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“Francis?” Seth scoffed. “He’s one of our accounts clerks. He’s a nerd.”
“Nevertheless,” Justine said, “he’s the first person we want to talk to.”
“Do the cops know?”
Sci shook his head. “Not yet. We will share the information with them if it comes to anything.”
“Why didn’t my vetting firm spot this?” Seth asked. “Or the cops?”
Justine shrugged.
“We have extensive resources,” Sci replied. “The cops will probably see the anomaly when they start looking at your employee records. We have methods that speed up the process for us.”
Justine knew he was referring to an AI search algorithm Mo-bot had designed to spot identities that had been implicated in large data thefts.
“Maybe I need to come to you next time,” Seth said.
“We’d be happy to hear from you,” Justine replied. She handed him a business card, which he examined thoughtfully. “Can we talk to Mr. Johnson?”
“He’s not come in today.”
“You think you could give us an address?” Sci asked. “And a photograph?”
“You bet,” Seth replied. “It would be my pleasure.”
CHAPTER 28
MY HEART WAS racing as we finished our climb to the top of the fire stairs. Part exhaustion, part anxiety, it thundered like a jackhammer while I watched Zhang Daiyu circumvent the alarm that should have automatically sounded when she opened the fire door. She used a portable device to maintain the illusion of a closed circuit as she cut into the alarm wires before pushing the door wide.
We went through, and behind us came Huang Hua, the head of private Beijing’s tech team. He was thirty-six, but his long foppish black hair and upbeat demeanor made him seem much younger. Like Zhang Daiyu and me, he was dressed in black and moved like a shadow as we crossed the roof.
Zhang Daiyu had managed to get blueprints for Molly Tan’s building and she and Hua had identified a point of entry through the ventilation system. He had secured the necessary equipmentfrom an emergency stockpile he kept at home. We had driven to Molly’s building, arriving just after 3 a.m. and breaking in through a service entrance to the rear of the high-rise.
The wind hit my face as Zhang Daiyu led us across the roof, and when we neared the edge, my legs went weak at the sight of the fifty-story drop. Beijing was so far below us it looked like a never-ending, glittering toy town.
“It’s this one,” she said, dropping to a crouch beside an air duct.
Hua and I joined her. He dropped his tool bag, produced an electric screwdriver and used it to remove the mesh that covered the duct. Next he reached into his bag for a small flight case and opened it to reveal a tiny drone nestled in custom laser-cut foam.
“The drone carries six bugs,” he said, pointing to half a dozen tiny surveillance devices on the device’s undercarriage.
He took the drone out of the foam, switched it on, and used the small remote control with inbuilt video camera to conduct a test flight before sending the device into the air duct. Six tiny rotors, each about the size of a dime, worked to keep the drone steady as it descended through the ventilation system. When Hua saw “48” appear on-screen, signaling the device had reached Molly’s floor, he moved it horizontally, guiding it along the vent network until it reached her apartment.
He piloted the drone toward another mesh, and on-screen I saw the hallway Zhang Daiyu and I had entered by the previous day. He didn’t plant one of the bugs there, but instead piloted the drone further into the network until he reached the next mesh.He set it down next to the metal guard, and I saw the large sitting room beyond that.
“Odd,” Hua said, and used the remote to direct the camera away from the living room, pointing it parallel to the mesh. “I thought I saw something when it landed.”
There, a few inches away from our drone, was a tiny bug, an audio-visual surveillance device like the ones attached to our aircraft.
“It’s another bug,” he confirmed.
“Someone else has been spying on her,” Zhang Daiyu remarked.
“Can we find out who?” I asked.
“I can try,” he replied. “It’s sloppy work. These things are magnetic. Designed to be removed once an operation is concluded. This should have been recovered by whoever planted it.”
“Maybe it’s still running,” I suggested.
