Countdown Read online

  She shoved and locked the windows, going as quickly as she could throughout the house. She stumbled in the hallway to a halt. The kidnapper’s knife had gouged her kitchen floor. The reality of what had almost happened made her heart race. Suddenly lounging alone on the couch sounded like the least appealing thing in the world.

  She forced herself to continue her walk-through. In her peripheral vision something seemed off. She placed a hand on the door frame of the bathroom. The window screen had been ripped from top to bottom.

  Her breathing quickened. She gulped and took short steps closer to the window. She lifted her chin and leaned forward to see outside. The flowering bushes below the window—something she used to find beautiful—now seemed like nothing more than a place for a man to hide.

  Her fingers drifted across the rough edges of the screen. So that was how he’d gotten inside. Had the kidnapper watched her from afar? Seen James drop her off? Seen her laughing with the boys about pizza and ice cream? A shiver ran down her spine. The familiar sensation she’d become all too accustomed to as a child returned—an instinct she’d promised herself she’d never ignore.

  She wasn’t safe.

  She shoved the window closed and ran down the hall. Rachel flung open the coat closet and grabbed a baseball bat. She lunged up the stairs, two steps at a time. She peeked behind each door and underneath her bed before she grabbed a backpack and filled it.

  While she’d promised herself she’d never trust or depend on a man, this wasn’t the same. James would take her somewhere safe... Although at the moment she couldn’t think of a place to go. Surely she would think of somewhere by the time they left.

  Five minutes flat and Rachel was ready to leave. She grabbed her purse and slung it diagonally across her torso on her way out the front door. Oh, how she wished her car wasn’t out of commission. Her jaw clenched. She should’ve insisted on a ride to a rental place before coming home, and then she wouldn’t have to rely on a man—a man that had a lot of explaining to do.

  Rachel opened the front door and peeked behind the bushes lining the porch. The sun hung low in the sky. Pale blues, pinks and violets outlined the clouds. She used to love this time of day, but now it created shadows underneath the trees. Were her eyes playing tricks on her, or were those really just shadows?

  She took a deep breath and darted behind the giant oak separating their houses. Squeezing past the lilac bush, she made it to his front patio. With a look over her shoulder, she rang the doorbell.

  A shadow crossed the peephole before the front door opened wide. James surveyed the area behind her. “You’re fast. Good. Come on in.” He’d changed into a soft-looking Henley the color of a night sky, faded jeans and sneakers. She’d never seen him look so...casual. Even on days she knew he worked from home, he at least wore tan pants and a collared shirt. His glance moved to the bat still in her hands.

  Her cheeks heated. “You made me nervous.” She shook her head. “Well, the kidnapper made me nervous, but you—”

  “I get it.” He nodded solemnly. “I wasn’t critiquing.”

  Rachel stepped past him into the living room. The warm muted colors on the walls made her think of a cabin in the woods on a fall day. A leather couch, a navy-cloth recliner, a thick wooden coffee table and a big-screen television furnished the living room. A décor fit for an all-male house. “Nice place.”

  He surveyed the room as if he hadn’t noticed. “Thanks, uh, yours was, too. I would’ve said something but—”

  She tried to smile but failed. “You were a little busy.”

  James closed the door and flipped the dead bolt. “So, have you figured out where to go?”

  She blinked. “Where to go?”

  “Do you have some family in town you can visit?”

  The very word—family—caused her jaw to clench. A family man like James probably didn’t understand the only reason she counted herself among upstanding citizens was that she’d escaped from her relatives. “Uh, no.”

  She slipped the bat into the opening in her backpack and crossed her arms. “I need you to tell me what’s going on before I decide where you’ll drop me off.”

  “Fair enough.” James looked over her head. She turned around to follow his gaze. Through the opening of the curtains she could see a nondescript black sedan pull to a stop. “Do you know anyone who drives a sedan like that?”

  “Uh, no.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I don’t, either.” James stepped to the intercom panel next to the door and pressed a button. “Boys, game time. Let’s see how fast you can get back down to my office. Remember to bring your backpacks. Ready?”

  He let go of the button. “Yeah,” little voices hollered through the speaker.

  James pressed the button. “Set. Go.” He crossed over to the bookshelves and put his hands on the middle shelf and pulled. “I have an important phone call to make before we talk.” The right side of the bookshelves swung open, revealing a stairway.

  Rachel’s jaw dropped. “That’s the coolest basement door I’ve ever seen.”

