Neal Stephenson - Reamde

She then began to ask herself whether she really wanted to find George Chow.

The most paranoid explanation she could think of for the last half-hour’s events was that Chow was not an MI6 agent at all, but a Chinese agent (or what would amount to the same thing, a double agent) who had bamboozled Olivia into believing that he’d help get her and Sokolov to safety. Instead of which he had sent Sokolov directly into a trap.

The more she thought about it, though, the less she favored this theory. She guessed that Chow was a legit MI6 man but that one of two things must be the case:

1. He had been followed or ratted out during his earlier movements around Jincheng, and some of the Chinese agents who had come over on the ferry this morning had been waiting for Sokolov on the boat.

2. MI6 actually wanted Sokolov dead and had hired some local talent to make it happen.

The latter also seemed a bit paranoid. But there was no doubt that Sokolov was, for MI6, a highly inconvenient and dangerous loose end. Moreover, Olivia could envision a situation in which the Chinese government would get in touch with the British government through some deep, dark channels and say, “We are hysterically pissed off about what went down in Xiamen yesterday and we want to see heads start rolling now; otherwise, we will make things quite difficult for you.” In other words, MI6 might have made a deal to get rid of Sokolov in exchange for maintaining the status quo ante with their Chinese counterparts.

Raising the question, Was Olivia too a loose end who needed to be disposed of as part of the same deal?

She guessed not, for the simple reason that, immediately before Sokolov had kissed her good-bye, he had supplied her with information that MI6 wanted as to how Abdallah Jones might be tracked down.

“DID YOU GET it?” was the first thing George Chow said to her as she approached the car. The directness of this question, so much at odds with Chow’s usual Cambridge/Oxford diffidence, did nothing to ease her suspicions.

She had paused at the water’s edge, out of his sight, to get her underwear on and her dress down where it was supposed to be. So the absolute best that could be said of her appearance was that her fanny wasn’t showing. But Chow, who had been standing there the entire time keeping an eye on her purse and her shoes, tactfully avoided looking directly at her.

“I have all the information he has,” she said. “Or perhaps the correct form of the word is had .”

Chow gawped at her, nonplussed.

She turned her head back out toward the sea, trying to judge whether he was just playing stupid. Was it possible that he could have failed to hear the gunfire? Sound traveled in funny ways on days, and in places, like this. For all she knew, he might have sat down inside the taxi and closed the doors and rolled up the windows just to stay out of the rain, in which case it was completely plausible that he might have failed to hear what she had heard.

In any case, she was not going to give him anything useful until she was in a safe place—preferably London. “Can we please get under way?” she asked, lunging for the door handle of the taxi before Chow could open it for her. “Loitering here seems not a good idea.”

He climbed in next to her and gazed at her curiously as the taxi pulled a U-turn onto the road and headed for the airport. She stared resolutely out the windscreen for a few minutes, then, finally, turned to look him directly in the face. “Do you have anything to tell me?” she demanded.

“You’re going to have to help me out,” he said.

“If you’re working for the PRC, put a bullet in me now,” she said. “Otherwise please try to get a fucking clue because or else you’re worse than fucking useless.”

“Olivia!” he exclaimed, in an offended-professor tone. “To the best of my knowledge, all has gone exactly according to plan. If you have better information, I should be obliged—”

“Of that I have no doubt,” she said. “What I don’t know is what the bloody fuck was the plan !?”

This silenced him until they reached the airport—which, given the size of the island, wasn’t long. Then it was all ticket counters and security checkpoints and boarding lounges for a while. He tried to beguile her into a remote corner where they could talk, but she could see no advantage in telling him anything until they were farther from China.

They took the next flight to Taipei.

There, George Chow pursued her to the departure lounge for her next flight, which was bound for Singapore. From there she was scheduled to fly nonstop to London.

It seemed that he had received an update on his phone. She hoped to God that they were using some kind of bulletproof encryption.

“Mr. Y,” he announced, “never turned up.”

“Never turned up where?”

“On the containership to Long Beach.”

“How fucking stupid would he have to be to actually board that ship considering…”

“Which is a good thing,” Chow added, “since it was overhauled and boarded by the Chinese navy on its way out of port.”

“So the whole operation was blown,” she said.

“Yes,” Chow said, “a fact you appear to have been aware of from the very beginning.”

Shit. He was trying to put this on her now.

“You’re seriously trying to tell me you didn’t hear that fucking Wild West shootout down there at the beach.”

“I heard nothing,” he said. “But if you heard something, you should have informed me so that we could…”

“Make sure you finished the job properly?”

“ What!? ”

“Or give the poor bastard even more of your professional assistance?”

Silence.

“He’s better off making shift for himself,” she said, “assuming he’s still alive. Which, come to think of it, seems like a rather bad assumption.”

George Chow had gotten a bit hot under the collar.

Not that Olivia could throw stones.

“I hadn’t realized until now,” he said, “to what degree this had become a personal matter for you.”

She thought about it for half a minute or so, and then said, calmly: “I just wish we had done a better job.”

“It is a common thing to wish,” Chow said, “in our line of work. Welcome to the profession.”

“My flight is boarding.”

“Bon voyage,” he said. “Hoist a pint for me, will you?”

“I’ll probably hoist a few.”

ZULA AWAKENED TO find herself hog-tied with what she guessed were torn strips of bedsheets. A pillowcase had been placed over her head and secured in place with a snug but not tight ligature. Cold pink brightness shone through it. By squirming around and pressing her face against things she confirmed that this was shining in through the jet’s windows.

The light began to fluctuate, shuttering on and off. The engines were straining up and down. Something thudded into the bottom of the plane, or vice versa, and they bounced, then sank and thudded again, and proceeded to make the roughest landing that Zula had ever experienced. As they thumped and rumbled to a stop, its noise, and the declining scream of the engines, was drowned out by cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and then a lot of thumping, as if some sort of scuffle were taking place forward.

Someone came in. Jones. She had learned his smell and the way of his movement. He cut through the bindings that joined her ankles to her wrists. Then he grabbed her by the feet and dragged her to the edge of the bed, then pulled her to a sitting position. He untied the thing around her throat and whipped off the pillowcase. She blinked and shook her head, puffed air out of the side of her mouth to blow a loose lock of hair away from her eye. He could have helped her but chose instead to watch in amusement.