“It is a long story.”
Jones let his head hang down and laughed. “Look at me,” he said. “Your man Ivanov has forced me to cancel certain arrangements. To make other plans. I’ve nothing but time. And unless I am quite mistaken, you have even more time on your hands than I do. So why on earth should I object to a long story at this juncture?”
Zula gazed out through the taxi’s window.
“It is your only possible way out,” Jones said.
Zula’s nose started to run, a precursor of crying. Not because her situation sucked. It had sucked for a long time. And it couldn’t suck worse than it had with Ivanov. It was because she couldn’t tell the story without mentioning Peter.
She took a few slow, steadying breaths. If she could just get his name out without cracking, the rest would be fine.
“Peter,” she said, and her voice bucked like a car going over a speed bump, and her eyes watered a little. “The man in the stairwell.” She looked at Jones until he understood.
“Your beau?”
“Not anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” Jones said. Not the least bit sorry. Just observing the proper formalities.
“No, I mean—not because he’s dead.” There. She’d gotten it out. “Not because Peter’s dead.” Trying the words, like easing out onto thin ice covering a farm pond, wondering how far she cold go before she felt it cracking beneath her. “We had broken up previously. On the day that everything went crazy.”
“Then perhaps it would be more informative if you could rewind to the day that everything went crazy, since that sounds like an interesting day,” Jones suggested.
“We had been snowboarding.”
“You live in a mountainous area?”
“Seattle. Actually we were several hours outside of Seattle, in B.C.”
“How does a Horn of Africa girl pick up snowboarding?” For the fact that Zula was from East Africa was written on her face plainly enough for a man like Jones to read.
“I never did. I just hung around.”
“Your lad drags you off into the mountains so that he can snowboard while you do nothing?”
“No, I would never put up with it.”
“I believe you just told me that you did.”
“There was plenty for me to do.”
“What? Shopping?”
She shook her head. “I’m not that way.” The question was still unanswered. “My uncle lives up there, so it was a chance for a family visit. And I could work; I brought my laptop.”
“Your uncle lives in a ski resort?”
“Part of the time.”
“You have a lot of family in B.C.?”
She shook her head. “Iowa. He’s the black sheep.”
“I’d have thought you were the black sheep.”
Zula could not fight off at least a hint of a smile.
Jones was delighted by this.
She was disgusted. Disgusted that he had played the black card so early and that it had worked on her.
How could he have guessed that she was adopted? Being from Iowa was definitely a clue. That, and her accent.
“So, the two black sheep are visiting while Peter snowboards. Is that where everything went crazy?”
“No. It’s where it started.”
“How did it start?”
“A man walked into the bar.”
“Ah, yes. A lot of good stories start that way. Pray continue.”
And Zula continued. Had Jones given her time to consider her options, to work through the strategy and tactics of what she ought or ought not to divulge, would she have done the same? There was no telling. She began to relate her memories of Wallace in the tavern, and the rest of the story just unfurled, like the wake behind a boat. Mr. Jones listened to it carefully at first, but as she advanced to the point where he could figure out the connections himself, his mind wandered, and he became more and more active on the phone.
He seemed to get along okay in Arabic, but it was gradually becoming clear to her that it was not his native language; he spoke slowly, stopping and starting as he worked his way through sentences, and from time to time, as he listened to the man on the other end, he would get a bemused grin on his face and, she thought, request clarification.
None of which seemed to be standing in the way of his making a plan. The first part of the conversation had been start-and-stop, with a lot of wandering down blind alleys and then suddenly backing out of them. Or so Zula judged from the tone of Jones’s voice, his gestures. But suddenly in the last few minutes Mr. Jones and his interlocutor seemed to have hit on a plan that they liked; he finally lifted his eyes from the back of the seat in front of him and began to look around brightly and to drop “Okay” into his utterances.
They were on the eastern curve of the island. This was its least built-up part, but no one would mistake it for an unspoiled natural space. Part of the road was built on reclaimed land, running over the top of a seawall, so along those stretches the water was right below Zula’s window. In other sections, a broad sandy beach stretched between road and shore. Occasionally the road would divert inland, ceding the waterfront to a golf course or residential complex. They had been going clockwise around the island for a long time—Zula didn’t have a watch, but she judged it must have been at least two hours. Now, at a command from the phone, the taxi driver executed a U-turn and began to head north, going counterclockwise up the eastern limb.
“OMYGOD,” YUXIA SAID, “he’s turning around.”
“Why would he do that?” Csongor asked rhetorically.
“He fears we are following him,” Marlon theorized.
They blew by the taxi, which had pulled into a crossover lane in the median strip and was waiting for an opening in the oncoming traffic. Its rear windows were so deeply tinted that they could see nothing through them. But the driver was clearly visible, holding the steering wheel in one hand, pressing a phone to his ear with the other. And paying no attention at all to them.
“Why is he talking on the phone?” Yuxia asked, shouldering the van into a gap in traffic and getting into the left lane.
“I think I am wrong,” Marlon said. “He did not look like a man who thought he was being followed.”
Csongor, the foreigner, was the first to put it together: “He doesn’t speak English,” he said. “And Zula and the terrorist don’t speak Chinese. They have someone on the phone who is translating.”
