She and whoever was at the other end of this connection—presumably a handler in London, routed through an untraceable connection to the instant messaging network—were using a completely open and public channel to pass messages in the clear. They had to be coy. HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER was written in a prearranged code, using characters calculated not to arouse the interest of the PSB. She spent a minute or two squatting there and puzzling over SEE YOU AT ELEVEN before realizing that it probably meant exactly what it said. Kinmen was connected to Taiwan by a long-range ferry, used mostly by mainland Chinese tourists, and by regular air service. The ferry wasn’t much use in these circumstances, but it would be easy for the British embassy in Taipei to send someone out on a commercial flight to meet with her at the airport.
This was a virgin phone with no traceable connections to Olivia or anyone else, and she was on Taiwanese soil anyway, and so she felt no hesitation about using its Internet connection to surf for airline schedules. It seemed that a flight from Taipei was coming in to the local terminal at 10:45.
She returned to the bunker to find it empty. But after a bit of looking around, she found Sokolov standing near the edge of the minefield, gazing up the length of the beach. Back toward Xiamen. He checked his watch, then turned to look at her.
She reached out with one hand and found his. He did not snatch it out of her grasp, and so she pulled on it and began walking.
She led him back to the bunker. Still not looking at him, she got up on tiptoe and steadied herself with an elbow crooked around the back of his neck and carefully touched her lips to his. Her heart beating hard, more from fear than from passion, since she was afraid that he would turn away, reject her. That his not taking advantage of her last night was simple lack of interest. But his hand came around against the small of her back, and it became clear that he had only been waiting for her permission.
She had wondered how it would feel having sex on the bed of matted vines, which had become flattened during the night, but it ended up not being an issue since they did it standing up, with her back against the wall. After months of hard work in Xiamen, characterized by nothing but loneliness and anxiety, it felt so good that it brought her almost to a kind of weeping and grateful hysteria. For his part, Sokolov, after he had let her gently down, tumbled back onto the floor, slapping it with both hands, and collapsed as if crucified under the beam of sunlight coming in through the door.
“I am no longer poor fucked Russian,” he stated, after ten minutes or so.
“I’ve got news for you, honey—”
“No. Alluding to yesterday’s conversation. In flat.”
“Well, you’re out of China at least,” she said, “but—”
“No. I have useful information,” he said.
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“What kind of useful information?”
“Information that can help your employer find Abdallah Jones,” he said.
“Aha.”
Sokolov got his legs under him, rolled up to a low squatting position. He reached for his trousers, which like many other items of clothing had gone ballistic a few minutes ago and remained sprawled in their positions of impact. He stood up and pulled them on. “Because,” he said, “you have message, no?”
“How’d you guess?”
“Heard phone vibrate.”
He politely looked the other way as she stood up and mounted a search-and-rescue operation for her clothes. Crisscrossing the floor of the bunker on filthy, bare feet, she thought about the amount of effort and money she devoted, every day, to personal grooming, and how completely beside the point all of it had been during her last two sexual liaisons.
“Why did you wait until now to tell me?” she asked.
“Because until now we were fucking,” he pointed out.
“No, I mean why didn’t you tell me last night?”
“Because last night I did not have information.”
“How could you possibly have obtained any information this morning?”
“This must remain a mystery,” he said, “for now.” But he glanced upward as he said it, as if the answer were written in the sky above the Xunjianggang.
ZULA FELT THE jet thumping and bucking underneath her and startled awake, fearful/hopeful that they had come under some sort of police assault. But in the first moments after she opened her eyes, she was astonished to see buildings and parked planes streaking past them, and bright sunlight glancing in low over the sea.
She was on a plane, or something else that moved pretty damned fast. She didn’t even know whether it was landing or taking off.
How could the sun be up? Hours must have passed while she was slumbering.
The fact that she was lying in a king-sized bed did nothing to help her get her bearings.
The ground was definitely falling away.
