A Melody for James (Christian Suspense) Read online

  A MELODY FOR JAMES TITLE PAGE

  Part 1 of the Song of Suspense series

  a Novel by

  Smashwords Edition

  Published at Smashwords by

  Olivia Kimbrell Press™

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  A Melody for James, a novel, part 1 of the Song of Suspense series

  First edition. Copyright © 2013 by Hallee Bridgeman. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or recording – without express written permission of the author. The only exception is brief quotations in printed or broadcasted critical articles and reviews. Your support and respect for the property of this author is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, places, locales or to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or publisher. The characters are productions of the author's imagination and used fictitiously.

  SPECIAL SMASHWORDS EDITION

  PUBLISHED AT SMASHWORDS BY: Olivia Kimbrell Press™*, P.O. Box 4393, Winchester, KY 40392-4393

  The Olivia Kimbrell Press™ colophon and open book logo are trademarks of Olivia Kimbrell Press™.

  *Olivia Kimbrell Press™ is a publisher offering true to life, meaningful fiction from a Christian worldview intended to uplift the heart and engage the mind.

  Some scripture quotations courtesy of the King James Version of the Holy Bible.

  Some scripture quotations courtesy of the New King James Version of the Holy Bible, Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas-Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Original Cover Art and Graphics by Romance Cover Creations (www.romance-covers.com)

  Library Cataloging Data

  Bridgeman, Hallee (Hallee A. Bridgeman) 1972-

  A Melody for James; Part 1 of the Song of Suspense / Hallee Bridgeman

  318 p. 23cm x 15cm (9in x 6 in.)

  Summary: Melody and James lead separate lives.An unexpected meeting brings suspense. Can their faith in God see them through?

  ISBN: 978-1939603081 (trade perfect) ISBN: 978-1939603074 (ebook)

  1. Christian fiction 2. man-woman relationships 3. suspenseful romance 4. romantic thriller 5. family relationships

  PS3558.B7534 A753 2013

  [Fic.] 813.6 (DDC 23)

  DEDICATION

  THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY DEDICATED TO …

  My mom, Kay:

  Fourteen years ago, I woke up from a dream in the middle of the night on New Year's night, turned on my computer, and just started typing. Ultimately, I wrote A Melody for James. It was my first book, and, I wrote it entirely in secret. Every morning, from the hours of 4 to 6 AM, I wrote, getting this story out as quickly as I could but telling absolutely no one I was doing it.

  Halfway through writing it, I printed out my progress and mailed it to my mom with a simple note. "I'm writing a book. Let me know what you think of it."

  For a week, half a novel sat on my mom's counter because she was afraid to read it — afraid it would be bad and then she'd have to pretend she enjoyed it. Finally, she could ignore it no longer. She sat down to read and couldn't stop because she became so engrossed in the story. She got to the end of what I'd sent her, picked up the phone, and called me at work.

  "This is your mother," she said by way of preamble. "I want you to quit your job, go home, and finish that book!"

  So, here it is, Mama. The finished book, 14 years later. I hope you enjoy it as much the second time as you did the first.

  ¯¯¯¯

  CHAPTER 1

  ANGELA Montgomery nearly missed it. She had lost herself in memories of her recent birthday celebration marking the passing of her 30th year on earth. Her husband, James, her junior by 2 short years, had gone all out. Being "much" younger, he had decorated the entire house with black balloons and held a surprise "wake" for the passing of her late youth. Daydreaming and lost in feelings of love and adoration for her beloved groom, Angela nearly failed to recognize the moment when it happened.

  When her consciousness shifted from her reverie back to the present, for several breaths she simply stared at the smart board in front of her and ran through the calculations again. Then she tried to ignore the little shivers of nervous excitement that danced up her spine.

  "Heeyyyyy …" Donald Andrews clicked a few keys on the laptop in front of him, magnifying the image on the smart board screen so that it covered the entire wall. "Did we just …"

  Angela rose, her legs feeling uncharacteristically stiff, and walked forward while staring at the screen. "You know what, I'm cautiously going to say yes. Yes, we did."

  Alvin Berry let out a loud, "Whoop!" He removed the ever present knit cap from the top of his head and tossed it into the air. The group collectively looked at each other and grinned. Years of work, and the breakthrough sat right there on that smart board, staring back at them.

  "We should celebrate," Lorie Frazier announced. She pulled her glasses from her nose and casually tossed them onto the stack of papers in front of her. "We need to celebrate, then we need to call a press conference. But only after we get to the patent office."

  Angela looked back at the screen. "We have to be sure."

  "We're sure," Alvin said. "Look at that beauty. It is so simple yet so elegant."

  "Call James," Lorie said. "Tell him to make us a reservation in the most ridiculously expensive restaurant Atlanta has to offer. Tell him we're going to celebrate."

  Despite her naturally conservative nature, Angela started to let the feeling of giddy excitement take over. She laughed and hugged Don as she pulled her cell phone from her pocket.

