No wonder the Chinese authorities were calling it a gas explosion. It wasn’t that they were trying to cover anything up. It just made for a simpler explanation.
If he were going to tell the families anything, it would have to be that they had died in a gas explosion, or a car accident, or some other such meaningless and random eventuality of war. Like the American soldiers who were getting electrocuted while taking showers in their shoddily constructed military bases. Who wrote those letters?
As he paced back and forth gazing out over the streaming and pulsing lights of the city, he saw that there was really only one way to make sense of the entire situation, if by “make sense” was meant “bring it to a conclusion such that proper letters could be written to the mothers of the men who had died this morning.” And that was to hunt down Abdallah Jones and kill him.
He squatted down on his haunches, stretching the sore and battered muscles of his legs in a way that hurt but felt good, and crossed his elbows atop his knees and rested his chin on his forearms and stared out at China.
Everything was clear to him, except how he was going to get out of this country. That all depended on Olivia. Helpless as a baby in her bare feet, her aloneness. And yet infinitely more powerful, more capable than Sokolov in this context.
There had been an odd moment there, toward the conclusion of their interview, when she had insisted that he was not welcome to stay in her apartment. A strange thing for her to bring up. As if Sokolov would have expected any such consideration. And yet she had felt it important to make this explicit. Why? Because she was attracted to him, as he was to her, and that made it imperative that scruples be observed, rules followed.
He tucked his chin, let himself fall back on his buttocks, rolled out flat, whipped his arms behind him and slapped the carpeted floor to break his fall, as in SAMBO. It would not be the worst place he’d ever slept. Even better if he got the Makarov out of his waistband. So he did that, placing it up next to his head, and he pulled the spare clip out of the breast pocket of the suit jacket and a little flashlight from the back pocket of the trousers and placed them all right next to each other. He unlaced Jeremy Jeong’s shoes. But rather than slip them off, he decided to learn from the lesson of Olivia and keep them on his feet loosely, just in case there were any more gas leaks.
Sleep did not come, though, since he could not stop thinking about how vulnerable he would be if someone came into the safe house.
He slung his CamelBak over his shoulders and went into the conference room. The big table was wired for Internet, a trunk line of gray wires zip-tied together beneath it. With some quick knife work he peeled loose a run of cable a few meters long and draped it over his neck. He planted a chair in the middle of the table, stood on it, reached up, and pushed a ceiling tile out of the way.
Above him, as he remembered, was a zigzagging steel truss. It was out of his reach, but in a couple of tries he was able to toss the end of the cable through it and then feed more cable up so that the loose end bent down of its own weight and came within his reach. He jerked it down and tied the ends together to form a loop that dangled through the ceiling hole to about a meter above the table’s surface.
Then he placed the chair back on the floor, lay down in the middle of the conference table, and slept soundly.
“THE POINT TO be conveyed by this little demonstration should be obvious to anyone with a bit of imagination. And you are obviously that kind of girl. So I, personally, consider it a waste of time. But my colleagues here are earthy chaps. They like concreteness. They don’t trust their ability to communicate across cultural and language barriers.”
Jones was preceding Zula down a steel-runged ladder into the ship’s hold.
“Or,” he added brightly, “perhaps they are just sadists.”
At this, Zula whipped her head around and got a brief whirling impression of a large, poorly illuminated space with several men in it, and Yuxia seated on a chair in the middle. Her instincts, of course, told her to get out of there. But Jones’s lieutenant — she had figured out that his name was Khalid — was above her on the stairs, practically treading on her hands.
The ship’s engines had started up some minutes ago, anchor had been weighed, and they had pulled out of the crowded cove and begun swinging around to the back side of the island, which seemed to be completely unpopulated. It was exposed to weather from the sea and it lacked a natural harbor, so it was probably accounted worthless. In this space belowdecks, the engines made a maddening racket. But as Zula cleared the bottom rung and touched down on the deckplates, the throttle was eased back to a low idle, just enough to make a bit of headway and keep the vessel under control.
Yuxia’s legs had been tied together at the ankles and knees, and her arms were pinioned behind her back.
A crew member came down the ladder after Khalid, bent sideways under the load of a five-gallon plastic bucket filled to the brim with seawater. A lot of it slopped out as he staggered across the cabin, but when he set it on the deck in front of Yuxia, it was still filled to within a couple of inches of the top.
“Stop,” Zula said, “this is just totally — ”
“Unnecessary. Yes. I just finished saying that,” Jones said. “For you and me, yes. And for her, certainly. But it seems terribly important for everyone else.”
Khalid had moved around behind Yuxia, and for a moment the tableau presenting itself before Zula’s eyes looked just like one of those grainy webcam videos in which a helpless hostage gets butchered.
But this was not to be one of those. Not exactly. “Your friend!” Khalid announced, and then nodded to the men standing to either side of Yuxia. They converged on her and, in a display of clumsiness and ineptitude that would have been funny in other circumstances, eventually managed to get her turned upside down, feet in the air, head down, whereupon they maneuvered her head into the bucket. Displaced water flooded over the rim and washed across the deck.
“No,” Zula said quietly.
“Think of it as a performance,” said Jones.
“Please tell them to stop it,” Zula said.
“You misunderstand,” Jones went on. “You are the one who needs to be performing. They want to reduce you to blubbering hysteria. And the longer you continue to play it cool, the longer she goes without oxygen.”
Zula launched herself forward and almost made it. Jones kicked out and tripped her. She fell full-length across the deck, her outstretched right hand only a few inches from the base of the bucket. She gathered herself to spring forward again, but a booted foot descended and trapped her hand. She twisted and looked up into the face of Khalid, staring directly down at her with a look of fascinated ecstasy. With her left hand she pawed at his ankle. He was wearing military-style boots with speed lacing hooks. One of them caught the bandage wrapped around her pinky; this spiraled away from her flailing hand and took the fingernail with it. His other foot stomped down on her left forearm, trapping it too. She had twisted around so that she was lying full-length on her side, both hands pinned, only inches away from the bucket within which Yuxia was now struggling for her life, her nicely cut black hair washing against the translucent plastic as she thrashed to and fro trying to knock it over, the surface of the water burbling as her lungs emptied.
Zula was not feeling anything like what they wanted her to feel. She simply wanted to kill them. And had it not been for Jones’s helpful suggestion, she might have failed to give them the performance they wanted: the only thing that could save Yuxia’s life. But a couple of the details — Yuxia’s swimming hair, and the blood streaming freely from the end of Zula’s pinky — were enough to send Zula over the edge, into some kind of community-theater method-acting headspace in which she finally let go of all the grief and rage that had been accumulating in her emotional buffer during the last several days and let herself fly out of control and degenerate into the weeping, wailing, messed-up, out-of-control basket case that these guys apparently wanted to see.