AFTER THE BURST of fire that had broken out the windows of Xinyou Quality Control Ltd. and sent Olivia sprawling to the floor, the gun battle across the street had died down rapidly. Olivia remained on hands and knees for a while, staying below the level of the windowsill. The office contained eight separate devices with kill switches. She was able to take care of three of them before she got to a place where the floor was covered with shattered glass: not the modern tempered stuff that crumbled into nice cubes, but jagged shards of the old school. Crawling on hands and knees through it didn’t seem like a good idea. She had not received a lot of combat training but she had received a little, and one of the more vivid lessons had demonstrated that the stuff civilians tended to hide behind—car doors, brick walls—was almost completely useless when it came to stopping high-velocity rounds. The walls of this building were brick. So it was pointless to hide behind them in any case. Olivia stood up and began crunching over the glass to reach the other five devices that needed to be killed. Footing was treacherous since her Chinese career-girl costume involved high heels, and the glass shards liked to slip over each other when she put her weight on them. At any rate she made it to all the devices and hit their kill switches. She was making a conscious effort not to be distracted by what was going on across the street. Abdallah Jones’s apartment had gone up in flames with preposterous speed, as if it were made out of flash paper. Either he was dead or had been flushed from cover into the streets of Xiamen, where he could not possibly last for more than a few minutes.