Reamde

IT WAS AN hour into the boat journey. The city was far behind. They were out in the open, ranging through a territory of broadly spaced, rocky islands. Jones had devoted much of the time to discussing matters in Arabic with the one Zula had come to think of as his lieutenant: the gunman with the binoculars and the phone. At a certain point, both men had begun to shoot glances in the direction of Zula and Yuxia, and then the lieutenant had come back and stood in front of Yuxia and caught her eye, then jerked his chin forward, as if to say, Come with me. Yuxia had in no way been receptive to the proposal. Jones had approached, sizing up the situation, and had stepped between the lieutenant and Yuxia and squatted down and explained to her in the mildest possible language that he, Jones, wanted to have a private conversation with Zula, and so Yuxia needed either to move peaceably to the bows or else jump off the boat and die—which, from his point of view, would be much preferable. “If we wanted something bad to happen to you, it would have been done already.”

And so Yuxia had gone forward with the lieutenant and found a place to sit up in the boat’s prow.

“I don’t want to have to endure any more of your Nancy Drew shenanigans,” Jones began. “It makes the cost of having you around very high, and since your value is essentially zero—well—as the saying goes—do the math.”

“Essentially zero,” Zula asked, “or zero? Because—”

“Ah, I forget you are a bright girl and inclined to parse my statements closely. Very well then. Look about yourself. Consider your situation. And then cooperate with me. Cooperate by answering my questions. Later, the same questions will be asked of Yuxia. It would be best for all concerned if the answers matched.”

Then nothing for a while. He was willing to wait all day.

Zula shrugged. “Ask away.”

“Describe the leader of the Russian military squad.”

She began to describe Sokolov’s appearance. Soon Jones was nodding, tentatively at first, then more emphatically, as a way of telling her to shut up already.

“Did you see him?” Zula asked, but it was a stupid question; she could tell that he had.

Jones looked away and ignored the question.

Her next question would have been Is he still alive? but she stifled it.

Jones went on to ask any number of other questions about Sokolov. It wouldn’t be an efficient use of his energies to show so much curiosity about a dead man. So she had her answer.

This, she realized, was what Jones and his lieutenant had been talking about. Jones had related the story of this morning’s events, as he’d seen them, and at some point, a gap had become obvious: they had not seen Sokolov die, they had not observed his body.

The notion that Sokolov was still alive gave her a thrill of irrational excitement and a sense of weird hope. He was the only person she had seen in the last few days who seemed to be equal to the situation. Was it idiotic to think that he might want to help her? But even if he did, this did her no good if he didn’t know she was alive, didn’t know where she was. He must be on the run now, even more hard-pressed than she was.

They had gone past a couple of smaller islands and seemed to have set their course for another one, slightly bigger, yet still no more than a couple of miles long.

She needed to start thinking like Uncle Richard. Not Uncle Richard when he was at the re-u but Uncle Richard when he was doing business. She had only watched him in that mode a couple of times—she didn’t get invited to meetings where he did important-guy stuff—but when she had, she’d been fascinated by the way he slipped into a different persona and zipped it up over his regular personality. What does this person want? How does it conflict, or not, with what I want? And yet never fake, never dishonest. Because people could see through that.

Right now, Jones badly wanted to know about Sokolov. Something had happened between those two men, something that had made an impression on Jones.

“I don’t know much about his background, other than the medals and so on…”

“Medals?”

“… but I interacted with him a fair amount when we took the jet down to Xiamen, and at the safe house, and while we were hunting down the virus writers.”

“Hold on, hold on,” Jones said. For his eyes had gotten a little wider, his gaze a little more intense, at each of these disclosures.

She had not mentioned, until now, the fact that Ivanov’s jet was in Xiamen.

Good. Answering his questions about those would kill another hour.

What would happen when she ran out of material?

All he had to do was google her name and he would know about Richard. Then the logical thing for him to do would be to hold her for ransom.

Of course, he didn’t know her last name yet.

The curse of having a distinctive first name: if he just googled “Zula,” combined with the name of the company where she worked, he’d probably come up with something.