Fatal Error by J.A. Jance Page A

but that wasn’t happening. They had gotten a hell of a deal by paying the lease in advance, but time was up. The landlord had someone who was interested in moving in.
    Renters for the warehouse/manufacturing spaces in the office park complex were few and far between at the moment, so he was letting them hang on to their storage space at a greatly reduced rent. That gave Mark and Mina a place to store the office equipment and furniture they had been unable to unload. How much longer they’d be able to manage even that paltry amount of space was a question for which Mark had no easy answer.
    Mark slammed open the door to his wife’s office, then he went inside and collapsed into the nearest chair.
    “How’d it go?” Mina asked.
    Mark shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s something wrong with the controls. The drone flew fine for a while, like there was nothing at all the matter with it. I was putting it through its paces and it was perfect, but when I tried to land it, everything went to hell.”
    “It crashed?” Mina asked.
    “I’ll say,” Mark said with a nod. “And I don’t know why—no idea.”
    “What about the wreckage?” she asked.
    “Don’t worry,” Mark said. “That’s the only good thing about all this. It went into the water. No one will ever find it.”
    The water in this instance was the Salton Sea, near Mark’s rustic cabin. It was possible that someday if the lake dried up, someone might find the wreckage, but it wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
    “Good,” Mina said.
    That was all she said. She could have said a lot more. When Mark had insisted on doing the test run himself, she had worried about how capable he was, but right then there really wasn’t anyone else to do the critical flight. They’d let everyone go, and Mina sure as hell couldn’t fly one of the damned things herself. When Mark said he could do it—that it was “dead simple”—she had believed him. Evidently she’d been wrong about that, but playing the blame game wasn’t going to serve any purpose. Ermina Blaylock was nothing if not absolutely practical.
    “What can we do to fix this?”
    “I’m no engineer,” Mark said, shaking his head. “And I don’t have the technical skills to sort it out. We need help, Mina, and we need it fast. If we’re going to make this deal work, we’re going to have to bring back someone from engineering.”
    That was a risk and they both knew it. When the military contractwent away, they had bought up an entire warehouse of UAVs as scrap and for pennies on the dollar with the understanding that the UAVs would all be destroyed. Rutherford International had been paid a princely sum to make sure they were. The powers that be were concerned that if one of the UAVs happened to fall into the wrong hands, people unfriendly to the United States might manage to reverse engineer the product and come up with a workable drone design of their own.
    Together Mark and Mina had falsified records showing the scrapped UAVs had all been destroyed and a helpful inspector had signed off on the paperwork. Now after months of putting out discreet feelers, Mina had finally stumbled across a potential customer, one Enrique Gallegos, who wanted to buy several working UAVs, for which he was prepared to pay an astonishing amount of money into a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. Before anything could happen, however, Mark and Mina needed to put on a successful demo flight. Mina was grateful that Enrique Gallegos hadn’t been on hand to witness this afternoon’s show-and-tell disaster.
    It was easy to see that once they made the sale to Gallegos, they’d be financially whole again, but all of that depended on their having a working product. Right now they didn’t.
    “We need it to work,” Mark said desperately, giving voice to what Mina herself already knew to be true. “We’re going down for the third time.”
    Mina couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the man. She