Reamde

When they took pity on her and sent her “home,” she went to a safe house in London: a perfectly anonymous Georgian town house that had been taken over and bent to this purpose. During the very limited amount of time that she was not working or sleeping, she found herself with nothing to do. She could not resume being Olivia Halifax-Lin just yet, could not begin facebooking or whatever it was people did now. She found a hairdresser who catered to Asians and got that business taken care of, ending up with something pageboyish, straight out of a porn film, that she never would have taken a risk on had circumstances not forced her hand. She rubbed her sore, immunized muscles. Warned to expect foreign travel, she bought clothes: enough lightweight, quick-drying synthetic garments to fill a carry-on bag and a blazer that she could throw on when she wanted to make a symbolic nod in the direction of greater formality. A new passport showed up, which made her wonder just now MI6 did these things: Did they have a passport factory of their very own? Or just a special room at the Central British Passport Factory where they could nip in and bang out a few as the occasion demanded?

There was another session with the injectionist, perhaps a bit ahead of the normal schedule, and she was given antimalaria pills and a stern talking to about why mosquito repellent was such a good thing. Uncle Meng picked her up in what appeared to be his personal car and took her out to Heathrow, though they stopped halfway there for a cup of coffee and a scone.

“You are bound for Manila,” he said, “by way of Dubai.”

“I presume Manila is not my final destination?”

“It is as far as commercial airlines are concerned,” he said. “When you are there, you’ll have one night in a hotel to pull yourself together and then you’ll find yourself in the company of one Seamus Costello, Captain, U.S. Army, retired.”

“So he is, what, just a gentleman of leisure now?”

Uncle Meng did not wish to dignify her witticism with a direct response.

“Mostly,” Olivia said, “I would just like to know whether he’s working for some other branch of the government or a private security contractor.”

“Oh no, we wouldn’t set you up with a mercenary,” said Uncle Meng, a bit pained.

“Right then, so he was a snake eater. They decided he had talents beyond his station in life. They kicked him upstairs.”

“The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex,” was all that Uncle Meng would say. “It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.”

“He must have other duties.”

“Oh yes. He spends most of his time on Mindanao, looking after the Abu Sayyaf crowd.”

Here, as Olivia knew perfectly well, Uncle Meng was referring to Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines who had hosted and succored Abdallah Jones for several months. U.S. special operations forces, operating hand in hand with their Filipino counterparts, had launched a raid against a jungle encampment where Jones had been positively sighted. They had found the place abandoned but extensively booby-trapped. Two Americans and four Filipinos had lost their lives. Weeks later, Jones had been traced to Manila, where he had set up a bomb factory in an apartment building and created explosive devices that had been used in a precisely timed series of car bombings. From there his trail had consisted of nothing but hints and rumors until Olivia had found him in Xiamen.

“Costello has been after Jones for a long time,” Olivia guessed. “He takes pride in his work, or used to. Jones got the better of him more than once. Killed members of his team in sneaky and cowardly ways. Blew up civilians on his watch. Then left the country—went where Costello couldn’t get to him. Leaving Costello stuck in a backwater.”

“He is just your type,” Uncle Meng said gently. “Please do try not to fuck him.”

“How come it’s okay for James Bond?”

THE FLIGHT TO Dubai was all rich Arabs and City types. The Dubai-to-Manila leg was almost entirely Filipina domestic servants headed for home. The racial and cultural crossrip was far too heavy for Olivia to get thinking about, so she watched movies and played Tetris, finally falling asleep thirty minutes before they began their descent into Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It was late afternoon. Four days had now passed since she and Sokolov had parted ways at Kinmen. A car picked her up and took her to a business hotel in Makati where she ate room service steak, cleaned up, took her malaria pills, and went to bed.