Yuxia braked hard, triggering a storm of furious honking, and veered onto the next crossover.
“Which raises the question,” Csongor continued, “who is helping this guy?”
A gap in traffic presented itself fortuitously, so instead of coming to a full stop Yuxia just rolled across the oncoming lanes and pulled around on the shoulder, waited for a few cars to blow by, then accelerated. They had not lost much ground on the taxi, which had had worse luck with the traffic and was being driven more conservatively in any case. But if anyone was looking back through those tinted windows, it would have to be obvious, now, that the battered van was tailing them.
Marlon shrugged, telling him that the answer was obvious: “He has friends around here.”
“But they’re all dead.”
“Not all. There must be some others. In another building.”
“Then why did they not simply go straight to that building?” Csongor asked. “Why drive around the island for hours?”
“He wanted to see if he was being followed?” Marlon said. “But we have been obviously following him and he did not notice.”
“Not that obvious,” said the offended Yuxia, triggering a brief exchange of recriminations in Mandarin.
“He’s been organizing something. Some kind of drop-off or exchange,” Csongor said, tamping down the argument. “Using the backseat of that taxi as his office.”
“Fuck, man,” Marlon said. “I should never have got into this van.”
“You’re just getting that now?” Yuxia asked. Still a little irked at
him.
“You said you were going to give me a ride,” Marlon said, looking at Csongor.
“You can get out whenever you want,” Csongor said.
Yuxia said something in Mandarin that appeared to reinforce Csongor’s offer with considerable vigor.
“Seriously,” Csongor said, “you saved my life, that is enough for one day.”
“Who saved mine?” Marlon asked. “Mine, and my friends’?”
Csongor turned to look at him curiously.
“By flashing the power on and off. Warning us.”
“Oh,” Csongor said. He had quite forgotten this detail in the midst of so many other happenings. “That was Zula.” He nodded in the direction of the taxi, a couple of hundred meters ahead of them.
“And that is why the big man—Ivanov—was so angry,” Marlon said, working it out. “Because he knew that Zula had messed up his plan to kill us.”
“Yes.”
“I see.” Marlon nodded, then drew in a deep breath and began stroking his beardless chin absentmindedly. Finally, he came to some sort of decision and sat up straighter. “I have done nothing wrong today. The cops can’t charge me with anything.”
“Except REAMDE,” Csongor reminded him.
“For that,” Marlon said, “I’m already fucked anyway. But that’s a small thing in all of this. So I will go with you for a little while longer and see what happens.”
“You sure will,” Csongor said.
WHENEVER THE LOOKING was good, Mr. Jones looked out across the water. Zula tried to follow his gaze. But there wasn’t much to see. Directly across a narrow strait, close enough that a good swimmer could have reached it in a few hours, was the smaller of the two Taiwanese islands. Perhaps that accounted for the barrenness of the coast, and the lack of shipping traffic. Over the course of a few minutes, their orbit turned them away from that fragment of foreign territory. A larger, more built-up headland came into view off to their right, and they began to see more maritime traffic, since the water to their right was now a strait, about a mile wide, between Xiamen and another part of the People’s Republic. The road diverged from the shore to make room for a container port built on flat reclaimed land, indistinguishable, to Zula’s eye, from the same facility on Harbor Island in Seattle, with all the same equipment and the same names stenciled on the containers. A series of huge apartment complexes hemmed them in to landward. Then the sea rushed in to meet the road again, and all traffic was funneled onto a causeway-and-bridge complex that they had already crossed a few times today; it spanned an inlet, an arm of the sea that penetrated the round shell of the island and meandered off into its interior.
Looking perpendicularly out the window as they hummed across the bridge, Mr. Jones saw something. He seemed to be focusing on a typical Chinese working vessel that had peeled off from the longshore traffic and was cutting beneath the bridge to enter the inlet: a long flat shoe in the water, a pilothouse built on its top toward the stern, cargo stacked and lashed down on the deck forward. A man had clambered to the top of one such stack and was standing with his elbows projecting to either side of his head; Zula realized he was looking at them through binoculars. His elbows came down and he made a gesture that she could recognize as whipping out a phone and pressing it to his head.
Mr. Jones’s rang. He answered it and listened for a few moments. His eyes swiveled forward to lock on the back of the taxi driver’s head. After listening to a long speech from the man on the boat, he said, “Okay,” and handed the phone to the taxi driver again.
They pulled off the ring road at the next opportunity.
“A BOAT,” YUXIA said, taking her foot off the gas and getting ready to exit. “They are getting on a boat. This explains everything.”
“Don’t follow them so close!” Marlon chided her.
“It’s okay,” Csongor said. “They’re not even looking. Think. All the Russians are dead. And if the cops were following them, then they would have been arrested a long time ago, right? So the fact that they are not arrested yet proves that no one is following them.”
“But very soon it will get obvious,” Marlon insisted, “and we know that the black one has a gun, and if he has friends on a boat, they will probably have guns too.” And he glanced down nervously at the pistol that Csongor had left unloaded on the seat of the van.
