Turning his back on the splash, Sokolov noted that the carter had already discovered his tip waiting for him in the bottom of the cart: another brick of magenta bills. This disappeared instantly into the man’s trousers. He was saying something to Sokolov. Thanking him, probably. Sokolov ignored him and broke into an easy jog. In less than a minute he was out on the waterfront, headed for the hotel tower, loping from one patch of shade to the next, and trying not to listen to the screaming alarm bells that were going off in his mind. For he had spent the entire day hoping that no one would see him. And now he was being watched, pointed out, remarked on, gawked at by a thousand people. But they were not — he kept reminding himself — doing it because they knew who or what he was. They were doing it in the same way they’d stare at any Western jogger crazy enough to go out in the midday sun.
OLIVIA MADE IT all the way down to street level before she fully took in the fact that she was barefoot. She had been blown out of her shoes. They were up in the office with the Russian dog-of-war.
In a hypothetical footrace between Olivia barefoot and Olivia in high-heeled career-girl shoes, over uneven, rubble-strewn ground, it was not clear which Olivia would stand the best chance of winning. It probably depended on how long it took barefoot Olivia to step on a shard of glass and slice her foot open. Not very long, unless she was careful.
The building had an old front that faced toward the building that had just blown up, and, on the opposite side, a new front, still under construction, facing toward a commercial district in the making. Access to the latter was complicated by its being an active construction zone, but she knew how to get there, because the people who had trained her in London had drilled it into her that she must always know every possible way of getting out of a building. So instead of taking the obvious exit through the front, which she envisioned as an ankle-deep surf zone of broken glass, she doubled back and followed the escape route she had already scouted through the construction zone. This changed from day to day as temporary barriers were erected and removed between the various shops and offices that the workers were creating. Today, though, they had left all the doors open as they had fled the building, so all that Olivia really needed to do was pursue daylight while scanning the floor ahead of her for dropped nails.
There were none. Western construction workers might leave dropped nails on the floor, but it seemed that Chinese picked them up.
And so she made it out into the relatively undevastated side of the building, which backed up onto the rim of a man-made crater several hundred meters in diameter, guarded by temporary fencing. Visitors to China often spoke of a “forest of cranes,” but this was more akin to a savannah, being largely open ground with a few widely spaced cranes looming over it. Its natural fauna were construction workers, and right now, a couple of dozen of them were gazing, with horrified expressions, in her general direction.
No, they were gazing in her exact direction.
Feminist thinkers might argue with social conservatives as to whether women’s tendency to be extremely self-conscious about personal appearance was a natural trait — the result of Darwinian forces — or an arbitrary, socially constructed habit. But whatever its origin, the fact was that when Olivia walked out of a building to find a large number of strange men staring at her, she felt self-conscious in a way she hadn’t a few seconds earlier. Lacking a mirror, she put her hands to her face and her hair. She was expecting them to come away caked with dust. They came away glistening and red.
Oh dear.
She was not a fainter, and she doubted that the wounds were going to cost her an important amount of blood. The voice of a first aid instructor came back to her: If I were to take a shot glass full of tomato juice and throw it into your face … But there was no way that these guys were going to let a bleeding, barefoot woman simply wander off alone into the streets. Two of them were already running toward her with hands reaching out in a manner that, in normal circumstances, would have seemed just plain ungentlemanly. What would have been designated, in a Western office, as a hostile environment was soon in full swing as numerous rough strong hands were all over her, easing her to a comfortable perch on a chair that was produced as if by magic, feeling through her hair to find bumps and lacerations. Three different first aid kits were broken open at her feet; older and wiser men began to lodge objections at the profligate use of supplies, darkly suggesting that it was all because she was a pretty girl. A particularly dashing young man skidded up to her on his knees (he was wearing hard-shell knee pads) and, in an attitude recalling the prince on the final page of Cinderella, fit a pair of used flip-flops onto her feet.
Getting an ambulance during this particular half-hour window of time was completely out of the question, so they shoved a couple of bamboo poles through the legs of her chair, lashed them in place, and turned it into a makeshift palanquin on which Olivia was borne, like a Jewish bride, around the edge of the crater to a place where it was possible to hail a taxi. The chair ride was fun if only because Olivia could not stop thinking about the Brits who had trained her at MI6 and their insistence that she avoid any situation that might draw undue attention to herself. Fortunately she had so many first aid supplies wrapped around her head at this point that no one would be able to pick her out from a random lineup of mummies and burn victims.
THE TAXI BOLTED forward and disappeared off the end of the pier. The ensuing sound effect — a crash, rather than a splash — told Zula that it had nose-dived into the deck of the boat.
The van’s velocity dropped to almost zero, which gave Zula a clear look through the windshield — or as clear as was possible, given that it was coated with dust and had just been spiderwebbed by the impact. Behind the wheel, she saw nothing but a white balloon: the airbag. But she was certain that in the moment just before impact, she had got a subliminal glimpse of Yuxia’s face.
The van kept rolling forward, passing no more than arm’s length from Zula, and as it went by she got a direct view, through the driver’s-side window, of Yuxia in profile. The airbag was deflating and peeling away from her face, but she was staring dully ahead, stunned by its impact, and the weight of her foot must still be on the gas pedal. “Yuxia!” Zula cried, and she thought that Yuxia stirred; but the van accelerated and followed the taxi off the end of the pier.
It did not, however, completely disappear. For crashed vehicles were beginning to accumulate on the deck of the boat, and so the van only nosed over and ended up with its rear wheels projecting into the air above the pier’s deck.
This was not something that one saw every day, and so it held the attention of everyone: Zula, Abdallah Jones, his two surviving accomplices (for the gunman by the driver’s-side door had been leaning into the taxi at the moment of impact, had fared quite poorly, and was lying motionless on the pier), and the taxi driver. And so a peculiarly long span of time elapsed before they all came fully aware that they had been joined by a new participant. Before she had even turned to look at his face, Zula recognized him, in her peripheral vision, simply by the shape of his body, as Csongor. He was staggering toward her and Jones. He was considerably the worse for wear and making a visible effort to snap himself out of a kind of stunned and woozy condition. He must have tumbled out the van’s side door just after the impact. Zula began raising her arms to hug him, then stifled the impulse as she felt the handcuff’s chain go tense. Csongor was reaching into his trouser pocket.