The Project: A Kat Beckman Thriller, page 7
The question was whether it was real or imagined. Kat knew better than anyone else what games stress could play on someone. It had happened to her.
Kat let herself in the house, quickly saying hello to Dillon and Tyrant who were scampering around her feet as if she had been gone on a European vacation for the last six months. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and sent Logan a text, “Can you give me the names of the people on your team? Especially the ones that disappeared?”
It seemed like a reasonable place to start.
By the time Kat grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and started a pot of coffee, her phone chirped. It was Logan. “Here’s the list. George Hunt and Bobby Jenkins are the ones that disappeared. I’ll be in touch. Have to go to a meeting.”
Kat raised her eyebrows. The fact that Logan was still going to work was not only brave but wise. Whatever made George and Bobby run, their disappearance only made them look more afraid and guilty.
Kat wasn’t sure at this point who the guilty party was…
Hearing the voice of Dr. May in her head clamoring for her attention again, Kat went into the small home office she shared with Van when he worked at home and gathered her laptop. She poured herself half a cup of coffee from the pot that was still brewing and opened the door to the backyard. Tyrant and Dillon came scrambling after her as she walked to the picnic table and set her computer and coffee down. She went back inside and got her bottle of water and then raised the umbrella to block the rays of sunshine poking through the trees.
What was left of the morning was calm and peaceful, almost the polar opposite of the experience she’d had with Logan. Being in his presence, as agitated as he was, left her feeling edgy and frayed. Kat sat completely still for a minute, staring. The trees that went up the mountainside that flanked their house were hardly moving. There was only the slightest breeze, the branches lifting up and down as though angels were pushing them aside as they walked by. The midsummer Pacific rains had kept everything a vibrant green. The smell of freshly cut grass floated through the air. Kat took a deep breath then and closed her eyes for a second, willing the agitation she felt in her gut to go away.
It didn’t.
Kat shook her head. She had no idea why she was feeling agitated. As much as her time at Meadowood had been a good rest, Kat was beginning to wonder if removing herself from society for twenty-eight days had been the best plan. She sighed, realizing at that moment they’d made the best decision they could. Van wanted her better. She wanted to be better too. But did she really have the skills and the fortitude to reengage in life the way she wanted to? She couldn’t sit on the sidelines forever. She had a life — a job, a husband, a son. There were things she still wanted to do, things she still wanted to experience.
Not to mention stories she still wanted to write. Those stories required work, and even some risk.
Kat took another sip of the bitter coffee. She lifted the lid of her laptop and ignored the questions pounding in her head. If there was one thing she’d learned over the last month, it was that some introspection was good, but nearly constant introspection could be paralyzing, not to mention completely myopic and selfish. That’s not who she was. It was time to get to work. Was Logan onto something or having a breakdown? Only time would tell…
17
It didn’t take Kat long to find the trail of George Hunt and Bobby Jenkins. Their pictures and bios were still listed on the Alphacon corporate website, as were the rest of the research and development team that Logan worked on. In addition to Logan, George, and Bobby, four other people worked under Sam Rutgers, the head of product and technology development, on the laser project.
Of course, the initial information Kat found didn’t identify the classified Navy laser project as such. Someone in the Alphacon communications department had cleverly decided to call Logan’s department the “Tech Innovation Research Team.” Basic and boring, but functional.
After spending a few minutes digging around on the Alphacon website using an incognito browser, which gave Kat a basic level of protection against someone looking back in the other direction to determine her ISP address, she moved to other sources. She had to be careful. New technology made it easy to determine the physical location of any device. If Logan was right, Kat needed to be careful and quiet, especially while she gathered information.
Still using the incognito browser, Kat created a new individual profile on a professional social media site and started browsing. It took her only a few minutes, and she located their resumes. George and Bobby, like all of the people on Sam Rutgers’s team, had a background in engineering. George had gotten a degree in math from USC, with a Master’s in electrical engineering. Bobby had almost the same education, only with engineering as both his undergrad and graduate degrees.
Kat spent the next few minutes digging through information on both of the men using a simple search on the Internet. “If people only knew how much information was available about them, they’d be shocked,” she mumbled to herself as she sent pictures of the men to her printer. She got up and went into the house, hearing the quiet thrumming of the printer working as she walked inside. She moved slowly, intentionally, trying to practice what she had learned at Meadowood. Grabbing the pictures off of the printer, she walked back outside, settling back in her chair, taking a sip of her water, trying desperately to slow the racing of the questions in her head down.
After spending a few minutes staring at the pictures, Kat heard a beep from her phone. Logan had sent something. She frowned, sending the contents of the text to her email so that she could study them on her laptop. Clicking them open, she gave them a cursory look. She drew her eyebrows together. Logan had sent her the government contract for the laser weapons as well as the specification sheets for what they had designed. She cocked her head to the side. It was exactly as Logan had described. It looked like Alphacon had figured out a way to make laser weapons that were handheld, only a little bit bigger than a pistol, but not as unwieldy as an AR-style rifle, which would make them lightweight and easily concealable. In addition, they had scaled the power of the laser into something that looked much like a cannon. There was a note at the bottom of the email Logan sent. “Test is scheduled for this week on the newest version of these. The SW has already been sent to a destroyer in the Pacific.” A shiver ran down Kat’s back. A dangerous, untested laser cannon was sitting somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Everything was moving too fast.