  The floor vibrated as a herd of elephants approached. Rachel spun around. How such little feet could make so much noise was beyond her comprehension. The boys ran past her and down the stairs.

  James looked over his shoulder. “Welcome to my home office.”

  * * *

  He watched the look 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.

  Jam
es’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 able to stop a process James had written. His own parents didn’t know the extent of what he had done for the NSA in his younger years.

  Crash!

  Every muscle stiffened at the sound from above. It sounded like the men broke his back door window to get inside.

  “Daddy, I’m scared,” Ethan whimpered.

  Rachel turned to the boys at the same time as he reached out to hug them. “Your daddy is here, and you’re safe.” She leveled a cold glare at him. “Now that we know they’re not here for a chat, what’s the plan?”

  He stood and turned the volume on the intercom speaker to low. “They can’t hear us, but we can hear them.” The basement wasn’t soundproof, but he knew from experience that he would have to be yelling before anyone would hear him upstairs, through the closed door.

  He pulled out his smartphone. Telling the police his theories about Launch Operations would be foolish but alerting them to a break-in seemed pretty cut-and-dried. “I’m calling 9-1-1.”

  Footsteps and doors slamming could be heard even without the aid of the intercom. “I thought they were supposed to be here,” a gruff voice said through the speaker.

  Rachel’s breath hitched.

  James turned to make sure she was okay. She seemed to understand his unasked question because she nodded, her lips in a tight line. She crossed her legs, sat on the ground and the boys jumped onto either side of her lap. She whispered into their ears, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He trusted she was attempting to soothe them as she’d done earlier.

  “Maybe they’re onto us,” the other man said. “I found a car in the garage, but it’s empty.”

  “Or they got picked up by that neighbor girlfriend of his.”

  James turned in time to see Rachel roll her eyes.

  “So we’re going to check there, too?” the other man’s voice responded. “I heard she’s a spitfire.”

  “I’ll go. She won’t give me problems.”

  The other man laughed, a sickening chuckle. “Just because you hide behind your NSA badge.”

  “Hey,” the man yelled. The sound of shuffling feet rattled the bookshelf door upstairs. James flinched. If they were thorough, it wouldn’t take them long to figure out there was no wall behind it.

  “I wouldn’t be here if your team hadn’t messed up,” the second man said, his voice seething. “So get to work finding the guy’s computer. Grab any electronics you see like a hard drive or something.”

  James glanced at the backpack at his feet where he’d stuffed his laptop. Even if they got their hands on it, he felt sure they wouldn’t find anything of use. He’d wiped all evidence of his work from it.

  “Trash the place?�
��

  “Whatever it takes to get the job done.”

  James’s heart dropped. He shoved the phone back in his pocket. NSA? This wasn’t how the NSA acted, so either the agent was a fake or crooked, but either way, the police wouldn’t do him much good if one of the men had an NSA badge to flash.

  But now he knew what they were after. They’d confirmed his suspicions. This was about Launch Operations, and Derrick was the only one he could trust. He clicked the intercom volume off before the boys could understand their toys were in danger of being smashed. “I think it’s time to go.”

  Rachel extracted herself to stand. “Where?”

  Crash!

  James grimaced and swung his backpack over his shoulder. “Let’s focus on getting out of here first.” He pointed to the white door behind the staircase. “This office used to be part of the garage before we remodeled. Boys, time to go.” He led the way in case one of the boys slammed the door open, drawing attention to their location. He cracked the door open and trained his eyes on the set of steps connected to the kitchen.

  All clear.

  Rachel followed behind.

  He waved them closer but kept his eye on the other door into the house. “Remember, no noise, boys. Quiet game.”

  Rachel placed Caleb in his booster seat while Ethan jumped into his. James shoved the backpacks the boys had discarded underneath their feet.

  “We can buckle them in later,” she whispered.

  James grabbed the seat belt to Ethan’s left. That was not a risk he was willing to take, no matter how short the ride. “No. We buckle them in now.”

  Her wide eyes met his for half a second before she nodded and buckled Caleb.

  “Lift the handle as you close it,” Rachel whispered, but it came out more like a hiss. Closing the doors still made some noise. James hoped the chaos the men were creating inside would mask their movements.

  A moment later they were all inside the Charger. Rachel held her purse against her chest like someone clinging to a flotation device pictured on an airplane safety pamphlet, and her backpack sat between her feet. “You, too,” he said softly, his eyes drifting to the unbuckled seat belt.