Her leg tensed again. Relaxed. A delicate foot tick-tocked back and forth at the end of the mattress, red toenails bright and stark against the white sheet. Her brain was working through some problem. Was it how to get Fu to stay with her, or was she instead envisioning a large map, as he would have done had he heard her having this same conversation? Was she trying to work out what important destinations a corporate jet might reach in less than four hours?
The admiral easily agreed to Fu’s use of the company plane, a Cessna Citation CJ3 registered to an Internet gaming company in Beijing. The company did not mind the use of their name on the international paperwork, and members of Admiral Zheng’s intelligence service enjoyed some degree of anonymity when they traveled. Four of Fu’s men were already in the air from Beijing. They would meet him in Tirana.
Fu ended the call and set the phone back on the nightstand beside his hat. He waited for Talia to speak.
She rolled toward him, draping her leg across his thighs again, nuzzling his neck with her button nose, kneading gently at his shoulder with her chin. “Do you really have to leave me,
“I am afraid so,” Fu said, attuned to the reaction of the muscles in her belly as she lay flush against his hip.
She groaned, pouting, pulling herself closer to him, as if getting any closer were even possible.
She did not ask where he was going, which made him doubt his earlier assessment. Instead, she asked when he was coming back.
“I am not certain,” Fu said, being honest. He did not know if he would ever return to Moscow.
She nuzzled him harder, breathing against his neck. “You have at least one more hour, no?”
He shook his head. “I must leave now.”
She pulled away, far enough to lift herself up on one elbow and stare down at his face, head tilted, auburn hair draped to one side, exposing the small diamond stud in her beautiful ear. She kept her leg where it was, hooking him gently with her heel.
“What could be so important that you have to rush away?”
“Work,” he said, leaving it at that. Now her questions would come. The angled interrogation of a spy hiding under the guise of a wistful lover.
Instead, she collapsed beside him, dejected and glum, and pressed him no further. “Very well,” she said. “I am not accustomed to this. It is usually I who leaves.”
Fu kissed her on the shoulder and got out of bed.
Talia pulled the white sheet to her chin and rolled on her side to watch him get dressed. She slipped back and forth between Chinese and Russian as she talked about all the things they might do together when he came back to Moscow.
She was still in bed, naked but for the sheet, when he shrugged on his long wool coat and pulled his gray hat snug. The odds were sixty-forty against her working for the Russian SVR — and that saved her life.
For the moment.
Commander Wan’s exposure suit gripped him like a fist as water flooded the trunk and pressure equalized with the sea outside. He climbed the short ladder and unlocked the hatch. He took a deep breath before he gave it a kick. It opened easily, and he pulled himself through, clinging to a small exterior handle long enough to shut the door behind him, throwing him into complete and utter darkness.
And then he let go.
The sonar technician aboard
“Con, Sonar. Heavy screws. Close. Zero-five-zero.”
Captain Tian pursed his lips. Perhaps the distress buoy had gotten through the ice. “Another submarine?”
“Negative, Captain. A surface ship. Icebreaker.”
In training, Commander Wan had been taught to yell “ho, ho, ho,” like Santa Claus all the way to the surface to keep venting air so his lungs would not burst as the pressure increased as he shot to the surface. In truth, he simply screamed. The huge hood shot him upward at two meters per second, as if pulled by a hoist, arms outstretched over his head like Superman. Even moving so quickly, it took almost a minute and a half for him to reach the surface. Ears squealing, his lungs on fire, his face felt as though he’d been beaten with a hammer as pockets in his sinuses struggled to deal with the rapid ascent. And the cold. It was very cold, even in the suit. He imagined for a moment that he was falling, not rising, plummeting from a fifty-story building. If he hit overhead ice, the results would be close.
