Wanted (FBI Heat Book 3) (3 page)

Expecting to hear her mother’s voice, Kat did a double take at the sound of a man on the phone. A voice that wasn’t her dad’s either. She shook her head to clear the fog of sleep. Then her eyes opened wide.
Dillon? My Dillon. Oh God.

“Kat? Are you there? What the hell’s going on?” Dillon demanded. “Why have you been calling me?”

Now wide awake, she noticed the slight slurring of his speech and the anger within it. He’d been drinking, and he was pissed. Not the condition she wanted him in if she regained the courage to ask for his help.

“Yes, I’m here, Dillon.”

He went silent, but she could still hear his uneven breathing. Did her voice have the same effect on him as his had on her?

“I…I didn’t expect you to call back,” she said softly, gently, hoping to get him talking again.

“Answer my questions.”

He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. He was still as intense and focused as always.
Well, damn.
She couldn’t just blurt out the “what” and “why” to answer his questions. Could she? No, of course not. Better to calm him down first. “Are you…all right?”

“Don’t mess with me, Kat. What do you want?”

She cringed but then bristled. “Who says I want anything? Maybe I just need to be sure you’re all right.”

“Bullshit. If you didn’t care two years ago, you sure as hell don’t care now.”

I did care, and I do. More than you’ll ever know.
Tears stung her eyes as she struggled to keep it together.

“Spill it or I’m outta here. And I won’t answer or call again,” he warned.

Well, shit.
Now or never.
“I need your help.” She threw the words out there. They hung like a bad odor in the silence that followed.

“You what?” he sneered.

“I have a problem, and I need your help,” she repeated.

He barked a harsh laugh. “So ask your…your husband or boyfriend, not the guy you played for a fool.”

Her heart squeezed. “I-I didn’t play you, and you’re no fool.”

“I must be or I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

“Does that mean you hate me, Dillon?”

He huffed. “Not as much as I used to.”

His words were like daggers impaling her heart. Her throat tightened. “Well, that’s a huge relief, but it confirms what I said earlier: Calling you was a mistake.” She forced herself to give up. “I hope someday you can forgive me. And I hope you won’t let your hate keep you from moving on. Have a nice life, Dillon. Bye-o.” Her voice cracked on the last word.

“Kat, wait!” He sighed. “Please.”

She did and held her breath. Only one other time had waiting been so agonizing, and then she’d been staring at a plastic stick.

“Last chance, Katriona. Why are you asking me instead of…someone else?”

Because I trust you. Because I still love you.
She rolled her eyes even as tears threatened. No, confessing her love would never work. “Because of your qualifications.”

“My
qualifications
.” He said it like a cussword. And like he was disappointed.

She frowned, puzzled.

“Which of my many
qualifications
do you need to fix your problem?”

Had he just given her a ray of hope? She crossed her fingers. “Your computer skills.”

“Shit,” he muttered. “There are hundreds of computer fix-it companies in the Bay area. Call one of those geek shops if you’re having trouble with your laptop.”

“It’s not my laptop. It’s the computers at work.”

“Your employer should have great IT people.”

Dillon was right, even though he must be thinking of her old employer, Avila Canyon. But old or new, she couldn’t take her problem to the in-house techies.

“Of course. But I’m not sure…” She hesitated. How much should she tell him if he hadn’t committed to helping her?

“Not sure…?” he prompted.

She gulped. At least he sounded interested. Slightly. “Not sure…who I can trust.”

Her admission was met with silence. She could practically hear the gears whirring in his brilliant mind.

“Ah,” he finally said. “This is about my computer skills
as an FBI agent
.”

“A little bit.”

“Since this involves the computer system at the Avila Canyon plant, I suggest you call another one of the old gang in the San Francisco office.”

“I already did,” she admitted.

“Oh, I see. I’m your
last
choice,” he grumbled.

She sat up in bed and turned on the lamp with trembling fingers. Apparently, they were actually going to have a conversation. “No. I called the San Francisco office looking for you
first
because you wouldn’t answer your phone. But the operator said you didn’t work there anymore. So I asked for Steve, Kevin, and Jeff. None of them wanted to talk to me either.” She sighed. “Besides, it’s not Avila Canyon. Like you, I have a new job.”

“Really. Where?”

“DBNPP.”

“Excuse me?”

“Diablo Beach Nuclear Power Plant.”

He hissed something under his breath she couldn’t understand.

“It’s in San Diego County, on the coast north of Oceanside, next to Camp Pendleton,” she explained.

“I know where it is.” His voice sounded even more strained, if that was possible.

