Private Beijing

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 equipment from 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.

Hua checked a small signal display next to the main monitor on his remote control and shook his head. “It’s not giving off a signal. The batteries are probably dead.”

To illustrate what he meant, he used the remote to release the first bug from the drone’s undercarriage. The moment it detached, it showed up as an AV signal on the remote’s display and Hua was able to toggle between the audio-visual feed of the bug and the drone on the main monitor.

“Even if we couldn’t decrypt the signal, at this range we would pick it up,” he said. “Let me see if I can grab it.”

He piloted the drone forward a few inches and there was a click as the bug snapped into place in the vacated bay on the undercarriage.

“Got it.”

He flew the drone through the rest of the ventilation network and deposited our surveillance devices. There were other bugs in every room and Hua collected five more of them before piloting the drone back through the maze of ducts and up to the roof. He powered down the device and picked it up to examine the bugs on its underside.

“Same model as ours,” he observed.

“Guoanbu?” Zhang Daiyu asked, referring to the Chinese Intelligence service.

“Maybe.” He nodded. “Hard to say for sure at this point, but at least we now have eyes and ears on Molly Tan.”

He cycled the remote-control screen through images being broadcast by the six bugs he had placed throughout her penthouse.

I was determined to find out what she really knew. And besides that, I was more than intrigued to learn that someone had been spying on her well before we had placed our bugs. Who could that be?