly. Otherwise, every time she shakes, it’s going to be another shower for the both of us.”
“I’m going to be forever grateful to Molly,” she said, rubbing her face dry. “She found me. Are these newspapers for her?”
“No.” He flipped on his windshield wipers and cleared the windshield of snow. That’s when Chandler realized that the weather must have started with freezing rain or sleet because there was a thin layer of ice on Ethan’s windshield. He turned on the defrost. “I realize that it’s rather old-fashioned, but I still like to read a newspaper.”
“Me, too. My dad always read the newspaper. Front to back.”
“I know. Ready?”
She nodded.
“Good. Let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” he said. “I’m not going to use my lights. Can you shine the flashlight on the road? It should be enough for me to see a couple feet ahead but won’t be as visible from a distance as truck lights.”
Chandler couldn’t imagine that they were going to attempt to navigate icy, snow-covered winding roads with only the aid of a flashlight. They were dangerous on dry days in broad daylight—much less in a bad winter storm in the middle of the night. But she kept her mouth shut. She pulled the strap of the flashlight over her head, gripped it in her hand, leaned forward with one arm braced on the dash and lit the way.
It was barely a dent in the darkness, but evidently enough for Ethan.
When they passed the road that would have led them to the McCann cabin, she turned in her seat, wishing that she could have a closer look. “I wonder how bad it is.” Her father was going to be so sad about the loss.
“I’ll come back and check,” Ethan offered. “But first I’m going to get you out of here.”
She put her hand on his arm. “You can’t come back. It’s too dangerous.”
“Nobody will even know I was here.”
“I thought you flew helicopters. Not that you were some super-duper spy.”
He turned his head. “Super-duper? Not hardly.”
He was selling himself short. She didn’t know much about his military career, but she remembered overhearing Mack and her dad talking about Ethan and that he was frequently in the middle of heavy combat situations.
“If you’re going to circle back, I’m coming, too.”
He didn’t respond.
“Ethan,” she prompted.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I have to,” she said simply. “I have to see it with my own eyes.”
She heard him sigh. “Okay. But for now, we’re both getting the hell out of here. There’s going to be a lot of activity and I don’t want somebody to stumble over us by chance.”
When they came to a fork in the road, she expected him to go right. Instead he turned left.
“Where are you going? The highway is that direction.”
“This is the back way out. Emergency vehicles will come in on the other road and I don’t want to meet up with any of them. This road isn’t as good but the truck will handle it. I’m counting on the fact that most people don’t even know it’s here.”
She hadn’t known about the road but then again, it had been years since she’d been at the cabin. Hopefully whoever was after her didn’t know about it, either.
He was right about the quality of the road, which was really more of a path, with big ruts and snow-filled holes. Her car would have never made it. It was work just to keep the flashlight steady, and with each dip and sway, Molly’s wet body slid on the seat, crowding close to either her or Ethan.
They crept along at fifteen miles an hour for another mile or so. She knew it was the fastest Ethan could go without much light on a road that was almost washed out in places.
“I never knew you drove a truck,” she said. It was mindless chatter but she couldn’t stand the silence broken only by the swish-swish of the windshield wipers.
“Just bought it four weeks ago when I got back to the States. I may never drive a car again.”
“A pickup truck and a dog. You’re sort of a country song.”
He turned his head and she switched the flashlight from the road to his face for just a second. He was smiling. “All I need is a cheatin’ wife.”
She didn’t think he’d ever married. Every once in a while, over the years, she’d make a casual inquiry of Mack about the marital status of his two best friends. Brody had come close but his fiancée had left him practically standing at the altar. Ethan, it seemed, had been married to the military and had hardly come home much after his mother died many years ago. She remembered Mack mentioning that Ethan was such a talented helicopter pilot that the army was quick to take him up on his offers to defer his leaves and remain available for flying.
“No cheatin’ wife for you,” she said, verifying her suspicions.
“Cheatin’ or otherwise,” he agreed.
How nice.
Too bad they had to meet again after all these years under these circumstances.
After what seemed like forever, they finally reached the highway. The back end of the truck slid back and forth as tires grabbed for pavement. There had to be several inches of snow already on the ground. Ethan flipped on his headlights. She could see a fire truck approaching, its lights flashing and its siren blaring. Not far behind it were two SUV-type emergency vehicles with lights blazing.
