Tanner

by Dale Mayer

  Hard to work on a relationship while here though. He was really worried about Wynn’s paragliding accident. He wondered if anybody had considered Todd’s accident in the same light. Maybe someone was after both siblings?

  “Dinnertime. Up and at ’em,” Mason called out.

  Tanner bounced to his feet and walked out of the tent. A bunch of the guys were waiting for him. The chow line was brutally long. While standing in line, Tanner thought about his own future. He’d been saving up his money since forever. Always in the back of his mind he had planned that he would get married, buy a house and start a family. Like that standard dream everybody had. But it hadn’t happened yet. And then he came up against Wynn and Todd and saw what they were building, what they were doing for themselves, and it made Tanner wonder when he would go down that road. What did he want to do after his time in the navy? He had never really considered that, thinking he would retire from the navy in his sixties. But life happens …

  “Hey, you still thinking about her?” Shadow gave him a light punch in the shoulder. “That’s a good sign, right?”

  Tanner looked at him and said, “I don’t know. Is it? Somebody is trying to kill her. I need to solve that problem, or I won’t be able to take her on a second date.”

  “Not only do we protect the old and the innocent and the injured,” Shadow said quietly, “but we also protect those we love.”

  Tanner shot him a shuttered look. “It’s not there yet.”

  Shadow tilted his head, undeterred. “Given that, you’ll need to stick close. As in move-in type of close.”

  “But it’s not there yet,” Tanner repeated.

  Shadow’s lips quirked. “Oh, yeah, it is. You’re just in denial.”

  “I hardly know her.”

  At that, all the men fell silent and turned to look at him.

  Tanner raised both hands in frustration. “What?”

  “None of us knew our women very well before we ended up more or less hitched, but we knew the important parts,” Mason said. “When it’s right, it’s right.”

  Tanner thought about that as they waited in line for dinner. Was it that simple? He’d met a lot of women who he had liked. But none who kept him awake at night. None that worried him quite the same way as Wynn did. He loved the fact that she was following her passion and that she was doing so well with what she wanted to do. That she might have made some big enemies just meant she was doing some big things. Nothing like power and competition to get other people on edge.

  Rarely did people come up against somebody who tried to kill them though.

  He pulled out his phone and sent her a text.

  The answer came back soon. Hey, thought you forgot about us.

  He winced. Sorry. Out of country.

  Immediately her response was Sorry. I know. I didn’t mean to make that sound accusatory. And she sent a happy face emoji.

  He chuckled and texted Just thinking of you.

  Ditto.

  He pocketed his phone and looked up to find all the guys grinning crazily at him. Tanner growled. “What?”

  They all shook their heads.

  Mason said, “Wynn is good people.”

  “She is. And I already feel half responsible for her. But is it because I saved her life or because I really care?”

  “You already know the answer to that,” Shadow said. “Don’t take something pure and fill it with excuses or doubts. It is what it is. Just move forward.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re on the other side.”

  “Sure, but all of us have been through it,” Shadow said quietly. “There’s only one person you’re lying to, and that’s yourself. So open your heart, figure out what it really wants and go from there.” And with that profound statement, Shadow stepped ahead of Tanner in the line, snagged a plate and started filling it with food.

  Chapter 9

  Four days later Todd said, “Have you still not heard from Tanner?”

  “Just the once,” she said. “I’m hardly a priority for him right now when he’s on an overseas mission. And we still don’t have a bodyguard replacement after the last SEAL got called to duty last night. Just so you know.” But Todd didn’t pay much attention to things when he was working.

  Thankfully Todd left her alone after that. It was Friday, nine days after her accident. She walked into the office, unlocked the door, turned on the lights and headed to her computer to boot it up. As she sat down, her phone buzzed. She lifted it to see a message from Tanner.

  Surprised, she stared at it, but inside her heart warmed. He’d been here it seemed like constantly for the majority of the forty-eight hours after her accident. Just about to respond to his text, her phone rang. And it was also Tanner. She picked up the phone and answered. “Hello?”

  “Are you angry at me?”

  “Of course not.” But of course she was. A little. She sighed. “At least not very much. Besides, you were working. It is what it is.”

  He laughed. “I didn’t get a chance to contact you again. I got in late last night.”

  She smiled. “So are you off today?”

  “I am. I was going to swing by and see if you wanted to go out for lunch.”

  “Absolutely I do,” she said. “What time?”

  “How about noon?”

  “See you then.” Smiling, she ended the call, glad to have Tanner as her assigned bodyguard now. She felt bad that those other guys had given up their free time to be here. And wouldn’t you know it? There had been a break-in when one guy had to leave with no backup guard for them. Made her wonder if her house wasn’t being watched. But she really didn’t want to consider that.

  She put down the phone and tried to log in. But she couldn’t. She tried again and again. She got up and walked out to the shop, but Todd was in his office, along the same side of the building as her office, yet on the opposite end of the workshop. She walked in and said, “Have you been able to log into the system this morning?”

