Reamde

“Count on it. The big expense in aviation is fuel. Everything else is a pittance by comparison. There is absolutely no way that they would fuel that plane up and fly it somewhere else for three days, just to save on the pilots’ hotel bill. No. Believe you me, the flyboys have been sitting in the Hyatt, watching pornography and running up their bar tab the entire time you’ve been in Xiamen, and they were probably told to be on call for a departure today. They are probably sitting there right now wondering when the hell Ivanov is going to show up.”

Zula was content to let Jones run his mouth. She saw no relevance to her in all of this.

“But Ivanov’s not going to show up, because I killed him,” Jones went on.

He got to his feet and began pacing around, thinking. The cabin was so tiny that his pacing was soon reduced to a kind of irritable shifting of weight from one foot to the other. He would not meet her eye. He was on the trail of an idea, trying to work something out. “So,” he continued, “what would be their orders, if the boss fails to show up? They can’t just leave. They have to wait for him. That’s all these guys do, is sit around and wait for their masters to snap their fingers.”

The idea that had been gestating in Jones’s head was so big and crazy that Zula was slow to perceive it. Then she had to bite the words back before blurting them out: You want the jet!

What was he thinking? He would need the pilots to fly it out of here for him. Which meant he had to obtain power over the pilots in some way.

She was conscious, suddenly, that Jones was staring at her.

“They would remember you,” he said. “They would recognize your voice on the phone.”

Zula tried to turn her face to stone. But she knew it was too late. He had seen the truth.

LESS THAN THIRTY minutes after the conclusion of the chat in Olivia’s apartment, Sokolov was back in the safe house on the forty-third floor of the skyscraper.

Everything was gone except for the trash they’d left behind, and the computer they’d purchased while they were here. When Peter’s advice not to leave this behind had fallen on Ivanov’s deaf ears, Peter had begun a project of opening its case to remove its hard drive, which he planned to take with him. But this had proceeded too slowly for Ivanov’s tastes and had been interrupted halfway through.

Sokolov was now confronted, therefore, with a partially dismantled machine, whose hard drive—a steel brick about the size of a sandwich—had been unplugged but not yet physically removed from the case. Reconnecting it was idiotically simple, since the plugs only fitted into the sockets one way. He rebooted the machine and it came up as normal. The Internet seemed to work, but he did not do any surfing, since almost anything he looked at might tip off the PSB. Olivia had written out the URL of a popular Chinese chat site that featured occasional English language conversations. He typed it into the browser’s address bar and went there, then navigated to the room she had specified. It seemed very quiet, and he didn’t see any of the coded phrases that she had told him to look for. This was hardly surprising since she probably had not even made it to the wangba yet.

What he really needed to do was sleep, so that he could be sharp tomorrow. He hated to waste the hours of darkness, during which it was easier for him to move about without drawing too much attention. But there was no reason to move about, nothing to be doing. He strolled up and down the length of the office suite a couple of times, looking out at the galaxy of colored lights spread below, the neon letters he didn’t know how to read.

He knew already that in spite of his immense tiredness, he would not sleep well.

His command had been wiped out today. All of the men under him were dead. They had wives, mothers, girlfriends back in Russia who were waiting to hear from them and who did not know, yet, that they were gone forever. He had pushed this out of his mind until now, since thinking of it was useless. He had been leading men for a long time, since he had been promoted to the rank of corporal and assigned responsibility for a squad. Given the nature of the places where he had been sent, casualties had been frequent and severe. He had written letters home to those grieving mothers and wives. He had used the same old tired verbiage about how these men had fallen while fighting for the motherland: a difficult claim to make during the invasion of Afghanistan, only slightly easier in Chechnya.

If he had pen and paper here, and the addresses of the bereaved, what comforting lies would he write? These men had been mercenaries working for a shady organization whose sole motive was profit.

As was he.