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Chapters (83)
  1. Cover
  2. ALSO BY TOM CLANCY
  3. PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
  4. 1
  5. 2
  6. 3
  7. 4
  8. 5
  9. 6
  10. 7
  11. 8
  12. 9
  13. 10
  14. 11
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  83. What’s next onyour reading list?

As Jack turned the first corner, Paul asked, “Should we call the American embassy?” He practically shouted over the pounding rain.

“And tell them what? You’re involved in corporate espionage and I just killed two foreign nationals? They’d hand us over to the Singapore authorities as fast as they could. Besides, the storm has knocked out all the cell service.”

“Oh, crap!”

“What?”

“My laptop. I left it back at the house. I need to get it.”

“Why?”

“I copied Rhodes’s software onto the hard drive. Not a good idea to leave that lying around. I’ve also got a lot of important work on there I wouldn’t want to lose.”

Jack smiled at the idea. “It’s the last place they’d think we’d go.”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but you’re right.”

Jack made another turn, heading for the PIE. Traffic had cleared up considerably, but the rain was even heavier than before. The streets were flooding now. Jack couldn’t go full speed even if he wanted to.

“So finish your story. You said you didn’t like what you found on Rhodes’s drive.”

“I took a look at the code. I’m no expert, but I’ve read extensively on the subject of cybersecurity—kind of a hobby. I recognized a few lines. I don’t know why they seemed familiar, but they did, so I Googled them when I got back to the guesthouse. I nearly wet myself when I discovered that it was a Stuxnet variant. Super-nasty stuff—the software that took down the Iranian centrifuges, remember?”

“Yeah. Why would the CIA want to load something like that into the Dalfan system?”

“I dug a little further into the software. Dalfan wasn’t the target. It was pointed at the Hong Kong stock market.”

“Hong Kong,” Jack reflected as he pulled onto the Paya Lebar Flyover, heading for the PIE. The few cars that were on the road now were flashing their emergency lights. A wailing ambulance screamed past them in the opposite direction.

The trees on either side of the freeway were bent over by the fierce winds. Leaves flew like ash through the air, and branches skittered across the pavement. Jack fought the wheel to keep the car in line. A huge gust of wind buffeted the car, rocking it side to side.

“Wow! That was huge!” Paul said. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Dalfan’s security is air-gapped, remember? They don’t do Wi-Fi. But they’re a registered stock on the Hong Kong exchange, so they’re hardwired to the exchange’s computers via fiber-optic cable. I think the program was designed to do to the Hong Kong exchange what Stuxnet did to those Iranian centrifuges.”

“Why would the CIA want to crash the Hong Kong stock market?”