Trepidation filled Karen Forrester as she stepped off the private jet that had flown from Dulles International to Singapore. Her partner, Yu Long Zhou, had forgone procedure and held onto their case files of their target, Damon Wade, instead of deleting it from their files as the chairman had ordered. Zhou remained tight-lipped throughout the plane ride, refusing to discuss his motives until they left the tarmac.
At the car rental, Zhou flashed a Singapore inspector’s badge, complete with credentials. Speaking in Chinese, the clerk quickly brought around a car Forrester estimated must be worth at least $300,000.
“A souvenir?” she asked as they sped away.
“In my line of work, it helps to know the right people,” Zhou responded tersely.
That was enough. Forrester whipped out her phone. After a few taps, she accessed the car’s power source and killed the engine.
“Who the hell are you? Is your name even really Zhou? Ever since you heard Wade’s message in the apartment, you’ve been acting crazy. And what’s this whole act you’ve been putting on since we arrived? What’s going on?”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you, Forrester.”
“You better if you want my help bringing Wade in.”
Zhou stared at the wheel, tightly clutching it before speaking.
“You read my file, right? Martial arts expert, speaks multiple languages, all those degrees? It’s been falsified. The only concrete detail in my life is that I work for Source Point, and that I have been for five years. I don’t remember my life before that. Source Point provided the resume in case someone asked. The doctors say that my mind is repressing those memories, or that some type of severe trauma is causing my neural implants to block them out. I’ve retained those motor skills, like the languages and such, but whatever I did in the past wasn’t pretty.”
Forrester was stunned. She hesitated.
“What is it you do for Source Point?”
“These days, I’m sent on retrieval cases—scientists or information that is Source Point’s assets and property. Sometimes peacefully. Sometimes not.”
He looked in the side view mirror as rain drops impacted the car.
“I can’t tell you who I am Karen, because even I don’t know. But what I do know is that for some reason, hearing Wade’s name pop up when I took the job, the names of his team, looking at the lead here in Singapore—it’s the first time I’ve felt my mind stirring, as if those memories are rising to the surface. Wherever Wade is, it might have the answers to why I’m like this.”
Turning the key, he started up the car and drove on.
“I, I had no idea Zhou…”
Zhou grimaced and shrugged.
“Can’t miss what you don’t remember. I get bad headaches near water,” he noted as the rain began to pour.
“But there’s a reason we’re here in Singapore. The IP address of the off-site admin, the one Wade talked to on an encrypted channel—I’ve seen it before. It belonged to the company, Telecom Int’l.”
“Telecom?” Forrester’s brow pricked. “They supply a lot of the world’s satellite receivers. Source Point’s phones too.”
Zhou nodded.
“They operate a large shipping warehouse down here. Before this week I had no reason to believe he had any contact from Damon’s old team, who are either dead or missing. Then I realized we were just including full-time staff from his team. I called my friends at Telecom and requested the Singapore branch roster, and the people who worked on the day he conversed with someone. Does the name Kenji da Silva sound familiar?”
Forrester froze.
“Kenji was an intern working on Project Antares with Damon and his team, but he was gone by the time Damon and his team went underground.”
The car swerved through the crowded streets.
“But why is he here?” Forrester asked. “Why come to Singapore when anywhere else would do … unless … oh no.”
“What?”
“Source Point is unveiling their new automated upgrade system. It’s allowing our cheaper augmentation and AI tech to be sold at discounted prices to the general public. On-site installations have been going on worldwide for almost a month now. But why go through Telecom?”
Forrester quickly dug into Telecom’s deep archives, all the way back to when they were mysteriously bought out by…
Subsidiary of Source Point Industries.
“That’s why Faust wants Wade taken care of without us getting more involved! He doesn’t want anyone to know about the relationship. Let the Feds bag a terrorist, and he pulls in a favor. But what about the Source Wade mentioned in his message?”
“All tech comes from somewhere right? Be it human ingenuity or reverse engineering. Some radicals theorize the reason for so much innovation in the last 10 years of AI and augmentation technology is the presence of a nexus or source, from which we can study or reverse engineer.”
Exiting the car, Zhou and Forester slowly approached the door of the Telecom office building.
Drawing his gun, Zhou spoke tersely.
“Whatever we find in here, Wade will most certainly be among them.”
Read part 11 here.
Read part 13 here.
