A jittery and sometimes outrageous series of misunderstandings led, none too soon, to the following arrangement aboard the fishing boat: Mohammed (for that was the name of the pilot who had been left at the vessel’s controls) remained at his station, steering the vessel on a course that would, he claimed, get them out of Chinese territorial waters as quickly as possible without arousing any suspicion that they might be heading for Kinmen. Csongor, armed with the pistol, remained on the bridge with him, to keep an eye on the little GPS screen and make sure he didn’t do anything tricky. Meanwhile Yuxia and Marlon, accompanied by the cook, who gave his name as Batu, went up and down the length of the vessel, just trying to get a basic sense of where stuff was and how things worked. Batu’s name, appearance, and accent made it obvious to Marlon and Yuxia that he was a member of the Mongolian ethnic minority, and it could be guessed that he had been drawn to Heartless Island as an economic migrant. He had accepted the sudden takeover of his vessel by armed strangers with remarkable serenity and seemed to prefer the new management to the old.
They began by climbing to the flat roof of the superstructure, directly above the bridge. A large white fiberglass capsule was mounted here. Batu said that it contained an inflatable life raft. The hushed voice, cringing posture, and sidelong glances with which he explained this as much as told them that this was some kind of statutory requirement, and hence the epicenter of an elaborate complex of rules, penalties, inspectors, and bribes. Other than that, the vessel didn’t have anything in the way of a dinghy. It seemed that, in the harbors it frequented, small craft were so numerous that one could be hailed in a few moments with a wave of the hand, and so there was no need to carry one aboard. A disk-shaped enclosure mounted high up on a steel mast was said to contain a radar antenna, but Batu was skeptical about its being in any kind of working order. The same mast sported mount points for additional lights and antennas, only some of which were used. Marlon looked warily at the things that seemed to be antennas, and Yuxia could see his eyes tracing the cables down the mast and into fittings in the roof of the bridge.
One level below that was the bridge, and the narrow catwalk that surrounded it. Bracketed to the catwalk’s railing, directly in front of the bridge’s forward-facing windows, were two life preservers, formerly bright orange but sun faded to a sort of bilious caramel hue. Threadbare green-and-white poly ropes had been laced through the railing’s stanchions and used to support one edge of a plastic tarp that had been stretched across much of the foredeck; it had been under its cover, Yuxia explained, that much work had earlier been done packing and prepping whatever sort of cargo the vessel had been carrying. If the vessel were being used for its intended purpose, this was where the fishermen would work with the nets, pull the fish on board, and do whatever else it was that fishermen did.
They made a cursory tour of the cabins, mostly just checking for dangerous and/or useful articles, and then ventured belowdecks. Things looked different here from when Yuxia had been put through her ordeal. Then, the place had seemed larger, since its contents had been neatly stowed in boxes. But in the hours since, some kind of frenzied unpacking had taken place, and junk was strewn all over, interspersed with slashed-open cardboard boxes. Yuxia remarked on this, which led to a conversation with Marlon in which she explained, as curtly as she could, what had happened in this place during the afternoon. Yuxia held up her wrists to show the damage inflicted by the ropes as she had struggled. This seemed to affect Marlon deeply, and she was astonished to see tears beginning to come into his eyes.
They decided to get out of there and sort through the junk later.
Batu conducted them to the galley and, as a sort of automatic reflex, got busy making tea. Watching Batu fill a kettle from a spigot, Marlon asked him about the ship’s supply of potable water, and Batu assured him that there was plenty—hundreds of liters—in its storage tanks; he prided himself on keeping these topped up at all times. “Water is cheap—not like fuel!”
This prompted the obvious question—which, as soon as it was asked, made Marlon feel foolish for not having asked it before—of how much fuel the vessel might have on board.
Batu didn’t know the answer, but the look on his face made it obvious that this could be a serious problem.
“I’m going to go up to the bridge and look at the fuel gauge,” Marlon said, getting to his feet, but Batu waved him off, saying that there was no such thing on a boat like this; fuel level was estimated by dipping a stick into the tank and seeing how much of it came out wet. So Marlon sat down again, and he and Yuxia waited while the tea was prepared.
“That guy on the bridge,” Marlon said. “Mohammed. Was he one of the ones who—”
“Who what?”
“Did that thing to you?”
“Yes,” Yuxia said curtly.
That seemed to dampen the conversation, and so they began to sip at their tea, sitting back in their chairs a little. Yuxia’s eyes fell closed, then slowly opened. “I am going down,” she said in English. Switching back into Mandarin, she asked Batu to pour a larger cup of tea—not just a thimble—so that she could take it to Csongor, who might be having a hard time staying awake up there. Batu rummaged through his bungee-corded cabinets until he found a mug. Meanwhile Marlon asked him, “When was the last time they bought fuel?”
Batu had a difficult time remembering. “They brought out a couple of drums last week,” he said. He set the mug on the table, holding it down with one hand, since the boat had begun to roll as they got away from the coast and into higher seas offshore. He poured the mug full, pausing once to refill the little teapot.
“A couple of drums,” Marlon repeated. “That can’t be very much for a vessel this size.”
Batu made no comment.
“There’s really no reason to fill the tanks unless you’re going out on a long sea voyage,” Marlon said, working through the logic of it. “And this thing didn’t go out on long voyages, did it?”
“Not recently,” Batu said, meaning not since it became the floating headquarters of a terrorist cell.
Yuxia tossed back the last of her tea-thimble, then picked up Csongor’s mug and got carefully to her feet, stepping across the galley in a wide-based gait to compensate for the vessel’s movement beneath her. She passed out through the hatch and began ascending the stairs that led up to the bridge.
“What do you think the range of this boat is? Enough to make Taiwan?” Marlon asked.
Batu shrugged, as if to say, You’re asking a Mongolian about boats?
From above, they heard Yuxia asking a question, then flashing into anger and speaking in a raised voice. There was a massive thud, as of a body hitting the deck, and the crash of a shattering mug. Csongor cried out in a blurry voice. There was more crashing and banging, and then a series of very loud pops.
CSONGOR HAD KNOWN it was a mistake to sit down. The only way he could remain awake was by staying on his feet. But when the boat worked its way out into the big swells, and the deck began to heave and bank underneath him, he finally had the excuse he needed. Until then he’d been standing in the middle of the bridge, looking out the front windows over Mohammed’s shoulders. But along the aft bulkhead was a short bench that had been calling to Csongor for a while. Like everything else of consequence, it was welded to the deck; these people used welders as carpenters used nail guns. Csongor backed away from Mohammed, moving slowly as he compensated for the pitching of the deck, and let himself down to the bench.
Yuxia’s voice was in his ears, nearby. Odd, since Yuxia was not on the bridge.
Another oddity: Csongor’s eyes were closed. He didn’t remember allowing that to happen. He got them open and discovered Yuxia just inside the hatchway with a mug in her hand. She was looking across the bridge at Mohammed, whose posture seemed to indicate that he had just spun around to gaze at Yuxia in astonishment.
Astonishment, and fear.
Mohammed was holding something in one hand: a gray plastic microphone, connected by a coiling black cord to a small electronic box mounted on brackets above the control panel. This had been dark when Csongor’s eyes had closed, but glowing LEDs shone out of it now.
The pilot was talking on the two-way radio, or getting ready to.
Csongor reached for the pistol in his back waistband while using his other hand to push himself up off the bench. He noticed that his feet were slow to move. At about the same time, Yuxia was throwing the contents of the mug at Mohammed.
Csongor’s body weight was now well forward, but his feet still hadn’t budged. They were somehow trapped. He realized he was going to fall flat on his face. His hands came forward instinctively to stop his fall. One of these had achieved a partial grip on the pistol. His ankles were getting torqued in a bad way and he was going down in an extremely awkward fashion, and at some risk of taking Yuxia down with him. He came to rest painfully and in discrete sections, like a big tree breaking into chunks as it fell over in a windstorm. The pistol went sliding across the deck. He could not reach it. Mohammed was crying out in rage and wiping hot tea out of his face. Yuxia hurled the empty mug at him, then dropped to her knees and clawed the pistol up off the deck. She aimed it in his approximate direction and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened because the safety was on.
“Yuxia, give it to me!” Csongor cried, with a beckoning motion, and Yuxia turned and slid the pistol across the deck to him.
Mohammed had recovered enough to reel in the microphone, which had been dangling at the end of its cord. He lifted it to his mouth.
Csongor flicked off the pistol’s safety and cocked the hammer. He aimed it at Mohammed, but his view along the sights was blocked abruptly by Yuxia, who threw herself across the bridge and made a grab at the microphone. There was a few moments’ wrestling match. Mohammed shoved her away, but she dragged him back with her. This happened to give Csongor a clear shot at the radio. One bullet through that box would put an end to the pilot’s broadcasting ambitions. Csongor drew a bead on it.
Mohammed reached up and grabbed a flashlight bracketed above the bridge windows and clocked Yuxia in the head with it and she fell backward to the deck, clutching her face and crying out, more in anger than pain. He raised the mike to his mouth again. Csongor squeezed the trigger and went deaf. The pistol snapped his hands back. A hole appeared in the window above the radio, and cracks networked across the glass. Csongor fired a second time and made another hole in the glass, a few centimeters from the first. He lowered his aim just a hair and pulled the trigger three times in succession.
Mohammed had frozen for a moment after the first bullet had been fired. Then, looking across the bridge to see Csongor aiming in roughly his direction, he assumed that Csongor was aiming at him and decided to get out of there. His way out happened to take him directly in front of the radio and so at least one of Csongor’s three-round fusillade struck him in the thorax. He went down immediately.
MARLON RAN HALFWAY up the steps and then paused, wondering if he was about to get his head blown off. But then he heard Csongor’s voice, and then Yuxia’s, and so he climbed up the rest of the way and entered the bridge.
Csongor was lying on the deck, twisted around in an awkward position. Yuxia was sitting in one corner, holding one hand over a bloody laceration on the side of her head and weeping. Mohammed was lying on the deck surrounded by a lot of blood, still gripping a radio microphone. Its cable, now stretched nearly straight, ran almost vertically up from the microphone to a small box mounted to the top of the ship’s control panel. The box had been perforated by a bullet, and the window above it sported two more bullet holes and a fan of cracks.
The mike slipped out of Mohammed’s relaxing hand and jumped up and bobbed on the end of its cord like a yo-yo.
Csongor did something with the pistol to make it safe, then drew himself back toward a crude bench at the back of the bridge. Something was amiss with his ankles. Stepping over to get a better look, Marlon saw that both had been lashed to the bench’s supporting angle irons by several turns of electrical wire. A reel and a pair of wire cutters rested on the deck nearby.
Marlon fetched the wire cutters and tossed them to Csongor, who went to work snipping himself loose. “I went to sleep,” Csongor said. “He wanted to use the radio—to call his friends, I suppose. But he must have been afraid that I would wake up from the sound of his voice. He couldn’t attack me because he didn’t have any weapons. So he did this. He knew that he would have time to send out a distress call before I could get loose and come stop him. But Yuxia showed up.”
“Did she show up in time?” Marlon asked.
“I don’t know,” Csongor said, “but I think she did.”
Marlon, stepping over a broad ribbon of blood that had found a path across the deck, went to Yuxia. A flashlight was rolling around on the floor with blood on it. Controlling a strong feeling of disgust, Marlon picked this up and turned it on. Yuxia was fully conscious but very upset. “Let me see it,” Marlon said. “Let me see it.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Let me have a look.”
“It’s fine.”
“I want to see.”
He finally understood that she did not care about the wound on her head and just wanted some comfort. He did not feel it was appropriate, just yet, to put his arms around her, or anything like that, and so he reached down with his free hand and rested it on top of her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll get some ice from Batu,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said in a tiny voice, like a child. Not like her.
Marlon got up and passed out through the hatch to the gangway just in time to hear a loud scraping and bumping noise from above. Batu was not down in the galley, where Marlon had left him; he was up on the roof of the bridge. Thumping footsteps suggested he had now gone into rapid motion.
A large white fiberglass capsule rolled and banged down from above, nearly catching Marlon in the head. It splashed down into the sea alongside the ship.
Batu was above him, perched like a cat on the railing. A faded orange life preserver was slung over one shoulder. “There’s more water down in the hold,” he said, “in plastic drums. Use it sparingly. You don’t know how long you’ll be drifting.” And then he sprang from the railing and plummeted about five meters into the water.
The white capsule was bobbing in the ship’s wake now. It had fallen open, and something big and orange was blooming on the water: the life raft, inflating automatically. Batu, belly down on his life preserver, was dog-paddling toward it.
Marlon went back into the bridge and stepped gingerly across a remarkably wide pool of blood to the control panel, where he pulled back on the lever that controlled engine speed. Then he swung the wheel around so that the vessel was pointed due east, toward Taiwan.
“Why did you slow us down?” Yuxia asked.
“To conserve fuel,” Marlon said.
“You think we’re going to run out?” Csongor asked.
“Batu does.”
FINE, SEE YOU AT ELEVEN.
This was the text message that Olivia found on the phone when she turned it on while peeing in a thicket at 6:49 the next morning. It was a response to last night’s HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER.
Actually the whole island was a thicket; she had found an especially dense part of it for this purpose and checked for snakes and bugs before dropping into a squat.
