Point of Contact

60

Jack blinked himself awake. His head throbbed, but his wrists burned like they were cut. It took him a moment to figure out they were tied behind his back. He was lying on his side, not far from the dead German.

Paul sat on a small, threadbare couch across from him, the Makarov pointed at Jack’s face.

“I’ll ask you again, why did Rhodes send you?”

“Damn it, Paul! I told you he didn’t.”

“Then why were you talking to him on your phone ten minutes ago?”

“He called me, looking for you.”

“That’s my point.”

Jack stretched his shoulders. “What did you tie my wrists with, piano wire?”

“Lamp cord. Last chance, Jack. Otherwise, I’m going to shoot you.”

“Goddamn it, Paul, who are you?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

Jack winced against the hammer clobbering his brain. “Yeah, Rhodes called me, looking for you. But I was already on my way to find you before he called.”

“Why?”

“You disappeared. I was worried about you.”

“How did you find me?”

“I didn’t. Gavin did.”

“So Gavin’s in on this, too?”

“In on what?”

Paul reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out Rhodes’s USB drive. “This.”

“What’s that?”

“You tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“No. I can’t, because I don’t know what it is. Is that the one you had hidden in the shower-curtain rod?”

“How did you know?”

“I caught you fooling with it after the police raid, remember?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Jack winced again. “Can you at least cut me loose?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, you better hurry. These assholes probably have friends, and they might be on their way over. We should get out of here.”

“Maybe I’ll leave and you can stay here and explain what you did to their friends.”

“At least one of us would survive.”

That caught Paul by surprise. “What did Rhodes tell you?”

“That he was worried about you, that he asked you to do him a favor, that if you didn’t do that favor by midnight tonight, you would be in big trouble. That about cover it?”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. He said he couldn’t ‘read’ me into the rest of it.”

“So you’re not working with him, or for him?”

“Yes, of course I am, just like you, doing the Dalfan audit.”

Paul snorted, pointing his gun at the two dead men. “You’re no auditor.”

“Technically, you’re right. I’m a financial analyst.”

“I never knew anybody in accounts receivable that could take out a couple of operators bare-handed. What are you, CIA?”

Jack shook his head. “No.” Jack winced again. “C’mon, Paul, my arms are killing me.”

“Just a second. If you’re not CIA, what are you? FBI? DIA?”

“None of the above.”

“Foreign service? Interpol?”

“Look, you’re smart enough to know that if I’m with a sworn service I can’t tell you. But Gerry will vouch for me.”

“Gerry was working with Rhodes. I don’t know if I can trust him.”

“Gerry’s good people. You know that. If Rhodes is pulling a scam, Gerry’s not part of it.” He looked into Paul’s pale gray eyes. “And neither am I. If I was, my dad would kick my ass.”

Paul chuckled. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

Paul crossed over to the kitchen and pulled a knife out of the drawer. He cut Jack’s bonds.

Jack sat up, rubbing his wrists. “Thanks.”

“How’s your head?”

“I’m gonna need a new one when we get back home.” Jack touched it. Blood on his fingers. He stood up stiffly.

Paul’s voice softened to a whisper. “I’m really sorry about that. It’s just that I thought for sure you were coming to kill me.”

Jack went to the kitchen, looking for a clean towel. “Because of that USB drive? What’s on it? And what’s the story on Rhodes?” He found one and pressed it against his scalp.

Paul sat back on the couch, the gun limp in his hand. “Last Monday when we got hooked into this thing and Gerry took you outside, Rhodes took me aside and said he was working with Langley, and that he had a special mission for me to carry out — loading his USB drive onto the Dalfan mainframe. But you saw how secure Dalfan was. It took me a few days to figure out a way to get around it, and I did. In fact, I was just about going to load it tonight when I decided to take a look at the code. I didn’t like what I found.”

“Which was?”

“Rhodes said it was just a piece of sniffing software that the CIA had written. He said they wanted to be sure that the Dalfan systems hadn’t been compromised by Chinese malware before the merger with Marin Aerospace happened.”

“Sounds plausible enough. Don’t take this the wrong way, but why would Rhodes recruit you?”

Paul frowned. “We have a history. From way back.”

“And he called in a favor.”

“More like he stroked my ego, made me feel important again.”

“Sounds like the Weston Rhodes I know.”

Jack checked the towel. The bleeding had stopped. “Let’s keep talking, but we should get out of here.” They took two minutes to wipe off fingerprints and hide any other evidence of their presence before running for the Audi. Paul kept his gun and gave Jack the other one. They fell into the coupe soaking wet and sped away.

