Zula did not want to admit that she was following him, but she found that she could no longer hold his gaze, and so she looked to Yuxia instead. The face of Qian Yuxia had gone still and devoid of expression, and she would not meet Zula’s eye. Zula reckoned that she had already made some kind of adjustment to what Jones was describing as the Heartless Island milieu.
“And so,” Jones concluded, “things are about to get ugly. Not that they were pretty to begin with. But, during the journey, you might wish to consider how you can keep them from really getting out of hand. I would suggest an end to pluck, or spunk, or whatever label you like to attach to the sort of behavior you were showing back on that pier, and a decisive turn toward Islam: which means submission. Just a thought.”
OLIVIA, THE PRIVILEGED Westerner, was outraged at the amount of time she had to wait at the hospital. Meng Anlan, the hard-bitten Chinese urbanite, wondered who she’d have to pay off, then remembered she didn’t have any money. More to the point, no government ID, the sine qua non of Chinese personhood. No connections to speak of either. She could get her uncle Binrong to patch a call through to some hospital administrator and holler at him for a while; but Meng Binrong, as a fictional character based in London, had no pull here either, and, at the moment, a lot of people were probably queued up wanting to say unpleasant things to the people who ran this place.
As time went on, though, the Meng Anlan side of her began to see a kind of simple logic at work here: she had been injured several hours ago, and she was actually fine. The wound — an inch-long laceration in her scalp, well above the hairline — had stopped bleeding. She had a headache, perhaps indicative of a mild concussion, but no blurred vision, no cognitive deficits. Perhaps just a bit of memory loss around the time that she had suddenly found herself crumpled against the wall of a devastated office. But that might not have been memory loss at all; maybe it just reflected the fact that explosions in the real world, as opposed to in movies, happened very quickly, like camera flashes.
It occurred to her that she might just get up and leave without bothering to get any medical treatment at all — which was obviously what the overburdened staff were hoping she would do.
The only obstacle, then, was squaring things up with the two remaining construction workers who had sat it out with her the whole time. They seemed to feel that they were under some sort of obligation to bring the adventure to a satisfactory conclusion — a story they could tell to their coworkers the next day. Or perhaps they were hoping for a reward? She figured out a way to satisfy both requirements by taking down their names and numbers, borrowing a bit of cash to pay for a ferry ticket, and promising to pay it back at the next opportunity, along with a little something for their trouble. They protested at the latter, but she suspected they would not turn it down.
In an epic hospital-hallway haggling showdown, she then talked an orderly out of a roll of gauze, largely by making it clear that if this were given to her, she would disappear almost immediately and never trouble them again.
She then cleaned herself up as best she could in the lavatory and rebandaged the wound with a white headband of gauze that could almost pass for some kind of deliberately chosen fashion-forward accessory, at least until blood began to leak through it. She made good on her promise to leave the hospital and walked in her free set of flip-flops down to the waterfront, where she used her donated construction-worker money to buy a ferry ticket back to Gulangyu.
During the walk, she had undergone the transformation from Meng Anlan, career girl, back to Olivia Halifax-Lin, MI6 spy. During the brief ferry ride, the latter asked herself several times whether going back to her apartment was the right thing to do. But there was no reason to suspect that the PSB would be on to her yet. And if they were, then what could seem more suspicious than a failure to go back to her own apartment when she was so badly in need of clothes and rest? She had to get out of China, that was for certain. But lacking money and documents, she would have to summon help from her handlers. Lacking a phone or laptop, she would have to do that by going to a wangba and sending a coded message.
But she couldn’t rent a terminal at a wangba without her ID card.
She didn’t even have the keys to her own place. So after a ten-minute trudge up the steep winding ways of Gulangyu Island in those oversized flip-flops, which were making the most of every opportunity to escape from her feet, she had to track down the building manager, interrupting his dinner, and get his wife to let her into her own apartment.
The wife was unsettled by her messed-up state. But in a long and polite interrogation session right there on her threshold, Olivia managed to convince her that all was well and that the only thing she needed right now was to be left alone. She did not mean to make it seem as though she were physically blocking the entrance, but this was in fact what she was doing. Body language didn’t work on the woman, and so she had to use the other kind of language. But finally Olivia gained the upper hand and reached the point where she felt that she could close the door and double-bolt it without giving offense.
She got a bottle of water out of the refrigerator and began to sip from it, then pulled out a bag of frozen baozi from the freezer, opened it, and verified that her Chinese “Meng Anlan” passport was still there.
This, of course, was not meant to pass for spycraft. It wasn’t where a spy would hide incriminating fake documents. But it was the sort of place that a young woman who wasn’t a spy might hide her legitimate passport to keep it out of the hands of common burglars. So she now had a way to identify herself as Meng Anlan even if her ID card was lost.
Those few sips of water had been enough to get her kidneys working again, so she set the bottle down, left the passport on the kitchen counter, and went into the bathroom.
As soon as she walked in she felt and heard the door being kicked shut behind her. She turned around, straight into an oncoming wall of white. A pillow slammed into her face as a hand took her by the back of the neck. She cried out once, but the sound went nowhere. Then she heard a quiet voice in her ear: “Don’t make any sound. Do you understand?”
He was speaking in Russian.
She nodded.
The pillow came away, and she found herself looking into the blue eyes of the man who had crashed into her office earlier today; but now he was wearing a suit, and he had shaved his head. Judging from evidence near to hand, he had done so in her bathroom sink, using a pink plastic girl-razor that he had borrowed from her stuff.
“Many apologies,” he said.
She made some gesture combining elements of shrug, nod, and shiver.
“We have nice talk?” he said in English.
She would look anywhere except at his eyes.