Countdown. Heather Woodhaven
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of disbelief cross his neighbor’s face. “My brother is a contractor and my sister-in-law is an architect.” James reached past her and grabbed his bag “The first time she stepped inside my house she said the ugly brown door in the living room had to go. Aria believes every house should have a hidden door.”
He peeked out the windows. “Two men in suits got out of the sedan and are coming this way. I may be overreacting, but I’d feel a lot better if we both got downstairs before our unexpected visitors ring the doorbell.”
Her eyes widened, but she remained silent. James could kick himself. Once again, his inept communication skills were messing things up. He operated in an analytical and efficient fashion while she was clearly a people person, apt to taking her time and discussing all the options—something he’d heard normal people did.
Well, he couldn’t take the time to say anything more now. He stepped past her as the boys jumped up and down at the bottom of the steps.
“How fast were we, Daddy?”
“Yeah, how fast?”
James grinned and looked back to see Rachel’s face relax, although the lines around her eyes were still tight. “One second, boys. I need to lock the door.”
They maneuvered an awkward sidestep. Her arm brushed against his. James almost slowed down from the sudden warmth of her touch.
The back of the swinging bookcase had a regular doorknob. He pulled it closed and flipped the hooked latch on the back to keep anyone else from accessing the entrance. If anyone recognized it as a door, though, they’d be able to break the hook pretty easily. “My sister-in-law asked me if I wanted it to double as a panic room, but I thought that would’ve been over the top. Now I wish I’d taken her up on it.”
Even more so after he heard about the harrowing experience his brother Luke had gone through in the past year. A panic room had saved Luke’s life and the life of Gabriella, another new sister-in-law.
Downstairs, they found the boys playing with the train table stationed near his desk.
Rachel turned to him, wide-eyed. “Okay, we’re downstairs. Can you tell me what’s going on now?”
“Bear with me a little longer.” James put one hand on each of the boys’ shoulders. “We’re going to play another game. There are some men that might try to get into our house. We need to make sure they don’t hear us, okay?”
“Are they bad men?” Caleb asked. His fingers tightened around the blue train in his pudgy hand.
James’s heart sank. So much for keeping things light and playful. “I don’t know. They might be good guys,” he answered. “But they’re not the men that tried to take you. Those men are in jail.”
Ethan didn’t respond, but his serious focus on the trains in front of him betrayed his concern.
“So we’re playing this game to make sure everyone leaves us alone.” Rachel leaned forward and used a higher pitched voice. “Just in case. It’s like hide-and-go-seek, and your dad’s office is a fort.” She flashed a radiant smile and winked at Ethan.
That seemed to calm the boys, and they both maneuvered their trains toward the bridge. James worried his lip. Even at their quietest they still made choo-choo noises without realizing it.
“So, back to what’s going on...” Rachel said, her voice hushed. But it came across more like a question.
He straightened and looked around his office with a fresh set of eyes. He’d never had a nonrelative female in his house, let alone his workspace. The framed portrait showed him in front of the South Korean flag as he accepted a black belt. It served as the only wall decoration. His wife had hated that he hadn’t smiled for that photograph, but his instructor had told him anything other than a serious face would break tradition. At least his walls weren’t white anymore, thanks to his sister-in-law’s insistence.
How did he even begin to explain the work predicament to a hairdresser? Nikki had worked in the IT field so James had never had to talk about work to a normal person. In fact, his company discouraged it. He took a deep breath. “You know I work for Launch Operations, right?”
She nodded. “The space company.”
“Yes. We launch satellites, usually for telecom services but sometimes for the government, as well.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You work on computers there.”
“I handle system operations.” He searched for the right words. “I watch the processes...the scripts that go through the system. Maybe I should back up—”
Rachel put two hands on her hips and closed her eyes while she inhaled deeply. Her eyes flashed open. “You’re trying to dumb it down for me, which I can appreciate, but for the sake of time, why don’t you speak candidly? I can ask questions if I need to.”
“That works for me.” James’s shoulders relaxed. “I’m a systems administrator, so I monitor system processes. A glitch happened a few days ago and I fixed it but discovered another process set up for constant monitoring. It sent alerts to someone—I don’t know who—on the status of radioactive material.”
Her mauve-tinted mouth dropped open. “Radioactive? Is that normal?”
James studied the thin carpet underneath his sneakers. How much detail should he go into? “For this launch, the radioactive part isn’t normal. I had a hunch about what it could mean, though. Do you know what an EMP, an electronic magnetic pulse weapon, is?”
She cocked her head. “Something that could knock out our power?”
“At a rudimentary level.”
Rachel darted a glance at the boys. Her frown was so intense her eyebrows almost touched her thick lashes. “You think you found that?”
“The process indicates something radioactive hiding within the satellite, something not on any of the schematics.” He blew out a breath. “The launch had been approved. All the necessary permits gathered. The air force even had to certify it beforehand, and it passed with flying colors. There are government officials on site to oversee things, which made me wonder who I could trust.”
“That’s why you contacted the NSA?”
“A friend of mine, yes. He got back to me a couple days ago and asked me to stall the launch. He said there was reason for concern, but he needed more time to investigate to get to the bottom of it.” James sighed. “I agreed to help and wrote a process that writes more processes and sends error messages about the rocket’s engine being faulty.”
She squinted. “Are you trying to say you wrote a virus?”
James looked at the ceiling. Technically, what he did was different, but he didn’t have time to discuss semantics. “Uh, basically. A very complicated virus, if you want to call it that. Bottom line is they won’t be able to launch until it’s fixed.”
“Oh.” She blinked rapidly and turned toward his desk. “That’s...a lot to take in.”
James raked a hand through his hair, the curls off his forehead a moment before they bounced back into position. “I thought the NSA would take over by now. I did my part. But I believe whoever is hiding something on that satellite figured out what I did and shut me out of the system. I got locked out at the same time someone tried to kidnap my kids.”
She put a hand on her cheek as she paled.
He hadn’t meant to say “kidnap,” but the kids didn’t react to his slip-up. “That’s why,” he said, “I think they’ve been looking for someone to use as leverage against me.”
She dropped her hands. “So you’ll fix the virus.”
James sighed. It was a relief she understood the gravity of the situation and seemed to believe him. He didn’t want to explain why the NSA knew it would take other men with the same qualifications days to be