Paul scratched his comb-over, frustrated. “I found the backup system they use—it’s hardware, located in this building, not cloud-based. Near as I can tell, they keep the previous thirty days available on their backup drive, then probably download anything before that and put it in some kind of permanent storage somewhere. That file should’ve been in the thirty-day backup, but it’s not. Somebody used a bot or some other automated sniffer to find every version of that file and destroy them all.”

“Then we’re screwed.”

“Whoever built the file originally did it to keep track of the transactions. It’s not likely they’d want to lose those records—otherwise, why keep them in the first place?”

“So whoever deleted those files made a hard copy before they deleted them?”

“That would be my guess. I can’t tell you who or where, but at least there’s the possibility—a remote one, I grant you—that you can someday recover the data.”

About that moment, Bai came into view, beelining for Paul’s office. Jack heard his phone ringing in his office next door. Only Yong or Lian had ever called him. Might be important.

“I’d better grab that.” Jack dashed over to his desk phone.

Paul was grateful. He had clandestine work to do this morning, and he didn’t want Jack snooping around while he did it. Unfortunately, Bai wasn’t going to give him much room to maneuver, either. There was still more than twelve hours to pull this off, but suddenly that didn’t seem like such a long time.

Bai shook his raincoat off and hung it up on the coat rack next to Paul’s, still dripping wet. “Good morning, Mr. Brown.”

“Hello, Bai. How was your evening?”

“Not good.” Bai dropped into his chair, exhausted. “Didn’t sleep very well.”

“The storm?”

“Yeah. And my mother. She’s very worried. She thinks the storm will turn into a big typhoon that will come hit us.”

“The weatherman doesn’t think so.”

“But she does. And she’s a wu.”

“A what?”

“A wu. Eh, maybe ‘witch’ in English. She tells fortunes, sees the future. For fun, mostly. But she’s pretty good.”

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“And she sees a big storm coming?”

“Huge. She’s very scared.”

Paul smiled at the young man. “I think you’re the one who’s a little bit scared.”

“I’m worried for my mom. My dad is dead. No brothers or sisters. So I look out for her.”

Paul watched Jack hang up the phone, then head back to Paul’s office.

“Everything okay?”

“That was Lian. She wants to see me.”

“About what?”

“Turns out a Dalfan van was stolen and wrecked last night.”

Paul feigned surprise. “Really?”

“Yeah, crazy, eh? There we were, you and I, watching the local news together and then going to bed, and while we were sleeping, all of that happened.”