Reamde - Страница 67

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.

Then John spent three days teaching Olivia all that he could about scuba diving.

Then he took her back to the airport, gave her a great big salty/sandy hug, and put her on another plane. She was sad to see the last of him but also a little bit relieved. Less than twelve hours after she’d first come aboard his boat, Olivia and John had started having sex, and hadn’t stopped until ten minutes before the stroll to the airport. This was by far the fastest time Olivia had ever gone zero to sixty with any man; she was thrilled, shocked, and embarrassed by it and understood that if she had stayed on that boat for even one more day, the whole situation would have started to go sour and maybe even blown up her career.

Flying back into Singapore with John’s handprints almost palpable on her, she followed instructions to go and dine at a particular restaurant. There she met a man named Stan, whose attempts to dress like a tourist did very little to hide the fact that he was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Stan and Olivia ate noodles together and then proceeded by taxi to Sembawang Wharves, where Olivia boarded an American destroyer in a long raincoat with the hood up while carrying a large umbrella. It wasn’t raining.

The destroyer seemed impatient for her to arrive, and cast off its lines and headed out to sea even while she was being shown to her accommodations. Somewhat to her relief, Olivia did not find herself having impulsive sex with Stan or any other members of the destroyer’s crew.

A day and a half later, under heavy clouds just before daybreak, she was transferred to a Royal Navy submarine that had been waiting for them out in the middle of nowhere. Here the accommodations were the tiniest imaginable, and she saw all sorts of circumstantial evidence that men and stuff had been hastily and grudgingly moved aside for her benefit. A waterproof pouch awaited her. It contained a cheap but reasonably presentable business suit from a Shanghai tailor who had evidently been supplied with her measurements. There was also a purse, prepacked with her Chinese identity card; her Chinese passport; a somewhat used wallet containing credit cards, money, photos, and other plausible wallet contents; half-used-up containers of the same cosmetics she used normally, mostly Shiseido stuff that could be obtained in any city in the world; and other purse junk, such as used train tickets, receipts, candy, cough drops, breath mints, tampons, dental floss, hotel give-away sewing kit, Krazy Glue, and, inevitably, a condom, expiration date three years ago, artfully timeworn so it would look like she had thrown it into her purse after a mandatory safe sex workshop and forgotten about it.

The captain of the sub handed her a sealed envelope, half an inch thick, covered with warnings as to its secrecy. She opened it up to find three items:

• A letter from her boss telling her to establish the precise whereabouts of Abdallah Jones. This document did not bother to point out, or even hint at, the terrible things that would happen to Jones soon afterward. This only made it feel heavier in her hands, as if it had been typed out onto a sheet of uranium.

• The dossier of her Chinese alter ego. Most of this she had written herself and had memorized, but they’d apparently included it in case she wanted to do some last-minute cribbing.

• An addendum explaining how the hell her alter ego had suddenly found herself in Xiamen. This she read closely, since it all came as a surprise to her.

Aboard the sub was a squad of Special Boat service men. One of them showed her a place where an extra pod had been welded onto the hull of the submarine, like a wen on a camel. This could be accessed through a system of hatches. Olivia was quite certain that it was the most expensive single object she had ever seen in her life. The pod was a tiny submarine, capable of holding up to half a dozen men. “Or five men and one woman, if it comes to that,” the SBS man said. In some ways it was a simple vessel. It was not made to be filled with air or to withstand the pressure of the ocean. The seawater filled it, and the occupants wore scuba gear. But in other respects it was loaded with what she took to be fantastically complex navigation and stealth technology.

She spent a day on the sub, mostly alone, though they did throw a nice dinner for Olivia in the officers’ mess and made several toasts to her, to her fine qualities, to her mission, to her good luck, et cetera, et cetera.