“Are those bullets?” Yuxia asked.

Csongor placed Yuxia’s phone and its battery in the cup holder next to her elbow, then reached into the bag and held up one of the ammunition clips. The top couple of cartridges were clearly visible at its top. “Yes.”

“You have a gun?” Her tone of voice was not: It would be really cool and useful if you had a gun. It was, rather, If you have a gun, we are in even worse trouble than I had thought.

“No. Only these. Maybe the other guy took Ivanov’s gun.”

“What is in the end part?” Marlon asked, eyeing a separate compartment on the end of the bag, big enough to hold a couple of paperback books. Something was definitely making it bulge. Csongor unzipped it, reached in, and, to his own shock, pulled out a pistol. This one was smaller than the one Ivanov had been carrying, with woodgrained grips. He recognized it: this was the basic sidearm that Soviet and Russian military had always carried. He simply could not believe that one of them was in his hand.

“OMG,” Marlon said.

In Hungary, Csongor had had very little access to guns. But on a trip to a hacker conference in Vegas two years ago, he had spent a couple of evenings at firing ranges that catered to foreign visitors, and he had learned a few basics. He figured out how to eject the clip from this weapon, then maneuvered it into a shaft of sun coming in through the crack in the roof and pulled back the slide just enough to verify that no rounds were in the chamber. Then he found the safety and flicked it back and forth a couple of times just to get a feel for when it was on and when it was off. When he was certain that the weapon contained no cartridges and that it was inert, he set it on the van’s seat next to him, then reached back into the bag pocket to see what other treasures might be contained in there. He came up with a spare clip for the pistol, fully stuffed with cartridges. Then he pulled out a pair of heavy black cylinders with steel rings affixed to their tops.

He looked up and locked eyes with Marlon. Neither of them had ever seen anything like this before, outside of a video game, but Csongor was pretty certain, and Marlon’s expression confirmed, that these were grenades.

“Make some noise if you are alive,” said Yuxia. Traffic had become complex, and she was doing a lot of lane changing.

“Now we have a pistol and a couple of hand grenades,” Csongor announced.

Marlon had taken one of the grenades and was examining it. The sides of the canister were perforated with large holes, revealing some internal structure. “These are not real grenades,” he announced. “Look. No shrapnel. Holes instead.”

“Stun grenades?” Csongor guessed.

“Or smoke or tear gas.” Marlon and Csongor could communicate very clearly as long as they hewed to vocabulary from video games.

Yuxia intervened. “Csongor’s supposed to be telling us who he is,” she reminded Marlon. “Grenade can be explained later.”

“I’ll tell you who I am,” Csongor promised. “But first please tell me what just happened. What do you know about that tall black guy?”

Marlon was glaring at him. Csongor realized that he had insulted Marlon, or more likely just spooked him, by implying that he, Marlon, might know something about who the guy was. He looked into Marlon’s eyes. “It might be important,” Csongor pleaded.

“He lived upstairs with dudes from the far west,” Marlon said. “We only saw him a couple of times.”

“Did you know that these dudes from the far west had AK-47s?”

“What do you take me for, man?”

“Okay, sorry.”

Csongor leaned back in his seat, hoping that this would ease the throbbing in his head. There was a significant silence: their way of reminding him that he had yet to explain himself. “Okay,” he said. “Do you guys know anything about Hungary?”

Neither of them did. But neither would come out and admit it, perhaps worried about being impolite. Marlon, somewhat surprisingly, made a reference to the 1956 Olympic water polo team. But that was where his knowledge of Hungary began and ended.

Whenever Csongor found himself in an airport, he would go to the newsstand and browse the endless racks of glossy English-and German-language magazines, bemused by the phenomenon of cultures that were large enough to support monthly publications in which people would dither in print over the minutest details of makeup, high-performance motorcycles, and model railways. Hungarians learned those languages so that they could feign membership in that world when it suited them. But their isolation and tininess were nothing compared to what it would have been if Hungary had been part of China. Here, if Hungarians survived at all, they would be trotted out once a year to perform folk dances, simply to prove to the rest of the world that they hadn’t yet been exterminated. Csongor had never heard of Yuxia’s ethnic minority, the Hakka, and yet he didn’t have to look them up on Wikipedia to guess that there were probably ten times as many of them as there were Hungarians.

So where to begin?

“It is a long story. I could start with the Battle of Stalingrad,” he said, “and go on from there. But.” He stopped, sighed, and considered it.

“First, I am an asshole who made a lot of wrong decisions.”

Hungary was an embedded system. It was idle to dream of what it would be like, and of all the brave and noble decisions Hungarians would have made, had it been a thousand times larger and surrounded by a saltwater moat. He paused to rest.

Yuxia checked him in the rearview.

Marlon fixed him with a somewhat incredulous look as if to say, If you’re an asshole who made wrong decisions, what am I?

Csongor couldn’t help chuckling at this. Somewhat to his astonishment, Marlon’s face cracked open with a smile. Cool, tough, world-wise, but unquestionably a smile. He turned back toward the window to hide it.

“And because of certain fucked-up remnants of the past, which we are now getting rid of,” Csongor continued, “things were actually simple and easy for me as long as I kept making the wrong decisions. However”—he checked his watch, and found that its crystal was shattered and its hands had stopped—“something like half an hour ago, I made the correct decision and did the right thing. Look where I am now.”

Another nervous mirror-glance from Yuxia. Csongor realized he’d better explain that remark. “In a car with nice people,” he said.

That was better, but he was still planting his big feet in the wrong places. To Csongor, Marlon would always be the guy who risked his life to enter a collapsing building and lead a stranger to safety. But Marlon, he sensed, didn’t want to be thought of that way. He had the cool insouciance of the skate rats performing their death-defying leaps in the Erszébet Tér, the hackers showing off their latest exploits at DefCon in Vegas.

“Or at least one nice person,” Csongor corrected himself.

Marlon turned around and gave him that smile again, then reached back with his right hand. Some kind of complex basketball-player handshake ensued. Csongor was pretty sure he muffed his end of it; Central European hockey players didn’t go in for such things. But he no longer had that awful feeling that he used to get when he was trying to skate backward, and so he let it rest there.

MR. JONES SAID nothing further in English until an hour into the journey, when he looked at Zula and said, “I give up.”

By that time they had completed a couple of circuits of the ring road that lined the island’s shore. Contrary to the first instruction given, they had not gone to the airport. Zula had been confused by this until she had understood that her companion—if that was the right word—didn’t speak a word of Chinese, and that he assumed (correctly as it turned out) that the taxi driver spoke no English; so he had just shouted the one English word that every taxi driver in the world had to know. This had been just to get him moving. Once that driver had nudged and honked his way clear of the chaos surrounding the exploded building, Mr. Jones had produced a phone, dialed a number, and spoken in Arabic. Zula had known that it was Arabic because she had heard a fair bit of that language while living in a refugee camp in the Sudan. After a brief exchange of news, which Zula could tell had been extremely surprising to the person on the other end of the line—for Mr. Jones had soon grown weary of insisting that every word was true—he had handed the phone up to the taxi driver, who had listened to some instructions, nodded vigorously, and said something that must have meant “yes” or “I will do it.”

Mr. Jones had then exchanged a few more terse Arabic sentences with his interlocutor and hung up. And the taxi driver had begun to drive laps around the ring road.

Zula had been resting her free elbow on the frame of the taxi’s window, turning her hand out, from time to time, to press her fingertips against the tinted glass. There was something about the manufactured environment of a car that engendered a completely bogus feeling of safety.

When Mr. Jones said those three words: “I give up,” Zula opened her eyes and startled a little. Could it really be that she had gone to sleep? Seemed a strange time for a nap. But the body reacted in odd ways to stress. And once they had gotten out onto the ring road, there had been nothing in the way of shootings or explosions to demand her attention. Exhaustion had stolen up on her.

“He was Russian, yes? The big man?”

“The man you … killed?” She couldn’t believe that sentences like this one were coming out of her mouth.

Surprise, then a trace of a smile came over the gunman’s face. “Yes.”

“Yeah. Russian.”

“The others too. Upstairs. Spetsnaz.”

Zula had never heard the word “Spetznaz” until a couple of days ago, but she knew what it meant now. She nodded.

“But there were three others … different.” He raised his cuffed hand, dragging hers with it, and stuck his thumb up in the air. “You.” His index finger. “The one that the big Russian killed in the stairwell. I think he was American.” His long finger. “And the one in the cellar who tried to protect you…”

“He did more than try.”

“He was maybe Russian too—but somehow different from the others?”

“Hungarian.”

“The big man—organized crime?”

“More like disorganized,” Zula said. “We think he was on the run from his own organization. He screwed something up, big-time. He was trying to cover it up. Make amends.”

“You say ‘we.’ What do you mean by ‘we’?”

She twisted her cuffed hand up and around and mimicked his counting-on-the-fingers gesture.

“The three of you,” he said.

Mr. Jones thought about it for a while. His mood seemed to be improving, but he was cautious all the same. “If I take what you say at face value,” he said, “then this is not what I assumed at first.”

“You assumed what?”

“Covert special ops raid, of course.” The phrase was familiar enough, being the fodder of countless newspaper articles and summer movie plots, but he spoke it with an emphasis, an inflection she had never heard before, as one who actually knew of such things firsthand, had seen his friends die in them. “But if this is really what you say—” He blinked and shook his head, like a man trying to fight off the effects of a hypnotizing drug. “Impossible. Stupid. It was absolutely a special ops job. In fancy dress.”

“Fancy dress?”

“What you would call a costume party,” he shot back, slipping into a parody of a flat midwestern accent. “To make it deniable.” Back to the usual British accent now, the one she couldn’t quite place. “Because it would make a hell of a diplomatic mess to send a military team into China. This way, though, they can shrug their shoulders: ‘It’s those crazy Russian mafia guys, we have no control over them, there was nothing we could do.’ ”

It sounded so convincing that Zula was starting to believe it herself.

“What was your role?” he asked.

Zula laughed.

His eyes widened slightly. Then he laughed too. “The three,” he said, making the hand gesture again. “Why does a deep cover Russian hit squad need to be dragging around the Three We? Handcuffing them to pipes and shooting them in the head?”

At the reminder that Peter was dead, Zula’s face collapsed and she felt a momentary sick shock that she’d been laughing only a moment earlier. They were silent for a while, just driving.

“So you guys are in the virus-writing business?” she tried.

She now learned what Jones looked like when he was utterly dumbfounded. This would have been satisfying had Zula not been every bit as confused.

“The Russians,” she explained. “That’s why they—we—went to that apartment building. To find someone who had written a virus.”

“A computer virus,” Jones said, stating the question as a fact.

Zula nodded and was left with the unsettling notion that Jones’s group might be working with other kinds of viruses.

“We have nothing to do with writing computer viruses,” Jones announced. “Come to think of it though, might be a good line to get into.” Then his mind snapped into focus. “Oh,” he said. “That lot downstairs. Boys with computers. Always wondered what they were doing.”

Zula swallowed hard and went silent. She had just remembered a fleeting image from just before the start of the gunfire: a coin shoved into the fuse socket, a crescent moon and a star. Someone—perhaps Jones himself—had put that coin in there when they had invaded the vacant flat and set up a squat.

This was all her doing. What would Jones do to her when he understood that?

“So the big Russian—” Jones began.

“Ivanov.”

“He was royally pissed off at those lads.”

“You might say that.”

“How did you get involved?”

“It is a long story.”

Jones let his head hang down and laughed. “Look at me,” he said. “Your man Ivanov has forced me to cancel certain arrangements. To make other plans. I’ve nothing but time. And unless I am quite mistaken, you have even more time on your hands than I do. So why on earth should I object to a long story at this juncture?”

Zula gazed out through the taxi’s window.

“It is your only possible way out,” Jones said.

Zula’s nose started to run, a precursor of crying. Not because her situation sucked. It had sucked for a long time. And it couldn’t suck worse than it had with Ivanov. It was because she couldn’t tell the story without mentioning Peter.

She took a few slow, steadying breaths. If she could just get his name out without cracking, the rest would be fine.

“Peter,” she said, and her voice bucked like a car going over a speed bump, and her eyes watered a little. “The man in the stairwell.” She looked at Jones until he understood.

“Your beau?”

“Not anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” Jones said. Not the least bit sorry. Just observing the proper formalities.

“No, I mean—not because he’s dead.” There. She’d gotten it out. “Not because Peter’s dead.” Trying the words, like easing out onto thin ice covering a farm pond, wondering how far she cold go before she felt it cracking beneath her. “We had broken up previously. On the day that everything went crazy.”

“Then perhaps it would be more informative if you could rewind to the day that everything went crazy, since that sounds like an interesting day,” Jones suggested.

“We had been snowboarding.”

“You live in a mountainous area?”

“Seattle. Actually we were several hours outside of Seattle, in B.C.”

“How does a Horn of Africa girl pick up snowboarding?” For the fact that Zula was from East Africa was written on her face plainly enough for a man like Jones to read.

“I never did. I just hung around.”

“Your lad drags you off into the mountains so that he can snowboard while you do nothing?”

“No, I would never put up with it.”

“I believe you just told me that you did.”

“There was plenty for me to do.”

“What? Shopping?”

She shook her head. “I’m not that way.” The question was still unanswered. “My uncle lives up there, so it was a chance for a family visit. And I could work; I brought my laptop.”

“Your uncle lives in a ski resort?”

“Part of the time.”

“You have a lot of family in B.C.?”

She shook her head. “Iowa. He’s the black sheep.”

“I’d have thought you were the black sheep.”

Zula could not fight off at least a hint of a smile.

Jones was delighted by this.

She was disgusted. Disgusted that he had played the black card so early and that it had worked on her.

How could he have guessed that she was adopted? Being from Iowa was definitely a clue. That, and her accent.

“So, the two black sheep are visiting while Peter snowboards. Is that where everything went crazy?”

