“Batu does.”
FINE, SEE YOU AT ELEVEN.
This was the text message that Olivia found on the phone when she turned it on while peeing in a thicket at 6:49 the next morning. It was a response to last night’s HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER.
Actually the whole island was a thicket; she had found an especially dense part of it for this purpose and checked for snakes and bugs before dropping into a squat.
She and whoever was at the other end of this connection — presumably a handler in London, routed through an untraceable connection to the instant messaging network — were using a completely open and public channel to pass messages in the clear. They had to be coy. HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER was written in a prearranged code, using characters calculated not to arouse the interest of the PSB. She spent a minute or two squatting there and puzzling over SEE YOU AT ELEVEN before realizing that it probably meant exactly what it said. Kinmen was connected to Taiwan by a long-range ferry, used mostly by mainland Chinese tourists, and by regular air service. The ferry wasn’t much use in these circumstances, but it would be easy for the British embassy in Taipei to send someone out on a commercial flight to meet with her at the airport.
This was a virgin phone with no traceable connections to Olivia or anyone else, and she was on Taiwanese soil anyway, and so she felt no hesitation about using its Internet connection to surf for airline schedules. It seemed that a flight from Taipei was coming in to the local terminal at 10:45.
She returned to the bunker to find it empty. But after a bit of looking around, she found Sokolov standing near the edge of the minefield, gazing up the length of the beach. Back toward Xiamen. He checked his watch, then turned to look at her.
She reached out with one hand and found his. He did not snatch it out of her grasp, and so she pulled on it and began walking.
She led him back to the bunker. Still not looking at him, she got up on tiptoe and steadied herself with an elbow crooked around the back of his neck and carefully touched her lips to his. Her heart beating hard, more from fear than from passion, since she was afraid that he would turn away, reject her. That his not taking advantage of her last night was simple lack of interest. But his hand came around against the small of her back, and it became clear that he had only been waiting for her permission.
She had wondered how it would feel having sex on the bed of matted vines, which had become flattened during the night, but it ended up not being an issue since they did it standing up, with her back against the wall. After months of hard work in Xiamen, characterized by nothing but loneliness and anxiety, it felt so good that it brought her almost to a kind of weeping and grateful hysteria. For his part, Sokolov, after he had let her gently down, tumbled back onto the floor, slapping it with both hands, and collapsed as if crucified under the beam of sunlight coming in through the door.
“I am no longer poor fucked Russian,” he stated, after ten minutes or so.
“I’ve got news for you, honey — ”
“No. Alluding to yesterday’s conversation. In flat.”
“Well, you’re out of China at least,” she said, “but — ”
“No. I have useful information,” he said.
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of useful information?” Your spy Olivia Halifax-Lin is a helpless slut.
“Information that can help your employer find Abdallah Jones,” he said.
“Aha.”
Sokolov got his legs under him, rolled up to a low squatting position. He reached for his trousers, which like many other items of clothing had gone ballistic a few minutes ago and remained sprawled in their positions of impact. He stood up and pulled them on. “Because,” he said, “you have message, no?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Heard phone vibrate.”
He politely looked the other way as she stood up and mounted a search-and-rescue operation for her clothes. Crisscrossing the floor of the bunker on filthy, bare feet, she thought about the amount of effort and money she devoted, every day, to personal grooming, and how completely beside the point all of it had been during her last two sexual liaisons.
“Why did you wait until now to tell me?” she asked.
“Because until now we were fucking,” he pointed out.
“No, I mean why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“Because last night I did not have information.”
“How could you possibly have obtained any information this morning?”
“This must remain a mystery,” he said, “for now.” But he glanced upward as he said it, as if the answer were written in the sky above the Xunjianggang.
ZULA FELT THE jet thumping and bucking underneath her and startled awake, fearful/hopeful that they had come under some sort of police assault. But in the first moments after she opened her eyes, she was astonished to see buildings and parked planes streaking past them, and bright sunlight glancing in low over the sea.
She was on a plane, or something else that moved pretty damned fast. She didn’t even know whether it was landing or taking off.
How could the sun be up? Hours must have passed while she was slumbering.
The fact that she was lying in a king-sized bed did nothing to help her get her bearings.
The ground was definitely falling away.
First things first: she was on a plane. The plane was taking off. It was something like seven or eight in the morning. The bed was in a private cabin in the plane’s tail — Ivanov’s cabin. She could smell his hair oil on the pillow.
The city dropping away from her was Xiamen. Looking out the windows on the right side, she could see, only a mile or two away, the big inlet where Csongor had confronted Jones yesterday. Yuxia’s van and a crushed taxi lay somewhere on its bottom. And a few miles beyond that in the same direction, on the other side of a strait, was the larger of the two Taiwanese islands; she was sighting straight down the length of a beach, prickly with tank traps and shingled with hexagonal blocks.
Not long after it cleared the runway, the jet banked hard to the right, giving her an even better view of the Taiwanese island — Kinmen — as they swung around it in a broad arc, rapidly gaining altitude, and began to head south. Another turn, a few minutes later, brought them on to what she guessed was a southwesterly course. Nothing but ocean was now visible on the plane’s left, but on the right was the whole Chinese mainland, slowly getting farther away from them.
She must have fallen asleep in her seat at about one in the morning, when they were still talking of flight plans. Jones or someone must have carried her into the aft cabin and deposited her on the bed. The four “soldiers” who’d been cooling their heels in here must have been evicted and sent up to the main cabin. These men might stone her to death sooner or later, but in the meantime they would go to great lengths to preserve her modesty.
She remembered one figure very clearly: six hours. That was the amount of time it took to file a domestic flight plan in China. Pavel must have filed such a plan at about the time she’d gone to sleep, and they must have secured approval for takeoff only just now.
THEY BEGAN TO consider how to arrange transportation to Kinmen’s airport. Olivia used her mobile to pull up a map, from which they learned that they were all of about three thousand meters away from it.
Olivia was for going straight there. With a pensive and reluctant Sokolov in tow, she began to bushwhack inland. They passed quickly through what turned out to be a narrow belt of woods running parallel to the island’s north shore and emerged into a flat agricultural countryside, gridded with farm lanes. A hamlet, consisting of a couple of dozen closely spaced buildings, was only a couple of hundred meters off to their right; they avoided this instinctively and sidetracked away from it until a somewhat larger hamlet came into view ahead of them. Then they began cutting south across the island and soon came upon a larger road that ran east-west, across their path. Nor did that make it unusual, since it seemed as though the island’s centers of population were in its broad east and west ends, and the several roads joining them squeezed together through the island’s narrow waist, which they were transecting: a rocky spine tufted with trees and studded at its summit with the geodesic domes of Cold War radar installations.