True Fiction (Ian Ludlow Thrillers #1)(18)



Did he detect a hint of incredulity in her voice? “Yes, that’s exactly what I think.”

“That’s absolutely ridiculous. No, it’s beyond that. It’s insane.” He definitely detected some incredulity this time. “I’m sure there are much more believable reasons why someone is out to murder you. What do those other writers think about your theory?”

“They’re dead,” he said.

Margo stopped in front of a big Tudor-style brick house with half-timbered walls, pitched gables, diamond-paned windows, six chimneys, and a four-car garage.

“Dead how?” she asked.

“Drowning, heart attack, and drug overdose,” Ian said. “All within a few weeks of one another and around the same time that I fell off a cliff and my house blew up.”

Margo went up to the house as if she owned the place, used a key to open the front door, and then stepped inside the high-ceilinged foyer to type a code into the alarm panel on the wall. She faced him in the doorway.

“Make yourself at home,” she said.

Ian went in and closed the door behind him. Two grand staircases curved up to the second floor in front of him and looked like they belonged in an opera house rather than a private home. The ostentatious display of wealth gave him some comfort. He was sure he’d be able to find some Vicodin or other opioids here.

He heard a rumble, and the scratching of nails on marble, and then two excited golden retrievers came bounding down the hall to greet Margo, jumping on her with delight. She was just as pleased to see them, petting them vigorously and whipping up a cloud of dog hair around her.

“Meet Kim and Kanye,” she said. “They’re sweeties.”

The dogs didn’t seem to care that Ian was there. Margo led the dogs and Ian down the hall and through a door into a huge kitchen that had every possible appliance, including a brick pizza oven. In the center of the kitchen was an enormous dining and cooking island under a rack of pots and pans that Ian guessed were mostly for decoration. The kitchen opened out into a surprisingly warm and inviting family room filled with overstuffed couches and chairs. The furniture was aligned to face the stone fireplace and the large flat-screen TV above it. French doors offered a fantastic view of Lake Washington and the perfectly manicured lawn that sloped gently down to a boathouse. There were worse places to hide out for the night.

“Did Bob show you his ID?” Margo asked, which told Ian that she was still seriously thinking about his story.

“Of course not. He’s a spymaster. He isn’t going to compromise his identity by flashing his ID or posting his espionage résumé on the web so he can be googled.”

“Then how do you know he was really in the CIA?” Margo opened the french doors and the dogs bolted outside.

“Think about it,” Ian said. “Who else besides the CIA has the resources to hack into cameras and cars?”

“You tell me,” Margo said. “You’re the guy with the wonderful imagination.”

She walked outside and Ian did, too. He went down to the boathouse while the dogs peed and crapped on the lawn. Margo cleaned up after them with a pooper-scooper.

He walked to the end of the dock. The water lapped gently against the pilings. He watched a small seaplane land gracefully in the middle of the lake and glide like a haughty swan toward the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. It was relaxing to stand there but his head still pounded and now his right shoulder ached from the weight of the cast. He unbuttoned his dress shirt halfway down, exposing his T-shirt underneath, and tucked his broken arm inside the opening like it was a big pocket. It eased the strain on his shoulder, though now the weight of the cast tugged his shirt collar tightly against the back of his neck. He couldn’t win.

Margo dumped the dog poop into a garbage can, set the pooper-scooper down beside it, and joined Ian at the end of the dock. The dogs frolicked on the lawn, glad to be freed from the house.

“What was your plot to take control of the plane?” Margo said. “Did it involve Clint Straker seducing all of the stewardesses?”

“Passenger jets are big, flying Wi-Fi hot spots these days,” Ian said. “Everybody on board can check their e-mails, tweet, and web surf. Even the plane itself is tweeting, constantly sending out data—”

Margo interrupted him. “I get it. Your idea was that the bad guys hack the plane. But in reality, there must be hardware barriers between the Wi-Fi stuff and flight control.”

“What if the bad guys had people working on the aircraft assembly line? What if they put a tiny device deep inside the plane’s wiring that bypasses those hardware barriers and allows the autopilot to be hacked by anyone with a Wi-Fi connection?”

“But you were just making shit up,” she said. “There wasn’t a device like that.”

“There is now,” he said.





CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The assassin amused herself on the short flight from Denver to Seattle, imagining all of the ways that she could murder the annoying woman in the next seat.

The trouble began before they took off. The woman boarded the plane late, yammering on her phone while holding a Starbucks coffee, lugging a huge shoulder bag, and dragging an overpacked rolling suitcase. She was a chubby fake blonde in her twenties wearing a pink tank top and black cobra-skin-patterned tights, a tacky outfit that accentuated her basketball boobs and bloated ass. The woman thrust her coffee cup into the assassin’s hands without asking, then repeatedly bashed her in the head with her swinging shoulder bag as she shoved her suitcase into the overhead bin.

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