Blind Instinct: A Tess Barrett Thriller

by Michael W. Sherer

  “Tess,” Turnbull said softly, “you might be taking this to the extreme. Let Dave’s team check the source code. If it there’s something wrong, they’ll fix it. If it’s clean, though, they have to release the game. It’s too important to the company’s bottom line.”

  “I disagree, sir,” Oliver piped up. “As I suggested earlier, as a publicly held company you have an even greater responsibility to consumers, not just shareholders. Even one death, if it’s linked to your product, can cost you dearly. If this launch is as important to the company as you say, a few days’ delay won’t hurt. Tech companies do it all the time if beta tests uncover bugs.”

  “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen,” Bradley said. “If there’s a problem, we’ll find it.”

  “There’s definitely a problem,” Tess said.

  “Prove it,” Bradley shot back. “Bring me proof, not just some story.”

  Tess gritted her teeth. “Oh, I will. I promise you that.”

  Chapter 21

  The blister on the side of his thumb from loosening the rail spike had popped and now bled. His fingers were so numb from the cold that Travis hardly felt the pain, but the metal grew slick with blood and hard to grip. Without letting go, he stopped for a moment to catch his breath and started in again. He wasn’t about to quit now. He gripped the spike tighter and rocked it. As the bleeding slowed and dried the spike actually grew stickier so he loosened his cramped fingers some as he toggled the spike back and forth like a switch.

  He’d screwed up bigtime. Not just because he hadn’t anticipated this possibility—he’d thought their focus was on Tess, had never even considered he might be in their sights. No, he’d screwed this up from the very beginning. From the moment he’d accepted Jack Turnbull’s assignment—protect the family—he’d handled every situation like a rank amateur, not a Special Forces soldier in an elite black ops division.

  First, the debacle on the mountain a year earlier that had taken James and Sally out of the picture and blinded Tess. Then the endless problems with the micro-drone he’d first tested in Afghanistan. If he hadn’t destroyed the only prototype, all those legions of design and software engineers at MondoHard would not have had to spend the past year reinventing the wheel. So many of the drone’s design details had been in James’s head. And the bizarre worm that had infected the operating software had been the icing on the cake. If not for Derek’s genius the past couple of weeks they wouldn’t have a chance of getting the prototype ready before the defense subcommittee’s deadline. They still might not if Travis didn’t get himself out of this jam somehow.

  But his biggest screw-up had been Tess. Well, not Tess herself, but the way he’d parented her for the past year. He didn’t know how James and Sally had managed, even with just one kid. Hell, Travis didn’t know how James had managed to parent him at such a young age, how James had managed to keep him out of trouble and in school until he was old enough to join the army. Parenting was hard. He’d given James a lot of credit for many things, but never for being a great father. And now that it was his turn, all he could do was mess up.

  True, he’d walked into parenthood totally unprepared, but what parent didn’t? Also true, he’d been saddled with a teenager his first trip out the chute, not a newborn that couldn’t think or provide for itself. But that meant he had the benefit of all those years of terrific guidance from Sally and James. So why couldn’t he connect with Tess? They circled each other like a couple of wary wolves fighting for territory. Travis understood what it was like to lose parents. He wasn’t insensitive to Tess’s feelings, to what she endured every day. Why couldn’t she see that? All she saw were his rules, his overprotective efforts to keep her safe. Nothing short of prison could keep any child safe—the world was a scary and dangerous place—and even prison would dampen a kid’s spirit to the point of irreparable harm.

  He sighed. He would just have to suck it up and accept the fact that Tess was bound to hate him no matter what he did. His job was to protect her, and he would keep that promise to James and Sally if he died trying. Because one thing he knew with absolute certainty was that the threat against the family was real. Someone wanted to sabotage the company, steal its secrets, possibly both. Some people suspected Travis himself. Maybe they weren’t far off.

