Neal Stephenson - Reamde

The fact that the office building was under renovation provided huge advantages in using it as a surveillance platform. Its façade was obscured by a tangle of scaffolding, ropes, tarps, lashed bamboo, extension cords, work lights, and pneumatic hoses. Amid all that clutter, Alastair’s equipment—which was really quite modest in size—could easily go unnoticed. Their primary camera peered out through a hole, no larger than the tip of Olivia’s finger, in the blue tarp.

Olivia did not have to read any ecstatic memos from London to know that she had found a gold mine. What feedback she did get from London suggested that the value of the information they were getting was so high that they now wished that Abdallah Jones would pursue a very lengthy career of blowing things up, or preparing to, in Xiamen, just so that they could go on milking him. Reading the foreign newspapers, Olivia saw occasional reports of Predator drone strikes in Waziristan and could not help getting the impression that the stuff she was sending back to London was directly correlated with some of those.

She was running one of the most high-value installations in the global war on terror. And she was the only person who could run it. The operation was a colossal success—much more important than whatever now-forgotten job they’d originally wanted her to do. Euphoric as she might have been about this, at some level she knew that it couldn’t last. Eventually Jones would have to do something. He couldn’t just live there for month after month constructing bombs to no purpose. Sooner or later they would learn, from the lasers on the windows, that Jones was about to go blow something up. And then MI6 would have an interesting decision to make. If they did nothing, the explosion would happen and the PSB would investigate it and eventually find their way to Apartment 505. And working outward from there they would eventually come and check out Olivia’s office and find all the high-tech surveillance gear, arrest her, and subject her to God only knew what sort of treatment. If it came to that, Olivia would have to destroy the equipment and get out of town first.

Or, in a spirit of international cooperation, MI6 might tip off the Chinese authorities and thereby prevent Jones from carrying out his plan. But in so doing they would also tip their hand as to the sources and methods they’d used to learn all these interesting things, which would lead to the same or similar consequences for Olivia.

Or they could send in some kind of hit squad to kill Jones or even abduct him and get him out of the country. This, to put it mildly, would be a challenging operation.

In any case, Olivia had been supplied with detailed instructions as to how to shut down her little safe house, should it come to that. There were no papers to shred, no tapes to burn. Everything was electronic. So the shutdown procedure came down to frying the electronics. This they had made easy. Everything in the place had a kill switch; all she had to do was hit that, and a jolt of high voltage would go through all the chips and destroy the information stored in them. The PSB could still recover the circuit boards, but, according to Alastair, these were devoid of useful information; they were just stock chips, off-the-shelf stuff that anyone could buy from electronics retailers on the Internet, connected together in an obvious way. The important stuff—the unique stuff—was all in how they were configured, the bits that they contained, and this was easy to scramble. It would be nice, he stressed, if she could prevent the stuff from falling into their hands—for example, by throwing it over the railing of a ferry or burning down the building (she couldn’t tell whether he was being serious about this last suggestion)—but the most important thing was to hit all those kill switches.

In a properly manned safe house, there would have been at least three ­people, working in shifts, looking after the gear, always ready to hit the kill switches and shut the place down on a moment’s notice. A few decades earlier MI6 might have had the resources to maintain that many deep cover agents in China. If the operation had been in almost any country, they could have found a way. But in China it was just too difficult. Once Alastair had flown home, she was the only person there, and she could only spend so much time in the office. Meng Binrong sent her many pretend emails making him look like a total slavedriver, and this gave her the excuse she needed to clock twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day in the office, but sometimes she had to go back to Gulangyu and get a few hours’ sleep in her apartment, if only to keep up appearances with the landlord and the neighbors.

Because of those long hours and the tunnel vision that tended to set in as a result, perhaps she could be forgiven for being so oblivious, for so long, to the obvious target of Abdallah Jones’s preparations. Xiamen was hosting an international conference, bringing in diplomats from all over the globe. Ostensibly this was to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Zheng Chenggong’s liberation of Taiwan from the Dutch. But everyone knew that the real agenda was to discuss relations between Taiwan and mainland China and that very significant developments might be announced there. Some radical Islamists claimed Zheng Chenggong as one of their own, and accordingly considered Taiwan to be part of the Islamic Caliphate. It was a forlorn pretense, but anyway they were furious about oppression of Muslims in western China, so any excuse would suffice.

Olivia had noticed banners going up on lampposts, featuring heroic images of Zheng Chenggong, but did not really become aware that the conference was happening until it began to cause traffic jams on her way to work in the morning. At which point she understood, far too late, that there must be some connection between this and a recent spike in chatter from Apartment 505. The crisis must be nigh.

ONE MORNING SHE was returning to the office, having just enjoyed a few hours of sleep at home, when she noticed a minor oddity: a van parked on the street between the apartment building and her office. It was messing up the flow of traffic and creating a minor sensation among street vendors and passersby. If it hadn’t been for the diplomatic conference and her awareness that something big was about to happen, she might have ignored it. But as it was, her first thought was that the jig was up: it was a squad of PSB investigators come to knock on Abdallah Jones’s door and ask him what he and his friends were doing in there. Or worse: they were coming to arrest Olivia.

On further inspection, though, it didn’t look like an official vehicle, and the driver was a young woman in blue boots who seemed to be having some trouble with keys. But it had been enough to get her heart pounding, so after walking slowly and calmly into the office building and getting into the stairway where no one could see her, she ascended the steps two at a time and got into her office as soon as she could. Resisting the temptation to gawk out the window, she pulled on the headphones that she used to monitor the sounds in Abdallah Jones’s apartment.

Everything sounded routine: some snoring, a few sleepy men getting up and making tea, listening to an Arabic podcast. The very normality of this calmed her down quite a bit and made her feel a fool for having become so excited. She blotted perspiration from her forehead, sat down, set her purse on the desk, woke up her computer, and checked her email.

A huge thud came through on the headphones, followed by a great deal of excited talking.

Then some loud pops, clipped by the electronics so that they just came through as dropouts in the stream of noise.

Then the sound went dead entirely. She pulled off the headphones and realized that she could hear more pops directly from across the street. She went to the window and checked the laser device. It seemed to be in good repair. Then she peered through a peephole in the blue tarp and saw the problem: it worked by bouncing a laser off a windowpane. But the windowpane in question no longer existed.