Point of Contact

Jack watched the server deliver a tall red drink to Park’s table. He examined it, his eyes frowning with confusion.

“Our boy Park just got his delivery,” Jack said.

Paul turned around just in time to watch Park flip them both the bird.

“What did you send him?”

“A Shirley Temple. I figured he wasn’t allowed to drink liquor while on the job.”

Paul cracked a smile. “I don’t think you want to mess with that guy.”

“What else is there to do?”

The server arrived bearing platters of sizzling-hot shrimp, steaming bowls of rice, and crisp stir-fried vegetables. They dug in.

Paul enjoyed the sweet and fiery spicy chili sauce and the crunchy stir-fried shrimp, but his mind was still on Rhodes’s USB drive. He was glad he had run his little experiment today with the dummy drive. He assumed their protocols would catch something like that, but he wasn’t sure. If that really had been Rhodes’s drive the guard had discovered in his bag today, he might be sitting on a plane right now flying back to the United States, or pacing in a cramped Singaporean prison cell. The good news was that they didn’t do a body search. Dalfan was serious about their security but not paranoid. A mistake on their part, he told himself.

He chewed quietly, working the puzzle. Even if he’d been allowed to keep his dummy USB drive, he never got the chance to try and load it on his Dalfan computer today for a test run, and according to Bai, it wouldn’t have worked anyway, since it wasn’t loaded with the Dalfan encryption code.

Bai himself was a security barrier, Paul decided. If he was going to stay that glued to him, he’d never get the opportunity. Odds were he was going to fail the mission, and quite possibly get caught in the attempt. Neither scenario appealed to him. Rhodes even said there probably wasn’t a problem to begin with — this was all just precautionary. Sitting here, it suddenly didn’t seem worth the risk. Time to try a third option. Maybe get the mission canned altogether.

“So, if you didn’t find anything and I didn’t, either, maybe we should just sign off on this thing and go home early,” Paul said.

Jack laughed. “Why? Are you as bored as I am?”

“Something like that. Dr. Fairchild wouldn’t care if we wrapped this thing up.”

“Rhodes seemed to want us to do some serious digging while we’re here.”

“But he still wants us to sign off in the end.” Paul drained the rest of his glass. He didn’t want to seem too eager or oversell it. “I mean, you never seemed big on this assignment anyway and I need to get back, so, whatever you want to do, I’m up for it.”

Paul hoped to God Jack would take the bait. He didn’t think his nerves could stand this for another four days. If they were sent home early by Fairchild, then he really couldn’t be blamed for failing the mission, could he?

“I don’t know. We’re here, we might as well do the job right. Let’s keep painting by the numbers and see what turns up.”

“Okay. Sounds good to me.” Paul fought the panic welling up inside his chest. When he saw his server rush by, he held his empty glass up high at her and jiggled the ice. “Another one of these.”

She nodded and headed for the bar.

Paul sighed. It was going to be a long week.

19

Mind if I ask you a question?” Jack asked.

“Sure.”

“What made you want to become a fraud examiner?”

Paul stabbed another glistening shrimp. “Well, I was always pretty good at numbers and my mother said that accountants could always find work, so I decided to go that route in college. In my junior year I had a professor who was a JD and a CPA and he had retired from the FBI before going into teaching. He told us all kinds of great stories from his time in the Bureau — he described it like being a detective or a spy hunter, but instead of using guns, he used numbers. So what’s a fat kid from Iowa gonna do? He’s going to become a forensic accountant.”

“And you were in government service?”

“Briefly.”

Paul’s clipped answer told Jack to not probe further — at least right now. He changed subjects.

“And you enjoy fraud examination?”

“It’s really interesting. Never a dull moment.”

Jack fought the urge to roll his eyes. Was he kidding? The thought of drilling down into accounts-receivable ledgers and hunting for misplaced decimal points made him want to shove his chili-stained chopstick in his eye. “Interesting… how?”

Paul’s drink finally arrived. He said, “Chili’s pretty hot, isn’t it?” as if that was the reason he was about to take a sip from his third vodka tonic.

“Hot but good. I’m glad we came here.”

“Me too. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah. Why the job is interesting. Well, for me it’s interesting because in the end it’s never about the numbers, it’s always about the people. People are creatures of habit and pattern. Turns out numbers are pretty good at revealing habits and patterns, and the kinds of fraud people commit generate habitual patterns of numbers and data sets, too.”

“Is there a certain kind of person more likely to commit fraud?”