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Back Point of Contact Save as PDF
Chapters (83)
  1. Cover
  2. ALSO BY TOM CLANCY
  3. PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
  4. 1
  5. 2
  6. 3
  7. 4
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  83. What’s next onyour reading list?

Jack shook his head. “No.” Jack winced again. “C’mon, Paul, my arms are killing me.”

“Just a second. If you’re not CIA, what are you? FBI? DIA?”

“None of the above.”

“Foreign service? Interpol?”

“Look, you’re smart enough to know that if I’m with a sworn service I can’t tell you. But Gerry will vouch for me.”

“Gerry was working with Rhodes. I don’t know if I can trust him.”

“Gerry’s good people. You know that. If Rhodes is pulling a scam, Gerry’s not part of it.” He looked into Paul’s pale gray eyes. “And neither am I. If I was, my dad would kick my ass.”

Paul chuckled. “He would, wouldn’t he?”

Paul crossed over to the kitchen and pulled a knife out of the drawer. He cut Jack’s bonds.

Jack sat up, rubbing his wrists. “Thanks.”

“How’s your head?”

“I’m gonna need a new one when we get back home.” Jack touched it. Blood on his fingers. He stood up stiffly.

Paul’s voice softened to a whisper. “I’m really sorry about that. It’s just that I thought for sure you were coming to kill me.”

Jack went to the kitchen, looking for a clean towel. “Because of that USB drive? What’s on it? And what’s the story on Rhodes?” He found one and pressed it against his scalp.

Paul sat back on the couch, the gun limp in his hand. “Last Monday when we got hooked into this thing and Gerry took you outside, Rhodes took me aside and said he was working with Langley, and that he had a special mission for me to carry out—loading his USB drive onto the Dalfan mainframe. But you saw how secure Dalfan was. It took me a few days to figure out a way to get around it, and I did. In fact, I was just about going to load it tonight when I decided to take a look at the code. I didn’t like what I found.”

“Which was?”

“Rhodes said it was just a piece of sniffing software that the CIA had written. He said they wanted to be sure that the Dalfan systems hadn’t been compromised by Chinese malware before the merger with Marin Aerospace happened.”

“Sounds plausible enough. Don’t take this the wrong way, but why would Rhodes recruit you?”

Paul frowned. “We have a history. From way back.”

“And he called in a favor.”

“More like he stroked my ego, made me feel important again.”

“Sounds like the Weston Rhodes I know.”

Jack checked the towel. The bleeding had stopped. “Let’s keep talking, but we should get out of here.” They took two minutes to wipe off fingerprints and hide any other evidence of their presence before running for the Audi. Paul kept his gun and gave Jack the other one. They fell into the coupe soaking wet and sped away.

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