“No. It’s where it started.”

“How did it start?”

“A man walked into the bar.”

“Ah, yes. A lot of good stories start that way. Pray continue.”

And Zula continued. Had Jones given her time to consider her options, to work through the strategy and tactics of what she ought or ought not to divulge, would she have done the same? There was no telling. She began to relate her memories of Wallace in the tavern, and the rest of the story just unfurled, like the wake behind a boat. Mr. Jones listened to it carefully at first, but as she advanced to the point where he could figure out the connections himself, his mind wandered, and he became more and more active on the phone.

He seemed to get along okay in Arabic, but it was gradually becoming clear to her that it was not his native language; he spoke slowly, stopping and starting as he worked his way through sentences, and from time to time, as he listened to the man on the other end, he would get a bemused grin on his face and, she thought, request clarification.

None of which seemed to be standing in the way of his making a plan. The first part of the conversation had been start-and-stop, with a lot of wandering down blind alleys and then suddenly backing out of them. Or so Zula judged from the tone of Jones’s voice, his gestures. But suddenly in the last few minutes Mr. Jones and his interlocutor seemed to have hit on a plan that they liked; he finally lifted his eyes from the back of the seat in front of him and began to look around brightly and to drop “Okay” into his utterances.

They were on the eastern curve of the island. This was its least built-up part, but no one would mistake it for an unspoiled natural space. Part of the road was built on reclaimed land, running over the top of a seawall, so along those stretches the water was right below Zula’s window. In other sections, a broad sandy beach stretched between road and shore. Occasionally the road would divert inland, ceding the waterfront to a golf course or residential complex. They had been going clockwise around the island for a long time—Zula didn’t have a watch, but she judged it must have been at least two hours. Now, at a command from the phone, the taxi driver executed a U-turn and began to head north, going counterclockwise up the eastern limb.

“OMYGOD,” YUXIA SAID, “he’s turning around.”

“Why would he do that?” Csongor asked rhetorically.

“He fears we are following him,” Marlon theorized.

They blew by the taxi, which had pulled into a crossover lane in the median strip and was waiting for an opening in the oncoming traffic. Its rear windows were so deeply tinted that they could see nothing through them. But the driver was clearly visible, holding the steering wheel in one hand, pressing a phone to his ear with the other. And paying no attention at all to them.

“Why is he talking on the phone?” Yuxia asked, shouldering the van into a gap in traffic and getting into the left lane.

“I think I am wrong,” Marlon said. “He did not look like a man who thought he was being followed.”

Csongor, the foreigner, was the first to put it together: “He doesn’t speak English,” he said. “And Zula and the terrorist don’t speak Chinese. They have someone on the phone who is translating.”

Yuxia braked hard, triggering a storm of furious honking, and veered onto the next crossover.

“Which raises the question,” Csongor continued, “who is helping this guy?”

A gap in traffic presented itself fortuitously, so instead of coming to a full stop Yuxia just rolled across the oncoming lanes and pulled around on the shoulder, waited for a few cars to blow by, then accelerated. They had not lost much ground on the taxi, which had had worse luck with the traffic and was being driven more conservatively in any case. But if anyone was looking back through those tinted windows, it would have to be obvious, now, that the battered van was tailing them.

Marlon shrugged, telling him that the answer was obvious: “He has friends around here.”

“But they’re all dead.”

“Not all. There must be some others. In another building.”

“Then why did they not simply go straight to that building?” Csongor asked. “Why drive around the island for hours?”

“He wanted to see if he was being followed?” Marlon said. “But we have been obviously following him and he did not notice.”

“Not that obvious,” said the offended Yuxia, triggering a brief exchange of recriminations in Mandarin.

“He’s been organizing something. Some kind of drop-off or exchange,” Csongor said, tamping down the argument. “Using the backseat of that taxi as his office.”

“Fuck, man,” Marlon said. “I should never have got into this van.”

“You’re just getting that now?” Yuxia asked. Still a little irked at him.

“You said you were going to give me a ride,” Marlon said, looking at Csongor.

“You can get out whenever you want,” Csongor said.

Yuxia said something in Mandarin that appeared to reinforce Csongor’s offer with considerable vigor.

“Seriously,” Csongor said, “you saved my life, that is enough for one day.”

“Who saved mine?” Marlon asked. “Mine, and my friends’?”

Csongor turned to look at him curiously.

“By flashing the power on and off. Warning us.”

“Oh,” Csongor said. He had quite forgotten this detail in the midst of so many other happenings. “That was Zula.” He nodded in the direction of the taxi, a couple of hundred meters ahead of them.

“And that is why the big man—Ivanov—was so angry,” Marlon said, working it out. “Because he knew that Zula had messed up his plan to kill us.”

“Yes.”

“I see.” Marlon nodded, then drew in a deep breath and began stroking his beardless chin absentmindedly. Finally, he came to some sort of decision and sat up straighter. “I have done nothing wrong today. The cops can’t charge me with anything.”

“Except REAMDE,” Csongor reminded him.

“For that,” Marlon said, “I’m already fucked anyway. But that’s a small thing in all of this. So I will go with you for a little while longer and see what happens.”

“You sure will,” Csongor said.

WHENEVER THE LOOKING was good, Mr. Jones looked out across the water. Zula tried to follow his gaze. But there wasn’t much to see. Directly across a narrow strait, close enough that a good swimmer could have reached it in a few hours, was the smaller of the two Taiwanese islands. Perhaps that accounted for the barrenness of the coast, and the lack of shipping traffic. Over the course of a few minutes, their orbit turned them away from that fragment of foreign territory. A larger, more built-up headland came into view off to their right, and they began to see more maritime traffic, since the water to their right was now a strait, about a mile wide, between Xiamen and another part of the People’s Republic. The road diverged from the shore to make room for a container port built on flat reclaimed land, indistinguishable, to Zula’s eye, from the same facility on Harbor Island in Seattle, with all the same equipment and the same names stenciled on the containers. A series of huge apartment complexes hemmed them in to landward. Then the sea rushed in to meet the road again, and all traffic was funneled onto a causeway-and-bridge complex that they had already crossed a few times today; it spanned an inlet, an arm of the sea that penetrated the round shell of the island and meandered off into its interior.

Looking perpendicularly out the window as they hummed across the bridge, Mr. Jones saw something. He seemed to be focusing on a typical Chinese working vessel that had peeled off from the longshore traffic and was cutting beneath the bridge to enter the inlet: a long flat shoe in the water, a pilothouse built on its top toward the stern, cargo stacked and lashed down on the deck forward. A man had clambered to the top of one such stack and was standing with his elbows projecting to either side of his head; Zula realized he was looking at them through binoculars. His elbows came down and he made a gesture that she could recognize as whipping out a phone and pressing it to his head.

Mr. Jones’s rang. He answered it and listened for a few moments. His eyes swiveled forward to lock on the back of the taxi driver’s head. After listening to a long speech from the man on the boat, he said, “Okay,” and handed the phone to the taxi driver again.

They pulled off the ring road at the next opportunity.

“A BOAT,” YUXIA said, taking her foot off the gas and getting ready to exit. “They are getting on a boat. This explains everything.”

“Don’t follow them so close!” Marlon chided her.

“It’s okay,” Csongor said. “They’re not even looking. Think. All the Russians are dead. And if the cops were following them, then they would have been arrested a long time ago, right? So the fact that they are not arrested yet proves that no one is following them.”

“But very soon it will get obvious,” Marlon insisted, “and we know that the black one has a gun, and if he has friends on a boat, they will probably have guns too.” And he glanced down nervously at the pistol that Csongor had left unloaded on the seat of the van.

Was he nervous because it was there at all?

Or because Csongor had not loaded it yet?

It was a question Csongor needed to start asking himself.

THE TAXI DROVE for a few hundred yards down a big four-laner that seemed to have been constructed for no particular purpose, since it was running across reclaimed land, perfectly flat, only a few feet above sea level, and utterly barren: silt that had been dredged up from the strait and that was too salty or polluted to support life. Soon, though, they doubled back on a smaller street that cut through some kind of incipient development, platted and sketched in but not yet realized. This connected them to the road that lined the shore of the inlet. Zula had lost track of directions in the last few sets of turns but now caught sight of the bridge, spanning the inlet’s connection to the sea, that they had crossed a minute earlier.

The inlet ballooned to a width of maybe half a mile. Sparse outcroppings of docks and marinas lined its shore, but boat traffic was minimal. After more discussion on the phone, the taxi turned back toward a system of buildings that were being erected along its shore, laced together by pedestrian walkways that ran over the shallows on pilings. The whole complex appeared to be under construction, or perhaps it was a development that had been suspended for lack of funds. Nearby, a broad, stout pier, strewn with empty pallets, was thrust out into the inlet. Jones projected his free hand over the seat and used his gun as a pointer, directing the driver to turn onto it. The taxi slowed almost to a stop, the driver nervously voicing some objection to Jones.

Mr. Jones pointed one more time, emphatically, and withdrew his hand. Then, making sure that the taxi driver could see him in the rearview, he disengaged the pistol’s safety and then rested it on his knee, aiming straight through the back of the seat into the middle of the driver’s back.

The driver turned gingerly onto the pier, which was wide enough to support three such vehicles abreast, and proceeded at an idling pace. The boat carrying Jones’s friends was headed right for them, churning up a considerable wake.

“Okay. Stop,” Jones said.

FOLLOWING THE TAXI was no longer necessary, since it had arrived at a dead end on the pier. Yuxia pulled the van into a space between two waterfront buildings, a couple of hundred meters away, whence they could spy on it from semiconcealment. Obviously it was waiting for something, and obviously that something had to be a boat, and by far the most likely candidate was right out before them in the inlet, chugging along in plain sight, carrying several young male passengers who were suspiciously overdressed for today’s hot, muggy weather.

Csongor heaved a great sigh that developed into a laugh. He picked up the semiautomatic pistol. There were two clips. He slipped one of them into a pocket, then shoved the other into the pistol’s grip until it clicked into place.

Marlon and Yuxia were watching him closely.

“There is an English expression: ‘high-maintenance girlfriend,’ ” Csongor remarked. “Now, of course, Zula is not my girlfriend. Probably never would be, even if all this shit were not happening. And I think that if she were my girlfriend? She would not be high maintenance at all! She is just not that type of girl. However. Because of circumstances, today she is the most high-maintenance girlfriend since Cleopatra.”

If this pistol worked like most of them, he would have to do something, such as pulling the slide back, to chamber the first round from the newly installed magazine. He did so. The weapon was live, ready to fire.

“What are you going to do?” Marlon asked, with admirable cool.

“Walk over there, unless you want to give me a ride, and fucking kill that guy,” Csongor said. He reached for the door handle and gave it a jerk. But because of damage sustained earlier, it did not give way easily. Before he could get it to move, Yuxia had started the engine, shifted the van into reverse, and started backing out of the space where they’d been hiding.

“I’ll give you a ride,” she said, though Csongor suspected she was just trying to complicate matters. And indeed, the next thing out of her mouth was, “Why don’t we call the PSB?”

“Go ahead if you want,” Csongor said, “but then I will spend a long time in a Chinese prison.”

“But you are good guy,” Yuxia said sharply.

Marlon snorted derisively and, in Mandarin, gave Yuxia a piece of his mind about (Csongor guessed) the effectiveness of the Chinese judicial system in accurately distinguishing between good and bad guys in the best of circumstances, to say nothing of the case where the good guy was a foreign national, in the country illegally, connected with murderous foreign gangsters, with his footprints all over the basement of a collapsed terrorist safe house and his fingerprints all over a cache of weapons and money-bricks. Or so Csongor surmised; but toward the end of this disquisition Marlon also began pointing to himself, suggesting that the topic had moved around to his own culpability. And, as if that weren’t enough, he pointed a finger or two at Yuxia as well. For during their drive around the ring road, Yuxia had told the story of how she had handcuffed some poor locksmith to the steering wheel, while telling any number of lies to the neighborhood beat cop.

Whatever Marlon was saying, it struck home keenly enough that Yuxia had to pull the van over to the side of the road and weep silently for a few moments. Csongor simultaneously felt grateful for Marlon’s acuity and sad about its effect on poor Yuxia.

But just as Csongor was taking advantage of this uncharacteristic moment of weakness on his driver’s part by making another grab for the door handle, he was slammed back against his seat by powerful acceleration as she gunned the van forward.

Marlon shouted something at her, and Csongor could guess its meaning: What the hell are you doing?

All of this violent stopping and starting had made Csongor nervous about an accidental discharge of the pistol. He felt for its safety lever and flicked it.

Marlon switched to English and looked at Csongor. “I would like to get out of the car.”

“Fine,” Csongor said. He shoved the Makarov into a cargo pocket on his trousers, then made yet another grab for the door handle.

“I thought you wanted to help the girl who saved your ass,” Yuxia said, with a wicked glance over her shoulder.

“I do,” Marlon said. “Maybe in a way that doesn’t suck.”

Csongor had managed to get the van’s side door open. Marlon lurched to his feet, crouching low to avoid gouging his scalp on the jagged metal of the van’s torn roof. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone and its battery, which he jacked back together. This he dropped into the cup holder next to Yuxia. In the same motion he grabbed Yuxia’s phone and battery, which Csongor had left sitting there, and stuffed those into his pocket. Yuxia, bowing to the inevitable, allowed the van to slow down. Marlon spun around on one foot, passing in front of Csongor, and reached down into the open bag and grabbed a small cash-brick. He raised this to his face and clenched it between his teeth, then backed out of the van, slapping the seat next to Csongor as he half fell out. He tumbled and rolled in the dust on the side of the road and then fell away to aft as Yuxia gunned the vehicle forward.

