Reamde

always told himself as a way to justify his choice of a second career.

The fact that visibility had dropped to much less than a hundred meters was both a good and a bad thing. It was good that Sokolov would be able to board the boat and transfer to the containership unobserved by any spies ashore. It was bad that he could not see his ride coming. In the taxi, he had asked several questions of “George Chow” about how he had made these arrangements, how he had chosen this particular boatman, and whether he might have been observed or followed by any mainland Chinese operatives. George Chow had seemed confident—a bit too breezily confident for Sokolov’s tastes—that it had all been pulled off perfectly. This sort of self-assurance, in and of itself, was frequently a warning sign. Sokolov knew nothing of George Chow and his history in this sort of business, nor of the extent to which the mainland authorities had penetrated the police and security forces of this island, and so it seemed safest for him to assume that Chow had been followed from the hotel, or (easier and cheaper) observed on security cameras as he had made his way through Jincheng and down to the waterfront to hire a boatman. If that were the case, then it would have been quite easy for a mainland operative to go and talk to the same boatman as soon as Chow departed and, through some combination of bribery and threats, get him to tell what he knew.

(“What does the boatman know?” Sokolov had asked, in the taxi.

“Only that he is to pick someone up at a certain place and time” had been the answer from the front seat. “You must tell him where you are going.”)

Anyway, the boat waiting at the rendezvous point marked on the GPS device Chow had given him might turn out to be full of men who had come over from the mainland this morning specifically to find Sokolov and either kill him or take him back to the ­People’s Republic of China for interrogation and God only knew what other sort of treatment.

If that came to pass and if it developed into a gunfight (which, if Sokolov had anything to say about it, it most certainly would), then how would it look—or sound, since they couldn’t see it—to Olivia and George Chow? A series of gunshots, largely muffled by the sound of surf finding its way through the thousands of stone fingers jutting out of the sand. Even if Olivia were foolish enough to attempt to wade out and investigate, she would find nothing; the boat would have departed by then. At the most there might be a corpse or two floating in the water, but it was highly improbable that she would happen upon such direct evidence. Much more likely was that the outcome would remain mysterious to both her and George Chow and that, spooked, they would get to the airport as quickly as possible and get out of this place.

In the taxi, Sokolov had asked George Chow what was going to happen when he reached the end of the voyage in Long Beach. Chow had assured him that friendly agents of the U.S. government would board the containership at that point and whisk him away to a safe place where he could be debriefed of all the information he had to offer about Abdallah Jones and given assistance in making his way through immigration formalities.

But Sokolov was in no way interested in being thus greeted and debriefed and assisted. He already had a B-1 visa, which entitled him to enter the United States any time he wanted. If he were to sneak into the United States from a containership, which, compared to what he’d been doing in the past twenty-four hours, ought to be as easy as pissing off a dock, then the worst thing that anyone could say about him was that he had not had his passport stamped when he’d entered the country: theoretically a problem, but so trivial and so distant that it hardly seemed worthy of his notice at this time. He had already given Olivia all the useful information that he had regarding the whereabouts of Abdallah Jones, and so any further debriefings in L.A. would inevitably center on topics whose elaboration could only make life more difficult for him, such as Ivanov and Wallace and what had happened yesterday morning in the apartment building. If the American authorities believed that he had been killed in an ambush in the fog and mist off the shore of Kinmen, then he would be spared such embarrassments.

There was also the matter of Olivia.

