Chapter 1

The placard on the frosted glass door read, “Mathew J. Singletary, Director of Corporate Systems Analysis.” That’s me: Matt, to my friends. I’m darn near six feet tall, heavy set, blue-eyed, confident, and a fairly well respected businessman to boot. At the ripe old age of twenty-nine, I was, so far as I knew, the only holder of that particular title in the whole business world.

I used to shrug when asked what the title actually meant; no one ever explained it to me either. What was clear was my role in the corporate structure. My function? Well, if the business world was a Louis L’Amour western, I was the gun-handy cowhand who rode into the territory to clean it up and make it a wonderful place for pretty schoolmarms and lady ranch owners.

My boss, the owner of the self-named Reese Donnellson Enterprises, used me like a hired gun, sending me out to his various operations with carte blanche to analyze the operation of each activity from top to bottom. I had the authority to make a lot of changes on the spot. If it was more appropriate—for instance, if I was recommending a top executive be canned for cause—I’d send Mr. Donnellson my recommendations. He almost never declined my suggestions and when he did, he sat me down and explained all the whys and wherefores.

I wasn’t sure if I was technically on the top rung of management, or at the lowest rung of the executive group, but it didn’t really matter. The only person who had any kind of supervisory control over me was the big boss. More than one intramural pissing contest was settled by a quick call to the boss man’s private number. I had it in my contacts list, and many of his senior staff did not.

I had certain God-given talents that allowed me to spot inefficiencies, identify bottlenecks and root out corruption that cost Mr. Donnellson money. I used those skills daily in Mr. Donnellson’s behalf. I was good at my job, very good, and I was known as someone you didn’t want to get on the bad side of, because I could spot deceit and double-dealing in a heartbeat. At least, I could do these things in my professional life—unfortunately, not so much in my private life.

It was the day after Independence Day, and I was busily gathering everything I needed into my briefcase. It was only 10:30 in the AM on Friday, but all of us were getting an early start on the weekend because old man Cummings had just announced he was shutting down the office and sending everyone home.

The boss man said most of the businesses we depended on for material support (and, in fact, most of the downtown companies) were already closed. His reasoning was none of his employees were going to be able to get anything done, so it wasn’t worth keeping the lights on. Sounded good to me!

Closing the strap on the side of my briefcase, I closed my office door and patted the sign on the door in mock affection. Because there were people watching me, I pretended to use the cuff of my right sleeve to buff off a smudge that wasn’t there.

Seeing a crowd moving toward the elevators from down the hall, I broke and sprinted that way as if in a panicked race to get there first. There were chuckles and some of the guys and gals began running just as hard to beat me. It was all in fun. Donnellson’s was a family business and we in the headquarters building got along very well together.

At home by 11:10, I’m pretty sure my eyes were shining with excitement as I rolled out my new toy, a Shabah drone. It was probably one of the most superbly equipped drones available and had the longest range in the world of drones, inside or outside the military. From reading the owner’s manual, I knew “Shabah” meant ghost in Arabic; it was what they’d called the F-117 stealth fighters in the Gulf Wars. This drone model was named Shabah because it was one of the quietest, stealthiest drones on the market, according to the manual.

My wonderful wife, Faye, had somehow picked up this jewel on one of those bidding sites for just pennies on the dollar, somehow outbidding someone else by exactly one cent, just a fraction of a second before the auction closed. And now, it was all mine, given to me for my birthday last Sunday!

I had been working on it all week, in the evenings after work, getting the ugly little beast ready to fly, so all I had to do was check it over one last time and wipe off some stray fingerprints on one of the rotor blades. It was ready for its maiden flight. All I needed was Faye, my lovely wife of three years, to watch.

Faye had told me that morning she would be out and about, showing properties to various clients, but she shouldn’t be late getting home in the early evening. I wanted her here earlier—like, immediately!

I didn’t make a habit of bothering her at work, but this one time I tried to call her company-supplied smartphone to see if she might be able to take the afternoon off and come home for the first flight. It was only a little after noon, and Faye would probably be still at lunch, but the call went to voicemail immediately. So did my next two attempts.

I didn’t know why that would happen, because Faye was very junior real estate agent at an agency run by a genial sixty-four-year-old by the name of Martin Rutherford. The home office was on the southwest side of town but I knew Faye wasn’t in the main office; I’d called their landline first. I was a little irritated because I knew Mr. Rutherford had a company policy that Rutherford associates always be immediately accessible through the company-provided equipment.

Well, maybe she was in a part of town without a good cell-tower signal. It happens.

Giving up, I decided not to wait on my wife. Chances were she wouldn’t be all that excited anyway about watching the Shabah fly for the first time. She might not even be interested. Flying toys were not her thing.