As Jack turned the first corner, Paul asked, “Should we call the American embassy?” He practically shouted over the pounding rain.

“And tell them what? You’re involved in corporate espionage and I just killed two foreign nationals? They’d hand us over to the Singapore authorities as fast as they could. Besides, the storm has knocked out all the cell service.”

“Oh, crap!”

“What?”

“My laptop. I left it back at the house. I need to get it.”

“Why?”

“I copied Rhodes’s software onto the hard drive. Not a good idea to leave that lying around. I’ve also got a lot of important work on there I wouldn’t want to lose.”

Jack smiled at the idea. “It’s the last place they’d think we’d go.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right.”

Jack made another turn, heading for the PIE. Traffic had cleared up considerably, but the rain was even heavier than before. The streets were flooding now. Jack couldn’t go full speed even if he wanted to.

“So finish your story. You said you didn’t like what you found on Rhodes’s drive.”

“I took a look at the code. I’m no expert, but I’ve read extensively on the subject of cybersecurity — kind of a hobby. I recognized a few lines. I don’t know why they seemed familiar, but they did, so I Googled them when I got back to the guesthouse. I nearly wet myself when I discovered that it was a Stuxnet variant. Super-nasty stuff — the software that took down the Iranian centrifuges, remember?”

“Yeah. Why would the CIA want to load something like that into the Dalfan system?”

“I dug a little further into the software. Dalfan wasn’t the target. It was pointed at the Hong Kong stock market.”

“Hong Kong,” Jack reflected as he pulled onto the Paya Lebar Flyover, heading for the PIE. The few cars that were on the road now were flashing their emergency lights. A wailing ambulance screamed past them in the opposite direction.

The trees on either side of the freeway were bent over by the fierce winds. Leaves flew like ash through the air, and branches skittered across the pavement. Jack fought the wheel to keep the car in line. A huge gust of wind buffeted the car, rocking it side to side.

“Wow! That was huge!” Paul said. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Dalfan’s security is air-gapped, remember? They don’t do Wi-Fi. But they’re a registered stock on the Hong Kong exchange, so they’re hardwired to the exchange’s computers via fiber-optic cable. I think the program was designed to do to the Hong Kong exchange what Stuxnet did to those Iranian centrifuges.”

“Why would the CIA want to crash the Hong Kong stock market?”

“They wouldn’t. If the Hong Kong market crashes, then so does Shanghai’s, then Tokyo’s, then all of the markets in Europe, and the U.S. crashes right behind them. It would be a global economic catastrophe.”

Jack whistled. “Doesn’t sound like Langley, does it?”

“That’s why I ran. Whoever wrote that software was a genius.”

“No, whoever ordered it written is the brainiac we’re after.” Jack glanced in his rearview mirror. No one following. He asked, “Why were you hiding in a whorehouse?”

“I told the taxi driver to take me to a cheap hotel. He thought I wanted to get lucky, I guess.”

Jack grinned. “Holing up with a boom-boom girl until the shitstorm passes isn’t the worst idea in the world.”

Paul shot Jack an incredulous look. “I just wanted a place to hide until after midnight. Rhodes said that if I didn’t get this thing installed by then, the software would self-destruct.”

“Like Mission: Impossible?”

“Nothing that dramatic. A timer inside the program deletes a few lines of code and disables it.”

“Why didn’t you just destroy it?”

“It’s evidence against Rhodes, and it’s biometrically passcoded to my thumbprint. Without me, nobody can open it, not even Gavin. So I had to run, too.”

“For what it’s worth, your plan makes sense.”

“And for the record, there wasn’t any boom-boom girl.”

Jack smiled. Of course not. “We’ll grab your laptop and then we’ll figure the rest of this out together.”

“Thanks, Jack. I appreciate it. And I’m sorry I got us into this mess.”

“I don’t blame you. It’s Rhodes I’m going to have a few choice words with.”

Another gust of wind slammed into the car. For a second, Jack thought they’d been hit by another vehicle.

“What the hell’s going on with this storm?” Jack punched the radio button.

“… with gusting winds of one hundred and forty kilometers per hour. The storm is still tracking toward Singapore. Singapore authorities have issued an emergency alert, advising all citizens to stay indoors to avoid flying debris and downed power lines. Cell towers are down, affecting most cell service providers.”

Jack snapped the radio off. “We need to get out of this weather.”

“After we get my laptop, where do you want to go?”

“Somewhere where it doesn’t rain.”