out transaction. There was a blue umbrella, battered to the point where it could no longer fold up. Experimenting with this, he found that he could get it mostly open and use it to shade his stubbled head from the direct light of the sun. Two oars served as backup propulsion. A plastic container of the type used in the West to contain yogurt served as a bailing device. Csongor, having nothing else to do, went to work bailing. He was thirsty. He looked around and noted that Marlon hadn’t had time to procure drinking water.
AFTER THEY HAD put about half a mile of distance between themselves and the Xiamen shore, Jones knelt down and opened both halves of the handcuffs. A box of first aid supplies was produced from somewhere. Most of its contents were claimed immediately by Jones, who, with help from a member of the crew, pressed a stack of sterile pads against the side of his head and then turbaned it into place with a roll of gauze. With what remained, Yuxia went to work on Zula’s pinky. Zula had become used to keeping this balled up and pressed to her stomach, and so peeling it away from her belly and straightening the finger was a painful and bloody undertaking. It hurt and bled all out of proportion to the actual seriousness of the wound. Yuxia poured water onto it from a bottle, washing away the blood that had gone all dry and sticky. The nail wasn’t quite ready to come off and so they left it on. Then they wrapped gauze around it until her pinky had become a clumsy white baseball bat of a thing.
Meanwhile, just next to them, men were making tea. Zula had been here long enough to recognize all the elements of the ritual. The local procedure involved a lot of spillage, which here was taken care of by a baking sheet that looked as if it had once been used as a shield by riot police. A flat perforated rack was set into this, and resting on the rack were tiny bowls, smaller than shot glasses, old and stained. It seemed terribly important to the men on the boat that Zula accept one of them and drink. So this she did. The first sip of tea only reminded her of how desperately thirsty she was, so she tossed the rest of it back; when she set the bowl down, it was replenished immediately. Yuxia was next. Then Jones had his. Apparently they were considered guests.
She had never really understood the tea thing until this moment. Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.
The men on the vessel were not Middle Eastern and they were not Chinese, but depending on how light and emotion played over their faces, they showed clear signs of both ancestries. They spoke some other language than Chinese or Arabic, but there was at least one—the more competent of the two gunmen, also equipped with binoculars and the phone—who could switch to Arabic when he wanted to communicate with Jones. Zula got the sense that they were burning a lot of fuel during the first fifteen minutes of the voyage, probably trying to put distance between themselves and trouble. The place where they’d shot it out with Csongor could be seen from any number of high-rise apartment buildings; perhaps some curtain twitcher on an upper story had seen the whole thing and was watching their getaway. But even if this were the case, Jones had little to worry about, since there was nothing about this boat to distinguish it from all the others. They churned out into open water, then cut around the northern limb of the island, going right past the end of the runway, where a jetliner on its landing run passed so close overhead that Zula could count the wheels on its landing gear. A slow turn to the south brought them into the busiest zone, the strait between Xiamen and its industrial suburbs on the mainland, spanned by huge bridges and chockablock with much larger vessels.
“To the Heartless Island,” said Jones, apparently sensing Zula’s curiosity as to where they might be going.
“Come again?”
The skipper had cut the throttle, and the boat, after being slapped on the stern one time by its own wake, had slowed to a much more leisurely pace. They had merged comfortably into a stream of traffic—mostly boats just like this one, and passenger ferries—that weaved among huge anchored freighters like a stream flowing around boulders.
Jones nodded indefinitely toward a southern horizon cluttered with small islands, or perhaps some of them were headlands of the Asian continent, gangling out into the harbor. “Hub of the commercial fishing fleet,” he explained. “Economic migrants from all over China go there because they’ve been promised jobs. When they arrive, they find that there’s nothing for them and they can’t afford to go back. So they work as virtual slaves.” He nodded toward one of the crew members, who was refilling the teapot. “The place has an official name, obviously. But Heartless Island is what these people call it.”
If this had been a real conversation, Zula might now have made further inquiries. It seemed unnecessary though. She could piece it together easily enough. These men on the boat belonged to some Muslim ethnic group from the far west. They had been drawn to Heartless Island in the way that Jones described. Having no other way to make sense of their lives, they had been recruited by some sort of radical group, part of a network that was in touch with whoever Abdallah Jones hung out with. And when Jones had decided to come to China, these men had provided him with the support system he needed.
But she got the sense that he wasn’t finished. So she held her gaze on him. In turn, he regarded her with a look that was somewhat difficult to interpret, as one side of his face was distorted by swelling, and he was hardly the most easy-to-read man to begin with. “These men work with me,” he said, “because they choose to. I have no power over them. If they began to ignore my commands, or simply threw me overboard and left me to drown, the only consequences, for them, would be that their lives would suddenly become much simpler and safer. And so even if I were the type of man who was capable of forgiving and forgetting your attempt, just a few minutes ago, to get me shot in the head, I would have to be some kind of a fool to allow myself to be seen, by these men, as having shown such weakness. It is not the sort of thing that gains a man respect and influence in the Heartless Island milieu, if you follow me.”
Zula did not want to admit that she was following him, but she found that she could no longer hold his gaze, and so she looked to Yuxia instead. The face of Qian Yuxia had gone still and devoid of expression, and she would not meet Zula’s eye. Zula reckoned that she had already made some kind of adjustment to what Jones was describing as the Heartless Island milieu.
“And so,” Jones concluded, “things are about to get ugly. Not that they were pretty to begin with. But, during the journey, you might wish to consider how you can keep them from really getting out of hand. I would suggest an end to pluck, or spunk, or whatever label you like to attach to the sort of behavior you were showing back on that pier, and a decisive turn toward
OLIVIA, THE PRIVILEGED Westerner, was outraged at the amount of time she had to wait at the hospital. Meng Anlan, the hard-bitten Chinese urbanite, wondered who she’d have to pay off, then remembered she didn’t have any money. More to the point, no government ID, the sine qua non of Chinese personhood. No connections to speak of either. She could get her uncle Binrong to patch a call through to some hospital administrator and holler at him for a while; but Meng Binrong, as a fictional character based in London, had no pull here either, and, at the moment, a lot of people were probably queued up wanting to say unpleasant things to the people who ran this place.
As time went on, though, the Meng Anlan side of her began to see a kind of simple logic at work here: she had been injured several hours ago, and she was actually fine. The wound—an inch-long laceration in her scalp, well above the hairline—had stopped bleeding. She had a headache, perhaps indicative of a mild concussion, but no blurred vision, no cognitive deficits. Perhaps just a bit of memory loss around the time that she had suddenly found herself crumpled against the wall of a devastated office. But that might not have been memory loss at all; maybe it just reflected the fact that explosions in the real world, as opposed to in movies, happened very quickly, like camera flashes.
It occurred to her that she might just get up and leave without bothering to get any medical treatment at all—which was obviously what the overburdened staff were hoping she would do.
The only obstacle, then, was squaring things up with the two remaining construction workers who had sat it out with her the whole time. They seemed to feel that they were under some sort of obligation to bring the adventure to a satisfactory conclusion—a story they could tell to their coworkers the next day. Or perhaps they were hoping for a reward? She figured out a way to satisfy both requirements by taking down their names and numbers, borrowing a bit of cash to pay for a ferry ticket, and promising to pay it back at the next opportunity, along with a little something for their trouble. They protested at the latter, but she suspected they would not turn it down.
