Which led her to a moment, there on the toilet, looking sideways into the mirror, of something akin to prayer. Her earlier thoughts on this topic still stood and so it was not a hands-together, now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep sort of prayer. More of an act of will. Because if there were some power like grace, like the Force, or Providence, or what-have-you, that had been at work in the world today, then it needed to find its way now to the boat where Qian Yuxia was being held captive and it needed to go one step further in whatever mysterious chain of transactions was playing out here. And if it were possible for a conscious effort of will on Zula’s part to make that happen, then she was willing it to happen.
She pulled herself together, splashed water on her face, and came back out into the jet’s cabin. Pavel and Sergei were still talking in Russian, panning and zooming around digital maps of the world on the big screen. Jones was on his feet, phone clamped to his head, finger in his ear, looking dumbfounded. He talked in Arabic for a while, his voice and his eyes dull. Not defeated, she thought, so much as completely exhausted. Then he hung up.
“You’re free to go,” he said, looking Zula in the eye.
“What are you talking about?” she said. Because he could show a kind of mean sarcasm, and this seemed like one of those times.
“The boat,” he said, “with your girlfriend on it…”
“Yes?”
“Has disappeared.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dis. Appeared. Without a trace. Not responding on the wireless. Not answering phone calls. No sign of wreckage. No distress call.”
“You know this how?”
“Those lads who dropped us off at the dock,” Jones said. “They went back to the island, and there is simply nothing there.”
Zula badly wanted to show how happy she felt, but certain matters had to be settled first. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it doesn’t matter,” Jones said. “You’re going to stay on the plane anyway.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. Because you’re in China illegally. You’re associated with people who have committed more murders in a few days than Xiamen normally sees in a year. And there is only one way for you to get out of this country, and it’s to stay on this plane”—Jones extended a hand, in a sarcastic flourish, toward Pavel and Sergei—“with your white knights.”
The racial gibe was not lost on Zula. “I’d take knights of any color,” she said. Substituting wordplay for action. Because she knew Jones was right. This plane was her only way out.
“Okay,” Pavel announced, “we have plan for getting out.”
“How’s it going to work?”
“File flight plan now,” Pavel said. “Explain later.”
“File it then,” Jones said. “I’m going to take a bloody nap.”
A jittery and sometimes outrageous series of misunderstandings led, none too soon, to the following arrangement aboard the fishing boat: Mohammed (for that was the name of the pilot who had been left at the vessel’s controls) remained at his station, steering the vessel on a course that would, he claimed, get them out of Chinese territorial waters as quickly as possible without arousing any suspicion that they might be heading for Kinmen. Csongor, armed with the pistol, remained on the bridge with him, to keep an eye on the little GPS screen and make sure he didn’t do anything tricky. Meanwhile Yuxia and Marlon, accompanied by the cook, who gave his name as Batu, went up and down the length of the vessel, just trying to get a basic sense of where stuff was and how things worked. Batu’s name, appearance, and accent made it obvious to Marlon and Yuxia that he was a member of the Mongolian ethnic minority, and it could be guessed that he had been drawn to Heartless Island as an economic migrant. He had accepted the sudden takeover of his vessel by armed strangers with remarkable serenity and seemed to prefer the new management to the old.
They began by climbing to the flat roof of the superstructure, directly above the bridge. A large white fiberglass capsule was mounted here. Batu said that it contained an inflatable life raft. The hushed voice, cringing posture, and sidelong glances with which he explained this as much as told them that this was some kind of statutory requirement, and hence the epicenter of an elaborate complex of rules, penalties, inspectors, and bribes. Other than that, the vessel didn’t have anything in the way of a dinghy. It seemed that, in the harbors it frequented, small craft were so numerous that one could be hailed in a few moments with a wave of the hand, and so there was no need to carry one aboard. A disk-shaped enclosure mounted high up on a steel mast was said to contain a radar antenna, but Batu was skeptical about its being in any kind of working order. The same mast sported mount points for additional lights and antennas, only some of which were used. Marlon looked warily at the things that seemed to be antennas, and Yuxia could see his eyes tracing the cables down the mast and into fittings in the roof of the bridge.
