Neal Stephenson - Reamde

The big man was shouting at him in English. Marlon couldn’t make out a word he was saying. This was partly because of the window and the ambient noise (though the gun battle seemed to be over) but also, as he came to realize, because the big man had a heavy accent of some type.

And also because the big man was completely out of his mind with rage. A rage that only seemed to grow the more he bellowed and gesticulated.

The big man was talking himself into something.

He was talking himself into doing something dreadful to the younger man.

Marlon noticed, now, that a pistol had appeared in the big man’s hand.

When he was ready, the big man aimed his gun directly at the young man, who tried to hide behind the white palms of his hands. There were three enormous booms. The big man made some contemptuous remark and then walked past the younger man, who was still collapsing to the floor, and proceeded down the next flight of stairs.

After a few moments the black man stalked after him.

IT HAD BEEN with mixed feelings that Olivia Halifax-Lin had learned that Abdallah Jones had absconded from Mindanao and turned up in Xiamen. For Olivia had just devoted the better part of a year, and MI6 had spent half a million quid, on setting her up with a false Chinese identity so that she could work under deep cover within the borders of the Middle Kingdom. And she really hated Abdallah Jones a lot. But hunting Islamic bombers was not supposed to be her job.

As any Halifax-Lin family photograph would demonstrate, one could never predict the outcome of what used to be called miscegenation. Olivia had two siblings. Her older brother looked Welsh to Welsh ­people, but on a trip to Portugal he’d been mistaken for Portuguese, and when he went to Germany, Turks came up to him on the street and greeted him in Turkish. Their younger sister had classic mixed-race looks. Olivia, on the other hand, could walk down any street in China without drawing undue notice. In a small town, she would likely be pegged as waidiren, but in a big city she would never be identified as waiguoren .

Their father was an economist, born and raised in Beijing but relocated to Hong Kong in his late teens and eventually to an academic post in London, where he had married Olivia’s mother, a speech therapist. They had grown up speaking English and Mandarin interchangeably. Olivia had read East Asian history at Oxford. It was considered good form to pick up at least one language you didn’t already know, and so she had taken a couple of years of Russian.

Preferring to hang with a more international crowd, she had spent a lot of time in the student bar at St. Antony’s College, and it was there that she had first been approached by a member of the faculty who suggested in a deniable and genteel—almost subliminal—way that (ahem) MI6 knew of her existence. While flattered, she had deflected the overture—supposing that’s what it was—by mentioning that she had plans to pursue a master’s degree in international relations at the University of British Columbia, with an eye toward coming back to St. Antony’s to pursue a Ph.D.

The professor, by this point, had bought her a drink. After allowing a few minutes to pass, he had made a whimsical suggestion. The Chinese community in Vancouver was huge: a city within a city, populous enough that the appearance of an unfamiliar Chinese-looking and-acting person in a store or an apartment building would not arouse any particular notice. Olivia’s memory of the conversation was a bit hazy—she was a lousy drinker—but she was pretty sure he had used the term “spy Disneyland.” And when she had asked for an explanation, he had pointed out that a girl like Olivia could go to a place like Vancouver’s Chinatown and try to pass as Chinese and see if anyone detected the subterfuge. It would give her a feeling for what would be entailed in working as a deep cover agent in China, but it would be as safe, and as fake, as Disneyland.

The idea of Olivia as an MI6 agent had seemed comical at first, and yet she had to admit that it appealed to the same part of her personality that enjoyed acting in amateur theatrical productions—which, aside from sporadic and desultory participation in field hockey and kung fu, was her main extracurricular activity.

She had performed sixteen speaking roles in a dozen different productions. The numbers looked funny because she tended to get cast in roles so small that, with a change of costume, she could easily do more than one in the same play. With time and experience she had graduated to sidekick and girlfriend roles in small productions around Oxford. Beyond that, she had no ambitions in the theatrical world. But she had come to understand that the decisions of casting directors reflected the way that people in general, and men in particular, looked at her. New men who swam into her environment ignored her at first. Some then began to gaze curiously at her. Then they either went back to ignoring her or else found some way of letting her know that they thought she was beautiful; that this was by no means obvious; and that they deserved some reward or appreciation for having been so ingenious as to notice it. Different directors had awarded her greater or lesser roles depending on where they fell in the continuum of Olivia-face-appreciation, but starring roles had eluded her for the reason mentioned.

But in the deep cover agent game, bit players, girlfriends, and sidekicks were precisely what was wanted. No James Bond types need apply.

There were about half a dozen photographs in the world—mostly candid shots taken on phones—that made Olivia look really beautiful. And she had learned that she could make people look for, and eventually see, that beauty by looking as if she expected it. But she could just as well make them fail to see it by looking otherwise. She thought it might be a good skill for a spy.

AFTER SIX MONTHS in Vancouver, she had suddenly been overcome by a craving for winter melon soup that resulted in a spontaneous trip to Chinatown. Not the old one downtown, but the new one out in the suburbs. A haggling session with a greengrocer had led to Olivia’s taking possession of a winter melon as long as her arm. As they had finished the transaction, the grocer had made a bit of small talk with Olivia, asking her how long she had been in Canada. “Six months,” Olivia had told him, and he had then politely inquired which part of China she had come over from. And rather than try to explain everything about her parents, she had just said, “Beijing.” He had accepted that with no trace of skepticism, and nearby onlookers had joined in the conversation, accepting her as a pure Chinese woman from China.

During her second year, then, she had moved to an apartment building in a mostly Chinese neighborhood and had passed, with very little difficulty, as a graduate student from Beijing. The closest she ever came to being outed was when someone made a comment—a flattering one, she hoped—about her unusual looks. But then, Yao Ming probably got a lot of comments about his unusual height. No one doubted Yao Ming was Chinese.

After a while she had been invited to tea (the English kind) by a woman based at the British consulate in Vancouver, who again in a very genteel and deniable way wanted to know how it was all going and whether a Ph.D. from St. Antony’s were still in her future, or might she consider taking a bit of time off first and gaining some experience in the world of work? Olivia had not ruled it out, and after that, the teas had become a regular thing and had led to luncheon interviews in nice London restaurants when she went home for the holidays.

She had begun not doing certain things that, had she done them, would have made it impossible for her to work for MI6 in the future. She had not put up a Facebook page. She had not posted photos of herself on Flickr. She had not visited China, meaning that the government of that country had no photos of her, no record of her existence. She had not done these things for the simple reason that the MI6 plants who kept popping up in her path kept asking her whether she had ever done them. And when she said no, the news was always greeted with impressed eyebrow raising.