The wife was unsettled by her messed-up state. But in a long and polite interrogation session right there on her threshold, Olivia managed to convince her that all was well and that the only thing she needed right now was to be left alone. She did not mean to make it seem as though she were physically blocking the entrance, but this was in fact what she was doing. Body language didn’t work on the woman, and so she had to use the other kind of language. But finally Olivia gained the upper hand and reached the point where she felt that she could close the door and double-bolt it without giving offense.
She got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and began to sip from it, then pulled out a bag of frozen baozi from the freezer, opened it, and verified that her Chinese “Meng Anlan” passport was still there.
This, of course, was not meant to pass for spycraft. It wasn’t where a spy would hide incriminating fake documents. But it was the sort of place that a young woman who wasn’t a spy might hide her legitimate passport to keep it out of the hands of common burglars. So she now had a way to identify herself as Meng Anlan even if her ID card was lost.
Those few sips of water had been enough to get her kidneys working again, so she set the bottle down, left the passport on the kitchen counter, and went into the bathroom.
As soon as she walked in she felt and heard the door being kicked shut behind her. She turned around, straight into an oncoming wall of white. A pillow slammed into her face as a hand took her by the back of the neck. She cried out once, but the sound went nowhere. Then she heard a quiet voice in her ear: “Don’t make any sound. Do you understand?”
He was speaking in Russian.
She nodded.
The pillow came away, and she found herself looking into the blue eyes of the man who had crashed into her office earlier today; but now he was wearing a suit, and he had shaved his head. Judging from evidence near to hand, he had done so in her bathroom sink, using a pink plastic girl-razor that he had borrowed from her stuff.
“Many apologies,” he said.
She made some gesture combining elements of shrug, nod, and shiver.
“We have nice talk?” he said in English.
She would look anywhere except at his eyes.
“I know you are spy,” he said, sticking to English for now; maybe he was unsure of her abilities in Russian.
Now she did look him in the eyes. She was expecting, or fearing, a triumphant look. Gloating. I have you in the palm of my hand. But that wasn’t it. It was more like—professional courtesy.
“Maybe you are only person in Xiamen who is more fucked than me,” he said. “My name is Sokolov. We should talk.”
What the hell. “My name is Olivia.”
IT WAS AN hour into the boat journey. The city was far behind. They were out in the open, ranging through a territory of broadly spaced, rocky islands. Jones had devoted much of the time to discussing matters in Arabic with the one Zula had come to think of as his lieutenant: the gunman with the binoculars and the phone. At a certain point, both men had begun to shoot glances in the direction of Zula and Yuxia, and then the lieutenant had come back and stood in front of Yuxia and caught her eye, then jerked his chin forward, as if to say, Come with me. Yuxia had in no way been receptive to the proposal. Jones had approached, sizing up the situation, and had stepped between the lieutenant and Yuxia and squatted down and explained to her in the mildest possible language that he, Jones, wanted to have a private conversation with Zula, and so Yuxia needed either to move peaceably to the bows or else jump off the boat and die—which, from his point of view, would be much preferable. “If we wanted something bad to happen to you, it would have been done already.”
And so Yuxia had gone forward with the lieutenant and found a place to sit up in the boat’s prow.
“I don’t want to have to endure any more of your Nancy Drew shenanigans,” Jones began. “It makes the cost of having you around very high, and since your value is essentially zero—well—as the saying goes—do the math.”
“Essentially zero,” Zula asked, “or zero? Because—”
“Ah, I forget you are a bright girl and inclined to parse my statements closely. Very well then. Look about yourself. Consider your situation. And then cooperate with me. Cooperate by answering my questions. Later, the same questions will be asked of Yuxia. It would be best for all concerned if the answers matched.”
Then nothing for a while. He was willing to wait all day.
Zula shrugged. “Ask away.”
“Describe the leader of the Russian military squad.”
She began to describe Sokolov’s appearance. Soon Jones was nodding, tentatively at first, then more emphatically, as a way of telling her to shut up already.
“Did you see him?” Zula asked, but it was a stupid question; she could tell that he had.
Jones looked away and ignored the question.
Her next question would have been Is he still alive? but she stifled it.
Jones went on to ask any number of other questions about Sokolov. It wouldn’t be an efficient use of his energies to show so much curiosity about a dead man. So she had her answer.
This, she realized, was what Jones and his lieutenant had been talking about. Jones had related the story of this morning’s events, as he’d seen them, and at some point, a gap had become obvious: they had not seen Sokolov die, they had not observed his body.
The notion that Sokolov was still alive gave her a thrill of irrational excitement and a sense of weird hope. He was the only person she had seen in the last few days who seemed to be equal to the situation. Was it idiotic to think that he might want to help her? But even if he did, this did her no good if he didn’t know she was alive, didn’t know where she was. He must be on the run now, even more hard-pressed than she was.
They had gone past a couple of smaller islands and seemed to have set their course for another one, slightly bigger, yet still no more than a couple of miles long.
