Point of Contact

by Mike Maden

  A memory too terrible to forget.

  53

  JAKARTA, INDONESIA

  She dashed toward the ten-story cylindrical building in the drenching downpour beneath her big black Nike golf umbrella. Her glasses steamed in the cool air. She was shrouded in a fashionably flowered purple hijab, the one immodesty the childless widow allowed herself. Beneath her rain gear and traditional clothing she cradled a small package wrapped in paper and twine. She had retrieved it from a post box just thirty minutes before. It came with instructions.

  Sania Masood ignored the furtive glances of the men and Western-styled women entering and exiting the glass doors to the BMKG, the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics.

  She wiped the steam from her glasses as she stood in the security line, careful to keep her gaze directed away from others, especially the shameless women. The line was longer than usual. Of all mornings, she told herself. The one morning she could not be late to work.

  Inshallah.

  When Sania neared the security desk, the uniformed guard recognized her instantly—they both attended the same mosque, just fifteen minutes south of here. She flashed a badge. The guard nodded slightly and with a nonchalant hand waved her around the magnetic metal detector so that she need not pass through it. This had been arranged.

  Now all she had to do was get to the fourth floor.

  SINGAPORE

  In the heavy rain and jammed traffic, it took Jack and Paul twice as long to make the short drive from their guesthouse to Dalfan HQ. The radio news reported that the big tropical storm in the Java Sea had stalled. Meteorologists had originally predicted it would head west, skirting far below Singapore but crashing into Jakarta. That stalled storm kept dumping rain on Singapore, however, and the streets were starting to flood, snarling traffic even further.

  They arrived at Dalfan, Paul’s limp worse than ever. Everybody was anxious and distracted by the storm. Jack and Paul were waved through security with a perfunctory check. Paul required a bathroom stop on the way to their offices. Bai wasn’t in yet—that was a lucky break. Paul fell into his chair and jumped onto his desktop, Jack leaning over his shoulder. Paul entered his randomized passcode and logged in. For the next twenty minutes his chubby fingers sped across the keys, aided by the occasional mouse click. He opened file after file at blazing speed.

  “You know your stuff,” Jack said, checking around to see if they were being watched through their glass wall. So far, so good.

  “Well, that’s a great big chocolate banana.”

  “What?”

  “The file is gone.”

  “The QC file you found before?”

  “Yup. It’s flat-out gone.”

  “You sure you’re looking in the right place?”

  Paul turned his head. They were practically nose to nose. “Seriously?”

  “Maybe somebody moved it.”

  “More likely deleted it. I’ve already done a global search. It’s gone.”

  “Couldn’t it just have been renamed?”

  “I did a search for files in the folder. Key words, you name it. Nothing.”

  Jack stood. “We need that file. It’s the last shred of evidence we have.” He paced around for a moment. “Wouldn’t Dalfan have some sort of a backup system? To protect against data loss?”

  “Yeah, sure. Good idea. Gimme a few minutes.” Paul tapped keys furiously.

  Jack decided to do some nosing around himself. He crossed over to his office and logged on to his computer and did some searching on his own. After twenty minutes, he gave up. He couldn’t find anything. He returned to Paul’s office.

  Paul scratched his comb-over, frustrated. “I found the backup system they use—it’s hardware, located in this building, not cloud-based. Near as I can tell, they keep the previous thirty days available on their backup drive, then probably download anything before that and put it in some kind of permanent storage somewhere. That file should’ve been in the thirty-day backup, but it’s not. Somebody used a bot or some other automated sniffer to find every version of that file and destroy them all.”

  “Then we’re screwed.”

  “Whoever built the file originally did it to keep track of the transactions. It’s not likely they’d want to lose those records—otherwise, why keep them in the first place?”

  “So whoever deleted those files made a hard copy before they deleted them?”

  “That would be my guess. I can’t tell you who or where, but at least there’s the possibility—a remote one, I grant you—that you can someday recover the data.”

  About that moment, Bai came into view, beelining for Paul’s office. Jack heard his phone ringing in his office next door. Only Yong or Lian had ever called him. Might be important.

  “I’d better grab that.” Jack dashed over to his desk phone.

  Paul was grateful. He had clandestine work to do this morning, and he didn’t want Jack snooping around while he did it. Unfortunately, Bai wasn’t going to give him much room to maneuver, either. There was still more than twelve hours to pull this off, but suddenly that didn’t seem like such a long time.

  Bai shook his raincoat off and hung it up on the coat rack next to Paul’s, still dripping wet. “Good morning, Mr. Brown.”

  “Hello, Bai. How was your evening?”

  “Not good.” Bai dropped into his chair, exhausted. “Didn’t sleep very well.”

  “The storm?”

  “Yeah. And my mother. She’s very worried. She thinks the storm will turn into a big typhoon that will come hit us.”

  “The weatherman doesn’t think so.”

  “But she does. And she’s a wu.”

  “A what?”

