Point of Contact

“Coffee,” Paul told himself. He took a minute to try to clear the cobwebs, then figured out where the coffee, filters, and coffeepot were located. Ten minutes later he sat back down in front of his computer, a giant steaming cup of Sumatran coffee in hand, creamed and sugared like a cheesecake. He slurped it down as fast as he could, then opened up his laptop again and got his bearings.

He found the file containing the captured Dalfan encryption code where Gavin’s program had placed it. He opened it and scanned the lines of software. He blinked hard. It might as well have been Sanskrit. Paul could write basic software and create macros for his Excel spreadsheets easily enough, but encryption algorithms made his head spin. He closed the file back down.

After missing the slot a few times, Paul finally inserted the CIA drive into the drive port on his laptop. When the drive icon appeared on his desktop, he dragged the Dalfan encryption code onto it. A minute later, the file was copied to the CIA drive.

Paul sighed through his nose. His plan was actually working.

He felt the warmth of Carmen’s approval flooding over him. He picked up the cup of coffee but didn’t see the point in drinking it now. His work was done for the evening. Time to finish up the last of the whiskey still waiting for him in the living room. He had reason to celebrate.

He stood and headed back to the living room. The heavy rain thundering outside jogged his memory.

Where the hell was Jack?

46

Jack thought his “better idea” was pretty solid until the sky opened up and torrential rain poured down in sheets. He was already twenty feet up in the air and still climbing the exterior drainpipe at the back of the Dalfan headquarters building.

His feet slipped against the rough concrete wall a couple times, but his hands were locked tight on the pipe — John Clark taught him a long time ago that grip strength was the key to overall power and stamina, and it was paying off in spades tonight.

The slashing, sidelong rain whipped his face, but his Baltimore Ravens cap stayed fixed to his skull. He was halfway to the rooftop. Climbing down at this point would be just as hazardous as continuing the climb up, and it wouldn’t get him to his goal anyway. His arms were tired, but the prospect of plummeting to his death on the asphalt below strengthened his resolve, and he took advantage of the steel brackets supporting the pipe for extra foot grips. As he finished looping an arm around the top of the roofline, the rain suddenly stopped—of course! — and he hauled the rest of his rain-drenched body over the edge and headed for the roof access door.

Jack had taken a flathead screwdriver he’d borrowed from the garage and was working against the latch bolt in the door when the rain came crashing down again. When Feng had shown him the roof his first day on the job, Jack noticed that the strike plate was hardly worn, suggesting that the strike plate was set too deep in the door frame. That meant the deadlocking plunger probably didn’t engage when the door was shut.

Sure enough, it took only a couple twists with the flat blade of the screwdriver to push back the latch bolt and open the door. Jack had also noticed that the door hadn’t been secured with an electronic alarm or even a magnetic sensor. There weren’t any cameras on the roof, either. Feng’s sand-filled coffee can was flooded over with water, the butts washed out onto the roof, all around Jack’s feet.

Jack slipped inside and took a second to pull off his cap and coat and shake them out, trying to dry off as much as possible. Once he was inside he would get picked up on security cameras; if the guard on duty bothered to check the cameras and if they actually saw him dripping wet, he might guess Jack’s entry into the building was less than conventional.

Jack sped down the steel stairwell but did his best to keep as quiet as possible. No point in alerting anybody by thundering down the steel steps. He reached the third-floor access door and paused for a moment, listening to see if anybody was nearby. He didn’t hear anything, so he waved his security card past the reader and the door clicked open. He wondered how he’d explain his actions when Dalfan checked their security logs tomorrow, but that was another problem for another day.

The first thing he did was dash into the men’s room, where cameras were thankfully not present, and he used fistfuls of paper towels to finish drying off before heading back out to the main floor. Nobody was around. He had the place all to himself.

Jack made his way past the second glass security wall with another wave of his security card, then headed straight for the workstation that controlled the Steady Stare surveillance drone system. He logged on with his passcode and accessed the window for the live feed and found exactly what he expected — nothing. In weather like this, the drone would be grounded. But it wasn’t a live feed he was looking for.