Sokolov now moved up and sat in the seat next to the driver. He had his bag with him. He turned on his flashlight and put it in his mouth like a cigar, then shone it down into the bag, which he had zipped open. It was stuffed with a miscellany of junk, but the predominant color was the queasy red/magenta of large-denomination Chinese currency. Much of it was crumpled loose bills, but Sokolov stirred through these and then pulled out a wrapped brick about one inch thick. He let the light shine on it and glanced up at the driver to make sure that it had been noticed. Then he pulled out a plastic sack—a white laundry bag blazoned with the logo of a luxury hotel. He dropped the money stack into this and then carefully rolled it up into a neat packet.
Then he looked at Olivia. “Please drive boat,” he said.
“I am going to drive the boat now, please get out of the way,” she said to the driver in Mandarin.
He was slow to move.
“I have been watching this man for a while now, and I don’t think he hurts people who are not his enemies,” she said. “I think it is going to turn out all right.”
Watching Sokolov carefully, the driver stood up and vacated the controls. Olivia clambered over the back of his seat and settled in behind the wheel. She picked out a light in the distance and used it to steer by for the time being.
They had exited the strait and come into the fetch of broad ocean waves that were bashing the little boat around. Keeping his center of gravity low, the driver took a seat on one of the benches. Sokolov dropped to his knees in front of the man and thrust the wrapped money-brick at him, then pantomimed a gesture of shoving it into his pants. The driver, whose mood was shifting from abject fear to extreme curiosity, complied. Sokolov then handed him a life vest and made gestures indicating that he should put it on. “Closer to beach please,” he said to Olivia, and she steered the boat in closer to some tidal flats that, since the tide was low, reached out a great distance from the shore of Xiang’an and dully reflected its pink-orange lights.
The driver put the life vest on and snapped its strap around his waist. Sokolov, inspecting him like a squad leader checking a trooper’s parachute, tugged at the strap and gave it a yank to make it tighter. He then held up his fist, thumb and pinky akimbo, to his jaw. The driver, understanding this universal gesture, reached into his pocket and produced his phone, which Sokolov confiscated.
Then Sokolov made a little gesture with his head and stared expectantly into the driver’s eyes.
The driver did not want to go but soon reached a place where he would rather drown than suffer that gaze anymore, so he reached up, pinched his nose, and vaulted over the side.
“Kinmen,” Sokolov said. “Top speed.”
Olivia swung the wheel hard to starboard and pushed the throttle lever forward as far as it would go. The engine howled, the boat surged forward into the darkness and began pounding across perpendicular wave crests. Sokolov moved up and sat next to Olivia and flipped switches on the dashboard until he found the one that turned off the running lights.
Then he spent a while trying to read the tiny screen of his phone despite the jarring impacts of the hull on the waves.
“Taiwan military will shoot at boat?”
“Maybe.”
“You swim?” he shouted.
“Very well,” she said.
“Better than me,” he admitted. He crawled back and returned a few moments later with a pair of life vests, one of which he placed across her lap. He put one on, then took the wheel while she did the same.
She had gotten into the habit of thinking of Kinmen as being farther away than it really was, because of the military and political barrier; but crossing into its waters took so little time that they were barely able to get themselves strapped into the life vests before they closed to within swimming range. Sokolov experimented with taking his hands off the wheel and found that the boat was rigged in such a way that it would basically keep going straight.
And so at some point, much earlier than she felt ready for, he suddenly nodded at her and she—since it seemed to be expected of her—nodded back. Sokolov spun the wheel around and got the boat aimed toward open water, then took her hand and got one foot up on the gunwale. With his free hand he picked up the bag he had earlier rigged with a life vest. Another exchange of nods and then they went over the side.
The water was warm by the standards of oceans, but her immediate and powerful impression was of being cold. Then she got over it and started swimming.
