Reamde

• The dossier of her Chinese alter ego. Most of this she had written herself and had memorized, but they’d apparently included it in case she wanted to do some last-minute cribbing.

• An addendum explaining how the hell her alter ego had suddenly found herself in Xiamen. This she read closely, since it all came as a surprise to her.

Aboard the sub was a squad of Special Boat service men. One of them showed her a place where an extra pod had been welded onto the hull of the submarine, like a wen on a camel. This could be accessed through a system of hatches. Olivia was quite certain that it was the most expensive single object she had ever seen in her life. The pod was a tiny submarine, capable of holding up to half a dozen men. “Or five men and one woman, if it comes to that,” the SBS man said. In some ways it was a simple vessel. It was not made to be filled with air or to withstand the pressure of the ocean. The seawater filled it, and the occupants wore scuba gear. But in other respects it was loaded with what she took to be fantastically complex navigation and stealth technology.

She spent a day on the sub, mostly alone, though they did throw a nice dinner for Olivia in the officers’ mess and made several toasts to her, to her fine qualities, to her mission, to her good luck, et cetera, et cetera.

And that was when she started to get scared.

You’d think it would have happened earlier. It wasn’t as though hints had been lacking as to the nature of the plan. But the thing that got to her emotionally about that dinner was precisely the tradition of it: hundreds of years of Royal Navy men going out to strange parts of the world to do spectacularly imprudent things. It was a way for those who weren’t going to show their appreciation—a precursor of survivor’s guilt.

It hadn’t occurred to her before, but: she had to cross the Chinese border somehow. Crossing at any legal port of entry would leave traces impossible to reconcile with her cover story. Even if she did it with fake papers and then threw them away, they’d have photos of her, and you had to assume they were using digital face recognition software now. Theoretically she could have hiked across the border from some place like Laos or Tibet, but that seemed awfully Victorian. They simply didn’t have time. So it was going to be this. At three in the morning she put on the scuba gear and carried her waterproof pouch to the miniature pod-sub, where, as promised, five of the SBS men were waiting. Some kind of long and tedious procedure followed, involving lots of checklists. The thing filled with water and started to move independently of the big submarine.

Then there was nothing but darkness and silence for an hour. The men controlling the sub’s movements were working hard, reading instruments, looking at electronic maps. She began to see landforms she recognized: the big round island of Xiamen nudged its way onto the screen.

They drew very near to one of the outlying islands, and one of the SBS men spent a while peering through the electronic equivalent of a periscope. Then the decision was made and the order given. Accompanied by one of the divers, she swam the last hundred meters and belly-crawled up onto a garbage-strewn beach in an unfrequented cove and kept crawling until she and the diver were concealed in foliage. They pulled off their masks and lay there motionless for a while, until certain that no one was nearby. Olivia peeled off her wetsuit. Modestly looking the other way, the diver opened the waterproof pouch and pulled out garments one by one, starting with panties, and handed them over his shoulder to her. When she was fully clothed, he turned around and saluted her —another detail that almost killed her—then crawled down through the garbage into the water, dragging behind him a bag containing her scuba kit. A wave lapped over him and he was gone.

Olivia applied mosquito repellent and squatted in the woods for two hours, then walked uphill to a little road and then down the road for a kilometer to a place where hundreds of ­people, mostly young women, were streaming out of a huge new apartment complex to a bus stop. Like them, she took a bus to the ferry terminal, and from there she joined in a flow of thousands across the wide aluminum gangplanks onto a crammed passenger ferry. An hour later she was in downtown Xiamen. Following instructions memorized from that envelope, she went to a FedEx office and picked up a large box that was waiting for her. Slitting it open with a penknife from her purse, she found that it contained an altogether typical-looking rollaway suitcase of the type currently making the rounds of every airport luggage carousel in the world.

