Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Or at least they didn’t do it openly . There were any number of firms that, for all practical purposes, were controlled by women; but they were always fronted by men. So the plausibility of Olivia’s cover story was founded on her fictitious uncle Binrong in Guangzhou, who was (according to the story) the real boss. Meng Anlan was just running errands for him, acting as a sort of personal assistant. All decisions of significance had to be referred to Binrong.

This was a bit more complication than was really desirable in a spy’s cover story. But there simply weren’t that many plausible excuses for a young woman in China to be out on her own, far away from home and family. There were millions of them doing low-level factory jobs and living in company dorms, but there was little point in MI6 sneaking her into China so that she could adopt that lifestyle. She was only useful as an agent if she had the money and the freedom to move around. They had even considered making Olivia into a high-priced call girl or a kept woman. This needn’t have involved actually having sex with anyone; the clients could have been imaginary. They had settled on the industrial-liaison story because it would give her excuses to do things like travel around the region, make contacts with people in industry, and lease office space.

They had used various forms of electronic misdirection to set up Guangzhou telephone and fax numbers that would ring through to a subterranean room at MI6 headquarters where a small Chinese-British staff was available: a woman playing the role of receptionist and a blond, blue-eyed Englishman, fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin, playing the role of Meng Binrong. So the story would hold up as long as the people she talked to in Xiamen went no further than contacting her uncle by phone, fax, or email. But if anyone got curious enough to visit the offices of Xinyou Quality Control in Guangzhou, they’d find nothing, and the whole story would unravel. And there were any number of other ways in which Meng Anlan’s identify could be picked apart. When that happened, the best possible outcome would be that she’d have to leave, never to come back, never to work in this kind of role again. Other possible outcomes included serving a long prison term or being executed.

She was being spent. There was no other way to put it. Her combination of looks, background, and command of language made her a one-of-a-kind asset. Someone at MI6 must, at one time, have had high hopes for her—must have planned to use her for something big and important. Her identity had been created, at enormous expense and trouble, to serve that purpose, whatever it might have been. But that original purpose had been forgotten when Abdallah Jones had moved to Xiamen and thrown away his mobile. Someone had made the decision that Olivia must be redeployed and put on the job of finding this one man.

She found a nice Western-style apartment on Gulangyu Island, just across a narrow strait from downtown Xiamen, and got it furnished and decorated in a style that was consistent with her cover story. She began taking the ferry into downtown every day and “looking for office space.” But the search for office space was really a block-by-block reconnaissance of the square kilometer where Abdallah Jones was believed to have his safe house.

She went through several huge emotional swings in her assessment of the level of difficulty. A thousand meters simply wasn’t that great a distance. Ten football pitches. And so, viewed from a comfortable remove, the job hadn’t seemed that difficult. During her first couple of weeks of wearing out shoe leather in downtown Xiamen, though, she became inordinately depressed about her chances of making any headway. The population of the square kilometer in question was probably between twenty and thirty thousand. The number of buildings ran to several hundred. She felt overwhelmed, wandering around all day getting lost in the district’s tortuous, crowded streets and then lying half awake all night in her Gulangyu apartment, retracing the steps she’d taken during the day and having hallucinatory dreams about all that she’d seen.

The apartment, at least, was nice. Gulangyu Island was small, steep, green, largely vehicle-free, and covered with sinuous, narrow roads that switchbacked through its little enclaves. A finer mesh of alleys and stone staircases webbed its parks and courtyards together. It was where Westerners had built their villas and their consulates in the post–Opium War period, when Xiamen had been known by its Fujianese name of Amoy. Though that era had long passed, the buildings remained.

Just barely. To look around Gulangyu Island was to be reminded that Fujian had been a tropical jungle and wanted, in the worst way, to be a tropical jungle again. If humans ever walked away from it, or stopped fighting it back with pruning shears and bucksaws, the creepers and lianas, the root systems, runners, spores, and seed pods would, in the space of a few years, overrun everything they had ever built. She did not know the detailed history of the place, but it was obvious that something like this must have happened to Gulangyu during the time of Mao, and that post-Mao real estate developers had gotten to the island just in the nick of time. From place to place you could still see an old Western-style building that was being torn to pieces in slow motion by foliage, rendering it so structurally unsound that only rats and wood-munching bugs could live there. But quite a few of the old buildings had been rescued—Olivia imagined a D-day-style invasion of the island, gardeners with saws and shovels parachuting out of the sky and storming the beaches—and were being liberated from the thorny or flowery embrace of climbing vines, deratted, reroofed, fixed up, and condoized. Her apartment was small but nicely located on the top floor of what had once been a French merchant’s villa and now served as home to a couple dozen young professionals like Meng Anlan. Her bed looked out onto a small balcony with a view across the water to the brilliant downtown lights of Xiamen, and during those nights when sleep eluded her, she would sit up and hug her knees and stare across the water, wondering which of those scintillae was the screen of Abdallah Jones’s laptop.

But as weeks went by and she got the square kilometer sorted out in her head, it began to seem doable. Ninety percent of the buildings could simply be ruled out. They were commercial properties or private residences. Unless Jones had some sort of an arrangement with a shop owner or a prosperous family, which seemed most unlikely, he had to be living in an apartment building, and not just any, but one that catered to transients and economic migrants. There were only a few of those in the search zone, and by various means she was able to cross several of them off the list. So those first few weeks of confusion and misery culminated, suddenly, with a short list of plausible Jones hideouts.

On rational grounds, she could not make a choice from among these, but her gut feeling was strongly in favor of a large, locally notorious dump of a place, five stories high, enmeshed in the finely reticulated streets of an old neighborhood but close enough to its edge that it was probably fated for demolition and skyscraperization. It had been a proud building during the era that the city was called Amoy and rich Europeans maintained wine cellars on Gulangyu. A hotel, perhaps. But long since repurposed into a workers’ apartment building.

Olivia pretended to be interested in leasing an office in a building directly across the street. The two buildings were of equal height and similar vintage, webbed together by particolored skeins of improvised wiring. The landlord wanted to steer Olivia to offices in the lower floors, where access was easier and rent was higher. But Olivia had become expert in prolonging her “search for office space” to ridiculous lengths by making claims about the nutty miserliness of her uncle in Guangdong. She had a whole line of patter ready to go, and a war chest of anecdotes about how cheap Meng Binrong was. She used these to prod the landlord ever higher in the building and cajoled him to pry open old dusty doors and let her see offices that were being used as storage dumps for maintenance supplies and doors, toilets, and ventilators that were awaiting repair. In each office that she inspected, Olivia was careful to go and look at the view, forcing stuck windows and thrusting her head out into the hot muggy breeze. As she explained, her only compensation for working in an office so many flights of stairs above street level was the nice view she could get, and the natural ventilation. In truth, of course, she was looking at the building across the street, gazing into its windows, hoping to see a glimpse of a tall black Welshman.