Kat’s skin started to crawl, a wave of dizziness crashing over her. She reached for her phone to call Van but felt Dillon put his paw on her leg. She stopped. Van couldn’t protect her from her feelings. She needed to calm down and get control again. Drawing in a deep breath, she focused on Dillon for a moment. She wasn’t the kind of person that had trouble with innovation or new technology, but the idea that an untested weapon with compromised security was sitting on a United States ship somewhere in the Pacific seemed exceedingly risky. It made sense that Alphacon had assured the Navy that all was well, but what if no one knew that earlier versions of the weapons had gone missing? It wasn’t as if anyone at Alphacon would be eager to share that information. Based on what Logan had said, the security around the Alphacon products seemed porous at best, and compromised at worst. Kat set the pictures off to the side and closed her laptop. She felt tired, drained. A part of her told her she should put away her laptop and the pictures, go get her journal, make a cup of tea, and spend the rest of the day playing with the dogs and puttering around the house.
Taking a deep breath, she knew that wasn’t who she was.
Kat glanced at the pictures poking out from underneath her laptop. She tugged at the paper, studying the two faces in front of her. She swallowed. According to what Logan had said, the two men in the pictures were missing. The story from Alphacon was they quit. Was that true?
Maybe. Maybe not. Someone was lying. Kat narrowed her eyes, staring at the pictures once again. It was time to figure out who.
18
“Come on, guys.” Kat whistled to the dogs. She was getting antsy sitting in the backyard staring at her laptop and the two pictures of the missing Alphacon workers, George Hunt and Bobby Jenkins. There was no point in watching the grass grow. Dr. May would have scowled at her decision, but she couldn’t sit and rest for the rest of her life. Kat wasn’t tuned up that way.
The moment she started moving, the dogs did too, Tyrant and Dillon scampering to see who could get back into the house first, the two of them darting for the back door. Kat looked at them, grumbling, “Give me a sec, you two!” Through her search on the Internet, she had found George’s and Bobby’s home addresses. It was at least worth a drive to take a look. Maybe Logan was wrong, and they’d both gotten new jobs. But maybe he was right. She’d never know if she didn’t look for them. She grabbed her phone, sending a quick text to Van, “Running a couple of errands. Be back in a little bit.” There was no reason to tell him exactly what she was doing. No reason to make him worry, which is exactly what he’d do. Part of her felt guilty, but she didn’t want him to hover over her or question her decisions. At least not yet…
A moment later, she got a response, “Okay.” She smiled to herself. Clearly, Van wasn’t too concerned. That was a good sign.
Stuffing her phone in her back pocket, Kat walked to the laundry room, got the leashes for the dogs, and pulled Dillon’s red service dog vest off of the hook. She snapped it around his neck and belly and opened the back door, the two dogs darting for the Jeep. As they jumped inside, Kat got them settled in the backseat, programmed the GPS for George Hunt’s house, and backed out of the driveway, unsure what she would find, but glad to keep moving.
The drive to George Hunt’s house only took about twenty minutes. He lived on the other side of the Sauk Valley, close to the acres of tech buildings that California was known for. In the paperwork Logan had sent over, he said that Alphacon’s headquarters was closer to the port. That didn’t matter, at least not at the minute. Kat knew most people worked remotely, at least for part of their week. The days of being in an office forty-plus hours a week were largely over, most companies abandoning their commercial workspace a few years after the global pandemic had finally settled down, discovering their workers were as productive at home as they were in the office. Kat frowned, wondering how true that was for engineers like Logan, Bobby, and George who needed equipment, space to manufacture parts and test areas. Their jobs were probably more the exception than the rule anymore.
Kat hummed under her breath as she drove, occasionally checking to see how the dogs were doing in the backseat.
Kat stopped singing to herself as she pulled up in front of George Hunt’s house, a small bungalow on a street near a bunch of shops, with a small square patch of yellowish dried grass in the front yard. Kat parked on the street, leaving the dogs in the car. She glanced back as she walked away. A lump formed in her throat. If she got into any trouble, all she knew she needed to do was yell for Tyrant. He would jump out the window and come help her. But in the meantime, she didn’t want to be fighting with the dogs while she approached the house.
Walking up to the front door, Kat noticed the shrubs had been trimmed, but not recently. The pale blue paint on the siding had started to peel near the corners, a few flakes resting on the ground. A black tin mailbox was installed next to the door, stick on numbers reading, 793. The front door was bare of any kind of wreath or door knocker. All said, the house had the feeling of being abandoned.
Kat rang the doorbell, waiting. She stood off to the side, keeping an eye on the Jeep. There was no noise for a moment. Just as she was wondering if she should turn around and go back, she heard a rattle at the door.
A little boy answered, not more than eight years old, “Hello,” he said, his wide brown eyes looking up at her. “Who are you?”