A five-minute taxi ride took her to a middling business hotel near the waterfront. She walked into the place looking as if she had just breezed in from the airport, presented her Chinese ID card, and rented a room. Settling into it, she opened the rollaway to find a laptop that she recognized, since she had bought it and set it up herself, making certain that every detail of its hardware and software configuration was consistent with her cover story. She booted it up, connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, and discovered several days’ messages from anxious clients in London, Stockholm, and Antwerp.

She was now Meng Anlan, working for a fictional Guangzhou-based firm called Xinyou Quality Control Ltd., founded and owned by her fictitious uncle Meng Binrong, who was trying to set up a branch office in the Xiamen area. Xinyou Quality Control Ltd. acted as a liaison between clients in the West and small manufacturing firms in China. That was a common way to make money nowadays, and many firms were doing it. The only thing the least bit unusual about the cover story was Meng Anlan’s gender; except in some very unusual cases, women simply didn’t do things like this in China.

Or at least they didn’t do it openly. There were any number of firms that, for all practical purposes, were controlled by women; but they were always fronted by men. So the plausibility of Olivia’s cover story was founded on her fictitious uncle Binrong in Guangzhou, who was (according to the story) the real boss. Meng Anlan was just running errands for him, acting as a sort of personal assistant. All decisions of significance had to be referred to Binrong.

This was a bit more complication than was really desirable in a spy’s cover story. But there simply weren’t that many plausible excuses for a young woman in China to be out on her own, far away from home and family. There were millions of them doing low-level factory jobs and living in company dorms, but there was little point in MI6 sneaking her into China so that she could adopt that lifestyle. She was only useful as an agent if she had the money and the freedom to move around. They had even considered making Olivia into a high-priced call girl or a kept woman. This needn’t have involved actually having sex with anyone; the clients could have been imaginary. They had settled on the industrial-liaison story because it would give her excuses to do things like travel around the region, make contacts with people in industry, and lease office space.

They had used various forms of electronic misdirection to set up Guangzhou telephone and fax numbers that would ring through to a subterranean room at MI6 headquarters where a small Chinese-British staff was available: a woman playing the role of receptionist and a blond, blue-eyed Englishman, fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin, playing the role of Meng Binrong. So the story would hold up as long as the people she talked to in Xiamen went no further than contacting her uncle by phone, fax, or email. But if anyone got curious enough to visit the offices of Xinyou Quality Control in Guangzhou, they’d find nothing, and the whole story would unravel. And there were any number of other ways in which Meng Anlan’s identify could be picked apart. When that happened, the best possible outcome would be that she’d have to leave, never to come back, never to work in this kind of role again. Other possible outcomes included serving a long prison term or being executed.

She was being spent. There was no other way to put it. Her combination of looks, background, and command of language made her a one-of-a-kind asset. Someone at MI6 must, at one time, have had high hopes for her—must have planned to use her for something big and important. Her identity had been created, at enormous expense and trouble, to serve that purpose, whatever it might have been. But that original purpose had been forgotten when Abdallah Jones had moved to Xiamen and thrown away his mobile. Someone had made the decision that Olivia must be redeployed and put on the job of finding this one man.

She found a nice Western-style apartment on Gulangyu Island, just across a narrow strait from downtown Xiamen, and got it furnished and decorated in a style that was consistent with her cover story. She began taking the ferry into downtown every day and “looking for office space.” But the search for office space was really a block-by- block reconnaissance of the square kilometer where Abdallah Jones was believed to have his safe house.

She went through several huge emotional swings in her assessment of the level of difficulty. A thousand meters simply wasn’t that great a distance. Ten football pitches. And so, viewed from a comfortable remove, the job hadn’t seemed that difficult. During her first couple of weeks of wearing out shoe leather in downtown Xiamen, though, she became inordinately depressed about her chances of making any headway. The population of the square kilometer in question was probably between twenty and thirty thousand. The number of buildings ran to several hundred. She felt overwhelmed, wandering around all day getting lost in the district’s tortuous, crowded streets and then lying half awake all night in her Gulangyu apartment, retracing the steps she’d taken during the