Reamde

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.