She and whoever was at the other end of this connection—presumably a handler in London, routed through an untraceable connection to the instant messaging network—were using a completely open and public channel to pass messages in the clear. They had to be coy. HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER was written in a prearranged code, using characters calculated not to arouse the interest of the PSB. She spent a minute or two squatting there and puzzling over SEE YOU AT ELEVEN before realizing that it probably meant exactly what it said. Kinmen was connected to Taiwan by a long-range ferry, used mostly by mainland Chinese tourists, and by regular air service. The ferry wasn’t much use in these circumstances, but it would be easy for the British embassy in Taipei to send someone out on a commercial flight to meet with her at the airport.
This was a virgin phone with no traceable connections to Olivia or anyone else, and she was on Taiwanese soil anyway, and so she felt no hesitation about using its Internet connection to surf for airline schedules. It seemed that a flight from Taipei was coming in to the local terminal at 10:45.
She returned to the bunker to find it empty. But after a bit of looking around, she found Sokolov standing near the edge of the minefield, gazing up the length of the beach. Back toward Xiamen. He checked his watch, then turned to look at her.
She reached out with one hand and found his. He did not snatch it out of her grasp, and so she pulled on it and began walking.
She led him back to the bunker. Still not looking at him, she got up on tiptoe and steadied herself with an elbow crooked around the back of his neck and carefully touched her lips to his. Her heart beating hard, more from fear than from passion, since she was afraid that he would turn away, reject her. That his not taking advantage of her last night was simple lack of interest. But his hand came around against the small of her back, and it became clear that he had only been waiting for her permission.
She had wondered how it would feel having sex on the bed of matted vines, which had become flattened during the night, but it ended up not being an issue since they did it standing up, with her back against the wall. After months of hard work in Xiamen, characterized by nothing but loneliness and anxiety, it felt so good that it brought her almost to a kind of weeping and grateful hysteria. For his part, Sokolov, after he had let her gently down, tumbled back onto the floor, slapping it with both hands, and collapsed as if crucified under the beam of sunlight coming in through the door.
“I am no longer poor fucked Russian,” he stated, after ten minutes or so.
“I’ve got news for you, honey—”
“No. Alluding to yesterday’s conversation. In flat.”
“Well, you’re out of China at least,” she said, “but—”
“No. I have useful information,” he said.
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of useful information?” Your spy Olivia Halifax-Lin is a helpless slut.
“Information that can help your employer find Abdallah Jones,” he said.
“Aha.”
Sokolov got his legs under him, rolled up to a low squatting position. He reached for his trousers, which like many other items of clothing had gone ballistic a few minutes ago and remained sprawled in their positions of impact. He stood up and pulled them on. “Because,” he said, “you have message, no?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Heard phone vibrate.”
He politely looked the other way as she stood up and mounted a search-and-rescue operation for her clothes. Crisscrossing the floor of the bunker on filthy, bare feet, she thought about the amount of effort and money she devoted, every day, to personal grooming, and how completely beside the point all of it had been during her last two sexual liaisons.
“Why did you wait until now to tell me?” she asked.
“Because until now we were fucking,” he pointed out.
“No, I mean why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“Because last night I did not have information.”
“How could you possibly have obtained any information this morning?”
“This must remain a mystery,” he said, “for now.” But he glanced upward as he said it, as if the answer were written in the sky above the Xunjianggang.
ZULA FELT THE jet thumping and bucking underneath her and startled awake, fearful/hopeful that they had come under some sort of police assault. But in the first moments after she opened her eyes, she was astonished to see buildings and parked planes streaking past them, and bright sunlight glancing in low over the sea.
She was on a plane, or something else that moved pretty damned fast. She didn’t even know whether it was landing or taking off.
How could the sun be up? Hours must have passed while she was slumbering.
The fact that she was lying in a king-sized bed did nothing to help her get her bearings.
The ground was definitely falling away.
First things first: she was on a plane. The plane was taking off. It was something like seven or eight in the morning. The bed was in a private cabin in the plane’s tail—Ivanov’s cabin. She could smell his hair oil on the pillow.
The city dropping away from her was Xiamen. Looking out the windows on the right side, she could see, only a mile or two away, the big inlet where Csongor had confronted Jones yesterday. Yuxia’s van and a crushed taxi lay somewhere on its bottom. And a few miles beyond that in the same direction, on the other side of a strait, was the larger of the two Taiwanese islands; she was sighting straight down the length of a beach, prickly with tank traps and shingled with hexagonal blocks.
Not long after it cleared the runway, the jet banked hard to the right, giving her an even better view of the Taiwanese island—Kinmen—as they swung around it in a broad arc, rapidly gaining altitude, and began to head south. Another turn, a few minutes later, brought them on to what she guessed was a southwesterly course. Nothing but ocean was now visible on the plane’s left, but on the right was the whole Chinese mainland, slowly getting farther away from them.
She must have fallen asleep in her seat at about one in the morning, when they were still talking of flight plans. Jones or someone must have carried her into the aft cabin and deposited her on the bed. The four “soldiers” who’d been cooling their heels in here must have been evicted and sent up to the main cabin. These men might stone her to death sooner or later, but in the meantime they would go to great lengths to preserve her modesty.
She remembered one figure very clearly: six hours. That was the amount of time it took to file a domestic flight plan in China. Pavel must have filed such a plan at about the time she’d gone to sleep, and they must have secured approval for takeoff only just now.
THEY BEGAN TO consider how to arrange transportation to Kinmen’s airport. Olivia used her mobile to pull up a map, from which they learned that they were all of about three thousand meters away from it.
Olivia was for going straight there. With a pensive and reluctant Sokolov in tow, she began to bushwhack inland. They passed quickly through what turned out to be a narrow belt of woods running parallel to the island’s north shore and emerged into a flat agricultural countryside, gridded with farm lanes. A hamlet, consisting of a couple of dozen closely spaced buildings, was only a couple of hundred meters off to their right; they avoided this instinctively and sidetracked away from it until a somewhat larger hamlet came into view ahead of them. Then they began cutting south across the island and soon came upon a larger road that ran east-west, across their path. Nor did that make it unusual, since it seemed as though the island’s centers of population were in its broad east and west ends, and the several roads joining them squeezed together through the island’s narrow waist, which they were transecting: a rocky spine tufted with trees and studded at its summit with the geodesic domes of Cold War radar installations.
The place was decidedly more rural than the mainland looming over it a few miles across the water. Rural, anyway, by Chinese standards. At no point were they out of sight of a building. Bicyclists rode past in one and twos, looking at them curiously. Olivia was inclined to ignore them and trudge on, but Sokolov was obviously uncomfortable. After they had crossed over the second east-west road, he noticed a nearby watercourse, thick with trees, and led her down into it. It was a sort of drainage ditch or canalized creek that ran under the road through an arched stone culvert. Before disappearing completely into the foliage that lined its banks, Sokolov took a good look around at the flat countryside. They were completely exposed.
“Good meeting place,” he mused.
Olivia realized that the openness of the landscape cut both ways: anyone could see them from a distance, but by the same token, no one could sneak up on them here.
Moving at less than half the speed they could have made in open country, they followed the watercourse south and uphill for almost a kilometer until what had been a narrow stripe of foliage broadened into a wood that merged with the dense quilt of trees spread over the island’s central ridge.
They had used all their drinking water last night, and because of Sokolov’s precautions they had not come anywhere near a place where they could buy more. “I’m getting really dehydrated,” Olivia remarked at one point, and Sokolov turned and fixed her with a curious look. She decided not to complain about this anymore.
The airport’s location was now obvious, since from this altitude they were able to watch a plane coming in for a landing and eventually disappearing behind the ridge. Olivia checked her watch and verified that this was the 10:45 flight from Taipei. Her good-girl instincts were telling her to get down there immediately so that she could impress her contact with her punctuality. Sokolov, however, was having none of this. “He will wait,” he pointed out.
“But—”
“You are not here to make him have nice day.”
Olivia could hardly deny that.
Sokolov took control of the phone, and Olivia watched over his shoulder for a few minutes as he consulted the map. He needed her linguistic help to locate the island’s ferry terminal, where regularly scheduled boats came in from Xiamen. She found this at the island’s southwestern tip. The most obvious route from it to the airport would be along the fattest of Kinmen’s east-west roads, which they had not crossed yet, as it traversed the southern aspect of the ridge.
They were only about a kilometer—a thousand long strides—from the airport. And yet Sokolov insisted that they hike east—which was to say, away from the ferry terminal—through the worst terrain that he could find, darting over little mountain lanes as necessary, until they came in view of a major road intersection. Sokolov found a place where he could monitor this from cover and sent Olivia down alone, insisting that she wait for a bus so that she could enter the airport “like normal person.” “See you at meeting place,” he said.
“When?”
“When you are there.”
Olivia made a final effort to get semipresentable, waited until the coast was clear, and then emerged from the trees, towing a four-meter-long strand of flowering vine behind one ankle until she kicked free of it. The bus arrived forty-five minutes later and took her on a journey that she could have done on foot in ten.
During the wait, she had the presence of mind to check the screen of the phone she’d been using and saw the message OUT RUNNING ERRANDS—BUYING A WEDDING GIFT FOR NIECE—I THINK SHE WOULD LIKE NEW KITCHEN KNIFE.
“Kitchen knife” and “wedding gift” were not established code phrases. “Out running errands” seemed like a tipoff that her contact had decided to leave the airport and go elsewhere on the island. But Olivia had no way of guessing where. And the next bus that came along was headed to the airport whether she liked it or not. She climbed aboard. There were three seats available. She chose one on the aisle, not wanting to present her face in a window.
She was still puzzling over the message as the bus pulled up in front of the main terminal and disgorged twenty or so locals, mostly airport workers. As Olivia gazed into the terminal building, all her alarm bells went off at once. All the bad things that she’d been trained to look for were there on display, as if this were a spy training film, carefully designed to depict the worst imaginable scenario. Every bench, every snack bar, every security checkpoint had one or two loitering, watchful men, pretending to pay attention to their mobile phones. Some of them even had the temerity to wear sunglasses indoors.
She was seeing precisely what Sokolov had anticipated: the mainland PSB had packed this morning’s ferry with plainclothes goons who had flooded the airport and any other place where Olivia and Sokolov might be likely to show up. They were keeping an eye out for any white male—but especially one traveling in the company of a Chinese female.
What those men might actually do, if they sighted the two together, was not clear to her. They had no power to arrest anyone on Taiwanese soil. Gunplay in a public space seemed unlikely. But they could take pictures and make a hell of a stink.
Olivia’s contact, getting off the plane, must have seen the same thing and decided to get out of there.
She remained aboard the bus, sinking low in her seat and peering through the lower edge of a dirty window. A stocky, middle-aged man, wearing a bulky suit and mirrored shades, was leaning against an advertising case, smoking a cigarette and barking into a phone. As the bus began to pull away, she noted that the case was filled with kitchen cutlery—the traditional Chinese cleaver-shaped knives. Which jogged her memory, finally. The island was within artillery range of Xiamen, and during the late 1950s, half a million high-explosive shells had been lobbed into the place. Over the next two decades, these had been followed by five million shells packed with propaganda leaflets. Local artisans dug them out of the ground and used the steel to make cleavers.
THE KNIFE FACTORY was an ideal place for a meeting, if one was concerned about being bugged or overheard. It was just a large open industrial structure, filled in the middle with many thousands of old rusted shells, bullet shaped, melon sized. Workers cut them into cigarette-pack-sized chunks using abrasive-wheel saws that shrieked like condemned souls while hurling out showers of sparkling white hellfire. A mechanical hammer beat these out flat, and they were pushed into a roaring furnace for heat treating. Finally, the tempered slabs were ground into knives on stone wheels and finished on belt sanders that looked and sounded as though they could jerk a finger off without noticing. This business of making shells into cutlery was sufficiently unusual that the factory offered tours. Olivia joined a group of five others who had flown in from Taiwan to see the sights and buy knives.
Getting here had taken long enough that the implications of all those goons in the airport had begun to work themselves out in Olivia’s mind. It was strongly in MI6’s interest to get her safely back to London, and so she had few worries on that score. But Sokolov was a different matter. MI6 did not know, yet, how she had made her way to Kinmen. They didn’t know about her travel buddy. Now that she had made it to Taiwanese soil, he was—to use dry British understatement—inconvenient. But if she were to ditch him here—which would be easy—she would have to spend the rest of her life avoiding mirrors.
If this had been the good old Cold War days, and Sokolov had been a possible defector, stuck behind the Iron Curtain, then they might have organized some sort of caper to smuggle him out to the West and set him up with a new life. In exchange, he would supply them with priceless military intelligence. But from what little she’d been able to learn, Sokolov divided his time between Toronto, London, and Paris. And there was very little in his head that MI6 didn’t already know.
“Meng Anlan?”
The speaker was Chinese, or at least Chinese-looking: a hefty man in his fifties wearing shaded glasses and dressed in the loud shirt of a tourist who didn’t care if everyone knew that he was a tourist. He had been checking her out through those shades.
She just looked at him. If he had to ask…
“May I walk with you?” he asked. Or rather shouted, since they were standing two meters away from one of those abrasive-wheel saws.
It looked like the conversation was going to be in Fujianese-inflected Mandarin. Fine with her.
She fell in step beside him, and they began a slow procedure of falling farther and farther behind the main tour group. He was shouldering a bag. She hoped it might be full of food. But now was the wrong time to ask.
What the hell. “Do you have anything—a candy bar, a bag of peanuts.” She had managed to buy water along the way but had not eaten in something close to twenty-four hours.
“Forgive me,” he said in English, and rummaged in his bag. The best he could come up with was a bag of almonds.
