Point of Contact

Jack pulled up another window, which allowed him to access the stored video data for the last twenty-four hours. “Time for a little time travel,” he whispered.

* * *

It took Jack just a few clicks to find the video data files he was looking for. His concern was what he would find on them.

Overall, the weather had been pretty good today, but there were occasional gusting winds and downpours. In other words, typical Singapore weather for this time of year. If Steady Stare was going to be a viable option for the Singapore Police Force, its drone aircraft needed to be able to fly in less-than-ideal conditions.

A few more clicks and Jack found what he’d been hoping for. The Steady Stare video program was completely intuitive, but the training Dr. Singh had given him made it even easier. The Steady Stare aircraft had luckily been flying most of the day. The first screen he opened was a bird’s-eye view of the entire city. He typed in the warehouse address, and the video image zoomed in to the western side of the city and with a few more clicks enlarged the warehouse and its grounds.

Jack suddenly realized that if the Steady Stare aircraft had been flying tonight it would’ve caught him on its cameras, too. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. It was time to focus on the task at hand.

When Jack approached the warehouse yesterday it was heavily guarded. Tonight, the guards were gone and the contents had been removed. That had obviously occurred within thirty-six hours, give or take. Judging by the way Lian had insisted on taking them on the tour and taking them out to eat, it was now clear to him that she was keeping them occupied while the warehouse was being emptied.

He tapped on a few more keys and then hovered an arrow over the time scrubber, designating the calendar day, hours, minutes, and even seconds. It didn’t take Jack long to find a semi truck pulling into the loading dock area. Jack decided he liked time travel.

A lot.

Because the truck was backed up to the loading dock and the dock itself was covered, Jack couldn’t make out what was being loaded into the semi. That was unfortunate, but not fatal. He pushed the scrubber forward in time until the truck pulled away. Jack then zoomed out several hundred feet, put a tracking reticle on the vehicle, then let the program run at 10x speed. He watched the truck traverse several streets and pull into another warehouse facility less than four miles away. Jack snapped a photo of the address with his phone.

Once again, it wasn’t possible to see what was being unloaded from the truck. He pulled up the data on the warehouse ownership, though he suspected it was a shell company that would shield the identity of the real owner. He wanted to grab some faces for the facial-recognition software, but the two people walking around the truck both wore long-billed caps and had the OPSEC smarts to not look up. Even if he had grabbed a few faces and could get them to Gavin, Jack suspected, they would’ve come up empty again if this was the same bunch who had secured the first warehouse facility.

All of that was bad luck. The good news was that whoever was moving this stuff around didn’t simply load it onto a ship and send it on its way. But this warehouse, like the first, was butted up against the bay, and Jack suspected that a ship was en route to pick up the secretive cargo. How soon, he couldn’t know. But sooner rather than later, no doubt, and whatever the shipment was, it was hot enough that the owners felt they had to move it just on the suspicion that Jack Ryan might dig further.

They didn’t know how right they were.

* * *

Jack tracked the semi’s journey out of that facility and back over to a rental yard across town. He snapped a photo of the image of the truck and the name and address of the rental yard with his phone, but he knew that neither would likely lead to anything of consequence. His target wasn’t the truck, it was the new warehouse and whatever the hell had just been loaded into it.

Jack shut the Steady Stare program down, thinking about what his next move would be. He couldn’t contact anyone by cell phone inside the building, including Gavin. He could call him on a Dalfan landline, but that call would be automatically logged and possibly recorded, and he didn’t want to draw that much attention to himself, Gavin, or even Hendley Associates at this point, especially since he was now engaged in an illegal activity — several, technically.