  “A wu. Eh, maybe ‘witch’ in English. She tells fortunes, sees the future. For fun, mostly. But she’s pretty good.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she sees a big storm coming?”

  “Huge. She’s very scared.”

  Paul smiled at the young man. “I think you’re the one who’s a little bit scared.”

  “I’m worried for my mom. My dad is dead. No brothers or sisters. So I look out for her.”

  Paul watched Jack hang up the phone, then head back to Paul’s office.

  “Everything okay?”

  “That was Lian. She wants to see me.”

  “About what?”

  “Turns out a Dalfan van was stolen and wrecked last night.”

  Paul feigned surprise. “Really?”

  “Yeah, crazy, eh? There we were, you and I, watching the local news together and then going to bed, and while we were sleeping, all of that happened.”

  Paul nodded his understanding of Jack’s coded alibi. “Yeah, crazy.”

  “A stolen van?” Bai said. “I don’t believe it. Cars don’t get stolen in Singapore.”

  “Even Oz has its flying monkeys,” Jack said.

  Bai frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “Never mind.” He turned to Paul. “She’s waiting for me on the third floor. I’ll talk to her, then come back here so we can pick up where we left off. Okay?”

  “Take your time. I’ve got plenty to do.”

  Jack nodded and headed for the elevators.

  Now Paul had to deal with Bai.

  But how?

  54

  Jack entered the third-floor office where Lian was located. She’d commandeered the space to meet with him privately, out of earshot.

  “You wanted to see me?” Jack asked.

  “Have a seat.”

  Jack took a seat. “You were saying something about a stolen van?”

  “The Singapore police called earlier this morning. They found one of our vans smashed to pieces over in the warehouse district across town around two-thirty this morning.”
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  “I’m sorry to hear that. Anybody hurt?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.” Lian’s eyes narrowed, studying Jack’s face. “You don’t look so good yourself. How are you feeling this morning?”

  Jack shrugged. “Didn’t sleep well last night. The storm kept waking me up. Besides that, pretty good.” Jack had taken the time to cover up his black eye again—thankfully, he hadn’t taken the time to toss out the base makeup from his kit. He was fully shaved and showered, and his limp had mostly gone away. He was lucky she didn’t ask him to take off his shirt. A wicked purple bruise painted his arm from the bottom of the shoulder down to his elbow, where the bat had hit and grazed him. It was sore to the touch, but nothing had been broken. Raising it over his head to wash his hair, though, had been a real treat.

  “I hate to ask, but as head of security, I must: Did you steal our van last night?”

  “No. Why would I? I have a company car at my disposal.”

  “Because you didn’t want to be followed? To hide what you were doing?”

  “I didn’t do anything last night except watch the local news with Paul, then I went to bed. I was feeling a little under the weather.”

  “And he’ll vouch for you?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Of course.” Lian smiled. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “What was in the van worth stealing?”

  “It was one of our delivery vans. Electronic parts, wires, catalogs. The contents were worth maybe four or five thousand dollars, American.”

  “I’d think there would be more valuable things to steal around here.”

  “There are. That’s what’s so puzzling.”

  “And they took it all?”

  Lian shrugged. “No. Actually, nothing valuable is missing, as far as we can tell.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Unless they weren’t stealing the van for the cargo inside.”

  “You mean, like, selling the van for parts?”

  “Perhaps. But that doesn’t make any sense, either. A Toyota Camry would be worth a lot more than that van. Why risk going to jail to part out a generic van?”

  “Nothing else is missing from your property?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “What did your security cameras show?”

  “Isn’t that an interesting question? I checked them first thing. Somehow, all of the security footage for the last twenty-four hours has been erased.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “And on a hunch, I decided to take a look at the Steady Stare footage. Unfortunately, the drone wasn’t up last night, due to the weather. But do you know what I found?”

  “No.”

  “Twenty-four hours of video had been wiped away.”

  Jack frowned, genuinely confused. “How could that happen?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Jack knew it wasn’t him. But whoever had done it must have known that Jack had accessed that footage last night. He decided to take a chance. “You must have logs of whoever accessed that video yesterday.”

  Lian’s eyes examined Jack’s face, searching for a tell. “I don’t suppose you can guess what I discovered?”

  “That the logs have been scrubbed, too.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Someone’s covering their tracks.”

  “Yes, they are.” Lian sat forward. “I’ll ask you again: Was it you?”

  “No, I can guarantee you, it wasn’t me.”

  She sat back, confused. “Then who?”

  Good question. Apparently he had a guardian angel. Whoever had deleted the surveillance footage and log-in data probably disposed of the bodies at the warehouse, too, otherwise Lian would’ve mentioned it. Murder was rare in Singapore, and she would have heard about four dead foreign nationals from her police contacts. And if she thought that Jack really had stolen the van, she would’ve had him arrested already, or at least fired from the job. Since neither had happened, she must have had her doubts.

  Or maybe she was saving that trump card for later.

  Jack decided it was time to deflect and go on the offensive.

