Reamde

Because of those long hours and the tunnel vision that tended to set in as a result, perhaps she could be forgiven for being so oblivious, for so long, to the obvious target of Abdallah Jones’s preparations. Xiamen was hosting an international conference, bringing in diplomats from all over the globe. Ostensibly this was to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Zheng Chenggong’s liberation of Taiwan from the Dutch. But everyone knew that the real agenda was to discuss relations between Taiwan and mainland China and that very significant developments might be announced there. Some radical Islamists claimed Zheng Chenggong as one of their own, and accordingly considered Taiwan to be part of the Islamic Caliphate. It was a forlorn pretense, but anyway they were furious about oppression of Muslims in western China, so any excuse would suffice.

Olivia had noticed banners going up on lampposts, featuring heroic images of Zheng Chenggong, but did not really become aware that the conference was happening until it began to cause traffic jams on her way to work in the morning. At which point she understood, far too late, that there must be some connection between this and a recent spike in chatter from Apartment 505. The crisis must be nigh.

ONE MORNING SHE was returning to the office, having just enjoyed a few hours of sleep at home, when she noticed a minor oddity: a van parked on the street between the apartment building and her office. It was messing up the flow of traffic and creating a minor sensation among street vendors and passersby. If it hadn’t been for the diplomatic conference and her awareness that something big was about to happen, she might have ignored it. But as it was, her first thought was that the jig was up: it was a squad of PSB investigators come to knock on Abdallah Jones’s door and ask him what he and his friends were doing in there. Or worse: they were coming to arrest Olivia.

On further inspection, though, it didn’t look like an official vehicle, and the driver was a young woman in blue boots who seemed to be having some trouble with keys. But it had been enough to get her heart pounding, so after walking slowly and calmly into the office building and getting into the stairway where no one could see her, she ascended the steps two at a time and got into her office as soon as she could. Resisting the temptation to gawk out the window, she pulled on the headphones that she used to monitor the sounds in Abdallah Jones’s apartment.

Everything sounded routine: some snoring, a few sleepy men getting up and making tea, listening to an Arabic podcast. The very normality of this calmed her down quite a bit and made her feel a fool for having become so excited. She blotted perspiration from her forehead, sat down, set her purse on the desk, woke up her computer, and checked her email.

A huge thud came through on the headphones, followed by a great deal of excited talking.

Then some loud pops, clipped by the electronics so that they just came through as dropouts in the stream of noise.

Then the sound went dead entirely. She pulled off the headphones and realized that she could hear more pops directly from across the street. She went to the window and checked the laser device. It seemed to be in good repair. Then she peered through a peephole in the blue tarp and saw the problem: it worked by bouncing a laser off a windowpane. But the windowpane in question no longer existed.

She was startled by crashing and splintering noises from inside the office, just to her right. Pulling her head back inside, she noticed that half of her windows were now shards on the floor. There was dust in the air and craters in the wall opposite the windows. Her mind, slowly catching up, told her that she had just heard a long burst of automatic weapons fire and that a good bit of it had come directly across the street and sprayed the office.

She dropped to hands and knees, reached up, and hit the kill switch on the laser device.

MI6 had sent in a hit squad. They were doing it now. But they had forgotten to advise her.

Or perhaps they had just decided that she was expendable.

SOKOLOV HAD SEEN many strange things already this morning, and yet still he was taken aback when he swung out of the shattered window and scanned the front of the building to find it cluttered with young Chinese men crawling around on it like spiders.

Then he remembered that, sixty seconds earlier, his greatest concern in the world had been what to do about a cabal of Chinese hackers. These must be them.

He understood and approved of the decision that the hackers had made to avoid the building’s stairwells and escape via its exterior surface. It would have been easy enough to follow their lead down to the street, and in a sense this was the obvious decision to make, since they knew the terrain much better than he did. Often, in unfamiliar territory, it was wisest to pattern one’s movements after the locals’.