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.”
IT WAS AN hour into the boat journey. The city was far behind. They were out in the open, ranging through a territory of broadly spaced, rocky islands. Jones had devoted much of the time to discussing matters in Arabic with the one Zula had come to think of as his lieutenant: the gunman with the binoculars and the phone. At a certain point, both men had begun to shoot glances in the direction of Zula and Yuxia, and then the lieutenant had come back and stood in front of Yuxia and caught her eye, then jerked his chin forward, as if to say, Come with me. Yuxia had in no way been receptive to the proposal. Jones had approached, sizing up the situation, and had stepped between the lieutenant and Yuxia and squatted down and explained to her in the mildest possible language that he, Jones, wanted to have a private conversation with Zula, and so Yuxia needed either to move peaceably to the bows or else jump off the boat and die—which, from his point of view, would be much preferable. “If we wanted something bad to happen to you, it would have been done already.”
And so Yuxia had gone forward with the lieutenant and found a place to sit up in the boat’s prow.
“I don’t want to have to endure any more of your Nancy Drew shenanigans,” Jones began. “It makes the cost of having you around very high, and since your value is essentially zero—well—as the saying goes—do the math.”
“Essentially zero,” Zula asked, “or zero? Because—”
“Ah, I forget you are a bright girl and inclined to parse my statements closely. Very well then. Look about yourself. Consider your situation. And then cooperate with me. Cooperate by answering my questions. Later, the same questions will be asked of Yuxia. It would be best for all concerned if the answers matched.”
Then nothing for a while. He was willing to wait all day.
Zula shrugged. “Ask away.”
“Describe the leader of the Russian military squad.”
She began to describe Sokolov’s appearance. Soon Jones was nodding, tentatively at first, then more emphatically, as a way of telling her to shut up already.
“Did you see him?” Zula asked, but it was a stupid question; she could tell that he had.
Jones looked away and ignored the question.
Her next question would have been Is he still alive? but she stifled it.
Jones went on to ask any number of other questions about Sokolov. It wouldn’t be an efficient use of his energies to show so much curiosity about a dead man. So she had her answer.
This, she realized, was what Jones and his lieutenant had been talking about. Jones had related the story of this morning’s events, as he’d seen them, and at some point, a gap had become obvious: they had not seen Sokolov die, they had not observed his body.