Point of Contact Read online

  Yong nodded at Bai, who grabbed a desk phone and speed-dialed a number. Paul guessed it was the IT department. Bai and the party on the other end of the line chatted in Chinese for a bit. Bai hung up. “Mr. Brown is right. They don’t want to upload his software.”

  “Even if they check it?” Yong asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “There is one other possibility,” Paul suggested. “If you can loan me one of your encrypted USB drives, I can download the data I need and transfer it to my machine. That way my machine is never in direct contact with your computer.”

  “Why can’t you just use Bai’s?”

  “I prefer one of my own.”

  “Why?”

  “It would be a violation of the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board auditing protocols to allow a Dalfan employee—or a Marin Aerospace employee, for that matter—to have access to the data and records I’m examining. Surely you see how that would be an ethical violation?”

  Yong rubbed his face, thinking. “Yes, I suppose it would be.” He turned to Bai. “Get him one of our drives—and wipe it clean. Then make sure he’s registered with it and the serial number is recorded.”

  “Yes, sir. Will he have to turn it in each day before he leaves?”

  “Yes, of course.” He turned to Paul. “Is that a problem?”

  “No. I’ll BleachBit the drive clean each day, just to keep things . . . ethical.”

  “You must also return the drive to us when you’re finally through with it. It’s proprietary, and we keep a strict accounting of each device.”

  “No problem. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. It’s just that I have a job to do.”

  “I understand. Hopefully this will be the last hurdle for you to jump in order for you to complete your assignment.”

  Paul smiled. “That’s the plan.”

  —

  It was mostly bullcrap, of course.

  Paul had to lie. It was his only choice. But he wasn’t happy about it.

  Bai was right. IDEA was a great piece of analytical auditing software, and just about anything Paul needed to do on this “due diligence” audit could’ve been done with it. Paul’s software was even better because he’d written the macros and templates himself, based on his years of experience in fraud analysis. But to do a proper fraud investigation would take several weeks for a company this size. What Paul really needed was the Dalfan encrypted USB flash drive. That didn’t solve his problem, but it got him one step closer to completing his mission.

  Or so he hoped.

  In the meantime, he had work to do. Rhodes had told him that the audit was legit, but that it was in addition to his more important task. Paul couldn’t shake the feeling that the auditing assignment was just a cover for the software upload. A giant waste of time. That didn’t make sense, either, though. Rhodes was paying a lot of money to send him and Jack out here. But then again, it wasn’t his money, was it?

  Paul pushed that idea aside and opened up his program. Time to eat the elephant.

  Even if he had all the time in the world, on a project this size the trick was to cut it up into bite-sized pieces rather than try to swallow it whole. If there was some kind of fraud or illegal activity taking place, and if whoever was behind it was careless enough to record the transactions somewhere in the general ledger, his auditing software might be able to sniff it out. It would take a great deal of luck to find anything, since all he could do with so little time available was perform random checks of selected data sets. But Fortune was a lady, and she favored the bold, statistically.

  Paul had constructed thirty discrete tests to perform, most of them numerical, but some were qualitative, searching and comparing the names and addresses of vendors, banks, warehouses, and products, as well as key words related to transactions, assets, destinations, and personnel. Connecting people, places, and patterns of behavior sometimes proved more valuable in cracking a fraud case, especially when the fraudsters were good at hiding the numbers. In fact, one of the Singapore banks that did business with Dalfan had been connected to the North Korean rare-earth-element debacle a few years ago, though no charges were ever filed. It was an interesting coincidence he would check out later.

  But it was number-crunching that dominated Paul’s work. He believed that most fraudsters weren’t as good at hiding the numbers as he was in finding them, and he had the track record to prove it. But he was no fool, and it usually took a combination of both investigative approaches to crack the hardest cases. As far as he knew, Dalfan was innocent of any wrongdoing, but for the sake of this exercise, he was going to assume they were hiding something, and hiding it very well.

  Would he find Dalfan vendors that changed bank accounts frequently? Had any Dalfan employees authorized multiple payments for items below a certain threshold limit to avoid triggering a limit alarm? Were there invoice receipts paid for amounts greater than the goods receipts they were matched to? How many purchase payments were made that exceeded the purchase-order amounts?

  And then there was his Benford’s law search engine.

  Paul rolled up his sleeves. It was going to be another long day, but it was still going to be a lot of fun. It was hard for him to believe that anybody could find this kind of work boring.

  28

  Okay,” Jack said. “So what else is there?”

  “Mostly technical details,” Singh said. “Maybe not that interesting.”

  “Try me.”

  Lian’s eyes narrowed, calculating.

  Jack flashed a roguish smile. “I’m sure those technical details will look really great on that report.”

  She nodded to Singh, defeated. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  Singh pointed at the video wall. He punched another button.

  The red and yellow terminal points flashed specific addresses, then a list of names and accompanying photos of the occupants of each residence on record. Singh paused the program again.