  He thought about the board meeting, and wondered if Tess was terrified or holding her own. He knew Jack would maneuver her into position to sit in for Travis, but the board would insist she not vote. They would wait until either Travis showed up, which appeared unlikely anytime soon, or the court appointed her a new guardian, effectively blocking any meaningful decisions.

  Travis frowned. There wasn’t anything very important on the agenda that he could recall. He kept going back to the question of why they’d taken him. Why now? They still had done nothing to intimidate him or get information from him. No interrogations under blinding lights. No beatings or waterboarding. They’d done nothing but warehouse him. The same silhouetted figures had brought him food again. Another sandwich twenty-four hours after the first hadn’t been enough to sustain him—he was burning body fat quickly trying to keep warm—but it had taken the edge off his hunger. Unless… They were trying to derail the drone project, keep him out of the picture long enough to prevent the prototype from being thoroughly tested before demonstrating it to the defense subcommittee. That had to be it!

  The thought chilled Travis more than the cold emanating from the tunnel’s rock walls. If his bid to renew the defense contract failed, it could cripple the company. The company had poured too much money into the development of the second prototype due to all the snafus. Unless MondoHard could sell a working model to the military to recoup that investment, the company’s investors would bail. He couldn’t let that happen. After all the work James and Sally had put into the company, it couldn’t fail. Not on his watch. He tensed at the thought, a molten river of anger and frustration coursing through him. Unconsciously, his hand gripped the spike even tighter, and with a roar he pulled on it until the tendons on his neck stood out and his eyes bulged.

  His arms quavered with the strain, and the hard, packed earth finally released its grip on the cold steel. Travis drew the spike out of the ground like Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone, and raised it over his head in triumph. Now he had a tool. His hope rekindled, he stood on creaky joints and walked to the bat gate, working out the kinks in his back and legs as he went. He pressed the button on his watch that illuminated the face and held it out to light his way. Slowly, he inspected the gate, especially where the bars were anchored in the rock wall. Some moisture had seeped down one wall, corroding the metal. The rust and corrosion meant whoever had installed the gate had used a less expensive type of steel. Travis had expected a material more along the lines of manganese steel used to produce heavy machinery like tanks and bulldozers.

  His nostrils flared, detecting the faint echo of something rotten. He wished he had the little drone he’d tested in Afghanistan, with its ability to distinguish odors. But his nose was good enough to identify sulfuric acid. The moisture had leached some sulfides from the soil on its way down through the ceiling and wall of the tunnel. The resulting acid had no doubt hastened the metal’s corrosion.

  The length of re-bar welded to the grate that served to anchor the grate to the wall was so rusted it sat loosely in the anchor hole drilled into the wall. The bar below it also had corroded, though not as badly. Shining the weak light across the gate, Travis felt his excitement grow. The weakened bars were less than a foot from the hinged side of the door built into the grate. Aiming the glow from his watch at the anchor hole, he stabbed at the rock around the corroded bar with the rail spike. Sparks flew as steel struck rock. Travis screwed his eyelids nearly shut to keep the flying rock chips from hitting an eye and blinding him for real.

  Savagely, he hammered at the rock and steel with the point of the spike with all his strength, chipping the edges of the hole a millimeter at a time. His breathing grew labored and sw
eat broke out on his forehead and dripped into his eyes. He swiped it away with a sleeve and continued pounding the wall around the hole until his arm felt like lead. Mouth parched from the effort, thirst forced him to stop. Foolish. Expending that much effort simply drained his reserves that much faster. And overheating would lead to rapid cooling in this environment.

  Locating the water they’d left him, he sipped slowly, rationing it carefully. When his heart rate settled down, he squatted next to the grate where he’d been working, gripped one of the cross bars and pulled. The metal groaned as the gate shifted a fraction of an inch. He pushed it the other direction, putting his weight into it, trying to bend the corroded re-bar anchored into the wall. Again, it shifted a fraction, but the re-bar anchor showed no sign of weakening. He had a lot more work to do, but he’d made progress.

