Reamde

Zula let go of the door handle and gripped Jones’s hand. She slid sideways across the seat until she had reached the place where she could rotate on her bottom and get her feet aimed out the door. Jones was strong and she learned that she could rely on his grip. She got her other hand wrapped around his forearm and then executed a sort of chin-up to get her feet clear of the taxi. As she rose to a standing position on the surface of the pier, she glimpsed his face, gazing, not so much in amazement as simple curiosity, at something that was approaching them from the road.

At that moment—for the brain worked in funny ways—Zula suddenly recognized him as Abdallah Jones, a big-time international terrorist. She’d read about him in newspapers.

Following the gaze of Abdallah Jones, Zula turned her head just in time to see a van come roaring in and crash into the rear bumper of the taxi.

SOKOLOV TOOK INVENTORY. In combat there was this tendency to divest oneself of objects at astonishing speed, which was why he and all others in his line of work tended to attach the really important things to their bodies. Less than an hour ago, in the cellar of the apartment building, he had shed his retired Chinese angler costume and changed into a black tracksuit, black trainers, hard-shell knee pads, an athletic supporter with a plastic cup to protect his genitals, and a belt with the Makarov holster and some spare clips. A bulky windbreaker covered a black vest-cum-web-harness from which he had hung a variety of knives, lights, zip ties, and other things he thought he might need. On his back was a CamelBak pouch full of water. Why carry water on a mission that was supposed to last only fifteen minutes? Because once in Afghanistan he had gone out on a fifteen-minute mission that had ended up lasting forty-eight hours, and when he had made it back to his base, having remained barely alive by drinking his own urine and sucking the blood of rodents and small birds, he had made a vow that he would never be without water again.

He unknotted the garbage bag of stuff he had taken from the office. He had to move in tiny increments lest it become obvious, to the people in the crowd all around him, that there was a living creature underneath the carter’s tarp. He felt around inside the bag and identified the miscellany of heavy electronic boxes and then found the soft and squishy leather purse.

Most of the purse’s contents were of zero to minimal usefulness. As an example, there was a condom, which he considered fitting over the muzzle of his Makarov to keep dirt out of the barrel, but there was little point in doing so now. He did, however, find a wallet with a government identity card bearing a photo that more or less matched the face of the Russian-speaking, Chinese-looking woman—the spy—he had seen in the office. And so here was a case in which a seemingly trivial aspect of the women’s fashion industry had profound consequences, at least for Sokolov. For a man would have carried the contents of this wallet on his person and would have departed with them. But women’s clothes made no allowances for such things, so it all had to go in the purse.

The photograph was on the right side of the ID card. A serial number, in Arabic numerals, ran along the bottom. The remaining space was occupied by a set of fields, each field labeled in blue and the actual data printed in black. The top field consisted of three characters, and he assumed that it must be the woman’s name. Below it were two other fields, arranged on the same line since each of them consisted of only a single character. He assumed that one of these must be gender. Below that were three fields on the same line, printed in Arabic numerals. The first of these was “1986,” the second “12,” and the third “21,” so it was obviously the woman’s date of birth. The last field was much longer and consisted of Chinese characters running across one and a half lines, with additional room below, and he assumed that this must be the woman’s address.

In his vest he carried a small notebook and a pen. He took these out and devoted a while to copying out the address. Because of his cramped position in the rattling cart, this took a long time. But he had nothing else to do at the moment.

Also in the purse was a mobile phone, which he of course checked for photographs and other data. He did not expect to find much. If the woman was a spy of any skill whatsoever, she would take the strictest precautions with a device such as this one. Indeed, the number of photos was rather small and seemed to consist mostly of snapshots of real estate. Most of the pictures depicted office buildings, and most of these were of the block where this morning’s events had taken place. But a few were of a residential building in a hilly neighborhood with a lot of trees. Interspersed with these were some shots of the interior of a vacant apartment, and the view from its windows: across the water to the downtown core of Xiamen.