REAMDE

Marlon had remained frozen through all of this, not wanting to draw notice by making any sudden movements, but now he let himself down so hastily that he lost his grip and found himself briefly dangling by one hand before he was able to regain his grip and plant his feet again.

 

Coming in view of the first-story window, he saw the first man, the big white fellow, standing with his back to Marlon, confronting another white man who had apparently been coming up the stairs from the basement. This second man was young, slender, with longish hair and a heavy beard-shadow. His facial features were difficult to make out, but it was obvious from his body language that he was in a state of terror so advanced that he had become physically unstrung. He was leaning back against the wall of the stairwell as if getting that extra inch of distance from the big man would somehow improve his situation. He had turned his head down and to one side and was holding his hands up in front of him.

 

The big man was shouting at him in English. Marlon couldn’t make out a word he was saying. This was partly because of the window and the ambient noise (though the gun battle seemed to be over) but also, as he came to realize, because the big man had a heavy accent of some type.

 

And also because the big man was completely out of his mind with rage. A rage that only seemed to grow the more he bellowed and gesticulated.

 

The big man was talking himself into something.

 

He was talking himself into doing something dreadful to the younger man.

 

Marlon noticed, now, that a pistol had appeared in the big man’s hand.

 

When he was ready, the big man aimed his gun directly at the young man, who tried to hide behind the white palms of his hands. There were three enormous booms. The big man made some contemptuous remark and then walked past the younger man, who was still collapsing to the floor, and proceeded down the next flight of stairs.

 

After a few moments the black man stalked after him.

 

IT HAD BEEN with mixed feelings that Olivia Halifax-Lin had learned that Abdallah Jones had absconded from Mindanao and turned up in Xiamen. For Olivia had just devoted the better part of a year, and MI6 had spent half a million quid, on setting her up with a false Chinese identity so that she could work under deep cover within the borders of the Middle Kingdom. And she really hated Abdallah Jones a lot. But hunting Islamic bombers was not supposed to be her job.

 

As any Halifax-Lin family photograph would demonstrate, one could never predict the outcome of what used to be called miscegenation. Olivia had two siblings. Her older brother looked Welsh to Welsh people, but on a trip to Portugal he’d been mistaken for Portuguese, and when he went to Germany, Turks came up to him on the street and greeted him in Turkish. Their younger sister had classic mixed-race looks. Olivia, on the other hand, could walk down any street in China without drawing undue notice. In a small town, she would likely be pegged as waidiren, but in a big city she would never be identified as waiguoren.

 

Their father was an economist, born and raised in Beijing but relocated to Hong Kong in his late teens and eventually to an academic post in London, where he had married Olivia’s mother, a speech therapist. They had grown up speaking English and Mandarin interchangeably. Olivia had read East Asian history at Oxford. It was considered good form to pick up at least one language you didn’t already know, and so she had taken a couple of years of Russian.

 

Preferring to hang with a more international crowd, she had spent a lot of time in the student bar at St. Antony’s College, and it was there that she had first been approached by a member of the faculty who suggested in a deniable and genteel—almost subliminal—way that (ahem) MI6 knew of her existence. While flattered, she had deflected the overture—supposing that’s what it was—by mentioning that she had plans to pursue a master’s degree in international relations at the University of British Columbia, with an eye toward coming back to St. Antony’s to pursue a Ph.D.

 

The professor, by this point, had bought her a drink. After allowing a few minutes to pass, he had made a whimsical suggestion. The Chinese community in Vancouver was huge: a city within a city, populous enough that the appearance of an unfamiliar Chinese-looking and-acting person in a store or an apartment building would not arouse any particular notice. Olivia’s memory of the conversation was a bit hazy—she was a lousy drinker—but she was pretty sure he had used the term “spy Disneyland.” And when she had asked for an explanation, he had pointed out that a girl like Olivia could go to a place like Vancouver’s Chinatown and try to pass as Chinese and see if anyone detected the subterfuge. It would give her a feeling for what would be entailed in working as a deep cover agent in China, but it would be as safe, and as fake, as Disneyland.

 

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