Free Fatal Error by J. A. Jance Page A

airplanes. His own collection, layered with dust, covered the bookshelves where his mother had once kept her collection of murder mysteries. Those had been banished to the trash heap at the bottom of the basement stairs.
    There were plenty of people who wanted to fly model airplanes but didn’t have brains enough to put them together properly. In addition to building his own planes, he made several hundred bucks a month on the side by doing the assembly work for those dunderheads. They sent him their kits and their money; he sent them their planes.
    Doing that, however, meant he needed packing material. That was also in the dining room. The packing station was his mother’s old buffet, where instead of good china, packing boxes and tape and shipping labels held sway. To the side of the buffet, on the floor, a huge plastic bag spilled a scatter of foam peanuts in every direction.
    Richard spent most of his waking hours either working at the dining room table or at his computer at the far end of the small living room. Over time, there had come to be trails from the computer station and the dining room table that led through the debris field to other rooms in the house—the bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen. Most of the time he didn’t worry about any of this.
    The string of women he romanced over his VoIP connection had no idea how dirty his house was or how long it had been since he’d had a haircut—or a shower. The delivery guys who handed him packages or dropped them on the front porch or picked up the outgoing ones didn’t mind how Richard or his house looked. It wasn’t their business, and it wasn’t their problem.
    Now, though, with Mina standing out on the front porch, Richard realized how the house would look through her eyes—how he would look—and he was embarrassed. He spent a few minutes clearing a spot on the couch so she’d have a place to sit down. Finally, when she rang the doorbell again, Richard made his way to the door.
    “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”
    “Hello, Richard,” Mina said. “Can I come in?”
    “Sure,” he said. “What brings you to these parts?”
    He pushed open the screen door. Mina looked great, but then she always looked great. He often wondered why she put up with Mark. He seemed so . . . well . . . ordinary. Boring and old. Mark had to be pushing sixty, probably twice Mina’s age.
    Richard led her through the entry and into the living room. He gestured her to a place on the couch while he resumed his place on the chair in front of the computer. On the screen, Lynn Martinson was leaving him a long text message. More whining, no doubt.
    “I need some help,” Mina said, then she corrected that statement. “We need some help.”
    Clearing a path through the mess on the floor, Richard rolled his desk chair closer to the couch. “With what?” he asked.
    That was disingenuous. Richard knew exactly what Mina needed help with—a problem with the drone guidance system. The reason Richard knew all about that problem and how to fix it was that the problem was his own creation. One of his last acts when leaving Rutherford International was a bit of “gotcha” sabotage. He had inserted the problem, a single set of rogue commands, buried deep in the thousands of commands it took to run the supposedly scrapped drone and make it work on GPS coordinates.
    Richard knew that a sharp programmer might be able to locate and fix the problem, but a search like that would take time and money—lots of money. He also understood why it had taken so long for the problem to come to light. That had to do with the fact that no one had bothered to do a drone test flight for well over a year. No test flights meant that RI had no customers.
    If Mark and Mina knew about the problem now, that meant they had needed and tested a working model—for someone. A customer of some kind must have come out of the woodwork. Richard knew it sure as hell wasn’t the military, because as far as they knew the