Csongor noticed that one of the two stun grenades was now missing. He picked up the remaining one and put it into his jacket pocket. He had lost track of where they were: moving down a woebegone street lined with small businesses that all seemed to have something to do with marine stuff: knowledge he gained not by careful observation but through momentary glimpses and reeks of sparks, smoke, fish, turpentine, gas. But then they crossed an invisible plane into some other property, and the buildings fell away to reveal a clear path to the pier. The taxi still waited and the boat was almost there.

JONES COULD NOT show himself outside of the taxi, and so they sat, engine running, for several minutes, watching the boat approach. The taxi driver was motionless, staring straight ahead, sweat running from beneath his short haircut and trickling down the back of his neck. Zula was aware, of course, that between the two of them, they might be able to overpower Jones, or at least belabor him to the point where the taxi driver might be able to run away and summon help. But that would require some communication between the two of them—which, with Jones sitting right there listening, would have been impossible even if they’d had a language in common.

The boat glided up along the end of the pier and cut its engines. Its pilot had judged matters perfectly and so it eased to a stop directly before them. The difference in altitude between pier surface and boat deck was only a few feet: a minor obstacle, it seemed, for three men who scrambled up onto the pier and walked up to meet the taxi. One of them came alongside the driver’s-side door and let the driver see the grip of a pistol projecting from the pocket of his trousers. Then he gave a little toss of the head that meant Get out. The driver popped his door latch, and the gunman pulled it open. Moving in fits and starts, the driver pivoted on his seat, got his feet on the ground, looked up at the gunman for his next cue.

A second man flanked the door on the passenger’s side. The third came round and opened Jones’s door and greeted him in Arabic. Jones responded in kind while groping for Zula’s hand. He interlaced his fingers with hers and then scooted toward the door, pulling her along as he went.

Getting on that boat—which was obviously what would happen next—seemed like an overwhelmingly bad idea to Zula. She gripped the doorside handle with her free hand, anchoring herself there, and refused to be pulled out.

Jones paused on the threshold and looked back at her. “Yes, we can do it kicking and screaming. There are four of us. Someone might notice, might summon the PSB. The PSB might respond and might get here in time to get a good enough look at yonder boat that they could distinguish it from the thousands of other boats just like it. But you should understand, Zula, that this is a close-run affair. Narrow margins. We can only afford so many unwilling passengers. If you don’t let go of that fucking handle and come nicely, we will shove the taxi driver into the trunk of his vehicle and push it into the water.”

Zula let go of the door handle and gripped Jones’s hand. She slid sideways across the seat until she had reached the place where she could rotate on her bottom and get her feet aimed out the door. Jones was strong and she learned that she could rely on his grip. She got her other hand wrapped around his forearm and then executed a sort of chin-up to get her feet clear of the taxi. As she rose to a standing position on the surface of the pier, she glimpsed his face, gazing, not so much in amazement as simple curiosity, at something that was approaching them from the road.

At that moment—for the brain worked in funny ways—Zula suddenly recognized him as Abdallah Jones, a big-time international terrorist. She’d read about him in newspapers.

Following the gaze of Abdallah Jones, Zula turned her head just in time to see a van come roaring in and crash into the rear bumper of the taxi.

SOKOLOV TOOK INVENTORY. In combat there was this tendency to divest oneself of objects at astonishing speed, which was why he and all others in his line of work tended to attach the really important things to their bodies. Less than an hour ago, in the cellar of the apartment building, he had shed his retired Chinese angler costume and changed into a black tracksuit, black trainers, hard-shell knee pads, an athletic supporter with a plastic cup to protect his genitals, and a belt with the Makarov holster and some spare clips. A bulky windbreaker covered a black vest-cum-web-harness from which he had hung a variety of knives, lights, zip ties, and other things he thought he might need. On his back was a CamelBak pouch full of water. Why carry water on a mission that was supposed to last only fifteen minutes? Because once in Afghanistan he had gone out on a fifteen-minute mission that had ended up lasting forty-eight hours, and when he had made it back to his base, having remained barely alive by drinking his own urine and sucking the blood of rodents and small birds, he had made a vow that he would never be without water again.

He unknotted the garbage bag of stuff he had taken from the office. He had to move in tiny increments lest it become obvious, to the people in the crowd all around him, that there was a living creature underneath the carter’s tarp. He felt around inside the bag and identified the miscellany of heavy electronic boxes and then found the soft and squishy leather purse.

Most of the purse’s contents were of zero to minimal usefulness. As an example, there was a condom, which he considered fitting over the muzzle of his Makarov to keep dirt out of the barrel, but there was little point in doing so now. He did, however, find a wallet with a government identity card bearing a photo that more or less matched the face of the Russian-speaking, Chinese-looking woman—the spy—he had seen in the office. And so here was a case in which a seemingly trivial aspect of the women’s fashion industry had profound consequences, at least for Sokolov. For a man would have carried the contents of this wallet on his person and would have departed with them. But women’s clothes made no allowances for such things, so it all had to go in the purse.

The photograph was on the right side of the ID card. A serial number, in Arabic numerals, ran along the bottom. The remaining space was occupied by a set of fields, each field labeled in blue and the actual data printed in black. The top field consisted of three characters, and he assumed that it must be the woman’s name. Below it were two other fields, arranged on the same line since each of them consisted of only a single character. He assumed that one of these must be gender. Below that were three fields on the same line, printed in Arabic numerals. The first of these was “1986,” the second “12,” and the third “21,” so it was obviously the woman’s date of birth. The last field was much longer and consisted of Chinese characters running across one and a half lines, with additional room below, and he assumed that this must be the woman’s address.

In his vest he carried a small notebook and a pen. He took these out and devoted a while to copying out the address. Because of his cramped position in the rattling cart, this took a long time. But he had nothing else to do at the moment.

Also in the purse was a mobile phone, which he of course checked for photographs and other data. He did not expect to find much. If the woman was a spy of any skill whatsoever, she would take the strictest precautions with a device such as this one. Indeed, the number of photos was rather small and seemed to consist mostly of snapshots of real estate. Most of the pictures depicted office buildings, and most of these were of the block where this morning’s events had taken place. But a few were of a residential building in a hilly neighborhood with a lot of trees. Interspersed with these were some shots of the interior of a vacant apartment, and the view from its windows: across the water to the downtown core of Xiamen.

This was all very diverting, but he needed to have a plan for what to do when the carter finally got him to the hotel. For by now they had made it to the big boulevard that ran along the waterfront, and from here progress would be quicker. Sokolov flipped open his mobile and refreshed his memory of the place by flipping through the snapshots he had taken a couple of days ago. There was not much here to help him: it was the front entrance of a big Western-style luxury business hotel, and as such it was indistinguishable from the same sort of place as might be seen in Moscow, Sydney, or L.A.

He kept flipping back and forth through the same half-dozen photos, looking for anything that might be of use. Most of the people around the entrance were, of course, bellhops and taxi drivers. Guests went in and out. Some were dressed in business suits, others in casual tourist attire. He did not see any commandos in tracksuits.

Still, something about tracksuit nagged at him. He flipped through the series a few more times until he found it: a man entering the hotel. He appeared in two successive pictures. In the first his naked leg and bare arm were just swinging into the frame. In the second, he was nodding to a smiling bellhop who had pulled the door open for him. The man was probably in his early forties, tall, slender, blond hair with bald patch, wearing a skimpy pair of loose shorts and a haggard tank-top shirt emblazoned with the logo of a triathlon. Track shoes completed the ensemble. Strapped around his waist was a fanny pack, with a water bottle holstered in a black mesh pocket.

Sokolov was carrying three knives, one of which sported a back-curving hook at the top of the blade, made for slicing quickly through fabric. Working in small, fidgety movements, he got it caught in the fabric of the tracksuit at about midthigh and then made a circumferential cut, slashing off most of one trouser leg. He repeated the same procedure on the other side. Now he was wearing what he hoped would pass for a pair of athletic shorts. With painstaking care he divested himself of his windbreaker, his gear harness, and his gun belt, leaving his upper body clad only in a T-shirt.

He sucked the CamelBak as dry as he could make it. This was a ballistic nylon sack about the size of a loaf of bread, with a circular filling port at its top. The port was large—about the size of the palm of his hand—which made it easier to fill the thing up. He threw in the woman’s mobile, her ID card and most of the contents of her wallet—everything that might be used to identify her. This amounted to a few credit cards and slips of paper and didn’t take up much room. He added his little notebook and a couple of his knives. He removed the slide from the Makarov pistol and then threw all the gun’s parts in, as well as two spare clips that he had been carrying on his belt. He crammed the remaining volume with currency, partly because he might need it and partly to make it bulge as though it were full of water. Then he closed the CamelBak’s port again.

Neatly folded in a pocket of his vest he kept a towel—actually half of a diaper, sufficiently threadbare that it could be compressed into a little packet. This was another thing that he had learned never to be without. He extracted this from its compartment and stuffed it into his waistband.

All his other stuff he crammed into the garbage bag. He was moving a little less stealthily now because the carter had made his way out onto a street that was not so crowded. Sokolov had saved out one zip tie, which he used to knot the bag shut.

He risked a peek out from under the tarp and saw the tower of the hotel a couple of hundred meters ahead.

Even if his jogger disguise were perfect, it wouldn’t do for him to jump out from under a tarp on a cart in plain view of the bellhops, or of anyone for that matter. And he still had to get rid of the garbage bag. He flipped his mobile open again and reviewed his snapshots one more time. The other day, after looking at this hotel, they had crossed the street to the waterfront and done some reconnoitering there. Though much of it was built-up and crowded ferry terminals, some of it, farther to the north, was a slum of seedy docks and rubbishy stretches of disused shoreline. He found a snapshot of that general part of the waterfront, then got the carter’s attention by hissing at him.

They were now peering at each other through a little gap under the edge of the tarp. Sokolov made a finger-crooking motion. The carter reached his hand under the tarp. Sokolov handed him the phone. The carter pulled it out and looked at it for a few moments, then nodded and thrust it back underneath. Sokolov took it and shoved it into a small external pocket on the CamelBak.

He had worked out a way that he could look out from under the edge of the tarp and thus keep an eye on where they going. From the heavy traffic of the boulevard they moved off onto a smaller and quieter frontage road that ran between it and the shore and got to a place where there was surprisingly little traffic. He could hear water lapping and smell the unmistakable stink of waterfront. He risked pulling the edge of the tarp back, but the carter, without looking back, shook his head and spoke some kind of warning that made Sokolov freeze. A few seconds later, a bicyclist whizzed past them from behind.

But a minute later the carter diverted onto a ramp that ran down onto a rickety pier, brought the cart to a stop, and lit a cigarette. After puffing on it for a minute or so, he suddenly peeled the tarp back and muttered something.

Sokolov rolled out onto his feet, pulling the garbage bag behind him. He executed a 360-degree pirouette, scanning in all directions for witnesses. Seeing none, he completed another spin, moving faster, and let go of the garbage bag. It flew about four meters and sank in water that probably would not have come up to the middle of his thigh, had he been so unwise as to wade into it. But that was enough to conceal the bag perfectly, since this water was not easy to see through, and the bag was black.

Turning his back on the splash, Sokolov noted that the carter had already discovered his tip waiting for him in the bottom of the cart: another brick of magenta bills. This disappeared instantly into the man’s trousers. He was saying something to Sokolov. Thanking him, probably. Sokolov ignored him and broke into an easy jog. In less than a minute he was out on the waterfront, headed for the hotel tower, loping from one patch of shade to the next, and trying not to listen to the screaming alarm bells that were going off in his mind. For he had spent the entire day hoping that no one would see him. And now he was being watched, pointed out, remarked on, gawked at by a thousand people. But they were not—he kept reminding himself—doing it because they knew who or what he was. They were doing it in the same way they’d stare at any Western jogger crazy enough to go out in the midday sun.

OLIVIA MADE IT all the way down to street level before she fully took in the fact that she was barefoot. She had been blown out of her shoes. They were up in the office with the Russian dog-of-war.

In a hypothetical footrace between Olivia barefoot and Olivia in high-heeled career-girl shoes, over uneven, rubble-strewn ground, it was not clear which Olivia would stand the best chance of winning. It probably depended on how long it took barefoot Olivia to step on a shard of glass and slice her foot open. Not very long, unless she was careful.

The building had an old front that faced toward the building that had just blown up, and, on the opposite side, a new front, still under construction, facing toward a commercial district in the making. Access to the latter was complicated by its being an active construction zone, but she knew how to get there, because the people who had trained her in London had drilled it into her that she must always know every possible way of getting out of a building. So instead of taking the obvious exit through the front, which she envisioned as an ankle-deep surf zone of broken glass, she doubled back and followed the escape route she had already scouted through the construction zone. This changed from day to day as temporary barriers were erected and removed between the various shops and offices that the workers were creating. Today, though, they had left all the doors open as they had fled the building, so all that Olivia really needed to do was pursue daylight while scanning the floor ahead of her for dropped nails.

There were none. Western construction workers might leave dropped nails on the floor, but it seemed that Chinese picked them up.

And so she made it out into the relatively undevastated side of the building, which backed up onto the rim of a man-made crater several hundred meters in diameter, guarded by temporary fencing. Visitors to China often spoke of a “forest of cranes,” but this was more akin to a savannah, being largely open ground with a few widely spaced cranes looming over it. Its natural fauna were construction workers, and right now, a couple of dozen of them were gazing, with horrified expressions, in her general direction.

No, they were gazing in her exact direction.

Feminist thinkers might argue with social conservatives as to whether women’s tendency to be extremely self-conscious about personal appearance was a natural trait—the result of Darwinian forces—or an arbitrary, socially constructed habit. But whatever its origin, the fact was that when Olivia walked out of a building to find a large number of strange men staring at her, she felt self-conscious in a way she hadn’t a few seconds earlier. Lacking a mirror, she put her hands to her face and her hair. She was expecting them to come away caked with dust. They came away glistening and red.

Oh dear.