As she was stuffing these into her mouth, he said: “Bit of a stink.” His accent said that he had grown up in England.
“I’m sure lots of people are bloody furious,” she said. “Can we sort that out later?”
“Hunger makes you irritable.”
“It’s not the hunger. It’s the not-knowing-what’s-going-to-happen.”
“You’re fine,” he said. “You’re safe. You’re going home. But it has to be done with a decent respect for the feelings of that lot.” He nodded toward the mainland, which they could not see from here, but which loomed psychologically over everything. “They watch the ferries. The terminals. If you were to just waltz on board a plane and fly off to Taipei, it would be construed as—”
“Rubbing their face in it.”
“Apparently there were a lot of bodies.”
“Four, to be exact.”
“In your flat, yes. But there’s the matter of the apartment building—or had you forgotten?”
“I remember it well.”
“What in God’s name happened there?”
“Long story. Not the place for it.”
“We agree,” the man said.
“Sorry if I’m focusing too much on narrowly practical matters,” she said, “but how do I get aboard a plane without seeming to ‘waltz on board’?”
“Use a fake name. Change your appearance. And travel with me.”
“You think that will fool them?”
“Actually, I do,” he said, “but even if it doesn’t, the purpose is—”
“To show a decent respect for their feelings.”
“Yes.” The man—somehow they had skipped over any sort of formal introduction—drew closer to her and transferred his bag to her shoulder. “Clothes,” he said. “Money. British passport. Not in your name, of course. A veritable cornucopia of feminine hygiene. A few odds and ends.”
“A book or two?” she asked. “Or is that too much to hope for?”
He chortled. “You’re already worried about what you’re going to do on the flight to London?”
“Never mind. I’m sure I’ll be drinking myself senseless.”
He turned his attention to the knife tour for a few moments, admiring a trip-hammer that was using hydraulic power to beat the hell out of a piece of hot steel being moved around in it by a tong-brandishing worker, stripped from the waist up.
But then he turned back.
“There are, of course, many questions.”
“Of course.”
“You’ll answer them all in due course.”
“So I supposed.”
“But there is one in particular that I have been directed to ask you, just in case something goes awry.”
“In case I get sucked out of the airplane.”
“Rogue wave. Meteor strike.”
“All right. What is the one question?”
“Who killed all those men in your apartment?”
She made no answer.
“Was it you?”
She snorted.
“Because we didn’t think you were that sort of spy.”
“I’m not,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”
“Well, who was it then?”
“You squandered your one question,” she said, “on something that would take me a day and a half to answer properly.”
“Do we need to worry about him—I’m going to make a wild supposition that a Y chromosome is involved and use the masculine pronoun—do we need to worry about him killing a great many more Chinese people on Chinese soil at any time in the near future?”
“Those probably weren’t even Chinese people,” she said, “but the answer is no. And by the way, he’s not British.”
“Good. Ah yes. One more thing.”
“I thought you said there’d only be one more question.”
“It’s difficult to stop once I’ve got started.”
“Go ahead, then.”
“Where is Abdallah Jones?”
“He could be anywhere in the world,” she said. “He was at an airport last night.”
“Bloody shame.”
“Isn’t it.”
“An airport? Odd phrasing.”
Olivia shrugged.
“How do you know he was at an airport?”
This, then, was the moment. But she didn’t know who this guy was. How much power he wielded, what he might, or might not, be able to do for her. Her sense was that he was just acting here as a conduit between her and someone else, someone back in London. “Mr. Y,” she said.
“He of the chromosome?”
“Yes.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Mr. Y talked to Jones on the phone.”
“That must have been an interesting conversation.”
“Mr. Y’s half of it certainly was. In any case, he knew, somehow, that Jones was at an airport. I would guess he heard jet engines in the background, or instructions on how to fasten a lap belt.”
“But Mr. Y knows nothing further.”
“Funny you should ask,” Olivia said. “Mr. Y says he has more information now. Information that could be used to figure out where Jones went.”
“And where is Mr. Y? Stuck in China?”
“Probably looking at you from behind a shrub. Don’t look around, though.”
“I shan’t. Can’t say how pleased I am that he understands the need to keep his head down.”
“He has all sorts of talents.”
This elicited a searching look from the man. Olivia, remembering this morning’s activities in the bunker, felt her face getting warm and hoped that he would mistake it for the red heat of the case-hardening furnace glowing on her face. Hurrying on, she continued: “If you would like to make an arrangement with him to get him out of the country safely—which is what I recommend and advocate—then I can make a rendezvous with him and let him know where matters stand.”
“Obviously, I don’t have a ready-made passport for a gentleman of his description,” the man said, “since I don’t even know what his description is. Even if I did, for him to go to the airport today and get on a plane—”
“I understand. I get it.”
“Speaking of passports—”
Olivia was nonplussed for a few moments, then took his meaning. She reached into her pocket and took out her Chinese passport. Her million-pound Meng Anlan passport. The man took it from her and, with a flip of the wrist, tossed it through the open maw of the forge. It exploded into flame before it had even touched the coals, and was fully consumed in a few moments.
“Farewell, Meng Anlan,” he said. “Hello, whoever’s name is on the passport in that bag. I’ve forgotten it already.”
“Obviously, I’m pleased that you can get whoever I now am out of the country,” Olivia said. “But I am disinclined to leave until I know what is to come of Mr. Y. I know you can’t get a passport for him. But isn’t there some way—”
The man was nodding. “We do, in fact, have a backup plan.”
“Really?”
“Yes. We’re good at such things. It is much more old-school. Very Cold War. Your friend might like it.”
“Pocket submarine?”
“Even more old-school than that. There’s a containership,” he said. “You can actually see it from the north shore of the island. Riding at anchor. Panamanian registered. Filipino crewed. Taiwanese owned. It has been taking on cargo at Xunjianggang. In a few hours, it is departing for the Port of Long Beach. We’d hoped we could get something Sydney bound—which would be quicker—but it’s more important to get you and your fantastically homicidal entourage out of here today, before the Chinese can get any more furious than they already are. So Long Beach it is. The great circle route takes two weeks or so.”
“How do we make this work?”
“He will need to get out to the ship just after dark. This is something that you shall have to arrange yourself, preferably without leaving the waterfront district littered with corpses. As the ship is pulling out of the Xunjianggang, just starting to build up speed, it should be possible to pull up alongside it and come aboard. As long as you stay out of sight, it should be fine.”
“Stay out of sight? Are you serious?”
“From the mainland. Come up on its starboard side.”
“And they’ll be ready for this?”
“They had better be,” he said, “considering what we have paid them.”
THEY SPENT THE remaining hours of darkness learning the physics of the boat, which was by no means easier given that they had all been awake for going on twenty-four hours now.
Mohammed’s body had to be gotten rid of. This meant throwing it overboard, which seemed like a terrible and disgraceful thing, even notwithstanding the Osama bin Laden precedent. They avoided the matter for a little while, but it was simply out of the question that they could share the bridge with a dead man. So, after some dithering and stalling, Csongor went rummaging for something that was dense and heavy enough to pull the body down to the floor of the sea, but not too heavy for them to move, and that they didn’t need for any other purpose. He ended up settling on a black steel box filled with 7.62 millimeter cartridges, of which there were several strewn around the cargo hold. He laid this across Mohammed’s ankles and held them up in the air while Yuxia lashed it all together with surplus pallet wrap, and then he dragged Mohammed out of the bridge and jackknifed him over the railing. The corpse was poised there for a moment. Csongor felt it would be proper to say something. But he realized that there was nothing he knew how to say that Mohammed and his people would not find grievously sacrilegious. So he tumbled the body the rest of the way over. The shrink-wrapped lashings seemed to hold, and the corpse vanished.
With buckets of seawater, hauled up on a rope, they sluiced the steel floor of the bridge until it was no longer bloody. Learning their way around the vessel, they found scrub brushes and cleaning supplies and gave the place a more thorough washing down, swabbing blood splashes and fingerprints away from some of the bridge’s vertical surfaces. Marlon pulled the ruined radio off its bracket and threw it into the sea, trailing its bloody microphone.
The user interface of the GPS was anything but intuitive, but Marlon figured out how to zoom and pan its tiny map. Standing around it in the dark, they began to get a sense of where they had been—for the GPS displayed the boat’s past track—and where they were going. It seemed that, for the first hour of their voyage, Mohammed had steered them generally south along the coast, then changed to an easterly heading, making directly for Taiwan at a speed of something like ten knots. This had brought them to a point about thirty nautical miles off the Chinese coast, which was where the confrontation and shooting had taken place.
At that point, Marlon had dropped the vessel’s speed to more like five knots. This was not the absolute slowest they could go, but if they went any slower they lost all sense that they were making forward progress, and the boat seemed to wallow and wander (an impression that could be confirmed by zooming in on the track and observing the way it staggered across the screen). The rudder, it seemed, was not capable of doing its job unless water was flowing across it with at least some minimum speed.
Marlon told Csongor about what Batu had said regarding the fuel gauge, or lack thereof, and so Csongor went down to the engine room and spent a while figuring out how the diesels worked, eventually identifying the fuel line and the pump that fed it. From this, plumbing led back through a bulkhead to a space mostly occupied by a pair of cylindrical tanks of impressive and reassuring size, each rather more than a meter in diameter and perhaps three meters long. Each had a fill pipe welded into its top. Csongor traced those up to a pair of fittings on the deck, which he guessed they would use whenever they pulled up to the nautical equivalent of a gas station. Shining his flashlight around that area, working out slowly in concentric circles, he finally found where they kept the dipstick: a piece of (inevitably) bamboo secured under the gunwale with bungee cords, ruled with felt-tip scribe marks and (to him) cryptic annotations. He called Yuxia down to help him interpret the marks, and then they opened one of the fuel fill hatches and shoved the bamboo pole down into it. Then he began pulling it out in a hand-over-hand movement, praying that he would feel cold wet diesel fuel on his palms. This did not happen, however, until the last few inches of the stick emerged. Yuxia read the nearest number marked on the pole. This meant nothing since they had no idea how quickly the diesels consumed fuel. But there was no ignoring the fact that it was the last number on the stick. “We just have to be scientific about this,” Csongor said, and he marked the exact location of the fuel level and noted the time.
They then repeated the experiment with the other tank and found that it was completely dry. Csongor went down and fiddled with the valves and confirmed his suspicion that the empty tank had simply been disconnected from the system; the jihadists had only used the one tank, and they hadn’t bothered to put more than a little bit of fuel in it, since all they ever did was putter around the harbor at the island.
Yuxia went back up to the bridge to keep Marlon company and make sure he didn’t fall asleep on his feet, and Csongor devoted more time to sorting through the hold’s contents. It did not take a Sherlock Holmes to read the recent history of this boat. It had been owned, and used hard, for many years by actual fishermen who had accumulated the sorts of gear and supplies one would expect: nets, lines, stackable plastic trays, polyethylene cutting boards, cutlery, whetstones, all manner of tools, paint, lubricants, solvents, and the like. As sustenance on longer voyages they had also laid in white plastic drums of what he took to be potable water, and sacks of rice, and a few other bulk food items such as soy sauce and cooking oil.
Then, at some point, the boat had been acquired by the jihadists, who had turned it into a floating arsenal: probably not enough to run a war, or even an insurrection, but plenty if the only goal was to blow up a building or plan a Mumbai-style shooting spree. So there was a pallet carrying a black steel drum of what Csongor guessed, by smell, to be fuel oil, and another carrying heavy woven-plastic sacks of white powder labeled as FERTILIZER: ammonium nitrate, presumably. Those two ingredients, mixed together, would make a high explosive that, as Csongor knew from reading the newspapers, could be detonated if one had some blasting caps handy. Csongor had no idea what a blasting cap even looked like, but he soon enough found out, as a carton of them had been helpfully stored on a shelf next to a translucent plastic box filled with phones, all of the same make and model.
Other boxes and pallets had been loaded with ammunition, mostly loose rifle cartridges in dark green or black steel boxes. But these had been raided and depleted earlier in the day as Jones and his men had made hasty preparations for their departure. He already knew that the guns were all missing, since they’d carefully searched for them earlier.
Supposing that they got picked up, eventually, by naval or coast guard vessels, he did not want to be found on board with such things, and so he began to consider how most easily to throw them overboard. Looking up, he noted that much of the foredeck consisted of a large cargo hatch, and so he went up and figured out how to get that open, and then spent a few minutes shining his flashlight over the equipment poised above it: cranes and winches and cables that had obviously been put there to facilitate moving things in and out of that hatch, if only he could figure out how to turn them on and use them. Some of the winches sported hand cranks, and so he reckoned he could get it done with muscle power if he had to. Now that he was out of China, he was finally getting a feel for how things were done in the country, and realizing that they had a genius for the kind of simple technology that required no instruction manuals. It was going to help them during this voyage.
Returning to the hold, he began sorting things out into three piles: trash (e.g., empty cardboard boxes), stuff they might be able to use (food), and dangerous or incriminating objects that needed to be jettisoned. He found four boxes, shrink-wrapped together, packed with instant ramen. Then three cartons of military rations: ready-made meals sealed in black pouches. Opening one of these just to see what it was, he discovered that he was ravenous and ate the whole thing standing up, stuffing the food into his mouth with filthy hands.
He found cigarettes and first aid kits and sorted those into the “keep” pile.
