BooksBarbecue
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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
  15. 12
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  36. 33
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  38. 35
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  40. 37
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  51. 48
  52. 49
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  55. 52
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  82. 79
  83. What’s next onyour reading list?

Paul turned around just in time to watch Park flip them both the bird.

“What did you send him?”

“A Shirley Temple. I figured he wasn’t allowed to drink liquor while on the job.”

Paul cracked a smile. “I don’t think you want to mess with that guy.”

“What else is there to do?”

The server arrived bearing platters of sizzling-hot shrimp, steaming bowls of rice, and crisp stir-fried vegetables. They dug in.

Paul enjoyed the sweet and fiery spicy chili sauce and the crunchy stir-fried shrimp, but his mind was still on Rhodes’s USB drive. He was glad he had run his little experiment today with the dummy drive. He assumed their protocols would catch something like that, but he wasn’t sure. If that really had been Rhodes’s drive the guard had discovered in his bag today, he might be sitting on a plane right now flying back to the United States, or pacing in a cramped Singaporean prison cell. The good news was that they didn’t do a body search. Dalfan was serious about their security but not paranoid. A mistake on their part, he told himself.

He chewed quietly, working the puzzle. Even if he’d been allowed to keep his dummy USB drive, he never got the chance to try and load it on his Dalfan computer today for a test run, and according to Bai, it wouldn’t have worked anyway, since it wasn’t loaded with the Dalfan encryption code.

Bai himself was a security barrier, Paul decided. If he was going to stay that glued to him, he’d never get the opportunity. Odds were he was going to fail the mission, and quite possibly get caught in the attempt. Neither scenario appealed to him. Rhodes even said there probably wasn’t a problem to begin with—this was all just precautionary. Sitting here, it suddenly didn’t seem worth the risk. Time to try a third option. Maybe get the mission canned altogether.

“So, if you didn’t find anything and I didn’t, either, maybe we should just sign off on this thing and go home early,” Paul said.

Jack laughed. “Why? Are you as bored as I am?”

“Something like that. Dr. Fairchild wouldn’t care if we wrapped this thing up.”

“Rhodes seemed to want us to do some serious digging while we’re here.”

“But he still wants us to sign off in the end.” Paul drained the rest of his glass. He didn’t want to seem too eager or oversell it. “I mean, you never seemed big on this assignment anyway and I need to get back, so, whatever you want to do, I’m up for it.”