  He was working on his big tablet, making design changes. He shook his head. “No. I was going to ask you when you arrived.”

  She groaned. “So is this the usual bullshit with computers, or have we been hacked?”

  Slowly he lifted his gaze, and a look of horror crossed his face. “We better not have been hacked.”

  She returned to her office, picked up the phone and called the IT security company. “I can’t log in. Can you see what’s going on, please?” While she was on the phone, the IT techs went through her system.

  “Yes, there was an attack. Somebody trying to get in, too many log-ins within a short time. We locked down all the accounts.”

  “How many attempts?”

  “Seven.”

  Dazed, she raised her gaze to Todd, now standing with his crutches in her doorway. “Somebody attempted to log in seven times before the system shut him down.”

  “In that case make sure that’s changed to three,” Todd snapped. “The hell anybody gets seven tries.”

  “The system was locked down after three tries,” the guy at the end of the phone said. “But we didn’t put up an error message, so they continued to try.”

  “Oh, good.” She explained that to Todd, who was surprised.

  “That’s interesting. Can they tell what passwords were tried?”

  She asked the tech that.

  “Yes, we do have a list of variations of passwords tried. I’ll send those over by email. That was forty-seven minutes ago.”

  She stared at Todd. “This happened forty-seven minutes ago.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s eight o’clock now. So we would have been having coffee in the kitchen about seven-fifteen.”

  Todd shook his head. “No, we probably weren’t even up yet. We were late getting around this morning, remember?”

  “How long did all those attempts take?” she asked the guy on the phone.

  “It took eleven minutes and thirty seconds,” the voice on the other end said. “Now if you want to run through the secu
rity log-ins, as soon as I get the right answers I can get your system back up and running so your password is allowed in.”

  By the time she ran through that double-check and entered her log-in and password, the system booted up. “Okay, I’m in.” She released a breath. “Thanks. What I would like to do is have a message alert, something sent to me if this happens again.”

  “We can set that up,” the tech answered. “Is a text message okay?”

  “Text message is perfect.” Getting off the phone, she turned to Todd. “They’ll text us an alert anytime somebody tries to access the system from now on.”

  “Also have it set up so, if anybody accesses the system outside of regular working hours, we get an alert then too.”

  “I told them you and I both work evenings and often from our rooms,” she reminded him.

  Frowning, he thought about that and nodded. “Anything else in here touched?”

  She glanced around and realized the filing cabinet lock looked odd. She pulled the key out from where it was taped behind the filing cabinet and unlocked it. The key wouldn’t go in. “Somebody has jimmied the lock on the filing cabinet,” she announced. “All three break-ins happened when we didn’t have a bodyguard on the premises. Granted, the first time we didn’t know we needed a bodyguard. Do you think somebody is watching the house now that we both work here full-time?”

  Her brother started to swear. “You know? It’s got to be somebody after our designs,” he said. “There’s no other reason to break into our workshop and to try getting into the computers and the filing cabinet.”

  “I know, but they didn’t succeed in breaking into the filing cabinet. And my laptop was in the bottom drawer.”

  “But your desktop has the same designs backed up to it that are on your laptop, right?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Presumably we’re heading into more and more of this kind of espionage.”

  “I hope not,” she said. “We’ve been pretty lucky. I don’t really want to start living in a world like this.” She replaced the key in its spot and sighed. “I guess I need a locksmith in here to change out the lock and key so that I can get into my own filing cabinet.” She sat back down, hoping to get some work done. She heard Todd not very far away. She got up and poked her head out of her office door.

  Todd stood in the workshop in front of the inventory of raw materials, glancing through everything.

  “Was anything taken?” she asked sharply. “I didn’t even think about that.”

  “It doesn’t look like it,” he said. “But how did they get in in the first place?”

  “Who knows?” She ran a hand through her hair. “Just because the police drive by more now, and we have SEALs for bodyguards as often as they can possibly swing it with their real job, we are here alone at times too. I mean, we have locks on the doors, but we don’t yet have security alarms on all the windows.” She pointed to one of the windows that was open about a foot and a half.

  Swearing even more, Todd made his way over and peered out. “Footprints outside,” he said.

  She raced to his side and stared out. Sure enough this window looked upon the interior courtyard between the L-shaped house attached to the L-shaped workshop. The courtyard could only be accessed via the shop or the house. It was one of the reasons they’d left it open all the time. There was always a nice breeze. “So, somehow he gets in this way. Did he paraglide in or climb over the two-story-tall roof? Regardless, he had free access to everything in the workshop. He gets into my office but can’t get into the computer or the files.”

  Todd nodded. “Sounds about right. So what does he do now?”

  “He leaves before we get up, but now he’s planning and plotting when to get back in and what he needs to get the job done right this time.” She shook her head. “And I really don’t like the sound of that.”

  “So we need to ask somebody who’s a specialist in this field,” Todd said.