  Her husband would probably jump up and down or do a little dance of celebration. She felt like she might just as easily be making a call to announce that she was expecting their first child instead of the conclusion of this long project.

  For five years, she and this amazing team of engineers had worked to perfect this revolutionary data storage solution. For five years, usually working six days a week, usually not less than twelve hours a day, they'd toiled in this basement lab in her inherited home. While she'd hoped and prayed for all that time, now that the reality of what they'd accomplished actually shone back at her from that beautiful smart screen, she realized she hadn't ever really been certain they'd succeed.

  But they had.

  She got James' voice mail. "Darling," she purred, knowing he'd hear the smile in her voice. "We did it. We're done. I cannot wait to show you. Come home. Come see. We need to celebrate."

  As soon as Angela hung up, she gave Lorie a hug and said, "I vote for cheesecake."

  "Copious amounts," the nearsighted genius agreed. "Oh! With strawberries! And really good coffee."

  Angela felt her heart skip when the red security light started flashing. Her eyebrows crowded together in confusion. Why was the intruder alarm going off now?

  Angela had inherited the farmhouse at the age of 17 from her late uncle and lived there throughout her lengthy matriculation at Georgia Tech. For a brief time when this venture was just beginning, she and her brand new husband, James, as well as their business partner and his best friend, Kurt, had all lived there under the same roof.

  During the initial months and years, Kurt and James had renovated the basement entirely; installing a T1, a two post rack of networking gear, a four post rack of high performance servers; and most importantly, a state of the art security system, designed and built by her brilliant h
usband himself. For the last five years, they had hardened the basement into a panic room with steel reinforced doors, magnetic locks, and pinhole security cameras. It took two-factor authentication to even get into the room.

  When the magnitude of the fact that the security alarm was still sounding sunk in, Angela whirled around until her eyes met Don's. When she spoke, she hated the shrill edge of panic she detected in her voice. "Back it up to the Snap."

  His fingers clicked on the keys with the speed of machine gun fire as he spoke. "There's no time. We didn't do an incremental yesterday because the waffle was running a defrag."

  "Right. Execute a differential and encrypt it." She waited a few heartbeats while Don's fingers played out a staccato percussion on his laptop.

  With confusion clouding his eyes, he looked up and announced, "Our hard line is down."

  Alvin pressed a series of keys on his computer and several small screens appeared on the smart board, all showing different angles of her home. Men in masks moved through the empty house with military precision, high powered and very deadly looking carbine rifles tucked tightly into their shoulders at the ready. They stared around every corner through the sights on the short rifles.

  Lorie gasped and said, "What is going on? Who are they?"

  Fear and panic tried to take over. Her stomach turned into ice and Angela felt like her breathing wasn't productive, like she could never get a deep enough breath. Focus, she said to herself. You will have time to be scared when it's over.

  "Can you remember how we got here since the last backup?" Angela asked Alvin, her hand pointing in his direction like a knife blade. If she'd ever met anyone whose memory rivaled her husband's, it was Alvin.

  His voice sounded flat, emotionless. "Yes. Of course I can."

  She watched a crouched figure outside the entrance to the lab tape two liter plastic bottles filled with water to the hinges of the security door. The security that James and Kurt had installed was tight, state of the art even, and the door was sealed. But no seal in 100 miles would withstand the blast of a shaped charge pushing water ahead of a supersonic shock wave. It would slice through the steel door faster than the world's most powerful cutting torch.

  Whomever these people were, they had known the defenses they would have to overcome. They were prepared. They had planned. They had obviously even rehearsed as was apparent in their staged and perfectly timed precision movements. And the most dangerous thing Angela and her team had for protection once that door came down were a few custom computer viruses.

  She'd known the risks. The long term applications of the soon to be patented technology could not even be calculated. The reason they worked out of her home instead of in some downtown lab was for the secrecy of the project.

  They'd taken additional precautions which Angela belatedly realized she had characterized as "paranoid." A commercial exothermic incendiary device much like a military grade thermite grenade perched atop each server array that would, when detonated, melt their way through the machines at over 4 thousand degrees Fahrenheit, effectively destroying everything in a completely unrecoverable fashion. They would burn 3 times hotter than molten lava and the crew would have to be careful not to look at them since the radiant energy was bright enough to blind them without a welding visor.

  "Then destroy it. Destroy it all."

  Lorie's finger hovered over a steel pin. "You're sure?"

  The explosion above them shook the room. Alvin rushed to the inner door and made sure the panic room door remained bolted on all four corners. Angela closed the lid on her laptop and slid it into the 2 inch air gap between network switches. Then she draped her hand on Lorie's shoulder and whispered, "Do it."

  She closed her eyes and started to pray as the room around her grew suddenly very hot and smoke started billowing up to the ceiling. "Heavenly Father, if I live through this, let me remain in Your will. But if I come home to you, Lord, please watch over my husband. Let him feel your comforting love and let him find the destiny you have in mind for him."

