The Previous Night
Dallas, Texas
After Megan left with a copy of the laptop's hard drive on her USB jump drive, Fabian continued to work on the laptop. He unzipped the files, one at a time. The files were so large it took him hours to open up all 4000 of the PDF files.
Fully unzipped and decompressed, each file contained a series of zeroes and ones. Fabian recognized that they were coded representations. Without the decoding key, it would take him days to sort out the information and understand what the numbers represent. Perhaps Megan could give him a better idea tomorrow. The man in Hong Kong that she took the laptop from must have had something to do with its contents.
Fabian's eyes started to water. He stared blankly at the digital clock and realized it was almost 3:00 a.m. His brain was screaming for a break. He would have to try to catch a few winks. As a security measure, Megan would set her alarm at 5:55 a.m. and call him at six sharp. They would usually do this every twelve hours for the first three days after a mission.
It was a hot and humid night. Fabian decided to open the bedroom window to let in fresh air. The bars and clubs below his apartment were starting to wind down. Dallas had an ordinance that allowed drinking establishments to stay open only until 3:30 a.m. He could hear the traffic sounds gradually thinning, as he drifted off to sleep.
In the office building directly opposite Fabian's apartment, one floor higher, the sniper looked through his infra-red binoculars and realized that it was time. The rifle was modified from an AR-15, with a range of more than 1,000 feet. With the target just fifty feet away, the sniper could easily aim at an area the size of a man's eyeball. Tonight's work would be a walk in the park for him.
Exhaling through his teeth, the sniper put down the pair of binoculars. The rifle was already set up on a tripod next to the window. He sat down next to the rifle, closed an eye, and looked through the scope. The faint light from the moon was sufficient for the sniper to see Fabian through the scope without using the infra-red attachment. He preferred it that way. Somehow, looking at a victim through the naked eye enhanced the thrill of the kill.
Fabian slept fitfully, turning and tossing frequently. His nightmares were filled with images of Megan being buried alive and howling at him to rescue her. When Fabian finally turned his torso to face the window, the sniper held his breath and gently squeezed the trigger. The 5.56 caliber round took less than a tenth of a second to slice through the air, entering between Fabian's eyes and exiting at the back of his head. He was instantly brain dead, his heart beating for a minute or two before ceasing.
The circle of blood on the pillow had radiated to half the bed, soaking the front bed posts and reaching the carpet by the time the sniper picked the lock and entered the apartment. Wasting no time, he found the laptop, jerked it away from the power cord, and carried it under his right arm.
Both laptops, one still with the USB drive attached to its side, had been recovered. Alan Wong was very pleased to hear that when he received a call on his disposable flip phone. He threw the phone as far as he could into the dark waters of the Hong Kong harbor.
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Alan Wong hated America. He was not born with the hatred. In fact, for many years, he loved the United States of America. The USA had been good to him.
Born in Penang, Malaysia, Alan grew up learning Bahasa Malay in public schools. On weekends, his parents would take him to private schools in learn Mandarin Chinese. Alan was a good student. He especially enjoyed mathematics, and excelled in it.
By the age of 18, he decided that he wanted to be an engineer when he grew up. His working-class parents could not afford to send him to the local university. But Alan learned from a friend that he could work as a taxi driver in Australia while attending school.
Every summer, Alan worked hard as a taxi driver, driving 16-hour shifts. By the end of summer, he would make enough to pay for his tuition fees. During the school year, he worked on weekends, ferrying passengers from the airport in Sydney from the airport to downtown hotels. In this way, Alan worked his way through school.
Upon graduation, he returned to Penang, getting a job as a junior engineer in Motorola. With his work ethic and native intelligence, he excelled in his job, winning kudos from his managers and peers. After just two years, a Vice President from America took an interest in him. He was promoted to a managerial position in Motorola Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong, Alan made many useful contacts as a procurement engineer. Three years later, even though he was rapidly promoted, he grew tired of earning merely a fixed salary from the conglomerate. Together with another engineer, Alan founded an electronics assembly plant, selling printed circuit boards back to Motorola. The factory was located in Shenzhen, China, just an hour by train from Hong Kong.
With an initial investment of only $50,000, Alan Wong and his partner grew the company until it was shipping hundreds of thousands of circuit boards to numerous consumer electronics customers. When Motorola made a $5 million offer to buy the factory, Alan did not want to sell, but his partner persuaded him to. Suddenly case rich and only in his mid-thirties, Alan started a new company that made electronic toys. Sales were initially modest. But he struck gold when Walmart decided to sell his range of cutting-age educational toys.
Finally, Alan was able to relax a little. Through mutual friends, he met his soul mate. Also in her thirties, Shirley was a professor of physics in the University of Hong Kong. During her summer vacations, Alan and Shirley took long trips abroad. They enjoyed traveling throughout the United States in a recreational vehicle. Alan would drop by as many Walmart stores as he could, checking the toys section to make sure the displays were fresh. Shirley loved to study the night skies through her telescope. As soon as Alan was done with a store, they would drive to a remote location dark enough for her research into the distant galaxies light years away.
Their happy lives were too perfect to last. When the couple was vacationing in New Mexico one day, Alan received a phone call from his sales manager in Arkansas.