  “Security alarms on the windows might help, but a glass cutter would easily take care of that,” she said. “Anybody with any skills in breaking and entering would be able to pick the locks and bypass security alarms. They got into my office, but they didn’t get into the computers—this time. As for the filing cabinet, he either thought he didn’t have time or wasn’t too concerned about what was in it.”

  “Since there’s a hand truck right here in the shop, why not just load up the filing cabinet and take it away with him?”

  She turned and stared at her brother in horror. “Is that seriously what we’re looking at? I came out here to suggest we digitize all our files as it is. Now you’re making me think I need to do that today.”

  Todd straightened and looked at her. “Honestly I’m afraid it is something we need to look at today. We also need to look at a better alarm system before nightfall. Somebody is after our designs,” he said slowly. “I wonder if it’s somebody from your former employer.”

  She shook her head. “Tanner asked me the same thing. Particularly after the latest accident, I just don’t understand why anybody would give a damn. We’ve been designing new prototypes for several years, and I’ve worked at the school for two of those.”

  “Sure, but it’s only in the last few months we came up with the best ideas of all, and don’t forget. Just because we were designing for years, we weren’t building them for anyone else but ourselves. It’s only recently that we’ve put them together. A physical prototype. And you know they’re damn good paragliders. The harness system is better than anything else on the market. And somebody else knows it.”

  “It really breaks my heart to think anybody who I worked with over the last two years is involved in breaking and entering into my place and stealing our intellectual property information that we worked so hard to develop.”

  “And I don’t think they give a damn,” Todd said sadly. “Somebody you know, somebody you worked with, someone somewhere has probably been keeping track of your progress with these designs all this time. When you were fired, he realized he would have to come here and take the material you had removed from the warehouse. He didn’t get a chance to steal anything, or maybe he just needed the last bits. Who knows? Maybe he figured you were fired because you wouldn’t share your designs. I can’t say. But what we can say is, we’re now on somebody’s radar. And we have to do whatever we can to make sure they don’t get all our hard work and leave us with nothing.”

  *

  Tanner had a couple days off, and he needed them. He was tired. He hadn’t slept well in Iraq, and the pace had been brutal, as always. He got out of the shower, leaving the door open for the steam to vent outward, and, with the towel still wrapped around his hips, he walked into the small kitchen of his apartment and put on a pot of coffee. By the time that had finished dripping, he was dressed. When his phone rang, it was Mason. At least it wasn’t Wynn canceling lunch.

  “Hey, Tanner. How are things at your end? You at Wynn’s or at home?”

  “I’ll be at Wynn’s place soon. I wanted to do some research into Todd’s accident in the meantime.”

  “Well, that’s partly why I’m calling. You wanted Tesla to research background info on the two owners of the paragliding school and to do a full rundown on everybody who worked with Wynn. Well, she has that for you. But she says you have to come here and have coffee with us before she’ll hand it over.”

  He chuckled. “Now that’s devious. But I accept. Are you sure you’re ready to see more of me though?”

  “Doesn’t matter if I am or not. What Tesla wants, Tesla gets,” Mason said with a note of good humor.

  But Tanner wasn’t fooled. Mason was so head over heels in love that it was stupidly scary. “Be there in ten minutes.”

  *

  Mason and Tesla were waiting for him, both with warm grins. She handed him a sheaf of papers she’d printed off. “This is what I’ve accumulated so far.”

  He sat down and looked it over while she poured him a cup of coffee. “The school is in financial trou
ble?”

  “Yes, they brought Wynn in, thinking it would bring them big sales. Instead the market itself has taken a hit. The cost of the gear has gone up, and some of the cachet has gone out of the industry—the accidents in this sport are gaining more press coverage, for one. So, instead of getting increased revenues, they ended up with less.”

  “So firing Wynn made financial sense then.”

  “Well, it does until you realize there was a life insurance policy on her.”

  “Who holds the policy?”

  “Hartman Insurance,” Tesla says. “The benefactor is her brother.”

  “Well, Todd didn’t try to kill her. I know that for sure.”

  “We can never know anything for sure. Remember that,” Mason said. “We can assume, but we can’t ever really know.”

  Tanner lifted his gaze and smiled at Mason. “He really loves his sister, and he’s got lots of his own money. So I don’t think that’s an issue.”

  “No, but what you don’t know is,” Tesla said, “Charlie’s school is insured, so, if any of the staff dies on the job, the family gets a rider, but so does the school itself, to help cover the bad press.”

  “Isn’t that a very unusual policy?”

  “It’s incredibly unusual. But, when you consider what a death would mean to the school, it might make sense.”

  “I’m surprised someone took that on. What insurance company issued that policy?”

  “Hartman.”

  Tanner lifted his head and looked over at her. “Now that doesn’t sound right.”

  “Especially not when you consider Hartman is a very small insurance company, and it’s owned by friends of the grandparents of Todd and Wynn.”