Point of Contact

47

Yong sat at his desk, nude.

The storm blasted against the heavy plate glass of his twenty-fourth-story luxury condo, but his eyes were fixed on the same video images of the semi truck and warehouse that Jack was watching simultaneously.

“Ice?” Meili was nude, too, but in the kitchen, fixing drinks. She held a cube of ice aloft in a pair of silver tongs.

“No.”

She muttered a curse to herself as she tossed the ice cube into the stainless-steel sink, then poured a couple ounces of Casa Noble Anejo, a fine sipping tequila, into two tulip-shaped Glencairn whiskey glasses and carried them into the living room.

“That’s why you got out of bed? I was hoping you were looking for more porn, or maybe QVC.”

“The alarm triggered.” Yong lifted the glass to his lips and sipped, keeping his eyes on the screen. Unknown to Jack or Paul, wireless trackers were embedded in their Dalfan security cards, keyed to an alert system on Yong’s computers.

“I’m surprised you heard it. You were quite busy at the time.”

“I’m a great multitasker.” Yong threw back the rest of his tequila.

“More?”

“Of course.” His eyes fixed on the heart-shaped mole over her lip, stirring a memory. Blood rushed to his manhood.

“What’s Ryan up to?” She finished her glass.

Yong snorted; the blood retreated. “He’s a nosy bastard. I’ve never known an auditor to be so pushy.”

Meili stroked the back of Yong’s neck as she watched the screen over his shoulder. “He’s becoming quite a problem.”

“He’ll head to the warehouse tonight.”

“In this weather? No way.” Meili dragged her nails gently across his back.

“He’s persistent.”

“What do you intend to do about it?”

“Scare him off.”

Meili stopped rubbing him. “We need to kill him.”

Yong gazed at her. “Too risky. Besides, he won’t find what he’s looking for.”

“No, he won’t, but he’ll just keep looking. You said yourself he’s persistent. We need to get rid of him.”

“We can’t kill him. It will bring the cops in — or worse, the Americans.”

“It won’t be a problem if it looks like an accident. He’s not supposed to be sneaking around in that warehouse, right? A large crate could fall on him, or maybe he interrupts a burglary in progress.”

“It can’t be traced back to me — or Lian.”

“It won’t.”

“Let’s do it my way first.” Yong picked up a phone.

“There isn’t much time.” Meili picked up her phone. “You call your men, I’ll call the warehouse. If your plan fails, mine won’t. But one way or another, Jack Ryan will be dealt with tonight.”

The rain hammered on the metal roof of the garage as Jack climbed into the white Nissan NV200 compact cargo van plastered with a Dalfan-logo vehicle wrap. The automatic garage door opened and sheets of heavy silver raindrops poured in front of the van’s bright halogen headlights. The storm was definitely getting worse.

The van smelled showroom-new. The odometer read three hundred and forty-two kilometers. He logged in his destination on Google Maps even though his cell signal was still jammed in this location, but he knew it would pull up once he left the property.

He approached the automated gate and it swung open. No guard was in the shack, but he was certain the security cameras were logging license plates. With the brim of his hat pulled over his eyes and his head tilted down, he was confident that his face wouldn’t be seen by the cameras, allowing him the slimmest possibility of denial if it came to that.

Jack pulled out onto Changi North Crescent and headed for the PIE. It wasn’t the fastest route, but he’d done it enough times to feel comfortable taking it even if for some reason Google Maps or the onboard-vehicle GPS couldn’t pull up his route.

He passed a silver Toyota minivan parked at the curb, facing in the opposite direction. He saw the driver’s face when a bolt of lightning flashed across the Toyota’s windshield as the big wipers cleared away the rain. Dark, scowling eyes beneath a thick unibrow tracked him as he passed. A Turk? Maybe. Hardly worth noting, except the Turk tracking him sat next to a blond man in his mid-thirties who was shouting into a cell phone.

His eyes also caught the bright black-and-white license plate bolted to the front. Easy to read, at least part of it. SAM 00 was all he caught. It reminded of a dead friend, Sam Driscoll. It stuck in his brain.

But the mini movie scene in the front seat of the Toyota was over in a flash — literally — and Jack didn’t think any more about it as he turned left onto Upper Changi Road North.

