So I travel with a laptop and a backup iPad with a keyboard, so there is always a way to write. I take two phones — and two booster battery packs. I carry an AT&T portable hot spot, and still I’ve had to fall back at times on the built-in Wi-Fi hot spot on my iPhone. Oh, and a Logitech camera that allows me to do TV hits over a Skype connection without using the built-in pinhole camera in the laptop.

So my backpack weighs plenty — and my wife and our sons think carrying it everywhere is faintly ridiculous. Until they run out of cellphone power.

You’d think that belt-and-suspenders approach would cover everything. It doesn’t. In Hanoi, Vietnam, this year for a summit meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, we were, as my colleague Edward Wong put it, “comms cursed.”

Lots of things failed. It didn’t help that I was staying in the Metropole hotel, where the meeting was being held, and security personnel blanketed the lobby with a cellphone suppression technology that keeps terrorists from detonating bombs remotely. Turns out it also keeps reporters from updating their stories on the web.

You published your third book, “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age,” last year. It’s a geopolitical look at how nations are using cyberweapons, and not just for espionage. Ever been a target?

I’m afraid that if you are in my line of work — writing about the intersection of technology, spying, cybersabotage and national power — you attract attention from intelligence services.

In Beijing in 2017 with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, I made the mistake of looking up something about the Tiananmen Square massacre from my hotel room, over a portable hot spot. Big mistake. The hot spot stopped working. I couldn’t revive it in Japan, or back at home. We later determined that Chinese intelligence had fried the firmware.