She was not a fainter, and she doubted that the wounds were going to cost her an important amount of blood. The voice of a first aid instructor came back to her: If I were to take a shot glass full of tomato juice and throw it into your face … But there was no way that these guys were going to let a bleeding, barefoot woman simply wander off alone into the streets. Two of them were already running toward her with hands reaching out in a manner that, in normal circumstances, would have seemed just plain ungentlemanly. What would have been designated, in a Western office, as a hostile environment was soon in full swing as numerous rough strong hands were all over her, easing her to a comfortable perch on a chair that was produced as if by magic, feeling through her hair to find bumps and lacerations. Three different first aid kits were broken open at her feet; older and wiser men began to lodge objections at the profligate use of supplies, darkly suggesting that it was all because she was a pretty girl. A particularly dashing young man skidded up to her on his knees (he was wearing hard-shell knee pads) and, in an attitude recalling the prince on the final page of Cinderella, fit a pair of used flip-flops onto her feet.

Getting an ambulance during this particular half-hour window of time was completely out of the question, so they shoved a couple of bamboo poles through the legs of her chair, lashed them in place, and turned it into a makeshift palanquin on which Olivia was borne, like a Jewish bride, around the edge of the crater to a place where it was possible to hail a taxi. The chair ride was fun if only because Olivia could not stop thinking about the Brits who had trained her at MI6 and their insistence that she avoid any situation that might draw undue attention to herself. Fortunately she had so many first aid supplies wrapped around her head at this point that no one would be able to pick her out from a random lineup of mummies and burn victims.

THE TAXI BOLTED forward and disappeared off the end of the pier. The ensuing sound effect—a crash, rather than a splash—told Zula that it had nose-dived into the deck of the boat.

The van’s velocity dropped to almost zero, which gave Zula a clear look through the windshield—or as clear as was possible, given that it was coated with dust and had just been spiderwebbed by the impact. Behind the wheel, she saw nothing but a white balloon: the airbag. But she was certain that in the moment just before impact, she had got a subliminal glimpse of Yuxia’s face.

The van kept rolling forward, passing no more than arm’s length from Zula, and as it went by she got a direct view, through the driver’s-side window, of Yuxia in profile. The airbag was deflating and peeling away from her face, but she was staring dully ahead, stunned by its impact, and the weight of her foot must still be on the gas pedal. “Yuxia!” Zula cried, and she thought that Yuxia stirred; but the van accelerated and followed the taxi off the end of the pier.

It did not, however, completely disappear. For crashed vehicles were beginning to accumulate on the deck of the boat, and so the van only nosed over and ended up with its rear wheels projecting into the air above the pier’s deck.

This was not something that one saw every day, and so it held the attention of everyone: Zula, Abdallah Jones, his two surviving accomplices (for the gunman by the driver’s-side door had been leaning into the taxi at the moment of impact, had fared quite poorly, and was lying motionless on the pier), and the taxi driver. And so a peculiarly long span of time elapsed before they all came fully aware that they had been joined by a new participant. Before she had even turned to look at his face, Zula recognized him, in her peripheral vision, simply by the shape of his body, as Csongor. He was staggering toward her and Jones. He was considerably the worse for wear and making a visible effort to snap himself out of a kind of stunned and woozy condition. He must have tumbled out the van’s side door just after the impact. Zula began raising her arms to hug him, then stifled the impulse as she felt the handcuff’s chain go tense. Csongor was reaching into his trouser pocket.

Zula felt a painful jerk on her left wrist as Jones’s hand reached up and across her body. He snaked the back of his hand across her right breast and shoved rough fingernails into the gap between her armpit and her upper right arm, the steel of the cuff digging into her flesh. Since her left arm had no choice but to follow his right, it ended up pulled sideways across her belly.

His grip closed around her bicep. His elbow jammed into her chest as he flexed his arm, spinning her about so that he was face-to-face with her and her back was to Csongor. He was using her as a shield.

Jones’s left hand came up bearing the pistol and he put its barrel against her neck, torquing it awkwardly in his hand, aiming through her. She heard the safety come off. And at the same time, Csongor reached around the side of her head with his right arm, and she was surprised to see a pistol in his hand. Except for that, she could not see Csongor, but she could feel him. The pressure of Jones’s gun’s muzzle against her throat made her want to get away from it, so she leaned back and soon found her head resting comfortably against the heaving, thumping, sweaty barrel of Csongor’s chest. The two men were of roughly equal height, and Zula now found herself tightly sandwiched between them.

“Is that the true Makarov or the Hungarian variant?” Jones asked, in a light, conversational tone. “Difficult for me to make out the markings at this distance.” He was alluding to the fact that Csongor was holding the weapon’s muzzle directly against his brow, just above one eye.

“I got it from a Russian.”

“Probably the real thing then,” Jones remarked. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you had the presence of mind to chamber a round.” He was gazing (Zula guessed) into Csongor’s eyes, hoping to read a clue there.

Which he apparently did. “I see less than perfect certainty on your face,” Jones said in a tone of drawling amusement. “Still, it would be imprudent for me to assume that there’s no round in the chamber. I happen to be quite familiar with the Makarov, since they are all over Afghanistan. I sense that you are a newcomer to it. I’m curious: Did you put the safety on?”

“The safety is most certainly not on at this time,” Csongor said.

“Oh, but that’s not what I asked. I asked whether you had put it on, at any point, after you chambered a round and cocked it. You seem like the sort who would. The way Ivanov spoke of you. Your protectiveness of Zula. You are thoughtful, careful, deliberate.”

Csongor said nothing.

“I only ask,” Jones continued, “because the Makarov has an interesting quirk: when you put the safety on, it decocks the hammer. Taking the safety off doesn’t re-cock it. No. You’re left with a weapon that’s loaded but not yet in a condition to fire. Quite unlike Ivanov’s fine 1911 here, which is both loaded and fully cocked. If I apply even the slightest amount of pressure to the trigger, I’ll put a rather large piece of metal all the way through Zula’s neck and from there into your heart, killing you both so rapidly you’ll never even know it happened.”

Sirens were approaching: more than one cop car, making its way around the inlet, headed their way. Jones glanced in their direction for a moment, then centered his gaze on Csongor’s face again and continued: “You’re not even going to get the romantic experience of lying there bleeding to death with her decapitated corpse on top of you, because a hydrostatic shock wave is going to travel straight up your aorta into your brain and render you unconscious and maybe even pop out your eyeballs. You, on the other hand—should you decide to take any action—have a very long trigger pull ahead of you. It’s that first round out of the Makarov’s magazine that is the bitch. Because the hammer isn’t cocked, you’re going to have to pull hard on that trigger for what seems like forever in order to get it drawn back for the first shot. And since your finger is about two inches in front of my left eyeball, it’s going to be bloody difficult for you to do this in a way that’s going to surprise me, isn’t it?”

Csongor said nothing. But Zula could sense in his breathing that Jones’s words were hitting home. Between that, and the approaching cop cars, the fight was draining out of him.

“What are the odds that you can make it to the end of that trigger pull while you and Zula are still alive, Csongor?”

Jones was staring straight into Csongor’s eyes, unblinking, awaiting his submission. “Did I mention, by the way, that being handcuffed to this bitch is a serious pain in the arse? I should like nothing more than to be rid of her.”

“Csongor,” Zula said. “Listen. Can you hear me? Say something.”

“Yes,” Csongor said.

“I’d like you to have a look at the pistol that Mr. Jones is holding up to my neck. Do you see it?”

A pause, then, “Yes, I am looking at it.”

“Do you note anything remarkable about the condition of its hammer?” Zula asked him.

Jones, still looking at Csongor, had been surprised by Zula’s entry into the conversation. Now, though, he smiled broadly. Zula, it seemed, was doing his work for him. Reminding Csongor, in case he’d failed to appreciate it the first time, that the 1911 was only a microsecond away from killing both of them.

Then the grin was replaced by astonishment as Csongor’s trigger finger went into motion, executing that long hard pull that Jones had only just warned him of.

THE BELLHOPS WHO would see Sokolov running in had never seen him run out of the hotel. In a smaller place, this might have aroused suspicion. But this place was forty stories high, and he knew that they would think nothing of it as long as he didn’t act in a way that would arouse suspicion. If working as a security consultant had taught him nothing else, it had taught him how to walk in and out of expensive hotels. He jogged up the street, turned into the hotel’s huge curving entry drive, slowed to a trot, and entered the shade of its awning, which was big enough to shelter twenty cars. There he dropped to a brisk walk, checked his wristwatch, and pretended to press one of its little buttons. He pulled his towel out of the CamelBak’s external pocket, unfolded it, wiped his face, and then draped it over his head like an NBA player just sent to the bench. He put the CamelBak’s drinking tube into his mouth and pretended to suck on it while pacing back and forth for half a minute or so along a line of potted shrubs that had been planted along the edge of the drive. These grew in big rectangular boxes of concrete, surfaced with pebbles and filled with dirt. Interspersed with them were waste receptacles, constructed in the same manner, with sand beds on top where waiting taxi drivers could stub out their cigarettes, and open slots below where refuse could be deposited.

At this point he had no particular plan, other than that he would enter the hotel and then try to think of something. But now, glancing into one of the waste receptacles, Sokolov noticed something that looked like a credit card, though emblazoned with the logo of this hotel. It was a key card that some departing guest had thrown away; or perhaps a taxi driver had found it abandoned in his backseat and had tossed it there. On the pretext of throwing away some small bit of debris, Sokolov picked it up and palmed it. Then, using his other hand to wipe his face with the towel—he hoped that this might complicate future analysis of the surveillance video—he approached the hotel’s entrance. He bent down, letting the towel drape around his head, and pretended to pull the key card out of his sock. A bellhop opened the door for him and gave him a cheerful greeting. Sokolov nodded and entered the lobby.

What was their ridiculous word for gymnasticheskii zal? He was scanning the directional signs, trying not to be too obvious about it.

Fitness Center. Of course.

It was on the third floor, a nice one, with windows overlooking the waterfront. Key card access only. He swiped the card he had stolen and got a red light. Rapped the card against the window and got the attention of an attendant, a young woman, who smiled and hurried to the door to let him in.

They had tiny bottles of water and bananas. Thank God. But he had to pace himself or it would look very strange indeed. A grid of pigeonholes, just by the entrance, served as a place for guests to stash their belongings while they worked out. Sokolov slid his CamelBak into one of these. Stuffed with cash, it did not sag and wobble the way a water-filled one should have, and so he pulled it out and put it on the top shelf where it might not be so conspicuous. Half a dozen other pigeonholes were occupied, two with women’s bags, the rest with only a few small items such as key cards and mobile phones. Sokolov went into the men’s bathroom, made sure he was alone, turned on a faucet, bent over, and drank from it for a while. Dust from this morning’s activities was frozen into the hairs on his arms. He rinsed them clean and splashed water on his face. Exiting the bathroom, he plucked two bottles of water and a banana from the display and carried them over to a bank of treadmills. This was served by three large flat-panel television sets, two showing CNN and one showing a Chinese news channel. Sokolov got on a treadmill that was closer to a CNN screen but in view of the Chinese one, and walked on the thing for a while, drinking water, eating the banana, and monitoring local news coverage. Most of this seemed to be about the diplomatic conference. There was a brief story that seemed to be about a fire in Xiamen. But that was only a guess, based on the graphics and a few fleeting video clips of fire trucks and ambulances in a crowded street, people caked with dust, limping and stumbling, supported by astonished bystanders.

Of course they would claim it was a gas explosion. Everything was always a gas explosion. But Sokolov knew that the PSB investigators now working on the case were under no illusions.

He spent forty-five minutes on the treadmill and half an hour lifting weights. Guests came and went. As they did, Sokolov tallied them: gender, nationality, size, shape, age. Which pigeonhole they put their stuff in.

An Asian man came in; Sokolov guessed Japanese or Korean. He was trim, well put together. He shoved his wallet and a phone into one of the pigeonholes. Sokolov, moving from one machine to another, walked past him and judged him to be of the same height. Shoe size was more difficult to judge at a glance. After wandering around the Fitness Center and taking an inventory of its machines and facilities, this man boarded an elliptical trainer and set it up for a half-hour program, then turned his attention to a magazine.

Sokolov went to the entryway and set a half-empty water bottle down on the counter, then got his CamelBak down, shoved one arm through a shoulder strap, and let it swing free while he poked the other arm through the other strap. It knocked the water bottle off the counter. He cursed and ran to pick it up, but it had already leaked most of its contents into a puddle on the floor. The attendant, delighted to have something to do, ran over, assessed the situation, and then went to grab some towels, assuring Sokolov that it was all okay and she would take care of it.

While she had her back turned, Sokolov turned to face the pigeonholes. He pulled out the Asian man’s wallet and flipped it open. His key card was right there in the easiest-to-reach pocket. Sokolov pulled it out and replaced it with the one he had stolen from the wastebasket outside, then put the wallet back.

He then went into the sauna, which was unoccupied, and slipped the stolen key card into his sock. He sat in the sauna for twenty minutes.

When the Japanese or Korean man finished his exercise routine, he retrieved his belongings from the pigeonhole and exited the Fitness Center with Sokolov a few paces ahead of him. They ended up in the elevator lobby together. Sokolov, pretending to be distracted by a phone call, was slow to get on the elevator; the other courteously held the door for him. Sokolov scanned the button panel, reached to hit the button for 21, then hesitated, startled to find that his floor had already been selected. He hit the button again anyway. During the elevator ride, he pretended to lose his connection and, after uttering a couple of mild curses, began fiddling with the buttons, trying to make a new call. He was still doing so when the doors opened and the other man exited. Trailing well behind him, Sokolov ambled down the corridor. The man stopped before the door to Room 2139 and swiped his key card, only to get a red light. Sokolov kept on walking and disappeared around the next corner.

A few moments later he peeked back around the corner to see the man’s retreating back. He was headed for the elevators, going down to the lobby to get a new key card made.