  “Where did you get that data?” Jack asked.

  “What you see on the screen right now is all OSINT. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube—these are all big platforms in Singapore just like the U.S. We also utilize phone number listings, tax records, and all of the public filings.” Singh paused. “But because this is a pilot project for the SPF, we’re also linked into their databases—immigration, prison records, internal security, civil defense, and even Interpol. So we can get virtually any information we need about anybody at any time if they’re in Singapore.”

  “And you’re pulling all of them together into one analytical platform?”

  Singh beamed with pride. “My teams write great algorithms. That’s our secret weapon, Mr. Ryan.”

  “Even more impressive.”

  Singh then highlighted the photo of a twenty-eight-year-old male named Ho who was living in the red terminal point. He tapped another key and more data came up. “You can see that Mr. Ho is employed by the delivery company we’ve been tracking. So now we have a good confirmation that he’s one of our targets.”

  Singh hesitated.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Singh glanced at Lian one last time for a final nod of confirmation.

  Singh continued. “If we let the software keep tracing their movements from the previous day, week, month, or year, we can collect all sorts of interesting data. Every time they enter a building we can determine who they are meeting with. Then we can trace the movements of those new targets as well. In this way, we can reconstruct entire networks of people, establish relationships, property locations, patterns of movement, et cetera, and all in far less time and for far less cost than traditional methods.”

  Jack ran the calculations in his head, multiplying the number of policemen times the number of hours in stakeouts, surveillance ops, shift rotations, vehicle miles driven, and a dozen other cost factors that added up to hundred
s of thousands of dollars in salaries and expenses for even small intelligence operations over a decent length of time.

  “Let me show you a quick example. We’ve been running this test program for the last sixty-four days. So let’s see what Mr. Ho has been up to.”

  Singh tapped several more keys. First, he cleared the screen of the yellow line representing the other delivery driver, then extended the time-trace parameter to sixty-four days. Nearly instantly, the screen filled with a crazy spiderweb of red lines, all tracing Ho’s movements, and all centered on Ho’s residence. The red lines mostly tracked along the same routes, with a few loose strands snaking around the island to parks, recreation areas, and shopping centers.

  “Now, if I hit another key, the software will show me Mr. Ho’s five most visited locations as measured by length of stay.” Singh executed the new function, isolating five specific locations, and took away all of the red spiderweb trace lines to clarify the image.

  “As you can see, two of those five locations are his home and his place of work. A third looks to be a local bar, and the fourth a horse-racing venue. The fifth . . .”

  Singh tapped more keys. “Is the residence of this woman.” A photo popped up, along with her personal stats. It was a thirty-two-year-old single woman, plain and somewhat heavyset.

  “So Mr. Ho spends quite a bit of time with this woman. For the sake of her privacy, I won’t pull up her name. But just for fun—”

  “Dr. Singh—” Lian said, but too late.

  Dozens of tracer lines, each in a different color, radiated out from the woman’s apartment. The home terminal of each line appeared, along with the images of their occupants—all men, of various ages and races.

  “It seems Mr. Ho’s ‘friend’ has a lot of other friends.” Singh raised an eyebrow. “If you catch my meaning.”

  “Friends who are friendly by the hour, judging by the time stamps,” Jack added.

  “That’s enough, Dr. Singh.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Singh tapped another key and all of the data disappeared, leaving only the live overhead image of Singapore on the screen.

  Jack shook his head. “I’m utterly amazed. You’re putting a beat cop in the sky. A beat cop with a perfect set of eyes and a perfect memory.”

  Singh nodded thoughtfully. “More or less, yes.”

  “This is what military and intelligence agencies have been doing for the last ten years,” Jack said. “I know you’ve written your own AI programs, but what’s your value-added?”

  “You know how these government systems run. A Predator operation might have eighty, a hundred, even two hundred people in the loop, everyone from the ground-control station and flight crew all the way back to the Pentagon, with civilian and military analysts added in for good measure.” He held up the tablet again. “Here’s your analysis team. The UAV we’ve developed can be transported in the back of a truck, unloaded, assembled, and made ready to launch in less than thirty minutes by just two people with a wrench and a screwdriver. Compared to the large military systems, Steady Stare is cheap, easy to use, and requires very little manpower.” Singh flashed a smile. “And of course, Dalfan is prepared to provide any or all of those manpower services if the client requires them. If not, Dalfan provides all of the training and technical support they might need.”

  Jack glanced around the room. There were four analysts sitting at workstations with headsets on, speaking. “How does a police department actually use a system like this?”

  “The SPF is responding to various calls around the city every day. If they conduct their initial investigation and can’t identify the culprits in a crime—for example, a hit-and-run car accident—an assigned detective will call us and give us the street address of the accident, and then we perform a ‘time travel’ search function like the one I just showed you. We would then call in the terminal address of the alleged vehicle to the detective and officers would be dispatched to the location. We’re not replacing police work, we’re just making it far more efficient.”

