Olivia pretended to be interested in leasing an office in a building directly across the street. The two buildings were of equal height and similar vintage, webbed together by particolored skeins of improvised wiring. The landlord wanted to steer Olivia to offices in the lower floors, where access was easier and rent was higher. But Olivia had become expert in prolonging her “search for office space” to ridiculous lengths by making claims about the nutty miserliness of her uncle in Guangdong. She had a whole line of patter ready to go, and a war chest of anecdotes about how cheap Meng Binrong was. She used these to prod the landlord ever higher in the building and cajoled him to pry open old dusty doors and let her see offices that were being used as storage dumps for maintenance supplies and doors, toilets, and ventilators that were awaiting repair. In each office that she inspected, Olivia was careful to go and look at the view, forcing stuck windows and thrusting her head out into the hot muggy breeze. As she explained, her only compensation for working in an office so many flights of stairs above street level was the nice view she could get, and the natural ventilation. In truth, of course, she was looking at the building across the street, gazing into its windows, hoping to see a glimpse of a tall black Welshman.
An irregular thumping noise was emanating from somewhere, not inside this building but nearby. At first she heard it only subliminally, since it was buried in ambient sound from the street. But as she dragged the exhausted and irritable landlord skyward, this sound began to break clean from the clamor of the street and to enter her consciousness. The thumping started and stopped. It would go for three or six or ten beats, like the pounding of a heart, then cease for a little while, then start again, sometimes faster and sometimes slower. Sometimes it terminated in a faint crashing noise. She knew the pattern well because she and her colleagues in London had heard it in the background of Abdallah Jones’s recorded phone conversations and had devoted many hours to wondering what it was. Their first thought had been construction noise from a neighboring apartment, but it didn’t really fit that pattern; what sort of construction used only hammers but never a saw? Perhaps Jones lived upstairs of a butcher shop where heavy cleavers were being used to whack apart big carcasses? Or a martial arts dojo where students were hitting a punching bag? They had never really been able to pin it down, and it drove them crazy.
But the higher that Olivia climbed in that office building, the more certain she became that she was hearing exactly that pattern of sounds from the apartment building across the street. It was becoming more distinct, and she was growing more excited the higher she climbed.
Reaching the top floor, she entered an office and found her view blocked by a tattered blue tarp that had been hung down in front of the windows. She strode across the room, hauled the window open—they were huge, old-school, double-sash windows—and pulled the hem of a blue tarp to one side.
Directly across the street, perhaps twenty meters away from her, on the roof of the apartment building, half a dozen young men were playing basketball.
She watched one of them dribble through the defenders—thump, thump, thump, thump, thump—and take a shot. Crash.
“This might be acceptable,” she said to the landlord, a bit distractedly since she was taking phone video of the hoopsters. “I’ll get back to you.”
The landlord made a phone call. Olivia continued to enjoy the view. The apartment directly below the makeshift basketball court had sheets or posters or something covering most of its windows. Olivia badly wanted to make a call of her own: I have found him. But she didn’t want to repeat Jones’s mistake. She had other ways of communicating with her handlers in London.
She found her way to the nearest wangba, logged onto a terminal, surfed the Internet at random for a while, then visited a certain blog and left a comment containing a prearranged phrase.
The next day she received a message encrypted in the least significant bits of an image file, telling her what to do next.
Some part of her hoped that MI6 would yank her straight back to London, buy her dinner at a nice restaurant, and give her a promotion. That fantasy was based on her guess that they would move on Jones immediately, either by tipping off the Public Security Bureau to his presence or by sending a hit squad.
The encrypted message, however, told a different story about how Olivia would be spending the next weeks or perhaps months.
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.