She needed to start thinking like Uncle Richard. Not Uncle Richard when he was at the re-u but Uncle Richard when he was doing business. She had only watched him in that mode a couple of times—she didn’t get invited to meetings where he did important-guy stuff—but when she had, she’d been fascinated by the way he slipped into a different persona and zipped it up over his regular personality. What does this person want? How does it conflict, or not, with what I want? And yet never fake, never dishonest. Because people could see through that.
Right now, Jones badly wanted to know about Sokolov. Something had happened between those two men, something that had made an impression on Jones.
“I don’t know much about his background, other than the medals and so on…”
“Medals?”
“… but I interacted with him a fair amount when we took the jet down to Xiamen, and at the safe house, and while we were hunting down the virus writers.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Jones said. For his eyes had gotten a little wider, his gaze a little more intense, at each of these disclosures.
She had not mentioned, until now, the fact that Ivanov’s jet was in Xiamen.
Good. Answering his questions about those would kill another hour.
What would happen when she ran out of material?
All he had to do was google her name and he would know about Richard. Then the logical thing for him to do would be to hold her for ransom.
Of course, he didn’t know her last name yet.
The curse of having a distinctive first name: if he just googled “Zula,” combined with the name of the company where she worked, he’d probably come up with something.
But there was no Internet on this boat, and, from the looks of where they were going, that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
“Are you telling me that the Russians had a safe house?” The question Brit inflected, falling rather than rising at the end.
“Yes.”
“In Xiamen?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
r />
“In a—” Zula was getting ready to describe the building. Then she turned and looked back to the city. It was a few miles aft by this point, but the tall downtown towers were clearly visible. “That one,” she said. “The new modern tower. Curvy floor plan. Yellow crane sticking out of the top of it.”
Jones called for the binoculars. Trading them back and forth with Zula, he made sure he knew precisely which building she was talking about.
He wanted to know which floor. That gave Zula pause, for as she’d looked through the binoculars, she’d wondered whether Sokolov was up there, gazing out the window. Was she putting him in danger by divulging so much?
But Sokolov knew perfectly well that he was in danger, and he would be taking precautions.
It was a way to communicate with him. If Jones sent someone to the forty-third floor of that building, Sokolov would wonder how they had known the location of the safe house, and he might conclude that they’d gotten the information from Zula.
“Forty-three,” she said.
“Describe the—” Jones began, but they were interrupted by a few words from the skipper. Jones listened, nodded, then fixed his gaze on Zula and jerked his head toward the pilothouse. “Things are about to get crowded,” he said. “You’ll be a good deal less conspicuous in there.”
Zula wondered to herself, not for the first time, just how cooperative she ought to be. But Jones seemed to enjoy her company and to want information from her, so she had a general sense that things were merely bad and not all the way desperate. Jumping off the boat and swimming for it would certainly make them desperate. Cooperating now might lead to more trust later. So she stood up and walked into the cramped, loud, and ferociously hot confines of the pilothouse. A minute later she was joined by Yuxia. They stayed there for the remainder of the voyage.
She guessed that the word “teeming” must have been coined to describe places like the harbor on this little island. Since then, though, it had been hopelessly diluted by application to such subjects as Manhattan traffic, jungles, and beehives, none of which really approached the level of activity and jam-packed-ness that was belaboring Zula’s eyes as they chugged deeper and deeper into the harbor. You’d think that having so much in such a small space would lead to less, rather than more, activity, since crowding made it harder to move, but none of the people who lived here seemed to be aware of any such equation. The outskirts of the bay were gridded over with raftlike structures about the size of city blocks, each consisting of numerous square pens, separated by gangplanks, and covered with stretched netting. The gangplanks were supported by various kinds of floats, including plastic tanks filled with air, giant sausages of closed-cell foam, or simply large plastic bags stuffed with Styrofoam peanuts. Each of these rafts supported a little shack. Zula reckoned that they were fish farms.
The number of fishing boats defied belief or estimation. They exceeded available dock space by a factor of many hundreds, so they had been pushed up onto the beach until the beach was full and then they had been rafted together, side by side, in long arcs stretching across the harbor. When one arc ran out of space, a new one would get started, and in the outskirts of the bay there were a few consisting of only half a dozen or so boats.
Somewhere beyond all of this there must be actual land, and some kind of port town, but Zula saw it only in glimpses. For there was a cleft in all this improvised rafting that penetrated to a dock: just a single pier, where at the moment a passenger ferry was drawn up. From it a road rambled up the hill, forming the spine of a town. The road was lined with low buildings and half choked with people in doulis squatting on the hot pavement to mend stretched-out fishnets or string bald tires onto cables. Welding arcs and cutting torches glinted everywhere, bluer and brighter than the sun. Smaller boats like the one that they were on circulated through every patch of water large enough to float them, like mitochondria in cells. The sheer complexity of the rigging and the traffic and the patterns of movement baffled the mind and faded into the haze and humidity long before it started to make sense.
