Abdul Rahman showed the piece of hotel notepaper he had copied an address on to earlier that morning to the fourth person since he had arrived at Al Ain. This place was far less urban paradise and far more desert than any of the other Emirates. The sun beat down through a cloudless sky on a mostly lazy street, packed with squat apartment buildings, sheesha bars and electronics-repairs shops built into packed little shacks.

This fourth person he asked directions to looked Filipino. He read through it a couple of times. "I think inside there?" He pointed to a building taller than all the others, perhaps two hundred metres away. Paint peeled from its front façade which bore the not entirely unexaggerated title of Alsalam Mall.

Abdi smiled and thanked him, putting the address back in his pocket and resuming his march. He had received the email he had been waiting for the previous night. Nothing more than a single line Al-Ain address and signature: Saigon Herman. He had expected the place to be in the more developed part of Al-Ain with the farms and falconries and zoos and everything. But, he supposed nobody would pay anybody any attention here.

The inside of the mall was even more dishevelled than its exterior. The shops were not particularly different from the ones outside, in form or function. He asked the first friendly looking person he could find, a portly looking Syrian in front of a fried-potato stand, where the place was. "Third floor, to your left."

He followed the directions. Saheb-E-Alam Computer Services was lit by flickering white tube lights, illuminating rows of Chinese plastic smartphone cases, side-market power-adapters, headphones looking only a little cheaper than their branded counterparts and all manner of software-packages. The man inside was either Indian or Pakistani, dressed in a tight, silky football jersey. He was fiddling on a couple of phones at the same time, all connected to a whirring old laptop.

"Antivirus update?" he asked in Arabic, not looking up.

"No," Abdi said. "Sylvester sent me."

"Who?" the man looked up at him, confused. "Who sent you?"

"Sylvester. I was told to tell you-

"You wait for boss. Boss comes soon. Wait." The man indicated a grease covered plastic chair in one corner of the store, under a stack of precariously placed Samsung batteries. Abdi sat and waited.

He wasn't worried about following an ambiguous thread, he had done so many times in the past. But, he felt an increasing wariness about whether this would lead anywhere worthwhile. He was hoping for the thing with Lindsey to bear fruit because then he'd have an official channel to track with proper, if not easily uncovered, paperwork and the guarantee that there'd be something at the other end, even if it wasn't anything substantial. Saigon Herman felt to Abdi like the type of mystery informant who wouldn't have any qualms about shuttling you around the world chasing thin, attenuated links. He hoped there was something more than conspiracy and hysteria at the end of the tunnel.

The Boss came after another fifteen minutes. He was also Indian or Pakistani, young, thin haired and very jerky and ferretlike. He spoke to his minion in Hindi for a bit and turned and smiled at Abdi.

"You have a special request for us, sir?" he asked in Arabic.

"Well, yes. I was sent here by a man named Sylvester. Do you speak English?" His Arabic was fluent but Abdi guessed he was fitting words together in his head before he said them-a translation from some other language.

"Yes, that is fine," he said. "Sylvester. Yes, I understand. You are looking for certain security configurations on your devices, yes?"

"I suppose." Abdi stood so the much taller man wouldn't have to keep craning his head down. "I'm Abdul Rahman."

"I don't know your name and you don't know mine, brother." He shrugged. "Don't be offended, that is how your contact would want it. What devices?"

"A cellphone and a laptop, I suppose."

"Anything else you carry around which has a wireless connection? Perhaps something you don't use regularly? A tablet or an e-reader or something?"

"Not on me now," Abdi said.

"But with you?"

"I have an iPad back at my hotel but I don't carry it around with me." The iPad was buried somewhere deep within his luggage. He'd only use it when he needed to work on multiple things at once and the laptop was dedicated to something exclusive.

"When there is contact between you and um...Sylvester?"

"Yes, that's what he said."

"If he chooses to speak to you audibly, which is rare, put your tablet in the freezer. Do this also if you are speaking to anybody about sensitive matters. Your devices, please?"

Abdi pulled out his laptop from his shoulder bag and the phone from his pocket. The assistant walked delicately around him in the cramped space, shutting the glass door and dimming the lights.

"Android, good." He turned the phone around in his hand. "The operating system on your laptop?"

"Windows Eight, I think?"

He nodded. "The security protocols will cease all further updates so that is where it will stay. You will not lose any existing data, of course. But I would advise you not to maintain any sensitive documents, leaked files or whatever it is you want to deal with on this system for more than two days. I will be a while."

Abdi sat back down. The assistant handed him the television remote and pointed to a small flat-screen mounted to the wall. "Be comfortable," he said in Arabic. Abdi flipped through the channels, most of which were either Arabic or in a variety of different Indian langauges. He stopped when he found a very grainy BBC World Service, half paying attention.

His phone rang from on top of the glass countertop after a while. The man in charged turned the screen to Abdi. "It is a Mujeeb Boss. You must attend this call?"

"No, it's okay. You can shut it off or whatever."

The man nodded and continued. He hadn't sent Mujeeb much more than a few rumours he had found circulating early on. He usually got a little impatient when subjected to more than a couple of days of radio silence.

He was just about to fall asleep when the word Damya through the weak TV speakers jolted him awake.