people could see through that.
Right now, Jones badly wanted to know about Sokolov. Something had happened between those two men, something that had made an impression on Jones.
“I don’t know much about his background, other than the medals and so on…”
“Medals?”
“…but I interacted with him a fair amount when we took the jet down to Xiamen, and at the safe house, and while we were hunting down the virus writers.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Jones said. For his eyes had gotten a little wider, his gaze a little more intense, at each of these disclosures.
She had not mentioned, until now, the fact that Ivanov’s jet was in Xiamen.
Good. Answering his questions about those would kill another hour.
What would happen when she ran out of material?
All he had to do was google her name and he would know about Richard. Then the logical thing for him to do would be to hold her for ransom.
Of course, he didn’t know her last name yet.
The curse of having a distinctive first name: if he just googled “Zula,” combined with the name of the company where she worked, he’d probably come up with something.
But there was no Internet on this boat, and, from the looks of where they were going, that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
“Are you telling me that the Russians had a safe house?” The question Brit inflected, falling rather than rising at the end.
“Yes.”
“In Xiamen?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In a—” Zula was getting ready to describe the building. Then she turned and looked back to the city. It was a few miles aft by this point, but the tall downtown towers were clearly visible. “That one,” she said. “The new modern tower. Curvy floor plan. Yellow crane sticking out of the top of it.”
Jones called for the binoculars. Trading them back and forth with Zula, he made sure he knew precisely which building she was talking about.
He wanted to know which floor. That gave Zula pause, for as she’d looked through the binoculars, she’d wondered whether Sokolov was up there, gazing out the window. Was she putting him in danger by divulging so much?
But Sokolov knew perfectly well that he was in danger, and he would be taking precautions.
It was a way to communicate with him. If Jones sent someone to the forty-third floor of that building, Sokolov would wonder how they had known the location of the safe house, and he might conclude that they’d gotten the information from Zula.
“Forty-three,” she said.
“Describe the—” Jones began, but they were interrupted by a few words from the skipper. Jones listened, nodded, then fixed his gaze on Zula and jerked his head toward the pilothouse. “Things are about to get crowded,” he said. “You’ll be a good deal less conspicuous in there.”
Zula wondered to herself, not for the first time, just how cooperative she ought to be. But Jones seemed to enjoy her company and to want information from her, so she had a general sense that things were merely bad and not all the way desperate. Jumping off the boat and swimming for it would certainly make them desperate. Cooperating now might lead to more trust later. So she stood up and walked into the cramped, loud, and ferociously hot confines of the pilothouse. A minute later she was joined by Yuxia. They stayed there for the remainder of the voyage.
She guessed that the word “teeming” must have been coined to describe places like the harbor on this little island. Since then, though, it had been hopelessly diluted by application to such subjects as Manhattan traffic, jungles, and beehives, none of which really approached the level of activity and jam-packed-ness that was belaboring Zula’s eyes as they chugged deeper and deeper into the harbor. You’d think that having so much in such a small space would lead to less, rather than more, activity, since crowding made it harder to move, but none of the people who lived here seemed to be aware of any such equation. The outskirts of the bay were gridded over with raftlike structures about the size of city blocks, each consisting of numerous square pens, separated by gangplanks, and covered with stretched netting. The gangplanks were supported by various kinds of floats, including plastic tanks filled with air, giant sausages of closed-cell foam, or simply large plastic bags stuffed with Styrofoam peanuts. Each of these rafts supported a little shack. Zula reckoned that they were fish farms.
The number of fishing boats defied belief or estimation. They exceeded available dock space by a factor of many hundreds, so they had been pushed up onto the beach until the beach was full and then they had been rafted together, side by side, in long arcs stretching across the harbor. When one arc ran out of space, a new one would get started, and in the outskirts of the bay there were a few consisting of only half a dozen or so boats.
Somewhere beyond all of this there must be actual land, and some kind of port town, but Zula saw it only in glimpses. For there was a cleft in all this improvised rafting that penetrated to a dock: just a single pier, where at the moment a passenger ferry was drawn up. From it a road rambled up the hill, forming the spine of a town. The road was lined with low buildings and half choked with people in
The look on Yuxia’s face told Zula that it was equally foreign to her.
All the fishing vessels had been constructed to exactly the same plan, mass-produced in some shipyard somewhere, and all of them were painted the same shade of blue. It was a wonder to Zula that the people who lived and worked here could tell them apart. There was one, though, that stood apart simply because it literally did stand apart, being anchored a little farther out in the bay and not rafted to any other vessel. That was the one they headed for. They came up along its seaward flank, where fewer eyes could see them, and scaled a ladder to its deck. Like all of them, it had a heavy-looking prow, jutting high out of the water and laden with technical gear. Just aft of that was an expanse of open deck cluttered with gray plastic tubs nested together in stacks. Over that loomed a superstructure that occupied most of the aft half of the vessel. This was two decks high. The cabins in its lower story had only a few small portholes. The upper level sported a few windows and a couple of hatches opening out onto a narrow walkway that ran around its periphery. These were nothing more than brief impressions that Zula gained while she was being hustled straight back to a cabin, apparently used as a berth by fishermen who lived aboard the vessel, since the next thing that happened was that two men came in and dragged all their stuff out of it, leaving her alone in a stripped room with no decoration except a Middle Eastern rug on the steel deck, and two faded posters with Arabic lettering, featuring men in turbans and beards, pointing to the ceiling and unburdening themselves of some profound thoughts about (wild guess here) global jihad. The cabin had a single porthole that, fifteen minutes after her arrival, was unceremoniously sealed off by the simple expedient of taping a piece of paper over it on the outside. Openings and closings of the cabin door were accompanied by clanging sound effects that she interpreted as signifying that the hatch was chained shut on the outside. In a wordless, somewhat poignant act of chivalry, someone opened the door and handed her a bucket. Yuxia had also been taken aboard, but Zula had no idea where she was, or what might be happening to her.
“THERE’S VODKA IN the bar.” The spy Olivia said that in Russian. Sokolov guessed now, from her accent and from her freewheeling approach to dispensation of alcoholic beverages, that she was British.
“Thank you, but I am a Russian of somewhat unusual habits and will not be taking this opportunity to get drunk.”
She was a little slow to take that sentence in, but she got the gist of it. Her Russian was, perhaps, slightly better than his English. They would have to switch back and forth and watch each other’s faces.
“I am going to take every opportunity I can find,” she responded, and went over to the bar—really just a
