“You are fashion queen,” Sokolov observed.
“For two hours. Once I get to Taipei, all of this is coming right off.”
“Then where? London?”
“I assume so. Yes. Let’s go.”
“Where we go?” Sokolov asked, a bit sharply. He was much too worldly wise to imagine that he too would be whisked away to London.
“I’ll explain in the car,” Olivia said.
The weather had gradually turned gray as the day had worn on, and it was now becoming blustery, with a strong breeze out of the north. This suited their purposes, since it gave Sokolov an excuse to put on a rain slicker that they had purchased for him in Jincheng, and to wear it with the hood up. For now, though, he just slumped as far down as possible in the car’s rear seat as George Chow explained what was about to happen. Meanwhile the driver took them west back into town, then north, running parallel to the island’s western coast, until they had passed out of the built-up area (which took all of about thirty seconds) and into another of those strange places where no Chinese people went, apparently for the reason that no other Chinese people were there. This was a wild beach landscape similar to the one where they had crawled up out of the surf the night before. On higher ground above it, where the sand was held together by the root systems of sparse grass, a man and his son were flying a string of kites. Below, the beach stretched away for at least a kilometer. Olivia thought at first that it was studded with antitank obstacles even more thickly than the one she and Sokolov had washed up on. On closer examination, though, what she was looking at were thousands of concrete pillars that had been planted upright in the tidal zone to give shellfish something to grow on. Workers were picking their way among them. Each had a bamboo pole balanced over his or her shoulders, a basket or a bag dangling from each end. Seen through the thickening air of an incoming shower, it looked like a colossal cemetery: not a modern American cemetery with its polished and neatly arrayed monuments, but a thousand-year-old English churchyard crammed with worn gray stones tilting this way and that.
George Chow seemed to guess that they wanted privacy, or perhaps he felt a need to keep a watch over any traffic coming up the coast road, and so he remained in the taxi while Sokolov and Olivia walked out, trying to find salt water. For they had arrived early. The tide was low. Olivia left her purse in the car and went barefoot. Sokolov was now using a handheld GPS issued to him by George Chow, aiming for a waypoint marked on its screen.
When they reached a place where fog and mist had rendered them invisible from the road, they sat down on a couple of adjacent shellfish-pillars that had been picked clean by harvesters and watched the tide flow in. For they were only a hundred meters from the rendezvous point. Olivia wasn’t wearing much, and Sokolov didn’t have to ask to know that she was chilly, and so he sat upwind of her and wrapped his raincoat around her so that she could snuggle up under his arm.
“I think I’m going with you,” she announced, after ten minutes had passed in silence.
“Not get on plane?” Sokolov said.
“No. Why should I? Nothing prevents me from just getting on this boat with you, and taking the freighter to Long Beach.”
He considered it for a good long time. Long enough that she began to worry that she had screwed it all up. Sokolov had enjoyed this morning’s rumpus in the bunker, and might enjoy more in the future, provided there was no commitment; but being stuck on a freighter with Olivia for two weeks was a hell of a lot of togetherness. What man wouldn’t recoil, just a little, from that?
“Would make two weeks more interesting,” he allowed. Then he switched over to Russian. “But this is not the correct choice for you to make.”
Part of her wanted to say Why not? but, having affrighted him already, she did not want to get pouty on him now.
“What is the correct choice?”
“Find Jones,” he said. “Figure out where he is. Tell me.”
“But if we find him,” she said, “he’s dead, or captured, no matter what. We don’t need you to kill him.”
“I can dream,” he said.
“So you want me to spend these two weeks looking for Jones?”
“Yes.”
She peeled his arm from her shoulders and ducked out from beneath him, spinning off the pillar to land with both feet in the surf. It came up to her ankles, with waves sloshing over her calves.
“I’m sorry I have this shit on my face,” she said. “Makes me feel stupid.”
“Is fine,” he said, averting his gaze shyly.
“Listen,” she continued, “Jones’s trail is cold. There’s nothing I can do in the next two weeks to find him.”
“Unless I give information.”
“Yes. Which I think you are free to do now.” She glanced over her shoulder, out into the mist that had descended over the strait between Kinmen and Xiamen. They could hear a boat out there, its motor putt-putting away at a low idle, occasionally throttling up as its driver followed the tide in toward them. “Your ride is here,” she pointed out. “You’ve got what you wanted — safe passage out of China. Tell me what you know. I’ll use it while you’re on that freighter. When you get to L.A., call me.”
“Tail number of Jones’s airplane is as follows,” Sokolov said, and then recited a string of letters and numbers. Olivia had him repeat it several times. “He took off from Xiamen at zero seven one three hours local time and headed south.”
“Why do you think he would go south?”
“Maybe headed for Mindanao,” Sokolov said, “where jihadists have camps. But I doubt it. Is probably a diversion. He will get over the ocean, drop to low altitude, disappear from radar, turn off transponder, and then do something else.”
“That’ll make it difficult to find him.”
“Not so difficult. You will see,” Sokolov said. He planted both hands on the pillar, pushed himself off, dropped into water that was now knee-deep, gazed over Olivia’s shoulder, trying to get a fix on the boat’s location from its sound. “Intelligence services will have tapes of radar. Now that you know when he took off, which direction he went, you can follow him on tapes for a little while. Get clues. Figure out where he might have gone. Narrow it down. And then” — he turned to look her right in the eye — ” tell me where motherfucker went.”
“If he’s still alive in two weeks,” Olivia said, “I’ll tell you.”
“Good-bye,” he said. “I would give you kiss but do not want to damage professional makeup job.”
“It’s already damaged,” she pointed out.
“Okay then.” He wrapped his arms around her, gave her a long and quite thorough kiss. Then he spun her around and set her back down carefully on the top of the pillar, out of the inrushing surf. Turning his back on her immediately, he pulled the hood of the slicker up over his head, then began wading toward the sound of the boat that was idling somewhere out there in the fog. “Walk now or swim later,” he warned her, as he was disappearing.
In spite of that good advice, Olivia waited, wanting to hear the sound of the boat’s motor throttling up, taking him out of there.
What she heard instead was three short bursts of submachinegun fire. Then a series of sporadic pops. Followed by the sound of the boat screaming away at top speed.
AFTER A COUPLE of hours, Marlon came up to the bridge with tea service and a couple of military ration packets. As they wolfed these down, Csongor showed Marlon the chart of the Pescadores and explained the course he had been following, which he hoped would bring them into the center of the island group in another few hours.