It's Sunday lunchtime, and Molly is sipping jasmine tea and reading emails at her favourite Chinatown noodle bar. She's been coming here every weekend for a year or so now, and everybody knows her; she gets her usual Dim Sum and chilli oil without having to do much more than wave a hand at the waiter.
She's a regular, which is why she gets to sit on the second floor. When she first started coming, they would sit her downstairs with the tourists; a few months later, she was shown up to the first floor, which is quieter and has nicer seats. Recently, and with no great fanfare, she's qualified for the next floor up, which is slightly nicer again. Molly likes to fantasise that the restaurant keeps going up and up, getting plusher and plusher, until at the top it shades into the Jade Palace of the Celestial Emperor of Heaven, where sinuous dragons serve you peaches that make you immortal...
Molly's here today partly because of the Xiao Long Bao, which are excellent as always, but mainly because her window seat affords her an excellent view of the restaurant across the way, the Man Lee Hong. She can clearly see the table by the window on the first floor - the table with Danny's flash drive taped to its underside.
The reply to Molly's email had come back only minutes after she sent it:
-Who are you?
-I am the person with a flash drive containing 16GB of encrypted files. I think you want them, badly. If so, let's trade.
-I'm interested. What do you want in return?
-I want to be left alone. I can't access the files. I'm no threat to you. I'll give you the drive, you back off.
-Deal. Where do you want to meet?
Too easy, Molly had thought; none of the right questions. Like, "how did you get my email address?"
-Go to Leicester Square for 1pm, and check your email again.
She'd signed off, made sure she'd copied all the files off the drive, and wiped it. Then she'd filled it with random garbage that took up the same amount of space as before. As she did so, another question her correspondent never bothered to ask had occurred to her: "How do I know you haven't made a copy?"
It's a trap, and not a very subtle one, but whoever killed Danny clearly doesn't have much respect for the cunning of teenage hackers. It's a dangerous assumption that Molly intends to exploit for as long as she can.
Now, with the drive duct-taped in place, Molly pulls out her slate and fires off another email:
-Man Lee Hong, Lisle Street. First floor. Window seat nearest the stairs.
Five minutes later, as she's tucking in to her last prawn dumpling, a man sits down at the table. She pushes her chair back, a little, so that she's not so visible in the window. She's one storey up, but she isn't taking any chances; because she instantly recognises him as the man from the street outside Danny's house. The gaunt man in the raincoat.
The policeman.
That's going to be a problem, Molly thinks.
She lets him stew for the next ten minutes, while she pays her bill and watches him fuss with a pot of tea. When she's ready to leave, she emails him:
-Flash drive is taped under the table. This is going to be the last time you hear from me. Do not look for me. Do not contact me. I don't want to end up having an accident. I just want a normal life!
She watches through the long lens of a brand-new digital camera as Raincoat checks the email on his phone, then finds and removes the drive. He gives her a great shot of him examining it - he's framed perfectly in the window, a shaft of light clearly picking out his profile and the little red USB stick in his hands. Molly gets it all on film. When he gets up to leave, Molly is already on her way down to the ground floor, taking the narrow steps two at a time.
Outside, the lunchtime crowd is filling the pavements. Molly's wearing her black hoodie again, having spent quarter of an hour this morning picking Stanley's ginger hairs off it, and covers her own ginger hair with a black woollen beanie. She loiters by the Chinese supermarket nearby and pretends to be texting until Officer Raincoat emerges.
He's frowning as he turns and stalks off towards Piccadilly. Molly trails along behind. He's tall enough that Molly can keep track of him if she hangs a little way back. As he passes the Prince Charles Cinema she spots him clipping a Bluetooth earpiece on. He's making a call, but Molly's not close enough to hear what he's saying.
He takes her on a meandering route through Leicester Square, back up through Piccadilly, and ends up on Regent Street, where Molly watches him rent a computer in a cybercafé. She doesn't feel she can risk the long lens - it's a bulky camera that draws attention - but stands just inside the door and shoots some video from her phone as he plugs the drive in to the PC. She wonders what spies used to do before mobiles were invented. Nobody looks twice at someone jabbing at a phone screen, even if they're standing in the middle of the street. It's a big improvement over a newspaper with cut-out eyeholes.
While he's working, Molly strips off the hoodie and the hat and swaps them for the plastic raincoat from her satchel; one useful thing spy movies have taught her, more useful than the cut-out eyeholes, anyway, is that you need to keep changing your appearance when you're following someone. She doesn't want him to keep spotting the same colours out of the corner of his eye.
They're back on the road again in fifteen minutes. Molly estimates that's about as long as it would take to copy the files to a network somewhere; Raincoat just made a backup. Now he's making his way up towards Oxford Circus at a leisurely pace, with Molly shadowing him. He stops at the Circus itself, leans against the railings by the entrance to the Tube station, and looks up and down the road.
Molly keeps on walking, brings the phone up to her ear, and starts a fake conversation as she passes him; she cocks her head to one side so he can't get a clear look at her face. That's done it, she thinks; I can't let him see me again. She takes the stairs down into the station, then stops at the bottom, pressed against the wall. Looking up from the stairwell, she can see him still standing there, almost directly above. If he comes down into the station, I'm going to have to ditch him.
Molly doesn't have to wait long, this time, which is a relief - hordes of impatient shoppers are pouring in and out of the Tube entrance, and though she's doing her best to shrink out of the way, she has to endure a stream of dirty looks. But Raincoat's only been there a minute when a second man, someone Molly's never seen before, shows up. She brings the phone up, waits for the right moment, and gets the shot: the moment when Raincoat hands over the drive.
The minute he does so, she loses interest in him. She feels like she can tie up any loose ends with him later. Right now, she needs to know where his contact is going, and who wants Danny's data. When Raincoat moves off North, towards Great Portland Street, Molly jogs back up to street level, and spots the contact - a balding, middle aged man in a pin-stripe suit going shiny at the elbows - as he hails a black cab.
Molly's bike is back in Chinatown, but there's another taxi just behind the one that her target is now climbing in to. She flags it down and, despite everything, smiles hugely as she gets to say something that everyone's always wanted to:
"Follow that cab!"
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