The Puppeteer (20 page)

Jay tossed his head back and laughed. Ty rolled his eyes.

“Dani, Jay. Jay, Dani.” Ty made the introductions once Jay stopped laughing.

“So you're DEA,” Jay commented as he assessed her. She hadn't missed his initial male reaction to her, or his subsequent evaluation that, for a split second, as his eyes swept her body, conveyed doubts about her ability and about how she might have gotten to where she was. But when his eyes met hers in a gaze that didn't waver for a
second, Jay nodded in acknowledgement of what she knew he saw there—intelligence, confidence, and the kind of wariness that came with seeing too much of the world and all its nasty bits.

“Well, that's that, then,” Jay said, rising from his seat. “Did you bring the aluminum foil?”

Twenty minutes later, they stood with a couple of guys from Cotter's team in a small conference room in the building where Jay kept his offices. Sitting on the table in front of them were the Hunley and Abram. Both machines were the same make and model as those that surrounded Getz's peninsula.

“This is the Hunley,” Jay said, placing his hand on the larger of the two machines. It was about two feet tall, a foot in diameter, and shaped like R2-D2. “It's the acoustic monitor Getz has around his place. If it picks up a certain kind of noise, an alarm will sound in the house and you can be sure that, within minutes, some of Getz's finest will be both on and in the water.”

“What kinds of noises will trigger it? How does it differentiate between regular ocean sounds and abnormal sounds—sounds worth triggering the alarm?” Dani asked.

“It's a smart system,” Jay began to explain to the group. “It goes through a two-week recognition period where it familiarizes itself with the surrounding sounds. It knows the basics when it's installed but it takes some time to learn the subtleties and the nuances. Once it picks up and stores information on the regular, everyday sounds, it will only trigger an alarm when it hears something else.”

“Like what else?” Cotter asked.

Jay shrugged, “Anything, everything. Excess bubbles that come out of a regulator, the sound of any kind of weapon being loaded, human sounds. Even the sound of oars hitting the water or scraping against a boat would set it off.”

“Yeah, but aluminum foil will, uh, foil the system?” Dani's lips twitched at the bad pun. A couple of the guys laughed. No one could quite believe it.

“Yeah,” Jay smiled back as he tossed each of them some papers detailing the specs of the system. “It's true, we tested it when we found out. But you still need to understand what might set it off, in case you lose your force field.”

“Just how much foil are we talking about here?” Spanky asked. Dani heard a couple of the guys shift behind her. They were used to a lot of things: seeing a lot of things, doing a lot of things—ugly things. But not a single one of them relished the idea of covering themselves in foil.

“Not much,” Jay answered and Dani heard a collective sigh of relief.

“How much?” Ty asked.

“We tested it a couple of days ago and a few bands in strategic places was enough.”

“Will it cause the system to scramble or show any errors?” Dani asked, grabbing a cup of water from the cooler in the corner. The room wasn't meant to hold more than two or three people.

“No, that's the beauty of it. Something about the composition of aluminum foil makes the machine go deaf for a minute or two, only it doesn't know it.”

“So what's the layout of these machines?” Cotter asked.

Jay nodded in acknowledgment and turned toward the back wall of the room. He pulled down a marine map of Getz's peninsula that showed a series of red and blue Xs surrounding the land.

“The blue Xs are the Hunley monitors. The red ones are the Abram monitors, but we'll get to those later. As you can see, the Hunleys are arced around the peninsula about twenty-five feet apart. It creates a basic ‘wall’ around the land.”

“What's the range of detection?” Dani asked.

“On a good day, the range can be up to fifty feet.”

“Getz chose this option,” Jay said, motioning to the map behind him. “It looks cleaner, but from a security perspective, it's suboptimal because, once you get past the single line of machines, you're over the wall, so to speak. And we didn't feel like arguing with him,” he added and cast a glance at two of his employees who were smiling and shaking their heads.

“Not that Getz's men could do anything to us that we couldn't do to them in half the time. We just didn't like the guy. Real prick. We figured if the system failed he'd get what he deserved anyway,” he added.

Dani glanced at Drew and saw a wry expression on his face. He hadn't been too keen on bringing Jay in but Ty had convinced him.
Dani could tell by the smile that tugged at Drew's lips, he was beginning to like the guy.

“Any more questions on the Hunley?” Jay asked. They shook their heads. “We've got it set up in a bay not far from here so we'll take some test runs this afternoon, but we need to go over the Abram system next.” A couple of the guys took the opportunity to grab water as Jay moved toward the second machine sitting on the square table. Dani opted for opening a window. They'd gotten spoiled at her sister's place with all that space.

“It looks like something from the evil empire,” Spanky commented as they all returned to the table. The Abram machine was smaller, shaped like a basketball. Black in color, it had an ominous look to it.

“It not only looks like something from the evil empire, it acts like it, too,” Jay said.

“Meaning?” Dani prompted.

“This is one unforgiving bitch of a system,” Jay shook his head, and stared at the machine, as if trying to puzzle out its motives. “We've got people working on it, working on finding its weaknesses. We haven't found much but we do have two. And they're two substantial weaknesses.

“So, here is how it works,” Jay started, moving in front of the machine and pointing to a small black window. “This machine is custom-programmed for use in a specific area. In other words, if you want to use it in Florida, it would be programmed to recognize sharks because they've got them there and you wouldn't want the system going off every time a shark swam by. And, knowing what we know about the area, we can give an educated guess as to what Getz's systems is programmed to recognize. So here's what we think,” he moved back toward the marine map with the Xs as he spoke. “Given where we are, where Getz's house is, we're going to recommend that you assume anything over three feet long or two feet wide will be recognized.”

