Randi Russell slung the bag over her shoulder and dodged along the crowded sidewalk, watching her reflection in the store windows for anyone taking undue notice. Beyond a few admiring glances from the men she passed, her practiced eye spotted nothing. By design, she wasn’t the only Caucasian on the street. Covert-One didn’t keep a safe house in Tokyo, and Klein had been forced to set one up with less time and forethought than he usually brought to the task. They’d agreed that the best bet would be to hide in plain sight—to rent an apartment in a part of the city heavily frequented by foreign tourists and businessmen.

Randi cut right and jogged up a stairway leading to a set of glass doors. She pressed her hand against a palm reader—the Japanese loved technology—and heard the lock buzz. A moment later she was striding across a tastefully minimalist lobby toward a bank of elevators.

The one on the right was open and she ducked inside, keeping an eye on the glass front of the condo building as she punched in her floor number. Still nothing, but it didn’t mean much. In that kind of a crowd, a professional surveillance team would be virtually impossible to detect. And that didn’t even take into consideration probable hacks into the surveillance cameras that bristled from just about every wall in Tokyo. At this point, pretty much everything had become a roll of the dice. And those dice were most likely loaded.

The elevator rose smoothly to her floor without anyone else getting on. Randi put a hand on the Beretta under her jacket as she stepped into the hallway. Empty.

She moved quickly, feeling uncomfortable out in the open. A wave of her key card in front of a door near the back of the corridor caused it to pop open and she stepped through.

A man jumped up from the sofa that was nearly all the furniture that would fit in the tiny space, watching her with a startled expression.

“You’re not Jon.”

“They told me you were smart,” Randi said, entering the kitchen to empty her bag of the ramen and beer it contained. As expected, the refrigerator was no bigger than the one she’d had in college. Space in Tokyo was at an incredible premium, and while she would have liked to go with something a bit roomier, those kinds of condos tended to attract attention. Better to be just another one of the anonymous millions wedged into three hundred square feet.

“Who are you?”

“That’s not really important,” she said, tossing him a beer and taking one for herself. She came out of the kitchen and went straight for the couch. “Now, let’s have a chat about nanotechnology.”

Greg Maple looked down at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”