He needed a distraction, something that would consume his focus. Replacing the carafe back on its stand, Mac scanned the office. Three of his team members gathered around the center desk. One agent let out a loud laugh and made the mistake of glancing in his direction.
Mac didn’t have to hear their conversation to know they were still discussing the sting operation. He might have received the credit for putting Horde behind bars, but he would never live that day down. Lexie Trevena, who had to be a 100 pounds wet, took down Horde while Mac stood a foot away with vomit dripping off his leg.
If he wasn’t so damn pissed, maybe he would be able to find something to laugh about, too. He didn’t give a damn about being teased. It was what could have happened that stirred the acid in his gut.
The moments when Horde took Lexie hostage, his arm crushing her throat, played over again in his nightmares. What possessed her to play ninja? She could have been killed, and his idiotic team stood there laughing at him.
He took in another swig of coffee, headed toward his office, and stopped short. Shit.
His brother, Jason, sat in Mac’s chair, his legs resting on his desk like he owned the place. He was reading the Horde file with a stupid-ass grin on his face.
“Get out of my chair.” Mac set his coffee down, moved back toward the door, and pointed to the letters printed on the glass. “My name, my desk, my damn 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.
“Morning to you, too, bro. 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 through a couple of the photos in the folder. “You had way too much fun without me.” He tossed the papers back onto 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 damn office get the kind of danger they were in? The kind of 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. The 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 he’d felt the instant Lexie walked into the middle of his sting operation.
“I don’t think that is 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 any woman affect 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 damn …”
“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?”
“Oh 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 up from the chair, sending it to the floor. “Sarah, what’s wrong? Are you okay? 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 the best cryptologist in the department and a genius with numbers. If Díaz thought they needed her badly enough to drag her off maternity leave and allow something so unorthodox as bringing Mac’s three-week-old niece and nephew into the building, then something really ugly had happened.
“I heard you were already here so I sent a car to your house,” Díaz told Jason. “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?”
Taking his nephew’s carrier from his boss, Mac nodded toward the break room. “There’s a fresh pot of coffee if you are interested.” He headed toward the conference room, nodding to his team to follow.
Sarah and Jason placed the babies on two chairs between them. The tension in the room was palpable. Mac’s team was either 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, but he couldn’t control the rapid beat of his heart against his ribs.
Díaz slipped a flash drive into a laptop and projected the surveillance footage on the large screen. “A team of five men drove right 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 do know is that this crew was meticulous, almost methodical. 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 are no 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.
“Wherever you’re most comfortable. Anything you can do to help us will be greatly appreciated.” Handing Mac the file he held, he said, “I want e
veryone from the head honcho at Karnes to the janitorial services picked over with a fine-toothed comb. The drone wasn’t armed when it left the facility, but it was fully operational.”
Mac stood. “Who else knows about this, sir?”
“Right now, the only people who know are 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 beach front. This is domestic terrorism. Do what you have to do to get the drone back 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. Firemen aimed hose nozzles at a large, black hole where the front door once stood.
“What am I looking at?” Mac asked. His crazed beating heart dropped to the pit of his stomach.
“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. They are working through the home now for survivors.”
“The drone taken from Karnes would have been programmed to strike with such 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 back of the house and was placed 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 wish. Sleep would be a long time coming. 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 had offered to take over.
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 and reached for his daughter. “Her face is beet red. Colic again?”
Mac nodded. “Burped up the big one a couple of minutes ago, though, so she’s starting to calm.”
“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 back 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 get to talk to him?”
“I had a couple of minutes with him 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 by hiring more border patrol agents, or even using drones as a surveillance tool to control the border between Texas and Mexico. 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 if we permit people who are willing to work on this side of the river to do so.”
“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.” She pinned Mac with a hard stare. “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.”
“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.”
Mac 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 unencrypted 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 has been programmed to do the same thing on a variant schedule.”
Mac let out a loud sigh. “I don’t understand.”
“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?”
“That I don’t know. I don’t think our little team of thieves was aware of the program until it sent out the signal. They have probably deactivated the program 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, Sarah?”
“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. “You don’t need much room to launch a drone. If anyon
e was around that early in the morning, the drone would just look like a large model airplane.”
Mac cleared his throat. “If that is where it was launched, is that where it returned?”
“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. He hated feeling stupid. “Sarah, you said it took off there, not launched. What did you mean by that?”
His sister-in-law studied him before she answered. “You understand that you don’t have to even be in the same country as the drone to launch it, right?”
“If you know where the bastard is who launched a damn missile into a senator’s family home, I sure the hell wish you would tell me.”
“Rule number one. No cussing in front of the twins.” Sarah sat back in her chair and shifted so she could face Mac. “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 back 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?”
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