hungover and bleeding. In order to get from Terminal 5’s gates to Immigration and Customs, it was necessary to descend a prodigious stack of escalators, beginning well above ground level and terminating deep below. There was a place, about halfway along, where an escalator deposited the newly arrived passengers on a landing that happened to coincide with street level; as you executed a U-turn to get on the next, you could look out through glass doors and walls at a road with cars and trucks streaming along it. Uniformed personnel were forever stationed before those glass doors to make sure that everyone coming down those escalators kept going down into the levels where they were to be processed.
Everyone, that is, except for those lucky few who were being whisked. Olivia was ready to make the U-turn and descend along with everyone else, but her escorts got off that escalator and just kept walking in a straight line. And since Olivia was sandwiched between them, she did the same, expecting that, at any moment, one of the security guards stationed before the doors would wrestle her to the ground and begin blowing on a whistle. Instead of which, a door was opened for her, an alarm was stifled by a series of digits punched into a keypad, and suddenly she was out of doors climbing into a black Land Rover. They were out on the M4 before the stale air of the jumbo jet had even dissipated from her clothes and hair.
Into a London doctor’s office, some sort of exceedingly private and specialized practice, a basic tenet of which was never to evince surprise or skepticism. Where had she come from? South China. Health generally good? Until quite recently. What had happened recently? Hurled against a wall by a blast wave, showered with broken glass, half buried in debris, ran through a damaged building barefoot, makeshift bandages, fled from gunmen, swam in the polluted waters of the Nine Dragons estuary, crawled through minefield, slept on a pile of vines. The doctor just nodded absentmindedly, as if she were complaining of vaginal itching, and then ran her through a scanner the size of a nuclear submarine. That accomplished, he prodded her all over, put his fingers every place he could think of, squeezed bones and organs she didn’t know were externally accessible, peered into orifices with Dr. Seuss–like equipment, asked her probing questions intended to judge her cognitive status. Or other kinds of status. Had sex recently? Oh yes. Any chance of being pregnant? No. He lidocained the thing on the top of her head and put in a couple of stitches and did things that produced a scent of burning hair. Then he turned her over to an “injectionist,” who plied her trade on Olivia’s deltoids, forearms, buttocks, and thighs with unseemly diligence, pulling many wee tubes of blood out of her and replacing the lost fluids with vast, neon-colored inoculations. It was made clear to her that the large muscles in question would hurt later and that she would have to come back for more. All this attention paid to her health made her happy at first, until on further reflection she understood that they were getting ready to work her to death and they didn’t want her gumming things up by complaining of vague pains or chills. What, you say your ribs are hurting? That’s funny, we didn’t see anything on the scan.
Notes were jotted and verbal representations made to the effect that she should see certain specialized doctors and therapists at some vague time in the future. A follow-up was scheduled.
Then, off to MI6 for a surprisingly civil brunch and preliminary round of drinking with persons of gratifyingly high rank. Then the windowless conference room she had been anticipating and dreading. Her primary debriefer was none other than “Meng Binrong,” the Englishman who had been telephonically playing the role of her uncle during her time in Xiamen. He was blond-going-white, blue-eyed, with the classic florid English drinker’s complexion, energetic, mistakable for a man in his fifties or even late forties. But certain giveaways—the fact that he found it necessary to mow his eyebrows, the sheer number of burst capillaries—suggested he was older than that. Not eager to volunteer details about himself, but it was obvious from the sorts of things he knew—and
Where did that put him, she had to wonder? Was the operation considered a success or a failure? Or was it naive to think that MI6 would even bother assigning such facile designations to undertakings of such complexity? Supposedly they had garnered loads of intelligence from tapping Jones’s communications. No one could complain about that. The fact that he’d gotten away was unfortunate. But how could they possibly have anticipated—
“What the
“Everything I know, I know from talking to Mr. Y,” Olivia said, using the code name that she and George Chow had employed for Sokolov.
“Do you know his real name?”
“Does it matter right now?”
Uncle Meng just stared at her with his amazingly pale eyes.
“It’s just that I thought we were after Jones.”
“You know perfectly well that we are.”
“The whole situation with Mr. Y is extremely confusing to me,” Olivia said. “Because of what happened at the end.”
“Mr. Chow said that you claimed to have heard gunfire from out on the water.”
“The claim stands.”
“Mr. Y seems like quite the trouble magnet.”
“Does that put me in the category of trouble?”
“Why? Was he drawn to you?”
“I’d say it was mutual.”
Uncle Meng considered it. “So. You have feelings for Mr. Y. You think you heard him exchanging gunfire with un-known persons, somewhere out in the mists of the Orient. You are worried about what has become of him. And so here we are circling round each other and talking to no purpose because the conversation has become all about him.”
“Yes.”
“So let’s talk about Jones.”
“All right.”
“The entire point of trying to put Mr. Y on that ship to Long Beach was to secure his cooperation—to get some information he supposedly had as to where Jones was going. Did you get that information from him?”
“Jones was able to get control of a business jet parked at the FBO at Xiamen Airport,” Olivia said. She stood up, turned to the whiteboard, and wrote down its tail number. “Mr. Y observed it taking off at zero seven one three hours local time.” She wrote that down too. “It headed south.”
The conference room was well supplied with younger aides, one of whom, at a nod from Uncle Meng, commenced typing furiously.
Olivia said, “You’ll find that it’s leased to, or maybe even owned by, a Russian national based out of Toronto, and that it had flown into Xiamen a few days earlier.”
“Is this Russian national the same person as Mr. Y?”
“No, Mr. Y worked for him as a security consultant.”
“That being a euphemism for the sort of chap who leaves a pile of corpses in the hall outside of your flat.”
“They deserved it,” Olivia said.
Uncle Meng raised his shorn eyebrows at this, but not in a disapproving way.
“Do we know who else is aboard that plane?”
“I don’t know the ins and outs of flying,” Olivia said, “but I’ve been turning it over in my mind and I can’t but think that its usual pilots must be at the controls. Jones must have coerced them somehow.”
“I don’t disagree, but I was really asking about the bloody terrorists.”
“Not many of Jones’s crew could have survived what happened in that building,” Olivia said. “I’m amazed that Jones did. But he can’t have been acting alone. So he must have had some other safe house or support network that he drew on later.”
“The yacht club,” said Uncle Meng, using a bit of jargon that he and Olivia had devised during the course of the operation. They’d been unable to get many details, but they were fairly certain that Jones had traveled by sea from the Philippines to Taiwan and from there to Xiamen, and that he was getting supplies and personnel through