From somewhere inside the house, she heard someone coming, steps running toward the door. A harried woman not much younger than Kat appeared, her hair in a frizzy ponytail, wearing worn jeans and a faded red T-shirt that was two sizes too big for her thin frame. She frowned at the child. “Ben, I told you not to answer the door. Now go put your toys away.”
Ben looked disappointed but complied.
She looked at Kat. “Can I help you?”
Kat adjusted the baseball cap on her head and looked at the woman. “I’m looking for George Hunt. I was told this was his address?”
The woman pressed her lips together and frowned, keeping a hand on the door frame as if she was barring Kat from entering. “There’s no George Hunt here. I’m sorry, I gotta go.” She started to close the door.
“Wait,” Kat said, holding up her hand.
“What is it? I told you George Hunt doesn’t live here. You’ve got the wrong address.”
“I don’t mean to pry, but do you rent this house? Could he have lived here before you?” Kat asked, tilting her head to the side.
The woman sighed. “I suppose so. Somebody else came looking for the same guy a few weeks ago. I told him the same thing. When I rented the house, it was empty. I don’t know the name of the person that lived here before. Honestly, I didn’t ask.” She blinked for a second and then looked down at the ground. “Hold on.” The woman disappeared from the door for a second, closing it behind her.
Kat stood, waiting, a wash of confusion rushing over her. Was the woman coming back?
A moment later, Kat heard the click of the lock open again. The woman reappeared at the door. “When I moved in, I found this box of stuff. I didn’t really take the time to look at it. I think there’s some mail inside and maybe a couple of books or something. The landlord told me to get rid of it. You can have it.”
The woman shoved the box at Kat who barely had time to grab it before the woman slammed the door closed. Kat muttered, “Thanks,” to the closed door as she walked back down the sidewalk.
The box the woman had given Kat wasn’t large. It was more flat than tall and was light, as if it didn’t have much in it, a little bigger than a shoebox. As soon as Kat made it back to the Jeep, she picked at the corner of the tape, pulling it away from the top of the box. She had no idea whether the landlord, the previous tenant, or the woman who lived there had sealed it closed, but given the fact the woman had said there was some mail and papers inside, it made sense the woman would have taken a cursory glance at it. The woman had probably just chalked it up to something to throw away and hadn’t gotten around to it. Every house had items like that, things that filled shelves and drawers that were never used and yet took up a lot of space.
Lifting the flaps to the brown cardboard box the woman had given her, Kat peered inside. Layered at the top were some magazines, one on old cars and another on vintage motorcycles. As Kat lifted them, she could see a stack of mail underneath. She pulled the first envelope out and read the address. It was for George Hunt. She glanced back over her shoulder at the house. George Hunt had lived there. Where was he now? More importantly, why hadn’t the woman told Kat he was the previous tenant? If she looked at the mail, she would have seen his name. What was she hiding?
Kat closed the lid of the box, set it on the floor of the passenger side of the Jeep, and slammed the door behind her.
It was time for her to try to find Bobby Jenkins.
19
The address for Bobby Jenkins, the other missing member of the Alphacon product development team Logan mentioned, took Kat to the other side of the county. Although the area that Kat and Van’s house was in wasn’t exactly considered urban, it was more suburban than where Bobby’s house was. After traveling down some rural roads for a while, with more dirt and broken pavement than smooth roadways, Kat finally found the house. She pulled up the gravel driveway hearing the stone crunch under the wheels of the Jeep, the two dogs happily hanging their heads out the window, feeling like the day had become an amazing adventure. Kat wasn’t sure she agreed, at least not yet. She sat in the Jeep for a moment, her head on a swivel. Unlike what Logan had reported, there was a car in the driveway, a white SUV with California plates, a dent in the right rear bumper. She narrowed her eyes, feeling a surge of nerves that made her stomach lurch, studying the farmhouse in front of her.
The house itself looked like it had been constructed at least a hundred years before, the white clapboard well maintained, the lack of shutters giving the windows an open-eyed impression. Kat could see thin gauzy white curtains next to each of the windows, one of them half pulled across the panes on the second floor. An attached garage looked like it had been added at some time after the house had been built. There was a second building, what looked to be an outbuilding, farther back on the property. Kat frowned. The presence of a car made her think someone was at the house, but who, she wasn’t exactly sure.
Slipping out of the Jeep, she opened the back door, grabbing the dog’s leashes. She wasn’t going to take any chances this time. “Come on, guys. Let’s go for a walk.” Looping Tyrant and Dillon’s leashes around her wrist, she looked down at Dillon. It was time for him to get to work. “Heel,” she said quietly. Dillon took a position on her right side, walking next to her calf. Every few feet, she could feel the brush of his soft fur against her bare legs. Tyrant stayed on Kat’s left side a few steps ahead, though not pulling her with the leash, sniffing and watching, ever vigilant. Kat shook her head as she walked toward the garage. She had her protector and her comforter. What else could she need? If she hadn’t been so preoccupied with figuring out what had happened to Bobby Jenkins and George Hunt, she might have laughed out loud at the tangle of leashes around her legs.