He was spending a lot of time maneuvering around the black steel drum of fuel oil, and finally—for perhaps the energy from the food was at last making its way to his brain—realized that the ship’s engines would probably burn it. How to transfer it into the fuel tanks? He spun up a sort of harebrained idea that involved using the ship’s crane to haul the drum up out of the hold and then somehow funnel its contents into the fuel filler abovedecks. With a little more consideration, though—for perhaps the Chinese way with technology was beginning to catch on with him—he realized that a siphon ought to work, since the ship’s fuel tank was actually situated below the altitude of the fuel drum. So he scrounged a hose and got the thing rigged up and after some false starts and spills and spitting out of fuel oil was eventually able to get a siphon working that drained the drum over the course of the next half hour.
He then redipped the tank, hoping to observe a triumphant and dramatic rise in fuel level, and found that all of his labors had made no effect; in the amount of time it had taken him to do it, they’d burned as much as he’d added.
The eastern sky was growing lighter when he was finished with all of this. He went up to the bridge and found Yuxia up there alone, piloting the boat eastward and silently weeping. Marlon was apparently getting some sleep down in one of the cabins.
It required no great leap of imagination for Csongor to understand why Yuxia had tears running down her face. They had taken insane risks and devoted all their energy during the last few hours to the goal of escaping from China. Replaying the story in his memory, Csongor was unable to see any moment when they might have chosen differently. He and Marlon could not have abandoned Yuxia to whatever fate the jihadists might have had in mind for her. Once they had unexpectedly gotten control of this fishing boat, they’d had to do something with it, and getting out of the People’s Republic of China had seemed like a good idea. In Csongor’s mind, this happened to be synonymous with getting closer to home. Marlon didn’t seem to be especially broken up by this hasty and unplanned departure from his native land; for him it must be an adventure of the sort that any young man would want to go on. Anyway, he needed to put some distance between himself and the apartment where he had created REAMDE, and this was an excellent way to accomplish that. But Yuxia had originally been drawn into this by nothing more than her desire to befriend some clueless Westerners she had observed wandering lost in the street. She had family back in Yongding, family who must be worried about her, and she must be asking herself now whether she would ever see them again.
Even if she did, how could she explain certain things to them? The fight on the dock? The torture in the bucket of seawater? Aiming a pistol at Mohammed and trying to shoot him?
No wonder she was a wreck.
“I’ll do this,” Csongor said. “Go get some food. Go to sleep.”
She didn’t move.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We will sort it all out somehow. None of this was your fault. You will go back home someday.”
This was meant to be comforting, but it sent Yuxia running out of the bridge with a wail escaping from her throat. Csongor followed her halfway, fearing that she was about to throw herself into the sea, but she thumped down the steel steps and ran into a cabin and slammed the door behind her.
Csongor continued steering the vessel into the sunrise while poking at the controls on the GPS unit, trying to get a sense of where they were. The morning light filtering into the front windows made it much easier to see around the bridge, and he noticed a stash of nautical charts that had escaped their notice in the darkness. He began to spread these out and to try to make sense of them. Most were large-scale depictions of complex features up and down the coast of China, and it was difficult for him to figure out their context. But one sheet caught his eye because it depicted a group of small islands, whose shapes jogged his memory; he’d seen them earlier while panning and zooming the GPS. They were identified, on the chart, as the Pescadores. They were out in the middle of the Straits of Taiwan, nearer to Taiwan than the mainland, but still a good fifty kilometers nearer to the boat’s current position than the shore of Taiwan itself. And the GPS seemed to be saying that these islands lay rather close to the course that they’d been steering anyway. So it seemed obvious that they should be making for the Pescadores. Csongor altered his course accordingly, steering on a slightly more southerly heading. As best he could make out from the charts and the GPS, they would reach the island group at something like four o’clock this afternoon. Assuming, that is, that they did not run out of fuel along the way.
THE JET CONTINUED to follow what seemed to Zula like an unremarkable flight plan: slowly gaining altitude, following a straight course that took it away from the Chinese mainland and southward over the South China Sea. Some mountains poked their heads over the eastern horizon, and she guessed that these must be on Taiwan; but they rapidly fell away aft.
She could not make up her mind whether to open the door or remain cloistered back here. A strong instinct told her simply to hole up in the dark and private cocoon of Ivanov’s cabin. But sooner or later she’d have to pee, and the jet only had one lavatory, which was forward.
As long as she was alone, it seemed sensible to take stock of what was at her disposal. Though small, the cabin had a little dresser. She checked the drawers and found nothing besides spare pillows and blankets. Ivanov would have taken all his stuff with him, of course. There was also a little flip-down desk, just large enough to support a laptop, and above this, built into the cabinetry, an appliance that was obviously an intercom. It had a row of pushbuttons, variously marked CABIN, COCKPIT, PA, and TALK. Next to them was a volume knob.
She turned the volume all the way down, then pressed the COCKPIT button. She found that if she pressed hard enough, it would lock down, causing an LED to illuminate, marked MONITOR. She then experimented with turning the volume up slowly and began to hear speech: Pavel and Sergei communicating with each other in Russian. Of which she, of course, knew not a word. But from time to time she would hear something she recognized, like “jumbo” or “Taipei.” And occasionally a voice in English would burst out of their radio: air traffic controllers, she supposed, communicating with them, or with other planes, from towers on the mainland.
She did not really understand the purpose or the content of these transmissions, but after a few minutes she was able to pick out certain patterns. Many of the transmissions began with a Chinese-accented voice saying “Xiamen Center” followed by the name of an aircraft manufacturer such as “Boeing” or “Airbus” or “Gulfstream” followed by a series of letters and numbers. Then a series of laconic instructions concerning altitude or heading or radio frequency. She reckoned that these transmissions all originated from an air traffic control center responsible for Xiamen’s airspace and that they were bossing the pilots of various airplanes around. In almost all cases, another voice would respond directly, frequently speaking in an English or American or European accent, repeating the series of letters and numbers that seemed to be their plane’s call sign, and then acknowledging the command with “Roger” followed by repeating the instructions out loud, presumably just to be sure that they’d gotten the details correctly. Occasionally, though, a transmission would go unacknowledged, and then Xiamen Center would have to repeat it; and if that failed, they might ask some other plane to relay the message. All of which was done with absolute, deadpan calm, which made sense given that it was what these people did all day, every day, just like bagging groceries or driving a truck. Twice she recognized the voice of Pavel acknowledging one of these transmissions, and in that way she learned the call sign of the plane on which she was a passenger, or rather a prisoner.
From time to time the instruction would be something like “Contact Hong Kong Center” or “Contact Taipei Center” followed by a series of digits, which she assumed must be a radio frequency. Whereupon the pilot would identify himself and repeat the instructions as usual, and then sign off with a “Thank you” or “See ya” or “Out,” never to be heard from again. At least on this channel. So she figured that these were outbound aircraft being handed off from one air traffic control center to another.
The time came when Xiamen Center called out the ID of the plane that Zula was on and issued the command transferring them to the responsibility of Hong Kong center. Pavel answered in the usual way and bid Xiamen Center adieu. Pavel and Sergei then exchanged a few sentences in Russian.
Suddenly the plane shifted beneath Zula’s feet with a crispness that one never experienced on a commercial airliner. She had to throw out both hands to prevent herself from being thrown forward into the cabin door. The plane was not merely descending in the way that airliners did, that is, by throttling back on the engines and shedding altitude in level flight; it was actually pointed down, using the power of its engines to thrust itself directly toward the sea.
The steepness of the dive increased to the point where Zula was lying full-length on the cabin door. Through it she could hear luggage and junk flying around in the cabin, and sleepy men shouting in alarm, and wakeful ones laughing delightedly.
She had thought at first that this was just a temporary maneuver to shed some altitude, but as it went on and on, she came instead to the realization that Pavel and Sergei had decided to commit suicide by crashing the plane into the sea. This couldn’t possibly go on any longer; her ears had popped three times.
But then, just as abruptly as it had gone into the dive, the plane pulled out of it, pressing her into the door, and then the corner between the door and the floor, and finally the floor itself with what felt like several Gs of acceleration as its nose came up and it returned to what seemed to be level flight. When she was able to move again, she peeled herself off the cabin floor, popped her head over the edge of the bed, and looked out a window to see blank white, and raindrops streaming across the glass. She elbow-crawled across the bed, put her face to the window, and looked down. The clouds and fog were too dense to allow her to see very much, but through an occasional gap, she was able to glimpse the gray surface of the ocean hurtling past no more than a hundred feet below.
The plane now banked and executed a course change: a long sweeping leftward turn.
There was a flat-screen TV mounted to the bulkhead above the foot of the bed. Zula had not tried turning it on yet, because she didn’t like TV, but now it occurred to her that she was being foolish. So she turned it on and was presented with a menu of offerings including an onboard DVD player, a selection of video games, and “MAP.” She chose the latter and was presented with a map of the South China Sea, apparently generated by exactly the same software that was used aboard commercial airliners, since the typefaces and the style of the presentation were familiar to anyone who had ever taken a long-haul airline flight. The place of origin had been programmed in as Xiamen, and the destination was Sanya Phoenix International Airport, which was at the southern tip of a huge elliptical island, comparable in size to Taiwan, that lay off China’s southern coast. She was pretty sure that this was called Hainan Island and that it was part of the People’s Republic of China. A flight plan had been drawn on the map, connecting Xiamen to Sanya by two straight legs of roughly equal length. The first leg headed south-southwest from Xiamen, roughly paralleling China’s southern coast. Then it doglegged into a more westerly heading that took it straight to the southern tip of Hainan. Just guessing, it looked as though the course had been laid out to keep it well clear of the Hong Kong/Shenzhen/Macao/Guangdong area, which was right in the middle. Presumably the airspace around it was extraordinarily crowded and a good thing to avoid.
The plane’s actual track and current position were also superimposed on the map, and these showed that the flight plan had been followed precisely until a few minutes ago. Now they were headed a little north of due east, on a track that looked as though it would take them just south of Taiwan.
None of this would have made sense to her had she not been party to last night’s meeting in the main cabin. Obviously, they had never had any true intention of flying to Hainan Island. They had chosen that destination solely because it was a domestic flight and as such would not draw the attention of the immigration authorities at Xiamen’s airport. For that, any destination in China would have sufficed. But Hainan seemed to have another advantage, which was that a flight to there from Xiamen would naturally pass over the ocean; and over the ocean it was possible to get away with tricks such as screaming along at wavetop level to evade radar.
She reckoned that they were playing some kind of game having to do with the workings of the air traffic control system. Though she had never studied such things in any detail, she knew in a vague way that radar had limited range and that the structure of the air traffic control system somehow reflected that fact; a country’s airspace was divided into separate zones, each managed from a different control center with its own radar system. Airplanes in flight were handed off from one control center to the next as they made their way across the country. At some point they had stopped being the responsibility of the air traffic controllers in Xiamen and entered into a zone controlled from Hong Kong. Or perhaps by flying out over the ocean they had entered into a no-man’s-land that was not monitored or controlled by any authority. At any rate, she guessed that they had, a few minutes ago, reached one of those edges or seams in the system. Pavel and Sergei had then bid farewell to the air traffic controllers in the zone that they were departing and had gone into the power dive before they showed up on the radar screen, and came to the attention, of any other controllers.
Where they were going now she could only conjecture. Once they cleared the southern cape of Taiwan, there was nothing out there but the Pacific Ocean. But she’d seen enough of great circle routes yesterday evening to understand that flying basically east, as they were doing now, was no way to get across it.
It took them about half an hour’s flying time to get east of Taiwan. The plane then banked left again, and its little icon on the screen rotated around until it was pointed a little east of north. So it appeared that they were executing a large U-shaped maneuver around Taiwanese airspace.
The radio, which had been silent for a while, came alive again; apparently the pilots had switched over to a different frequency, and apparently that frequency was being used by Taipei Center, since all the transmissions now seemed to originate from there. Taipei Center seemed to be managing a large number of Boeings and Airbuses. These were helpfully identified, not only by their call signs, but by their origins or destinations as well, and so Zula got a clear impression of an extremely busy airport handling jumbo jets coming in from, or flying out to, far-flung destinations such as Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, and Chongqing.
It took rather less than an hour for the plane to clear the northern tip of Taiwan, which was where Taipei was located. It then executed a series of maneuvers and began a long steady ascent, which Zula was able to track using the helpful data screens thrown up every minute or so on the TV display. Presumably this would make the plane visible on radar, supposing that any radar stations were in range. But looking at the smaller-scale map that occasionally flashed up on the TV, Zula noted that they were in a region where planes from all over Southeast Asia and Australia might fly northward en route to Japan or Korea. So maybe they were hoping that their bogey would go unnoticed in all the clutter?
Her bladder could not stand any more waiting, and so she finally opened the door and stepped forward into the main cabin. This was crowded and smelled like sweaty men. The four soldiers were seated close together in the back. Two of them were napping, one was reading the Koran, and the fourth was intently focused on a laptop. At the cabin’s forward end, a fold-down table had been deployed and was covered with large aeronautical charts on which Khalid and Abdallah Jones had apparently been tracking their progress. Khalid was there now, staring directly at Zula with hate, fascination, or both. Jones was not in evidence until she made her way up the aisle to the lavatory. She then discovered him lying on his back with his feet in the aisle and his head in the cockpit. He was staring almost vertically upward through the cockpit windows. Pavel and Sergei likewise were craning their necks in what seemed a most awkward manner, attending to something that seemed to be above and ahead of them.
Zula used the lavatory. When she emerged, all three men were still in the same positions, though Jones had now begun cackling with satisfaction.
