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.