  He rested another five minutes, gripped the strap of his watch in his fist so he could aim the dim light at the wall, and chipped away at the hole with the spike. Working more methodically this time, he conserved his energy. Slow and steady would win this race. The steady rhythm of his pounding mesmerized him into a kind of stupor, and his movement grew as automatic as the ticking armature of a metronome. After a while nothing existed except the loud whang of metal on rock, as regular as his pulse. Even the pain in his hands and legs and back faded into another place as the hypnotic swing of his arm became his sole focus.

  Sometime later, and without warning, the little light on his watch winked out, plunging the tunnel into total darkness. Travis had completely lost track of time. He didn’t know if it had been minutes or hours since he’d started. For a moment he panicked, but he forced himself to breathe deeply and rein in his fear. Darkness was his friend. Darkness had provided cover under which he’d been able to strike his enemy undetected in Afghanistan. Darkness had provided shelter when he and his team had needed rest and refuge. For years, darkness was the environment in which he’d operated best, tracking and stalking his kill like a heat-seeking missile.

  But this was different. This was complete blindness. He held his hand in front of his face. Nothing.

  This was Tess’s world.

  Chapter 22

  “Come on,” I muttered. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I took her elbow and helped her stand, turned and waited until I felt her fingers find a spot on my shoulder and give me a gentle tap to let me know she was ready. I returned a few curt nods as we walked out, but most of the men in the room ignored us. I was a hired hand—the “help” as they used to say down south—and Tess was female, status that rendered us both insignificant, unimportant. I wanted out of there as quickly as possible not to spare Tess any more humiliation—despite their best efforts, she’d held her own pretty well—but because if we stayed any longer I might’ve hit somebody.

  The tension in Tess radiated up through her arm and out the tips of her fingers. I could feel their imprint on my skin through my shirt.

  “They didn’t even listen.” Her voice trembled with anger.

  “Oh, they listened,” I growled. “They just didn’t want to hear what you had to say.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Get proof.” I stopped in the hallway and pushed the button to signal an elevator. “Derek never should have sent you into that meeting without it.”

  “I had to be there anyway. And Derek can’t prove anything yet.”

  “Then he shouldn’t have asked you to speak to the board. They made a laughingstock of you, Tess. And now it’s going to be twice as hard to convince them, even with proof.”

  A set of elevator doors opened with a soft ding. I led Tess inside. Down the hall, General Turnbull broke away from a group of board members and hurried toward us. He raised his hand.

  “Hold the elevator,” he called.

  I let the doors close without making an effort to stop them.

  “Was that—?”

  “Turnbull. Not much help in there. Let him get his own elevator.”

  “Well, we didn’t exactly let him in on it ahead of time,” Tess said. “Maybe I should have.”

  “Look, he’s either an ally or an enemy. He didn’t act like much of an ally in there. How much do you know about him, anyway?”

  Tess chewed on a fingernail.

  “I thought so.” I looked at the blinking numbers. “We’re next.”

  The elevator slowed and stopped with a soft bump on a garage level. Tess’s fingers crept to the top of my shoulder. They trembled as she followed a half step behind me to the car, and I heard her sniffle.

  “Where are we going?” she said as she lowered herself into the passenger seat.

  He turned her head away, but not far enough to hide her swiping at her cheek with her sleeve.

  “I don’t know yet.” I shut her door and rounded the hood to get in behind the wheel.

  “I don’t want to get home too late,” she said in a small voice after I started the engine. “Tim’s supposed to come over later so we can do math homework.”

  Again with the boyfriend. She was breaking my heart, not to mention cutting into my hours. What we needed was a break from all of it—from the psychopathic app that made kids shoot up school cafeterias to Travis’s disappearance to stuffy company board meetings. And, yes, from the new boyfriend, too. Suddenly, inspiration struck. I pulled out of the parking garage with a clear destination in mind. A black SUV pulled out right behind me—our security detail for the day, though I couldn’t remember who was on duty. Red, maybe.

