day and having hallucinatory dreams about all that she’d seen.
The apartment, at least, was nice. Gulangyu Island was small, steep, green, largely vehicle-free, and covered with sinuous, narrow roads that switchbacked through its little enclaves. A finer mesh of alleys and stone staircases webbed its parks and courtyards together. It was where Westerners had built their villas and their consulates in the post–Opium War period, when Xiamen had been known by its Fujianese name of Amoy. Though that era had long passed, the buildings remained.
Just barely. To look around Gulangyu Island was to be reminded that Fujian had been a tropical jungle and wanted, in the worst way, to be a tropical jungle again. If humans ever walked away from it, or stopped fighting it back with pruning shears and bucksaws, the creepers and lianas, the root systems, runners, spores, and seed pods would, in the space of a few years, overrun everything they had ever built. She did not know the detailed history of the place, but it was obvious that something like this must have happened to Gulangyu during the time of Mao, and that post-Mao real estate developers had gotten to the island just in the nick of time. From place to place you could still see an old Western-style building that was being torn to pieces in slow motion by foliage, rendering it so structurally unsound that only rats and wood-munching bugs could live there. But quite a few of the old buildings had been rescued—Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches—and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment was small but nicely located on the top floor of what had once been a French merchant’s villa and now served as home to a couple dozen young professionals like Meng Anlan. Her bed looked out onto a small balcony with a view across the water to the brilliant downtown lights of Xiamen, and during those nights when sleep eluded her, she would sit up and hug her knees and stare across the water, wondering which of those scintillae was the screen of Abdallah Jones’s laptop.
But as weeks went by and she got the square kilometer sorted out in her head, it began to seem doable. Ninety percent of the buildings could simply be ruled out. They were commercial properties or private residences. Unless Jones had some sort of an arrangement with a shop owner or a prosperous family, which seemed most unlikely, he had to be living in an apartment building, and not just any, but one that catered to transients and economic migrants. There were only a few of those in the search zone, and by various means she was able to cross several of them off the list. So those first few weeks of confusion and misery culminated, suddenly, with a short list of plausible Jones hideouts.
On rational grounds, she could not make a choice from among these, but her gut feeling was strongly in favor of a large, locally notorious dump of a place, five stories high, enmeshed in the finely reticulated streets of an old neighborhood but close enough to its edge that it was probably fated for demolition and skyscraperization. It had been a proud building during the era that the city was called Amoy and rich Europeans maintained wine cellars on Gulangyu. A hotel, perhaps. But long since repurposed into a workers’ apartment building.
Olivia pretended to be interested in leasing an office in a building directly across the street. The two buildings were of equal height and similar vintage, webbed together by particolored skeins of improvised wiring. The landlord wanted to steer Olivia to offices in the lower floors, where access was easier and rent was higher. But Olivia had become expert in prolonging her “search for office space” to ridiculous lengths by making claims about the nutty miserliness of her uncle in Guangdong. She had a whole line of patter ready to go, and a war chest of anecdotes about how cheap Meng Binrong was. She used these to prod the landlord ever higher in the building and cajoled him to pry open old dusty doors and let her see offices that were being used as storage dumps for maintenance supplies and doors, toilets, and ventilators that were awaiting repair. In each office that she inspected, Olivia was careful to go and look at the view, forcing stuck windows and thrusting her head out into the hot muggy breeze. As she explained, her only compensation for working in an office so many flights of stairs above street level was the nice view she could get, and the natural ventilation. In truth, of course, she was looking at the building across the street, gazing into its windows, hoping to see a glimpse of a tall black Welshman.
An irregular thumping noise was emanating from somewhere, not inside this building but nearby. At first she heard it only subliminally, since it was buried in ambient sound from the street. But as she dragged the exhausted and irritable landlord skyward, this sound began to break clean from the clamor of the street and to enter her consciousness. The thumping started and stopped. It would go for three or six or ten beats, like the pounding of a heart, then cease for a little while, then start again, sometimes faster and sometimes slower. Sometimes it terminated in a faint crashing noise. She knew the pattern well because she and her colleagues in London had heard it in the background of Abdallah Jones’s recorded phone conversations and had devoted many hours to wondering what it was. Their first thought had been construction noise from a neighboring apartment, but it didn’t really fit that pattern; what sort of construction used only hammers but never a saw? Perhaps Jones lived upstairs of a butcher shop where heavy cleavers were being used to whack apart big carcasses? Or a martial arts dojo where students were hitting a punching bag? They had never really been able to pin it down, and it drove them crazy.
But the higher that Olivia climbed in that office building, the more certain she became that she was hearing exactly that pattern of sounds from the apartment building across the street. It was becoming more distinct, and she was growing more excited the higher she climbed.
Reaching the top floor, she entered an office and found her view blocked by a tattered blue tarp that had been hung down in front of the windows. She strode across the room, hauled the window open—they were huge, old-school, double-sash windows—and pulled the hem of a blue tarp to one side.
Directly across the street, perhaps twenty meters away from her, on the roof of the apartment building, half a dozen young men were playing basketball.
She watched one of them dribble through the defenders—
“This might be acceptable,” she said to the landlord, a bit distractedly since she was taking phone video of the hoopsters. “I’ll get back to you.”
The landlord made a phone call. Olivia continued to enjoy the view. The apartment directly below the makeshift basketball court had sheets or posters or something covering most of its windows. Olivia badly wanted to make a call of her own:
She found her way to the nearest
The next day she received a message encrypted in the least significant bits of an image file, telling her what to do next.
Some part of her hoped that MI6 would yank her straight back to London, buy her dinner at a nice restaurant, and give her a promotion. That fantasy was based on her guess that they would move on Jones immediately, either by tipping off the Public Security Bureau to his presence or by sending a hit squad.
The encrypted message, however, told a different story about how Olivia would be spending the next weeks or perhaps months.
They were congratulatory, in the devilishly understated manner that you would expect. But they seemed to have decided that Abdallah Jones would be worth more to them if he could be milked for intelligence before being dispatched to reap his quota of black-eyed virgins. They wanted her to find a place from which Jones’s apartment could be placed under surveillance, and then report back.
Olivia called the landlord, went back to the building across the street, took phone pictures of the office, and negotiated a lease. Using her cover identity, she sent an email to Meng Binrong, containing all the pictures and full details as to the terms of the lease. The message went to a mailbox registered in Guangzhou but was automatically encrypted and forwarded to London.
Another message, purring with satisfaction, reached her the next day. She was told to work on her cover and await further contacts.
Working on her cover was good advice; she had let that slide for a couple of weeks as she’d got herself established in Xiamen. She caused a desk and a chair to be moved into the new office, then buckled down to her pretend work, swapping volumes of email with her pretend clients and her pretend uncle, arranging trips to small factories up and down the estuary of the Nine Dragons River, and keeping one eye, always, on Apartment 505 across the street. The tenants were careful to keep most of the windows blocked, but sometimes they had to open them up for ventilation, and when they did, Olivia could see exciting details: lots of mattresses on the floor, and containers of what looked like industrial solvents, and men who did not seem to be from around here. She never
