She misses him already.
Flagging down a taxi, a green Volkswagen Santana, Simon gives the driver the address of their hotel.
“I didn’t know you spoke Mandarin,” Eve says.
Simon runs a hand over his stubble-roughened jaw. “I did a year of it at university. If this guy starts a real conversation, I’m stuffed.”
“So does he know where the Sea Bird Hotel is?”
“I think so. His expression suggested he didn’t think much of it.”
“Let’s see. Discreet was how Richard Edwards described it.”
Eve and Simon’s visit is strictly non-official, so there’s no one from the Shanghai MI6 station to meet them. Indeed, everything about their status is irregular. Since her recruitment by Edwards to investigate the Kedrin killing, an operation run strictly off-the-books, Eve has not contacted a single one of her former colleagues. Instead, day after day, week after week, she has made her way to the cramped and dingy office over Goodge Street tube station. There, with the long-suffering Simon, she has scrolled through file after classified file, staring at her computer screen until her head pounds and her eyes ache with tiredness, in the search for anything—a whisper, an afterthought, the ghost of a suggestion—that might lead her closer to the woman who murdered Viktor Kedrin.
And she’s got nowhere. She’s identified several high-profile political and criminal killings in which a woman is rumoured to have been involved, and a handful which she’s almost certain were carried out by a female shooter. She has watched, more times than she can remember, the CCTV recording from Kedrin’s London hotel in which his killer can be seen coming and going. But the images are smeared and indistinct, even when fully enhanced, and the figure’s face is never visible.
When not scouring cyberspace, Eve has followed the real-world lines of inquiry presented by the Kedrin case. But every lead, no matter how initially promising, has brought her up against a smoothly impermeable barrier. There’s no witness, no forensic evidence, no useful ballistics, no money or paper trail. At a certain point, everything just cuts out.
Despite this lack of progress, Eve has a sense of the woman she’s hunting. The woman she sometimes calls Chernaya Roza—Black Rose—after the 9mm Russian hollowpoint ammunition used to kill Kedrin and his bodyguards. Eve thinks that her Black Rose is in her mid-twenties, highly intelligent, and a loner. She is audacious, cool under pressure, and supremely skilled at compartmentalising her emotions. In all probability she is a sociopath, wholly lacking in affect and conscience. She will have few or no friends, and such relationships as she forms will be overwhelmingly manipulative and sexual in nature. Killing, in all probability, will have become necessary to her, with each successful murder further proof of her untouchability.
It’s less than twenty-four hours since Richard Edwards walked unannounced into the office over the tube station.
“Does anyone ever clean this place?” he enquired, with vague distaste.
“Yes, Simon does. And very occasionally me. Sorry if it’s not up to Vauxhall Cross standards. We’ve ordered some more vacuum cleaner bags.”
“Well, that’s something to look forward to. And in the meantime…” He opened the briefcase at his feet, and took out two well-used passports and a sheaf of flight tickets and schedules. “You’re going to China. Tonight. Someone’s taken out the leader of their cyber-warfare team in Shanghai, and it’s thought that the hit was carried out by a woman.”
It took him less than five minutes to bring her up to speed on the demise of Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Lei. “Your brief,” he told her, “is to make discreet contact with the MSS, the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and convey my assurances that the murder of Zhang was not sponsored, enabled or executed by us. Furthermore, you are to offer them any assistance they might need in investigating the murder, including sharing our suspicions about a female contract killer.”
“Do I have a contact at the MSS?”
“Yes. His name is Jin Qiang. I knew him in Moscow, when he was their head of station there, and he’s a good man. Since then he and I have kept certain back-door channels open. He knows you’re coming.”
“Isn’t he going to wonder why he’s dealing with me, rather than one of the local station officers? Who are presumably already on the case.”
“He’ll guess there are sensitivities. Reasons why you can’t go in under official cover.”
“So do we make contact with the MI6 station at all?”
Edwards stood, walked to the window, and peered through the grime at the traffic. “For safety’s sake, we have to assume that the conspiracy to cover this woman’s tracks has global reach. If she’s killing people in Shanghai, they’ll have people there. Possibly our people. So you’ve got to keep clear of them. We can’t afford to trust anyone.”
“How much can I tell the MSS guy?”
“Jin Qiang? As far as our hitwoman goes, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving him everything you’ve got.” He drained his coffee, and dropped the paper cup into the bin. “We need to catch her, he needs to catch her.”
The door swung open. “You know, I’m convinced Goodge Street station’s a portal to hell,” said Simon, shrugging his computer bag from his shoulders onto his desk. “I’ve just had such a Buffy moment…” He froze. “Oh, hello, Richard.”
“Hello, Simon. Good morning.”
“We’re going to Shanghai,” said Eve, and wondered what on earth she was going to tell Niko.
“Look at this,” Simon says, lowering the window of the taxi and flooding it with the warm night. “It’s extraordinary.”
And it is. They’re approaching the Nanpu Bridge, with vast office blocks to right and left of them, their numberless windows pinpricks of gold against the bruised purple of the sky. And suddenly Eve’s tiredness evaporates, and she’s light-headed with the novelty of it all. Everything’s about money and profit. You can see it in the soaring high-rises, smell it in the diesel fumes, taste it on the night air. The hunger. The high stakes and the huge returns. The unbridled