  Twenty minutes later we pulled into a gravel drive not far from Tess’s house that curved up to a long, low-slung stable. At the far end was a large fenced-in riding ring, and beyond that a smaller covered ring for riding in inclement weather. I parked close to the big sliding door at the end of the stable. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I was glad to see that the SUV had hung back without turning into the drive, and now parked on the shoulder of the road.

  “Wait here,” I said as I got out. “I have to check something.”

  “Where are we?”

  “You’ll see. Just wait. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I hurried into the stable before Tess grew impatient, and quickly found the manager mucking out a stall.

  “Mrs. Forrester?”

  She stopped and leaned on her fork, peering at me from under a baseball cap embroidered with the stable’s logo.

  “Do I know you?”

  “I’m Oliver Moncrief. We met on a couple of other occasions.”

  She shook a finger in my direction. “Hang on. Just about got it. Yep, you were with Suki Hashimoto. Both times. Or was it three? How’d that work out?”

  “I got a few good rides out of it,” I grinned.

  “Figured, seeing as how she’s been here with, oh, two or three boys since. What can I do you for?”

  I explained what I wanted. She looked doubtful, and glanced at her watch.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s slow right now, so I’ll give you half an hour. Free, if you help me finish mucking out these stalls.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  I hustled out to get Tess while Mrs. Forrester saddled up a horse. She wrinkled her nose as I helped her out of the car. I sniffed the air—earthy, with the grassy scent of straw. The odors were stronger in the stable—horse sweat and the sharp scent of urine mixed in with the smell of straw and earth.

  “I smell horses.” Tess said.

  Mrs. Forrester led a dark bay mare from its stall. It nickered softly as they approached.

  Tess took a step back. “What’s going on, Oliver?”

  “You are going riding,” I told her.

  “I’m not dressed for it or anything!” she blurted.

  “You’re dressed just fine,” Mrs. Forrester said. “All you need’s a helmet, and we’ve got extras lying around.”

  “But I can’t,” she protested. “Oliver, tell her. I’m—”

  “Blind?” Mrs. Forrester said. “Swee’ Pea, here, can see just fine. And
she doesn’t give a hoot what you’re wearing.”

  The mare nickered again and nuzzled Tess’s hand. Tess tentatively stroked the mare’s muzzle. Swee’ Pea blew into her hand in response. A hint of a smile lightened Tess’s face as she moved her hand up to the horse’s cheek and then its strong, graceful neck. Swee’ Pea stood motionless, pressing her nose and forelock into Tess’s side as Tess stroked her neck.

  A few minutes later, a helmeted Tess sat astride Swee’ Pea, hands white-knuckling the saddle’s pommel as I led the horse to the covered ring.

  “She won’t bite. And she won’t buck you off, either. Relax.”

  Tension drained out of her, shoulders coming down from around her ears, and legs swinging more naturally with the horse’s gait. She leaned forward, taking one hand off the pommel and running it up Swee’ Pea’s neck. Twining her fingers in the horse’s mane, she leaned farther still until her nose touched Swee’ Pea’s glossy coat. She breathed deeply. When she straightened, a smile spread across her face that made me glad I’d thought of this place. She looked happier than I’d seen her since I answered Alice’s ad for a personal assistant.

  “I’ve never done this,” she said sounding surprised to enjoy it.

  “You’ve never ridden a horse? Isn’t that a mandatory phase in every girl’s life—ballerina, gymnast, equestrian…?”

  “Not this girl. I was a tomboy I guess. How’d you know about this place? I mean, I’ve seen it a million times. Well, I used to see it. It’s the stable near my house, right?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated. “I dated a girl who rides here. That’s how I met Mrs. Forrester. Mrs. Forrester volunteers her time to a school for the blind, and the owners of the horses donate them for an hour or two a week so the blind kids can ride them.”

  Tess was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “So, are you still dating her?”

  “That girl? No, not my type.”

  “That’s too bad.” Somehow she didn’t sound all that sorry. “Well, I’m glad Mrs. Forrester remembered you. This is nice.”