Noticing Zula standing above him, he tucked his chin, rolled to his feet, and beckoned her forward. She squeezed past him into the cockpit, dropped to one knee, and looked up.
No more than a hundred feet above them was the underbelly of a 747.
So that explained why they had felt free to gain altitude. They had timed their flight plan so as to synchronize it with this jumbo’s takeoff from Taipei airport. It was headed for (she guessed) Vancouver or San Francisco or some other West Coast destination. Cutting underneath it as it vectored northward from the tip of Taiwan, they had positioned themselves beneath it and gained altitude in lockstep with it, their bogey merging with its bogey on the radar screens of air traffic controllers and military installations up and down the eastern coast of Asia.
She helped herself to a can of Coke and a bag of chips from the plane’s miniature galley, then made her way back aft through the cabin, sensing Khalid’s eyes on her spine. Jones was now sitting across the table from him, and they were examining a chart of the northern Pacific.
The soldier with the laptop was sitting with his back to her. Looking over his shoulder she saw what was holding his attention so closely: he was playing Flight Simulator. Practicing a takeoff run from a rural landing strip.
She didn’t want to make it obvious that she had noticed, so she kept walking without breaking stride and returned to the cabin, closing the door behind her.
THE MAN, WHO was calling himself George Chow, took Olivia into Jincheng: a fishing town at the island’s western end. A couple of hotels had been thrown up near the ferry terminal, serving a mix of tourists and businessmen, and George Chow had taken a suite in one of them. He had apparently traveled here in the company of a Thai woman who had some talents as a hairdresser and a makeup artist. The woman had a bob haircut and wore conspicuous designer eyeglasses and dramatic makeup. She had spread newspapers on the floor and laid out her shears and combs and brushes. Olivia took a quick shower and then received a bob haircut exactly like that of the Thai woman, which, under any other circumstances, she’d have been afraid to take a risk on. The eyeglasses turned out to be fake—the lenses didn’t do anything. Olivia ended up wearing them. The same makeup too. And a few minutes later, the same clothes. A PRC goon holding a blurry photograph of Meng Anlan would not immediately peg her as being the same person; and if anyone had noticed George Chow coming off the Taipei flight this morning with the Thai woman on his arm, they’d assume that he was going home in the company of the same lady.
While all of this was happening, George Chow disappeared for about an hour, then came back saying that various matters had been arranged.
One of which, apparently, was a taxi, waiting for them in the alley just off the hotel’s loading dock, piloted by a man who, Olivia inferred, had been well paid not to notice or talk about anything. They drove to the place in the middle of the island that Sokolov had identified, earlier, as a good meeting site. Its advantages now became plain. They stopped near the culvert, and George Chow pretended to take photographs of Olivia standing against the backdrop of the wooded ridge. Sokolov was able to remain perfectly hidden, even though only a few meters away, until a moment when the road was free of traffic. He then emerged and did a passable job of concealing his amusement at the new Olivia.
“You are fashion queen,” Sokolov observed.
“For two hours. Once I get to Taipei, all of this is coming right off.”
“Then where? London?”
“I assume so. Yes. Let’s go.”
“Where we go?” Sokolov asked, a bit sharply. He was much too worldly wise to imagine that he too would be whisked away to London.
“I’ll explain in the car,” Olivia said.
The weather had gradually turned gray as the day had worn on, and it was now becoming blustery, with a strong breeze out of the north. This suited their purposes, since it gave Sokolov an excuse to put on a rain slicker that they had purchased for him in Jincheng, and to wear it with the hood up. For now, though, he just slumped as far down as possible in the car’s rear seat as George Chow explained what was about to happen. Meanwhile the driver took them west back into town, then north, running parallel to the island’s western coast, until they had passed out of the built-up area (which took all of about thirty seconds) and into another of those strange places where no Chinese people went, apparently for the reason that no other Chinese people were there. This was a wild beach landscape similar to the one where they had crawled up out of the surf the night before. On higher ground above it, where the sand was held together by the root systems of sparse grass, a man and his son were flying a string of kites. Below, the beach stretched away for at least a kilometer. Olivia thought at first that it was studded with antitank obstacles even more thickly than the one she and Sokolov had washed up on. On closer examination, though, what she was looking at were thousands of concrete pillars that had been planted upright in the tidal zone to give shellfish something to grow on. Workers were picking their way among them. Each had a bamboo pole balanced over his or her shoulders, a basket or a bag dangling from each end. Seen through the thickening air of an incoming shower, it looked like a colossal cemetery: not a modern American cemetery with its polished and neatly arrayed monuments, but a thousand-year-old English churchyard crammed with worn gray stones tilting this way and that.
George Chow seemed to guess that they wanted privacy, or perhaps he felt a need to keep a watch over any traffic coming up the coast road, and so he remained in the taxi while Sokolov and Olivia walked out, trying to find salt water. For they had arrived early. The tide was low. Olivia left her purse in the car and went barefoot. Sokolov was now using a handheld GPS issued to him by George Chow, aiming for a waypoint marked on its screen.
When they reached a place where fog and mist had rendered them invisible from the road, they sat down on a couple of adjacent shellfish-pillars that had been picked clean by harvesters and watched the tide flow in. For they were only a hundred meters from the rendezvous point. Olivia wasn’t wearing much, and Sokolov didn’t have to ask to know that she was chilly, and so he sat upwind of her and wrapped his raincoat around her so that she could snuggle up under his arm.
“I think I’m going with you,” she announced, after ten minutes had passed in silence.
“Not get on plane?” Sokolov said.
“No. Why should I? Nothing prevents me from just getting on this boat with you, and taking the freighter to Long Beach.”
He considered it for a good long time. Long enough that she began to worry that she had screwed it all up. Sokolov had enjoyed this morning’s rumpus in the bunker, and might enjoy more in the future, provided there was no commitment; but being stuck on a freighter with Olivia for two weeks was a hell of a lot of togetherness. What man wouldn’t recoil, just a little, from that?
“Would make two weeks more interesting,” he allowed. Then he switched over to Russian. “But this is not the correct choice for you to make.”
Part of her wanted to say Why not? but, having affrighted him already, she did not want to get pouty on him now.
“What is the correct choice?”
“Find Jones,” he said. “Figure out where he is. Tell me.”
“But if we find him,” she said, “he’s dead, or captured, no matter what. We don’t need you to kill him.”
“I can dream,” he said.
“So you want me to spend these two weeks looking for Jones?”
“Yes.”
She peeled his arm from her shoulders and ducked out from beneath him, spinning off the pillar to land with both feet in the surf. It came up to her ankles, with waves sloshing over her calves.
“I’m sorry I have this shit on my face,” she said. “Makes me feel stupid.”
“Is fine,” he said, averting his gaze shyly.
“Listen,” she continued, “Jones’s trail is cold. There’s nothing I can do in the next two weeks to find him.”
“Unless I give information.”
“Yes. Which I think you are free to do now.” She glanced over her shoulder, out into the mist that had descended over the strait between Kinmen and Xiamen. They could hear a boat out there, its motor putt-putting away at a low idle, occasionally throttling up as its driver followed the tide in toward them. “Your ride is here,” she pointed out. “You’ve got what you wanted—safe passage out of China. Tell me what you know. I’ll use it while you’re on that freighter. When you get to L.A., call me.”
“Tail number of Jones’s airplane is as follows,” Sokolov said, and then recited a string of letters and numbers. Olivia had him repeat it several times. “He took off from Xiamen at zero seven one three hours local time and headed south.”
“Why do you think he would go south?”
“Maybe headed for Mindanao,” Sokolov said, “where jihadists have camps. But I doubt it. Is probably a diversion. He will get over the ocean, drop to low altitude, disappear from radar, turn off transponder, and then do something else.”
“That’ll make it difficult to find him.”
“Not so difficult. You will see,” Sokolov said. He planted both hands on the pillar, pushed himself off, dropped into water that was now knee-deep, gazed over Olivia’s shoulder, trying to get a fix on the boat’s location from its sound. “Intelligence services will have tapes of radar. Now that you know when he took off, which direction he went, you can follow him on tapes for a little while. Get clues. Figure out where he might have gone. Narrow it down. And then”—he turned to look her right in the eye—“tell me where motherfucker went.”
“If he’s still alive in two weeks,” Olivia said, “I’ll tell you.”
“Good-bye,” he said. “I would give you kiss but do not want to damage professional makeup job.”
“It’s already damaged,” she pointed out.
“Okay then.” He wrapped his arms around her, gave her a long and quite thorough kiss. Then he spun her around and set her back down carefully on the top of the pillar, out of the inrushing surf. Turning his back on her immediately, he pulled the hood of the slicker up over his head, then began wading toward the sound of the boat that was idling somewhere out there in the fog. “Walk now or swim later,” he warned her, as he was disappearing.
In spite of that good advice, Olivia waited, wanting to hear the sound of the boat’s motor throttling up, taking him out of there.
What she heard instead was three short bursts of submachine gun fire. Then a series of sporadic pops. Followed by the sound of the boat screaming away at top speed.
AFTER A COUPLE of hours, Marlon came up to the bridge with tea service and a couple of military ration packets. As they wolfed these down, Csongor showed Marlon the chart of the Pescadores and explained the course he had been following, which he hoped would bring them into the center of the island group in another few hours.
Csongor then went down into a cabin, climbed into a bed, and arranged himself carefully, since he knew that he would fall asleep instantly and not move until awakened.
The thing that awakened him was a sudden heaving and heeling of the vessel. Csongor was unable to tell the time, but he sensed that he had been asleep for some time; his bladder was quite full and he actually felt rested. But daylight was still coming in through the porthole. He got up and staggered into the head and relieved himself, then pushed the cabin door open against the forces of the wind and (because the boat was listing) gravity. Something hit him in the face that was halfway between rain and mist. He could not see more than a few hundred meters in any direction.
The engine was still running. That was good.
He went up to the bridge where Marlon was planted exactly where Csongor had last seen him. According to the digital clock on the bulkhead, it was a little past three in the afternoon, which meant that Marlon had been running the ship alone for seven hours. He turned his face away from the screen of the GPS to look at Csongor, who was unnerved by the look on his face: haggard, wrecked by exhaustion and stress. “This is the worst video game of all time,” he said.
“Kind of a boring one,” Csongor allowed.
“Boring,” Marlon agreed, “and it doesn’t work. The user interface sucks ass.”
“What kinds of problems are you having?”
“It doesn’t shoot where you aim.”
It doesn’t shoot where you aim. What could that mean? Csongor drew closer and looked at the display on the GPS, showing the track they’d been following during the time he’d been asleep. He was expecting to see a straight line aimed directly at the Pescadores. Instead, he saw a track that gradually curved south, then jogged northward, then curved south again. Marlon, it seemed, had been trying to steer a straight line for their destination, but something had been pushing the boat inexorably southward. Once he had noticed this, he had tried to correct for it by aiming the boat back the other way. But the net result was that they were actually a little bit south of the Pescadores’ latitude at this point, perhaps ten kilometers away from the nearest of the islands, driving north-northeast in an effort to work their way back to it.
The mist had developed into rain, which was spattering the forward and port windows. “We are fighting the wind,” Csongor said.
“Now, yes.” Marlon said. “But that is new. Something else was bending us south.”
“There must be a current in the strait,” Csongor said.
“Current?”
“Like a river, a flow of water to the south.”
“Fuck!” Marlon said. “We would have been there by now, if I had known.”
“I thought it was like a car,” Csongor said. “It goes where you point it.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Marlon said. “It goes where it wants.”
The vibration that they’d been feeling in their feet the entire time they’d been aboard devolved into a series of coughs and chugs, then reestablished itself for a few moments, and then ceased.
“Out of gas,” Csongor said.
“Game over,” Marlon said.
“No,” Csongor said. “Game continues. We just made it to the next level.”
THE HANDLE OF the sledgehammer was bright yellow plastic, a detail preposterous to Richard, who had paced up and down the length of the relevant aisle at Home Depot trying to find something less painfully embarrassing until the department manager had insisted that he make his choice and leave—it was closing time, nine o’clock.
Standing on the doorstep of Zula’s apartment at nine fifteen, gripping the ridiculous implement in brand-new, ergonomically designed work gloves (an impulse purchase, yanked from an aisle-end display as the manager had harried him toward the checkout counters), he realized why he didn’t like it: the thing looked like a T’Rain sledgehammer. The realization struck him with such force that it queered his first blow, which caromed off Zula’s doorjamb and nearly took out his knee. Then he got a grip, not only on the yellow plastic handle, but on himself, and swung again, getting his hips into it and striking true. The door practically exploded. Supposing Zula turned up all right, he would have a talk with her about the virtues of physical security and devote an afternoon to beefing up her door.
Or her replacement door, to be precise, since there wasn’t much left of this one.
“You can turn down the stereo now,” he said to James and Nicholas, who were five steps below him, cowering as one. James and Nicholas, a gay couple, lived downstairs of Zula and, as it turned out, had taken an almost parental interest in her welfare. Earlier today, back in the—ha!—long-forgotten hours when Richard had attempted to do this through official channels, they had assured Richard that he should get in touch with them at any time of the day or night if there were anything they could conceivably do to help him get to the bottom of Zula’s disappearance. Three minutes ago, Richard had put their offer to the test on multiple levels, knocking them up late in the evening to see how they would feel about some really loud banging and splintering noises from upstairs. As it turned out they had been as good as their word and had even offered to turn up their stereo for a while in case that would help cover any noises that might disturb the nocturnal peace of neighboring properties. A foolish reverence for official cop procedures did not, apparently, go hand in hand with gayness.
