“You have computer here?”
“Not anymore,” she said. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t do it from here. I’d go to a wangba.”
“Have you done this?”
She shook her head. “No government ID, no wangba access,” she said. “But now that I have this …?” She wiggled the ID and smiled.
“We go to wangba?”
It looked like she was about to say yes. Then her face hardened. “Who’s ‘we,’ white man?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “It’s an old American joke.”
“I enjoy jokes. Tell me joke.”
“You know the Lone Ranger?”
“Cowboy in mask? Has Indian friend?”
“Yes. So the Lone Ranger and Tonto get ambushed by some Comanches and they get chased up into a box canyon and they end up hiding behind some rocks shooting at the Indians, and the Lone Ranger looks at his friend and says, ‘Well, Tonto, it looks like we’re surrounded.’ To which Tonto replies—”
“Who is ‘we,’ white man?”
“Yes.”
“Is funny joke,” Sokolov said.
“That’s a strange thing for you to say since I don’t see the slightest trace of amusement on your face.”
“Is Russian sense of humor. What you call dry.”
“Okay.”
“Joke has meaning.”
“Yes, Mr. Sokolov, it has meaning.”
“Why should you help poor fucked Russian? That is the meaning.”
“More importantly,” Olivia said, “why should MI6 help you? Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what I want or am willing to do. It matters what MI6 is willing to do. And while they might be willing to pull out all the stops to get my arse out of China, I can’t necessarily persuade them to do the same in your case.”
“Tell them I have useful information.”
“Do you?”
Sokolov shrugged. “Probably not. But that is beside the point.”
“If I tell them you have useful information, and it turns out that you don’t, I look like an idiot.”
“Perhaps more important things are to be worried about now than whether you look like idiot when safe in London eating fish and drinking beer.”
She spent a while thinking about it.
“I know British,” he said. “Looking like idiot is part of being British. Happens all the time. They understand. Have procedures.”
“Can you get access to Internet later?” she asked him.
“Hmm, difficult,” Sokolov said. “Why?”
“Right now I need to take the ferry back into town and go to a wangba and send out my little distress call,” she said. “Later I’ll probably get instructions on where to go, what to do. I’ll need to convey that information to you somehow.”
Sokolov balked.
“Were you thinking you were going to stay here? Because you are not going to stay here,” Olivia told him. “For obvious reasons, Meng Anlan can’t have a Russian commando mercenary sleeping on her fucking sofa. You need to find a place to spend the night, and you need to figure out how you are going to access the Internet. Because if you can do that, then I can send you a message in a chat room or something.”
“Mmm,” Sokolov remarked. “There is solution.”
“Yes?”
“I have place to stay. With Internet. I will go there. Wait for instruction.”
A pause. “Really?” she asked.
“Dangerous,” he admitted. “Perhaps fucking stupid. But maybe will be fine.”
“Does it involve tying up or killing any of my neighbors?”
“Not unless you have neighbor you don’t like.”
She didn’t know how to take that.
“Humor,” he explained. Then he nodded out the window. The sun was getting low over Fujian, and orange light was gleaming in the windows of the skyscrapers across the water. “Is over there,” he explained. “No problem for you.”
“Then let’s go,” she said. “Obviously we have to leave this building separately. I can be a lookout for you. Tell you when the stairwell is clear, when it’s safe for you to move.”
“Very good.”
“We will walk to the ferry terminal separately and take separate boats,” she said. “After that, I can promise nothing.”
“Maybe you get me out of China,” Sokolov said. “Maybe not. Maybe I am captured. Interrogated. Have to tell them location of British spy equipment and documents from office.”
She just stared at him.
“Details,” he went on, “for you to share with your boss when you go to wangba.”
LATER, WHEN ONE of the crew opened the hatch to bring her a bowl of noodles and empty her bucket, Zula saw that it was dark outside.
She had tried to use the time to think. Nothing came.
Seemed as though grieving for Peter would be in order. She got ready to cry. Sitting on the edge of a steel-framed bunk bed, elbows on knees, ready to let it come. And some tears did come. Enough to blur her vision and give her the sniffles but not enough to break free and run down her face. She was sad that Peter was dead. Sad enough to forgive, but not enough to forget, the fact that Peter had ditched her in the cellar moments before Ivanov had basically executed him for doing so. That was the truly miserable part about Peter’s death: what he had done right before it.
But her mind drifted away from this forced and self-conscious grieving procedure, and she found herself worrying about Csongor. About Yuxia.
A memory came to her, almost as shocking as the first time around, of the young Chinese man’s face in the stairwell window, inches from hers.
It seemed as though prayers were in order. Prayers for the dead, for the missing, and for herself. Given that she had been raised by churchgoing folk, it was a bit odd that this hadn’t occurred to her before. No aspect of what was going on seemed as though it might be improved by communication with a deity. With the possible exception, that is, that it might make her feel better. That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse. None of which especially bothered Zula or made her doubt its worthwhileness. Making sad people feel better was a fine thing to do.
