“The hackers who created the virus,” John translated.
“Yeah. If they succeeded in tracking down those hackers, then this Ivanov character might have been crazy enough to go in shooting. Who knows, maybe they even used grenades or satchel charges.”
“Why the hell would you use satchel charges?” John demanded. He had long gotten over the fact that Richard was a draft dodger. But he hated it when Richard strayed into topics of which Richard knew nothing and John had personal experience.
“I don’t know, John; I’m just trying to think of a reason why the building blew up. Because the building is gone. It is destroyed.”
“A satchel charge wouldn’t be powerful enough to bring down a multistory building.”
“Okay, well, maybe it was a gas explosion then, but it was set off as a result of the gun battle.”
“Maybe it had nothing to do with Zula at all!” John protested.
“But John, the thing is — as Corvallis here can explain much better than I — at the same time that this gun battle and explosion took place, the Troll dropped off the Internet. And hasn’t come back since.”
The back of Corvallis’s neck turned red. They drove past Peter’s loft. Everyone observed silence for a while. According to Zula’s note, a man — Wallace — had died in there.
Only a couple of minutes later, they turned off Airport Way into the frontage road that led to the FBO.
Considering the net worth of its clientele, one might have expected a glitzier place. But it was just a boxy two-story office building that faced the frontage road — a public thoroughfare — on one end and the restricted zone of the airport tarmac on the other. The airfield’s tall cyclone fence ran right up to one wall and then continued on the other side. As they pulled off the road, they entered a parking lot with only a few cars scattered about; at its opposite end this was terminated by the fence, or rather by a large rolling gate set into it. Corvallis pulled up to it and stopped. Richard clambered out of the car. As soon as the personnel inside recognized his face, they hit the button that caused the gate to trundle open. Richard waved Corvallis forward, and he drove onto the tarmac and directly to a bizjet that was parked no more than fifty feet away. Richard followed on foot and greeted the pilot by name as he emerged from the cockpit and descended the stairway. Corvallis parked at a respectful distance from the plane’s landing gear and then popped the Prius’s hatchback, and the men formed a bucket brigade to move the luggage up into the plane’s cargo hold. Richard was more than normally aware of these details since he knew that two weeks earlier Zula had passed through the same gate with the Russians.
The pilot, as usual, was ready to go, but they were still waiting for the assistant with the visas. He invited them to come aboard and make themselves comfortable; the flight attendant had brought in some sushi. John, for whom this sort of travel was still novel, took him up on the invitation. Richard strolled back toward the FBO, thinking he might get a cup of decaf and grab a newspaper. The airport-facing end of the building was a lounge, clean and reasonably well appointed but not flagrantly luxurious. At any time of the day or night, one might see a few people, individuals or small groups, sitting there checking their email and waiting for planes. At this particular moment there was only one other person there, an Asian woman in her twenties, short hair, dressed in jeans and sort of a nice jackety getup that made the jeans look slightly more serious. She had been reading a novel and drinking tea. Richard went over to the self-serve latte machine and began pressing buttons. He was keeping one eye out the window, watching for the taxi carrying the assistant fresh in from San Francisco with the visas.
“Mr. Forthrast?”
The words had been spoken with an English accent. Richard turned around, surprised, to see that it was the Asian woman. She was standing about ten feet away in a somewhat prim attitude, wrists crossed in front of her to hold the novel as a shield in front of her pelvis: Sorry, I know this is a bit awkward.
“The same.” Richard could read the signs well enough: this was either a hard-core T’Rain player who wanted to rap with him about the game, or someone who wanted a job at Corporation 9592. He dealt with both types all the time, pleasantly.
“Don’t go to China.”
He had been watching the foam dribble from the latte machine, but now his head spun around to fix on her. She looked apologetic. But quite firm.
“How the hell do you know where I’m going?”
“Zula isn’t there,” the woman said. “It’s a dead end.”
“How would you know any of this?”
“I was there,” the woman said.
IN RETROSPECT OLIVIA had never done more or traveled farther to achieve so little as in the past ten days.
After bidding adieu to “George Chow” in the Taipei airport, she flew to Singapore. Obsessed by the idea that everyone was looking at her funny, she monopolized a sink in the airport for a while, scrubbing away the ridiculous makeup job that Chow’s cosmetician had put on her face in the hotel room in Jincheng. She was itching to attack the haircut too, but you couldn’t have scissors in airports and she didn’t want to make that much of a spectacle of herself. The laceration on the top of her head had never been properly stitched. It tended to open up and start bleeding at odd moments and so it didn’t seem advisable to be getting hands-on up there. Maybe MI6 would have people in London who were good at this sort of thing — combat beauticians, trauma stylists. It seemed likely that her MI6 superiors were making hysterical efforts to get in touch with her and pump her for information during this layover, but she didn’t have any way of communicating with them that she was willing to trust. And even if someone walked up to her in person, right here in the ladies’, someone she recognized as working for the agency, she wasn’t sure how much she’d be willing to divulge. Someone had set an ambush for Sokolov out there in the mist off Kinmen, and she didn’t know who. Best case was that it had just been Chinese intelligence or local gangsters. Worst case was that MI6 actually wanted him dead. Between those two extremes, perhaps MI6 had been penetrated and Chinese intelligence had access to its secrets. In any case, she didn’t feel like spilling any more information about Sokolov until she got back to London and learned more.
Then the nonstop to London. She spent the first bit of it getting drunk and the rest of it sleeping.
The plane landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 at something like six in the morning. Since her immigration status had become impossible to make sense of, she was met, at the top of the jetway, by a man in a uniform and a man in a suit. She had always read of people being “whisked through” certain formalities, but this was the first time she had ever been personally whisked and she had to admit that it had its charms. Particularly when you were hungover and bleeding. In order to get from Terminal 5’s gates to Immigration and Customs, it was necessary to descend a prodigious stack of escalators, beginning well above ground level and terminating deep below. There was a place, about halfway along, where an escalator deposited the newly arrived passengers on a landing that happened to coincide with street level; as you executed a U-turn to get on the next, you could look out through glass doors and walls at a road with cars and trucks streaming along it. Uniformed personnel were forever stationed before those glass doors to make sure that everyone coming down those escalators kept going down into the levels where they were to be processed.
Everyone, that is, except for those lucky few who were being whisked. Olivia was ready to make the U-turn and descend along with everyone else, but her escorts got off that escalator and just kept walking in a straight line. And since Olivia was sandwiched between them, she did the same, expecting that, at any moment, one of the security guards stationed before the doors would wrestle her to the ground and begin blowing on a whistle. Instead of which, a door was opened for her, an alarm was stifled by a series of digits punched into a keypad, and suddenly she was out of doors climbing into a black Land Rover. They were out on the M4 before the stale air of the jumbo jet had even dissipated from her clothes and hair.