And neither did having a missing niece.
“I’d really appreciate it if you could turn it down,” Richard said, and then James and Nicholas understood that he just wanted them gone for a minute or two. They turned their backs on him and padded down the carpeted stairs. They occupied the first two floors, and Zula the third, of a big old house on Capitol Hill: Seattle’s most oddly named neighborhood, in that Seattle was not a capital and had never been graced with anything resembling a capitol.
This bit—walking into the apartment and turning on the lights—was by far the worst for him, just because of what he was afraid he might find. Growing up on a farm had exposed him to a few sudden and unpleasant sights that he had never been able to clear from his memory. But Zula stabbed or strangled on the floor of her apartment would, he knew, be the last thing that came into his mind’s eye at the moment of his death; and between now and then it would come to him unbidden at unforeseeable moments.
Instead all he found was a furious cat, yowling and stalking around an eviscerated cat food bag whose contents had spilled out onto the floor. A toilet drinker, by process of elimination. Other than that, all was orderly: no food left out, no lights left on. He checked her closet and noted that her winter coat wasn’t there, saw no skis or any of the other stuff she’d brought on the trip to the Schloss. All of which confirmed the suspicion, which had been pretty strong to begin with, that she had never come back to her apartment after that trip.
This didn’t mean she was alive, or even well. But it alleviated the most horrible of his fears. Whatever had happened to her couldn’t be as bad as what he had been bracing himself for ten seconds ago.
And it gave him something to write home about. Or whatever the Facebook-era equivalent of that was.
He pulled out his phone, ignored four new text messages from his brother John, and thumbed one out: IN Z’S APT. ALL NORMAL.
John, still in Iowa, seemed to think that Richard would forget the seriousness of the situation without frequent reminders. The cursed invention of text messaging had removed any inhibitions John might ever have felt about what he still denominated “long-distance” telephone calls. On the upside, it enabled Richard to fire off status reports like this one without having to make personal contact.
To John’s credit, though, he had, after a grumpy word or two from Richard, named himself the family’s single point of contact with Seattle. So at least Richard didn’t have to explain his progress, or lack thereof, to everyone, all the time. That chore was being handled by John, using a Facebook page.
Richard hadn’t checked the page yet—it seemed wrong to be facebooking at a time like this—but he supposed it must contain a lot of detailed information about just what the Seattle Police Department were and were not willing to do in response to a missing persons report. For Richard had made what now seemed like an unrecoverable error by contacting the authorities first and filing same. This had placed him into a mode where all he could really do was nag the officer who was responsible for the case; and said officer had already explained that, unless there was evidence of an actual crime, there was not much they could do in the way of direct, proactive investigation.
He thumbed out a P. S.: Z NEVER CAME BACK HERE AFTER B.C.
John was back at him fifteen seconds later: CONTACTING RCMP. For Richard had already mentioned to him—and perhaps this had been a mistake—that a winter couldn’t go by in the Pacific Northwest without at least one car skidding off a mountain road somewhere and getting trapped in a snowbank, where the inhabitants, if still alive, had to survive on snowmelt while awaiting a rescue that, in many cases, never materialized. Snow was gone at lower elevations, but if Peter and Zula had decided to take the northern route, across the Okanagans, they could be marooned off the apex of any of a hundred hairpin mountain turns.
Next step: figure where that little fuck Peter lived, and take the sledgehammer to his door.
Too bad Richard couldn’t remember his last name.
NIGHT CAME OVER the jet suddenly, from which Zula guessed that its trajectory had turned decisively eastward, diving over the terminator into the shadow of the world.
During her occasional runs to the lavatory she spied a new chart on the table, covering a vast swath of the earth with Newfoundland in the upper right, Florida in the lower right, the Aleutians in the upper left, and Baja California at the bottom. Both nations’ Pacific approaches were carved up into polygonal swatches labeled in block capitals: ALASKAN DEWIZ and DOMESTIC ADIZ and PACIFIC COASTAL CADIZ and so on.
A line of pen marks, updated every few minutes, was marching northeast, off the east coast of Siberia and then roughly parallel to the Aleutians. It tallied with what Zula could see on the television monitor back in the cabin.
Khalid and Jones were paying close attention to certain details of Yukon and British Columbian geography, which couldn’t have been very rewarding given the extremely small scale of this map.
The Aleutians and mainland Alaska were all encompassed in the region labeled DOMESTIC ADIZ. South of that was a swath of blank ocean labeled ALASKAN DEWIZ, which ran all the way east into what she thought of as the armpit of Alaska, where its southeastern panhandle was joined to its main land mass by a corridor only a few miles wide.
The entirety of southeast Alaska lay exposed to the Pacific, not encompassed in any of these ADIZ or DEWIZ polygons. Zula guessed that “IZ” must stand for something like “Intercept Zone” and that it was a military designation. She had read about the Distant Early Warning line in a Cold War history class, and so guessed that DEWIZ was Distant Early Warning Intercept Zone and ADIZ was Air Defense Intercept Zone and CADIZ was its Canadian equivalent.
The CADIZ didn’t begin until roughly Prince Rupert, which lay just to the south of the southeast Alaska panhandle, and so it seemed that there was a vast gap in the IZ system, at a rough guess maybe five hundred miles wide, between the Canadian and the American zones. Which, from a national defense standpoint, was not such a big deal, since it would only give the Russian bombers access to the upper bit of British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. They could use their nukes to melt snow or kill mosquitoes, depending upon the season, but they couldn’t penetrate to the cities of Canada or the United States without passing through IZs farther south. And to reach that gap in the first place, they’d have to fly along an awkward southerly course that would burn a lot of fuel.
The whole northwestern third of British Columbia seemed to lie above the Canadian IZ and below the American, and this was where Abdallah Jones seemed to be focusing all of his attention. At a glance it appeared to be impossibly mountainous and desolate, but since this was an air chart, very few features were labeled, roads didn’t appear, and towns were not marked unless they sported significant runways. So maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Khalid’s attention span did not seem to extend beyond about thirty seconds, and so it was his lot to roll his eyes and sigh hopelessly as Jones devoted hour after hour to his cartographic research. Zula had met any number of men like Khalid and so, even though they’d spent very little time together, she felt she knew the man and his ways. The only thing that could hold the attention of this kind of person for very long was direct interaction with another human being. What kind of interaction didn’t really matter. Since three of the four soldiers had dozed off and the fourth was still fixated on his flight simulator, and since Jones was absorbed in the map and the two pilots were intensely focused on this project of flying in close formation beneath the belly of the 747, there was no one for him to interact with except for Zula. And Zula was spending most of her time in the aft cabin with the door closed. Whenever she opened the door, it was to find Khalid’s burning eyes staring directly at her in a way that seemed to demand some kind of a response. Those eyes tracked her every movement. Khalid couldn’t help but notice when Zula glanced over Jones’s shoulder at the map.
This show of curiosity on Zula’s part had astonished Khalid the first time and offended him the second time. The third time he flew into what she thought was a pretty well-rehearsed rage, getting to his feet and invading her space in a way that all but forced her to back away from him. She couldn’t parse the grammar of his sentences, but she was able to recognize a few none-too-flattering nouns; if Khalid had been a gangsta rapper, he’d have been calling her a bitch and a ho. This went on until it disturbed Jones’s train of thought, at which point he spoke up and told Khalid to pipe down and put a lid on it. Jones spoke in a tired, even dispirited tone of voice, which seemed to match the overall mood of the jihadists.
Returning to her cabin, Zula considered it. A few hours ago, back in Xiamen, Jones had been convinced that they would be able to fly the jet to some friendly location in Pakistan, pick up a cargo of Bad (perhaps a dirty bomb?), then turn the jet around and fly it straight to some kind of Armageddon in Las Vegas. Instead, because of the intricacies of the international rules around flight plans and restricted airspace, and because of the way Pavel and Sergei had shown some backbone at a critical moment, he had been forced to settle for a hastily patched-together plan that had gotten them safely out of China but that would apparently lead to their running out of fuel many hundreds of miles short of the U.S. border. They would have to touch down in the middle of nowhere and then improvise. He had to be feeling as though he’d been handed an incredible opportunity, then squandered it; but there was little else that he could have done. Zula could clearly perceive a struggle in Jones’s head between the Western, university-trained engineer and the Islamic fundamentalist; the former wanted to execute carefully laid plans while the latter just wanted to wing it and trust to fate. Most of his comrades were fatalists and looked askance at the decisions he had been making.
She began considering what she might need to survive in northern Canada at this time of year. Though winter was over, it was still going to be cold. She did not know whether the jihadists had packed winter clothes among the gear in the plane’s cargo hold. It seemed unlikely, given that they’d been planning to carry out an operation in Xiamen, a hyperurban zone at the same latitude as Hawai’i. On the other hand, they’d been hanging out on a fishing boat, and such vessels usually had foul weather gear.
So they might have something; but Zula had nothing except for the bed linens in this cabin. Which the others would confiscate anyway, as soon as they felt a need for them. And in any case, she had nothing to wear on her feet except for the pair of ersatz Crocs that had been issued to her in Vladivostok, and if she went outside in those things she would, in short order, be crippled and then maimed by frostbite. The best she could do was rip up the blankets and wrap them around her feet, then slip the Crocs over them. This was better than nothing. But it would have been a lot easier with a knife.
She had always found her gun- and knife-obsessed male relatives to be faintly ridiculous. But she would go so far as to admit that a knife was a good thing to have, in a whole lot of different ways. She had, therefore, been looking around for things in her environment that might be convertible into knives. Plan A had been to shatter the glass screen of the television monitor, pull out a shard, and then fashion a handle by wrapping one end in a strip torn from a bedsheet. She reckoned that this would work but that it would be loud and difficult to hide and might produce knives of highly variable quality.
Plan B, then, had been simply to steal an actual knife from the galley: a nook between the bathroom and the cockpit, which she came close to whenever she went up to pee. She had conceived this idea after her first pee trip—the one where she had looked up through the cockpit windows to see the 747 directly above them. She had planned it during her second pee trip and executed it during her third, scoring a large, heavy steak knife from a drawer. She had shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans, piercing the pocket’s internal lining so that the blade was between her thigh and her pant leg, and the wooden handle was concealed in the pocket. With a chef’s knife, this would have been crazy, but the steak knife wasn’t sharp enough to do damage as long as it stayed flat against her skin.
Which only reminded her of a bit of lore she’d picked up in Girl Scouts, which was that jeans were the worst possible clothing for cold and wet weather. The heavy cotton fabric would soak up moisture and then lose its power to insulate.
Anyway, trapped now in the cabin by Khalid’s free-floating rage, unable to sleep, and with absolutely nothing to do, she decided to kill some time by watching a movie. It was a ridiculous urge, but it might be the last movie she’d ever watch and she literally could not think of anything else to do. One of the DVDs on the shelf was Love Actually, a romantic comedy, something like ten years old by this point, which she had seen about twenty times; she and her college roommates watched it ritualistically whenever they found themselves in a certain mood. So she turned that on.
The cabin was so arranged that the television monitor was in its aft bulkhead, facing forward, at the foot of the bed. Zula had made a pile of pillows at the head of the bed and arranged herself facing the screen, which meant that her back was to the entrance, off to one side.
Perhaps an hour into the movie, she became aware that she was not alone. The door had been opened a crack. Someone had been peering through, watching the movie with her.
Her first reaction was embarrassment more than anything else, since the film had a couple of ridiculous comic-relief subplots featuring extremely broad sexual comedy, probably meant to be self-mocking and read ironically by most of the intended audience, but which others on this plane might be inclined to take at face value.
She then got a feeling of vulnerability and discomfort from her position: lying on a bed. So she grabbed the remote, paused the video, and swung her feet onto the floor, preparing to stand up and see who was peeking in at the door.
As she was getting to her feet the door swung inward violently and knocked her back. The edge of the bed caught the back of her legs and made her sprawl back onto the mattress. Khalid stepped into the room, closed the door behind himself, and locked it.
She was making to sit up and get back on her feet, but he swung wildly at her face. She recoiled enough to take most of the force out of the blow, but something hard and sharp sideswiped her across the cheek and sent her back onto her ass with tears welling out of her eyes: not out of emotion, but an involuntary response to being struck in the face. Had she just been pistol-whipped? She reached up to wipe the tears from her eyes and felt something hard and cold press into her forehead: the barrel of a gun. It kept coming, obliging her to roll back. She ended up supine with the top of her head against the aft bulkhead, the frozen TV monitor and the control panel of the DVD player above her. The gun came away. She blinked away tears and saw the muzzle of the weapon aimed at her from maybe two feet away, Khalid holding it in his right hand, using his left to undo his trousers and pull them down. A totally erect penis snapped out. Zula was not a huge penis expert, but she knew it took at least a little bit of time for one of them to get that hard, which made her realize that Khalid must have been standing outside the door for a while, getting himself ready for this. All the other men in the cabin must have fallen asleep.
The thing with the gun was ridiculous. If he pulled the trigger, the plane would depressurize. She wondered if he understood this. But she had to assume he really was that stupid. Once the bullet had gone through her head, she would not be able to enjoy the satisfaction of watching these men lose consciousness from lack of oxygen.
