“I know you are spy,” he said, sticking to English for now; maybe he was unsure of her abilities in Russian.
Now she did look him in the eyes. She was expecting, or fearing, a triumphant look. Gloating. I have you in the palm of my hand. But that wasn’t it. It was more like — professional courtesy.
“Maybe you are only person in Xiamen who is more fucked than me,” he said. “My name is Sokolov. We should talk.”
What the hell. “My name is Olivia.”
IT WAS AN hour into the boat journey. The city was far behind. They were out in the open, ranging through a territory of broadly spaced, rocky islands. Jones had devoted much of the time to discussing matters in Arabic with the one Zula had come to think of as his lieutenant: the gunman with the binoculars and the phone. At a certain point, both men had begun to shoot glances in the direction of Zula and Yuxia, and then the lieutenant had come back and stood in front of Yuxia and caught her eye, then jerked his chin forward, as if to say, Come with me. Yuxia had in no way been receptive to the proposal. Jones had approached, sizing up the situation, and had stepped between the lieutenant and Yuxia and squatted down and explained to her in the mildest possible language that he, Jones, wanted to have a private conversation with Zula, and so Yuxia needed either to move peaceably to the bows or else jump off the boat and die — which, from his point of view, would be much preferable. “If we wanted something bad to happen to you, it would have been done already.”
And so Yuxia had gone forward with the lieutenant and found a place to sit up in the boat’s prow.
“I don’t want to have to endure any more of your Nancy Drew shenanigans,” Jones began. “It makes the cost of having you around very high, and since your value is essentially zero — well — as the saying goes — do the math.”
“Essentially zero,” Zula asked, “or zero? Because — ”
“Ah, I forget you are a bright girl and inclined to parse my statements closely. Very well then. Look about yourself. Consider your situation. And then cooperate with me. Cooperate by answering my questions. Later, the same questions will be asked of Yuxia. It would be best for all concerned if the answers matched.”
Then nothing for a while. He was willing to wait all day.
Zula shrugged. “Ask away.”
“Describe the leader of the Russian military squad.”
She began to describe Sokolov’s appearance. Soon Jones was nodding, tentatively at first, then more emphatically, as a way of telling her to shut up already.
“Did you see him?” Zula asked, but it was a stupid question; she could tell that he had.
Jones looked away and ignored the question.
Her next question would have been Is he still alive? but she stifled it.
Jones went on to ask any number of other questions about Sokolov. It wouldn’t be an efficient use of his energies to show so much curiosity about a dead man. So she had her answer.
This, she realized, was what Jones and his lieutenant had been talking about. Jones had related the story of this morning’s events, as he’d seen them, and at some point, a gap had become obvious: they had not seen Sokolov die, they had not observed his body.
The notion that Sokolov was still alive gave her a thrill of irrational excitement and a sense of weird hope. He was the only person she had seen in the last few days who seemed to be equal to the situation. Was it idiotic to think that he might want to help her? But even if he did, this did her no good if he didn’t know she was alive, didn’t know where she was. He must be on the run now, even more hard-pressed than she was.
They had gone past a couple of smaller islands and seemed to have set their course for another one, slightly bigger, yet still no more than a couple of miles long.
She needed to start thinking like Uncle Richard. Not Uncle Richard when he was at the re-u but Uncle Richard when he was doing business. She had only watched him in that mode a couple of times — she didn’t get invited to meetings where he did important-guy stuff — but when she had, she’d been fascinated by the way he slipped into a different persona and zipped it up over his regular personality. What does this person want? How does it conflict, or not, with what I want? And yet never fake, never dishonest. Because people could see through that.
Right now, Jones badly wanted to know about Sokolov. Something had happened between those two men, something that had made an impression on Jones.
“I don’t know much about his background, other than the medals and so on…”
“Medals?”
“… but I interacted with him a fair amount when we took the jet down to Xiamen, and at the safe house, and while we were hunting down the virus writers.”
“Hold on, hold on,” Jones said. For his eyes had gotten a little wider, his gaze a little more intense, at each of these disclosures.
She had not mentioned, until now, the fact that Ivanov’s jet was in Xiamen.
Good. Answering his questions about those would kill another hour.
What would happen when she ran out of material?
All he had to do was google her name and he would know about Richard. Then the logical thing for him to do would be to hold her for ransom.
Of course, he didn’t know her last name yet.
The curse of having a distinctive first name: if he just googled “Zula,” combined with the name of the company where she worked, he’d probably come up with something.
But there was no Internet on this boat, and, from the looks of where they were going, that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
“Are you telling me that the Russians had a safe house?” The question Brit inflected, falling rather than rising at the end.
“Yes.”
“In Xiamen?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In a — ” Zula was getting ready to describe the building. Then she turned and looked back to the city. It was a few miles aft by this point, but the tall downtown towers were clearly visible. “That one,” she said. “The new modern tower. Curvy floor plan. Yellow crane sticking out of the top of it.”
Jones called for the binoculars. Trading them back and forth with Zula, he made sure he knew precisely which building she was talking about.
He wanted to know which floor. That gave Zula pause, for as she’d looked through the binoculars, she’d wondered whether Sokolov was up there, gazing out the window. Was she putting him in danger by divulging so much?
But Sokolov knew perfectly well that he was in danger, and he would be taking precautions.
It was a way to communicate with him. If Jones sent someone to the forty-third floor of that building, Sokolov would wonder how they had known the location of the safe house, and he might conclude that they’d gotten the information from Zula.
“Forty-three,” she said.
“Describe the — ” Jones began, but they were interrupted by a few words from the skipper. Jones listened, nodded, then fixed his gaze on Zula and jerked his head toward the pilothouse. “Things are about to get crowded,” he said. “You’ll be a good deal less conspicuous in there.”
Zula wondered to herself, not for the first time, just how cooperative she ought to be. But Jones seemed to enjoy her company and to want information from her, so she had a general sense that things were merely bad and not all the way desperate. Jumping off the boat and swimming for it would certainly make them desperate. Cooperating now might lead to more trust later. So she stood up and walked into the cramped, loud, and ferociously hot confines of the pilothouse. A minute later she was joined by Yuxia. They stayed there for the remainder of the voyage.
She guessed that the word “teeming” must have been coined to describe places like the harbor on this little island. Since then, though, it had been hopelessly diluted by application to such subjects as Manhattan traffic, jungles, and beehives, none of which really approached the level of activity and jam-packed-ness that was belaboring Zula’s eyes as they chugged deeper and deeper into the harbor. You’d think that having so much in such a small space would lead to less, rather than more, activity, since crowding made it harder to move, but none of the people who lived here seemed to be aware of any such equation. The outskirts of the bay were gridded over with raftlike structures about the size of city blocks, each consisting of numerous square pens, separated by gangplanks, and covered with stretched netting. The gangplanks were supported by various kinds of floats, including plastic tanks filled with air, giant sausages of closed-cell foam, or simply large plastic bags stuffed with Styrofoam peanuts. Each of these rafts supported a little shack. Zula reckoned that they were fish farms.