Countermeasures. Janie Crouch
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Except for in this one case. Sawyer couldn’t help but be suspicious of that.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. Evan Karcz. Good, maybe now Sawyer could get an update on what was happening back at Omega.
Sawyer walked out of the vault without saying anything to Megan and Jonathan. They were obviously deeply focused on the countermeasure salvage. Sawyer doubted they would miss him at all.
“Evan. How’s it going in the real world?”
Evan chuckled a little at Sawyer’s greeting. “I take it that means you’re still less than thrilled with your Cyberdyne assignment?”
“Well, let’s just say it hasn’t been what I expected.”
“Oh yeah? More interesting or less?”
Sawyer glanced over his shoulder at Megan before walking farther down the hall toward her office. “More interesting. Definitely more.”
That got Evan’s attention. “Is something happening there, Sawyer? Good news, I hope.”
“Dr. Fuller thought it was going to take up to a few weeks to finish the Ghost Shell countermeasure, but we encountered a setback first thing this morning.” Sawyer told Evan about the problem in the vault.
“Well, that’s definitely not good. I hope they can recover something from the drive, because things are going to hell in a handbasket around here concerning DS-13 and Fred McNeil.”
“Movement?” Sawyer proceeded all the way into Megan’s office and closed the door.
“Word is, DS-13 is going to have some sort of infiltrative software system coming available in the next couple of weeks.”
“That sounds exactly like Ghost Shell.”
“I thought so, too.”
“Dr. Fuller said there were a number of computer people who would be able to finish the work on their version of Ghost Shell. That it was only a matter of time.”
“He was right, it looks like.”
Sawyer decided to let the erroneous pronoun choice go for the time being. “So what’s the plan?”
“I’m still going under. But as Bob Sinclair.”
That stopped Sawyer in his tracks. “What?”
“I know, Sawyer, believe me, I know. But one of my contacts who has direct ties with DS-13 reached out to me as Bob Sinclair about all this Ghost Shell mess.”
“I thought you retired Bob Sinclair a year ago. After...” Sawyer couldn’t even bring himself to say it.
Bob Sinclair was an undercover persona Evan had carefully developed as a high-end weapons buyer for terrorist groups. Juliet, Sawyer’s sister, had gone undercover with him as Lisa Sinclair, Bob’s wife. Until it had ended in tragedy.
“Sawyer, I know what you’re thinking. And believe me, Juliet won’t be involved this time.”
“She better the hell not be, Evan. She’s not ready.”
“Nobody wants to protect Juliet more than me.”
“Fine, just leave her out of it. And make sure Burgamy isn’t putting any pressure on her to go back under, either.” Sawyer didn’t like being away from Omega where he could make sure for himself that his sister wasn’t being pressured to go back undercover. But he trusted Evan.
“I just wanted you to know what was going on. Word is to expect a big sale coming up in the next couple of weeks. If that’s Ghost Shell, we need to be ready with the countermeasure.”
“Roger that. Dr. Fuller was pretty pissed off about what happened with Fred McNeil. Took a bit of convincing to get the team to trust that I wasn’t going to do something similar and get working on the countermeasure.”
Evan chuckled. “Dr. Fuller giving you hell? Even after only one day?”
“Yeah, she’s something.”
“She? I thought it was Dr. Zane Fuller?”
“Yeah, Dr. Zane Megan Fuller. Not sure if Burgamy left out the Megan part on accident or on purpose.” Sawyer rolled his eyes.
“Well, I certainly imagined that wrong. I guess two degrees from MIT made me think middle-aged guy.”
“You’re not the only one. But try female in her late twenties.”
Sawyer had to pull his phone back from his ear, Evan was laughing so hard. “Of course she is.”
“Shut up, Evan.”
“Look, I’ll let you go play with your scientist, but tell her to hurry up with the countermeasure.” Somberness crept back into Evan’s tone. “It’s going to be easy for this situation to get shot straight to hell very quickly.”
“I know, man, you be careful. Your Bob Sinclair cover has some holes, especially without Juliet.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll get it worked out. Looks like I might be coming down toward your current location. My contact is not far out of Asheville.”
DS-13 with movement just outside Asheville? Another interesting coincidence Sawyer wasn’t going to take at face value.
Sawyer saw Megan walking toward the office from the vault. “All right, man. Keep me posted if anything further develops. As soon as Cyberdyne has the countermeasure completed, you’ll be my first call.”
Megan tapped lightly on the door before walking in just as Sawyer was ending the call.
“How’d it go?” Sawyer asked her.
Megan threw the file she was carrying down on her desk. “I hope that whoever you were talking to had some good news for you. Because after a complete scan of the damaged hard drive, we discovered that almost nothing is recoverable. We’re basically starting from scratch.”
Four days later, Megan was considering killing herself and everyone around her. Absolutely nothing was going right with the Ghost Shell countermeasure. Everything she and the team did seemed to be one-step-forward and two-steps-back. First having to start from scratch after the drive was damaged, then errors both human and mechanical plagued them.
She was one mistake away from becoming a homicidal maniac.
Megan was used to working under pressure. Pressure was a challenge she generally enjoyed—it forced her brain to exert in ways not normally required of it. Thinking faster often produced new and exciting solutions that working a problem slowly often missed.
But right now thinking faster was just producing a bunch of junk.
Admittedly, the pressure Megan usually fell under wasn’t the save-the-world variety. It tended to be more of the save money or time variety. Knowing that if they didn’t get the countermeasure completed before Ghost Shell was sold on the black market by this DS-13 group then thousands of lives could be lost tended to put Megan a little on edge.
But really it was Sawyer Branson’s constant presence here that was damaging Megan’s calm. Not that he was critical or did anything to deliberately make her uncomfortable, he was just always there. Observing, reporting, ready to help if there was anything he could do.
It was driving her absolutely nuts.
After yet another error in the computer coding had forced Megan’s team to backtrack again this morning, Megan had decided to leave them to that part and take an early working lunch.
And yeah, Megan could admit she was hiding out a little from Sawyer here in the small break room of the R & D department.
She had brought with her the new drive she and the team had partially rebuilt over the past couple