“This is what I need for now,” he went on. “I need one of you to go back in there. You can use your phone to take some pictures of the entire device, carefully, without making it noticeable,” he said.
“I’ll go,” Jada said.
“No way is anyone going into the garage while it’s wired to explode,” I said firmly, panic entering my veins as the realization started to settle over me. “Should we get all the guests out? Will it damage the house?”
People could lose their lives. Mandy and Leena could lose everything.
Nolan seemed to sense my rising alarm and tried using a reassuring tone to keep it at bay. “I won’t know anything until I get a better picture of what’s there. I can’t go in. I have no reason to be in your lab as a guest.”
“I’ll do it,” Jada repeated firmly.
I took a deep breath. “No. It should be me. I’m the one they’d expect to be in there this early, right? Plus, this way, it’ll look like you didn’t tell me. I mean, if I knew it was rigged to blow, there’d be no way I’d go back in.”
I didn’t want to go back in. My anticipation and joy from earlier had slipped away. The quivering inside me at thoughts of Dawson coming back to New London was replaced with a shaking from head to toe from a very different emotion.
Dawson
IRIS
“When everything's made to be broken,
I just want you to know who I am.”
Performed by The Goo Goo Dolls
Written by John Rzeznik
If the crowd on the dock in Spain had been wild, the one at the yacht club in New York was out of this world. We could hear them even as we passed the buoy, barely five minutes ahead of Angelica and Demario. We’d pushed the engine well past the limit to take them over the night before. The one good thing about having designed the boat ourselves was that we knew exactly where and when we could push it—an edge Demario didn’t have.
Even though it was daylight, fireworks were going off over the yacht club building, and ticker-tape confetti was flying in the sky. Above us, a plane trailed a banner reading: Congratulations, Armaud Racing.
Dax and I grinned at each other as chills coated my body with the realization that we’d done it.
Two years ago, we’d spoken the idea in passing, and now it was a reality. None of it would have happened without Dax’s money and influence. Our partnership was still an uneven one, but it was one I was proud to be able to call mine.
Security held back the crowd with a rope as we docked and emerged from the Ada Mae. The mob was screaming at us. The media coverage in Spain had only amplified what we were doing. When the record had been set early in the century, I wasn’t sure anyone had even acknowledged it. A blip in boating news. They may have gotten a few key industry folks who’d shown up. But in today’s world of social media, twenty-four-hour news channels, and a lack of anything bigger happening in the world, our trip had topped the headlines.
We waited for Demario and Angelica to dock, and then the four of us headed toward the waiting throng. Demario and Angelica had broken the record as well. Both teams deserved the recognition.
Cameras were flashing, and people were screaming our names and reaching out to us. It was like we were rock stars. The security pushed us through the crowd until we reached the club. We stood on the marble steps with the Greco-Roman style building behind us and answered questions the news crews threw at us. After almost an hour, the questions slowly dwindled, and the crowd started to thin.
“Is it true Armaud Racing has ten more yachts in production as we speak? And are they already spoken for?” one of the men asked.
Dax nodded. “We have five ready for customization and five still at the framing stage. Six have tentative bids on them. Four are up for grabs.”
“What’s the base cost?” another person yelled out.
Dax grinned. “That’s between us and our customers who prefer to keep those matters confidential.”
“If I wanted one, you wouldn’t give me a quote, then?” a woman up front teased.
“Happily. In private.” He winked.
His flirtatious remark would be a sound bite played over and over again. But Dax didn’t care about those kinds of things. He was part of a class of people who