The idea of Olivia as an MI6 agent had seemed comical at first, and yet she had to admit that it appealed to the same part of her personality that enjoyed acting in amateur theatrical productions—which, aside from sporadic and desultory participation in field hockey and kung fu, was her main extracurricular activity.
She had performed sixteen speaking roles in a dozen different productions. The numbers looked funny because she tended to get cast in roles so small that, with a change of costume, she could easily do more than one in the same play. With time and experience she had graduated to sidekick and girlfriend roles in small productions around Oxford. Beyond that, she had no ambitions in the theatrical world. But she had come to understand that the decisions of casting directors reflected the way that people in general, and men in particular, looked at her. New men who swam into her environment ignored her at first. Some then began to gaze curiously at her. Then they either went back to ignoring her or else found some way of letting her know that they thought she was beautiful; that this was by no means obvious; and that they deserved some reward or appreciation for having been so ingenious as to notice it. Different directors had awarded her greater or lesser roles depending on where they fell in the continuum of Olivia-face-appreciation, but starring roles had eluded her for the reason mentioned.
But in the deep cover agent game, bit players, girlfriends, and sidekicks were precisely what was wanted. No James Bond types need apply.
There were about half a dozen photographs in the world—mostly candid shots taken on phones—that made Olivia look really beautiful. And she had learned that she could make people look for, and eventually see, that beauty by looking as if she expected it. But she could just as well make them fail to see it by looking otherwise. She thought it might be a good skill for a spy.
AFTER SIX MONTHS in Vancouver, she had suddenly been overcome by a craving for winter melon soup that resulted in a spontaneous trip to Chinatown. Not the old one downtown, but the new one out in the suburbs. A haggling session with a greengrocer had led to Olivia’s taking possession of a winter melon as long as her arm. As they had finished the transaction, the grocer had made a bit of small talk with Olivia, asking her how long she had been in Canada. “Six months,” Olivia had told him, and he had then politely inquired which part of China she had come over from. And rather than try to explain everything about her parents, she had just said, “Beijing.” He had accepted that with no trace of skepticism, and nearby onlookers had joined in the conversation, accepting her as a pure Chinese woman from China.
During her second year, then, she had moved to an apartment building in a mostly Chinese neighborhood and had passed, with very little difficulty, as a graduate student from Beijing. The closest she ever came to being outed was when someone made a comment—a flattering one, she hoped—about her unusual looks. But then, Yao Ming probably got a lot of comments about his unusual height. No one doubted Yao Ming was Chinese.
After a while she had been invited to tea (the English kind) by a woman based at the British consulate in Vancouver, who again in a very genteel and deniable way wanted to know how it was all going and whether a Ph.D. from St. Antony’s were still in her future, or might she consider taking a bit of time off first and gaining some experience in the world of work? Olivia had not ruled it out, and after that, the teas had become a regular thing and had led to luncheon interviews in nice London restaurants when she went home for the holidays.
She had begun not doing certain things that, had she done them, would have made it impossible for her to work for MI6 in the future. She had not put up a Facebook page. She had not posted photos of herself on Flickr. She had not visited China, meaning that the government of that country had no photos of her, no record of her existence. She had not done these things for the simple reason that the MI6 plants who kept popping up in her path kept asking her whether she had ever done them. And when she said no, the news was always greeted with impressed eyebrow raising.
And so to London and MI6, where she had toiled as an analyst for two years, developing her cover identity and writing reports on miscellaneous topics. One of which had been the Welsh terrorist Abdallah Jones, who was of particular interest to Olivia because he had once blown up Olivia’s great-aunt’s bridge partner on a bus in Cardiff.