Chapter 4 - Footsteps in the Snow
The luxury vehicle didn't make it to the front porch. Fifty yards from the house, the SUV bottomed out on a snowdrift, its undercarriage catching on the packed ice. The engine died with a wet hiss of steam escaping from the radiator grille.
The driver’s side door swung open against the howling wind.
A slender figure tumbled out into the knee-deep snow. Laurel Whitmore wasn't wearing a designer winter coat; she was wearing the same charcoal wool blazer she had worn in the boardroom twelve hours earlier, now soaked in sleet, with no hat, no gloves, and thin leather boots completely unsuited for a Colorado blizzard.
She took three stumbling steps, fell forward onto her knees into the freezing powder, and struggled back up, her teeth chattering so hard they made a clicking sound Grant could hear even from the porch.
Grant pushed open the heavy wooden front door, stepped out into the sub-zero gale, and walked down the steps. The snow crunched under his heavy boots as he moved with deliberate, steady strides toward the woman who had fired him the afternoon before.
When Laurel looked up through her snow-caked eyelashes and saw Grant standing above her, she stopped moving. She sat in the snow, her hands red and swollen from the cold, tears freezing into glistening tracks on her cheeks.
""Grant..."" she gasped, barely able to form the words.
Grant didn't say a word. He bent down, slipped his arms under her shoulders, and lifted her out of the drift as easily as if she were a child. She was shaking uncontrollably, her entire body rigid from early-stage hypothermia.
He carried her up the porch steps, brought her inside the house, and kicked the front door shut behind them, sealing out the deafening roar of the storm.
He set her down gently on the wooden bench in the entryway. Laurel collapsed against the wall, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. She looked around the small, unadorned home—the peeling paint on the doorframe, the four-foot artificial tree glowing in the corner, the hand-made ornaments—and then looked back at Grant’s impassive face.
""Get those boots off,"" Grant ordered calmly.
He walked into the bathroom, grabbed a thick dry towel, returned to the entryway, and knelt before her. Without waiting for her permission, he pulled off her soaked leather boots and damp wool socks. Her feet were pale and numb. He wrapped them tightly in the towel, then pulled off her soaked blazer and threw an old wool blanket over her shoulders.
""Drink this,"" Grant said, handing her the mug of freshly brewed black coffee he had put on ten minutes before she arrived.
Laurel took the ceramic mug with both hands, her fingers trembling so severely that dark droplets spilled onto the blanket. She took two sips, the heat shocking her throat, before she looked up at him with eyes hollowed out by terror.
""They're over Wyoming, Grant,"" she whispered, her voice cracking. ""Halverson Flight 402. Captain Miller, First Officer Davies, and flight engineer Vance. They're thirty miles north of Cheyenne right now, fighting a three-degree pitch-down attitude that's forcing them to burn through their reserves just to hold twenty-four thousand feet.""
""Why did Preston authorize a live flight on an unverified build?"" Grant asked, his voice low and dangerous.
""He told Halverson that your objection was an administrative disagreement over documentation formats,"" Laurel sobbed, burying her face in her trembling hands. ""He forged your digital clearance key on the release certificate. He told me Halverson needed an operational proof-of-concept run to release the escrow funds before midnight so our Q4 numbers wouldn't trigger the debt-covenant default. I believed him, Grant. Because I was terrified of losing the company. Because I was terrified of failing my family's legacy. I wanted so badly to believe everything was fine that I ignored the only person who actually cared about the truth.""
Grant stood up, walked over to the kitchen table, and opened his ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook laptop. He pressed the power button, the screen illuminating the dark kitchen with a cool blue hue.
""Tell me the data link configuration,"" Grant said.
Laurel blinked, lifting her head from the blanket. ""What?""
""If they have the Northstar engineering pod onboard, they have an L-band satellite telemetry uplink connected back to our ground station in Boulder,"" Grant said, his fingers already flying across the mechanical keyboard at blistering speed. ""Does that bird have the secondary debug channel open?""
""Yes,"" Laurel said, scrambling up from the bench, wrapping the blanket tighter around her shoulders as she stumbled toward the kitchen table. ""Tyler left the remote developer diagnostic port open in case we needed to pull telemetry during the flight.""
May you like
Grant looked at the clock on the microwave. 4:12 AM.
""Then stop crying, Laurel,"" Grant said, not looking up from the monitor. ""We have seventy minutes to rewrite the synchronization kernel before that plane turns into an eight-hundred-thousand-pound lawn dart.""
