and used a key to open the door to number 41.
He looked around the small, dusty apartment, with its cracked-tile kitchen, carpets rolled up into logs against a wall covered in water stains, the decade-old television, and the windows that looked across the narrow street to view the front of another low apartment building that Li Qide had been shocked to find on his target list. “What is this?”
“It’s an office.”
“No, you have bad CIA maps, like when you blew up our embassy in Belgrade. That’s an apartment building.”
“This isn’t from maps, Li Qide,” he said, then stretched the truth. “It’s from direct observation. In the basement level is a special Guoanbu center.”
“But those are homes over it.”
“Why do you think they installed it there? It’s that important.”
“What do they do in this special center?”
“They plan murders around the globe.”
“For example?”
“I know of thirty-three.”
“You don’t want to share specifics?”
“I’d be happy to,” he said and began to recite their names and the locations of their murders. “Sandra Harrison, Tallinn; Pak Eun, Daegu; Lorenzo Pellegrini, Cairo; Andy Geriev, St. Petersburg; Mia Salazar, Brasilia…”
Li Qide had accepted it, just as he’d accepted the other targets on the list: the recently completed Koolhaas-designed Central Television Headquarters on Guanghua Road, the Dongchen branch of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau in the Daxing Hutong, and one Olympic venue, the main building of the Shunyi Aquatic Park.
It was one thirty, an hour before the moment. He unscrewed the pipe and laid out the rifle pieces. Outside, bicycles filled the street as people took care of last-minute errands before rushing home or to bars to watch the Games on television.
“It has to be before the Games,” Li Qide had said.
“The whole idea was to humiliate them on the world stage, wasn’t it?”
“That was before we knew you wanted to blow up an apartment building. No, we’ll do it a few hours before the Games start, so that the civilian deaths will be minimal.”
Not only were most people out of their apartments at this hour, but the crowds on the street would camouflage the young men and women with canvas backpacks full of C-4 who dropped them in calculated spots along the buildings’ walls. Even Alan, as he tested the scope by examining the perimeter of the building, had trouble keeping track of people. Nor could he find those telltale backpacks against the corners of the building, but with an hour to go he knew better than to panic.
He’d gotten the rifle together when the rat-a-tat on his door started and an old woman’s voice asked a hesitant, measured question. He ignored it, rechecking the scope, but the woman tapped again, then banged with her fist, prattling on and then, to his terror, trying the door handle. For an instant, he couldn’t remember if he’d locked it, but he had.
There was a pause, during which she perhaps considered her options, then she banged again, following with a grating Mandarin singsong-some kind of demand. There was a definite sense of entitlement to her unintelligible prattle.
He got up and placed the rifle inside a creaky wardrobe, then stood beside the door. He interrupted her stream with a “Wo ting bu dong”-I don’t understand.
Silence.
He gave up on his phrasebook Chinese and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Mandarin. Do you speak English?”
She began with a long, surprised, “Oooh,” then started up again, louder, angrier. He used the key on the door, pulled it open a crack, and as he moved his face to the opening the door crashed against him. It wasn’t the force of an old woman but of a young man’s boot. The handle struck him just below the sternum, knocking the air out of him as he stumbled back onto the floor, trying to catch air, and when he looked up at the four uniformed soldiers rushing in, shouting in mangled English for him to Stay dair! he saw the old woman between their forms, outside his door, against the railing, arms crossed tightly as if holding her old, heavy body together, and her face was filled with hate.
Then the bag was pulled over his head and they began to move.
He was dragged across concrete and dirt, thrown into a truck and driven through streets full of voices and car horns and smells of food that made him queasy, the stink of car exhaust and burning rubber, and then, surprisingly, the smell of fresh grass, and then concrete dust. Again he was dragged, this time into a building and up stairs, before being thrown onto a floor. The hood was removed, and he blinked in the sudden light of an overhead bulb, slowly adjusting to the sight of a small, dirty, windowless room. Concrete walls, concrete floor and ceiling. The soldiers left him there, then closed and locked a simple wooden door.
After about fifteen minutes, he still hadn’t moved from his awkward position on the floor, and he started to laugh. His whole life, he thought, had led to that apartment window and that rifle. It was funny, really, that something you’d worked your whole life toward could be so easily made pointless.
There were tears, too, and he knew he really had spent too long with those amateurs in the mountains. It was the same old story. One or two of them had been letting the police know everything, and they had all made the long journey to Beijing only to reach an ambush. No one had made it through. The mistake had not been theirs, for this sort of thing had to be expected. The mistake had been his, giving them an operation he knew they weren’t ready for, and the whole folly had been the result of his desperation. The only reason he was still alive was because Xin Zhu would want some information from him. The others, the four in their trucks, the other three with their rifles-they were dead. The others who had been assigned to support the operation were probably dead, too, or soon would be. Twenty? Thirty? Thirty-three?
His hysteria had ebbed by the time a soldier opened the door and Xin Zhu came inside and told the soldier to leave them alone.
He really was enormous. All the reports had said this-Henry Gray had talked on and on about it, and Andrei Stanescu had been in awe of it-but that didn’t prepare him for the way the Chinaman seemed to fill the small room, making Alan feel as if he should press himself against the wall. Yet the anger kept him from showing anything. Thirty-three spots turning from red to blue encouraged him to climb to his feet, step forward a little, and consider how to take the man down with his hands. It was possible, and once he’d even done such a thing in a pomegranate orchard west of Kandahar in the Arghandab district. It had been hard and long and brutal, but he’d done it and after getting sick in the dirt he’d slept that night without dreams. Anything was possible.
Perhaps aware of how he was making Alan feel, Xin Zhu didn’t come close. He remained standing at the door and regarded him with resignation. Then he said, “You’re a lucky man.”
“Not as lucky as you, apparently.”
Xin Zhu didn’t bother replying to that. He said, “The bombs have been tracked and disposed of. Your comrades have been rounded up. Your little operation has been swept clean.”
“Yet here you are. A chancy move.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about myself. Not regarding you, at least. The men on the other side of this door will hurt you before you could ever hurt me.”
It didn’t sound like a bluff.
Xin Zhu said, “Before you go, I wanted to meet you. I wish I could apologize, but we both know I wouldn’t mean it. I did as I thought best at a certain moment, and it’s the nature of things that we have no choice but to live with the repercussions of our actions. I’ll be living with mine for years to come. You’ll probably have to do the same.”
Philosophy in a cell, Alan thought. “Enough, okay? We’re not here to make friendly. Just get it over with.”
Xin Zhu nodded, looked a moment at his fat fingers, then said, “The favors are finished. I’m not going to live my life giving things to him.”