That kind of religion did not have the power to make one give all of one’s money to a charlatan, drink poison Kool-Aid, or strap explosives to one’s body, but at the same time it did not seem equal to the challenges imposed by a situation such as this one. Since it had seemed perfectly acceptable to her before, she didn’t feel that it was entirely proper, at a moment like this, to suddenly change over into something more fervent.
It was the praying-for-outcomes part she didn’t get. Since when did she get to have a vote? This boat would go wherever they pointed it.
And it could go anywhere. That was obvious. The whole point of a fishing boat was to go out to sea—out to international waters. She didn’t have a map, but she had a vague idea that this thing could take them anywhere in Southeast Asia in a few days. This had to be Jones’s plan.
The door hardware started clanging again. The hatch creaked open and Jones came in. He closed the hatch behind him, then sat cross-legged on the rug, leaning back against a steel bulkhead. She sat on the edge of a bunk.
“Tell me about the jet.”
“They came from Toronto.”
“I know that. Where is the jet now?”
“Short-tempered this evening.”
He glared back at her. “The adrenaline has worn off,” he said. “Ten of my comrades died today. I think fully half of them were done by your man Sokolov. There was a wall of fire in the apartment. He was trapped on one side of it. No way out. Killed one of my men to get his rifle and then fired through the flames. Drilled several of my mates in the head. Really pisses me of
f.”
“How many of Sokolov’s men survived?”
“Not a one.”
“Well then.”
“In the hours after something like that, you’re on a chemical high. When that wears off—well—that’s when a Christian would go and get dead drunk.”
“What does a Muslim do?”
“Says his prayers and dreams of vengeance.”
“Well, I have no idea where Sokolov might be, or even if he’s alive.”
“He’s alive,” Jones said. “I’m not asking you to tell me where he is. I agree you can’t know that. I’m asking you about the jet.”
“And I’m thinking out loud,” Zula said. “I don’t think that Ivanov owned it. I think he leased it.”
“And this is based on what?”
“Some of the others seemed shocked by his actions. Like what he was doing was way out of line.”
“I’m willing to believe that,” Jones said, and Zula was encouraged to hear him say something positive. “I don’t care how much money these Russians make, they can’t be flying around on private jets as a matter of routine.”
“Well. I don’t know anything about that world. But I’ve heard that even if you don’t own one of those jets, you can lease it. I think Ivanov leased it.”
“It’s at the Xiamen airport?”
“I have no idea. That’s where I last saw it.”
“The pilots?”
“We dropped them off at the Hyatt, near the airport.”
“You’ve been in Xiamen for three days.”
“This is the end of the third full day,” Zula said.
“Did you get any sense from Ivanov or Sokolov as to what the plan was for today? Other than grabbing the hackers?”
“We were told to get all our stuff out of the safe house.”
“So the plan was to leave. To fly out of here today.”
Zula shrugged, letting Jones know that she did not care to speculate.
“It’s still there,” Jones said. “The jet is still there.”
“I’d have absolutely no way of knowing.”
“Count on it. The big expense in aviation is fuel. Everything else is a pittance by comparison. There is absolutely no way that they would fuel that plane up and fly it somewhere else for three days, just to save on the pilots’ hotel bill. No. Believe you me, the flyboys have been sitting in the Hyatt, watching pornography and running up their bar tab the entire time you’ve been in Xiamen, and they were probably told to be on call for a departure today. They are probably sitting there right now wondering when the hell Ivanov is going to show up.”
Zula was content to let Jones run his mouth. She saw no relevance to her in all of this.
“But Ivanov’s not going to show up, because I killed him,” Jones went on.
He got to his feet and began pacing around, thinking. The cabin was so tiny that his pacing was soon reduced to a kind of irritable shifting of weight from one foot to the other. He would not meet her eye. He was on the trail of an idea, trying to work something out. “So,” he continued, “what would be their orders, if the boss fails to show up? They can’t just leave. They have to wait for him. That’s all these guys do, is sit around and wait for their masters to snap their fingers.”
The idea that had been gestating in Jones’s head was so big and crazy that Zula was slow to perceive it. Then she had to bite the words back before blurting them out: You want the jet!
What was he thinking? He would need the pilots to fly it out of here for him. Which meant he had to obtain power over the pilots in some way.
She was conscious, suddenly, that Jones was staring at her.
“They would remember you,” he said. “They would recognize your voice on the phone.”
Zula tried to turn her face to stone. But she knew it was too late. He had seen the truth.
LESS THAN THIRTY minutes after the conclusion of the chat in Olivia’s apartment, Sokolov was back in the safe house on the forty-third floor of the skyscraper.
Everything was gone except for the trash they’d left behind, and the computer they’d purchased while they were here. When Peter’s advice not to leave this behind had fallen on Ivanov’s deaf ears, Peter had begun a project of opening its case to remove its hard drive, which he planned to take with him. But this had proceeded too slowly for Ivanov’s tastes and had been interrupted halfway through.