I rolled the thing onto the driveway in front of our two-car garage, started the miniature motors running and tested all the various functions. I gave it a quick test flight, flying it around in a short lazy-eight pattern between our house and the other side of the street for a few minutes, becoming accustomed to the feel of the controls and adjusting myself to the “cockpit” view on the bulky remote control unit. I was very impressed with the video feed from the 1080p camera mounted on the underside.

I landed the miniature craft back on the driveway. While the rotors idled, I took the remote control package inside the house, out of the sunlight. I transferred the imagery feed to the big monitor I normally plugged in to my laptop at home. I loved the bigger screen using my laptop and it worked beautifully with the remote control for the Shabah. I was soon “taking off” again from the comfort of the desk in our study.

Guiding the craft out over the center of the street, I guided it to the right, east, and added power to climb to forty feet. I figured that would be high enough to clear any poles or houses in the immediate area, even if I did somehow stray from the mid-line of the road. After a few minutes of looking out at the world through the drone’s cameras, I settled down. I was having a ball!

It was kind of like old times. I loved flying. I always had. My Uncle Jake taught me to fly many years ago as a young teenager; I soloed at fifteen in a single engine craft. I picked up a multiengine certificate two years later so I could fly Uncle Jakes twin-engine Cessnas. Those were the happiest few years in my young life at the time. These days, renting even the smallest of planes was prohibitively expensive. Times were tough for Faye and me; I just couldn’t afford to indulge myself. This little drone was the closest I could get to actually flying, and I loved it!

I traveled a few blocks without anyone noticing the “eye-in-the-sky” overhead. It was super, super quiet, and it wasn’t large enough to create much of a visual disturbance either. Most human beings keep their focus on things that are, more or less, at eye-level or below anyway. They’d never see me.

I could see them, though. There were kids playing in the yards, folks washing their cars, a Golden Retriever getting a bath in one backyard (and clearly not enjoying it one bit). Everyone was doing the myriad of things human beings do every day on a warm summer afternoon. I stopped the drone’s forward progress short of a nice brick home just this side of a cross street and took the opportunity to practice hovering, then increasing and decreasing my altitude.

I didn’t want to keep moving east, because if I did, I’d be passing over, or very near, the home of a certain Ms. Kelli Sanderson. The woman was apparently the same age as Faye and me, though some said she’d had a thirtieth birthday party in February for each of the past four years, and was actually—well, who knows? We did know she’d just cruised through her third divorce not long ago and was on the prowl for hubby number four, or maybe just a short-term relationship, whichever opportunity came to her first.

Kelli was a flirt and, by reputation, she absolutely would follow through on her flirty promises. Everybody said so. Her sister, in fact, while visiting last summer, had remarked Kelli would happily screw a fence post, if the post promised her dinner and a couple of drinks. Everyone around her when she’d made that comment was a woman. I was the only male who heard it through an open kitchen window and I left that vantage point post haste, as they say; I just didn’t want to know anything more. Unfortunately, one thing I did know was that Kelli didn’t seem to care whether the target of her flirting was a married or unmarried man. Kelli Sanderson made me nervous.

I banked around in a shallow left turn and headed back west, past my home, accelerating to a pretty good clip. No one seemed to notice the flyer, even with the increased noise level in the high-speed run. I took the Shabah west across a series of cross streets until I reached the western edge of the housing development and slowed my speed down to the slowest, and quietest, pace.

All the houses in our subdivision were, more or less, the same. A lot of the same architecture was incorporated into each structure with spacious lots, two-car garages, and large floor plans. The area here on the west side was referred to as the “George Orwell” neighborhood, because these homes were a little “more equal” than any of the others in the neighborhood. They were a tad better appointed, they had three or four-car garages instead of two, and every one of them had a nice swimming pool out in the back yard.

The Shabah reached the cul-de-sac where the finest homes in the Orwellian suburb were. Only undeveloped greenery lay beyond, and I wanted to bring the drone home to check the whole system over, see how long it took to recharged after a flight of this duration, and a zillion other things.

I began maneuvering to reverse course and bring the Shabah home. As the craft banked left, then steadied up on an easterly heading, I caught a momentary flash of color off to my right, in front of the garage of Taylor Hennings’ fine house.

I hesitated; I could feel my face contracting into a frown. I banked back toward the barely glimpsed bit of color because it looked for all the world like the same Matador Red color of my wife’s Lexus: the one we’d purchased a few months ago because Faye needed a vehicle with “status” to take prospective buyers out to see homes. There was no reason I could think of for my wife’s car to be in this part of the housing development, none at all—much less at the Hennings’ home.