pull-up that got his head out of the water so that he could breathe.
Marlon looked away and tended to his own problems for a moment. His upper body was out of the water, but his legs were being dragged along, creating powerful suction that threatened to rip him off the tire. Inching, like a rock climber, to a slightly better grip, he was able to lift a leg out and drape it over the adjoining tire, and this both reduced the suction and gave him leverage to clamber up and get better handholds. He worked his way to a place where he was standing with one foot on the tire’s rim and reaching up over his head with both hands to grip the boat’s gunwale.
He risked a look back and saw that Csongor had achieved similar results. The little rowboat was nowhere to be seen. Csongor was holding on with one hand, using the other to pat himself down, verifying that the gun was still where he had put it, the shoulder bag still slung across his body.
Then he began climbing, and Marlon followed suit. In a few moments, he was able to vault over the gunwale and land in a crouch on the main deck. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. From the sounds of it, Yuxia was still doing an excellent job of raising hell on the other side.
Csongor, squatting back at the stern, looked across to the opposite side, then turned to Marlon and shrugged, indicating that he saw nothing. He rose to his feet, took the pistol out of his pocket, checked it, and then began to walk around the back of the superstructure.
Marlon took one of the stun grenades out of his pocket and got his finger into its ring. Then he walked across the front of the superstructure, sticking close to its front bulkhead in case anyone might be looking down from the bridge, and peeked around the corner. Perhaps three meters aft, light was shining from an open hatch. Two men, a large one and a smaller one, were standing on the catwalk outside, looking in. The larger of the two got a snarling look on his face and strode over the high threshold into the cabin. As soon as he was out of the way, Marlon was able to look all the way aft to the stern of the boat and see Csongor’s bulky form there.
Marlon began to walk aft. Csongor began to walk forward. The smaller man who was still out on the gangway noticed Marlon first, and his whole body went into a kind of spasm. There was no helping it; he couldn’t prevent himself from being astonished at the sight of a stranger on his boat. Marlon caught his eye and pointed suggestively aft. The man turned to look in the direction indicated and saw Csongor raising a pistol and aiming at his face. While this poor fellow was thus distracted, Marlon pulled the pin out of the stun grenade—this was surprisingly difficult—and then reached around and chucked it into the cabin. He noticed, then, that the door opened outward, and so he gave it a shove and clanged it shut and leaned against it just in time to feel a mighty boom through his butt and feel a blast of hot air and shattered glass smack him in the back of the head.
SOKOLOV HAD A key card that would enable him to summon an elevator, but he reckoned that the jihadists might be down in the lobby, in view of the indicator panel. They might notice one of the lifts going into motion and stopping at 43. If so, they could simply kill him when the door opened. So he took the stairs instead, just as Zula had done the other day. He took them fast, bounding over banisters and caroming off walls. But he was still moving a hell of a lot slower than those guys in the elevator.
Fearing that the fire exit to the outside might set off an alarm, he took a chance on the door to the lobby, pushing it open slightly first to check for an ambush. No one was there.
They might be waiting to ambush him from the plantings outside, but if they really knew he was here and wanted to ambush him, they’d have gone about it differently. So he walked stolidly out of the building, down the drive, and out to the street. Then he broke into a jog, headed toward the ferry terminals, less than a kilometer away. He was keeping an eye out for the jihadists the entire way but saw nothing.
A ferry was loading at the terminal for Gulangyu. Sokolov swung wide around it, avoiding streetlamps, and made his way down to a smaller and lower dock nearby, where several speedboats were tied up, and their drivers sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking. These were the high-speed water taxis for moneyed passengers, and Sokolov had been eyeing them with interest the whole time he’d been in Xiamen.
On the way over he had made a large withdrawal from the Bank of CamelBak. He let them see the wad of magenta bills in his hand. This got their attention. Not in a favorable way. It made them nervous and suspicious. He could not concern himself with their emotional state just now. He nodded across the water and said, “Gulangyu.”
One of the boatmen was just a little quicker than the others; Sokolov ended up in his boat. This was a kind of small pleasure craft seen by the millions on lakes and rivers all over the world: an open white fiberglass skiff with a big outboard motor on its back, capable of seating maybe six people comfortably. Orange life vests were stored in an open bin, probably in obedience to some regulation, and disposable plastic rain ponchos were available for lightly dressed passengers caught in sudden downpours.
The ferry had already pulled away from its dock. At this time of night there were not too many people headed for Gulangyu. Most of the passengers remained in the ferry’s roofed, illuminated, Plexiglas-walled interior, perhaps to avoid a faint suggestion of a chill in the air; though around here, “chill” meant that a woman in a spaghetti-strap dress might experience goose bumps when exposed to the full force of the wind.
Not the least bit chilly were four male passengers grouped on an open deck up at the ferry’s bow, gazing toward Gulangyu, pointing and talking.
As the boat came abreast of the ferry—for it was going twice as fast as the larger vessel—Sokolov picked up a plastic poncho, swept it over his shoulders, and poked his head through the hole in the middle, then pulled the hood up over his head. He left it on, and did not look back, until a couple of minutes later, when the boatman cut his engine and let the little vessel glide the last few meters toward the Gulangyu terminal.
As he was disembarking, Sokolov glanced back and saw that the ferry was not as far behind them as he had hoped it would be. The little boat had accelerated more quickly at the beginning of the journey and jumped out to a lead, but the ferry, once it got going, moved faster than it appeared to.
Still, there was a reason why people paid more for the speedboats, and Sokolov reckoned it had to do with the congestion in the terminals. Gulangyu Island sported a number of parks, tourist attractions, and bars that attracted a younger crowd, many of whom were trying to make their way back to Xiamen at the moment, and so the terminal on this end was much more crowded.
He made as if to shrug off the plastic poncho, then thought better of it. The boatman was giving him an odd look. Sokolov held out his hand, palm up, and looked to the sky, trying to pantomime:
Sokolov flipped the hood up over his shaved head. He’d removed his hair to make himself harder to identify, in the event that the PSB had found a witness to this morning’s events or caught something on a surveillance camera. But now it was making him stand out in a way that wasn’t to his advantage.
He strode through the waterfront park for a distance, startling a few pairs of young lovers, then cut uphill on a steep street channeled between old stone walls. This was one of the few roads that actually showed up on the map. It wound from side to side, following the island’s steep contours, dodging huge outcroppings of gray stone that were plastered with vines, clutched in the monstrous root systems of outlandish trees, and occasionally incised with staircases. From time to time, just after rounding a corner, Sokolov would stop and peer behind to see if anyone was coming up the same way. He saw nothing obvious. But the island’s road network was a maze, and Olivia’s building could be approached from more than one direction.
As a matter of fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he knew where he was; he felt that he should have been there by now, but in the dark he couldn’t see any of the landmarks he had picked out earlier.
His view was blocked for a while by a rank of tall trees growing on the inside of a wall, marking the edge of a compound: some school or government institution. Then he came into a crossroads and saw the landmark he’d been searching for: a hotel built atop a high stony rise, with terraces and gardens that afforded a fine view over Gulangyu, the strait, and the city beyond. He had sat there for a while earlier today, gazing down into the courtyard of Olivia’s building, watching people come and go, and trying to come up with a Plan C for getting into her apartment after Plans A and B had exposed him to unacceptable risks of detection.
So now he understood where he was and where he needed to go: up a street that forked to the left. But coming down that street toward him, filling its width from wall to wall, was a group of half a dozen young men who he could tell had been enjoying a few drinks and were now ambling toward the ferry terminal. They were in the cheerful and gregarious stage of drunkenness, accosting everyone they saw and trying to strike up conversations in
