Chapter 10
Why was it always one step forward, two steps back with Mathilda?
Just when Rory was making progress in learning more about her, she slammed the door in his face.
Technically, she was slamming it in Lincoln’s face, but that was no comfort.
Revealing that he was only pretending to be Lincoln would be just as bad.
Luckily, Diane came back early from her morning art session and offered to trek out to the pittosporum patch with Mathilda.
He didn’t know if she would be any safer that way—the artsy and ethereal Diane didn’t strike him as great bodyguard material—but two people always had better odds against an attacker than one.
Besides, they both carried knives and machetes to deal with the thick vines that could make trails impassable.
He told himself they’d be fine, and then hoped he wasn’t lying to himself because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate.
After leaving him a set of instructions that included finishing Mathilda’s laundry and hanging it on the clothesline, the two women left him alone in the camp with Lincoln.
He let out a sigh of relief mixed with worry. The worry wouldn’t go away until Mathilda came back. The relief came from knowing that if Lincoln woke up, he’d be the only one there.
Another bonus—he could try again with the briefcase.
First things first. He couldn’t drop the ball with Mathilda’s laundry again, so he plugged in the cord, then hopped onto the machine before it could dance its way off the platform.
Then he climbed off, because that was ridiculous.
Didn’t anyone here have any better ideas about securing the damn thing?
He poked around the camp’s storage sheds until he found a collection of tools and some wood he could use to make shims. After whittling them into the right shape and size, he wedged them under the metal feet of the washing machine.
Satisfaction filled him as the beast stayed in one place while it chugged and churned. There! He didn’t even need a million dollars to solve that problem.
Now to his main mission, the briefcase.
Back to the tool collection.
A hammer, a chisel, a screwdriver…any of those could possibly work, but not without ruining the lock.
He didn’t necessarily want Lincoln to know he’d broken into his briefcase.
The man was unpredictable, and Rory was pretty sure spying on the contents of his briefcase would be a violation of his employment contract.
He needed to break in invisibly. How was he supposed to do that?
The noise of the washing machine stopped; time to hang up Mathilda’s laundry.
As he pegged her clothes to the line, he felt the sun on his face like a sweet caress.
Peace hovered over this little research camp like a physical presence.
He closed his eyes and listened to the cooing of the doves that nested near the site, and the clucking of the feral chickens wandering around.
Mathilda had told him he was welcome to feed them; they kept chicken scratch on hand for that purpose.
If he heard a hen launching into a continual loud squawking, he was supposed to look around for a freshly laid egg.
The mongoose would get those eggs if they didn’t collect them first.
The air smelled like flowers, though he couldn’t identify them.
Were they the lush lemony flowers on the vines that climbed up the tree trunks?
Or the brilliant tomato-orange blossoms littering the jungle floor?
Or maybe one of the plants in Sasha’s clay pots, part of her research into ancient Hawaiian medicinals?
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. The air moved through the camp like a living thing. The towering jungle trees offered some shelter, but somehow the wind found its way through the thick growth. It spoke to him like a friend he’d known forever but hadn’t talked to in a while.
Rory loved the wind. Before he’d become a pilot, he’d been obsessed with kites and paper airplanes—anything that was able to catch the wind.
Harnessing its power with a machine that could fly had struck him as an astonishing, magical invention.
Whenever anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he’d said “airplane pilot.” He’d never wanted to be anything else, and the first time he’d put his hands on the controls of a twin-engine plane, a sense of rightness and exhilaration had flooded through him.
That rush of energy when the air current curved across the wings of the plane and pulled it into the air—God, how he loved that.
Where had that joy disappeared to? He tried to remember the last time he’d felt it while flying.
Definitely during his first job doing overflights of wildfires, dropping water onto precise locations, knowing he was saving homes and possibly lives?
And his next job, which was flying search and rescue off the Oregon coast.
Had he felt that joy even once while working for Lincoln?
Emphatically, the answer was no.
Should he quit the job after Lincoln woke up?
