once. All the bad things that she’d been trained to look for were there on display, as if this were a spy training film, carefully designed to depict the worst imaginable scenario. Every bench, every snack bar, every security checkpoint had one or two loitering, watchful men, pretending to pay attention to their mobile phones. Some of them even had the temerity to wear sunglasses indoors.
She was seeing precisely what Sokolov had anticipated: the mainland PSB had packed this morning’s ferry with plainclothes goons who had flooded the airport and any other place where Olivia and Sokolov might be likely to show up. They were keeping an eye out for any white male—but especially one traveling in the company of a Chinese female.
What those men might actually do, if they sighted the two together, was not clear to her. They had no power to arrest anyone on Taiwanese soil. Gunplay in a public space seemed unlikely. But they could take pictures and make a hell of a stink.
Olivia’s contact, getting off the plane, must have seen the same thing and decided to get out of there.
She remained aboard the bus, sinking low in her seat and peering through the lower edge of a dirty window. A stocky, middle-aged man, wearing a bulky suit and mirrored shades, was leaning against an advertising case, smoking a cigarette and barking into a phone. As the bus began to pull away, she noted that the case was filled with kitchen cutlery—the traditional Chinese cleaver-shaped knives. Which jogged her memory, finally. The island was within artillery range of Xiamen, and during the late 1950s, half a million high-explosive shells had been lobbed into the place. Over the next two decades, these had been followed by five million shells packed with propaganda leaflets. Local artisans dug them out of the ground and used the steel to make cleavers.
THE KNIFE FACTORY was an ideal place for a meeting, if one was concerned about being bugged or overheard. It was just a large open industrial structure, filled in the middle with many thousands of old rusted shells, bullet shaped, melon sized. Workers cut them into cigarette-pack-sized chunks using abrasive-wheel saws that shrieked like condemned souls while hurling out showers of sparkling white hellfire. A mechanical hammer beat these out flat, and they were pushed into a roaring furnace for heat treating. Finally, the tempered slabs were ground into knives on stone wheels and finished on belt sanders that looked and sounded as though they could jerk a finger off without noticing. This business of making shells into cutlery was sufficiently unusual that the factory offered tours. Olivia joined a group of five others who had flown in from Taiwan to see the sights and buy knives.
Getting here had taken long enough that the implications of all those goons in the airport had begun to work themselves out in Olivia’s mind. It was strongly in MI6’s interest to get her safely back to London, and so she had few worries on that score. But Sokolov was a different matter. MI6 did not know, yet, how she had made her way to Kinmen. They didn’t know about her travel buddy. Now that she had made it to Taiwanese soil, he was—to use dry British understatement—inconvenient. But if she were to ditch him here—which would be easy—she would have to spend the rest of her life avoiding mirrors.
If this had been the good old Cold War days, and Sokolov had been a possible defector, stuck behind the Iron Curtain, then they might have organized some sort of caper to smuggle him out to the West and set him up with a new life. In exchange, he would supply them with priceless military intelligence. But from what little she’d been able to learn, Sokolov divided his time between Toronto, London, and Paris. And there was very little in his head that MI6 didn’t already know.
“Meng Anlan?”
The speaker was Chinese, or at least Chinese-looking: a hefty man in his fifties wearing shaded glasses and dressed in the loud shirt of a tourist who didn’t care if everyone knew that he was a tourist. He had been checking her out through those shades.
She just looked at him. If he had to ask…
“May I walk with you?” he asked. Or rather shouted, since they were standing two meters away from one of those abrasive-wheel saws.
It looked like the conversation was going to be in Fujianese-inflected Mandarin. Fine with her.
She fell in step beside him, and they began a slow procedure of falling farther and farther behind the main tour group. He was shouldering a bag. She hoped it might be full of food. But now was the wrong time to ask.
What the hell. “Do you have anything—a candy bar, a bag of peanuts.” She had managed to buy water along the way but had not eaten in something close to twenty-four hours.
“Forgive me,” he said in English, and rummaged in his bag. The best he could come up with was a bag of almonds.
As she was stuffing these into her mouth, he said: “Bit of a stink.” His accent said that he had grown up in England.
“I’m sure lots of people are bloody furious,” she said. “Can we sort that out later?”
“Hunger makes you irritable.”
“It’s not the hunger. It’s the not-knowing-what’s-going-to-happen.”
“You’re fine,” he said. “You’re safe. You’re going home. But it has to be done with a decent respect for the feelings of that lot.” He nodded toward the mainland, which they could not see from here, but which loomed psychologically over everything. “They watch the ferries. The terminals. If you were to just waltz on board a plane and fly off to Taipei, it would be construed as—”
“Rubbing their face in it.”
“Apparently there were a
“Four, to be exact.”
“
“I remember it well.”
“What in God’s name happened there?”
“Long story. Not the place for it.”
“We agree,” the man said.
“Sorry if I’m focusing too much on narrowly practical matters,” she said, “but how do I get aboard a plane without seeming to ‘waltz on board’?”
“Use a fake name. Change your appearance. And travel with me.”
“You think that will fool them?”
“Actually, I do,” he said, “but even if it doesn’t, the purpose is—”
“To show a decent respect for their feelings.”
“Yes.” The man—somehow they had skipped over any sort of formal introduction—drew closer to her and transferred his bag to her shoulder. “Clothes,” he said. “Money. British passport. Not in your name, of course. A veritable cornucopia of feminine hygiene. A few odds and ends.”
“A book or two?” she asked. “Or is that too much to hope for?”
He chortled. “You’re already worried about what you’re going to do on the flight to London?”
“Never mind. I’m sure I’ll be drinking myself senseless.”
He turned his attention to the knife tour for a few moments, admiring a trip-hammer that was using hydraulic power to beat the hell out of a piece of hot steel being moved around in it by a tong-brandishing worker, stripped from the waist up.
But then he turned back.
“There are, of course, many questions.”
“Of course.”
“You’ll answer them all in due course.”
“So I supposed.”
“But there is one in particular that I have been directed to ask you, just in case something goes awry.”
“In case I get sucked out of the airplane.”
“Rogue wave. Meteor strike.”
“All right. What is the one question?”
“Who killed all those men in your apartment?”
She made no answer.
“Was it you?”
