The answer to the first question was already in her head, and she needed only to pull it up from memory. On the boat, a couple of days ago, after the scene on the pier. Jones interrogating Zula. Zula telling him about the safe house, pointing to the skyscraper, calling out the forty-third floor. And wondering whether in doing so she was sending a message to Sokolov, letting him know that she, or some other member of the group, was still alive. Because if Jones’s men went snooping around on the forty-third floor of that building, it would raise the question: How had they learned the location of the safe house?
As to the second question: Jones had answered it, in a way, with his remark
What the hell did that mean?
Maybe Sokolov had said to Jones:
Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done it.
She realized this now. Calling out the wrong apartment number, sending them to 505 instead of 405: this was crazy. Suicidal. No wonder Peter had been furious with her. So furious that his next move had been to abandon her to her fate, leaving her handcuffed to a pipe. Csongor had been as shocked as Peter, but he’d taken her side in the matter because of dumb love. Why had Peter and Csongor been so incredulous at this decision that had seemed so easy, so obviously the correct move, to Zula?
Because Peter and Csongor had not been privy to the almost subliminal exchanges of glances and—not even anything as obvious as glances or words, but hidden signals in postures, facial expressions, the way that Zula, getting on an elevator with a group of Russians, had always chosen to stand by Sokolov’s side. Zula and Sokolov were allies. He would protect her from whatever fate Ivanov had in mind for them. And, sensing that she was under his umbrella, she had felt safe enough to send them to 505 when she knew that the Troll was in 405.
And she could do it again. She
That was why she had relaxed and shown no emotion when Abdul-Wahaab had padlocked the chain around her ankle. A little thing. But a little thing that Jones had noticed, even if—
Could Jones really be that easily manipulated? He seemed so smart in all other ways.
That explained it. Jones was at a loss to understand why Sokolov, his personal bête noire, thought enough of Zula to make her a primary topic of their one brief phone exchange. He had not observed the way that Zula and Sokolov had grown accustomed to each other during the days they’d been together; and even if he had, he might not have sussed it out, any more than Peter or Csongor had. Consequently, ever since hearing Sokolov’s voice coming out of that phone, Jones had been chewing on this, trying to figure out what Sokolov saw in her; and when she had killed Khalid, he had reckoned that this was the answer. He believed that Sokolov’s respect for Zula was rooted in an appreciation of Zula’s fighting spirit or her prowess with weapons or some other such quality: the kind of thing that a man like Jones would suppose that a man like Sokolov would hold in esteem.
And this left Jones wide open. Ready to be blindsided by the same tactics Zula had used with Sokolov. The difference being that in the case of Sokolov they hadn’t been tactics, just Zula instinctively trusting the man. The question now was: Could she bring about a similar effect in Jones’s mind by doing similar things in a way that was utterly calculated and insincere?
“ONE DAY, MY son, all of this could be yours,” Egdod intoned, swooping low over the Torgai Foothills. He was addressing an Anthron—a man, basically—whom he was holding by the scruff of the neck. The Anthron was dressed in the most nondescript possible woolen cloak. Between his bare feet (for he had declined to spend virtual money on shoes or even sandals), the mature coniferous forest of the Torgai streamed by, just a few hundred meters below.
“Far be it from me to question your
“There!” Egdod called out, banking into a tight turn and spiraling down toward an outcropping of basalt. “Just at the base of those rocks.”
