There was a series of deafening bangs. The side of Ivanov’s head was ripped off by an invisible shovel and flung across the room. He dove sideways as if trying to catch his brains before they hit the floor.
Zula now noticed that there was another person in the room: a tall black man. He was carrying a long weapon that Zula recognized from the re-u as an AK-47.
His eyes met hers.
“English?” he asked.
“American,” she said.
“Your confusion is understandable, but I was inquiring, not as to nationality, but as to language,” said the man with the assault rifle. “I’ll endeavor to make my questions less ambiguous in future.” He was speaking with some sort of British accent. He squatted down next to Ivanov’s corpse and began slapping it all over. “This the dude who cuffed you?” he asked, switching seamlessly to Ebonics.
A faint jingle sounded from one of Ivanov’s pockets. The man reached in and drew out a handful of change, sorted through it, and pulled out one item that was not a coin: a handcuff key. “Bingo,” he said. Slinging the assault rifle over his shoulder, he stood, strode over to Zula’s side, and unlocked the end of her handcuff that was locked around the pipe. “Freedom!” he proclaimed brightly.
“Thank you!” Zula exclaimed.
“Is an illusion,” he continued, and snapped the manacle shut around his right wrist, chaining his right arm to Zula’s left. Then he pocketed the key.
“Who are you?” she asked, squirming out from beneath Csongor.
“You can call me Mr. Jones, Zula,” he answered. He now let the assault rifle slip down off his shoulder, grabbed it by the barrel, and looked at it wistfully. “Difficult to fire with one hand,” he pointed out. He turned to look at her. His face was intelligent and not unattractive. “What’s the only thing more attention getting, on the streets of Xiamen, than two niggers handcuffed together?”
“I give up.”
“Two niggers handcuffed together with a Kalashnikov.” He laid the weapon on the floor. Then his eye fell on Ivanov’s semiautomatic. He picked it up with his unencumbered left hand. “Nice piece,” he said. “A 1911, if I’m not mistaken.”
Even in the midst of so many distractions, some part of Zula’s mind found it curious that Mr. Jones could be anything less than totally certain that Ivanov’s gun was a 1911. Obviously it was a 1911. He transferred it to his right hand, then put his thumb on its hammer, which was drawn back in ready-to-fire position. He pulled the trigger and carefully let the hammer down so that it wouldn’t fire. Then he reached across with his left and racked the slide once, ejecting a live round, chambering a fresh one, and automatically recocking the hammer. “Cocked,” he muttered. With a bit of fumbling, he taught himself how to apply the safety. “And locked.” Then, clearly wishing that his right hand were not encumbered, he transferred the weapon back into his left and stuck it in his pants. “Come on,” he said, “some kind of fascinating destiny is waiting for us out there. Inshallah.”
He grabbed her hand and started walking toward the exit. She tried to peel away and drop to Csongor’s side, but Mr. Jones simply let go of her hand and allowed the handcuff chain to go taut, so that the metal bit into her already-raw wrist and jerked her along in his path. She sprawled and staggered in his wake and bounced off a wall, where a filthy window, set in a well below street level, grudgingly allowed dim, confused gray light to seep in through several layers of bars and mesh, and thick lashings of rain-driven dirt.
Framed in that window was the face of a man, a young Chinese man, staring into her eyes. No more than arm’s length away. How long had he been watching events in the cellar?
But he might as well have been a talking head on a television screen for all that he could help her now. Jones gave another yank, pulling her closer, then reestablished his grip on her hand and began pulling her up the stairs.
AS HE WAS shinnying along the cable bundle, Sokolov had more time than was really good for him to develop that theme of the high explosives and the detonators in the burning apartment just a few meters away. Old instincts began to take over, and he noticed that his mouth was frozen in a yawn; this was so that his eardrums would not burst in the event of an explosion. Every time he advanced his hands to a new position, he took care to sink his fingers deeply into the wire bundle so that he could not be jarred loose by a shock wave. He kept his chin tucked against his chest, though every so often he would let it hang back so that he could get an upside-down view of the office building. For an agonizingly long time, this did not seem to be getting any closer, and so he forced himself not to check for a while. Then he looked again and saw that it was no more than two meters away. He reached forward as far as he dared, got a good solid grip into the guts of the wire bundle, and let go with his legs. He was now hanging a little more than arm’s length from the point where the wire bundle penetrated a gap between two hanging tarps.
The tarps flashed as if someone were taking a photograph from across the street. Sokolov began to open his mouth and to tighten his grip on the wires during the fraction of a second that elapsed between then and the arrival of the shock wave. This struck him like a wrecking ball and hurled him bodily into the tarps.
AFTER THE BURST of fire that had broken out the windows of Xinyou Quality Control Ltd. and sent Olivia sprawling to the floor, the gun battle across the street had died down rapidly. Olivia remained on hands and knees for a while, staying below the level of the windowsill. The office contained eight separate devices with kill switches. She was able to take care of three of them before she got to a place where the floor was covered with shattered glass: not the modern tempered stuff that crumbled into nice cubes, but jagged shards of the old school. Crawling on hands and knees through it didn’t seem like a good idea. She had not received a lot of combat training but she had received a little, and one of the more vivid lessons had demonstrated that the stuff civilians tended to hide behind — car doors, brick walls — was almost completely useless when it came to stopping high-velocity rounds. The walls of this building were brick. So it was pointless to hide behind them in any case. Olivia stood up and began crunching over the glass to reach the other five devices that needed to be killed. Footing was treacherous since her Chinese career-girl costume involved high heels, and the glass shards liked to slip over each other when she put her weight on them. At any rate she made it to all the devices and hit their kill switches. She was making a conscious effort not to be distracted by what was going on across the street. Abdallah Jones’s apartment had gone up in flames with preposterous speed, as if it were made out of flash paper. Either he was dead or had been flushed from cover into the streets of Xiamen, where he could not possibly last for more than a few minutes.
The initial shock of the gun battle had begun to clear from her mind, and she now realized that the situation was not as dire as she had believed at first. Of course she still had no idea who had invaded Jones’s apartment or why. Certainly there were many who wanted him dead. Speculating about it now would get her nowhere. No one was bashing down the doors of Xinyou Quality Control Ltd. So the correct thing for her to do was to gather up all the spy gear and destroy it. She thought she could manage this rather easily by collecting all of it into a garbage bag and then, during the ride home, throwing the bag into the strait between Xiamen and Gulangyu. It would look a little bit odd, but there was nothing radically unusual about Chinese people throwing garbage into the ocean, so it would probably go unnoticed. Even if someone did decide to make a fuss about it, such a crime hardly merited bringing out scuba divers to comb the murky bottom of the strait.