Point of Contact

46

Jack thought his “better idea” was pretty solid until the sky opened up and torrential rain poured down in sheets. He was already twenty feet up in the air and still climbing the exterior drainpipe at the back of the Dalfan headquarters building.

His feet slipped against the rough concrete wall a couple times, but his hands were locked tight on the pipe — John Clark taught him a long time ago that grip strength was the key to overall power and stamina, and it was paying off in spades tonight.

The slashing, sidelong rain whipped his face, but his Baltimore Ravens cap stayed fixed to his skull. He was halfway to the rooftop. Climbing down at this point would be just as hazardous as continuing the climb up, and it wouldn’t get him to his goal anyway. His arms were tired, but the prospect of plummeting to his death on the asphalt below strengthened his resolve, and he took advantage of the steel brackets supporting the pipe for extra foot grips. As he finished looping an arm around the top of the roofline, the rain suddenly stopped—of course! — and he hauled the rest of his rain-drenched body over the edge and headed for the roof access door.

Jack had taken a flathead screwdriver he’d borrowed from the garage and was working against the latch bolt in the door when the rain came crashing down again. When Feng had shown him the roof his first day on the job, Jack noticed that the strike plate was hardly worn, suggesting that the strike plate was set too deep in the door frame. That meant the deadlocking plunger probably didn’t engage when the door was shut.

Sure enough, it took only a couple twists with the flat blade of the screwdriver to push back the latch bolt and open the door. Jack had also noticed that the door hadn’t been secured with an electronic alarm or even a magnetic sensor. There weren’t any cameras on the roof, either. Feng’s sand-filled coffee can was flooded over with water, the butts washed out onto the roof, all around Jack’s feet.

Jack slipped inside and took a second to pull off his cap and coat and shake them out, trying to dry off as much as possible. Once he was inside he would get picked up on security cameras; if the guard on duty bothered to check the cameras and if they actually saw him dripping wet, he might guess Jack’s entry into the building was less than conventional.

Jack sped down the steel stairwell but did his best to keep as quiet as possible. No point in alerting anybody by thundering down the steel steps. He reached the third-floor access door and paused for a moment, listening to see if anybody was nearby. He didn’t hear anything, so he waved his security card past the reader and the door clicked open. He wondered how he’d explain his actions when Dalfan checked their security logs tomorrow, but that was another problem for another day.

The first thing he did was dash into the men’s room, where cameras were thankfully not present, and he used fistfuls of paper towels to finish drying off before heading back out to the main floor. Nobody was around. He had the place all to himself.

Jack made his way past the second glass security wall with another wave of his security card, then headed straight for the workstation that controlled the Steady Stare surveillance drone system. He logged on with his passcode and accessed the window for the live feed and found exactly what he expected — nothing. In weather like this, the drone would be grounded. But it wasn’t a live feed he was looking for.

Jack pulled up another window, which allowed him to access the stored video data for the last twenty-four hours. “Time for a little time travel,” he whispered.

It took Jack just a few clicks to find the video data files he was looking for. His concern was what he would find on them.

Overall, the weather had been pretty good today, but there were occasional gusting winds and downpours. In other words, typical Singapore weather for this time of year. If Steady Stare was going to be a viable option for the Singapore Police Force, its drone aircraft needed to be able to fly in less-than-ideal conditions.

A few more clicks and Jack found what he’d been hoping for. The Steady Stare video program was completely intuitive, but the training Dr. Singh had given him made it even easier. The Steady Stare aircraft had luckily been flying most of the day. The first screen he opened was a bird’s-eye view of the entire city. He typed in the warehouse address, and the video image zoomed in to the western side of the city and with a few more clicks enlarged the warehouse and its grounds.

Jack suddenly realized that if the Steady Stare aircraft had been flying tonight it would’ve caught him on its cameras, too. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. It was time to focus on the task at hand.

When Jack approached the warehouse yesterday it was heavily guarded. Tonight, the guards were gone and the contents had been removed. That had obviously occurred within thirty-six hours, give or take. Judging by the way Lian had insisted on taking them on the tour and taking them out to eat, it was now clear to him that she was keeping them occupied while the warehouse was being emptied.

He tapped on a few more keys and then hovered an arrow over the time scrubber, designating the calendar day, hours, minutes, and even seconds. It didn’t take Jack long to find a semi truck pulling into the loading dock area. Jack decided he liked time travel.

A lot.

Because the truck was backed up to the loading dock and the dock itself was covered, Jack couldn’t make out what was being loaded into the semi. That was unfortunate, but not fatal. He pushed the scrubber forward in time until the truck pulled away. Jack then zoomed out several hundred feet, put a tracking reticle on the vehicle, then let the program run at 10x speed. He watched the truck traverse several streets and pull into another warehouse facility less than four miles away. Jack snapped a photo of the address with his phone.

Once again, it wasn’t possible to see what was being unloaded from the truck. He pulled up the data on the warehouse ownership, though he suspected it was a shell company that would shield the identity of the real owner. He wanted to grab some faces for the facial-recognition software, but the two people walking around the truck both wore long-billed caps and had the OPSEC smarts to not look up. Even if he had grabbed a few faces and could get them to Gavin, Jack suspected, they would’ve come up empty again if this was the same bunch who had secured the first warehouse facility.

All of that was bad luck. The good news was that whoever was moving this stuff around didn’t simply load it onto a ship and send it on its way. But this warehouse, like the first, was butted up against the bay, and Jack suspected that a ship was en route to pick up the secretive cargo. How soon, he couldn’t know. But sooner rather than later, no doubt, and whatever the shipment was, it was hot enough that the owners felt they had to move it just on the suspicion that Jack Ryan might dig further.

They didn’t know how right they were.

Jack tracked the semi’s journey out of that facility and back over to a rental yard across town. He snapped a photo of the image of the truck and the name and address of the rental yard with his phone, but he knew that neither would likely lead to anything of consequence. His target wasn’t the truck, it was the new warehouse and whatever the hell had just been loaded into it.

Jack shut the Steady Stare program down, thinking about what his next move would be. He couldn’t contact anyone by cell phone inside the building, including Gavin. He could call him on a Dalfan landline, but that call would be automatically logged and possibly recorded, and he didn’t want to draw that much attention to himself, Gavin, or even Hendley Associates at this point, especially since he was now engaged in an illegal activity — several, technically.

Right now he didn’t need Gavin, anyway. What he needed was a way to get over to that second warehouse. He couldn’t use his cell-phone app to connect with another Uber ride — and if he used the landlines to call for a cab, well, who knows what that might trigger? He guessed that Lian’s security team was probably still staking out his guesthouse, so using the company car Lian had loaned them wouldn’t work unless he engaged in some fancy driving and shook them off his tail — but at night with little traffic and in the rain, with Lian’s mandate to her team to never lose him again, he suspected that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off short of a Fast and Furious movie-trailer car chase. And even if he did, he’d only piss Lian off even more and sour his already strained relationship with her. His job overall was to smooth the merger transaction between two companies, not cause irreparable damage to that relationship. His suspicions about the contents of that warehouse were just that — suspicions. He didn’t want to embarrass Gerry Hendley or Hendley Associates by going off on a snipe hunt that might not result in anything except screwing the pooch and ruining the merger.

Still… his instincts told him that checking out the warehouse was worth at least some risk. Stepping over to the window confirmed the weather was still miserable, so walking or running the twenty-five miles or so to get there was out of the question. He needed a set of wheels. Fortunately, Feng had shown him where the keys were kept for the company delivery vans parked in the back. Technically, he would only be borrowing one of them, not stealing it.

Or at least that’s what he’d tell the police after they arrested him.