Jack had asked Feng for a tour of the entire facility as part of his auditing duties, but he’d also been taught by John Clark to always scout the terrain wherever he found himself, even if it’s just a movie theater or restaurant. He could still hear Clark’s voice drilling the questions into his skull. “Where are the exits? Where is the quickest egress? What are the sight lines? What are the most defensible positions? Where’s the men’s room?”

“Why the men’s room?”

“In case you have to take a leak.”

Feng’s tour had been quite revealing. For the most part, Dalfan relied on electronic security for the building, with alarm systems, sensors, and cameras doing most of the heavy lifting. Dalfan’s most valuable commodity was their IP—intellectual property—and that was stored on the Dalfan mainframe and workstations, and those were passcode-protected. There really was very little crime in Singapore, so they felt comfortable with a single guard at the front station in the lobby monitoring the remote cameras, which Jack had also taken note of.

With his security pass and other Dalfan credentials, it wouldn’t be a problem at all for Jack to just walk in the front door and present himself to the guard at the security desk with a story about needing to finish up some paperwork. He had no doubt whatsoever that the guard would let him in. He had even less doubt that the guard would log him into his system and quite possibly discover that Yong or Lian had red-flagged him, requiring the guard to notify one or both of them if Jack suddenly appeared in the building after hours. That wasn’t going to work. For the work ahead of him tonight, Jack preferred to remain anonymous, if at all possible, at least until he got the job done.

He suddenly had a better idea.

—

Back at the guesthouse, Paul tipped the bottle, teasing out the last ounce of whiskey into his glass. He ran his finger around the mouth of the bottle, catching the last glistening drops on his fingertip, then ran it over his teeth, sucking away the very last of it as he set the bottle down with a thud.

He prided himself on his ability to hold his liquor, a gift from his Irish-German cop father, long dead, killed in the line of duty. The man could shoot a pistol—Paul displayed his father’s marksmanship trophies in a case back home—but his real gift, the old-timers told him, was his dad’s ability to drink any man in the precinct under the table and still be able to walk home in a straight line directly into a tongue-lashing from Paul’s teetotaling mother.