Sokolov went to Room 2139, opened the door, and made a quick inventory of its closet and dresser. The guest’s name was Jeremy Jeong and he was an American citizen (he had left his passport in a desk drawer). Sokolov established that the best place to hide was under the bed. In most hotels this would not have been the case because the bed was just a box, with no “under,” but this was a luxury place with real beds, and the bedspread hung down far enough to hide him. Once he was well situated there, he opened the CamelBak, pawed out the wads of money, and retrieved the pieces of the Makarov, which he quickly assembled into a functioning and loaded weapon. He hoped to God he would not need it, but to leave it in pieces would have been foolish.

He was stuffing the money back into the CamelBak when he heard the door opening and Jeremy Jeong coming in.

ABDALLAH JONES PULLED the trigger of his own weapon, causing its hammer to fly forward and pinch down painfully on the little finger of Zula’s right hand, which she had inserted into the gap between it and the weapon’s frame. This prevented it from striking the firing pin. Nothing happened.

Jones did not have time to take in and understand his own weapon’s failure to fire. The sight of Csongor’s trigger finger in motion had thrown him into an involuntary movement. He snapped his head around to the left, pushing the Makarov’s muzzle away. Zula saw and heard it discharge and saw Jones’s head jerk away from it.

A minute earlier Jones had grabbed her right arm and coiled her body up against his to make her a human shield. Now they uncoiled. Jones pivoted away from her, pulling the pistol loose from her finger, leaving an icy sensation in her fingertip that she knew meant serious damage. His left arm, still holding the gun, flailed back as he rotated away from her. His right hand let go of her arm and trailed away until the handcuff chain brought it up short like a dog that had run to the end of its leash, and then she felt a few more layers of wrist skin being macerated by the steel bracelet, and she toppled forward. Jones was near the end of a full one-eighty, and was collapsing to the surface of the pier. He ended up spread-eagled on his back, his right hand pulling Zula down—she had no choice, now, but to fall down on top of him—and his left sprawled out on the pier, still maintaining a grip on that pistol.

Zula fell. But as she did she launched herself as best she could in the general direction of that gun arm. Her right shoulder happened to come down on Jones’s breastbone, forcing the air out of his lungs, and as she was bouncing off it she flung her right hand out and planted it on Jones’s forearm, pinning the gun hand to the surface of the pier.

Only after she had reinforced that with a knee against his elbow did she dare to look at the side of Jones’s head. She saw red there, but it was the red of burns and abrasions, not of pumping blood. The pistol had gone off right next to the side of his head, but the bullet had not penetrated his skull.

Csongor didn’t know this; he was still standing there watching Jones and Zula come to rest, unwilling to fire the pistol again lest he accidentally strike Zula, and probably under the impression that it wasn’t necessary. He’d already shot Jones in the head once, and, she sensed, he was a little stunned by his own behavior.

Loud banging noises began to sound from nearby, and Csongor looked up in alarm. Zula followed his gaze back over her shoulder and saw one of Jones’s comrades, perhaps ten meters away, firing a pistol wildly, holding it in one hand so that it bucked with each recoil, and not bothering to sight over the barrel.

The taxi driver chose this moment to make a break for it, and the shooter, following some kind of dumb reflex to attack whatever was moving, turned and fired a couple of rounds that knocked the man flat on his stomach.

Csongor’s eyes went to Zula; she had taken the highly imprudent step of removing her free hand from Jones’s gun arm and was using it to wave him away and down. He backed up a couple of steps, raising the pistol.

Noting violent movement in the corner of her eye, Zula turned her attention to the other surviving jihadist, who was making a dive for a loose gun that had fallen from the pocket of the man who had earlier run afoul of the taxi.

“Get out, the cops are coming anyway!” Zula shouted.

Csongor backed up two steps toward the edge of the pier, then, just as the other jihadist was opening fire, turned around and jumped off. Unlike the taxi, he did make a splash.

Zula heard a step behind her and then felt something hard pressing into the back of her neck. She removed her knee from Jones’s elbow.

“Thank you,” Jones said, a bit groggy, but coming around fast. He bent his arm, raising the gun, and then used it to gesture at the prone taxi driver, and then in the direction of where Csongor had jumped. He shouted a command in Arabic. This was acknowledged respectfully by the first gunman to have opened fire, who walked over to the taxi driver and shot him casually in the back of the head. Then he walked over to the edge of the pier and looked down into the water.

A series of booms sounded from below, and the man quietly toppled over the edge and disappeared.

“Polar bears and seals,” Jones remarked. He reached up with his cuffed hand, collapsing Zula’s arm, and grabbed her hair, which was frizzed out and eminently grabbable. He wrenched her head around with a violent sweeping movement of the arm and slammed her face into the pier, then rolled over on top of her, pinning her full-length to the deck with his body on top of hers. “I’m not shielding you, by the way,” he explained, “you’re shielding me. You know how polar bears hunt?”

“From below?”

“Very good. It’s so nice having an educated person around. Your man Csongor can see up, just barely, through the cracks between the planks. He knew exactly where my man was.”

The other gunman seemed to have arrived at the same realization and was now moving around nervously, edging toward the end of the pier where the boat was waiting and the water was deeper.

The sirens were getting very close. Jones propped himself up on his elbows, taking some of his considerable weight off Zula, and gazed curiously down the pier, then, for some reason, checked his watch. Blood dribbled from the wound on the side of his head and spattered the side of her face. She turned away from it and let it drain down the side of her neck. Her pinky was starting to throb. She glanced at it and saw the nail ripped out at the base, hanging on by a few shreds of cuticle, and blood coursing out.

The pier jerked beneath them. A few moments later, a massive thud sounded from somewhere. It wasn’t especially loud, but one had the impression it had traveled from an event, far away, that had been very loud indeed.

Zula couldn’t see what the cop cars were doing, but she knew that they were close, no more than a couple of hundred feet away. There were two of them. One, then the other, turned off its siren.

Then nothing happened for half a minute. Jones just watched, fascinated, and checked his watch again.

Then the sirens came back on again, and the cars went into motion. Their frequency Dopplered down, and their volume began to diminish.

The cops were driving away from them at high speed.

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” said Jones, switching into a posh accent. He looked down at her, as if suddenly surprised to find her underneath him. “That bang was the sound of a very brave man martyring himself. Somewhere near the conference center. It seems to have drawn the cops’ attention. Which was the whole idea, of course. We have had to do rather a lot of improvising today. Speaking of which, you and I are now going to execute a very nonimprovised long walk off a short pier. If you work with me and come along nicely, I shall permit you to keep your teeth.”

JEREMY JEONG DOUBLE-BOLTED his door, which Sokolov approved of. One could not be too careful. Then he stripped off his gym togs and entered the bathroom and turned on the shower.

Sokolov rolled out from under the bed, stripped naked, and stuffed what was left of his clothes into a hotel laundry bag that he found clipped to a hanger. He dropped the CamelBak into the same and then rolled it up into a neat bundle. Having already marked the locations of the clothes he wanted, he was able to find and put on underwear, socks, shirt, and a business suit in less time than it would take Jeremy to shampoo his hair. He stuffed a necktie into his pocket and shoved his feet into a pair of shoes—a bit tight, but tolerable—and then slipped out the door, letting it close softly behind him. He took the elevator down to a mezzanine level, went into a men’s room, entered a stall, sat on a toilet, and put on the necktie, then tied his shoes. From the CamelBak he retrieved the little notebook where he had written the address of the spy woman. He exited the stall and checked his appearance in the mirror. The tie was a little askew, so he fixed it. Then he took the elevator to the lobby and approached the concierge, smiling helplessly.

“Sorry, English not so good.”

The concierge, a dazzling woman of about thirty, tried a few other Western languages on him, and they decided to stick with English.

“There is nice Chinese lady here. Extremely helpful to my company. I wish to say thanks. When I get back to Ukraine, I send her nice present, you understand?”

The concierge understood.

“Is to be surprise. Nice surprise.”

The concierge nodded.

“Here is address of woman. I try to write down correctly. Not good at writing Chinese as you can see. I think this is it.”

The woman’s eyes scanned the rudely fashioned characters, passing easily over some of them, snagging on others. Once or twice she allowed her flawless brow to wrinkle just a little. But in the end she nodded and beamed. “This is an address on Gulangyu Island,” she said.

“Yes. The little island just over there.” Sokolov waved toward the waterfront. “Problem is, when I get back to Ukraine, I cannot write woman’s address in Chinese on FedEx document. Need to have it in English. So my question for you is, can you please translate this address into English words for FedEx?”

“Of course!” said the concierge, delighted to be part of sending a lovely surprise gift to a nice Chinese lady. “It will be just a moment.”

And now a minute or two of moderate anxiety as Sokolov watched her write out the words on a hotel notepad, while handling two interruptions. He thought it very likely that Jeremy Jeong would not even notice that one of his suits was missing (he had three of them) for hours; and even then it would seem so bizarre that he would hesitate to mention it. But there was always the possibility that he was hypervigilant and prone to summoning the law at the slightest pretext, in which case Sokolov really needed to be out of here.

The concierge gave him another smile and slid the paper across the counter to him. Sokolov accepted it with profuse thanks, walked out the door, climbed into a taxi, and took it to another Western business hotel half a mile up the road. There, he availed himself of a free computer in the lobby, where he typed the spy’s English address into Google Maps.

This yielded a close-up view of an irregular street pattern, which told him nothing, so he zoomed out until he could see the whole island. He checked the scale and verified his general impression that Gulangyu was no more than a couple of kilometers in breadth. He tried to get a sense of its layout, its cardinal directions: basically, how to get to and from the ferry terminal even if he were lost. Then he turned on the satellite imagery. From this a few things were obvious. First of all, its transportation system was much more finely meshed than was hinted by the street plan, which only depicted perhaps 10 percent of the roads and rights-of-way. Or perhaps those were not roads, but alleys and walkways, private footpaths among the buildings. Second, the buildings were all roofed in tasteful earthtones, contrasting with the garish tile and sheet metal that tended to protect Xiamen’s buildings from the rain. Third, there was a lot of greenery. Fourth, the place names tended to be schools, academies, colleges, and the like; and the presence of large oval running tracks and so on suggested that they were rather nice schools.

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way. The slums of Lagos, Belfast, Port-au-Prince, and Los Angeles each would have presented a completely different and bewildering panoply of risks. But just from looking at this map, Sokolov knew that he could go to Gulangyu and walk its streets and make his way in the place just as well as he could in a parky suburb of Toronto or London.

He did not want to arouse undue attention by printing it out, so he sketched a rudimentary map onto the back of the note he had received from the concierge and spent a while examining the satellite view of the building in question, getting a rough idea as to its layout and the general shape of its grounds. He noted that there was a hotel nearby, standing on considerably higher ground. Its website informed him that it had a terrace where drinks were served in the afternoons.

He bought a man-purse from a store in the hotel lobby and dropped his CamelBak and other few possessions into it, then carried it down to the waterfront where he took the next ferry to Gulangyu.

BY NO MEANS had the planning of the taxi-ramming operation developed to an advanced state during the fifteen seconds between its conception in Yuxia’s mind and its execution. She had not, as an example, had time to communicate any part of it to Csongor. Consequently he’d been forced to figure it out by himself and to brace for impact by putting his head against the seat in front of him. Like a lot of good plans, though, this one was extremely simple. The bad men were up to something involving a boat. Yuxia could put the sole tool at her disposal (the van) to use in wrecking same, and thereby prevent them from doing whatever.

High mountain girl that she was, she didn’t know much about boats. She was now learning that all her intuitions about them were considerably off base. There had been no question in her mind that having a taxi—to say nothing of a taxi followed by a minivan—crash into the top of one of these things would completely destroy it. Now she was dumbfounded to see that the boat was not destroyed. It still floated; it was still a boat.

Not to trivialize what had happened. Undoubtedly it had been a very bad day for the boat. It might be damaged beyond repair. But it still floated. Gazing out the destroyed windshield while hanging facedown in the safety belt, she could kind of see how it worked: the deck might be wood, but the hull was steel. And because it was floating, when things crashed into it, the water acted like a shock absorber of basically infinite capacity. The comparative frailty of the wooden deck planks actually worked to its advantage, since in snapping and bending they soaked up a lot of damage. And the stacks of empty wooden cargo pallets on top of the deck had collapsed as the taxi had fallen through them, further cushioning the impact.

Another amazing fact: Qian Yuxia had ended up on the boat! This had not been the plan at all. The idea had been to stop on the pier. But she had not reckoned on the air bag. There must have been a few moments of inattention, following the crash, when she had let her foot press down on the gas.

“Csongor?” she called. But he was no longer in the vehicle.

A phone started ringing. Not hers. It was down somewhere near her foot…

It was in her boot! It had gone flying, bounced around the interior of the vehicle, and ended up dropping into the open top of her blue boot. It was now wedged against her right ankle bone. She tucked her foot closer, reached in, and pulled it out.

“Wei?”

“Wei? Yuxia?”

“Who’s this?”

“Marlon.”

“Why are you calling your own phone?” For she had recognized this one as his.

“Never mind. Are you okay?”

“I’m talking on the phone, aren’t I?”

“Are you still in the van?”

“Yes, but the van is—”

“I know. I’m looking at it. You’d better get out of it.”

“Why?”

“Because bad shit is going down on that pier—ohmygod.”

Marlon didn’t have to explain why he was saying this, because Yuxia could now hear gunfire behind her. Gunfire and sirens.

Bracing her right elbow against the steering wheel to support the weight of her upper body, Yuxia reached out with her left, found the door handle, and jerked back on it. Something went snick inside the door, but it didn’t open. It must have been jammed by one of today’s many violent impacts. Bashing her shoulder into it made no difference. She transferred the phone into her other hand so that she could reach down with her right and undo the seat belt. This caused her to fall forward into the steering wheel and sound the horn. “I’ll call you back,” she shouted, and snapped the phone shut and, for lack of a better place to put it just now, dropped it into her boot again. Then, using various hand- and footholds in the van’s interior, she clambered up into the backseat and across to the open side door.

