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.