  “Politicians will love it because their police departments will be solving far more crimes for less money,” Lian said. “And when word gets out, it will deter crime. If every speeding vehicle automatically gets ticketed because of Steady Stare, fewer people will speed—that means fewer accidents, lower insurance costs, and fewer injuries and deaths.”

  No wonder Marin Aerospace wants a piece of this, Jack thought. He ran his hand through his hair, considering the possibilities—and the profits.

  Jack turned to Lian. “Now I’m getting a better idea why Dalfan has such tight security. The Chinese would love to steal this kind of technology.”

  “They’ve already tried.” Lian smiled. “And not just the Chinese.”

  Jack checked his watch. “This has been fascinating, Dr. Singh. I’d like to see the airport facility.”

  “When?”

  “Why not now?”

  Lian shrugged. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  —

  The Dalfan hangar at the Seletar Airport was unremarkable, a duplicate of several other leased hangars on the property. A single-wide trailer was parked next to it.

  Singh, Lian, and Jack parked the company car and headed into the hangar, big enough to accommodate two Cessna 172s or a medium-sized executive jet. Inside was neither.

  “That’s the Steady Stare UAV,” Singh said.

  The pilotless plane had no cockpit, of course. Its wingspan was about sixteen feet, and the fuselage about half of that. It had a six-bladed propeller. Singh pointed at the glass-orbed housing on the belly. “Our camera, sensor, and communication payloads are mounted in here. Optical, infrared, night vision, laser rangefinder, GPS—you name it—everything can be interchanged. They’re all modular and designed to fit in the unit.”

  “What kind of runway length do you need to launch?”

  “None.” Singh nodded toward the corner. Four lengths of aluminum pipe were welded together with smaller, thinner pieces, forming a ten-foot-long piece of scaffolding. “That’s a spring-loaded catapult. It launches the Steady Stare into the air, so no runway is needed.”

  “What if you don’t have the catapult?”

  “Then I’d go get it. Right now it’s not equipped for a conventional takeoff, but it’s designed to attach landing gear. We didn’t see any advantage to doing that over the catapult.”

  Jack tapped on the fuselage with the tip of his finger. It was hollow.

  “The fuselage is made of carbon-fiber composites. Super-strong and lightweight.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m trying to find another word besides ‘impressive,’ but I can’t. I’m sold on the concept. It looks as easy to use as you say, and I’ve seen what the cameras and software can do. What are the downsides to this system?”

  “High winds will ground the system, and night flying is only possible if the operating and backup batteries are fully precharged. Of course, you can always deploy the auxiliary internal combustion engine if needed.”

  “I only see one problem, and I don’t know how you overcome it.”

  “What’s that?” Lian asked.

  “In the United States, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits warrantless searches, and I know that some legal scholars would consider continuous surveillance like this a violation of civil rights.”

  “Our sales team has encountered this issue on several occasions in the States, but American cities keep finding out about us and still contact us,” Singh said. “You’re right, it’s still a contested legal issue, and we suspect that our American operations won’t really pick up for another few years. But until then, Asian police departments have shown a tremendous interest in our product, and my best guess is that Western governments won’t be far behind. After all, they already deploy closed-circuit surveillance cameras everywhere, don’t they? That’s just an inefficient version of wh
at we offer, and it fails to deliver our nearly perfect results.”

  Lian added, “Police departments are our first target market, but any government agency that needs to track the movement of people—polluters, poachers, illegal immigrants, pirates—will all demand a system like this.”

  Singh nodded in agreement. “We also believe there will be an even bigger market for private companies. For example, trucking firms that want to track their delivery vehicles or auto insurance companies that want to determine the actual cause of car wrecks.”

  Terrorist groups and crime syndicates would love to “time travel,” too, Jack thought. So would outfits like The Campus.

  “If history teaches us anything, it’s that human morality follows technology, and not the other way around,” Lian said. “It’s only a matter of time before your crime-infested urban areas come around to our way of thinking.”

  Jack agreed. He understood all the advantages of this kind of program, and it made sense for governments to deploy it on behalf of their citizens’ safety.

  But he couldn’t help wondering, What happens when a government can’t be trusted? Dictators and tyrants would definitely use this kind of technology against their own people. But even in the United States, lone wolves in federal agencies like the IRS, the FBI, and even the CIA used their power to persecute domestic political enemies.

  Jack glanced up into the hazy sky. He couldn’t see the Dalfan drone circling overhead, but he knew it was there, and he hated the idea that it was watching him. It was irrational, he knew, but it was already changing the way he was thinking about himself and his personal security—and he wasn’t one of the bad guys.

  He ran a hand over the smooth fuselage again. It seemed just like an ordinary airplane, but today’s demonstration proved it was anything but ordinary.

  “Have you seen enough, Mr. Ryan?” Lian asked.

  “Yes, thank you. Quite enough.”

  At least for now, Jack told himself.