The AYE was mostly clear of traffic at this hour, but especially so in this weather. There were a few semi trailers whizzing along, their big tires spraying plumes of water off the asphalt, but few cars. Jack couldn’t make out the make or model of the vehicle several hundred yards behind him, but the halogen headlights had tracked with him for twenty kilometers now. Hard to believe it was a Dalfan surveillance team. Lian made it clear to her team he was never to shake them again. If that was a Dalfan vehicle following him, they’d make themselves known to him and keep close. More likely it was just a commuter coming home late from work in a storm.

Jack’s high-profile van rocked violently as a sudden burst of gusting wind buffeted his vehicle. He wasn’t interested in slowing down. A few kilometers farther, his spine tingled when the tires hydroplaned; he could almost feel the Nissan lifting off the pavement and skimming along on a thin sheet of water. A moment later he regained control easily enough and backed off his speed just a bit, only to have a big rig roar past him, spraying his windshield with even more water than the storm was throwing at him.

But Jack noticed that when he slowed down, so did the car behind him. Isn’t that what a tail would do? he asked himself. Jack chuckled. But so would a cautious commuter if he saw the idiot in front of him nearly lose control.

Jack turned on the radio and hit the scan button. Most of the stations were in English. When he heard a melodious British voice announce “BBC World Service,” he locked in the number.

“News from Asia,” the female voice began. “More trouble in the South China Sea. Vietnam filed a formal protest earlier today with the United Nations after an incident involving the collision of a Chinese minesweeper and a Vietnamese fishing trawler near the disputed Spratly Islands. In an exclusive BBC Radio interview, the Vietnamese foreign minister complained of several recent encroachments by Chinese naval vessels in territorial waters claimed by Hanoi.”

Jack heard more news: a meeting of ASEAN defense ministers, declining agricultural exports from Thailand, and a new fifty-two-week high for both the Shanghai and Hong Kong stock indexes. But it was the weather forecast that had caught Jack’s attention.

“The Australian Bureau of Meteorology in Perth is upgrading a tropical low in the Java Sea approximately one hundred and seventy-seven kilometers southeast of Singapore to a category-one tropical storm with gusting winds exceeding ninety kilometers per hour. Locally, expect strong gusting winds and heavy rainfall to continue for the next forty-eight hours with possible flood warnings for low-lying areas in Singapore, eastern Malaysia, Borneo, and Sumatra.”

“That can’t be good,” he said out loud, grateful it wasn’t hitting Singapore. He wondered how bad the storm would get. One hundred and sixty kilometers worked out to be about a hundred miles. Pretty far away. But fifty-five-mile-per-hour winds out there still meant a big-ass storm.

As if on cue, the car behind him flashed its turn signal and dove onto an exit ramp. Jack was practically alone on the road now. Fifteen minutes later he exited, turning onto Pioneer Road in the industrial district, heading for Tanjong Kling Road.

Jack followed the track on his Google Maps app along the tree-lined boulevard, where warehouses and industrial buildings stood neatly crowded behind cyclone fences. He’d slowed down to a crawl on the nearly empty street. The Nissan’s furious windshield wipers slapped vainly against the sheets of rain pouring down, giving Jack just momentary glimpses of open road between swipes, like the van itself was blinking. He couldn’t read any of the street numbers on the buildings.

The warehouse location he was searching for should be just up ahead and on the right. He rolled down his window, hoping to be able to read the numbers on the next building coming up. The cool rain splashed over his face and neck as he held one hand above his eyes to shield them from the heavy drops pelting him. He needed to stop. He glanced back into his side-view mirror just to be sure there wasn’t anyone behind him as he tapped the brakes, and that’s when he saw—

Oh, shit!

The grille of an unlit semi tractor slammed into the rear of his van. Jack heard the sickening crunch of sheet metal and glass behind him and the shotgun blast of the airbag in front of him. The seat belt cinched across his chest like a hangman’s noose as the polyester fist of the exploding airbag slammed his face, snapping his head against the headrest and crushing his body back into his seat.

And then things got interesting.

His ass lifted slightly into the air as it followed his strapped body when the entire van careened forward several feet at an oblique angle. His face punched the half-deflated airbag again when the vehicle smashed to a stop as it plowed into something immovable up front. What, he couldn’t tell, because he was blinded by the airbag.

It all happened in about a second and a half, maybe less. It seemed like forever.

Dazed from the double blow to his head, he instinctively clawed at the deflating airbag to tear it away from his face, clearing his view just enough to see that his van was smashed against one of the majestic trees looming over the street. He turned in time to see the hulking, boxy shape of a big-rig tractor racing away. Its headlights were still off but, thankfully, not the light illuminating the license plate. His mind managed to capture the letters and numbers.

Just before he blacked out.