  Smoke alarms went off and the lights flickered. Then she felt herself being picked up and thrown aside, riding on the wave of a perfectly timed blast. As she flew backward from the shock of the multiple explosions blowing open her steel door she prayed even harder — she prayed for courage, for protection, for strength.

  As she landed and fell against the tower of computer drives, she watched the thermite spill and splatter like lava, setting the entire area on fire. Her last thought was of pain as a spray of burning powder fell on her chest.

  ¯¯¯¯

  JAMES Montgomery stared at the blackened shell of what used to be his house. As the sun rose in the Georgia sky, he watched the last big fire department engine drive away. He felt empty, cold. He reached inside himself and tried to find anything — anger, grief — anything. He found only emptiness. Idly, he wondered why he didn't feel the least bit tired since he had last slept fifty hours earlier.

  He watched as the coroner's office carried yet another body out of the black shell. So far, he counted six. Due to the heat of the fire, the bodies themselves were unrecognizable, but he'd identified his wife's wedding ring. What remained of her was charred beyond recognition, her body curled up into a tight fetal position.

  Pugilism, the coroner had called it. Apparently, muscle and tendon burn at different rates making burned human bodies curl up and crouch like professional boxers. It was the kind of trivia that interested medical examiners offered when attempting to make polite small talk with the next of kin while standing over the earthly remains of the most important person in his world.

  How? Where had they gone wrong? What part of the hyper-diligent security measures didn't get followed? Was this an insider thing?

  "Mr. Montgomery, if it's okay I'd like to ask you a couple of questions," said the police officer who'd introduced himself hours before as Detective Roberts. James looked over at him with dry burning eyes. The detective had a lean athletic body, sandy blond hair, and laugh lines. He'd arrived with an older detective who sat back and let Roberts take the lead, obviously training him.

  "It's fine," James answered, his throat burning. His voice sounded ragged, weak. He didn't like it. He didn't know if he would ever get the smell of smoke out of his nose or the other smell from his memory.

  "That was a really impressive room you had in your basement. The security looks like it was amazing."

  James raised an eyebrow. "That isn't a question."

  Roberts nodded. "Why don't you just explain to me why you thought you might need a room like that in your basement, and maybe why you felt the need to keep thermite grenades handy."

  "My wife —" his voice hitched and he cleared his throat and swallowed. "My wife," he began again, "was an information security engineer. She and her team were developing a technology for data warehousing that would, in a conservative estimate, be worth about a hundred billion dollars the first year."

  Roberts paused in writing in his notebook. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Most of this work was a secret. We retrofitted our basement because we felt like it was the most inconspicuous, secure location. Our intent was security by obscurity." James put his hands in his pockets and balled his fists. "Obviously, that was folly." He felt his phone and pulled it out. "I had a voice mail from her. They'd made a breakthrough." He accessed the message and played it on speaker for Roberts. His heart twisted painfully in his chest as he heard his wife's voice again.

  "We had thermite grenades sitting on the stacks of hard drives so that if there was ever a security breach, they could just pull the pin and the data would be destroyed. We keep daily backups off site." He waved a hand weakly at the destroyed house. "It shouldn't have caused a fire to spread. The area was contained with two feet of cement on the ground and a ventilated chimney that had a battery backed up fan. I don't know how that happened."

  The detective said, "Did you account for the idea that intruders might use high explosives?"

  Jame
s shook his head. "That was a failure of our collective imagination."

  "Any thoughts as to who did this? Any idea where we should start?"

  James slipped his phone back into his pocket and ran a thumb over the keys. The late May wind picked up and blew his red tie over his shoulder. He took his glasses off and rubbed at his gritty eyes. "Detective Roberts, for a hundred billion dollars, I'd suspect your grandmother." He put his glasses back on his face and looked intently at the other man.

  "There was a grad student applying for an internship. She let him walk through the lab, but didn't end up hiring him. I never met him. I'll have to see if the University can give you his name."

  Roberts nodded and wrote in his book. "I appreciate that." He looked at the blackened home and then at James. "I'm sorry for your loss, sir." He pulled a business card out of his pocket. "Please let me know if you think of anything or if you learn of anything. Call anytime, day or night. Don't hesitate."

  James took the card, read it, and immediately committed the information to memory. "Likewise, detective." He heard the squeal of tires and turned his head to see his best friend's car coming fast down his road. "There's Kurt Lawson, my partner. He may know more about the intern. He deals directly with HR stuff like that."

  ¯¯¯¯

  RIKARD Šabalj stood on the banks of the Danube River. In the distance, he could see the walls of the Golubac Fortress of Serbia nestled into the cliff.

  Fury burned hot in his chest. Plans had gone awry. He hadn't known about the thermite. If he'd known, they would have gained access to the room a different way. But, he knew that the second they filed the patent, all would be lost. The second he had audio confirmation of the breakthrough, he had no choice but to move and move fast.