Fatal Error by J. A. Jance Read Free Book Online Page A

bed.
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    “The background check you ordered,” B. replied.
    “It’s already here?”
    “Stu’s been a busy little bee. And he gets things done. He must have dropped it off last night. Leland found it just inside the gate when he went down this morning to collect the newspaper. From the looks of this, your friend’s ex-boyfriend is a pretty interesting character.”
    With that, B. handed Ali the first of several pages.
    “But wait,” Ali said as soon as she read the top line of the header. “This is about somebody named Richard Lowensdale. I’m sure Brenda told me Richard’s last name was Lattimer.”
    “That may be what he told her,” B. corrected, “but if you keep reading, you’ll learn that Richard Lattimer is a figment of someone’s imagination. Richard Lowensdale is the guy who was raised in Grass Valley, California, and worked for Rutherford International in San Diego. As far as Stu can discover, Richard Lattimer doesn’t exist.”
    Continuing to read the report, Ali was appalled. “It looks like everything Richard Lowensdale told Brenda is a lie.”
    “Pretty much,” B. agreed.
    Yes, Richard had worked for a defense contractor, but as a minor player, not a big one. It turned out that Rutherford International was a small, minority-owned company with a niche market that supplied drone controllers. Lowensdale had a degree in electrical engineering from UCLA, but his career wasn’t exactly stellar. For one thing, he had spent time bouncing from one employer to another. For another, Stuart Ramey’s search of various databases revealed no patents issued in his name and no scientific papers listing him as author. His only listed hobby included a lifelong interest in model airplanes—remote-control model airplanes.
    “Model planes,” B commented. “That fits.”
    “What fits?” asked Ali.
    “He’s worked on drones. UAVs. Unmanned aerial vehicles—like the ones our troops are using in the Middle East.”
    “Aren’t those a lot bigger?” Ali asked. “Like Piper Cubs?”
    “Some are,” B. agreed. “The ones they’re using in Afghanistan, the Predators that fire the big missiles, are about that big, but the ones Rutherford was working on are much smaller. The most they could possibly carry would be a forty-pound payload, and some not even that much.”
    “So what’s the big deal then?” Ali asked.
    “There’s an even smaller variety that’s about the size of those remote-control helicopters that were such a hit at Christmas a couple of years ago. They can look in a window of a building and take out a single target sitting in the room without damaging anyone else.”
    “So there’s less chance of collateral damage,” Ali said.
    “Exactly,” B. agreed. “They cost a lot less because of size. They can go places where it would be too dangerous to have a piloted aircraft. Regardless of size, drones are relatively silent. They fly low enough to avoid radar detection. They can do precision targeting, and if you release enough of them at once, you can create a swarm.
    “Think about it. If you have a single offensive weapon flying at any given target, chances are you’ve got a missile defense of some sort that has a good chance of taking that one missile transport device down. If you’ve got several hundred tiny drones heading in all at the same time, defenders can probably take out some, but not all of them.”
    “Like trying to chase off a swarm of killer bees with a fly swatter.”
    “Exactly.”
    “So Lowensdale worked for Rutherford and then he stopped,” Ali said. “How come?”
    “Because the bottom dropped out of the drone market,” B. explained. “For a long time it looked like Rutherford was going to snag one of the big cushy military contracts. When that didn’t happen, when those opportunities went away, so did most of Rutherford’s employees, including Richard. The only people left working there are the owner and her husband, Ermina