“Really? I didn’t, until I applied for the job.” She paused. “Are you still with the Bureau?”

“Yeah. Let’s get back to your computer problem. What’s wrong—specifically?”

“Does this mean you’re going to help me?”

The Corona buzz Dillon had going when he drunk-dialed Kat had faded. Well, it wasn’t exactly a drunk-dial because he had all his faculties about him, knew damn well what he was doing, and why. He just didn’t know what he was going to say until she answered.

And now the conversation had taken off as he’d never expected. Holy hell, they were actually talking—something they hadn’t done since the night before their aborted wedding. And he’d been handling himself pretty damn well until she dropped the bombshell about Diablo Beach. That nuclear power plant was only about twenty miles north of where he lived.
Jesus H. Christ.
Kat probably lived somewhere in North County. Like he did. They might even be neighbors in Carlsbad.
Holy shit.
No way could he let her discover that. It was bad enough he knew it.

He shook his head and tuned back in to what she was saying.

“I’m relatively new at this job, and I can’t afford to lose it. When I tried to discuss this with my boss, he blew me off. But I can’t get past the feeling that something’s really wrong.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t have enough experience to understand the differences between an operating plant and a nonoperating one going through decommissioning.”

“Is he right?”

“Of course not,” she said indignantly. “Obviously, the work is different, but certain systems and safeguards have to be maintained.”

“Understood. Just to be clear, I assume ‘decommissioning’ is a fancy word for shutting down.”

“Actually, it’s a lot more than just shutting down the reactors and steam generators. That’s already been done. Decommissioning includes massive dismantling, transferring the nuclear fuel into long-term dry cask storage, and tons of other technical stuff. It’ll probably be close to twenty years before the land can be given back to the Navy.”

“Twenty years. Damn. So what was it your boss thought you were too naïve to understand?”

She sighed. “The radioactive material has all been removed from the reactors. From Unit One, a long time ago. And from Units Two and Three after the shutdown in 2013. Most of the nuclear material is now stored in the spent fuel pools, which are enclosed steel-lined concrete pools. An ocean-water cooling system maintains the temperatures within the pools at safe levels.”

“Okay, so before you go all Fukushima on me, what’s your beef with what’s going on? Is the pool boy not doing a good job cleaning the pools and monitoring the chemicals? Is he getting fresh with the female employees?”

“This isn’t a joke, Dillon.”

“Okay. But if your experienced boss isn’t worried, why not just let it go?”

“Are you familiar with the term ‘China Syndrome’?”

“Like in that old, classic movie?”

“Yes. Another term for a meltdown. And it’s what happened to some degree in real life at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.”

A slow burn started in his gut. “And…?”

“And if the cooling system in the spent fuel pools at Diablo Beach should malfunction, we…
could
…have a China Syndrome event. A meltdown.”

The burn spread to his chest. “Aren’t there all kinds of backup systems?”

“Sure. And they’re adequate for coolant disruption caused by a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami.”

Fuck.
“I hear a great big ‘but’ coming.”

“But…I think someone has hacked into the Diablo Beach computer system and is working to sabotage the entire cooling system, backups and all.”

“What makes you think that?” Dillon asked, skepticism tainting his tone.

Good question.
One she’d been asking herself repeatedly. Why couldn’t she accept her boss’s opinion? Asad Farook had decades of experience. If he wasn’t worried, why was she? If he saw nothing sinister in the fluctuations, why was she seeing criminal minds?

“My gut,” she said after a thoughtful pause.

He snorted.

“Oh? So it’s okay for you, the big, bad FBI agent, to trust your gut, but I can’t.”

“‘Big, bad’? As in ‘blow your house down’ or ‘what big eyes you have’?”

Her throat tightened. They used to joke about him resembling a wolf with his unruly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and intense concentration. Among other things. His possessiveness and protectiveness reminded her of the alpha with his mate in a wolf pack. And yet, he could be tender and loving.

“Kat?”

“Um, I don’t have any proof that anyone’s doing anything wrong. But these errors—if that’s what they are—shouldn’t be happening.”

“What kind of errors?” He was back to all business.

“The temperature in the pools. It shouldn’t vary that much. And it should definitely show up in the reports, but it doesn’t.”

“Explain.”

“I’ve witnessed the temperature jump or drop when I’m at work, but the changes don’t show up on the daily reports when I review them the next day.”

“Do you have to adjust something to fix the fluctuations?”

“No, they always self-correct. Pretty fast really. If I wasn’t watching the gauges closely, it’d be easy to miss.” She hesitated. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think someone was testing how to switch off all the cooling systems, but they haven’t figured out how to bypass the gauges. The other thing I don’t understand is why the alarm doesn’t go off.”