Once they were safely past them, she said, “We should stop soon if we’re going back.”
“It might be best if we keep going,” Ethan suggested.
He was probably right. But she didn’t want to leave Crow Hollow without seeing the damage firsthand. And he’d been confident that he could get back undetected. “I need to go back.”
He didn’t argue. “There’s a house up here on the next hill,” he said. “It sits back a good half mile off the road. I’ll pull into the lane.”
She waited as Ethan slowed before coming to a stop on the highway. He killed his lights and then backed the truck into the dark lane. He pulled in a hundred yards and turned off the engine.
&n
bsp; She felt invisible and it was a great relief. She heard him shift in his seat and knew that he was waiting for the explanation she’d promised.
“I lied earlier when I said that carelessness caused me to have the accident.”
“Okay.”
“A car bumped into me. Three times. On the third time, it was hard enough to send me flying. I sort of bounced off the mountain wall and went skidding off the side.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. When he spoke, his voice was hard. “Do you know who was driving this car?”
“No. I think it’s possible that it was a vehicle that passed me, coming from the other direction. Then it turned around to follow me. If it was, then I think it was some kind of SUV, one of the bigger ones. I wasn’t paying that much attention when I first saw it. I think there were two people in it.”
“So the vehicle hitting you was definitely deliberate?”
“Oh, yeah. A few minutes after the accident, someone was up on the road. I’m sure it was the people from the vehicle that hit me. I could only hear one of them clearly. It was a man. He was convinced I was dead and he was happy about it.”
“I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to hurt you, Chandler?”
She sighed. “It might be helpful if I give you some background. Almost everyone at my work has either secret or top secret security clearance. The work we do for the Defense Department is pretty specialized.”
“What exactly do you make?”
She hesitated. Old habits were hard to break. Maybe easier for some. It was beginning to look that way. But she still felt bound to the confidentiality agreement that she’d signed.
“Let’s just say that we specialize in stealth technology.”
“Now who’s the super-duper spy?”
She shook her head, knowing that he couldn’t see her. “I’m the computer geek. Unfortunately, sometimes the computer people see more than they should.”
“And you saw something that has people wanting to force cars off the road, to blow things up?”
“That’s what I’m not sure about. It all happened so fast. A couple nights ago, we upgraded several of our computer servers. One of the servers hosts our email system. I was troubleshooting a problem and in the process, looked at some emails that had come in to various people in the company.”
He didn’t respond.
“I have top secret security clearance,” she explained. “But still, I know that information is always shared on a need-to-know basis. So I tried to pick emails that seemed very innocent. I clicked on one titled Strawberry Shortcake Recipe.” She paused. “I like desserts.”
“And...”
“And it was set up like a recipe, with ingredients and cooking instructions. But the quantities looked odd. I’m sort of a math geek in addition to being a computer geek. So I started looking at it closer.”
“What was it?”
“It was written in code. There were a couple pieces that I wasn’t able to figure out. But I think it was a confirmation of delivery.”
“For?”
“That’s what I’m not sure of. But...”
“But what?”
She hesitated. “I’m fairly confident it was confirmation of a delivery of raw materials and product specifications for one of our most advanced systems.”
He whistled softly. “Someone in your company is selling secrets to the enemy. And the means to reproduce technology that could be used against Americans.”
“I think so,” she said, her voice soft.
“Who was the email addressed to?”
“That’s the problem. It was addressed to somebody who no longer works for the company. An administrative assistant. Her in-box should have been deleted but the Help Desk must have missed that. But it doesn’t make sense that this person sold the data. She would never have had the security clearance necessary to see this information in the first place.”
“Did you know this person well?”
“Not well. She had worked for Claudia. She left the organization without much notice a few months ago. I didn’t know of any way to reach this woman, plus I didn’t necessarily think it would be a smart thing to do. I tried to search the sender but all I ran into was a dead end.”
“What did you do then?”
“I started digging.”
“Understandable,” he said simply.
“Our system, like most computer systems, electronically stamps every action that is taken. Every keystroke. Every transaction. It’s a clean audit trail.”