  “I don’t know if it’s connected, but Paul and I were just looking for a file that has disappeared from the mainframe.”

  Lian frowned. “What kind of file?”

  Jack had to be careful. He didn’t want to tip his hand, and he didn’t want to offend her. “Just one of the files we needed for our audit.”

  “That’s rather vague.”

  “Agreed. But it’s an interesting coincidence.”

  “Check the mainframe backups for copies.”

  You thought of everything, didn’t you? Jack said to himself. “We did. All gone.”

  “Maybe it was never there to begin with.”

  “It was there, believe me.”

  “If it was so important, why didn’t you download and copy it?”

  Jack had been wondering the same thing. Why didn’t Paul download it? It seemed an obvious thing to do, and Paul was a sharp guy. Did he really just forget, or was it intentional?

  Hell, maybe Paul’s the one that deleted the file, Jack realized.

  “I guess we blew it. But I promise you I’m going to keep digging until I find it.”

  “Good, that’s your job.”

  “Agreed.” Jack stood to leave.

  “I’ll warn you once, Jack. If I catch you doing anything illegal, I’ll have you arrested.” She smiled. “Nothing personal.”

  “Yeah.” Jack started to leave, then turned around. “You said that you were going to run those Aussie IDs past a friend of yours in the PD. What did you find?”

  “Oh, yes. I forgot to tell you. Two of them have been released from hospital and deported. The third is still in hospital but scheduled to be released and deported tomorrow. All three have criminal records in Australia—mostly petty crimes, a few dropped assault charges—but no evidence of IC or military status.”

  “So we just got lucky and were jumped by the only three criminals in Singapore?”

  “They were here illegally, too. Hooligans, the lot of them.” She paused, then added, “Good riddance.”

  “Is ‘Good riddance’ for them or me?”

  Lian smiled. “Good day, Mr. Ryan.”

  55

  Paul turned to Bai. “Why don’t you go use Jack’s phone next door and call your mother, make sure she’s okay, then go and get us a couple of hot coffees.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  Bai shrugged. “C’mon, Mr. Brown. You know my job is to keep an eye on you.”

  “I’ve been a big threat, haven’t I? Doing all kinds of crazy things.”

  Bai smiled. “No, not really.”

  “But this storm is a problem, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I’m worried about my mother.”

  “Then go call her on Jack’s phone over there. Make sure she’s okay. And if she is, why don’t you run to the kitchen and fetch us a couple of hot coffees and something sweet? I won’t leave here, I promise. Okay?”

  Paul watched the wheels turning behind Bai’s eyes. Finally he said, “Okay. Cream and sugar, right?”

  “Plenty of both. Thanks.”

  Bai stepped over to Jack’s office and dialed his mother as Paul logged on to his Dalfan desktop computer and opened his hard drive.

  Paul watched Bai’s animated gesturing through the glass as he spoke with his mother over the phone. An argument of some sort, Paul guessed. Bai was completely distracted by his conversation with his mother, so Paul used the opportunity to pull up the CIA file on his laptop.

  As soon as Bai hung up the phone and headed for the break room, Paul pulled out his Dalfan USB drive from his desk and loaded
it onto his laptop. The USB drive icon appeared on his screen. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. Thirty seconds later, a file labeled BIGDADDYG appeared on his laptop.

  Paul ejected the Dalfan USB and replaced it with his CIA drive, smuggled in his left shoe and fetched out in the bathroom earlier. He dragged BIGDADDYG onto it.

  According to Gavin, that was it. The CIA drive could now be loaded onto a Dalfan computer. All he had to do was install it into the Dalfan desktop computer and type in his passcode when prompted, and the mission would be complete—in thirty seconds or less.

  Paul gripped the CIA drive between his thumb and index finger and pointed it at the USB port on the Dalfan computer. Just as the silver tongue of the USB drive was about to seat in the port, Paul stopped. He checked to make sure Bai was still gone, then opened his laptop back up. He pulled up the CIA file and opened the file folder, then drilled down into the files, digging deeper until he opened up the lines of code. He read them like a Talmudic scholar, his eyes raking over the numbers and letters, mumbling to himself as he read along.

  And then he saw it. A familiar line, connected to another, and another.

  “Holy schnikes,” he whispered. “No way.” He wished to God he could call Gavin and show him this. Incredible.

  And incredibly dangerous.

  “What the hell is that?” a voice said.

  Paul glanced up, stunned by the voice. It was Yong, his face hard as flint. He pointed at the lines of code on Paul’s screen.

  Paul swallowed hard. “This?”

  Yong stepped closer, furious. “Yes. That.”

  JAKARTA, INDONESIA

  Sania Masood sat at her workstation in her private office, curtains drawn, door closed. She studied the screen in front of her, but her mind was on the package in her drawer. It was nearly noon.

  Her phone rang. She picked up.

  “Deep Convection Analysis.”

  “Have you opened the package yet?”

  Masood smiled. She recognized the man’s voice. “The instructions said to wait until noon.”