Beyond this point, her way forward would take her across an exceedingly dangerous-looking terrain of crumpled taxi and splintered wood. Some combination of being struck in the face by the air bag and the boat’s gentle bobbing made her queasy and unsure of her movements. She crouched in the door frame while trying to recover her balance. She saw, and was seen by, an older man who had come forward from the boat’s pilothouse to inspect the damage. She considered saying something but got the idea, based on the man’s appearance, that he might not speak Mandarin. Drawing slowly on a cigarette, he gave her a most unpleasant look. She felt aggrieved by this, until she remembered that she had just done everything in her power to destroy his boat, which was probably the source of his livelihood.

It might have developed into an exchange of curses or even of blows had they not been distracted by the appearance of two figures above them on the edge of the pier: the tall black man and Zula. Yuxia controlled a sudden, ridiculous impulse to wave and call hello.

The black man said, “I am going to count to three and then jump. You may jump, or not.” Yuxia understood that, since the speaker was handcuffed to Zula and was much bigger than her, this was both a mean sort of joke and a threat.

In the end they jumped together and landed awkwardly on an open and uncratered stretch of deck. Zula cried out in pain and held a bloody fist protectively against her stomach. This finally got Yuxia moving; she clambered down out of the van’s door frame, thinking to go and see what was wrong. The black man looked at her curiously, but then turned his attention to the pissed-off skipper and gave him an order in a language Yuxia did not recognize. The skipper trotted back in the direction of the pilothouse.

Whatever pain had caused Zula to cry out was now subsiding. She looked up and spied Yuxia. A happy and grateful look came onto her face, but only for the briefest moment; then she looked anguished, horrified. “Yuxia! Get off! Jump into the water now!”

Yuxia hesitated, then realized that her girlfriend was probably giving her some good advice. But during that interval, another man had jumped down onto the deck from the pier. He was carrying a gun. At a word from the tall black man, he leveled the weapon at Yuxia, holding it in both hands and staring at her down the length of its barrel. Once his eye had connected with hers through its iron sights, he gave it a little twitch indicating that she should approach. She still had thoughts of taking Zula’s advice, but then the boat’s engine roared and it surged forward, causing the van to settle. Yuxia had no choice but to scamper away as the van toppled sideways off the crushed taxi. This only brought her closer to the gunman, who showed admirable focus in mostly ignoring the slow-motion vehicular avalanche taking place only a few meters away from him.

She was only a couple of meters away from Zula at this point, so she just walked over to her. Zula threw her bloody right fist around Yuxia’s shoulder, and Yuxia put both of her arms around Zula’s waist. “Thank you,” Zula said, starting to cry. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work,” Yuxia said.

The tall black man stuck his handgun into his waistband, then reached into his pocket. “Since the two of you are on such affectionate terms,” he said, pulling out a silver key, “let’s make it official.” He unlocked the manacle from his right wrist, then peeled Yuxia’s left arm away from Zula’s waist and snapped it onto her. The two women were now joined at their left wrists, which, as they immediately discovered, meant that they couldn’t face in the same direction. If one of them walked forward, the other had to walk backward, or else they had to do something awkward with their arms, and move shoulder to shoulder. Their captor understood this very well. Seizing the manacle’s chain with one hand, he towed them aft, around the side of the pilothouse, to an open space on the stern that was shaded under a canvas awning. Rummaging around in a toolbox, he produced a hammer and a large nail. He drove the nail about halfway into a deck plank, then dragged them over, forced them down, pressed the chain to the deck right next to the nail, and pounded on the nail until it had been bent over the chain and its bowed head driven deeply into the wood.

Having thus secured them, he moved forward again and assisted the remainder of the crew—half a dozen men, all told—in shoving first the van and then the taxi off the side of the boat and into the water. The boat by now had crossed to the middle of the inlet and had laid in a direct course toward the great bridge that crossed over the channel by which it connected to the sea. Though most of the inlet was quite shallow, this part of it seemed to be a dredged ship channel. Both vehicles sank immediately and disappeared into murky water.

Above them, it seemed as though every police and emergency aid vehicle in the People’s Republic of China was screaming across the bridge, all headed in the same direction, and all ignoring them completely.

As the men busied themselves throwing the vehicles overboard, Yuxia felt a momentary buzzing sensation against her ankle. She reached into her boot, pulled out Marlon’s phone, and checked the screen. It was showing a text message: TURN OFF THE RINGER.

As she stared at it, a second message came in: RED BUTTON ON SIDE.

She flipped the phone over and found a tiny red button with a picture of a bell on it. She flicked it to the off position and then dropped the phone back into her boot.

CSONGOR OBSERVED THE departure of the boat from a squatting position in the shallow water beneath the pier. Only his head was above the water. He was peeking from behind an old piling. The rhythmic surge of the waves rocked his body to and fro. He had already learned that it was inadvisable to hug the piling for balance, since it was covered with barnacles that turned it into a sort of 3D saw blade, and the general effect of the waves was to rub him against it. Little wavelets fetched up against the gray-white carapaces of the barnacles and stained them pink, for blood was emerging in impressive volumes from the semifloating body of the man Csongor had shot a few moments ago.

His entire body was shaking uncontrollably, but not because he was immersed in water. Much had happened in the last few hours that went far beyond any of his past experiences, but the one that he couldn’t get out of his mind was that he had put a gun to a man’s head and pulled the trigger. Somehow this was far more upsetting than having been shot at. And actually having shot and killed this other fellow had made curiously little impression on him, though he reckoned it would come back to occupy his nightmares later.

His jittery reaction was not doing him any favors now. He was simply watching, from a few meters away, as a band of terrorists ran off with someone he cared about. And yet no amount of thinking could make the situation any better. He had already tried a frontal assault. Only Zula’s quick thinking—how did she know so much about guns!?—had saved him. The advantage of surprise had been pissed away. The only action he could take now was to wade in closer and start blasting away with the Makarov. But they would be waiting for that; and from this distance, with shaking hands, he was as likely to hit Zula or Yuxia as he was to hit one of the terrorists. He had heard the tall black man speaking about the suicide bomber, and he had watched with his own eyes as the cops in the two squad cars had listened to orders on their radios, turned around, and raced away to more important duties. So even if he had been willing to simply summon the police and hand himself over to the law, he would not have been able to get their attention.

The exchange of gunfire on the top of the pier had, of course, been witnessed by everyone in the neighborhood, and so all other small craft had darted into shore and the inlet had gone perfectly still except for the churning wake of the terrorists’ boat, laboring out toward the open sea, listing and wallowing under the weight of two wrecked vehicles. The shoreline itself was deserted.

The only exception was a small open motorboat that buzzed out from a slip a few hundred meters away and turned to run parallel to shore, headed for the pier where Csongor had been hiding. The noise of its outboard motor quavered up and down like a tone-deaf person trying to carry a tune, and it took a somewhat meandering course at first. But its pilot—a tall slender fellow in a douli, or the traditional cone-shaped hat of the Chinese workingman—seemed to be a quick learner. He gained confidence as he went along, and as he drew up alongside the pier he nudged the big hat back on his head to reveal his face: it was Marlon.

Csongor stood up and smiled, which, if you thought about it, was a perfectly idiotic thing to do under the circumstances. Marlon grinned back. Then the grin went away as he realized that he was headed for the muddy shore with no way to stop himself and not enough room to turn around.

Csongor stepped out in front of the boat, leaned forward, and put his hands against its bow, which was covered with scraps of bald tires. Its momentum forced him to back up a few steps, but very soon he brought it to a stop and then swiveled it around so that it was pointing outward again. It was made of wood, perhaps four meters long, more elongated than a rowboat, yet not quite as slender as a canoe. Its most recent paint job had been red, but the one before that had been yellow, and in its earlier history it had been blue. Made to carry things, rather than people, it was not abundantly supplied with benches: there was one in the stern for the operator of the outboard motor, and one at the prow, more of a shelf than a seat.

Ivanov’s man-purse was strapped diagonally across Csongor’s shoulder. The whole time he had been squatting beneath the pier, it had floated next to him, gradually sinking as it took on water. He peeled it off over his head and threw it into the boat, then got his hands on its gunwale, flexed his knees, jumped, and vaulted in, pitching forward headfirst, praying the little craft wouldn’t simply capsize. It seemed excitingly close to doing exactly that but righted itself. Marlon gave it some throttle, and it groaned out along the pier and into the open water of the inlet. “Get down,” he suggested. Csongor slid off the vessel’s front seat and into the dirty water slopping around in the bottom of the hull. He still felt ridiculously exposed. But when he peered forward over the bow, he noted that he could no longer see the terrorists’ boat, which meant that they could not see him. And that was all that mattered. If they looked back, all they would see was a skiff being piloted by a man in a very common style of hat. No large armed Hungarians would be visible unless Marlon drew very close to them, which seemed unlikely.

“Did you buy this, or steal it?” Csongor asked, in a tone of voice making it clear that he didn’t actually care.

“I think I bought it,” Marlon said. He was piloting with one hand and texting with the other. “The owner didn’t speak much putonghua.”

Csongor was familiarizing himself with some random stuff in the bottom of the boat that its ex-owner had not had the presence of mind to remove during what must have been an extraordinarily hasty and poorly-thought-out transaction. There was a blue umbrella, battered to the point where it could no longer fold up. Experimenting with this, he found that he could get it mostly open and use it to shade his stubbled head from the direct light of the sun. Two oars served as backup propulsion. A plastic container of the type used in the West to contain yogurt served as a bailing device. Csongor, having nothing else to do, went to work bailing. He was thirsty. He looked around and noted that Marlon hadn’t had time to procure drinking water.

AFTER THEY HAD put about half a mile of distance between themselves and the Xiamen shore, Jones knelt down and opened both halves of the handcuffs. A box of first aid supplies was produced from somewhere. Most of its contents were claimed immediately by Jones, who, with help from a member of the crew, pressed a stack of sterile pads against the side of his head and then turbaned it into place with a roll of gauze. With what remained, Yuxia went to work on Zula’s pinky. Zula had become used to keeping this balled up and pressed to her stomach, and so peeling it away from her belly and straightening the finger was a painful and bloody undertaking. It hurt and bled all out of proportion to the actual seriousness of the wound. Yuxia poured water onto it from a bottle, washing away the blood that had gone all dry and sticky. The nail wasn’t quite ready to come off and so they left it on. Then they wrapped gauze around it until her pinky had become a clumsy white baseball bat of a thing.

Meanwhile, just next to them, men were making tea. Zula had been here long enough to recognize all the elements of the ritual. The local procedure involved a lot of spillage, which here was taken care of by a baking sheet that looked as if it had once been used as a shield by riot police. A flat perforated rack was set into this, and resting on the rack were tiny bowls, smaller than shot glasses, old and stained. It seemed terribly important to the men on the boat that Zula accept one of them and drink. So this she did. The first sip of tea only reminded her of how desperately thirsty she was, so she tossed the rest of it back; when she set the bowl down, it was replenished immediately. Yuxia was next. Then Jones had his. Apparently they were considered guests.

She had never really understood the tea thing until this moment. Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.

The men on the vessel were not Middle Eastern and they were not Chinese, but depending on how light and emotion played over their faces, they showed clear signs of both ancestries. They spoke some other language than Chinese or Arabic, but there was at least one—the more competent of the two gunmen, also equipped with binoculars and the phone—who could switch to Arabic when he wanted to communicate with Jones. Zula got the sense that they were burning a lot of fuel during the first fifteen minutes of the voyage, probably trying to put distance between themselves and trouble. The place where they’d shot it out with Csongor could be seen from any number of high-rise apartment buildings; perhaps some curtain twitcher on an upper story had seen the whole thing and was watching their getaway. But even if this were the case, Jones had little to worry about, since there was nothing about this boat to distinguish it from all the others. They churned out into open water, then cut around the northern limb of the island, going right past the end of the runway, where a jetliner on its landing run passed so close overhead that Zula could count the wheels on its landing gear. A slow turn to the south brought them into the busiest zone, the strait between Xiamen and its industrial suburbs on the mainland, spanned by huge bridges and chockablock with much larger vessels.

“To the Heartless Island,” said Jones, apparently sensing Zula’s curiosity as to where they might be going.

“Come again?”

The skipper had cut the throttle, and the boat, after being slapped on the stern one time by its own wake, had slowed to a much more leisurely pace. They had merged comfortably into a stream of traffic—mostly boats just like this one, and passenger ferries—that weaved among huge anchored freighters like a stream flowing around boulders.

Jones nodded indefinitely toward a southern horizon cluttered with small islands, or perhaps some of them were headlands of the Asian continent, gangling out into the harbor. “Hub of the commercial fishing fleet,” he explained. “Economic migrants from all over China go there because they’ve been promised jobs. When they arrive, they find that there’s nothing for them and they can’t afford to go back. So they work as virtual slaves.” He nodded toward one of the crew members, who was refilling the teapot. “The place has an official name, obviously. But Heartless Island is what these people call it.”

If this had been a real conversation, Zula might now have made further inquiries. It seemed unnecessary though. She could piece it together easily enough. These men on the boat belonged to some Muslim ethnic group from the far west. They had been drawn to Heartless Island in the way that Jones described. Having no other way to make sense of their lives, they had been recruited by some sort of radical group, part of a network that was in touch with whoever Abdallah Jones hung out with. And when Jones had decided to come to China, these men had provided him with the support system he needed.

But she got the sense that he wasn’t finished. So she held her gaze on him. In turn, he regarded her with a look that was somewhat difficult to interpret, as one side of his face was distorted by swelling, and he was hardly the most easy-to-read man to begin with. “These men work with me,” he said, “because they choose to. I have no power over them. If they began to ignore my commands, or simply threw me overboard and left me to drown, the only consequences, for them, would be that their lives would suddenly become much simpler and safer. And so even if I were the type of man who was capable of forgiving and forgetting your attempt, just a few minutes ago, to get me shot in the head, I would have to be some kind of a fool to allow myself to be seen, by these men, as having shown such weakness. It is not the sort of thing that gains a man respect and influence in the Heartless Island milieu, if you follow me.”

