REAMDE

He was (as she learned) of West Indian ancestry, that is, the descendant of slaves brought to the Caribbean to work on sugar cane plantations. He had grown up in a Cardiff slum where he had acquired an addiction to heroin. He had kicked that addiction with the assistance of a local mullah who had converted him to Islam. Chemically unshackled, he had taken an undergraduate degree in earth sciences at Aberystwyth and followed that up with graduate instruction at the Colorado School of Mines, where he seemed to have learned a hell of a lot about explosives. Returning to Wales, he had fallen in with a radical cell of Islamists and cut his teeth blowing up buses in Wales and the Midlands before migrating to London and graduating to tube stations. When those activities had rendered him the object of intense police curiosity, he had moved to Northern Africa, then Somalia, then Pakistan (the site of his largest single exploit, killing 111 people in a hotel blast), then Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Manila, Taiwan, and now—strange to relate—Xiamen. All those steps had made perfect sense except for the last two.

 

To say, as people frequently did, that Abdallah Jones was to MI6 what Osama bin Laden had been to the CIA was to miss a few important points, as far as Olivia was concerned. It was true that Jones was MI6’s highest-priority target. So to that point, the comparison served. Beyond that, as Olivia took every opportunity to point out, comparing Jones to bin Laden was dangerous in that it minimized the danger posed by Jones. Bin Laden’s best days had been over on September 12. One of the most famous men in history, he’d spent the rest of his life huddled in various hiding places, watching himself on TV. Jones, on the other hand, was little known outside of the United Kingdom, and even though he had blown up 163 people in eight separate incidents before his thirtieth birthday, there was little doubt that he would kill many more than that in the future.

 

Since he was out of the United Kingdom, and unlikely to return, he’d have to be caught in some other country.

 

Awkward, that.

 

Fortunately there was this thing MI6, an entity whose purpose was to operate in places that did not happen to belong to the United Kingdom. And so when Olivia’s bosses there asked her to write reports about Abdallah Jones, it was not simply because they wanted to fatten his already huge dossier. It was because they wanted to work out some way of catching him or killing him.

 

Olivia had assumed it was all academic, at least to her. Her languages were English, Mandarin, (less so) Russian, and (even less so) Welsh. This made it unlikely for her to get an undercover posting in the places where Abdallah Jones tended to hang out. So all her flawlessly gardened memos and PowerPoint presentations about what a bad actor Jones was and how important it was to go after him had seemed free of any taint of self-interest; MI6 could throw its entire annual budget after Jones and it wouldn’t bring Olivia Halifax-Lin any more budget authority or any chance at operational glory.

 

After a shoot-out in Mindanao that had left several American and Filipino special forces troops dead, Jones had moved to Manila for a couple of months and then breezed out of town hours before a police raid, leaving behind a fully operational bomb factory that he had thoughtfully booby-trapped. Circumstantial evidence suggested that he must have gotten passage to Taiwan on a fishing vessel. The Chinese-speaking world was not a normal locus of Islamic terror, and so why he had gone to Taiwan, and what he had done there, could only be guessed at.

 

After six months of lying very low, he had made the jump across the straits to Xiamen, of all places.

 

Vague as it might have sounded, this was incredibly precise and specific intelligence that hinted at the existence of extraordinary sources and methods. Though Olivia had not been told this explicitly, it was easy enough to guess that MI6 must have an informant in Pakistan who was privy to messages being passed between Jones and his al-Qaeda contacts.

 

She did know this much for certain: through that channel, MI6 had obtained the name of a city (Xiamen) and a couple of mobile numbers. Radio frequency devices had been used to scan for the digital signature of those mobile phones and slowly zero in on the place where they were being used. Much of this had been done in collaboration with American three-letter agencies, through pure signals intelligence technology: satellites, listening posts on the nearby Taiwanese island of Kinmen, and remote-control devices dropped in Xiamen by contract operatives who, of course, had no idea what they were doing or who they were working for.

 

That whole phase of the operation had been based on the premise, first put forth by Olivia, that Jones had to be sitting in one place most of the time. A tall black man simply couldn’t move around in a Chinese city without attracting a huge amount of attention. He must have a safe house somewhere and he must spend virtually all his time in it, communicating via phone. All of which was perfectly obvious to anyone who’d ever been in China, or even in Chinatown, but it had apparently come as a useful insight to some people in MI6 who had assumed that, because Xiamen was a big international port city, Abdallah Jones could wander about in the same way he might have done in Paris or Berlin.

 

Through these technical means, anyway, the signals intelligence geeks had narrowed Jones’s location down to roughly one square kilometer before Jones had had the good sense to throw away his phones and swap them out for new ones.

 

The day after those phones had gone dark, Olivia had been put on a plane to Singapore.

 

No particular orders awaited her there, and so she just wandered around Chinatown for a few days, reassuring herself that she really could pass for Chinese.

 

Then, in the abrupt and enigmatic style she was beginning to get used to, she was flown to Sydney, and from there to an airport on some place called Hamilton Island, where she was met by John, a sunburned Brit, formerly of the Royal Marines’ Special Boat service, now working, or pretending to work, as a recreational scuba diving instructor. From the airport, John and Olivia walked (the first time in her life she had ever departed from an airport as a pedestrian) to an anchorage only a few hundred meters away, where a diving boat awaited. Olivia made herself at home in a cabin while John motored to a smaller island a few kilometers away.

 

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