This provided the first real setback in the investigation. The devices were picking up a lot of data, but it seemed (to make a long story short) that Abdallah Jones’s safe house was located directly above a nest of Chinese hackers whose gear radiated a huge amount of electronic noise into the ether. These hackers, as far as Olivia could make out, were the basketball players, who also seemed to do a lot of work on the building’s roof—so Jones’s nest was actually sandwiched between two levels of hacker activity. This made it difficult to tell Jones’s noise apart from the hackers’. So much so as to suggest that Jones might have chosen the site deliberately as a trick to hide his own emanations in his neighbors’ noise.