After bidding adieu to “George Chow” in the Taipei airport, she flew to Singapore. Obsessed by the idea that everyone was looking at her funny, she monopolized a sink in the airport for a while, scrubbing away the ridiculous makeup job that Chow’s cosmetician had put on her face in the hotel room in Jincheng. She was itching to attack the haircut too, but you couldn’t have scissors in airports and she didn’t want to make that much of a spectacle of herself. The laceration on the top of her head had never been properly stitched. It tended to open up and start bleeding at odd moments and so it didn’t seem advisable to be getting hands-on up there. Maybe MI6 would have people in London who were good at this sort of thing—combat beauticians, trauma stylists. It seemed likely that her MI6 superiors were making hysterical efforts to get in touch with her and pump her for information during this layover, but she didn’t have any way of communicating with them that she was willing to trust. And even if someone walked up to her in person, right here in the ladies’, someone she recognized as working for the agency, she wasn’t sure how much she’d be willing to divulge. Someone had set an ambush for Sokolov out there in the mist off Kinmen, and she didn’t know who. Best case was that it had just been Chinese intelligence or local gangsters. Worst case was that MI6 actually wanted him dead. Between those two extremes, perhaps MI6 had been penetrated and Chinese intelligence had access to its secrets. In any case, she didn’t feel like spilling any more information about Sokolov until she got back to London and learned more.
Then the nonstop to London. She spent the first bit of it getting drunk and the rest of it sleeping.
The plane landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 at something like six in the morning. Since her immigration status had become impossible to make sense of, she was met, at the top of the jetway, by a man in a uniform and a man in a suit. She had always read of people being “whisked through” certain formalities, but this was the first time she had ever been personally whisked and she had to admit that it had its charms. Particularly when you were hungover and bleeding. In order to get from Terminal 5’s gates to Immigration and Customs, it was necessary to descend a prodigious stack of escalators, beginning well above ground level and terminating deep below. There was a place, about halfway along, where an escalator deposited the newly arrived passengers on a landing that happened to coincide with street level; as you executed a U-turn to get on the next, you could look out through glass doors and walls at a road with cars and trucks streaming along it. Uniformed personnel were forever stationed before those glass doors to make sure that everyone coming down those escalators kept going down into the levels where they were to be processed.
Everyone, that is, except for those lucky few who were being whisked. Olivia was ready to make the U-turn and descend along with everyone else, but her escorts got off that escalator and just kept walking in a straight line. And since Olivia was sandwiched between them, she did the same, expecting that, at any moment, one of the security guards stationed before the doors would wrestle her to the ground and begin blowing on a whistle. Instead of which, a door was opened for her, an alarm was stifled by a series of digits punched into a keypad, and suddenly she was out of doors climbing into a black Land Rover. They were out on the M4 before the stale air of the jumbo jet had even dissipated from her clothes and hair.
Into a London doctor’s office, some sort of exceedingly private and specialized practice, a basic tenet of which was never to evince surprise or skepticism. Where had she come from? South China. Health generally good? Until quite recently. What had happened recently? Hurled against a wall by a blast wave, showered with broken glass, half buried in debris, ran through a damaged building barefoot, makeshift bandages, fled from gunmen, swam in the polluted waters of the Nine Dragons estuary, crawled through minefield, slept on a pile of vines. The doctor just nodded absentmindedly, as if she were complaining of vaginal itching, and then ran her through a scanner the size of a nuclear submarine. That accomplished, he prodded her all over, put his fingers every place he could think of, squeezed bones and organs she didn’t know were externally accessible, peered into orifices with Dr. Seuss–like equipment, asked her probing questions intended to judge her cognitive status. Or other kinds of status. Had sex recently? Oh yes. Any chance of being pregnant? No. He lidocained the thing on the top of her head and put in a couple of stitches and did things that produced a scent of burning hair. Then he turned her over to an “injectionist,” who plied her trade on Olivia’s deltoids, forearms, buttocks, and thighs with unseemly diligence, pulling many wee tubes of blood out of her and replacing the lost fluids with vast, neon-colored inoculations. It was made clear to her that the large muscles in question would hurt later and that she would have to come back for more. All this attention paid to her health made her happy at first, until on further reflection she understood that they were getting ready to work her to death and they didn’t want her gumming things up by complaining of vague pains or chills. What, you say your ribs are hurting? That’s funny, we didn’t see anything on the scan.
Notes were jotted and verbal representations made to the effect that she should see certain specialized doctors and therapists at some vague time in the future. A follow-up was scheduled.
Then, off to MI6 for a surprisingly civil brunch and preliminary round of drinking with persons of gratifyingly high rank. Then the windowless conference room she had been anticipating and dreading. Her primary debriefer was none other than “Meng Binrong,” the Englishman who had been telephonically playing the role of her uncle during her time in Xiamen. He was blond-going-white, blue-eyed, with the classic florid English drinker’s complexion, energetic, mistakable for a man in his fifties or even late forties. But certain giveaways—the fact that he found it necessary to mow his eyebrows, the sheer number of burst capillaries—suggested he was older than that. Not eager to volunteer details about himself, but it was obvious from the sorts of things he knew—and didn’t know—and from the way he spoke Cantonese and Mandarin (the former with perfect fluency, the latter a bit choppily), that he had spent his young life in Hong Kong. To Olivia he had always been a gruff voice on the phone, her uncle and boss, her one connection to what was for her the real world. But never more than a play-actor. From certain things he now said and certain assumptions he made, it now became clear to Olivia that this man—who never quite got around to stating his name—had been responsible for running the operation.
Where did that put him, she had to wonder? Was the operation considered a success or a failure? Or was it naive to think that MI6 would even bother assigning such facile designations to undertakings of such complexity? Supposedly they had garnered loads of intelligence from tapping Jones’s communications. No one could complain about that. The fact that he’d gotten away was unfortunate. But how could they possibly have anticipated—
“What the fuck happened?” asked Uncle Meng, careful to say it in measured and melodious tones.