“Who rescued you?”
“They wore hoods,” Usenov said. “They did not say it, but I believe they were Wuming.”
“Wuming.” Yao took another drink of fermented mare’s milk.
“You have heard of them?” Mrs. Usenov asked. “They are angels, I think. Allah’s helpers here on earth. Most in the van had thought to grab a blanket or put on a coat. Kambar made sure I had a jacket, but the policeman dragged him out before he could retrieve his own. It was bitter cold, snowing, and Kambar was in his shirtsleeves. One of the Wuming saw this and gave my husband his coat.”
“I would love to interview a member of the Wuming,” Yao said.
Mrs. Usenov exhaled softly. “I do not know how that would happen. Surely that would be much too dangerous for them. The Chinese government would kill them all if they could.”
“That’s true.” Yao shrugged. “They sound like incredibly good people, giving you their own coat.”
“I still have it,” Usenov said proudly. “It is the best coat I have ever owned.” He scrambled to his feet, belying his age. “I will show you.”
Yao wiped his hands with a towel Mrs. Usenov gave him and stood, stepping back from the low table to look at the puffy down ski jacket Kambar Usenov brought out from the bedroom.
“Very nice.” Yao opened it to read the tag, knowing he wouldn’t find a name, but checking nonetheless.
Usenov reached into the pocket and showed him something almost as good.
Yao called Leigh Murphy on his secure mobile.
Excited at the prospect of a lead, he began to speak as soon as she picked up. “Tell me again what Beg said about the woods.”
“Hello to you, too,” Murphy said. “You must have something.”
“Maybe,” Yao said. “So go over Beg’s statement again. The part about the Wuming disappearing.”
“He said they would disappear into the forest, that they could slip over many borders to escape — if they exist at all. Why, what do you have?”
“Not sure,” Yao said. “Maybe nothing. There were some ticket stubs in the pocket of a coat that may have come from a member of the Wuming. They’re only partial stubs, but they’re for a boat tour. It’s something about a monster fish.”
“Lake Kanas?” Murphy said.
“It’s not on the ticket, but I assume the boat tour could be on a lake.”
“The tickets are Chinese, right?” Murphy asked.
“Correct.”
“Then Kanas Lake makes sense,” Murphy said. “They have their own version of the Loch Ness Monster.” She paused.
“You still there?” Yao asked.
“Yup. Just checking a map. This looks promising, Adam. Lake Kanas is north of Urumqi, tucked into a little thumb of land that is surrounded by Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia… It’s extremely rural, with many borders over which to escape — and lots of forest — just like Urkesh Beg said.”
“That’s thin,” Yao said. “But it’s a hell of a lot more than I had an hour ago. I appreciate this.”
“No prob,” Murphy said. “When are you coming to Albania so I can show you around? We need somebody with a brain to be our station chief. Rask chewed my ass for interviewing Beg without his blessing. I told him I wasn’t allowed to tell him who asked me, which really pissed him off.”
“Sorry about that,” Yao said. “I’ll make a couple of calls and get you top cover. In the meantime, don’t mention the Lake Kanas connection to anyone. Okay?”
“You got it, Chief.”
“Don’t,” Adam said and chuckled. “I’m not chief material.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” Murphy said. “It’s hard to find good friends.”
“In this outfit?”
Murphy sighed. “Anywhere, Adam.”
CIA Station Chief Fredrick Rask hunched over his keyboard, fuming, fingers blazing as he typed a cable. No, this could not be allowed to stand. Leigh Murphy was forgetting her place in the food chain.
A mentor had once told him to get up and go to the restroom before sending a cable or e-mail when you were angry. Good advice, to be sure, if you wanted to be civil, but Rask wanted a piece of somebody’s ass. He was either the station chief or he wasn’t. No one had the right to run an op on his turf without at least letting him know. And he’d be damned if he was going to let some secret-squirrel shithead from Langley sneak into his bailiwick and task one of his case officers without asking his permission. Not to mention the task in question was to chat up the former U.S. detainee about his continued association with Uyghur separatists. The guy had already been interrogated for four and a half years. This kind of shit had the propensity to blow up in your face. The media, Congress, his bosses in D.C. — they’d be all over him if they found out one of his people was harassing a guy they’d let go.
Someone at HQ needed to know about this — if only so Rask could cover his own ass from the blowback. He fired off the cable, making his boss aware of the situation, and then leaned back and sent a copy to his buddy on the Central Asia desk. If someone was poking around looking for Uyghur separatists, he’d want to know.
28
An hour into the seven-hour flight on the C-21A, the U.S. military’s version of the Bombardier Learjet 35, Dr. Patti Moon decided this kind of luxury was something she could become used to. They made a short stop to refuel at an FBO in Calgary, Alberta, and then continued direct from there to Washington Reagan. She had the plane to herself — just her and a couple of hotshot pilots who liked to practice near-vertical takeoffs and then explain how the Lear was really a fighter jet in a suit and tie. And anyway, somebody up the chain wanted her in D.C. ASAP, the pilots said, so they were told by their bosses not to spare the horses.
The closer they got to D.C., the more fretful she became. The whole suit-and-tie thing didn’t help. Moon’s mother, an extremely devout and weekly attendee of the Tikigaq Bible Baptist Church in Point Hope, had drummed into her from an early age that the devil would not be dressed in rags when he came to tempt her. He would, in fact, be dressed in fine furs… or even a suit and tie.
She’d worked herself into a lather by the time the little jet lined up left of the Potomac River and settled into a grease-smooth landing at Washington Reagan.
To make matters worse, the tall man in Navy khakis who met her in the lobby of Signature Flight Support at the south end of the airport introduced himself as Commander Robbie Forestall, a national security adviser to the President of the United States.
Navy habits abided long, and she very nearly introduced herself as Petty Officer First Class Moon. She caught herself, shook the commander’s hand, and then stepped back and let him lead the way. A meeting with the national security adviser… That was going to be weird. Still, Moon supposed she’d asked for it by asking Barker to push the recording up the chain.
The Marine helicopter had picked her up at breakfast, and the entire trip had been relatively short, but the time difference between Alaska and the East Coast meant it was already well into the evening by the time Commander Forestall showed Moon to a black Lincoln Town Car. He gave her a bottle of water and offered to help her with her bag, but she refused and held it on her lap instead.
Traffic on George Washington Memorial was a steady flow of red lights and headlights — a shock to Moon’s system after the high lonesome solitude of the far north where she spent much of her life. The ice floe was dispassionate and could crack loud as a gunshot, but there was silence there, too, and, when the sky was clear, the bowl of stars and aurora brought peace to Moon’s ever-wary soul.