“But thank you,” said Decker. He looked down at the floor. That’s where the robot had fallen, where it had flailed about on the ground. “Thanks for your help, though. It was an interesting party. I should be going, I guess. Got a plane to catch.”
Lulu fetched his coat from upstairs and, a few minutes later, Decker found himself outside in the cold once again.
Despite the ambient light thrown up by the city, the night sky was livid with stars. He stared up at the heavens, trying to pick out a Zodiac sign, but the stars seemed intractable. They looked scattered, unmoored.
Decker could not stop thinking about that workstation address. He knew whose it was. After seven years at the Center, he knew all the workstation addresses. But an IP address was just a machine, not a person. He would have to be sure. Before he said or did anything, before he acted, he would have to be certain.
CHAPTER 17
The rickety China Southern Airlines Airbus A300 banked over the Yalu River, buoyed by breezes rising off the Yellow Sea. It was well after sunrise and yet the city still glimmered with lights. Even by Chinese standards, Dandong was not particularly affluent; per capita income was just over $3,000 per year. But compared to Sinuiju, Decker thought, her sister city across the river in neighboring North Korea, Dandong’s skyline made her look like Dubai.
Thirty-plus-story high-rises and hotels lined the riverside. The boulevards shimmered with storefronts and the neon of ubiquitous KTV Karaoke bars. Cars and motorcycles zipped by on wide boulevards. This is the view that the residents of Sinuiju wake up to each morning, thought Decker. He spotted the old Friendship Bridge linking China to North Korea, bombed during the Korean War. It spanned only half of the river. Dandong’s riverbank was towers and hotels and neon, Decker mused, while Sinuiju’s was brown mud, broken trees and worn buildings. The North Koreans didn’t have electricity, let alone private cars. It was like looking backwards in time. Decker had seen the region from space on Google Earth, a night shot across the entire peninsula. One side had been lit up, just as Boston had appeared from the air, a wide swath of light, and the other an ocean of darkness.
The plane came to a thunderous landing at Dandong Airport. There was a brief moment when Decker was stopped at customs but it proved to be nothing. “Welcome to Dandong, Mr. Williams,” the custom’s clerk told him, stamping his Canadian passport. Then he waved him on through.
Decker grabbed a cab and made his way to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, an opulent five-star establishment overlooking the river, where he found a reservation waiting for him under the name Toby Williams. His room was on the twenty-sixth floor with an imposing view of the shimmering city. There was a box on his bed from something called Pan-Pacific Enterprises, wrapped in brown paper and string. Decker opened it carefully. Inside, he found a Nikon COOLPIX P100 camera with a telephoto lens, a baseball cap with the Canadian flag on the front, a blue nylon backpack, and — in an envelope — a ticket for a boat tour on the Yalu in less than an hour. But no note, of course.
Decker smiled.
He unpacked, washed his face. Then he slung the camera round his neck, slipped on the backpack and hat, and headed out the door. Moments later, he was in another taxi heading for wharf No. 2.
A series of tourist jetties had been constructed along the banks of the river where boats large and small, fast and slow, moored before carrying groups of sightseers over to the Korean side of the river. The boats didn’t actually make land in Korea, of course, but they traveled close enough to afford paying customers a remarkably close look at the shoreline of Sinuiju, Dandong’s sister city. All for just fifty Chinese yuan, or about $7.50. Once on board, sightseers could even rent binoculars and buy postcards and drinks.
Decker made it to wharf No. 2 a tad early and he decided to check out the stalls by the river. Vendors were hawking all manner of wares — from food, to North Korean currency, to propaganda posters. Most of the women behind the tables spoke heavily accented Mandarin to the tourists, while chatting with each other in Korean.
“You speak Chinese?” they said with surprise when Decker chimed back in some semblance of Mandarin. “Canadian?” they said over and over again, pointing up at his hat.
He nodded, grinned broadly, and snapped off a few pictures.
After strolling about for a while, Decker picked up some Korean barbecue on the square and ate it standing up by the river. Best of all was the spicy side of kim chi. All along the riverfront, entrepreneurs were renting binoculars and telescopes to tourists, mostly Chinese, eager for a glimpse of the past.
This must have been what it was like in the golden age, when Mao ruled the land, Decker thought, before Deng Xiaoping’s long march to a market economy.
When he was finished eating, Decker strolled along the dock, looking for slip number 14. Speed boats. Chinese junks. Ferries. All manner of boats choked the wharf. Decker spotted a Chinese junk which he thought was the one he’d been searching for. But, when he tried to climb up the gangway, a man at the top of the stairs took one look at his ticket and turned him away.
“Wrong boat,” he told him, pointing abeam of the junk. “That’s yours,” he said with a laugh. Yāo sì. Yāo sì. Number fourteen. Then he spat into the muddy brown water.
The number fourteen is considered unlucky in China. Yāo sì literally means one four in Mandarin, but it also sounds like yào sĭ, which means wants to die. Decker stared down at the beat-up, blue and white fishing boat moored alongside the junk. It figures, he thought.
The vessel looked like a hulk, only marginally seaworthy. Two scrawny men were crouched in the stern by the winch, mending nets, puffing cigarettes. When Decker jumped down to the deck, they barely glanced up from their work. They simply gestured toward the cabin and prepared to cast off.
Decker shrugged and made his way belowdecks. The cabin smelled of kerosene and dead fish.
A large handsome man in his fifties, dressed in a navy blue jogging suit, sat on a bench by a porthole looking out the port side at the rear of the cabin. His face was lit up by a single kerosene lamp dangling down from the ceiling. Decker took in the wide, uncompromising chin, the full lips, the aquiline nose and brown hair, now quite gray at the temples. It was Ben Seiden.
As soon as he saw Decker, Seiden leapt to his feet, took two strides, and picked Decker up in a bear hug. “John,” he said with a laugh. “It’s good to see you, my friend. You look good. Older, of course. Don’t we all. Don’t we all. But still good. Welcome to China.” He had a thick Israeli accent that always made it sound as if he were carrying rocks in his mouth. “Still working out, I can feel.”
“Ben,” Decker said. Just then the boat’s engine started to sputter and cough, and to finally start up. Decker could sense the vessel shiver out of the slip.
“No troubles, I see. You got the camera. Those Japanese. Still the best, I hate to say it, when it comes to things photography.”
Decker smiled and tapped the Nikon. “Yes, thanks,” he replied. “Thanks for everything.”
“Please,” Seiden said, raising his hand. “You helped me track down one of Israel’s most wanted terrorists and, in the process, prevented a major catastrophe. The Mossad doesn’t forget its friends. As far as I’m concerned, at least, we owe you. All of us. Although, I must say, your call did surprise me.”
Seiden walked over to the bench and sat down once again. “Come. Sit with me.” He patted the bench.