Right now he didn’t need Gavin, anyway. What he needed was a way to get over to that second warehouse. He couldn’t use his cell-phone app to connect with another Uber ride—and if he used the landlines to call for a cab, well, who knows what that might trigger? He guessed that Lian’s security team was probably still staking out his guesthouse, so using the company car Lian had loaned them wouldn’t work unless he engaged in some fancy driving and shook them off his tail—but at night with little traffic and in the rain, with Lian’s mandate to her team to never lose him again, he suspected that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off short of a Fast and Furious movie-trailer car chase. And even if he did, he’d only piss Lian off even more and sour his already strained relationship with her. His job overall was to smooth the merger transaction between two companies, not cause irreparable damage to that relationship. His suspicions about the contents of that warehouse were just that—suspicions. He didn’t want to embarrass Gerry Hendley or Hendley Associates by going off on a snipe hunt that might not result in anything except screwing the pooch and ruining the merger.

Still . . . his instincts told him that checking out the warehouse was worth at least some risk. Stepping over to the window confirmed the weather was still miserable, so walking or running the twenty-five miles or so to get there was out of the question. He needed a set of wheels. Fortunately, Feng had shown him where the keys were kept for the company delivery vans parked in the back. Technically, he would only be borrowing one of them, not stealing it.

Or at least that’s what he’d tell the police after they arrested him.

47

Yong sat at his desk, nude.

The storm blasted against the heavy plate glass of his twenty-fourth-story luxury condo, but his eyes were fixed on the same video images of the semi truck and warehouse that Jack was watching simultaneously.

“Ice?” Meili was nude, too, but in the kitchen, fixing drinks. She held a cube of ice aloft in a pair of silver tongs.

“No.”

She muttered a curse to herself as she tossed the ice cube into the stainless-steel sink, then poured a couple ounces of Casa Noble Anejo, a fine sipping tequila, into two tulip-shaped Glencairn whiskey glasses and carried them into the living room.

“That’s why you got out of bed? I was hoping you were looking for more porn, or maybe QVC.”

“The alarm triggered.” Yong lifted the glass to his lips and sipped, keeping his eyes on the screen. Unknown to Jack or Paul, wireless trackers were embedded in their Dalfan security cards, keyed to an alert system on Yong’s computers.

“I’m surprised you heard it. You were quite busy at the time.”