Leverage. Janie Crouch
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let him.”
“It’s no problem, hon. I can handle Burgamy.”
“Thanks for meeting Shelby. She and I knew each other in college. She’s...special.”
Dylan didn’t know what to make of special. That could mean a lot of things. “Well, I hope you don’t mean special as in special needs like your husband.”
Megan laughed. “No, Shelby is definitely not special needs. The opposite, in fact. A brilliant computer-game programmer.”
“Well, either way it’s no problem. I’ll see you guys soon. I’ve got to get going if I’m going to meet Shelby on time. Burgamy didn’t leave much wiggle room.”
“Thanks again, Dylan.”
“Anything for you, sweetheart. You just keep my little niece or nephew safe, okay? Bye.”
Dylan disconnected and went inside his house of the past four years. He had never brought a woman here; he’d preferred encounters to happen at their place instead. It made leaving much easier and awkward talks about why he couldn’t stay much less necessary.
Dylan preferred his solitude and planned to keep it that way. He’d tried dating, but many women thought being a widower meant he needed to be smothered with attention. With love. They wanted to wrap their arms around him and help chase his demons away. Dylan knew they meant well, but he couldn’t tolerate that kind of unrelenting attention.
Dylan would face his own demons. Always had.
So he kept things casual with women, and kept them out of his personal space. Sometimes, much more rarely now, he got physically involved, but he was sure to let a woman know up front that his heart was off the table. A future with Dylan was not an option.
Dylan walked into his bedroom and changed out of the dirty work clothes he’d had on for normal plane maintenance. He decided to take a quick shower, cursing Burgamy again when he couldn’t linger under the hot water to help loosen some of the residual soreness from old wounds. Thirty minutes wasn’t a long time to get to Falls Run from his house.
And yes, Sally’s was the only sit-down restaurant in the small town, more of a diner than anything else. There were also a couple of fast-food places, a gas station, a bar, hardware store and bank. Falls Run wasn’t that small. And it was perfect for Dylan’s purposes in a town: small enough that he didn’t have to worry about too many strangers wandering around, and large enough that he was able to get what he needed regularly enough for both his business and personal needs.
He’d chosen Falls Run on purpose. At the borders of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, it allowed him access, via his Cessna, to almost anywhere on the East and Gulf coasts. Plus, the town was surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains. In Dylan’s opinion, you couldn’t ask for better real estate than that.
And it was far enough from Washington, DC, and Omega for him to stay away from his past there.
Dylan rolled his eyes. At least he thought Falls Run was far enough away. Evidently not, given the past few years. Dylan got dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, grabbed his keys and wallet from the dresser and headed out the door to his pickup truck.
What the hell. He’d enjoy a nice meal at Sally’s—he was tired of his own cooking anyway—and meet Megan’s friend. Dylan pretty much kept to himself, but he knew how to be polite and charming when he wanted to be. His mother had instilled that much in the Branson siblings when they were growing up. Shelby Keelan wasn’t at fault for Burgamy’s high-handed tactics; no need to blame her. He’d meet her and move on.
Get the codes. Deliver the codes. Get out.
No problem.
For the first time she could remember, Shelby Keelan cursed her gifts when it came to math. Normally she was very appreciative of them: they allowed her to make a great living doing something she enjoyed—making games kids loved to play. But not this time. This time her abilities had brought her out of her nice comfortable home to a strange town to meet a strange person she had no real desire to meet.
Of course, Shelby rarely had the desire to meet anyone new.
She easily found a parking spot at the restaurant in Falls Run, although the lot was across the street from the diner due to the narrow shape of the town forced by mountains. Shelby had been told there was only one restaurant and she couldn’t miss it, but she’d still been a little worried. What kind of town had only one restaurant?
Evidently the town of Falls Run.
Shelby didn’t mind small towns. She didn’t mind big cities either. It was the people in both that tended to cause her stress. Shelby just didn’t do people very well.
Even now, pulling into a mostly empty parking lot, she was pretty stressed out. Shelby knew she would need to make small talk. With strangers. Multiple strangers maybe. She had many talents, but chatting with people wasn’t one of them. She was an introvert through and through.
Her introversion had driven her flamboyant mother crazy when Shelby was a child. Her mom wanted to show her off—as if people really wanted to hear some four-year-old recite pi to the two-hundredth digit—but young Shelby had just wanted to be alone.
Adult Shelby just wanted to be alone, too. Back at her own house in Knoxville, where everything had its place and was comfortable and safe and familiar. Where she didn’t have to think too hard about what she did or what she said or if she was coming off as rude or unfriendly or standoffish.
It wasn’t that Shelby was afraid of people, she really wasn’t. She wasn’t agoraphobic, as her mother tried so often to suggest. Wasn’t afraid something terrible would happen to her if she left her house. People just...exhausted Shelby. So she chose to be around them as little as possible. Fortunately, she had a job developing games and software that allowed her to spend most of her time away from people. Perfect.
Plus, she had plenty of friends in her life, just mostly of the four-legged and furry variety. And none of them were disappointed when Shelby wasn’t up to making small talk. They kept one another company just fine. And Shelby had a couple of the two-legged-friend versions, too.
But it took pretty grave circumstances to get Shelby to willingly leave her house and be around people she didn’t know for extended periods of time as she was doing now.
Like a terrorist-attack countdown in the coding of a children’s computer game. One that Shelby happened to discover two days ago. One that anyone else in the world would’ve missed.
But Shelby hadn’t missed it, the way she never missed anything having to do with numbers. She had known immediately the numbers she saw were not part of the game. They clearly had been planted, and once Shelby dug into them a bit, she realized they were, in part, a countdown. But she couldn’t figure out any more than that on her own.
Sure that she had stumbled on to something potentially criminal at best, downright sinister at worst, Shelby had emailed her computer engineering friend from their college days at MIT, Dr. Megan Fuller.
Except Megan was Dr. Megan Fuller-Branson now, and expecting a little baby Dr. Fuller-Branson in a couple of months.
Shelby had explained the coding she’d found and what she suspected. Most others would’ve scoffed or accused Shelby of overdramatizing, but Megan and Shelby had developed a healthy respect for each other years ago at MIT. They may not be the type to chat with each other over coffee, but they took each other seriously.
And it ended up that Megan was now working with her new husband at some sort of clandestine law enforcement agency that specialized in saving-the-world type of stuff. Quite convenient for the matter at hand. Especially since the codes had been planted by some terrorist group known as DS-13, who was evidently really bad news.
Spotting the codes