Fatal Error by J.A. Jance Page B

slept easily each night while he lay awake trying to find a way around their disastrous cash flow problems. Gallegos had been very specific in his request. He needed his UAVs capable of making an hourlong flight. He also wanted them equipped with some kind of self-destruct application.
    Mina was good at playing stupid, but she wasn’t stupid. Sheunderstood that Gallegos’s principals intended to use the UAVs to smuggle illicit cargo—drugs most likely—from somewhere in northern Mexico to predetermined landing areas in the United States well north of the last Border Patrol checkpoints. If each drone was capable of carrying a valuable ten-kilogram payload, she was a little puzzled by the need for a self-destruct mechanism, but she had agreed that any UAVs they sold would be so equipped.
    “What about Richard Lowensdale?” Mina asked Mark casually. “Maybe we could bring him in on a consulting basis.”
    Mark let his breath out. “I never liked Richard,” he said. “I’m not sure he can be trusted.”
    “Yes, but he’s a good engineer, and he knows the product,” Mina said.
    “But how the hell are we going to pay him?”
    “Let me see what I can do,” Mina said. “Maybe I can get him to defer payment until after he gets us up and running. To bring him on board, though, I’ll have to go see him. We can’t risk sending him an e-mail about any of this. I don’t want to put anything in writing.”
    “Yes, definitely,” Mark agreed. “Nothing in writing.”
    He stood up and stretched. “I’m going to go home and shower. It was hot as hell out there today, but by now the ATVers are all showing up for their long weekend. I was glad to come back to town.”
    Once Mark left, a worried Mina paced the small confines of her office. If the feds could pull a wrecked 747 out of the ocean and reassemble it, they could do the same thing to a drone that had gone down in the Salton Sea. All the parts, even the smallest integrated circuits, had source codes that would come straight back to Rutherford and to her. There were laws, federal laws, against selling supposedly scrapped equipment to unauthorized purchasers. Enrique Gallegos was definitely not authorized.Mina wanted to be rich again—she liked being rich—but she most definitely didn’t want to go to jail.
    Two nights later, she sat in a darkened bar in the Morongo Casino outside Palm Springs. She sipped a tonic with lime and waited for Enrique to pull himself away from the baccarat table. The casino was far enough out of the way for Mina to meet him there without raising any San Diego eyebrows.
    “Is there a problem?” he asked.
    She nodded. “My husband is hung up on the idea of blowing up the hardware,” she said. “It’s possible, of course, but in order to make sure it works, we’d have to take another drone out of our inventory. And there’s always the very real danger of an event like that leaving a debris trail. We’ll need to do a test run.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “If you want us to use two UAVs—one for us to blow up and the other for you to own—then you’ll need to pay us in advance for two UAVs.”
    Enrique lifted his glass to his lips. “Sounds expensive,” he said. “I don’t know if I can make that work.”
    “We’re the ones taking all the risks,” Mina said. “If we get caught, Mark and I could end up in jail for a very long time.”
    That’s what Mina said, even though she had already decided that she would disappear long before any possible fallout hit. She’d be gone; the money would be gone; and Mark—poor old Mark—would be the one left holding the bag.
    Without another word, Gallegos stood up and walked away. He didn’t say he’d be back, but Mina was sure he would be, and she was right. He returned twenty minutes later.
    “All right,” he said. “We’ll buy two of them up front.”
    Mina was impressed. Twenty minutes wasn’t very long to get the go-ahead on that kind of expenditure. Whoever was