“That's not very big and counts all of us out,” Dani pointed out.

“Yeah,” Jay agreed, “That's the bitch of the system,” he moved back to the machine. “As I said, it has two big flaws, and we're going to need to count on those. See these?” he asked, pointing to a series
of little black windows. “These are like infrared beams, like the kind you'd see in museum. And, like in a museum, unless you break the beam, the monitor isn't going to pick you up.”

“How many are there on each machine?” Drew asked.

“On a standard machine there are eighteen. We didn't install them, but the guy who did installed the standard version. Which brings up a good point, we're working on the assumption he hasn't altered either machine. Given that Getz used two different companies to install the systems, it's possible he used a third to customize them. I don't think it's likely, there aren't many of us who can do this kind of work, but it bears mentioning. But, back to the Abram, the beams can pick up movement up to fifteen feet away.”

“Okay, so we have some leeway in how we approach the monitors and I'm assuming we're going to run those trials today as well, so what's the second weakness?” Dani inquired.

Jay smiled. “The machines are completely unreliable.” He paused for dramatic effect. Next to her, Ty sighed.

“How unreliable?” he asked.

“If they bump into anything they'll shut off. If a big storm comes and shakes them around, they'll shut off. If it gets too warm or too cold, they'll shut off. And when they shut off they don't raise an alarm. Don't get me wrong, if they shut off, whoever is monitoring the system at the house will know the machine is off, but it won't raise an alarm.”

“And how often does this happen?” Dani asked.

“In the three hours we tested four machines, all of them shut off at least once for a time period of at least ten minutes.”

“Hell of a system,” Dani said. “Do they come back on automatically or do you have to reset them?”

“They come back on automatically in most cases, once the system readjusts or recalibrates, but we did have to manually reset one of the machines,” Jay answered, pacing in the front of the room.

“So, if we can get a couple of the machines to shut off at strategic times, given the number of times something similar has, presumably, happened in the past, it's unlikely the guards are going to come running,” Ty commented.

“One can hope,” Jay gave them all a satisfied, if somewhat feral smile. “The machines have created their own ‘cry wolf’ situation that we can take advantage of. And,” Jay added, moving back to the map, “looking at the placement of each system, I don't think it will be difficult to arrange for a machine or two to accidentally need to recalibrate.”

*   *   *

“Christ, I'm cold,” Dani swore to herself as she peeled the wetsuit off her body. Or at least she thought she was speaking to herself.

“It's because you have no body fat.” Ty stood next to her, already sans suit. Reaching out a hand, he helped her step out of her own.

“Funny, I thought it was because the water is about sixty degrees,” she shot back. She
hated
being cold. She'd soldier through, but she'd never like it.

Ty laughed at her disgruntlement. “We'll get dry suits next time. We should have had them this time.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Dani grumbled.

“Dani, are you grumbling about the cold again?” Spanky came up behind her and collected her suit. Unlike her, Spanky was a polar bear, the colder the better.

“Not me,” she gave him a toothy smile. “I'm being sweet as a peach.”

Her colleague snorted in response. “Remember that time in—”

Dani cut him a look and he stopped mid-sentence.

“Right, I'll go wash these up and get you a dry suit for tomorrow.” Spanky turned and walked away.

“That time when, what?” Ty asked with an amused look. He handed her a towel and a sweatshirt.

“It wasn't one of my better moments, I don't feel like reliving it right now,” she answered, drying her hair. She pulled the sweatshirt over her shoulders and then stripped the top of her bathing suit down underneath it. The air outside was warm but she was still
chilled from the water where they'd been training for the past two hours and needed the extra warmth of the sweatshirt. When it fell to mid-thigh, she glanced down and realized it was Ty's. She looked up at him. He shrugged.

“You looked like you needed it more than I did,” he answered. “So, what does Dani Williamson look like when she's not having one of her better moments?”

Dani glanced around for her sweatpants before finding them under a pile of towels. They were a little damp, but better than nothing. She slipped out of her bathing suit altogether, safe in the coverage provided by Ty's sweatshirt, and pulled on her pants. It was a delay technique. She'd cut Spanky off not because he was about to reveal something about her, but because he was about to talk about a nasty operation they'd been on together in the Arctic Circle. Not a place your average DEA agent went. And Dani had no doubt Ty would pick up on that fact.

“Let's just say I get mean and could out-swear even the nastiest sailor.” Dani remembered the operation. They had sat in sub-zero temperatures for ten days before the men they'd been waiting for decided to show up. She had been frozen for every minute of every one of those long days. It'd made her cranky and tired, and being tired had made her even crankier. She'd lost a lot of weight, which had made her body feel fatigued, which, shockingly, had made her
even more
cranky. But when the time had come, she'd single-handedly taken out nine of the ten heavily-armed men. “Of course, I also shoot really well when I'm cranky, so maybe being cold has its perks.”

*   *   *

Ty walked into the big house and, for once, it was quiet. Marmie was at her computer, but she was reading. A book. Not a report or a computer printout. He didn't know where everyone else was, but it was almost disquieting.

“Hi Marmie,” Ty spoke as he approached her. “It's quiet here this afternoon. Where is everyone?”

Marmie smiled and put her book down. Ty glanced at the title but couldn't make it out since it looked to be written in some sort of script.

“Cotter is out with his men and Jay, doing some more training. Adam's in Miami, the rest of my team is downstairs. Dani is up in her room reviewing some files and Drew is in the library,” she recited with her usual friendly but perfunctory manner.

“And Spanky?”

Marmie shrugged but didn't answer. There was no way Marmie didn't know where he was, she just wasn't going to say.

“Dani might be in a good mood by now if you want to go check on what she's up to,” Marmie suggested with surprising casualness.