“MI6 has emergency extraction procedure?”
“Resources,” Olivia corrected him, “that they could call on. To improvise such a procedure.”
That sounded like a procedure to him. “You activate this procedure how?”
“If I had no other choice, I would make a certain phone call,” she said, “but that’s to be avoided if I can use Internet.”
“You have computer here?”
“Not anymore,” she said. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t do it from here. I’d go to a wangba.”
“Have you done this?”
She shook her head. “No government ID, no wangba access,” she said. “But now that I have this …?” She wiggled the ID and smiled.
“We go to wangba?”
It looked like she was about to say yes. Then her face hardened. “Who’s ‘we,’ white man?”
“I beg your pardon?”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “It’s an old American joke.”
“I enjoy jokes. Tell me joke.”
“You know the Lone Ranger?”
“Cowboy in mask? Has Indian friend?”
“Yes. So the Lone Ranger and Tonto get ambushed by some Comanches and they get chased up into a box canyon and they end up hiding behind some rocks shooting at the Indians, and the Lone Ranger looks at his friend and says, ‘Well, Tonto, it looks like we’re surrounded.’ To which Tonto replies — ”
“Who is ‘we,’ white man?”
“Yes.”
“Is funny joke,” Sokolov said.
“That’s a strange thing for you to say since I don’t see the slightest trace of amusement on your face.”
“Is Russian sense of humor. What you call dry.”
“Okay.”
“Joke has meaning.”
“Yes, Mr. Sokolov, it has meaning.”
“Why should you help poor fucked Russian? That is the meaning.”
“More importantly,” Olivia said, “why should MI6 help you? Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what I want or am willing to do. It matters what MI6 is willing to do. And while they might be willing to pull out all the stops to get my arse out of China, I can’t necessarily persuade them to do the same in your case.”
“Tell them I have useful information.”
“Do you?”
Sokolov shrugged. “Probably not. But that is beside the point.”
“If I tell them you have useful information, and it turns out that you don’t, I look like an idiot.”
“Perhaps more important things are to be worried about now than whether you look like idiot when safe in London eating fish and drinking beer.”
She spent a while thinking about it.
“I know British,” he said. “Looking like idiot is part of being British. Happens all the time. They understand. Have procedures.”
“Can you get access to Internet later?” she asked him.
“Hmm, difficult,” Sokolov said. “Why?”
“Right now I need to take the ferry back into town and go to a wangba and send out my little distress call,” she said. “Later I’ll probably get instructions on where to go, what to do. I’ll need to convey that information to you somehow.”
Sokolov balked.
“Were you thinking you were going to stay here? Because you are not going to stay here,” Olivia told him. “For obvious reasons, Meng Anlan can’t have a Russian commando mercenary sleeping on her fucking sofa. You need to find a place to spend the night, and you need to figure out how you are going to access the Internet. Because if you can do that, then I can send you a message in a chat room or something.”
“Mmm,” Sokolov remarked. “There is solution.”
“Yes?”
“I have place to stay. With Internet. I will go there. Wait for instruction.”
A pause. “Really?” she asked.
“Dangerous,” he admitted. “Perhaps fucking stupid. But maybe will be fine.”
“Does it involve tying up or killing any of my neighbors?”
“Not unless you have neighbor you don’t like.”
She didn’t know how to take that.
“Humor,” he explained. Then he nodded out the window. The sun was getting low over Fujian, and orange light was gleaming in the windows of the skyscrapers across the water. “Is over there,” he explained. “No problem for you.”
“Then let’s go,” she said. “Obviously we have to leave this building separately. I can be a lookout for you. Tell you when the stairwell is clear, when it’s safe for you to move.”
“Very good.”
“We will walk to the ferry terminal separately and take separate boats,” she said. “After that, I can promise nothing.”
“Maybe you get me out of China,” Sokolov said. “Maybe not. Maybe I am captured. Interrogated. Have to tell them location of British spy equipment and documents from office.”
She just stared at him.
“Details,” he went on, “for you to share with your boss when you go to wangba.”
LATER, WHEN ONE of the crew opened the hatch to bring her a bowl of noodles and empty her bucket, Zula saw that it was dark outside.
She had tried to use the time to think. Nothing came.
Seemed as though grieving for Peter would be in order. She got ready to cry. Sitting on the edge of a steel-framed bunk bed, elbows on knees, ready to let it come. And some tears did come. Enough to blur her vision and give her the sniffles but not enough to break free and run down her face. She was sad that Peter was dead. Sad enough to forgive, but not enough to forget, the fact that Peter had ditched her in the cellar moments before Ivanov had basically executed him for doing so. That was the truly miserable part about Peter’s death: what he had done right before it.
But her mind drifted away from this forced and self-conscious grieving procedure, and she found herself worrying about Csongor. About Yuxia.
A memory came to her, almost as shocking as the first time around, of the young Chinese man’s face in the stairwell window, inches from hers.
It seemed as though prayers were in order. Prayers for the dead, for the missing, and for herself. Given that she had been raised by churchgoing folk, it was a bit odd that this hadn’t occurred to her before. No aspect of what was going on seemed as though it might be improved by communication with a deity. With the possible exception, that is, that it might make her feel better. That, as far as she could tell, was the purpose of the religion she had been brought up in: it made people feel better when really horrible things happened, and it offered a repertoire of ceremonies that were used to add a touch of class to such goings-on as shacking up with someone and throwing dirt on a corpse. None of which especially bothered Zula or made her doubt its worthwhileness. Making sad people feel better was a fine thing to do.
That kind of religion did not have the power to make one give all of one’s money to a charlatan, drink poison Kool-Aid, or strap explosives to one’s body, but at the same time it did not seem equal to the challenges imposed by a situation such as this one. Since it had seemed perfectly acceptable to her before, she didn’t feel that it was entirely proper, at a moment like this, to suddenly change over into something more fervent.
It was the praying-for-outcomes part she didn’t get. Since when did she get to have a vote? This boat would go wherever they pointed it.
And it could go anywhere. That was obvious. The whole point of a fishing boat was to go out to sea — out to international waters. She didn’t have a map, but she had a vague idea that this thing could take them anywhere in Southeast Asia in a few days. This had to be Jones’s plan.
The door hardware started clanging again. The hatch creaked open and Jones came in. He closed the hatch behind him, then sat cross-legged on the rug, leaning back against a steel bulkhead. She sat on the edge of a bunk.