An attendant sat inside, an old woman in a black chador who jumped as Lia opened the door.
The old woman began speaking in Arabic. Lia didn’t wait for the translator to explain, nor did she attempt one of the rudimentary phrases she’d memorized on the plane. She walked directly to the last stall and closed the door.
“You were supposed to give her change,” said Sandy Chafetz, her runner. “You get towels.”
Lia didn’t answer. She had no intention of leaving the stall now that she was inside. She knelt next to the commode. There wasn’t enough room to see what she was doing, and so she slid her fingers along the floor until they found the bolt cover. Sure of where it was, she withdrew her hand and reached to the pocket of her dress, removing what looked like a small lipstick holder. She twisted the two halves, then pushed them together. The device was designed to provoke a response from the bug beneath the bolt cover. If she got a beep from the device, she would know that it had not been tampered with.
That, of course, was how it was supposed to work in theory. Lia thought that a really clever engineer could come up with a way to defeat it — the Desk Three people did that all the time. She felt herself leaning her head back as she reached in.
Nothing.
She put her hand back in the space behind the toilet, reaching farther.
Still nothing.
Her hand trembled. A tiny beep sounded as she pulled it back.
“You’re good to proceed,” said Chafetz.
Lia took out a small medicine bottle with an eyedropper and placed it down on the floor, where she carefully unscrewed the top. The bottle held a strong solvent, which she needed to loosen the bolt cover. The scent was somewhere between rubber cement and ammonia; Lia coughed so hard she nearly lost the dropper.
The compact. She could use the mirror to see what she was doing.
As Lia reached into her pocket, her knee brushed against the bottle of solvent. Its contents spewed on the floor in front of the toilet.
Her hand trembled as she tried refilling the dropper from the nearly empty bottle, but she got no more than a half of the plastic tube filled. During the mission briefing they’d told her it would take at least four full eyedroppers of the solvent to remove the glue holding the bolt cover in place.
Lia applied what she could, trying to work the few drops around the base as if the dropper were a paintbrush. She got a little more from the floor, but most of the liquid had burned into the grouting around the mosaiclike floor tile. Panic surged in her chest, turning her esophagus to fire.
Almost too late she realized she was going to retch.
She got the top of the commode up just in time. Tears ran from her eyes; she gripped the porcelain lip with her hands, wanting to die.
33
Dean turned the comer behind the building, walking down the narrow alley toward a neighboring street. Two- and three-story brick apartment buildings nudged against one another on the left, crowding out much older structures that seemed as if they’d been made entirely of sand and glued into place. The charity building dated from just after World War II and was one of two nearly identical buildings lining the short avenue. The offices the terrorists used were on the second story at the corner, two floors over the restroom where Lia was.
The bug Lia was “servicing” was in principle a sophisticated electroacoustic receiver, sometimes called a concrete microphone. It worked by picking up minute vibrations in the building’s concrete and metal structure; those vibrations were transmitted to a larger pickup unit outside, which then transmitted them back to the NSA for interpretation. Plumbers in the United States sometimes used a less sophisticated version to listen for leaking pipes in concrete foundations and structures. Theirs couldn’t filter out various conversations or be tuned to pick up certain areas of the building’s skeleton — but then again, Deep Black’s couldn’t have found a leaking faucet a few feet away, much less heard a conversation there. The device had been placed in the women’s room not because it was difficult to detect there, but because the steel grid in the concrete carried the vibration from the room down in that direction. The bug could be easily defeated by heavy vibration devices — a simple vibrating sander against the wall would do the trick — but only if the targets knew to do so. And these didn’t.
In fact, thought Dean, the people in the office were extremely confident that they were safe here; they had the windows wide open. Dean watched from across the street as two shadows flitted across the space. He crossed the street, listening to the voice above. There were at least two people inside and so there was no question of going in, but he put a small audio fly below the window. The fly was low-powered; its battery would last only a few hours, transmitting voice information to a small unit he tucked into a wall around the corner, and from there back to the Art Room.
“Good,” said his runner as Dean crossed back. “They’re talking about food or something.”
“Maybe they’ll go to dinner soon. Let me know if they leave,” Dean answered.
“Will do.”
Dean walked down one of the connecting alleys past the apartments, crossed near some smaller row houses — they were more like shacks — and then around to the street across from the charity building, pretending to look at the wares spread out on the sidewalk and in general playing the interested but distracted tourist.
A man dressed in traditional white desert garb stood nearby, a microphone in hand, talking rapidly. The translator back in the Art Room told Dean he was a native entertainer, telling what were supposed to be humorous stories, though judging from the bored expressions of the few people watching him the stories weren’t very funny.
“The real entertainment is inside the medina,” added the translator. “And not until much later.”
Dean glanced at his watch. Lia should have been out by now.
“How we doing?” he asked the runner under his breath.
“She’s working on it, Charlie,” said Chafetz.
Dean walked down the street to a vendor who sold small morsels of charcoal-broiled fish. The translator told him how to ask for it, but Dean found it easier now simply to point, holding out a five-dirham note — a bit less than fifty cents at the current exchange rate. The man worked silently, scooping up a bit of the fish and placing it on a piece of bread. Dean took his change — two dirhams and fifty centimes — and nibbled at the food, walking slowly back toward the building.
“How is she doing?” he asked when he reached the corner across the street from the building.
“Everything’s fine,” said Telach. “Relax, Charlie.”
“I’m going inside,” he told the Art Room supervisor.
“There are still two people in the office. We can hear them very clearly.”
“I’m not going into the office. I want to check on Lia.”
“It’s not necessary. She planted a video bug in the hallway. We can see all the way to the top of the stairs. Just relax.”
“I’m going inside,” he insisted, crossing the street.
34
“Lia?” said Chafetz.
The attendant said something in Arabic, harsh words, as if she were yelling at Lia for messing the stall.
“She’s asking if you’re all right,” the translator told Lia. “Tell her this.”
Lia had to listen to the phrase three times before she could attempt it; her voice stuttered as she spoke. The
