“Mr. C.,” Midas said, blowing a blossom of vapor into the cold, musty-smelling air. “What have you gotten yourself into?”
Clark tapped Hala on the shoulder so she’d follow when he left the rally point. Midas was twenty minutes late, which meant they’d have to try again at 1400. There was too much law enforcement roaming the livestock market to tarry in one spot for long. They needed to get somewhere out of sight — away from the dead man at the dilapidated caravanserai.
With his phone battery near zero, he had no way of knowing if Midas was free to move around the city or if he’d picked up a tail. There was always a chance he’d been compromised. Clark would cross that bridge when he came to it, but in the meantime, he decided to pay a visit to Adam Yao’s contact, a woman named Cai, who sold handwoven carpets. Her presence at the market was the reason Clark had picked it as one of the meeting points in the first place.
The authorities appeared to be looking for someone with a child, so Clark whispered where they were going and then had Hala walk a few paces ahead, mingling with the other marketgoers. She blended in well with the crowd, always alert, stepping behind a string of camels or sheep when she spied approaching officers.
The clatter of hooves and
Hala stepped close enough to tug at Clark’s sleeve, translating before putting distance between them again. “Make way.”
Clark knew the general area where Yao’s contact would be set up, but he supposed assigned spots could shuffle from week to week with so many people being taken away to camps.
To his left, a young man wearing an embroidered green doppa hat and a white apron over his coat arranged small glasses of pomegranate juice on a table to tempt passersby. A girl about Hala’s age — his daughter, perhaps — stood behind him, leaning on the handle of a juice press twice her size to fill a large metal bowl with the vibrant red liquid. Beside her, a man fanned smoke away from a line of fatty mutton kebabs that had likely come from a friend of one of the flocks the next row over.
Across from the juice stand, a cobbler tapped at his bench beside a mountain of refurbished shoes as high as his waist. Beside him, blue tarps covered a stall with shelves of assorted Uyghur pottery.
Yao’s contact, Mrs. Cai, came into view as he walked, on the other side of the blue tarp. A stout woman with high cheekbones and a sun-pinked face, she wore an ankle-length brown coat of heavy wool over broad, workingwoman shoulders. A few strands of black hair escaped her white headscarf. A Hui Muslim, one of China’s fifty-six recognized ethnicities, Cai’s ancestors had likely been Central Asian travelers from Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan on the ancient Silk Road.
Clark kept his distance, watching the young cobbler tap tiny nails into the new heel of a gnarled pair of leather shoes, while he waited for a German couple to haggle over a Central Asian rug the size of a bathmat.
They finally got the price they wanted, and walked away with their tiny rug. Mrs. Cai glanced up at Clark but didn’t acknowledge him as she stuffed the Germans’ cash into a metal box underneath her table. Clark noted the tarp over the potter stall next door blocked a good portion of the security camera on the nearby electric pole.
“Nice carpets,” he said in English, keeping his back to the camera and the pottery seller.
She smiled but said nothing.
Clark smiled back and waved a hand over the hand-knotted display rug of rich maroon and deep blue wool. “Like Aladdin’s magic carpet,” he said.
She looked at him for a long moment and then nodded. “I’ve heard it said that Aladdin’s rug was Persian.”
Clark gave her Yao’s passphrase response. “I’ve heard that as well,” he said. “I have also heard that all Persian rugs are Oriental, but not all Oriental rugs are Persian.”
“You are John?” Cai whispered. Her expression never changed, and anyone who looked on would have thought they were still discussing carpets.
Clark watched her closely. Initial meets were always touchy, but at some point, you had to commit. To paraphrase Hemingway, sometimes the only way to know if you could trust someone was to trust them. There were so many soldiers and police around that all she had to do was raise her voice and he would be toast.
“Yes,” he said. “I am John.”
Like usual, the travel alias retained his real first name, so John was the given name on his Canadian passport. Cai would not know or care if it was his real name or not.
Her head dipped in an almost imperceptible nod toward Hala, who stood watching the shoemaker a few feet away.
“The girl is safe, then?”
Clark picked up a small rolled carpet, perusing the golden fringe. “She is,” he said. “But getting her out is a problem.”
“I will help,” the woman said.
“I would appreciate anything you could do,” Clark said. “The person we were supposed to meet hasn’t arrived.”