Now that Khalid’s intentions were clear, Zula wanted nothing more than to get her pelvic region as far as possible from him. But she was trapped in the back of the cabin. She planted her elbows in the mattress and levered herself up, scooted back, got her hands beneath her, pushed up to a sitting position. Khalid read this as lack of cooperation and became incensed, lunged forward, got a knee up on the bed between her knees, pawed at the waistband of her jeans. She pushed his hand away. He wound up to slap her across the face. She blocked the attack with one arm, but its force moved her sideways and made her head bounce against the front panel of the DVD player. A crisp mechanical noise sounded from behind her skull, and she heard the sound of the DVD being ejected from its slot.
Meanwhile Khalid was taking advantage of her disarray to undo the front of Zula’s jeans. He was jerking down on the waistband, trying to peel them off her, but this wasn’t working. Partly because he was only using one hand. But also, as Zula understood, partly because the steak knife in her pocket was trapped against her thigh and making it impossible to turn the garment inside out. He was yanking wildly, furiously, shaking her all over. She reached up to brace her hands against the bulkhead behind her, just to prevent her head being slammed into it. Her left hand came into contact with the ejected DVD.
Peter in the tavern at the Schloss. Snapping the DVD and cutting his hand.
Khalid seemed to have lost patience with doing everything onehanded and so he did something to his pistol—placing it on safety?—and then tossed it behind him so that it thumped onto the carpeted floor just in front of the door. He then made much more rapid progress on getting Zula’s jeans peeled back from her waist and buttocks. The knife swiveled around and made a long scrape on her thigh.
While he was thus distracted Zula had pulled the DVD from its slot and bent it between the thumb and fingers of her left hand, compressing it almost into a U. She was afraid to just snap it in half—it would make a loud noise, he would notice.
The jeans now bridged the space between her thighs and formed a barrier to Khalid’s progress. He had only made matters worse for himself. Looking down at her vulva, exposed but temporarily unreachable, he saw the blade of the steak knife jutting out from the pocket.
He let out a cry of rage. Getting back to his feet he gave the garment several terrific jerks, pulling both legs completely inside-out. Her butt was bouncing up and down anyway and so she swung her hand underneath it, let her weight slam down on the bowed DVD, felt it crack in half, the noise muffled by the mattress and by the flesh of her butt.
The jeans were now dangling from her ankles, the knife far out of her reach. Khalid shoved his hand in, groped for the pocket, and drew the weapon out triumphantly. Then he stepped in, ramming a knee down between hers, and then bent forward to plant the heel of one hand against her chin. He shoved her head back and then placed the blade of the knife against her throat.
Zula chose that moment to swing one arm down and around in a broad, blind scything motion, slashing at Khalid’s penis with the sharp corner of a DVD half.
She definitely made contact with something. He reflexively moved both hands down to his groin, leaving the steak knife resting on her belly.
Nothing was there to support the weight of his upper body and so his head leaned forward. His eyes bulged in astonishment—conveniently for Zula who rammed up with both hands, aiming for each eye with a DVD shard.
Some instinct told her to close her eyes as she did this and so she didn’t see the results. But she heard a howl from Khalid and felt him toppling backward.
Letting go of the DVD halves, she pawed at the knife on her belly but only succeeded in knocking it away; it bounced across the bed and fell into the crack between the mattress and the wall.
Just as well. The important thing was the gun. She rolled up and fell from the bed and crawled on hands and knees toward the door, where she reckoned the gun had come to rest. Khalid was right next to her, pawing at his face and screaming.
She saw the pistol and slapped one hand down on top of it just as the door was being kicked open from the other side. It burst open, trapping her gun hand against the wall.
She was now lying almost full-length on the floor, hobbled by her inside-out blue jeans, one hand free, the other holding a semiautomatic pistol of unfamiliar design, but pinned between the door and the wall, therefore hidden from view, but also immobilized.
The door had been kicked open by one of the soldiers, who was now leaning against it, pinning her arm. Abdallah Jones was right behind him, looking over his shoulder. Everyone was shouting.
Zula began exploring the pistol’s controls with her fingertips, trying to figure out which little protuberance might be the safety. She didn’t want to hit the clip ejection lever by mistake. Usually, the safety would be within easy reach of the right thumb. She found something that seemed to fit the bill and flicked it.
Jones brought a hand down on the shoulder of the man who was blocking the doorway and pulled him out of the way, then entered the cabin and dropped to his knees, straddling Khalid and making the cabin now a very crowded place indeed. Zula was being ignored for the moment. She pulled herself up to a sitting position, leaning against the door and slamming it shut. This triggered a fresh round of hollering and door beating on the other side. Zula looked at the gun in her hand to verify that it was cocked; she guessed it was, though she wasn’t familiar with this style. Khalid was sitting up about four feet way from her, in profile, knees to his chest, hands over his face. Jones was facing him, speaking to him ardently, trying to get him to take his hands away so that he could look at the damage.
Zula pointed the weapon at the center of Khalid’s torso and fired three rounds through what she guessed were his heart and lungs.
A loud, high-pitched noise dominated everything: either ringing in her ears or the sound of air escaping through bullet holes in the fuselage. Maybe both. Something huge flew at her: Jones had reacted by snatching the duvet off the bed and hurling it at her face. At the same time, the pressure on her back became immense. Air was escaping from the cabin, and the higher pressure in the front of the plane was forcing the door open. She fired another round in the direction where she guessed Jones might be coming from, but then his whole weight was on her gun arm, pinning it to the floor, and she was being crushed between his body and the door. His knee came down in the middle of her chest. She used her free hand to hurl the blanket out of the way. Jones was unharmed and on top of her, reaching above his head to grab for a yellow object dangling from the ceiling. She had some difficulty making it out, because it was blurry, but then she recognized it as an oxygen mask. Jones pulled it to him, placed it over his mouth and nose, and got the elastic band over the back of his head.
Then he looked down at her.
The instructions in the safety briefing said that you should put the mask on your own face first, then tend to anyone around you who needed help. Jones had done the first bit perfectly, but now he was just gazing at her interestedly as she went to sleep.
AS SOKOLOV WAS wading out toward the sound of the boat, he began to consider all of the ways in which this might go wrong—or might already have gone wrong. This kind of thinking had been his habit for as long as he could remember. It had been amplified a thousandfold during his service in the military and transferred quite comfortably to the security consultant business. If security consultants ran the world, militaries would no longer be needed, because all possible contingencies that might lead to the application of violence would have been anticipated and dealt with long before they had developed into actual wars. Or so he had always told himself as a way to justify his choice of a second career.
The fact that visibility had dropped to much less than a hundred meters was both a good and a bad thing. It was good that Sokolov would be able to board the boat and transfer to the containership unobserved by any spies ashore. It was bad that he could not see his ride coming. In the taxi, he had asked several questions of “George Chow” about how he had made these arrangements, how he had chosen this particular boatman, and whether he might have been observed or followed by any mainland Chinese operatives. George Chow had seemed confident—a bit too breezily confident for Sokolov’s tastes—that it had all been pulled off perfectly. This sort of self-assurance, in and of itself, was frequently a warning sign. Sokolov knew nothing of George Chow and his history in this sort of business, nor of the extent to which the mainland authorities had penetrated the police and security forces of this island, and so it seemed safest for him to assume that Chow had been followed from the hotel, or (easier and cheaper) observed on security cameras as he had made his way through Jincheng and down to the waterfront to hire a boatman. If that were the case, then it would have been quite easy for a mainland operative to go and talk to the same boatman as soon as Chow departed and, through some combination of bribery and threats, get him to tell what he knew.
(“What does the boatman know?” Sokolov had asked, in the taxi.
“Only that he is to pick someone up at a certain place and time” had been the answer from the front seat. “You must tell him where you are going.”)
Anyway, the boat waiting at the rendezvous point marked on the GPS device Chow had given him might turn out to be full of men who had come over from the mainland this morning specifically to find Sokolov and either kill him or take him back to the People’s Republic of China for interrogation and God only knew what other sort of treatment.
If that came to pass and if it developed into a gunfight (which, if Sokolov had anything to say about it, it most certainly would), then how would it look—or sound, since they couldn’t see it—to Olivia and George Chow? A series of gunshots, largely muffled by the sound of surf finding its way through the thousands of stone fingers jutting out of the sand. Even if Olivia were foolish enough to attempt to wade out and investigate, she would find nothing; the boat would have departed by then. At the most there might be a corpse or two floating in the water, but it was highly improbable that she would happen upon such direct evidence. Much more likely was that the outcome would remain mysterious to both her and George Chow and that, spooked, they would get to the airport as quickly as possible and get out of this place.
In the taxi, Sokolov had asked George Chow what was going to happen when he reached the end of the voyage in Long Beach. Chow had assured him that friendly agents of the U.S. government would board the containership at that point and whisk him away to a safe place where he could be debriefed of all the information he had to offer about Abdallah Jones and given assistance in making his way through immigration formalities.
But Sokolov was in no way interested in being thus greeted and debriefed and assisted. He already had a B-1 visa, which entitled him to enter the United States any time he wanted. If he were to sneak into the United States from a containership, which, compared to what he’d been doing in the past twenty-four hours, ought to be as easy as pissing off a dock, then the worst thing that anyone could say about him was that he had not had his passport stamped when he’d entered the country: theoretically a problem, but so trivial and so distant that it hardly seemed worthy of his notice at this time. He had already given Olivia all the useful information that he had regarding the whereabouts of Abdallah Jones, and so any further debriefings in L.A. would inevitably center on topics whose elaboration could only make life more difficult for him, such as Ivanov and Wallace and what had happened yesterday morning in the apartment building. If the American authorities believed that he had been killed in an ambush in the fog and mist off the shore of Kinmen, then he would be spared such embarrassments.
There was also the matter of Olivia.
Sokolov quite liked Olivia and wanted her to be happy. He could tell from watching her face that she was unwilling to be honest with herself about the nature of the relationship that she had enjoyed with Sokolov, which had quite obviously (to Sokolov anyway) been based on simple, animal attraction. Sometimes you met someone and you just instinctively wanted to fuck their brains out. It had to do with pheromones or something. Most of the time, the feeling was not reciprocated, but sometimes it was, and then these things happened with a suddenness and intensity that could not help but be disquieting to anyone who believed that his or her life made sense. There was nothing more to it than that, though. They’d had their fun in the bunker, and probably could have had quite a bit more if circumstances had put them in a safe place together. But such relationships were unlikely to last. Olivia, a highly cultivated and rational woman, was unwilling to admit that she was the kind of person who could engage in such a liaison, and so she was even now putting her powerful brain to work coming up with a story according to which it was really much, much more than that. If it were somehow the case that they lived next door to each other or worked in the same office, then she’d have had to work through a long and dramatic and ultimately painful process of coming to terms with the fact that it was all strictly animal attraction and that there was no actual basis for a relationship there.
Fortunately, the situation at hand was quite a bit simpler than that. Even if the rendezvous with the boat and with the containership went perfectly, the two of them would likely never see each other again. But if Sokolov were killed in an ambush in the fog and mist off the shore of Kinmen, then she could close the door on this highly satisfying but ultimately meaningless affair, and go on to live the happy and contented life that Sokolov very much wanted her to live.
And so, as he drew closer to the sound of the boat’s motor, Sokolov conceived of a plan, which seemed straightforward enough at the time, to greatly simplify both his future life and Olivia’s by firing a few shots from his weapon. This would scare the hell out of the boatman, but Sokolov thought he could bring that problem under control without too much difficulty. Once they had effected the rendezvous with the containership, Sokolov would then find some way to induce its captain to claim that the rendezvous had not occurred—that the boat carrying Sokolov had failed to show up and that Sokolov had never boarded the vessel. Two weeks from now, Sokolov would slip off the ship in Long Beach and make use of his connections in that town to lie low for a bit. Then he would make his way back to Toronto, which was where he had started. A thorough inspection of his passport stamps might turn up some inconsistencies, but he had never seen anyone actually look at those things.
As he drew closer to the place where the boat was waiting for him, he drew out both first the Makarov and then the submachine gun that he had taken last night from the jihadist and checked that both of them were in ready-to-fire condition, which was probably a good idea in any case. He reckoned that if he were trying to simulate the sounds of a battle, it would be more convincing if he could fire a few pistol shots and a burst or two from the submachine gun. He would, of course, wait until he was safely in the boat, so that the boatman would not simply run away from him in terror. To that end, he did not want to emerge from the mist with a weapon in each hand, and so he placed the Makarov in its usual push-through belt rail and slung the submachine gun over his back.
The water had become chest-deep, adequate to float a vessel of some size. Sokolov shrank down into it so that only the top of his head was protruding from the water, a somewhat difficult thing to manage since waves kept rising up to break over him. He began his final approach by sidling from one shellfish-encrusted pillar to the next. He could hear the boat’s hull rasping against one of the pillars no more than a few meters away.
Finally it began to come into focus: a long shadow riding on the water. As he drew closer the shadow resolved into a line of fat black Os: the tires slung over the boat’s side, the only things keeping it from being macerated by the stone pillars. He could see the boatman sitting erect at the stern, waiting, wondering when the mystery passenger would show up. A white rope ladder had been thrown over the port side near the bow; this was the closest corner to shore, and the boatman must have assumed Sokolov would approach from that direction and be glad of the assistance.
But those tires looked as though they would provide convenient hand- and footholds for clambering aboard, and Sokolov could see no advantage in boarding from the expected direction. So he devoted a few more moments to making his way around to the stern of the boat, half wading and half swimming now, and then approached to the point where he could get a good view of the tire and the loops of rope that he would presently be using to get aboard. Then he drew breath, sank below the surface, and covered the last few meters underwater.
