“Olivia!” he exclaimed, in an offended-professor tone. “To the best of my knowledge, all has gone exactly according to plan. If you have better information, I should be obliged—”
“Of that I have no doubt,” she said. “What I don’t know is
This silenced him until they reached the airport—which, given the size of the island, wasn’t long. Then it was all ticket counters and security checkpoints and boarding lounges for a while. He tried to beguile her into a remote corner where they could talk, but she could see no advantage in telling him anything until they were farther from China.
They took the next flight to Taipei.
There, George Chow pursued her to the departure lounge for her next flight, which was bound for Singapore. From there she was scheduled to fly nonstop to London.
It seemed that he had received an update on his phone. She hoped to God that they were using some kind of bulletproof encryption.
“Mr. Y,” he announced, “never turned up.”
“Never turned up where?”
“On the containership to Long Beach.”
“How fucking stupid would he have to be to actually board that ship considering…”
“Which is a good thing,” Chow added, “since it was overhauled and boarded by the Chinese navy on its way out of port.”
“So the whole operation was blown,” she said.
“Yes,” Chow said, “a fact you appear to have been aware of from the very beginning.”
Shit. He was trying to put this on her now.
“You’re seriously trying to tell me you didn’t hear that fucking Wild West shootout down there at the beach.”
“I heard nothing,” he said. “But if you heard something, you should have informed me so that we could…”
“Make sure you finished the job properly?”
“
“Or give the poor bastard even more of your professional assistance?”
Silence.
“He’s better off making shift for himself,” she said, “assuming he’s still alive. Which, come to think of it, seems like a rather bad assumption.”
George Chow had gotten a bit hot under the collar.
Not that Olivia could throw stones.
“I hadn’t realized until now,” he said, “to what degree this had become a personal matter for you.”
She thought about it for half a minute or so, and then said, calmly: “I just wish we had done a better job.”
“It is a common thing to wish,” Chow said, “in our line of work. Welcome to the profession.”
“My flight is boarding.”
“Bon voyage,” he said. “Hoist a pint for me, will you?”
“I’ll probably hoist a few.”
ZULA AWAKENED TO find herself hog-tied with what she guessed were torn strips of bedsheets. A pillowcase had been placed over her head and secured in place with a snug but not tight ligature. Cold pink brightness shone through it. By squirming around and pressing her face against things she confirmed that this was shining in through the jet’s windows.
The light began to fluctuate, shuttering on and off. The engines were straining up and down. Something thudded into the bottom of the plane, or vice versa, and they bounced, then sank and thudded again, and proceeded to make the roughest landing that Zula had ever experienced. As they thumped and rumbled to a stop, its noise, and the declining scream of the engines, was drowned out by cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and then a lot of thumping, as if some sort of scuffle were taking place forward.
Someone came in. Jones. She had learned his smell and the way of his movement. He cut through the bindings that joined her ankles to her wrists. Then he grabbed her by the feet and dragged her to the edge of the bed, then pulled her to a sitting position. He untied the thing around her throat and whipped off the pillowcase. She blinked and shook her head, puffed air out of the side of her mouth to blow a loose lock of hair away from her eye. He could have helped her but chose instead to watch in amusement.
A snow-covered pine branch was pressed against the airplane window.
Khalid was still lying on his side on the floor. The amount of blood was beyond her wildest expectations. Jones was standing in it, staring into her face.
“Pavel and Sergei are dead,” he announced.
“From the crash or—?”
“Pavel, I should say, was done in by a largish tree branch that came in through the windscreen and clobbered him in the throat. Sergei fared rather better until one of my colleagues entered the cockpit with a large knife and put him down.”
He watched her carefully as this little scene played out in her mind’s eye.
“You knew it would happen,” he said. “And you understand why. Both of them had been in the Russian Air Force, you know. Dropping napalm on people like me. Touching that they made you part of the deal. I must hand it to the Russians. As much as I hate them and would like to see the entire country sterilized, it is true that they know how to treat a lady.”
Zula looked him in the eye. Making the obvious comparison.