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.

“I know you are spy,” he said, sticking to English for now; maybe he was unsure of her abilities in Russian.

Now she did look him in the eyes. She was expecting, or fearing, a triumphant look. Gloating. I have you in the palm of my hand. But that wasn’t it. It was more like—professional courtesy.

“Maybe you are only person in Xiamen who is more fucked than me,” he said. “My name is Sokolov. We should talk.”

What the hell. “My name is Olivia.”

IT WAS AN hour into the boat journey. The city was far behind. They were out in the open, ranging through a territory of broadly spaced, rocky islands. Jones had devoted much of the time to discussing matters in Arabic with the one Zula had come to think of as his lieutenant: the gunman with the binoculars and the phone. At a certain point, both men had begun to shoot glances in the direction of Zula and Yuxia, and then the lieutenant had come back and stood in front of Yuxia and caught her eye, then jerked his chin forward, as if to say, Come with me. Yuxia had in no way been receptive to the proposal. Jones had approached, sizing up the situation, and had stepped between the lieutenant and Yuxia and squatted down and explained to her in the mildest possible language that he, Jones, wanted to have a private conversation with Zula, and so Yuxia needed either to move peaceably to the bows or else jump off the boat and die—which, from his point of view, would be much preferable. “If we wanted something bad to happen to you, it would have been done already.”

And so Yuxia had gone forward with the lieutenant and found a place to sit up in the boat’s prow.

“I don’t want to have to endure any more of your Nancy Drew shenanigans,” Jones began. “It makes the cost of having you around very high, and since your value is essentially zero—well—as the saying goes—do the math.”

“Essentially zero,” Zula asked, “or zero? Because—”

“Ah, I forget you are a bright girl and inclined to parse my statements closely. Very well then. Look about yourself. Consider your situation. And then cooperate with me. Cooperate by answering my questions. Later, the same questions will be asked of Yuxia. It would be best for all concerned if the answers matched.”

Then nothing for a while. He was willing to wait all day.

Zula shrugged. “Ask away.”

“Describe the leader of the Russian military squad.”

She began to describe Sokolov’s appearance. Soon Jones was nodding, tentatively at first, then more emphatically, as a way of telling her to shut up already.

“Did you see him?” Zula asked, but it was a stupid question; she could tell that he had.

Jones looked away and ignored the question.

Her next question would have been Is he still alive? but she stifled it.

Jones went on to ask any number of other questions about Sokolov. It wouldn’t be an efficient use of his energies to show so much curiosity about a dead man. So she had her answer.

This, she realized, was what Jones and his lieutenant had been talking about. Jones had related the story of this morning’s events, as he’d seen them, and at some point, a gap had become obvious: they had not seen Sokolov die, they had not observed his body.

The notion that Sokolov was still alive gave her a thrill of irrational excitement and a sense of weird hope. He was the only person she had seen in the last few days who seemed to be equal to the situation. Was it idiotic to think that he might want to help her? But even if he did, this did her no good if he didn’t know she was alive, didn’t know where she was. He must be on the run now, even more hard-pressed than she was.

They had gone past a couple of smaller islands and seemed to have set their course for another one, slightly bigger, yet still no more than a couple of miles long.

She needed to start thinking like Uncle Richard. Not Uncle Richard when he was at the re-u but Uncle Richard when he was doing business. She had only watched him in that mode a couple of times—she didn’t get invited to meetings where he did important-guy stuff—but when she had, she’d been fascinated by the way he slipped into a different persona and zipped it up over his regular personality. What does this person want? How does it conflict, or not, with what I want? And yet never fake, never dishonest. Because people could see through that.

Right now, Jones badly wanted to know about Sokolov. Something had happened between those two men, something that had made an impression on Jones.

“I don’t know much about his background, other than the medals and so on…”

“Medals?”

“… but I interacted with him a fair amount when we took the jet down to Xiamen, and at the safe house, and while we were hunting down the virus writers.”

“Hold on, hold on,” Jones said. For his eyes had gotten a little wider, his gaze a little more intense, at each of these disclosures.

She had not mentioned, until now, the fact that Ivanov’s jet was in Xiamen.

Good. Answering his questions about those would kill another hour.

What would happen when she ran out of material?

All he had to do was google her name and he would know about Richard. Then the logical thing for him to do would be to hold her for ransom.

Of course, he didn’t know her last name yet.

The curse of having a distinctive first name: if he just googled “Zula,” combined with the name of the company where she worked, he’d probably come up with something.

But there was no Internet on this boat, and, from the looks of where they were going, that wasn’t going to change any time soon.

“Are you telling me that the Russians had a safe house?” The question Brit inflected, falling rather than rising at the end.

“Yes.”

“In Xiamen?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In a—” Zula was getting ready to describe the building. Then she turned and looked back to the city. It was a few miles aft by this point, but the tall downtown towers were clearly visible. “That one,” she said. “The new modern tower. Curvy floor plan. Yellow crane sticking out of the top of it.”

Jones called for the binoculars. Trading them back and forth with Zula, he made sure he knew precisely which building she was talking about.

He wanted to know which floor. That gave Zula pause, for as she’d looked through the binoculars, she’d wondered whether Sokolov was up there, gazing out the window. Was she putting him in danger by divulging so much?

But Sokolov knew perfectly well that he was in danger, and he would be taking precautions.

It was a way to communicate with him. If Jones sent someone to the forty-third floor of that building, Sokolov would wonder how they had known the location of the safe house, and he might conclude that they’d gotten the information from Zula.

“Forty-three,” she said.

“Describe the—” Jones began, but they were interrupted by a few words from the skipper. Jones listened, nodded, then fixed his gaze on Zula and jerked his head toward the pilothouse. “Things are about to get crowded,” he said. “You’ll be a good deal less conspicuous in there.”

Zula wondered to herself, not for the first time, just how cooperative she ought to be. But Jones seemed to enjoy her company and to want information from her, so she had a general sense that things were merely bad and not all the way desperate. Jumping off the boat and swimming for it would certainly make them desperate. Cooperating now might lead to more trust later. So she stood up and walked into the cramped, loud, and ferociously hot confines of the pilothouse. A minute later she was joined by Yuxia. They stayed there for the remainder of the voyage.

She guessed that the word “teeming” must have been coined to describe places like the harbor on this little island. Since then, though, it had been hopelessly diluted by application to such subjects as Manhattan traffic, jungles, and beehives, none of which really approached the level of activity and jam-packed-ness that was belaboring Zula’s eyes as they chugged deeper and deeper into the harbor. You’d think that having so much in such a small space would lead to less, rather than more, activity, since crowding made it harder to move, but none of the people who lived here seemed to be aware of any such equation. The outskirts of the bay were gridded over with raftlike structures about the size of city blocks, each consisting of numerous square pens, separated by gangplanks, and covered with stretched netting. The gangplanks were supported by various kinds of floats, including plastic tanks filled with air, giant sausages of closed-cell foam, or simply large plastic bags stuffed with Styrofoam peanuts. Each of these rafts supported a little shack. Zula reckoned that they were fish farms.

The number of fishing boats defied belief or estimation. They exceeded available dock space by a factor of many hundreds, so they had been pushed up onto the beach until the beach was full and then they had been rafted together, side by side, in long arcs stretching across the harbor. When one arc ran out of space, a new one would get started, and in the outskirts of the bay there were a few consisting of only half a dozen or so boats.

Somewhere beyond all of this there must be actual land, and some kind of port town, but Zula saw it only in glimpses. For there was a cleft in all this improvised rafting that penetrated to a dock: just a single pier, where at the moment a passenger ferry was drawn up. From it a road rambled up the hill, forming the spine of a town. The road was lined with low buildings and half choked with people in doulis squatting on the hot pavement to mend stretched-out fishnets or string bald tires onto cables. Welding arcs and cutting torches glinted everywhere, bluer and brighter than the sun. Smaller boats like the one that they were on circulated through every patch of water large enough to float them, like mitochondria in cells. The sheer complexity of the rigging and the traffic and the patterns of movement baffled the mind and faded into the haze and humidity long before it started to make sense.

The look on Yuxia’s face told Zula that it was equally foreign to her.

All the fishing vessels had been constructed to exactly the same plan, mass-produced in some shipyard somewhere, and all of them were painted the same shade of blue. It was a wonder to Zula that the people who lived and worked here could tell them apart. There was one, though, that stood apart simply because it literally did stand apart, being anchored a little farther out in the bay and not rafted to any other vessel. That was the one they headed for. They came up along its seaward flank, where fewer eyes could see them, and scaled a ladder to its deck. Like all of them, it had a heavy-looking prow, jutting high out of the water and laden with technical gear. Just aft of that was an expanse of open deck cluttered with gray plastic tubs nested together in stacks. Over that loomed a superstructure that occupied most of the aft half of the vessel. This was two decks high. The cabins in its lower story had only a few small portholes. The upper level sported a few windows and a couple of hatches opening out onto a narrow walkway that ran around its periphery. These were nothing more than brief impressions that Zula gained while she was being hustled straight back to a cabin, apparently used as a berth by fishermen who lived aboard the vessel, since the next thing that happened was that two men came in and dragged all their stuff out of it, leaving her alone in a stripped room with no decoration except a Middle Eastern rug on the steel deck, and two faded posters with Arabic lettering, featuring men in turbans and beards, pointing to the ceiling and unburdening themselves of some profound thoughts about (wild guess here) global jihad. The cabin had a single porthole that, fifteen minutes after her arrival, was unceremoniously sealed off by the simple expedient of taping a piece of paper over it on the outside. Openings and closings of the cabin door were accompanied by clanging sound effects that she interpreted as signifying that the hatch was chained shut on the outside. In a wordless, somewhat poignant act of chivalry, someone opened the door and handed her a bucket. Yuxia had also been taken aboard, but Zula had no idea where she was, or what might be happening to her.

“THERE’S VODKA IN the bar.” The spy Olivia said that in Russian. Sokolov guessed now, from her accent and from her freewheeling approach to dispensation of alcoholic beverages, that she was British.

“Thank you, but I am a Russian of somewhat unusual habits and will not be taking this opportunity to get drunk.”

She was a little slow to take that sentence in, but she got the gist of it. Her Russian was, perhaps, slightly better than his English. They would have to switch back and forth and watch each other’s faces.

“I am going to take every opportunity I can find,” she responded, and went over to the bar—really just a cabinet with a few bottles in it—and took out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“You should not become heavily intoxicated,” he said, “since further action may be required soon.”

The look she gave him made it evident that she was at some pains to avoid laughing in his face.

Where had he gone wrong?

By assuming that she would trust him.

It was a logical assumption. If the spy Olivia were more experienced, she would know right away that trusting him was the correct move. She could trust him because he was completely fucked and he needed her—a Chinese-looking person who could pass for a local—to help him.

Why then no trust?

Because he had crashed through her office window at a particularly difficult moment and aimed an assault rifle at her and then broken into her apartment, probably.

“How did you get in here?” she asked.

“Plan D,” he said in English.

“And what is Plan D?”

“The fourth plan that I attempted. It took me all afternoon.”

He could have explained it, but it was idiotic to be discussing things in the past when they needed to discuss the future.

Still she was giving him the evil eye over the rim of her whiskey glass.

Pulling these items, one by one, from the pockets of Jeremy Jeong’s suit, he placed her ID card, her phone, her keys, and a few other items on the kitchen counter. Each one produced a little exclamation of surprise and delight from Olivia. “To prove I am not fucking asshole,” he explained.

She went for the phone first and checked the “Recent Calls” menu to see whether Sokolov had been so stupid as to use it. The answer, as he could have told her, was no.

“This is huge,” she said, slapping the ID card off the counter and pocketing it.

“Name on card is not Olivia?”

“Name on card is Meng Anlan.”

“Ah.”

“So you can’t read any Chinese at all.”

“Correct.”

“How did you even get here? Never mind. Plan D.” Still jumping back and forth between Russian and English. Sokolov could tell that she’d learned her Russian in an academic setting, was more comfortable with abstractions and formal sentence structure, had no idea how to express herself colloquially.

“You were conducting surveillance on the jihadists?” he asked. “Or the hackers who lived in the flat below them?”

“The jihadists.”

“The name of the leader? The Negro?”

“Abdallah Jones.”

Sokolov nodded. He had heard of Jones, seen his photograph in newspaper articles.

“You are employed by MI6?”

She made a visible effort to maintain a poker face, then seemed to realize its futility and nodded.

“MI6 has emergency extraction procedure?”

“Resources,” Olivia corrected him, “that they could call on. To improvise such a procedure.”

That sounded like a procedure to him. “You activate this procedure how?”

“If I had no other choice, I would make a certain phone call,” she said, “but that’s to be avoided if I can use Internet.”

“You have computer here?”

“Not anymore,” she said. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t do it from here. I’d go to a wangba.”

“Have you done this?”

She shook her head. “No government ID, no wangba access,” she said. “But now that I have this…?” She wiggled the ID and smiled.

“We go to wangba?”

It looked like she was about to say yes. Then her face hardened. “Who’s ‘we,’ white man?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She closed her eyes, shook her head. “It’s an old American joke.”

“I enjoy jokes. Tell me joke.”

“You know the Lone Ranger?”

“Cowboy in mask? Has Indian friend?”

“Yes. So the Lone Ranger and Tonto get ambushed by some Comanches and they get chased up into a box canyon and they end up hiding behind some rocks shooting at the Indians, and the Lone Ranger looks at his friend and says, ‘Well, Tonto, it looks like we’re surrounded.’ To which Tonto replies—”

“Who is ‘we,’ white man?”

“Yes.”

