“Why did you wait until now to tell me?” she asked.
“Because until now we were fucking,” he pointed out.
“No, I mean why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“Because last night I did not have information.”
“How could you possibly have obtained any information this morning?”
“This must remain a mystery,” he said, “for now.” But he glanced upward as he said it, as if the answer were written in the sky above the Xunjianggang.
ZULA FELT THE jet thumping and bucking underneath her and startled awake, fearful/hopeful that they had come under some sort of police assault. But in the first moments after she opened her eyes, she was astonished to see buildings and parked planes streaking past them, and bright sunlight glancing in low over the sea.
She was on a plane, or something else that moved pretty damned fast. She didn’t even know whether it was landing or taking off.
How could the sun be up? Hours must have passed while she was slumbering.
The fact that she was lying in a king-sized bed did nothing to help her get her bearings.
The ground was definitely falling away.
First things first: she was on a plane. The plane was taking off. It was something like seven or eight in the morning. The bed was in a private cabin in the plane’s tail—Ivanov’s cabin. She could smell his hair oil on the pillow.
The city dropping away from her was Xiamen. Looking out the windows on the right side, she could see, only a mile or two away, the big inlet where Csongor had confronted Jones yesterday. Yuxia’s van and a crushed taxi lay somewhere on its bottom. And a few miles beyond that in the same direction, on the other side of a strait, was the larger of the two Taiwanese islands; she was sighting straight down the length of a beach, prickly with tank traps and shingled with hexagonal blocks.
Not long after it cleared the runway, the jet banked hard to the right, giving her an even better view of the Taiwanese island—Kinmen—as they swung around it in a broad arc, rapidly gaining altitude, and began to head south. Another turn, a few minutes later, brought them on to what she guessed was a southwesterly course. Nothing but ocean was now visible on the plane’s left, but on the right was the whole Chinese mainland, slowly getting farther away from them.
She must have fallen asleep in her seat at about one in the morning, when they were still talking of flight plans. Jones or someone must have carried her into the aft cabin and deposited her on the bed. The four “soldiers” who’d been cooling their heels in here must have been evicted and sent up to the main cabin. These men might stone her to death sooner or later, but in the meantime they would go to great lengths to preserve her modesty.
She remembered one figure very clearly: six hours. That was the amount of time it took to file a domestic flight plan in China. Pavel must have filed such a plan at about the time she’d gone to sleep, and they must have secured approval for takeoff only just now.
THEY BEGAN TO consider how to arrange transportation to Kinmen’s airport. Olivia used her mobile to pull up a map, from which they learned that they were all of about three thousand meters away from it.
Olivia was for going straight there. With a pensive and reluctant Sokolov in tow, she began to bushwhack inland. They passed quickly through what turned out to be a narrow belt of woods running parallel to the island’s north shore and emerged into a flat agricultural countryside, gridded with farm lanes. A hamlet, consisting of a couple of dozen closely spaced buildings, was only a couple of hundred meters off to their right; they avoided this instinctively and sidetracked away from it until a somewhat larger hamlet came into view ahead of them. Then they began cutting south across the island and soon came upon a larger road that ran east-west, across their path. Nor did that make it unusual, since it seemed as though the island’s centers of population were in its broad east and west ends, and the several roads joining them squeezed together through the island’s narrow waist, which they were transecting: a rocky spine tufted with trees and studded at its summit with the geodesic domes of Cold War radar installations.
The place was decidedly more rural than the mainland looming over it a few miles across the water. Rural, anyway, by Chinese standards. At no point were they out of sight of a building. Bicyclists rode past in one and twos, looking at them curiously. Olivia was inclined to ignore them and trudge on, but Sokolov was obviously uncomfortable. After they had crossed over the second east-west road, he noticed a nearby watercourse, thick with trees, and led her down into it. It was a sort of drainage ditch or canalized creek that ran under the road through an arched stone culvert. Before disappearing completely into the foliage that lined its banks, Sokolov took a good look around at the flat countryside. They were completely exposed.
“Good meeting place,” he mused.
Olivia realized that the openness of the landscape cut both ways: anyone could see them from a distance, but by the same token, no one could sneak up on them here.
Moving at less than half the speed they could have made in open country, they followed the watercourse south and uphill for almost a kilometer until what had been a narrow stripe of foliage broadened into a wood that merged with the dense quilt of trees spread over the island’s central ridge.
They had used all their drinking water last night, and because of Sokolov’s precautions they had not come anywhere near a place where they could buy more. “I’m getting really dehydrated,” Olivia remarked at one point, and Sokolov turned and fixed her with a curious look. She decided not to complain about this anymore.
The airport’s location was now obvious, since from this altitude they were able to watch a plane coming in for a landing and eventually disappearing behind the ridge. Olivia checked her watch and verified that this was the 10:45 flight from Taipei. Her good-girl instincts were telling her to get down there immediately so that she could impress her contact with her punctuality. Sokolov, however, was having none of this. “He will wait,” he pointed out.
“But—”
“You are not here to make him have nice day.”
Olivia could hardly deny that.
Sokolov took control of the phone, and Olivia watched over his shoulder for a few minutes as he consulted the map. He needed her linguistic help to locate the island’s ferry terminal, where regularly scheduled boats came in from Xiamen. She found this at the island’s southwestern tip. The most obvious route from it to the airport would be along the fattest of Kinmen’s east-west roads, which they had not crossed yet, as it traversed the southern aspect of the ridge.
They were only about a kilometer—a thousand long strides—from the airport. And yet Sokolov insisted that they hike east—which was to say, away from the ferry terminal—through the worst terrain that he could find, darting over little mountain lanes as necessary, until they came in view of a major road intersection. Sokolov found a place where he could monitor this from cover and sent Olivia down alone, insisting that she wait for a bus so that she could enter the airport “like normal person.” “See you at meeting place,” he said.
“When?”
“When you are there.”
Olivia made a final effort to get semipresentable, waited until the coast was clear, and then emerged from the trees, towing a four-meter-long strand of flowering vine behind one ankle until she kicked free of it. The bus arrived forty-five minutes later and took her on a journey that she could have done on foot in ten.
During the wait, she had the presence of mind to check the screen of the phone she’d been using and saw the message OUT RUNNING ERRANDS—BUYING A WEDDING GIFT FOR NIECE—I THINK SHE WOULD LIKE NEW KITCHEN KNIFE.
“Kitchen knife” and “wedding gift” were not established code phrases. “Out running errands” seemed like a tipoff that her contact had decided to leave the airport and go elsewhere on the island. But Olivia had no way of guessing where. And the next bus that came along was headed to the airport whether she liked it or not. She climbed aboard. There were three seats available. She chose one on the aisle, not wanting to present her face in a window.
She was still puzzling over the message as the bus pulled up in front of the main terminal and disgorged twenty or so locals, mostly airport workers. As Olivia gazed into the terminal building, all her alarm bells went off at