“Alarm?”

“Yes, there are built-in, audible alarms to warn operators of problems.”

“In case an operator falls asleep on the job?”

She bristled. “An operator would never be so negligent, but it’s still possible to miss something—more so at an operating plant when tons of stuff is going on. But even though Diablo Beach is shutdown, the alarms haven’t been deactivated. At least, they’re not supposed to be off.” She cocked her head. “Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless someone has access to them in the computer system and can turn them on and off at will.”

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Someone wants to screw around with the pool water but doesn’t want anyone to notice. So he turns off the alarms and hopes his manipulations are so quick that no one sees the actual, real-time temperature change on the monitoring equipment. Still, why doesn’t it all show up in the reports?”

“I don’t know. Unless the person knows how to override the data going into the reports.”

“Wouldn’t that be pretty tricky?”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Yeah. I mean, if it were someone in house, he’d have to have a high enough authorization level. But I guess a hacker would figure out how to get around all of that, right?”

“It’d have to be a really good hacker because the data would most likely feed directly into the reports with no manual manipulation. How long has this been going on?”

“About a month.”

Her alarm clock buzzed.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I have to get ready for work.”

He paused. “You work at night?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

So I can have a few hours to play with my baby daughter during the day.
Well, no, she couldn’t tell him that. “I’m the newbie. I get the shit hours.”

He laughed, a real honest-to-goodness laugh. She smiled. He’d always been so intense that a laugh was a truly rare and precious thing.

“Does this mean you’ll help me, Dillon?”

“No,” he said emphatically and then exhaled. “I really don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Her hopes deflated, along with some dreams.

“But, if you’d like, I can…uh…make a few phone calls and maybe find…someone in the San Diego office who’d at least talk to you.”

Self-doubt chipped away at her confidence. “I don’t know. Dealing with a total stranger would be more difficult. He or she might not believe me because I don’t have any kind of concrete evidence. And I can’t lose my job.”

“An agent might be able to advise you on how to obtain evidence.”

“Yeah. But what if I’m wrong about the whole thing? I’ll feel like a fool.”

“Understood. But more importantly…what if you’re right?”

Dillon’s heart pounded like he’d run a marathon. At top speed.
But what the hell?
He’d just had a phone conversation with a woman. Of course, the woman was Kat. And admittedly, she was—no,
had been
—the love of his life. But she’d also shattered his heart two years ago. Not only had she never given him an explanation, she’d never even said good-bye. So why had talking to her just now sent his pulse into overdrive?

He grimaced. Saying he didn’t hate her as much as he used to was a lie. In truth, he’d
never
hated her. Although she’d cut him to the bone, he always believed that her leaving was his fault. In some way. He didn’t know how, but he had some pretty strong ideas. And deep in his heart, he knew he had to be the reason.

Self-blame was an all-too-familiar emotion in his life for him not to recognize it. Growing up in foster care, being dumped in one home after another and never being adopted, a kid soon realized that something was wrong with him, that he was unlovable. If he made the mistake of getting attached to anyone—foster parents, social workers, other kids—inevitably, they let him down, betrayed his trust and affection. So he’d learned to protect himself from people, from emotions, from the world.

By the time he hit puberty, Dillon had built such thick walls around his heart that he hardly noticed as the foster parents changed on the conveyor belt of his life. Self-sufficient became his motto. He didn’t need—or want—anyone close to him.

Katriona MacKenzie had changed all that. Or so he’d thought.

But in the end, she’d been like all the others. Betrayed him. Hurt him.

So why did a simple phone conversation rattle him like this?

He glanced down at his swollen package.
Traitor.
Unfortunately, Kat still affected him physically as well as emotionally. He shoved his fingers through his hair in frustration.

After turning off the television, he closed up the apartment and went to bed. But apparently, sleep wasn’t in the forecast. Every time he shut his eyes, images of Kat tormented him. Writhing naked beneath him. Riding on top of him with her head thrown back and mouth open in sheer pleasure. Skinny-dipping in the lake. Stripping to music just for him.

He growled when he realized the common denominator among the images: Kat naked. He sighed. The woman had one hell of a body—tall, slender, curves in all the right places—and she damn well knew how to use it.

He swore under his breath. He shouldn’t be thinking about her in that way. As awesome as it’d been, their sex life was ancient history. Remembering it would only result in more frustration—of multiple kinds. He needed to focus on how he could investigate her concerns about the Diablo Beach power plant without her knowing. If what she suspected was anywhere near the truth, the problem was much bigger than their personal issues, past or present.