“Is funny joke,” Sokolov said.

“That’s a strange thing for you to say since I don’t see the slightest trace of amusement on your face.”

“Is Russian sense of humor. What you call dry.”

“Okay.”

“Joke has meaning.”

“Yes, Mr. Sokolov, it has meaning.”

“Why should you help poor fucked Russian? That is the meaning.”

“More importantly,” Olivia said, “why should MI6 help you? Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what I want or am willing to do. It matters what MI6 is willing to do. And while they might be willing to pull out all the stops to get my arse out of China, I can’t necessarily persuade them to do the same in your case.”

“Tell them I have useful information.”

“Do you?”

Sokolov shrugged. “Probably not. But that is beside the point.”

“If I tell them you have useful information, and it turns out that you don’t, I look like an idiot.”

“Perhaps more important things are to be worried about now than whether you look like idiot when safe in London eating fish and drinking beer.”

She spent a while thinking about it.

“I know British,” he said. “Looking like idiot is part of being British. Happens all the time. They understand. Have procedures.”

“Can you get access to Internet later?” she asked him.

“Hmm, difficult,” Sokolov said. “Why?”

“Right now I need to take the ferry back into town and go to a wangba and send out my little distress call,” she said. “Later I’ll probably get instructions on where to go, what to do. I’ll need to convey that information to you somehow.”

Sokolov balked.

“Were you thinking you were going to stay here? Because you are not going to stay here,” Olivia told him. “For obvious reasons, Meng Anlan can’t have a Russian commando mercenary sleeping on her fucking sofa. You need to find a place to spend the night, and you need to figure out how you are going to access the Internet. Because if you can do that, then I can send you a message in a chat room or something.”

“Mmm,” Sokolov remarked. “There is solution.”

“Yes?”

“I have place to stay. With Internet. I will go there. Wait for instruction.”

A pause. “Really?” she asked.

“Dangerous,” he admitted. “Perhaps fucking stupid. But maybe will be fine.”

“Does it involve tying up or killing any of my neighbors?”

“Not unless you have neighbor you don’t like.”

She didn’t know how to take that.

“Humor,” he explained. Then he nodded out the window. The sun was getting low over Fujian, and orange light was gleaming in the windows of the skyscrapers across the water. “Is over there,” he explained. “No problem for you.”

“Then let’s go,” she said. “Obviously we have to leave this building separately. I can be a lookout for you. Tell you when the stairwell is clear, when it’s safe for you to move.”

“Very good.”

“We will walk to the ferry terminal separately and take separate boats,” she said. “After that, I can promise nothing.”

“Maybe you get me out of China,” Sokolov said. “Maybe not. Maybe I am captured. Interrogated. Have to tell them location of British spy equipment and documents from office.”

She just stared at him.

“Details,” he went on, “for you to share with your boss when you go to wangba.”

LATER, WHEN ONE of the crew opened the hatch to bring her a bowl of noodles and empty her bucket, Zula saw that it was dark outside.

She had tried to use the time to think. Nothing came.

Seemed as though grieving for Peter would be in order. She got ready to cry. Sitting on the edge of a steel-framed bunk bed, elbows on knees, ready to let it come. And some tears did come. Enough to blur her vision and give her the sniffles but not enough to break free and run down her face. She was sad that Peter was dead. Sad enough to forgive, but not enough to forget, the fact that Peter had ditched her in the cellar moments before Ivanov had basically executed him for doing so. That was the truly miserable part about Peter’s death: what he had done right before it.

But her mind drifted away from this forced and self-conscious grieving procedure, and she found herself worrying about Csongor. About Yuxia.

A memory came to her, almost as shocking as the first time around, of the young Chinese man’s face in the stairwell window, inches from hers.

It seemed as though prayers were in order. Prayers for the dead, for the missing, and for herself. Given that she had been raised by churchgoing folk, it was a bit odd that this hadn’t occurred to her before. No aspect of what was going on seemed as though it might be improved by communication with a deity. With the possible exception, that is, that it might make her feel better. That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse. None of which especially bothered Zula or made her doubt its worthwhileness. Making sad people feel better was a fine thing to do.

That kind of religion did not have the power to make one give all of one’s money to a charlatan, drink poison Kool-Aid, or strap explosives to one’s body, but at the same time it did not seem equal to the challenges imposed by a situation such as this one. Since it had seemed perfectly acceptable to her before, she didn’t feel that it was entirely proper, at a moment like this, to suddenly change over into something more fervent.

It was the praying-for-outcomes part she didn’t get. Since when did she get to have a vote? This boat would go wherever they pointed it.

And it could go anywhere. That was obvious. The whole point of a fishing boat was to go out to sea—out to international waters. She didn’t have a map, but she had a vague idea that this thing could take them anywhere in Southeast Asia in a few days. This had to be Jones’s plan.

The door hardware started clanging again. The hatch creaked open and Jones came in. He closed the hatch behind him, then sat cross-legged on the rug, leaning back against a steel bulkhead. She sat on the edge of a bunk.

“Tell me about the jet.”

“They came from Toronto.”

“I know that. Where is the jet now?”

“Short-tempered this evening.”

He glared back at her. “The adrenaline has worn off,” he said. “Ten of my comrades died today. I think fully half of them were done by your man Sokolov. There was a wall of fire in the apartment. He was trapped on one side of it. No way out. Killed one of my men to get his rifle and then fired through the flames. Drilled several of my mates in the head. Really pisses me off.”

“How many of Sokolov’s men survived?”

“Not a one.”

“Well then.”

“In the hours after something like that, you’re on a chemical high. When that wears off—well—that’s when a Christian would go and get dead drunk.”

“What does a Muslim do?”

“Says his prayers and dreams of vengeance.”

“Well, I have no idea where Sokolov might be, or even if he’s alive.”

“He’s alive,” Jones said. “I’m not asking you to tell me where he is. I agree you can’t know that. I’m asking you about the jet.”

“And I’m thinking out loud,” Zula said. “I don’t think that Ivanov owned it. I think he leased it.”

“And this is based on what?”

“Some of the others seemed shocked by his actions. Like what he was doing was way out of line.”

“I’m willing to believe that,” Jones said, and Zula was encouraged to hear him say something positive. “I don’t care how much money these Russians make, they can’t be flying around on private jets as a matter of routine.”

“Well. I don’t know anything about that world. But I’ve heard that even if you don’t own one of those jets, you can lease it. I think Ivanov leased it.”

“It’s at the Xiamen airport?”

“I have no idea. That’s where I last saw it.”

“The pilots?”

“We dropped them off at the Hyatt, near the airport.”

“You’ve been in Xiamen for three days.”

“This is the end of the third full day,” Zula said.

“Did you get any sense from Ivanov or Sokolov as to what the plan was for today? Other than grabbing the hackers?”

“We were told to get all our stuff out of the safe house.”

“So the plan was to leave. To fly out of here today.”

Zula shrugged, letting Jones know that she did not care to speculate.

“It’s still there,” Jones said. “The jet is still there.”

“I’d have absolutely no way of knowing.”

“Count on it. The big expense in aviation is fuel. Everything else is a pittance by comparison. There is absolutely no way that they would fuel that plane up and fly it somewhere else for three days, just to save on the pilots’ hotel bill. No. Believe you me, the flyboys have been sitting in the Hyatt, watching pornography and running up their bar tab the entire time you’ve been in Xiamen, and they were probably told to be on call for a departure today. They are probably sitting there right now wondering when the hell Ivanov is going to show up.”

Zula was content to let Jones run his mouth. She saw no relevance to her in all of this.

“But Ivanov’s not going to show up, because I killed him,” Jones went on.

He got to his feet and began pacing around, thinking. The cabin was so tiny that his pacing was soon reduced to a kind of irritable shifting of weight from one foot to the other. He would not meet her eye. He was on the trail of an idea, trying to work something out. “So,” he continued, “what would be their orders, if the boss fails to show up? They can’t just leave. They have to wait for him. That’s all these guys do, is sit around and wait for their masters to snap their fingers.”

The idea that had been gestating in Jones’s head was so big and crazy that Zula was slow to perceive it. Then she had to bite the words back before blurting them out: You want the jet!

What was he thinking? He would need the pilots to fly it out of here for him. Which meant he had to obtain power over the pilots in some way.

She was conscious, suddenly, that Jones was staring at her.

“They would remember you,” he said. “They would recognize your voice on the phone.”

Zula tried to turn her face to stone. But she knew it was too late. He had seen the truth.

LESS THAN THIRTY minutes after the conclusion of the chat in Olivia’s apartment, Sokolov was back in the safe house on the forty-third floor of the skyscraper.

Everything was gone except for the trash they’d left behind, and the computer they’d purchased while they were here. When Peter’s advice not to leave this behind had fallen on Ivanov’s deaf ears, Peter had begun a project of opening its case to remove its hard drive, which he planned to take with him. But this had proceeded too slowly for Ivanov’s tastes and had been interrupted halfway through.

Sokolov was now confronted, therefore, with a partially dismantled machine, whose hard drive—a steel brick about the size of a sandwich—had been unplugged but not yet physically removed from the case. Reconnecting it was idiotically simple, since the plugs only fitted into the sockets one way. He rebooted the machine and it came up as normal. The Internet seemed to work, but he did not do any surfing, since almost anything he looked at might tip off the PSB. Olivia had written out the URL of a popular Chinese chat site that featured occasional English language conversations. He typed it into the browser’s address bar and went there, then navigated to the room she had specified. It seemed very quiet, and he didn’t see any of the coded phrases that she had told him to look for. This was hardly surprising since she probably had not even made it to the wangba yet.

What he really needed to do was sleep, so that he could be sharp tomorrow. He hated to waste the hours of darkness, during which it was easier for him to move about without drawing too much attention. But there was no reason to move about, nothing to be doing. He strolled up and down the length of the office suite a couple of times, looking out at the galaxy of colored lights spread below, the neon letters he didn’t know how to read.

He knew already that in spite of his immense tiredness, he would not sleep well.

His command had been wiped out today. All of the men under him were dead. They had wives, mothers, girlfriends back in Russia who were waiting to hear from them and who did not know, yet, that they were gone forever. He had pushed this out of his mind until now, since thinking of it was useless. He had been leading men for a long time, since he had been promoted to the rank of corporal and assigned responsibility for a squad. Given the nature of the places where he had been sent, casualties had been frequent and severe. He had written letters home to those grieving mothers and wives. He had used the same old tired verbiage about how these men had fallen while fighting for the motherland: a difficult claim to make during the invasion of Afghanistan, only slightly easier in Chechnya.

If he had pen and paper here, and the addresses of the bereaved, what comforting lies would he write? These men had been mercenaries working for a shady organization whose sole motive was profit.

As was he.

Even if it were possible to instill a sense of personal loyalty to an organized crime cartel—which, come to think of it, must not be all that difficult, since men fought and died for such groups all the time—the fact was that this had not been a bona fide operation but a colossal mistake, undertaken by a man who had defrauded that group and gone half mad.

Even that could be explained. It would take an ingenious bit of explaining, but it did add up to a coherent state of affairs, as far as it went. What he’d never be able to put into a letter was the fact that they had accidentally stumbled into a bomb factory run by a cell of jihadists.

No wonder the Chinese authorities were calling it a gas explosion. It wasn’t that they were trying to cover anything up. It just made for a simpler explanation.

If he were going to tell the families anything, it would have to be that they had died in a gas explosion, or a car accident, or some other such meaningless and random eventuality of war. Like the American soldiers who were getting electrocuted while taking showers in their shoddily constructed military bases. Who wrote those letters?

As he paced back and forth gazing out over the streaming and pulsing lights of the city, he saw that there was really only one way to make sense of the entire situation, if by “make sense” was meant “bring it to a conclusion such that proper letters could be written to the mothers of the men who had died this morning.” And that was to hunt down Abdallah Jones and kill him.

He squatted down on his haunches, stretching the sore and battered muscles of his legs in a way that hurt but felt good, and crossed his elbows atop his knees and rested his chin on his forearms and stared out at China.

Everything was clear to him, except how he was going to get out of this country. That all depended on Olivia. Helpless as a baby in her bare feet, her aloneness. And yet infinitely more powerful, more capable than Sokolov in this context.

There had been an odd moment there, toward the conclusion of their interview, when she had insisted that he was not welcome to stay in her apartment. A strange thing for her to bring up. As if Sokolov would have expected any such consideration. And yet she had felt it important to make this explicit. Why? Because she was attracted to him, as he was to her, and that made it imperative that scruples be observed, rules followed.

He tucked his chin, let himself fall back on his buttocks, rolled out flat, whipped his arms behind him and slapped the carpeted floor to break his fall, as in SAMBO. It would not be the worst place he’d ever slept. Even better if he got the Makarov out of his waistband. So he did that, placing it up next to his head, and he pulled the spare clip out of the breast pocket of the suit jacket and a little flashlight from the back pocket of the trousers and placed them all right next to each other. He unlaced Jeremy Jeong’s shoes. But rather than slip them off, he decided to learn from the lesson of Olivia and keep them on his feet loosely, just in case there were any more gas leaks.

Sleep did not come, though, since he could not stop thinking about how vulnerable he would be if someone came into the safe house.

He slung his CamelBak over his shoulders and went into the conference room. The big table was wired for Internet, a trunk line of gray wires zip-tied together beneath it. With some quick knife work he peeled loose a run of cable a few meters long and draped it over his neck. He planted a chair in the middle of the table, stood on it, reached up, and pushed a ceiling tile out of the way.

Above him, as he remembered, was a zigzagging steel truss. It was out of his reach, but in a couple of tries he was able to toss the end of the cable through it and then feed more cable up so that the loose end bent down of its own weight and came within his reach. He jerked it down and tied the ends together to form a loop that dangled through the ceiling hole to about a meter above the table’s surface.

Then he placed the chair back on the floor, lay down in the middle of the conference table, and slept soundly.