Reamde

They were congratulatory, in the devilishly understated manner that you would expect. But they seemed to have decided that Abdallah Jones would be worth more to them if he could be milked for intelligence before being dispatched to reap his quota of black-eyed virgins. They wanted her to find a place from which Jones’s apartment could be placed under surveillance, and then report back.

Olivia called the landlord, went back to the building across the street, took phone pictures of the office, and negotiated a lease. Using her cover identity, she sent an email to Meng Binrong, containing all the pictures and full details as to the terms of the lease. The message went to a mailbox registered in Guangzhou but was automatically encrypted and forwarded to London.

Another message, purring with satisfaction, reached her the next day. She was told to work on her cover and await further contacts.

Working on her cover was good advice; she had let that slide for a couple of weeks as she’d got herself established in Xiamen. She caused a desk and a chair to be moved into the new office, then buckled down to her pretend work, swapping volumes of email with her pretend clients and her pretend uncle, arranging trips to small factories up and down the estuary of the Nine Dragons River, and keeping one eye, always, on Apartment 505 across the street. The tenants were careful to keep most of the windows blocked, but sometimes they had to open them up for ventilation, and when they did, Olivia could see exciting details: lots of mattresses on the floor, and containers of what looked like industrial solvents, and men who did not seem to be from around here. She never saw Jones; but then it was inconceivable that a man as careful as him would actually show his face in an open window.

Equipment began to show up via FedEx, disguised as prototypes of consumer electronics devices that her pretend clients wanted to have mass-produced in China. The disguise was pretty easy to maintain; all electronic devices looked the same under the hood, being just circuit boards with chips on them. It was known that Chinese intelligence had begun to embed custom chips in circuit boards that were being shipped to the West, chips that were programmed to phone home and send back intelligence, and Olivia suspected that her original destiny—the one she’d been groomed for—had been to investigate that problem. So there was some symmetry, and a bit of satisfaction, in turning the tables. Following elaborate instruction sheets, sent to her, encrypted, by boffins in London and Fort Meade, she got these devices running in the office, listening in on any electromagnetic signals emanating from the apartment building. Data streamed in and got compressed and encrypted and squirted back to London and Fort Meade, where people who actually understood this stuff could pick it apart and make sense of it.

This provided the first real setback in the investigation. The devices were picking up a lot of data, but it seemed (to make a long story short) that Abdallah Jones’s safe house was located directly above a nest of Chinese hackers whose gear radiated a huge amount of electronic noise into the ether. These hackers, as far as Olivia could make out, were the basketball players, who also seemed to do a lot of work on the building’s roof—so Jones’s nest was actually sandwiched between two levels of hacker activity. This made it difficult to tell Jones’s noise apart from the hackers’. So much so as to suggest that Jones might have chosen the site deliberately as a trick to hide his own emanations in his neighbors’ noise.

More stuff was FedExed, and Olivia made a foray into the apartment building and planted a device behind a radiator in the corridor just outside of Jones’s apartment. She was not privy to details, but she gathered that this somehow made it easier to sort out the terrorists’ bits from the hackers’ bits. Then MI6 flew in a signals intelligence boffin, using the name Alastair and pretending to be one of Xinyou Quality Control’s clients. Alastair and Olivia held lengthy “meetings” in the office, during which Alastair tweaked the equipment that was already there and installed a new box: a system for bouncing invisible lasers off the windowpanes of Apartment 505. Any sound inside the apartment would cause the windows to vibrate slightly, and the laser rig could pick up the vibrations and translate them back into surprisingly intelligible sound recordings. He also hooked up an automated video recording system that would turn on whenever movement was detected; that is, whenever the terrorists (for there was absolutely no doubt, now, that they were terrorists) opened a window.