control system. Though she had never studied such things in any detail, she knew in a vague way that radar had limited range and that the structure of the air traffic control system somehow reflected that fact; a country’s airspace was divided into separate zones, each managed from a different control center with its own radar system. Airplanes in flight were handed off from one control center to the next as they made their way across the country. At some point they had stopped being the responsibility of the air traffic controllers in Xiamen and entered into a zone controlled from Hong Kong. Or perhaps by flying out over the ocean they had entered into a no-man’s-land that was not monitored or controlled by any authority. At any rate, she guessed that they had, a few minutes ago, reached one of those edges or seams in the system. Pavel and Sergei had then bid farewell to the air traffic controllers in the zone that they were departing and had gone into the power dive before they showed up on the radar screen, and came to the attention, of any other controllers.
Where they were going now she could only conjecture. Once they cleared the southern cape of Taiwan, there was nothing out there but the Pacific Ocean. But she’d seen enough of great circle routes yesterday evening to understand that flying basically east, as they were doing now, was no way to get across it.
It took them about half an hour’s flying time to get east of Taiwan. The plane then banked left again, and its little icon on the screen rotated around until it was pointed a little east of north. So it appeared that they were executing a large U-shaped maneuver around Taiwanese airspace.
The radio, which had been silent for a while, came alive again; apparently the pilots had switched over to a different frequency, and apparently that frequency was being used by Taipei Center, since all the transmissions now seemed to originate from there. Taipei Center seemed to be managing a large number of Boeings and Airbuses. These were helpfully identified, not only by their call signs, but by their origins or destinations as well, and so Zula got a clear impression of an extremely busy airport handling jumbo jets coming in from, or flying out to, far-flung destinations such as Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, and Chongqing.
It took rather less than an hour for the plane to clear the northern tip of Taiwan, which was where Taipei was located. It then executed a series of maneuvers and began a long steady ascent, which Zula was able to track using the helpful data screens thrown up every minute or so on the TV display. Presumably this would make the plane visible on radar, supposing that any radar stations were in range. But looking at the smaller-scale map that occasionally flashed up on the TV, Zula noted that they were in a region where planes from all over Southeast Asia and Australia might fly northward en route to Japan or Korea. So maybe they were hoping that their bogey would go unnoticed in all the clutter?
Her bladder could not stand any more waiting, and so she finally opened the door and stepped forward into the main cabin. This was crowded and smelled like sweaty men. The four soldiers were seated close together in the back. Two of them were napping, one was reading the Koran, and the fourth was intently focused on a laptop. At the cabin’s forward end, a fold-down table had been deployed and was covered with large aeronautical charts on which Khalid and Abdallah Jones had apparently been tracking their progress. Khalid was there now, staring directly at Zula with hate, fascination, or both. Jones was not in evidence until she made her way up the aisle to the lavatory. She then discovered him lying on his back with his feet in the aisle and his head in the cockpit. He was staring almost vertically upward through the cockpit windows. Pavel and Sergei likewise were craning their necks in what seemed a most awkward manner, attending to something that seemed to be above and ahead of them.
Zula used the lavatory. When she emerged, all three men were still in the same positions, though Jones had now begun cackling with satisfaction.
Noticing Zula standing above him, he tucked his chin, rolled to his feet, and beckoned her forward. She squeezed past him into the cockpit, dropped to one knee, and looked up.
No more than a hundred feet above them was the underbelly of a 747.
So that explained why they had felt free to gain altitude. They had timed their flight plan so as to synchronize it with this jumbo’s takeoff from Taipei airport. It was headed for (she guessed) Vancouver or San Francisco or some other West Coast destination. Cutting underneath it as it vectored northward from the tip of Taiwan, they had positioned themselves beneath it and gained altitude in lockstep with it, their bogey merging with its bogey on the radar screens of air traffic controllers and military installations up and down the eastern coast of Asia.
She helped herself to a can of Coke and a bag of chips from the plane’s miniature galley, then made her way back aft through the cabin, sensing Khalid’s eyes on her spine. Jones was now sitting across the table from him, and they were examining a chart of the northern Pacific.
The soldier with the laptop was sitting with his back to her. Looking over his shoulder she saw what was holding his attention so closely: he was playing Flight Simulator. Practicing a takeoff run from a rural landing strip.
She didn’t want to make it obvious that she had noticed, so she kept walking without breaking stride and returned to the cabin, closing the door behind her.
THE MAN, WHO was calling himself George Chow, took Olivia into Jincheng: a fishing town at the island’s western end. A couple of hotels had been thrown up near the ferry terminal, serving a mix of tourists and businessmen, and George Chow had taken a suite in one of them. He had apparently traveled here in the company of a Thai woman who had some talents as a hairdresser and a makeup artist. The woman had a bob haircut and wore conspicuous designer eyeglasses and dramatic makeup. She had spread newspapers on the floor and laid out her shears and combs and brushes. Olivia took a quick shower and then received a bob haircut exactly like that of the Thai woman, which, under any other circumstances, she’d have been afraid to take a risk on. The eyeglasses turned out to be fake—the lenses didn’t do anything. Olivia ended up wearing them. The same makeup too. And a few minutes later, the same clothes. A PRC goon holding a blurry photograph of Meng Anlan would not immediately peg her as being the same person; and if anyone had noticed George Chow coming off the Taipei flight this morning with the Thai woman on his arm, they’d assume that he was going home in the company of the same lady.
While all of this was happening, George Chow disappeared for about an hour, then came back saying that various matters had been arranged.
One of which, apparently, was a taxi, waiting for them in the alley just off the hotel’s loading dock, piloted by a man who, Olivia inferred, had been well paid not to notice or talk about anything. They drove to the place in the middle of the island that Sokolov had identified, earlier, as a good meeting site. Its advantages now became plain. They stopped near the culvert, and George Chow pretended to take photographs of Olivia standing against the backdrop of the wooded ridge. Sokolov was able to remain perfectly hidden, even though only a few meters away, until a moment when the road was free of traffic. He then emerged and did a passable job of concealing his amusement at the new Olivia.
“You are fashion queen,” Sokolov observed.
“For two hours. Once I get to Taipei, all of this is coming right off.”
“Then where? London?”
“I assume so. Yes. Let’s go.”
“Where we go?” Sokolov asked, a bit sharply. He was much too worldly wise to imagine that he too would be whisked away to London.
“I’ll explain in the car,” Olivia said.
The weather had gradually turned gray as the day had worn on, and it was now becoming blustery, with a strong breeze out of the north. This suited their purposes, since it gave Sokolov an excuse to put on a rain slicker that they had purchased for him in Jincheng, and to wear it with the hood up. For now, though, he just slumped as far down as possible in the car’s rear seat as George Chow explained what was about to happen. Meanwhile the driver took them west back into town, then north, running parallel to the island’s western coast, until they had passed out of the built-up area (which took all of about thirty seconds) and into another of those strange places where no Chinese people went, apparently for the reason that no
