Point of Contact

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?”