The look on Yuxia’s face told Zula that it was equally foreign to her.
All the fishing vessels had been constructed to exactly the same plan, mass-produced in some shipyard somewhere, and all of them were painted the same shade of blue. It was a wonder to Zula that the people who lived and worked here could tell them apart. There was one, though, that stood apart simply because it literally did stand apart, being anchored a little farther out in the bay and not rafted to any other vessel. That was the one they headed for. They came up along its seaward flank, where fewer eyes could see them, and scaled a ladder to its deck. Like all of them, it had a heavy-looking prow, jutting high out of the water and laden with technical gear. Just aft of that was an expanse of open deck cluttered with gray plastic tubs nested together in stacks. Over that loomed a superstructure that occupied most of the aft half of the vessel. This was two decks high. The cabins in its lower story had only a few small portholes. The upper level sported a few windows and a couple of hatches opening out onto a narrow walkway that ran around its periphery. These were nothing more than brief impressions that Zula gained while she was being hustled straight back to a cabin, apparently used as a berth by fishermen who lived aboard the vessel, since the next thing that happened was that two men came in and dragged all their stuff out of it, leaving her alone in a stripped room with no decoration except a Middle Eastern rug on the steel deck, and two faded posters with Arabic lettering, featuring men in turbans and beards, pointing to the ceiling and unburdening themselves of some profound thoughts about (wild guess here) global jihad. The cabin had a single porthole that, fifteen minutes after her arrival, was unceremoniously sealed off by the simple expedient of taping a piece of paper over it on the outside. Openings and closings of the cabin door were accompanied by clanging sound effects that she interpreted as signifying that the hatch was chained shut on the outside. In a wordless, somewhat poignant act of chivalry, someone opened the door and handed her a bucket. Yuxia had also been taken aboard, but Zula had no idea where she was, or what might be happening to her.
“THERE’S VODKA IN the bar.” The spy Olivia said that in Russian. Sokolov guessed now, from her accent and from her freewheeling approach to dispensation of alcoholic beverages, that she was British.
“Thank you, but I am a Russian of somewhat unusual habits and will not be taking this opportunity to get drunk.”
She was a little slow to take that sentence in, but she got the gist of it. Her Russian was, perhaps, slightly better than his English. They would have to switch back and forth and watch each other’s faces.
“I am going to take every opportunity I can find,” she responded, and went over to the bar—really just a cabinet with a few bottles in it—and took out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“You should not become heavily intoxicated,” he said, “since further action may be required soon.”
The look she gave him made it evident that she was at some pains to avoid laughing in his face.
Where had he gone wrong?
By assuming that she would trust him.
It was a logical assumption. If the spy Olivia were more experienced, she would know right away that trusting him was the correct move. She could trust him because he was completely fucked and he needed her—a Chinese-looking person who could pass for a local—to help him.
Why then no trust?
Because he had crashed through her office window at a particularly difficult moment and aimed an assault rifle at her and then broken into her apartment, probably.
“How did you get in here?” she asked.
“Plan D,” he said in English.
“And what is Plan D?”
“The fourth plan that I attempted. It took me all afternoon.”
He could have explained it, but it was idiotic to be discussing things in the past when they needed to discuss the future.
Still she was giving him the evil eye over the rim of her whi
skey glass.
Pulling these items, one by one, from the pockets of Jeremy Jeong’s suit, he placed her ID card, her phone, her keys, and a few other items on the kitchen counter. Each one produced a little exclamation of surprise and delight from Olivia. “To prove I am not fucking asshole,” he explained.
She went for the phone first and checked the “Recent Calls” menu to see whether Sokolov had been so stupid as to use it. The answer, as he could have told her, was no.
“This is huge,” she said, slapping the ID card off the counter and pocketing it.
“Name on card is not Olivia?”
“Name on card is Meng Anlan.”
“Ah.”
“So you can’t read any Chinese at all.”
“Correct.”
“How did you even get here? Never mind. Plan D.” Still jumping back and forth between Russian and English. Sokolov could tell that she’d learned her Russian in an academic setting, was more comfortable with abstractions and formal sentence structure, had no idea how to express herself colloquially.
“You were conducting surveillance on the jihadists?” he asked. “Or the hackers who lived in the flat below them?”
“The jihadists.”
“The name of the leader? The Negro?”
“Abdallah Jones.”
Sokolov nodded. He had heard of Jones, seen his photograph in newspaper articles.
“You are employed by MI6?”
She made a visible effort to maintain a poker face, then seemed to realize its futility and nodded.
“MI6 has emergency extraction procedure?”
“Resources,” Olivia corrected him, “that they could call on. To improvise such a procedure.”
That sounded like a procedure to him. “You activate this procedure how?”
“If I had no other choice, I would make a certain phone call,” she said, “but that’s to be avoided if I can use Internet.”