Point of Contact

Paul watched the younger man eat. Over the last few days he’d gotten to know Jack Ryan and he seemed like a decent fellow and whip-smart, for sure. Everything in him wanted to ask Jack for help in carrying out the mission for Rhodes, especially now that he had hit a wall, but he knew he couldn’t ask him — and not just because Rhodes had forbidden him to do it. Paul was trying to protect the young analyst. If he pulled Jack into this operation and it went sideways, the President’s son could wind up in a world of hurt.

And then again, he still wasn’t sure if he could trust Jack, either. Jack was pleasant enough around the office, but he was obviously in a fight last night, and didn’t want to talk about it. If it was in self-defense, why hide it? Maybe the whole Mr. Nice thing was just an act.

No, he’d have to do this one without Jack, Paul decided, but he knew he couldn’t do it by himself.

He poured himself another whiskey and drained it.

* * *

After dinner, Jack and Paul loaded the dishwasher and cleaned up, then both headed for bed. Paul was yawning his head off and Jack wanted to finish his Churchill biography.

But before brushing his teeth and heading for bed, Jack grabbed his iPhone and opened the Photo Trap app again. Photo Trap listed the photos he had taken this morning and he pulled the first one up — his clothes-closet picture. The program prompted him, READY FOR PHOTO 2. He crossed over to the clothes closet and tapped the READY prompt, and the camera function on his iPhone pulled up a faint ghosted image of his closet so that he could match his new, live comparison shot to the original, lining up the edge of the closet door, a blue oxford shirt, and a few other markers so that the photos would exactly match. The Photo Trap app also provided directional arrows, telling Jack which way to rotate or tilt the camera on its axis to help match the first and second image. When the directional gauge grayed out all the arrows, he snapped the photo, then he manually flipped back and forth between the first and second photos to compare any differences, however subtle.

He repeated the process for the photos he took of his dresser drawer and in the bathroom. After he had manually flipped back and forth several times, it was clear to Jack that somebody had been in his room and searching for something. And if they had searched his room, they had probably searched the rest of the house as well.

Jack had an idea about who might have done it and what they were looking for. He thought about telling Paul about it but decided against it. Paul seemed distracted enough as it was, and there wasn’t anything the accountant could do about it. Jack gave his room a thorough inspection for electronic microphones and cameras but didn’t find anything — or so he hoped.

He suddenly felt very exposed.

* * *

Utterly exhausted, Paul headed upstairs to his bedroom and took a shower. Unlike most Americans, he preferred to shower at night and get the day’s dirt off and climb into bed clean. It was a practice Carmen had taught him.

Beneath the hot, steaming water, Paul’s Dalfan encryption problem occurred to him again. He’d been racking his brain all day, and if he was being honest with himself, the booze wasn’t helping matters. The shower was pushing away the cobwebs. But he needed the booze tonight. Grief had fallen on him again, as unbidden as the plague. The only way to loosen its grip and keep the tears away was the booze. Better numb than despondent. At least he could work that way.

Paul had come up with half of a plan, but he couldn’t figure out a way to finish it. Suddenly it dawned on him that he knew someone who could.

Gavin Biery, Hendley Associates’ IT director, was a man Paul grudgingly acknowledged was damn good at his job, even if he was a total smart-ass.

Paul toweled off, putting the final pieces together. What he needed next was for Gavin to write a piece of software to capture the Dalfan encryption code on the Dalfan USB drive he now had. Gavin’s software had to be written in such a way that when Paul installed the Dalfan USB into his personal laptop, the code would be captured. After capturing the code, he would load it onto the CIA drive, and then he could install the CIA drive directly on the Dalfan desktop.

But none of that would happen if Gavin didn’t write that software, and write it fast. The deadline was only three days away.

Unfortunately, Paul also knew Gavin was up to his eyeballs in IT requests at the busy financial firm. He had to find a way to jump to the front of that line and convince Gavin to drop everything else he was doing and write him that piece of code, ideally within the next twenty-four hours, if that was even possible. Knowing Gavin, it would be a long shot to capture his attention, let alone get him to jump through a major hoop on such short notice.

Paul needed to come up with a compelling reason for Gavin to do this for him without compromising his mission for Rhodes. But how?