the food and the feeling had passed. Then Marlon clambered up out of the slot and disappeared again for a while.
Csongor was awakened by someone shaking his shoulder. It was Marlon. The sky overhead was deep twilight.
“The boat is moving,” Marlon announced.
Csongor was still coming to terms with the fact that he was where he was; it had not all been just a bad dream.
“Back to Xiamen?”
“No. Toward us!”
The tide had receded, and so both men had to get out of the boat and shove it down the rock chute for a few meters to refloat it. The space was too narrow to deploy the oars, and so they had to push it out against wave action by pawing at the rock walls. But eventually they got out to a place where they could row again, and then Csongor saw the boat in question immediately. The smaller vessel—the one with the taxi crater in its cargo deck —was not in evidence. The fishing boat was motoring along directly in front of them, only a few hundred meters off their bow, headed for the dark, uninhabited side of the island.
Without gas for their motor, it was, of course, out of the question for them to follow this vessel. Csongor assumed that it was about to turn into the open sea and disappear. But instead it cut its engines to a low growling idle and kept station in front of the beach for a while—long enough for them to row halfway to it. Then they were scared out of their minds by a smaller vessel, similar in its general lines to the one that had earlier absorbed the hits from the taxi and the van, which came motoring around the north end of the island and made straight for the fishing boat, eventually tying up alongside it. Marlon and Csongor meanwhile backed water and pulled toward the shelter of the rocks. It was dark enough by this point that there was little chance of their being seen, as long as they maintained a prudent separation.
An hour passed. Muffled thuds and voices told them that people and goods were being moved from the fishing vessel to the launch. Then the launch revved its engine and made off to the south, rapidly disappearing around the end of the island, which suggested that it might be headed back toward Xiamen.
After a little while, the fishing vessel too began to head south, moving at an extremely slow pace, perhaps just as a way to save fuel. But by this time Marlon and Csongor had rowed back out into the open water and placed themselves directly in its path.
THE BOAT CARRYING Zula, Jones, and Jones’s crew retraced the course taken earlier up the strait between Xiamen and Gulangyu. But just as they were clearing the northern end of the battery of passenger ferry terminals, the skipper cut the throttle and began to steer a course toward shore, aiming for a dark patch along the waterfront. As they drew in closer, ambient light from the buildings of downtown made it possible to see a few mean little piers hosting a motley assortment of smaller craft. Nevertheless, they were sturdy enough to support vehicles. A taxi was waiting on one of them. Leaning against it, a dark human form suspended between the bluish pane of a phone screen and the bobbing red star of a cigarette.
In addition to the skipper, Jones, and Zula, there were six men on the boat. Two of them scrambled up from its prow onto the pier and made the boat fast, then padded over to the taxi and greeted the man who had been waiting for them.
Following, as instructed, one pace behind Jones, Zula disembarked. He led her to the taxi. The two of them climbed into the backseat where tinted windows would make them invisible. It was the same taxi they’d been in earlier in the day.
One man climbed, quite cheerfully, into the vehicle’s trunk. An additional two crammed themselves into the backseat along with Zula and Jones, and another got into the front passenger seat. The others stayed with the boat.
They drove to the skyscraper that contained the safe house. The men asked questions, which Jones translated into English for Zula; he then translated her answers back into Arabic. They were all mundane but very practical questions about fire exits, guard stations, the underground parking garage, and so on. The interrogation went on for longer than the drive, and so the driver circled the block a few times as Jones’s men satisfied their curiosity.
Finally the taxi pulled into the same covered entrance where, a very long time ago, Zula and Peter and Csongor and all of the Russians had climbed into the rented van and bantered with Qian Yuxia.
The man in the passenger seat climbed out and entered the lobby, where he engaged in conversation with a security guard seated behind a sweeping marble-clad desk.
After a few minutes, he turned half around, while keeping his eye fixed on the guard, and made a little wave back toward the taxi.
The entrance to the underground garage was just ahead of them, down a ramp that was sealed off by a steel door. This now groaned into movement and lifted out of their way. The taxi pulled into it and navigated to an elevator bank, where the two men in the backseat hopped out and liberated the one in the trunk. As they were doing this, the doors of one of the elevators slid open to reveal the first man standing next to the security guard. The guard had his hands behind his back, and he had a pistol to his head. All of them crowded into the elevator, and the doors closed.
The taxi then pulled back out of the skyscraper’s basement and onto the waterfront boulevard. A few minutes later they were back at the pier. Khalid and one of the other jihadists now joined them in the taxi, and Jones told the driver to head for the Hyatt by the airport. Once the taxi had pulled out onto the main road, he pulled out his phone, looked at Zula, and said, “Here is where you are going to be magnificently cooperative.”
“WHAT ARE YOU asking her?” Csongor demanded.
“Which side of the boat she is on,” Marlon said, taking the phone away from his head for a moment. Then he put it back and listened. “She is on that side.” He waved his hand out toward the open sea.
Csongor looked at the fishing vessel. It was perhaps a hundred meters away from them. If he stopped rowing, and it kept going on a straight course, it would pass just in front of them, leaving them on its starboard side—which was to say, the side facing toward the island. Marlon was telling him that Yuxia was in a cabin on the port side.
To say that they were trying to intercept the larger vessel would have been to imply, somehow, that they had a plan. Which, in turn, would have been to imply that Marlon and Csongor had been communicating with each other as to what they ought to do. Neither of these was true. Earlier, they had made use of the cover afforded by darkness, and the fact that their out-of-gas boat was incapable of making noise, to move around and keep an eye on the terrorists’ activities. This had nearly brought them to grief when the faster launch that had met the fishing boat had suddenly come roaring toward them. Since then Csongor had been rowing with all his might. And when he had rehydrated with a few bottles of water and filled his belly with noodles, his might was considerable, and he was able to jerk the little boat across the flat water like a water skater. But why was he doing it? What was the plan? No idea.
“What are we—” Csongor began, but Marlon cut him off. He was hanging up the phone. “I told her
“What does that mean?”
Marlon grinned, stalling Csongor while he worked through the translation. “Make it so that not even their dogs and chickens are at peace.”
“Meaning?”
“Raise hell, more or less.”
“Okay. Then what?” Csongor stopped rowing and looked at Marlon.
Marlon nodded significantly toward the oncoming vessel. “The wheels,” he said.
Csongor turned and looked. Marlon had used the wrong English word, but it was obvious what he was referring to. Every discarded tire in the entire industrialized world seemed to have ended up here on the Chinese coast, where they were used by the locals in the same way that their landlubber cousins used bamboo: as the Universal Substance out of which all other solid objects could be made. Sometimes they had to be hugely reprocessed in order to serve their intended function. In other cases, they still looked like tires. Every boat—nay, every floating object—in this universe was protected on all sides by tires slung from its gunwales on ropes, lined up
