Point of Contact

He pulled out his iPhone and tapped on his Photo Trap app — the best ninety-nine cents he had ever spent, as far as he was concerned — and then went around to his closet, his clothes drawers, and his bathroom sink. At each stop, he pressed the + button to record the date and time of an initial photo. Later this evening he would come back and stand in the same position and take secondary photos and then compare them on the app by hitting the manual flip function, which switched back and forth between the comparison photos to see if anything had been moved.

It was standard operating procedure at The Campus to establish personal security checks when on assignment — foreign hotel rooms were notorious surveillance traps for any visitor, especially Westerners. But beyond electronic devices, it wasn’t uncommon for hotel security — or, worse, national security personnel — to enter one’s private hotel room and search around in person for contraband.

Of course, this wasn’t a Campus assignment, but the habits drilled into him by Ding and the others were hard to break, including this one. For an extra thirty seconds of effort, the Photo Trap icon would scratch an itch that would otherwise drive Jack crazy, and would keep Ding’s nagging voice silent. Besides, Clark told him to always trust his gut, and Jack’s gut was telling him to stay vigilant.

Until recently, the way to find out if someone had broken in and searched around was to place a single piece of lint on a drawer lip or leave a zipper slider at an exact location on a piece of luggage, but most skilled surveillance people knew these kinds of tricks because they employed them themselves, and that meant they knew how to spot and defeat them. The great thing about the Photo Trap application was that it took a picture of everything, so that if anything was even slightly out of place, Jack would know someone had been in his room and what they had touched.

Not that he had anything to hide. But he hated the idea that someone would have been snooping around and he wouldn’t know about it.

He thought about telling Paul to do the same thing, but he didn’t want to give Paul any reason whatsoever for him to suspect that Jack was anything but a financial analyst for Hendley Associates. Finance guys on business trips didn’t do OPSEC. The less Paul knew about him, the better.

* * *

Paul and Jack arrived at the Dalfan building and split up. Paul was met by Bai, and the two of them headed for his office.

Jack waited for Lian, who arrived a few moments later, clearly off her game. She greeted him formally, then escorted him to the third floor for his appointment with Dr. Singh. She didn’t say a word on the elevator ride up. Neither did Jack.

Dr. Singh greeted Jack and Lian at the security desk and directed them toward the floor. He was taller than Jack but thinner, with a lean, handsome face that was heavily bearded. His turban was brilliantly white and perfectly wrapped. Dark, smiling eyes were framed by square glasses with stylish clear acetate frames.

“Are you familiar with our Steady Stare program, Mr. Ryan?”

“Only what I read from your materials. It’s a twenty-four-hour-a-day drone-based surveillance program for civilian applications.”

“That’s correct. But when you put it that way, it sounds rather boring, doesn’t it? What I want to show you today is how we put it all together, and what it really means for the bottom line for our customers and for Dalfan.”

“Can’t wait.”

“Good. Please, follow me.”

The Steady Stare floor was organized into two main divisions, much like the one downstairs. The first division was composed of offices and computer workstations.

“This is where we write our own proprietary software for GPS navigation, autopiloting, image correlation, and so forth,” Singh explained.

“What’s proprietary about any of it?” Jack asked. “Lots of people are writing software like that.”

Singh’s eyes shifted to Lian. She nodded.

“It’s the artificial-intelligence software we’ve written, and the means by which we’re applying it to each phase of the other software and hardware components that make Steady Stare a unique product,” Singh said.

“AI? That’s what Google and the other big boys in Silicon Valley are trying to figure out. You’re facing some stiff competition.”

“We believe we’re holding our own.”

He led Jack and Lian over to a computer-aided design station. “And here is one of our hardware design platforms. We use CAD to create and build our own devices — optics, sensors, communications, and the Steady Stare unmanned aerial vehicle itself.”

“And you manufacture all of these components here in Singapore?” Jack said.

“The proprietary ones,” Singh said. “We utilize a lot of off-the-shelf technology, too. Some of that we import from trusted sources.”

“Trust is hard to come by these days.”

“Rarer than the rarest earth element,” Lian said. “But we have our sources.”