Reamde

“Maybe. Depends on officials and passports.”

Jones waved this off. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now I want to talk about flight plans.”

Another long period of him thinking.

“I would really like to make a stopover in Islamabad,” he concluded. “Let’s go over the steps involved in the Kashgar gambit.”

“This depends on what you want to do after Islamabad. If you just want to abandon plane there, then your plan would work fine. We could file a plan for Kashgar and divert to Islamabad and no one could stop us.”

“Ah, but Islamabad is not the final destination,” Jones said. “After a brief stopover there, I would most definitely want to fly somewhere else.”

“What is brief?”

“A day or two. Maybe three.”

Pavel considered it. “Could work,” he finally allowed.

But Pavel had been thinking about it for so long that he had attracted the attention, and then the suspicion, of Jones, who now drew something out of his pocket and reached down and did something that made Pavel jerk uncomfortably. Zula looked down and saw a passing streetlight reflected in the polished metal of a blade, which Jones was holding against the side of Pavel’s hand. “You can fly an airplane with nine fingers, can’t you?” Jones asked.

Pavel said nothing.

Jones went on: “I’m just a bit concerned. Until now, you’ve been answering my questions without hesitation, which is how I like it. But the last answer was a long time in coming. Which makes me think that you are starting to play chess with me. I don’t want you playing chess. You need to understand that the success of my endeavors, and your personal survival, are now one and the same thing, Pavel. It would be a terrible shame, and a very bad thing for you personally, if I found out, a few days from now, that you had done something clever and fucked me. Fucked me, that is, by exploiting some technical nicety in the world of private jet travel that I can’t possibly know about.”

“I was thinking about consequences of staying in Islamabad for several days,” Pavel allowed.

“And that is very good,” Jones returned, “provided you share all those thoughts with me honestly.”

“It is a modern airport. You cannot simply fly a jet airplane into such an airport and park it like a car at a shopping mall. It will be noticed. Records will be made of it.”

“I encourage you to keep alerting me to such complications,” Jones said. “But the fact of its being noticed might not be a bad thing. After Islamabad, I only need to make one more flight.”

“To where?”

“Almost any major city in the United States of America would do. I rather have my heart set on Vegas, but I’m prepared to be flexible.”

Khalid, who had been sitting quietly in the front seat this entire time, now made a remark over his shoulder, entirely in Arabic, except for the words “Mall of America.”

“My comrade makes an excellent point,” Jones said, “which is that, if we don’t have the range for Vegas, Minneapolis would be brilliant. That would be easier, right? Because farther north.”

“Depends on great circles,” Pavel said stolidly. “May I use laptop?”

Jones considered it. “This is going to take longer than I had hoped,” he said. “We have a bit of business to attend to first. But after that, yes, you may use your laptop.”

They arrived at the dock they’d used earlier. The boat had been loitering out in the channel but came in to meet them again.

The driver of the second taxi was ushered onto the boat at gunpoint, and his place behind the wheel was taken by the bomb vest wearer who’d been riding in his passenger seat. The trunks of both taxis were stuffed with cargo. The last two Middle Eastern–looking jihadists, who had been cooling their heels aboard the boat this entire time, climbed into the second taxi along with Sergei. The two taxis pulled back onto the ring road and proceeded to the airport and then to the private jet terminal—what Pavel had referred to as the FBO. Access to this was controlled by a gate with a security guard, but Pavel, in his pilot’s uniform, seemed to know the right things to say, and so they were allowed to pull through and drive right up to the side of the jet. Jones and Zula and the two pilots went directly aboard while Jones’s men, under the direction of Khalid, began loading gear from the taxis into the plane’s cargo hold.

The interior of the jet had been cleaned and spruced up to the level that people who could afford to travel in this style would naturally expect, complete with flower arrangements, chocolates, and drinks in wee fridges. The wood-paneled interior gleamed softly under artfully designed halogen lights, and after the rigors of the last few days, the leather seats gave one the feeling of nestling in a giant baby’s lap. Jones did not sit down right away but spent a few minutes walking up and down the length of the thing, alternating between awe, outrage at the sheer level of luxury, and cackling amusement.

He was up in the cockpit, ogling the state-of-the-art displays, when his phone rang. He checked the screen.