Sokolov quite liked Olivia and wanted her to be happy. He could tell from watching her face that she was unwilling to be honest with herself about the nature of the relationship that she had enjoyed with Sokolov, which had quite obviously (to Sokolov anyway) been based on simple, animal attraction. Sometimes you met someone and you just instinctively wanted to fuck their brains out. It had to do with pheromones or something. Most of the time, the feeling was not reciprocated, but sometimes it was, and then these things happened with a suddenness and intensity that could not help but be disquieting to anyone who believed that his or her life made sense. There was nothing more to it than that, though. They’d had their fun in the bunker, and probably could have had quite a bit more if circumstances had put them in a safe place together. But such relationships were unlikely to last. Olivia, a highly cultivated and rational woman, was unwilling to admit that she was the kind of person who could engage in such a liaison, and so she was even now putting her powerful brain to work coming up with a story according to which it was really much, much more than that. If it were somehow the case that they lived next door to each other or worked in the same office, then she’d have had to work through a long and dramatic and ultimately painful process of coming to terms with the fact that it was all strictly animal attraction and that there was no actual basis for a relationship there.

Fortunately, the situation at hand was quite a bit simpler than that. Even if the rendezvous with the boat and with the containership went perfectly, the two of them would likely never see each other again. But if Sokolov were killed in an ambush in the fog and mist off the shore of Kinmen, then she could close the door on this highly satisfying but ultimately meaningless affair, and go on to live the happy and contented life that Sokolov very much wanted her to live.

And so, as he drew closer to the sound of the boat’s motor, Sokolov conceived of a plan, which seemed straightforward enough at the time, to greatly simplify both his future life and Olivia’s by firing a few shots from his weapon. This would scare the hell out of the boatman, but Sokolov thought he could bring that problem under control without too much difficulty. Once they had effected the rendezvous with the containership, Sokolov would then find some way to induce its captain to claim that the rendezvous had not occurred—that the boat carrying Sokolov had failed to show up and that Sokolov had never boarded the vessel. Two weeks from now, Sokolov would slip off the ship in Long Beach and make use of his connections in that town to lie low for a bit. Then he would make his way back to Toronto, which was where he had started. A thorough inspection of his passport stamps might turn up some inconsistencies, but he had never seen anyone actually look at those things.

As he drew closer to the place where the boat was waiting for him, he drew out both first the Makarov and then the submachine gun that he had taken last night from the jihadist and checked that both of them were in ready-to-fire condition, which was probably a good idea in any case. He reckoned that if he were trying to simulate the sounds of a battle, it would be more convincing if he could fire a few pistol shots and a burst or two from the submachine gun. He would, of course, wait until he was safely in the boat, so that the boatman would not simply run away from him in terror. To that end, he did not want to emerge from the mist with a weapon in each hand, and so he placed the Makarov in its usual push-through belt rail and slung the submachine gun over his back.

The water had become chest-deep, adequate to float a vessel of some size. Sokolov shrank down into it so that only the top of his head was protruding from the water, a somewhat difficult thing to manage since waves kept rising up to break over him. He began his final approach by sidling from one shellfish-encrusted pillar to the next. He could hear the boat’s hull rasping against one of the pillars no more than a few meters away.

Finally it began to come into focus: a long shadow riding on the water. As he drew closer the shadow resolved into a line of fat black Os: the tires slung over the boat’s side, the only things keeping it from being macerated by the stone pillars. He could see the boatman sitting erect at the stern, waiting, wondering when the mystery passenger would show up. A white rope ladder had been thrown over the port side near the bow; this was the closest corner to shore, and the boatman must have assumed Sokolov would approach from that direction and be glad of the assistance.

But those tires looked as though they would provide convenient hand- and footholds for clambering aboard, and Sokolov could see no advantage in boarding from the expected direction. So he devoted a few more moments to making his way around to the stern of the boat, half wading and half swimming now, and then approached to the point where he could get a good view of the tire and the loops of rope that he would presently be using to get aboard. Then he drew breath, sank below the surface, and covered the last few meters underwater.

When he saw the corner of the hull above him, he gathered his knees to his chest, let himself sink to the bottom, and then exploded straight up with as much force as he could produce. His hands shot out of the water first and got purchase on the tread of a tire. He brought a foot up and planted it in the tire’s rim, moved his hands up to the rope from which the tire was suspended, and then pulled with his arms and pushed with his leg, shooting up over the gunwale and sweeping his free leg around into the boat. For a moment, though his momentum was still