When he saw the corner of the hull above him, he gathered his knees to his chest, let himself sink to the bottom, and then exploded straight up with as much force as he could produce. His hands shot out of the water first and got purchase on the tread of a tire. He brought a foot up and planted it in the tire’s rim, moved his hands up to the rope from which the tire was suspended, and then pulled with his arms and pushed with his leg, shooting up over the gunwale and sweeping his free leg around into the boat. For a moment, though his momentum was still carrying him forward, he was straddling the gunwale. The boatman was turning to look at the source of this unexpected splashing. Sokolov caught his eye for a moment, then glanced into the cargo area forward and saw three armed men lying on their bellies, all gazing in the direction of that rope ladder.
It was too late to do anything about the momentum that was carrying him over the gunwale, and the manner in which he had swung one leg over the edge and planted it on the deck now obligated him to carry on in a pirouetting movement. He spun around the planted foot, drawing his other leg into the boat, turning his back on the prone gunmen for just a moment. The movement caused the submachine gun to fly outward on its strap. He stopped hard with both feet on the deck, and the weapon swung around him until it was in front of him. He caught it in both hands, dropping to a knee, and fired a burst into the buttocks of the closest man. Half a dozen rounds entered the target’s body through the pelvis and proceeded up through his viscera in the general direction of his brain. A second man levered himself up on his elbow and looked back to see what was happening. Sokolov obliterated his face. The third man, closest to the bow, erupted to his feet and dove over the boat’s bow in one motion, chased by a fusillade of rounds from the submachine gun. Sokolov let the weapon drop and hang from its strap and shoved his Makarov through its holster. He turned to the appalled boatman and pointed in the direction of open water. Then he threw himself down on his belly and elbow-crawled up the length of the boat, slaloming around the two stricken men who were flopping and writhing vaguely as they died, and peeked between two tires for a second before withdrawing his head. Three pops sounded from a few meters away: the third operative, probably firing at him from behind one of those stone pillars. Sokolov fired a few blind shots just as a way of making this man think twice about exposing himself. He could hear the motor revving up and feel it moving beneath his chest. The next time he popped his head up for a quick look, the standing stones had all vanished in mist that was now developing into rain. The boatman continued in reverse gear until he was well out to sea, then spun the vessel around and headed straight out.
DIRECTLY THE GUNSHOTS were engulfed in the whoosh and clap of the incoming surf, and the drone of the motor dwindled and failed as the boat built distance between itself and the island. Olivia stifled a ridiculous impulse to call out Sokolov’s name. She gathered her feet under her and squatted on the flat top of the stone pillar for a minute or so, cupping her hands to her ears, straining to hear—what?—a call for aid? Screams of terminal agony? Walkie-talkie bursts? But there was nothing, and she was left asking herself whether she had really heard anything at all.
A decent, albeit foolish, instinct told her to wade to the sound of the guns. Looking down, she saw that she would have to swim, rather than wade, and that the surf would bang her around like a pachinko ball among the pillars, foamed with knife-edged oyster shells and barnacles. She had only one course of action, which was to turn her back on whatever had just happened and make her way back toward shore. And she needed to act on it now, before the water got any deeper.
She hitched the skirt of her dress up above her waist—not that it was really going to help—and stripped off her panties and, wanting to keep her hands free, shoved one arm through a leg hole and pulled the garment up to her shoulder where it would stay put. She jumped off the pillar into the water, which came up to her navel, and began wading back in the direction of the shore. This involved some guesswork since the atmosphere had become a dense white fog salted with tiny hurtling raindrops, and it was impossible to see any landmarks, let alone the sun. The surf created swirling and unpredictable currents as it found its way among the pillars and tried to knock her legs out from under her. She moved from one pillar to the next, keeping a hand out for balance, yet trying to avoid any forceful contact between her skin and those serrated, shell-slathered columns. In the early going, she feared she might be headed the wrong way, but soon enough she noticed that the water was now lapping at her buttocks, then her upper thighs, and the going was becoming easier. She was headed back toward George Chow, at least approximately.
She then began to ask herself whether she really wanted to find George Chow.
The most paranoid explanation she could think of for the last half-hour’s events was that Chow was not an MI6 agent at all, but a Chinese agent (or what would amount to the same thing, a double agent) who had bamboozled Olivia into believing that he’d help get her and Sokolov to safety. Instead of which he had sent Sokolov directly into a trap.
The more she thought about it, though, the less she favored this theory. She guessed that Chow was a legit MI6 man but that one of two things must be the case:
1. He had been followed or ratted out during his earlier movements around Jincheng, and some of the Chinese agents who had come over on the ferry this morning had been waiting for Sokolov on the boat.
2. MI6 actually wanted Sokolov dead and had hired some local talent to make it happen.
The latter also seemed a bit paranoid. But there was no doubt that Sokolov was, for MI6, a highly inconvenient and dangerous loose end. Moreover, Olivia could envision a situation in which the Chinese government would get in touch with the British government through some deep, dark channels and say, “We are hysterically pissed off about what went down in Xiamen yesterday and we want to see heads start rolling now; otherwise, we will make things quite difficult for you.” In other words, MI6 might have made a deal to get rid of Sokolov in exchange for maintaining the status quo ante with their Chinese counterparts.
Raising the question, Was Olivia too a loose end who needed to be disposed of as part of the same deal?
She guessed not, for the simple reason that, immediately before Sokolov had kissed her good-bye, he had supplied her with information that MI6 wanted as to how Abdallah Jones might be tracked down.
“DID YOU GET it?” was the first thing George Chow said to her as she approached the car. The directness of this question, so much at odds with Chow’s usual Cambridge/Oxford diffidence, did nothing to ease her suspicions.
She had paused at the water’s edge, out of his sight, to get her underwear on and her dress down where it was supposed to be. So the absolute best that could be said of her appearance was that her fanny wasn’t showing. But Chow, who had been standing there the entire time keeping an eye on her purse and her shoes, tactfully avoided looking directly at her.
“I have all the information he has,” she said. “Or perhaps the correct form of the word is had.”
Chow gawped at her, nonplussed.
She turned her head back out toward the sea, trying to judge whether he was just playing stupid. Was it possible that he could have failed to hear the gunfire? Sound traveled in funny ways on days, and in places, like this. For all she knew, he might have sat down inside the taxi and closed the doors and rolled up the windows just to stay out of the rain, in which case it was completely plausible that he might have failed to hear what she had heard.
In any case, she was not going to give him anything useful until she was in a safe place—preferably London. “Can we please get under way?” she asked, lunging for the door handle of the taxi before Chow could open it for her. “Loitering here seems not a good idea.”
He climbed in next to her and gazed at her curiously as the taxi pulled a U-turn onto the road and headed for the airport. She stared resolutely out the windscreen for a few minutes, then, finally, turned to look him directly in the face. “Do you have anything to tell me?” she demanded.
“You’re going to have to help me out,” he said.
“If you’re working for the PRC, put a bullet in me now,” she said. “Otherwise please try to get a fucking clue because or else you’re worse than fucking useless.”
“Olivia!” he exclaimed, in an offended-professor tone. “To the best of my knowledge, all has gone exactly according to plan. If you have better information, I should be obliged—”
“Of that I have no doubt,” she said. “What I don’t know is what the bloody fuck was the plan!?”
This silenced him until they reached the airport—which, given the size of the island, wasn’t long. Then it was all ticket counters and security checkpoints and boarding lounges for a while. He tried to beguile her into a remote corner where they could talk, but she could see no advantage in telling him anything until they were farther from China.
They took the next flight to Taipei.
There, George Chow pursued her to the departure lounge for her next flight, which was bound for Singapore. From there she was scheduled to fly nonstop to London.
It seemed that he had received an update on his phone. She hoped to God that they were using some kind of bulletproof encryption.
“Mr. Y,” he announced, “never turned up.”
“Never turned up where?”
“On the containership to Long Beach.”
“How fucking stupid would he have to be to actually board that ship considering…”
“Which is a good thing,” Chow added, “since it was overhauled and boarded by the Chinese navy on its way out of port.”
“So the whole operation was blown,” she said.
“Yes,” Chow said, “a fact you appear to have been aware of from the very beginning.”
Shit. He was trying to put this on her now.
“You’re seriously trying to tell me you didn’t hear that fucking Wild West shootout down there at the beach.”
“I heard nothing,” he said. “But if you heard something, you should have informed me so that we could…”
“Make sure you finished the job properly?”
“What!?”
“Or give the poor bastard even more of your professional assistance?”
Silence.
“He’s better off making shift for himself,” she said, “assuming he’s still alive. Which, come to think of it, seems like a rather bad assumption.”
George Chow had gotten a bit hot under the collar.
Not that Olivia could throw stones.
“I hadn’t realized until now,” he said, “to what degree this had become a personal matter for you.”
She thought about it for half a minute or so, and then said, calmly: “I just wish we had done a better job.”
“It is a common thing to wish,” Chow said, “in our line of work. Welcome to the profession.”
“My flight is boarding.”
“Bon voyage,” he said. “Hoist a pint for me, will you?”
“I’ll probably hoist a few.”
ZULA AWAKENED TO find herself hog-tied with what she guessed were torn strips of bedsheets. A pillowcase had been placed over her head and secured in place with a snug but not tight ligature. Cold pink brightness shone through it. By squirming around and pressing her face against things she confirmed that this was shining in through the jet’s windows.
The light began to fluctuate, shuttering on and off. The engines were straining up and down. Something thudded into the bottom of the plane, or vice versa, and they bounced, then sank and thudded again, and proceeded to make the roughest landing that Zula had ever experienced. As they thumped and rumbled to a stop, its noise, and the declining scream of the engines, was drowned out by cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and then a lot of thumping, as if some sort of scuffle were taking place forward.
Someone came in. Jones. She had learned his smell and the way of his movement. He cut through the bindings that joined her ankles to her wrists. Then he grabbed her by the feet and dragged her to the edge of the bed, then pulled her to a sitting position. He untied the thing around her throat and whipped off the pillowcase. She blinked and shook her head, puffed air out of the side of her mouth to blow a loose lock of hair away from her eye. He could have helped her but chose instead to watch in amusement.
A snow-covered pine branch was pressed against the airplane window.
Khalid was still lying on his side on the floor. The amount of blood was beyond her wildest expectations. Jones was standing in it, staring into her face.
“Pavel and Sergei are dead,” he announced.
“From the crash or—?”
“Pavel, I should say, was done in by a largish tree branch that came in through the windscreen and clobbered him in the throat. Sergei fared rather better until one of my colleagues entered the cockpit with a large knife and put him down.”
He watched her carefully as this little scene played out in her mind’s eye.
“You knew it would happen,” he said. “And you understand why. Both of them had been in the Russian Air Force, you know. Dropping napalm on people like me. Touching that they made you part of the deal. I must hand it to the Russians. As much as I hate them and would like to see the entire country sterilized, it is true that they know how to treat a lady.”
Zula looked him in the eye. Making the obvious comparison.
“Which brings me to the subject of you,” he admitted with a sigh. He turned slightly, revealing a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand. She flinched, and he immediately raised the weapon to cover her. Zula had been so carefully inculcated in gun range etiquette that to have any weapon pointed her way was far more shocking than it would have been to any person unused to firearms. “It has been a great pleasure knowing you,” Jones said, as if he were seeing her off at the train station. “Really it has. In a perfect world—no—in a better world—I would now say to you something like ‘Zula, will you please accept Islam and become a mujahid and fight alongside us?’ and you would answer ‘Of course, I have seen the light of Islam’ and it would be so. The problem with that scenario being that, not so many hours ago, you made a reasonably sincere-looking commitment to be submissive and cooperative, and then you killed my best man with a DVD.”
She averted her gaze. Did it make any sense to feel guilty?
“Love Actually, of all things—a film for which I have always secretly harbored a soft spot, but that I will never again be able to enjoy in quite the same way. And that is why, as much as I hate to do it, I must now, for the good of the cause—”
“My uncle has six hundred million dollars,” Zula said.
That rocked him back.
“Really,” he said after a while.
“Really. If you don’t believe me, check it out. And if I’m wrong, you can give me the Khalid treatment.”
“Meaning what you did to him, or what he did to the schoolteacher?”
Zula had no answer.
“Because I’m perfectly capable of doing either, or both, with or without your say-so,” Jones pointed out.
“It’s true,” she insisted.
He considered it for a while. Then he caught her looking. “Oh, I believe you,” he assured her. “I’m just trying to work out whether it matters. You’re suggesting some sort of ransom deal? Of course you are. But it’s not clear to me how we would set up such a transaction, or what good the money would do us, even if we could take delivery of it without every police and special forces unit in the world descending upon us. It would be difficult enough in Waziristan. In Canada?” He scoffed.
“My uncle can get you across the U.S. border,” she tried.
Jones grinned.
She realized that Jones genuinely liked her. Was, at some level, looking for an excuse not to kill her. “No, really?” he asked. “The same uncle?”
“The same one.”
“The black sheep,” he said, piecing it together. “The one you went to visit in British Columbia.”
“We’re in British Columbia,” she reminded him.
“I really must meet this chap,” Jones said, switching to his sarcastic-posh accent.
“I’m sure it can be arranged.”
“Then if you don’t mind,” he said, “my four comrades and I are now going to be quite busy for a while, trying not to die. If we are able to string a couple of nonfatal days together, we may then return to your proposal.”
“How can I help?” Zula asked.
“Stop killing people,” he suggested.