Point of Contact

45

Jack Uber’d over to Dalfan headquarters but had the driver drop him off a few blocks away. He knew from the vice president of operations, Feng, that Dalfan shut down in the evenings, maintaining only a skeleton crew of security in the building. But it wasn’t unusual for a few of the hardworking employees at Dalfan to stay late or even overnight if they had hard deadlines to meet.

Jack had asked Feng for a tour of the entire facility as part of his auditing duties, but he’d also been taught by John Clark to always scout the terrain wherever he found himself, even if it’s just a movie theater or restaurant. He could still hear Clark’s voice drilling the questions into his skull. “Where are the exits? Where is the quickest egress? What are the sight lines? What are the most defensible positions? Where’s the men’s room?”

“Why the men’s room?”

“In case you have to take a leak.”

Feng’s tour had been quite revealing. For the most part, Dalfan relied on electronic security for the building, with alarm systems, sensors, and cameras doing most of the heavy lifting. Dalfan’s most valuable commodity was their IP — intellectual property — and that was stored on the Dalfan mainframe and workstations, and those were passcode-protected. There really was very little crime in Singapore, so they felt comfortable with a single guard at the front station in the lobby monitoring the remote cameras, which Jack had also taken note of.

With his security pass and other Dalfan credentials, it wouldn’t be a problem at all for Jack to just walk in the front door and present himself to the guard at the security desk with a story about needing to finish up some paperwork. He had no doubt whatsoever that the guard would let him in. He had even less doubt that the guard would log him into his system and quite possibly discover that Yong or Lian had red-flagged him, requiring the guard to notify one or both of them if Jack suddenly appeared in the building after hours. That wasn’t going to work. For the work ahead of him tonight, Jack preferred to remain anonymous, if at all possible, at least until he got the job done.

He suddenly had a better idea.

Back at the guesthouse, Paul tipped the bottle, teasing out the last ounce of whiskey into his glass. He ran his finger around the mouth of the bottle, catching the last glistening drops on his fingertip, then ran it over his teeth, sucking away the very last of it as he set the bottle down with a thud.

He prided himself on his ability to hold his liquor, a gift from his Irish-German cop father, long dead, killed in the line of duty. The man could shoot a pistol — Paul displayed his father’s marksmanship trophies in a case back home — but his real gift, the old-timers told him, was his dad’s ability to drink any man in the precinct under the table and still be able to walk home in a straight line directly into a tongue-lashing from Paul’s teetotaling mother.

Paul knew he was drunk, but the key to mastering the condition was to be cognizant of it, and Paul was fully aware that he was not in his right mind. But it was only in his inebriated self-aware state that he was finally able to put some distance between his heart and the light-absorbing black hole of inconsolable pain spinning inside his chest. For the first time that evening, Paul didn’t feel like crying. The booze allowed him to escape the gravitational pull of grief that never let him go while sober. Sober, at least, he could work, blinding his mind from the sense of loss with an intense focus on whatever task was at hand. But when his mind was idle for more than a few moments, he was invariably sucked back into the abyss. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t even normal, but it was the way things were. Carmen was his soul mate, and his soul was torn in two.

Now that he was drunk, the iron bonds of grief were slipped, which allowed for a certain clarity of thought, or at least perspective. He had the overwhelming sense that Carmen was watching him at that very moment, and he was certain she was unhappy with him. Not just unhappy, but ashamed.

“You have important work to do. Have you forgotten? Why are you just sitting there, feeling sorry for yourself?”

He nodded, agreeing with her. She was right. Carmen was always right.

“I’m sorry, Carmen.”

“Prove it.”

Paul shut his eyes, willing her voice away. He picked up his glass and lifted it to his lips, but he couldn’t drink it. Not now, at least.

He stood and wobbled toward the kitchen table, where he had laid his laptop shoulder bag. He struggled with the zipper but finally managed to get it open, and a minute later the machine was powered up. He blinked furiously, trying to remember what he was supposed to do next. Through the fog it finally came to him.

He zigzagged his way to the staircase and climbed up with some effort to his bathroom. He tugged on the spring-loaded shower curtain rod, but he pulled too hard and the whole thing came crashing down. Didn’t matter. He’d fix it later.

Paul pulled the cap off the far end, trying to fetch Rhodes’s drive, but his fat fingers couldn’t feel the tissue paper. He looked inside the rod. Nothing.

Someone had stolen the USB drive.

His heart raced as panic flooded over him, dumping enough adrenaline in his bloodstream to sober him up a little. He suddenly remembered something.

He dropped the curtain rod and marched over to his closet and picked up the shoe that he’d stuffed with the sock, and in it found the USB.

Snatching up the drive, Paul practically ran back downstairs and loaded it into the drive port on his laptop. He heard himself breathing heavily through his nose as a throbbing headache crept into his skull.

“This is too important to fool around with,” Paul told himself, repeating what he had heard Carmen tell him.

“Coffee,” Paul told himself. He took a minute to try to clear the cobwebs, then figured out where the coffee, filters, and coffeepot were located. Ten minutes later he sat back down in front of his computer, a giant steaming cup of Sumatran coffee in hand, creamed and sugared like a cheesecake. He slurped it down as fast as he could, then opened up his laptop again and got his bearings.

He found the file containing the captured Dalfan encryption code where Gavin’s program had placed it. He opened it and scanned the lines of software. He blinked hard. It might as well have been Sanskrit. Paul could write basic software and create macros for his Excel spreadsheets easily enough, but encryption algorithms made his head spin. He closed the file back down.

After missing the slot a few times, Paul finally inserted the CIA drive into the drive port on his laptop. When the drive icon appeared on his desktop, he dragged the Dalfan encryption code onto it. A minute later, the file was copied to the CIA drive.

Paul sighed through his nose. His plan was actually working.

He felt the warmth of Carmen’s approval flooding over him. He picked up the cup of coffee but didn’t see the point in drinking it now. His work was done for the evening. Time to finish up the last of the whiskey still waiting for him in the living room. He had reason to celebrate.

He stood and headed back to the living room. The heavy rain thundering outside jogged his memory.

Where the hell was Jack?