Sokolov was now confronted, therefore, with a partially dismantled machine, whose hard drive—a steel brick about the size of a sandwich—had been unplugged but not yet physically removed from the case. Reconnecting it was idiotically simple, since the plugs only fitted into the sockets one way. He rebooted the machine and it came up as normal. The Internet seemed to work, but he did not do any surfing, since almost anything he looked at might tip off the PSB. Olivia had written out the URL of a popular Chinese chat site that featured occasional English language conversations. He typed it into the browser’s address bar and went there, then navigated to the room she had specified. It seemed very quiet, and he didn’t see any of the coded phrases that she had told him to look for. This was hardly surprising since she probably had not even made it to the wangba yet.
What he really needed to do was sleep, so that he could be sharp tomorrow. He hated to waste the hours of darkness, during which it was easier for him to move about without drawing too much attention. But there was no reason to move about, nothing to be doing. He strolled up and down the length of the office suite a couple of times, looking out at the galaxy of colored lights spread below, the neon letters he didn’t know how to read.
He knew already that in spite of his immense tiredness, he would not sleep well.
His command had been wiped out today. All of the men under him were dead. They had wives, mothers, girlfriends back in Russia who were waiting to hear from them and who did not know, yet, that they were gone forever. He had pushed this out of his mind until now, since thinking of it was useless. He had been leading men for a long time, since he had been promoted to the rank of corporal and assigned responsibility for a squad. Given the nature of the places where he had been sent, casualties had been frequent and severe. He had written letters home to those grieving mothers and wives. He had used the same old tired verbiage about how these men had fallen while fighting for the motherland: a difficult claim to make during the invasion of Afghanistan, only slightly easier in Chechnya.
If he had pen and paper here, and the addresses of the bereaved, what comforting lies would he write? These men had been mercenaries working for a shady organization whose sole motive was profit.
As was he.
Even if it were possible to instill a sense of personal loyalty to an organized crime cartel—which, come to think of it, must not be all that difficult, since men fought and died for such groups all the time—the fact was that this had not been a bona fide operation but a colossal mistake, undertaken by a man who had defrauded that group and gone half mad.
Even that could be explained. It would take an ingenious bit of explaining, but it did add up to a coherent state of affairs, as far as it went. What he’d never be able to put into a letter was the fact that they had accidentally stumbled into a bomb factory run by a cell of jihadists.
No wonder the Chinese authorities were calling it a gas explosion. It wasn’t that they were trying to cover anything up. It just made for a simpler explanation.
If he were going to tell the families anything, it would have to be that they had died in a gas explosion, or a car accident, or some other such meaningless and random eventuality of war. Like the American soldiers who were getting electrocuted while taking showers in their shoddily constructed military bases. Who wrote those letters?
As he paced back and forth gazing out over the streaming and pulsing lights of the city, he saw that there was really only one way to make sense of the entire situation, if by “make sense” was meant “bring it to a conclusion such that proper letters could be written to the mothers of the men who
had died this morning.” And that was to hunt down Abdallah Jones and kill him.
He squatted down on his haunches, stretching the sore and battered muscles of his legs in a way that hurt but felt good, and crossed his elbows atop his knees and rested his chin on his forearms and stared out at China.
Everything was clear to him, except how he was going to get out of this country. That all depended on Olivia. Helpless as a baby in her bare feet, her aloneness. And yet infinitely more powerful, more capable than Sokolov in this context.
There had been an odd moment there, toward the conclusion of their interview, when she had insisted that he was not welcome to stay in her apartment. A strange thing for her to bring up. As if Sokolov would have expected any such consideration. And yet she had felt it important to make this explicit. Why? Because she was attracted to him, as he was to her, and that made it imperative that scruples be observed, rules followed.
He tucked his chin, let himself fall back on his buttocks, rolled out flat, whipped his arms behind him and slapped the carpeted floor to break his fall, as in SAMBO. It would not be the worst place he’d ever slept. Even better if he got the Makarov out of his waistband. So he did that, placing it up next to his head, and he pulled the spare clip out of the breast pocket of the suit jacket and a little flashlight from the back pocket of the trousers and placed them all right next to each other. He unlaced Jeremy Jeong’s shoes. But rather than slip them off, he decided to learn from the lesson of Olivia and keep them on his feet loosely, just in case there were any more gas leaks.
Sleep did not come, though, since he could not stop thinking about how vulnerable he would be if someone came into the safe house.
He slung his CamelBak over his shoulders and went into the conference room. The big table was wired for Internet, a trunk line of gray wires zip-tied together beneath it. With some quick knife work he peeled loose a run of cable a few meters long and draped it over his neck. He planted a chair in the middle of the table, stood on it, reached up, and pushed a ceiling tile out of the way.
Above him, as he remembered, was a zigzagging steel truss. It was out of his reach, but in a couple of tries he was able to toss the end of the cable through it and then feed more cable up so that the loose end bent down of its own weight and came within his reach. He jerked it down and tied the ends together to form a loop that dangled through the ceiling hole to about a meter above the table’s surface.