No, he couldn’t quit, because a clause in his contract said if he left before five years, he’d have to give back his signing bonus.
Most of his signing bonus had gone straight to the Shady Pines Residence where his brother lived.
Some of it had gone to his grandmother. And okay, a bit of it had gone to trading in his Jeep for a new truck.
The point was, all of it was gone. And he had two and half years left on his contract.
Maybe Mathilda couldn’t be bought off, but apparently he could.
He shook himself back to the task at hand. He needed to get that briefcase open so he could get some idea of why those drones had shown up. He grabbed it off the tool bench and carried it inside the yurt. Setting it on the table, he glared at it, as if that would somehow scare it into opening.
It did not.
He rummaged around in the plastic totes that held all the camp’s kitchen utensils. Maybe a metal skewer could trip the tumblers? Or some WD-40?
As he searched for something, anything, that might work, the image of Mathilda kept swimming back into focus.
She might seem like a passionate scientist nerd type obsessed with crows, but he had a feeling she was keeping another part of herself secret.
The way she’s shut him down when he’d asked if there was anything she wanted to share—she’d meant business.
There was something about her that she didn’t want him, or maybe anyone, to know.
Which, of course, had the opposite effect on him.
He was wildly curious about her. What had gotten her interested in birds?
Where had she grown up, and had it been a huge adjustment coming to this jungle encampment?
If only he had internet access out here—and if he knew her last name—he’d be googling her like mad.
He could still see her bent over Lincoln, frowning at the sound of him muttering Rory’s name.
If she found out he’d been lying to her this whole time, she might not forgive him.
No one wanted to be deceived. The worst part was that the more he knew her, the more he liked her, and the worse he felt about lying to her.
Wait a minute. He called back that image of her listening to Lincoln. There was something about that…
God, he was an idiot. He bolted to his feet, grabbed the briefcase, and ran from the yurt to the big tent where Lincoln was still stretched out unconscious on his cot. He picked up the briefcase and passed it across Lincoln’s face.
It didn’t open.
He needed Lincoln’s eyeballs. That little red light was probably supposed to scan Lincoln’s iris. This was going to be tricky.
He propped the briefcase on Lincoln’s chest, with the lock pointing toward his face.
Then he tilted his boss’s head up as far as he could, until his chin was digging into his chest. “Sorry, man,” he kept muttering.
“I’m doing this for both of us. No one out there is after me, it’s all you.
This is the only way I’m going to figure it out. ”
With one hand, he held Lincoln’s neck steady, with the other he carefully pried open his left eyelid.
A gentle click, and the briefcase came open.
Hallelujah! He wanted to dance a jig, but instead he gingerly returned Lincoln to his previous position and lifted the now-open briefcase off his chest.
“Good job, boss Lincoln,” he murmured. “You’re finally pulling your weight around here.”
He carried the case over to his own cot and set it on the blanket. He had no idea why it had taken him so long to remember that the briefcase could be opened with a retinal scan. The crash had shaken him up, clearly, not to mention getting shot at by giant metal mosquitoes.
The papers were as he’d left them when he’d stuffed them back into the case on the SyberJet. Everything was a mess, out of order, some upside down, others crumpled. He didn’t even know what he was looking for, so he started with the blueprints he’d noticed on the plane.
They seemed to show the specs of a multilevel building. Nothing unusual there; Lincoln had at least a dozen properties, and he liked being involved with renovations and construction.
But this one was different, he slowly realized.
For one thing, it was enormous. Each inch represented twelve feet, not the usual six.
It also had elevator shafts situated every thirty feet.
The structure must be…he counted up the levels…
definitely high-rise territory. The roof had some interesting hand-written nose scribbled nearby.
Gardens? Solar panels? Patio? Observation deck? Helipad?
Rory saw no mention of a geographical location for this enormous project. Was Lincoln planning to build it in Hawaii? Honolulu had a lot of high-rises, with more being built all the time as the condo market boomed. But this one didn’t look like a condominium.