Reamde

She then cleaned herself up as best she could in the lavatory and rebandaged the wound with a white headband of gauze that could almost pass for some kind of deliberately chosen fashion-forward accessory, at least until blood began to leak through it. She made good on her promise to leave the hospital and walked in her free set of flip-flops down to the waterfront, where she used her donated construction-worker money to buy a ferry ticket back to Gulangyu.

During the walk, she had undergone the transformation from Meng Anlan, career girl, back to Olivia Halifax-Lin, MI6 spy. During the brief ferry ride, the latter asked herself several times whether going back to her apartment was the right thing to do. But there was no reason to suspect that the PSB would be on to her yet. And if they were, then what could seem more suspicious than a failure to go back to her own apartment when she was so badly in need of clothes and rest? She had to get out of China, that was for certain. But lacking money and documents, she would have to summon help from her handlers. Lacking a phone or laptop, she would have to do that by going to a wangba and sending a coded message.

But she couldn’t rent a terminal at a wangba without her ID card.

She didn’t even have the keys to her own place. So after a ten-minute trudge up the steep winding ways of Gulangyu Island in those oversized flip-flops, which were making the most of every opportunity to escape from her feet, she had to track down the building manager, interrupting his dinner, and get his wife to let her into her own apartment.

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.”