Ayi Zhao pulled back, as if jolted by Old Cat’s words.
“Does that mean that you freed Xing Ming and Wang Bai?”
Faith recognized the names: Xing and Wang were eighty-year-old women whose sentencing to hard labor for planning a protest at the Beijing Olympics had engendered worldwide condemnation.
Old Cat nodded. “The criminals imprisoned there have fled into the hills, but the political dissidents have joined us here. And having suffered the way they did, they have their own ideas of what should happen to Wo-li and his wife. Especially his wife.” Old Cat looked at Faith. “The party runs the slave labor system and she’s the highest party representative in Chengdu.” Old Cat shrugged. “So you see, their lives are not entirely in my hands.”
“Of course they are,” Ayi Zhao said. “You can let them escape after they cooperate.”
Old Cat squinted toward the ceiling, then looked back at her and shook his head.
“They’re too well-known and they don’t have false papers. Even if they could get to a foreign border, there’s no way they could cross.”
Faith raised her hand as a prelude to speaking, but then lowered it. The only immunity she possessed arose out of her position as “the anthropologist,” the nameless professional witness. She looked at Ayi Zhao and understood a mother’s duty, and then asked herself where her own duty lay-and she was neither a mother, nor a revolutionary, nor even Chinese.
But then an image came to her mind of a wire service photographer that she’d once seen in a newspaper. His laying down his camera and diving into a Rwandan river to rescue a Tutsi baby who’d been thrown in to drown by a Hutu militia man-except that Wo-li and his wife weren’t innocent children. They were despicable adults, but they had a mother who didn’t deserve to suffer.
“I can get them out,” Faith said.
CHAPTER 39
Where are we going?” Gage asked Batkoun Benaroun as he gunned the six cylinders of his Citroen around the rising curves of the Marseilles hills. He sped through the oncoming flow of commuter traffic like a salmon swimming upstream, and with the same driven instinct.
“I’m not allowed to say until we get there,” Benaroun said.
“Isn’t this a little silly?”
“Of course, it’s like dancing the rumba without music or watching The Man in the Iron Mask without sound.” Benaroun glanced over and smiled. “In any case, we’ve come to the point in the program where we’ll have to supply our own lyrics.” He pointed ahead to where the road rose between banks of apartment buildings. “All they found up here was the car Hennessy had rented. Nothing else.”
Benaroun reached into his glove compartment and handed Gage a map. Looking at it, it wasn’t difficult for Gage to guess their location. The port was to the north behind them. The Mediterranean to the west. And the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde, overlooking the city, was high in front of them and now coming into view atop a limestone cliff.
They worked their way through the winding streets west of the church until the road forked, one prong heading toward the entrance, the other around the back. They then made a final ascent, and Benaroun drove to the base of the hill on the west side of the church, where it bordered a residential area composed of one-story bungalows and multistory apartments.
Just after he turned onto a narrow dead end street, Benaroun gestured toward the backs of the wall-to-wall hillside homes whose balconies on their far sides faced the sea a mile away.
“He parked just by that yellow one with the green shutters,” Benaroun said. “In front of the door.”
“You mean his car was discovered there,” Gage said.
Benaroun’s face reddened. “Sorry. I went a little beyond the evidence.”
He then made a three-point U-turn and pulled to the curb across from a spreading stand of aloe cactus and olive trees and bushes growing from patches of earth and from cracks in the hillside rock.
The sun that met them as they stepped from the car seemed to Gage to cast pure white light, hard and stark, that made the pastels of the houses and reds and blacks and blues of the cars on the street seem less like overlaid coloring and more like the things themselves.
Gage walked twenty-five yards to the end of the street. He stopped and looked west through a gap between the houses toward the Frioul archipelago a mile offshore. He could just make out the Chateau d’If, France’s Alcatraz, on the smallest of the four islands. It was where the French government once imprisoned political and religious dissenters. Despite the actual suffering inflicted there that Gage had read about in school, the castle- shaped structure now existed in the public imagination only as the setting for the fictional Count of Monte Cristo. He wondered whether Hennessy, too, had hesitated at this spot and saw Ibrahim and himself in the fictional mirror of a wrongful prosecution and a struggle for justice and redemption.
Gage continued a little farther, past the end of the pavement and onto a dirt trail. He walked another thirty yards to where he could overlook the port-and realized that Benaroun had not at all gone beyond the evidence.
Standing in this place with the city glowing gemlike below, even without binoculars Hennessy could’ve made out the north end of the grass meridian at the head of the port and the backdrop of buildings that framed it. With binoculars, the limousine procession would have passed before him like a line of ants under a magnifying glass.
Gage heard Benaroun’s footsteps come to a stop next to him.
“Is this where he was watching from?” Benaroun asked.
“No,” Gage said, staring down at the city.
Benaroun turned toward Gage and squinted up at him. “I don’t understand.”
Gage directed his thumb over his shoulder. “Hennessy wouldn’t have parked back there and then walked all this way. There was no reason to. He’d have parked where the pavement ended.” He thought of Hennessy’s wife and her smile when she mentioned her husband’s investigative techniques. “His FBI training would’ve insisted on it. He would’ve parked as close as he could to where he was headed and then faced the car in the direction he wanted to go when he left.” He smiled at Benaroun. “Just like you did.”
Gage turned and pointed up at the basilica, then drew a line with his finger from the gleaming golden statue of the Madonna and Child at the top and down to where Hennessy’s car had been parked and then back up again.
“He must’ve been a mountain goat,” Benaroun said. “Even if he wanted to park down here for some reason, there are stairs close by.” Benaroun made a curving motion to the right with his hand, indicating the far side of the hill. “Those would’ve been easier. Or he could’ve walked back down the main road until he reached the fork and then back up again to the front of the church.”
“It’s likely that he did just that,” Gage said, enacting in his mind what Hennessy might have been thinking. “I suspect that he was concerned about surveillance. He’d do some evasive driving through town to get here, then pretend to be a tourist. Take the stairs and mix in with the crowd. And if he became convinced that they’d caught up with him, he could slip into the shadows and work his way down the hillside.”
Gage pointed up at the church. “How about drive me up to the top and I’ll make my way back down. You come back here and search a strip along the bottom of the hill, maybe ten meters wide. See if you can find anything.”
Gage’s cell phone rang as they walked back to the car.
“I need the snakehead after all,” Faith said.
Gage didn’t express the relief he felt.
“You ready to come out?”
“I need to stay a little longer. It’s for the students and Ayi Zhao’s son and daughter-in-law.”
Benaroun cast him a puzzled look, and Gage mouthed Faith’s name.
“How soon?”
“Two days. Assuming Wo-li agrees to it.” “You mean the rebels are trading exile for information?”
“And Wo-li is deciding how much to give them. For him it looks like a long-term solution to what may be a short-term problem. If he spills everything and the rebellion fails, he’ll have torpedoed his future. The government
