Special Agent Donovan knew his operation was compromised. The false positive from Dr. Chen's laboratory had been a catastrophic failure of intelligence, nearly triggering an international incident of world-altering proportions. His coerced asset, the old lab steward Mr. Wu, was a psychological wreck, an unstable component at the heart of his delicate machine. The mission to detect the Emperor's power from a distance was a failure. He needed a new strategy.
He couldn't get a sensor inside the Forbidden City—that was suicide. But he could get closer. His new plan was born of desperation and audacious risk. He would place a second, more powerful, short-range resonance detector on a rooftop overlooking the main processional avenue that led from the palace to the Temple of Heaven. The Emperor, a man of tradition, made a ceremonial journey along this route four times a year. It was Donovan's only chance to get a fleeting, direct reading of the man's ambient energy signature as he passed by—a baseline that would allow him to recalibrate his instruments and distinguish a true signal from a false one.
He spent two days meticulously planning his route, studying maps of the city's ancient rooftops, timing the movements of the Qing patrols. He prepared his new disguise: no longer the Western businessman, but the lowest of the low, a humble night-soil collector, a man so wretched and anonymous he would be invisible to all but the most observant. He stained his clothes, dirtied his face, and adopted the slow, shuffling gait of a man broken by a lifetime of thankless labor.
Meanwhile, Spymaster Shen Ke's purge had begun. His first act was to address the glaring failure of the surveillance on Dr. Chen. He had assigned his top field agent to the case, a shadowy, enigmatic man known only as 'The Weaver.' The Weaver was not a thug or a common spy; he was an artist of intelligence, a man who saw the city not as a collection of streets and buildings, but as a vast, interconnected web of patterns and routines.
The Weaver had analyzed the reports from the initial surveillance. He'd read about the clumsy 'gardener' and the bungling American agent in the marketplace. He knew a skilled foreign operative was active, and he knew they were targeting Dr. Chen. He immediately tripled the manpower, but his new instructions were different. He told his men to stop watching the Doctor herself. "She is too smart," he had briefed them. "She will spot you. Watch the space around her. Watch for anomalies, for anyone who does not fit the pattern." Furthermore, he brought in a new team, specialists from the Ministry of Industry, armed with crude but effective portable electro-static detectors. They were no longer just looking for watchers; they were sweeping for listeners.
The night Donovan chose for his mission was moonless and overcast, a blanket of darkness over the capital. He moved through the sleeping city like a wraith. He climbed a rickety drainpipe, his movements silent and fluid, and slipped onto the tiled rooftops, a world of sharp angles and deep shadows. He moved quickly, his senses on high alert, every loose tile, every gust of wind a potential threat.
He reached his target: a dilapidated teahouse whose roof offered a perfect, unobstructed view of the processional avenue below. He lay flat on the curved tiles, the rough clay scraping against his cheek. He pulled the new device from his satchel. It was larger than the inkstone, a heavy, metallic cylinder that he needed to affix to a chimney stack.
As he prepared to place it, a primal instinct, the sixth sense that had kept him alive in dangerous places from Manila to St. Petersburg, screamed at him. Something was wrong.
He froze, becoming part of the shadows. He scanned the surrounding rooftops. At first, he saw nothing. Then, he caught it. A faint reflection in the window of a darkened attic across the street, a glint of light where none should be. It was the moonlight catching the lens of a spyglass. He shifted his gaze. A shadow on an adjacent roof, near a water cistern, detached itself from the deeper shadow of the cistern and then merged back. It was a man, and he was not moving with the slow gait of a clumsy guard. He was moving like a patient hunter.
Donovan's blood ran cold. He had been anticipated. This was not a standard patrol. This was a dedicated counter-intelligence team. A trap.
His primary mission was now impossible. To place the detector would be to hand it directly to the enemy. He had to abort. But simply retreating was not enough. They had sensed him; he needed to shape what they thought they had sensed. In a split-second decision, he switched from offense to misdirection.
He reached back into his satchel and took out a small, nondescript object he carried for just such an emergency. It was a decoy, a simple device containing a clockwork mechanism and a crude radio pulse emitter. It was designed to emit a simple, repeating, unsophisticated signal for a few minutes before falling silent.
He armed it, and with a flick of his wrist, tossed it onto the roof of the building next door, where it clattered loudly. He then did the one thing a professional agent should never do: he made a noise. He deliberately dislodged a roof tile, sending it skittering down to shatter in the alley below.
Then he ran. He abandoned all pretense of stealth, leaping from one rooftop to the next in a noisy, "panicked" escape, deliberately drawing the attention of the hunters toward him and away from his original target location.
On the opposite rooftop, the Weaver smiled in the darkness. He spoke softly into his communication device. "The rat has taken the bait. He is fleeing west. Let him go. All teams, converge on the source of the noise. Secure the package he dropped."
Minutes later, the Weaver's team had recovered the decoy. They brought it to him. He examined it with a professional's eye. It was a simple radio beacon, the technology crude. It confirmed his initial assessment.
He drafted his report to Shen Ke. FOREIGN AGENT DETECTED ATTEMPTING TO PLACE SURVEILLANCE DEVICE ON PROCESSIONAL ROUTE. AGENT IS SKILLED IN EVASION AND INFILTRATION, BUT HIS TECHNOLOGY IS CRUDE. HE WAS ATTEMPTING TO PLACE A SIMPLE TRACKING BEACON, LIKELY ON DR. CHEN'S PROJECTED ROUTE OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY. HE PANICKED WHEN HE SENSED OUR PRESENCE AND FLED. HE IS A PROFESSIONAL, BUT NOT A GENIUS. HIS THREAT IS MANAGEABLE.
Back in his safe house, Donovan stripped off his disguise, his heart still hammering in his chest. He had failed his mission. He had not placed the detector. But his feint had been a resounding success. He had deliberately presented himself as a technologically inferior opponent. He had made them complacent. They would now be looking for simple radio bugs, not highly advanced, passive resonance detectors.
He now knew he was facing a highly competent and coordinated counter-intelligence network, an opponent far more dangerous than he had imagined. The easy part of his mission was over.
And in her office at the university, the small, disguised inkstone, the original Nightingale device, continued its silent work. Mr. Wu, after his terrifying re-education in the marketplace, had returned it to its place, where it sat ignored. The Weaver's team, now busy chasing the ghost of Donovan's decoy and on the lookout for crude radio transmitters, paid it no mind. It was too sophisticated, too silent for their methods. It was the one piece of the puzzle they could not see, a quiet, ticking time bomb at the heart of their surveillance web. Donovan's only active asset was the one they no longer even knew to look for.