Was he nervous because it was there at all?
Or because Csongor had not loaded it yet?
It was a question Csongor needed to start asking himself.
THE TAXI DROVE for a few hundred yards down a big four-laner that seemed to have been constructed for no particular purpose, since it was running across reclaimed land, perfectly flat, only a few feet above sea level, and utterly barren: silt that had been dredged up from the strait and that was too salty or polluted to support life. Soon, though, they doubled back on a smaller street that cut through some kind of incipient development, platted and sketched in but not yet realized. This connected them to the road that lined the shore of the inlet. Zula had lost track of directions in the last few sets of turns but now caught sight of the bridge, spanning the inlet’s connection to the sea, that they had crossed a minute earlier.
The inlet ballooned to a width of maybe half a mile. Sparse outcroppings of docks and marinas lined its shore, but boat traffic was minimal. After more discussion on the phone, the taxi turned back toward a system of buildings that were being erected along its shore, laced together by pedestrian walkways that ran over the shallows on pilings. The whole complex appeared to be under construction, or perhaps it was a development that had been suspended for lack of funds. Nearby, a broad, stout pier, strewn with empty pallets, was thrust out into the inlet. Jones projected his free hand over the seat and used his gun as a pointer, directing the driver to turn onto it. The taxi slowed almost to a stop, the driver nervously voicing some objection to Jones.
Mr. Jones pointed one more time, emphatically, and withdrew his hand. Then, making sure that the taxi driver could see him in the rearview, he disengaged the pistol’s safety and then rested it on his knee, aiming straight through the back of the seat into the middle of the driver’s back.
The driver turned gingerly onto the pier, which was wide enough to support three such vehicles abreast, and proceeded at an idling pace. The boat carrying Jones’s friends was headed right for them, churning up a considerable wake.
“Okay. Stop,” Jones said.
FOLLOWING THE TAXI was no longer necessary, since it had arrived at a dead end on the pier. Yuxia pulled the van into a space between two waterfront buildings, a couple of hundred meters away, whence they could spy on it from semiconcealment. Obviously it was waiting for something, and obviously that something had to be a boat, and by far the most likely candidate was right out before them in the inlet, chugging along in plain sight, carrying several young male passengers who were suspiciously overdressed for today’s hot, muggy weather.
Csongor heaved a great sigh that developed into a laugh. He picked up the semiautomatic pistol. There were two clips. He slipped one of them into a pocket, then shoved the other into the pistol’s grip until it clicked into place.
Marlon and Yuxia were watching him closely.
“There is an English expression: ‘high-maintenance girlfriend,’ ” Csongor remarked. “Now, of course, Zula is not my girlfriend. Probably never would be, even if all this shit were not happening. And I think that if she were my girlfriend? She would not be high maintenance at all! She is just not that type of girl. However. Because of circumstances, today she is the most high-maintenance girlfriend since Cleopatra.”
If this pistol worked like most of them, he would have to do something, such as pulling the slide back, to chamber the first round from the newly installed magazine. He did so. The weapon was live, ready to fire.
“What are you going to do?” Marlon asked, with admirable cool.
“Walk over there, unless you want to give me a ride, and fucking kill that guy,” Csongor said. He reach
ed for the door handle and gave it a jerk. But because of damage sustained earlier, it did not give way easily. Before he could get it to move, Yuxia had started the engine, shifted the van into reverse, and started backing out of the space where they’d been hiding.
“I’ll give you a ride,” she said, though Csongor suspected she was just trying to complicate matters. And indeed, the next thing out of her mouth was, “Why don’t we call the PSB?”
“Go ahead if you want,” Csongor said, “but then I will spend a long time in a Chinese prison.”
“But you are good guy,” Yuxia said sharply.
Marlon snorted derisively and, in Mandarin, gave Yuxia a piece of his mind about (Csongor guessed) the effectiveness of the Chinese judicial system in accurately distinguishing between good and bad guys in the best of circumstances, to say nothing of the case where the good guy was a foreign national, in the country illegally, connected with murderous foreign gangsters, with his footprints all over the basement of a collapsed terrorist safe house and his fingerprints all over a cache of weapons and money-bricks. Or so Csongor surmised; but toward the end of this disquisition Marlon also began pointing to himself, suggesting that the topic had moved around to his own culpability. And, as if that weren’t enough, he pointed a finger or two at Yuxia as well. For during their drive around the ring road, Yuxia had told the story of how she had handcuffed some poor locksmith to the steering wheel, while telling any number of lies to the neighborhood beat cop.
Whatever Marlon was saying, it struck home keenly enough that Yuxia had to pull the van over to the side of the road and weep silently for a few moments. Csongor simultaneously felt grateful for Marlon’s acuity and sad about its effect on poor Yuxia.
But just as Csongor was taking advantage of this uncharacteristic moment of weakness on his driver’s part by making another grab for the door handle, he was slammed back against his seat by powerful acceleration as she gunned the van forward.
Marlon shouted something at her, and Csongor could guess its meaning: What the hell are you doing?
All of this violent stopping and starting had made Csongor nervous about an accidental discharge of the pistol. He felt for its safety lever and flicked it.