“And you found something?” he asked.
“I found something that was interesting, to say the least. You see, it’s only been recently, with the latest software upgrade, that we’ve been able to audit viewing.”
“Viewing?”
“Yes. Viewing is when somebody pulls up a screen but doesn’t take any action. Simply looks at the data. Just recently our system began stamping that activity and can tell us how long the person was viewing the screen.”
“And you found that somebody had recently viewed the specs on this particular product?”
“Two people. One was another analyst, just like me. His name is Marcus White. The other,” she said, unable to keep the misery out of her response, “my stepmother, Claudia Linder McCann. She’s the CEO. She’s always been the CEO. She’s only been my stepmother for the past year.”
She heard his soft hiss.
“Dicey,” he said finally.
She laughed, glad that she still could. “It’s not as if she doesn’t have permission to look at data. She owns the company. She can look at any data that she wants. But she doesn’t. That’s not her job.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“No. But I ran a report of all the other screens that she’d recently viewed. There were twelve of them. Every screen was related to this one product.”
“So then you went to your stepmother?”
“No. Maybe I should have. But you have to know Claudia Linder. There’s always been something about her that made me uncomfortable. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I didn’t really care when she was simply the CEO. I started to care more after my father fell head over heels in love with her.”
“But you said that someone else also accessed the screens.”
“True. And it’s possible that Marcus would have needed to do it for his work. He’s the analyst supporting a couple of the engineers who are working on this project. There’s really no reason for him to be looking at the screens, but maybe he was troubleshooting a problem. I just don’t know. I do know, however, that he was recently really upset at work. He applied for a promotion and didn’t get it. I really thought he would go get another job somewhere else. He’s very talented. But he stayed.”
“Stayed with bad intent, perhaps?” Ethan offered. “Your stepmother or Marcus White. Two choices.”
“Yes, I would think that Marcus would have been aware of our new ability to track viewing. Probably not Claudia. That’s sort of in the weeds for a CEO. Anyway, I was trying to decide what to do when I realized that there was some hidden code. Code that I hadn’t written. But somebody had, creating a program that ran in the background. I think it was basically an early warning system, designed to let somebody know that somebody else had accessed the screens. I got the heck out of the system but realized that if they were savvy enough to have set up that program, then they were likely savvy enough to track my IP address―my computer address,” she added.
“I assume Marcus White would know how to set that up. Would your stepmother?”
“She could have asked another analyst to do it for her.”
“Did you tell anybody?”
“No. I shut down my computer, grabbed my purse and my backpack, and was halfway back to my apartment w
hen I decided to come here. And if I’m right about what happened tonight, I think that somebody tracked the activity back to my computer and maybe realized I’d figured out what’s going on.”
“Your company was designing this product for the government, right?”
“Yes.”
“If you’re right and this information was sold, that’s treason.”
The silence hung heavy in the air.
“Worth killing for,” she said finally.
“I’d say so,” he answered. “Your stepmother would have known about the cabin. Would Marcus White have known?”
“I’m not sure. I may have mentioned it to him. We’ve worked together for over five years. His parents live in Grand Junction, which is quite a ways west. Still, he probably knows the general area. Would certainly have traveled Interstate 70 between Denver and Grand Junction many times. Plus, if the Help Desk had deactivated the administrative assistant’s username, which they are pretty good about doing quickly after someone leaves, Marcus would have had the capability and access to reactivate it.”
“Okay. Earlier you said that you grabbed your purse and your backpack. You didn’t get out of the car with them.”
“I know. They’re still in the car. I probably should have tried to grab them when I exited through the backseat but I was too scared that a wrong movement would tip the car.”
“You did exactly right,” he said. “You got out safely. That’s always the first priority.”
She turned to him. “What’s going to happen when the authorities find my purse and other things in the car and I’m not there?”
* * *
THE FIRST THING they would do, Ethan figured, was track her name and car registration back to her house. “Do you live alone?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He felt an absurd sense of relief.
“Well, the cops will probably talk to a couple of your neighbors. Do they know your father?”
“Some of them do. After he retired, he used to come over and cut my grass for me. The woman next door was always inviting him in for lemonade.”