Free DrillingDownDeep by Angela Claire Page B

they put
next to them for just that purpose. And when she was done stirring, she put the
stick in her mouth and chewed for a second. Damn.
    She wished—
    “No!” She threw the stick into the corner by the piled-up
chairs, the ones nobody ever used since they would only be needed if every
single person on the rig happened to be in the cafeteria at exactly the same
time and wanted to sit down. Crouching down to reach through the dust for the
stick, she caught sight of some sort of a box.
    Leaving tools or whatever this was lying around was
precisely the kind of thing she was always lecturing against. A clean rig was a
safe rig.
    Idly, she pulled the nondescript box out and took off the
cover. And heard the ticking.
    Oh no. It could not be. It wasn’t.
    Oh shit.
    She looked at the wires frantically and then at the timer.
Barely twenty-two minutes left. If the timer was even accurate, that is.
Sometimes it was set for misdirection.
    “What have you got there?”
    She jumped at Michael Reynolds’ voice suddenly over her
shoulder. He was looking down at her, having dressed and made his way to the
cafeteria in record time.
    She stood up quickly, trying to block his sight of the box.
“Nothing. Nothing. Just some odds and ends. It shouldn’t be lying around like
this. I’ll get rid of it.”
    He glanced over her shoulder. “Why is it ticking?”
    “It’s a, ah…part of it’s a—”
    “Let me see that.”
    “It’s nothing!” she said frantically, picking it up, but he
took it from her right away and she was loathe to haggle over it, not knowing
how unstable it might be.
    “This is a bomb, Vanny.” He crouched down carefully, setting
it on the ground. “Get me a pair of pliers and if you can find it, a magnifying
glass.”
    Blinking at the decisive tone in his voice, she hesitated.
    “Now. Do it.”
    By the time she fumbled in the supply closet down the
hallway and rushed back, a pair of grocery store reading glasses having to
substitute for a magnifying glass, she figured the timer was probably on nineteen.
Michael was still crouched down in front of the device, staring at it
carefully. She handed him the items.
    “Are you sure you should touch it?”
    “Get out of here,” he said, not looking at her, still
staring at the bomb, this time through the lenses of the glasses. He reached
down carefully, then glanced up at her and barked, “Out. And keep everybody out
of here.”
    “If you let me look at it, I might be able to figure out—”
    “If you don’t get out of here right now, I’m going to have
to waste three minutes picking you up and taking you out of here myself. And
I’d rather not spare the time.”
    She nodded and went out of the cafeteria, leaning back
heavily against the door. She’d give him about eight or nine minutes and then
she would go back in. She’d need at least ten minutes herself to disarm the
bomb.
    And God knew how long to figure out who the hell had planted
it and who the hell was trying to fuck this rig over.
    She closed her eyes for what seemed like only a blessed
minute, biting her lip, when the door started to open from the inside and she
scrambled away. She glanced at the clock on the wall. It hadn’t even been three
minutes.
    Michael was standing there with the conspicuously
not-ticking box in his hand. One look told her it was disarmed.
    “How did you know how to do that?” she stammered, unwilling
to divulge that she could have as well.
    “I was an electrical engineering major at Cal Tech before I
went to Wharton for my MBA. Bombs are the kind of thing we’d tinker around with
from time to time.” He looked at her, hard and grim. “The question, though, is
what were you doing with it?”
    There was none of the companionship of last night in his
tone or even the awkwardness of this morning. This Michael Reynolds looked hard
as nails, as if he’d earned every inch of his ruthless reputation.
    “Doing with it? I found it.”
    “You were hiding it from