He took the 7 local four stops and changed to the express. He stayed on that train for three long stops and switched to the E train into Manhattan. He rode the E to Penn Station and Thirty-Fourth Street, then bought a ticket for the AirTrain to Newark Liberty in New Jersey.

When he arrived at the airport, Grigor intended to briefly check into a hotel. He needed a place to hole up for a few hours. He needed to get rid of the knapsack with its weapons, ammunition and explosive mixtures—and make sure there were no chemical traces on his body. And he needed to take care of his wound.

There would be no stopping again once he reached Hawaii.

18

Various Locales
April 19, 2024

New York

“So,” Natasha said, looking at the computer monitor. “What’s here for us?”

“I’m gathering information,” Kali said.

“Shocker. About?”

Kali didn’t answer. Though Natasha wondered if she even heard the question. She was clearly focused on what was in front of her. One thing their Ouija web search had quickly demonstrated was that if you knew what you were looking for and where to search for it, it didn’t always take a complicated hack to mine solid gold information from the internet.

The web page Kali had clicked on was called Global Ship Finder, and it was the second site she had visited in the past few minutes. The first—and the one that led her directly to it—was a database of foreign importers and exporters named Asian TradeWizard Worldwide. Backtracking another step, TradeWizard had come up among a long list of hits when Kali googled the keywords US China trade resources. As far as Natasha could tell, she had navigated to it at random from among the rest.

Asian TradeWizard’s menu bar was pretty basic. Its drop-downs were Home, International Sellers, International Buyers and Transactions.

In a search box on the Sellers page, Kali had typed Jinggu Technologies. The filtering search box underneath it offered only a single company product: core steel piping.

Next, Kali had moved her cursor back to the menu bar and clicked on Transactions. That took her to a new page. Its top two search boxes were side-by-side near the top: Importer and Exporter.

For Ship-from, she typed Jinggu. For Ship-to, she entered CloudCable.

When she clicked the search button, a list of purchase orders appeared. These specified the quantity of each order, its departure date and location, and its delivery date and location. The transactions went back half a decade, but Kali was able to narrow her results to the current year.