Faith felt the weight of the question, as if he’d said, You’re the witness. It is you who’ll watch and report what we do.
“I’m not here in the service of science,” Faith said, “but of justice.”
“Doesn’t truth serve both?”
“It hasn’t so far,” Faith said, “at least in Beijing.”
His hard face splintered into a smile.
“Welcome to the revolution,” he said, then stepped aside and waved at the man behind him to open the storage room door.
Jian-jun’s parents looked up with wide eyes from where they sat on the linoleum floor, leaning against the wall, their arms around their legs. Their eyes closed and air exploded from their lungs as though they’d received a reprieve in the minutes before their scheduled execution. Together they rolled forward onto one knee, but they didn’t rise. Instead, they kowtowed toward Ayi Zhao, lowering their heads, a humbling gesture not seen in China since the Cultural Revolution.
But standing there watching, Faith wondered whether two of the once most powerful people in Sichuan Province were begging for forgiveness from someone who couldn’t give it-at least not alone-or simply playacting a traditional role to save their lives.
The revulsion in her stomach told her it was the latter.
Then she remembered what her Mandarin teacher had once warned her: The true survivor in China wasn’t the tiger, but the chameleon.
CHAPTER 33
Sunlight infused the blue-hued palette of the Mediterranean cove and warmed the backs of Gage and Tabari Benaroun as they hiked the juniper-bordered trail along a cliff edge east of Marseilles. In the previous hour, shadows had descended the limestone walls and the distant sea had lightened below the wide sky and merged with the southern horizon.
They’d driven from Nice the evening before, mostly in silence. Gage had decided to let Tabari control the conversation and not to press him to violate the oath he’d made to himself and reveal more than he intended. In Gage’s mind, Tabari, like his uncle, was not a rag to be used to wipe away grime and then thrown away. He was certain that the young detective would find a way to lead him to discover the facts on his own.
They were a slow mile in from the trailhead parking lot near the fishing village of Cassis. As they started out, Tabari had pointed out where a stolen car had been discovered on the day after Hennessy’s body was found. Tabari hadn’t commented about it beyond showing where it was parked and the condition it was in, and then had led Gage down a dirt road to the trail.
Tabari stopped and then braced himself against an oak tree and kicked at a granite boulder, knocking off the mud that had built up around the soles of his boots.
“How far?” Gage asked as he did the same.
Tabari pointed across the inlet toward a columnar outcropping that looked like the hoodoos Gage had seen in Zion and Bryce canyons in the American Southwest, but instead of glowing red or orange or yellow, it stood chalk white against the mazy green hillside and the cut brown trail and the azure sky.
“Just to the right,” Tabari said, “where the path nears the rim.” He lowered his hand until his finger settled on a spot just above where the incoming tide lapped against the rocks. “Hennessy’s body was found on that ledge.”
Gage imagined Hennessy walking their same route. Despite the cold, but wearing no jacket or overcoat, at least according to what Milton Abrams had learned, and passing three other inlets along the way and dozens of other places where he could have jumped.
Why, Gage asked himself, did Hennessy suffer the shivering and the frozen feet and the wind biting at his face and hands and piercing his clothing and needling his skin? Why not just get it over with? Put to an end both his psychological and physical suffering.
And if Hennessy had been murdered, why not do it in the parking lot, or along the road at the first outcropping above the shoreline rocks?
It didn’t make sense.
Gage pulled a map out of his jeans pocket and unfolded it. He traced a path from Cassis where he and Tabari had started the hike all the way along the coast to Marseilles, twenty miles to the west. If Hennessy had begun at the trailhead closest to Marseilles, it wouldn’t have been an hour walk, but a ten-hour walk, with tough ascents and treacherous descents on slippery stones and mud.
But say he really did start at Cassis? A mile or so of indecision, or of confusion, or of anguish “Exactly,” Tabari said, after watching Gage’s eyes scan the map. “From either direction it’s a long way to go to commit suicide.”
“Maybe not,” Gage said, picturing San Francisco’s Golden Gate, almost two miles in length. “Most people walk to the middle of a bridge before jumping, maybe looking for a certain kind of symmetry, maybe one that confirms their place at the center of the universe at the pivotal moment.”
“Or as distant as they can get from solid ground,” Tabari said. “I assume that people imagine they’ll enjoy a pristine death, as if the water below would simply absorb them whole and unbroken.”
“Either way,” Gage said, gesturing toward the rocky trail before them, “they can walk a long way before they kill themselves, sometimes a very long way.”
Tabari took the lead as they headed toward the deepest part of the cove. The area seemed to Gage to be a counterpoint image of the Utah Badlands, with fractured white chasm walls in place of red rock cliffs, with a pale sea in place of shadowed valleys, and with mesquite and sage and pinon pines in place of Aleppo and myrtle and ferns, but just as desolate.
After Gage and Tabari made the turn back toward the water, they stopped in the shadow of an oak tree. Through binoculars Gage scanned the path they’d traveled, checking whether they’d been followed. He then inspected the ridges above. He didn’t expect to see anyone, or at least anyone shrewd, since a person assigned to track them and who’d seen where they’d started could’ve guessed where they were headed. In any case, a fishing boat would have been a better choice for surveillance.
Gage suspected that if he’d been followed to the trailhead and the follower knew their destination and what they would find, he might’ve settled on taking some photos of Tabari and then headed back to Marseilles to try to identify him Unless that someone wanted to follow them not just long enough to identify Tabari or even just to the spot where Hennessy went over, but also to make sure that he and Tabari followed Hennessy all the way down to the rocks below.
“You tell anyone that you were coming out here?” Gage asked, lowering the binoculars.
“You see something?”
“No.”
“I didn’t even tell my father.”
Gage raised them again and turned the lenses toward the Mediterranean, starting at the pale blue water at the head of the inlet, then back and forth along the shoreline and finally following the darkening channel toward the open sea. A sailboat slid into view from the direction of Cassis, forty feet of white fiberglass and chrome reflecting the risen sun, sails down, motoring, its engine a distant murmur, its wake foaming the still surface.
A flash of glass told Gage that binoculars had been raised toward them, but had passed on. Gage figured that either they’d just been spotted or they weren’t the person’s target.
Gage focused on a woman standing alone on the bow. The binoculars flashed again and she raised her arm and pointed, not at them, but at the hill rising up behind them. Gage looked over his shoulder, for a half second expecting to spot a sniper poised on the hill-crest. Instead, it was a peregrine falcon swooping down from a pine top, its nearly two-foot wings first wide and flapping, then folded as it rocketed toward the water. A seagull shrieked and took flight from a yellow buoy at the mouth of the cove. The falcon swept down below the bird, and then slammed up into it, sending it tumbling and flailing, finally catching it by the back of the neck and carrying it to a ledge halfway up the cliff.