Interstate 5, which went right past the plant, was a congested north–south route. Other than the undeveloped Camp Pendleton property surrounding the site, the civilian portion of the I-5 corridor was heavily populated. A meltdown or even a release of radiation into the air could affect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. The mere possibility made his chest burn again.

If someone was doing this through computer hacking, they could be plotting the disaster from any place in the world without ever stepping foot on the property itself. Unlike the recent dirty bomb threat, this plot wouldn’t require minions on the ground, carrying out the orders of their terrorist leaders in the Middle East.

Terrorists. Computer hacking.
This was exactly the kind of counterterrorism operation he felt ultimately qualified to tackle.

However, there was one huge problem. He needed to figure out how he could handle it without Kat getting involved.

Kat darted out the door and found herself enveloped by pea-soup fog. Pulling up short, she muttered some Scottish cusswords. One of the few benefits of working nights was the absence of rush-hour traffic. The flip side, unfortunately, was the frequency of fog, which could slow traffic just as much, but with the additional element of danger. She was already running late, and now this assured she’d never make it to the plant on time.

As she sat at the driveway exit, watching closely for any cross traffic, headlights flashed on from a vehicle parked a short distance away but shrouded in fog. The beams sliced through the whiteness as it did a U-turn and drove away.

Kat pulled out onto the street, heading in the same direction and using the large, dark sedan like an icebreaker through the mist. Five minutes later, both cars took the I-5 north on-ramp. When the other vehicle didn’t speed up, Kat checked carefully in her mirrors and over her shoulder before angling across to the fast lane. With only a handful of cars on the road, she accelerated to a safe cruising speed for the adverse conditions.

Her mind kept drifting back to the conversation with Dillon, but she forced herself to stay focused on the road. The fog itself didn’t worry her as much as the drivers who didn’t adjust to the reduced visibility. Defensive driving was the rule, not the exception in SoCal, and driving inside a cloud made caution even more critical.

She breathed a sigh of relief when she spotted the exit sign for Basilone Road. After confirming she had a clear path, she merged over to the far right lane. When the off-ramp appeared through the fog a short time later, she flipped on her right blinker again.

Just as she veered onto the exit, two sharp, firecracker-like blasts made her jump. Her car lurched and swerved. At the same time, a black vehicle raced by on the left like a panther streaking after its prey, the larger car passing within mere inches of the Civic.

Shocked, Kat jerked the steering wheel to the right, but the rear end of her vehicle had a mind of its own, wobbling back and forth. Out of control, the car careened toward the shoulder. She stomped on the brake and screamed when the tires left the smooth surface, fishtailing through the gravel. The small car tipped up, higher and higher, to the right. She leaned left, fought for control and miraculously managed to regain balance. When the two driver-side tires slammed back to the ground with a bone-jarring thud, her head smashed into the side window.

Skye’s face was the last thing she saw before darkness engulfed her.

“Fuck!” he yelled into the fog as the Civic landed back on all four tires after the Mercedes sped off.

He’d watched the entire “accident” from the Basilone Road overpass. Everything had gone according to plan except the goddamn car hadn’t rolled over. Unfortunately, the darkness and fog prevented him from actually seeing into the car so he couldn’t determine Kat’s condition. What were the chances she was dead?
Not likely.

There was so little traffic this time of night, especially since the shift at the plant had already started.
She’s late as usual.
A potential topic for another reprimand, but it hadn’t been tonight’s goal. Maybe they’d get lucky, and she’d bleed to death from internal injuries before anyone discovered her inside the car. After all, the Civic would look like it simply had two flat tires to the rare vehicle speeding by on the freeway this foggy night. And people were hesitant to stop to help strangers, especially in the middle of the night.

He groaned when his phone rang. Damn, he wished he could rail at the bastards. But he strongly believed in the saying:
Discretion is the better part of valor.
So he pushed aside his frustration. “You failed. It didn’t roll over,” was all he allowed himself to say when he answered.

“Damn! Such a cheap car should have tipped easily.”

“Why didn’t you ram it?”

“That would’ve left evidence of another vehicle’s involvement. Too risky.”

“And letting her live isn’t?”

The silence that followed reminded him of the tightrope he walked. He swallowed his anger. “I’m sure she’s injured. She’ll probably be out for at least a week. You’ll have time to plan another accident.”

“We can’t wait a week. Perhaps a more direct approach is required.” The caller disconnected.

He folded his arms across his chest against the damp chill as he strolled to his vehicle parked on the opposite side of the overpass. What did “a more direct approach” mean? He didn’t much care as long as it got her off the scent as soon as possible.

And before she ruined his whole plan.