Reamde

“All right.”

“The entire point of trying to put Mr. Y on that ship to Long Beach was to secure his cooperation—to get some information he supposedly had as to where Jones was going. Did you get that information from him?”

“Jones was able to get control of a business jet parked at the FBO at Xiamen Airport,” Olivia said. She stood up, turned to the whiteboard, and wrote down its tail number. “Mr. Y observed it taking off at zero seven one three hours local time.” She wrote that down too. “It headed south.”

The conference room was well supplied with younger aides, one of whom, at a nod from Uncle Meng, commenced typing furiously.

Olivia said, “You’ll find that it’s leased to, or maybe even owned by, a Russian national based out of Toronto, and that it had flown into Xiamen a few days earlier.”

“Is this Russian national the same person as Mr. Y?”

“No, Mr. Y worked for him as a security consultant.”

“That being a euphemism for the sort of chap who leaves a pile of corpses in the hall outside of your flat.”

“They deserved it,” Olivia said.

Uncle Meng raised his shorn eyebrows at this, but not in a disapproving way.

“Do we know who else is aboard that plane?”

“I don’t know the ins and outs of flying,” Olivia said, “but I’ve been turning it over in my mind and I can’t but think that its usual pilots must be at the controls. Jones must have coerced them somehow.”

“I don’t disagree, but I was really asking about the bloody terrorists.”

“Not many of Jones’s crew could have survived what happened in that building,” Olivia said. “I’m amazed that Jones did. But he can’t have been acting alone. So he must have had some other safe house or support network that he drew on later.”

“The yacht club,” said Uncle Meng, using a bit of jargon that he and Olivia had devised during the course of the operation. They’d been unable to get many details, but they were fairly certain that Jones had traveled by sea from the Philippines to Taiwan and from there to Xiamen, and that he was getting supplies and personnel through some such connection, probably small fishing vessels passing stuff back and forth, literally and figuratively under the radar.

They ended up drawing a time line on the whiteboard. There was a gap of many hours between the explosion of the apartment building and Mr. Y’s startling and timely arrival—which seen from this remove had a touching Romeo-esque quality—on “Meng Anlan’s” balcony. This was at least tangentially relevant to Jones’s movements, since it was assumed that the men who’d been sent to her apartment had been acting at Jones’s behest. Olivia made her best guess as to the time of the phone conversation between Mr. Y and Jones, of which she had overheard Sokolov’s half while they’d been out on the stolen water taxi. Sokolov had known somehow that Jones was at the airport. He had guessed that some female named Zula was with him. He had threatened to find and dispatch Jones in some exceptionally cruel style if he did anything to Zula.

After that, the time line sported another white space until 0713 in the morning yesterday, China time, when the jet had taken off. Then a very long blank space encompassing the thirty-six hours between that moment and “NOW.” A few tentative marks were later drawn into that space, denoting when Olivia had made contact with George Chow, when Sokolov had disappeared into the mist, and the spans of time occupied by Olivia’s flights from Kinmen to Taipei, Taipei to Singapore, Singapore to London.

Then a difficult pause.

“It might have been convenient for us to have known,” said Uncle Meng, “just a bit earlier than now, that Abdallah Jones was in the air, in a jet with such-and-such tail number.”

Olivia was ready for this. Had been thinking about it. “By the time I got that information out of Mr. Y, Jones had already been in the air for eight hours. Because of what happened—the gunfire—I considered the operation blown and no longer trusted George Chow, so I didn’t give him the tail number. We had to get out of Kinmen anyway. By the time we reached Taipei, Jones had been in the air for at least ten hours. I had no secure line of communications from there by which to reach you. By the time I reached Singapore, it had been long enough that Jones’s plane was almost certainly no longer airborne.”

Uncle Meng seemed unconvinced. But before this awkward topic could be developed further, one of the younger, laptop-smacking analysts piped up with the following news: “Yesterday a missing persons report was filed on someone named Zula. A Yank. Adopted from Eritrea, hence the unusual name. Female, early twenties, lives in Seattle, which is where the report was filed.”

“Get us more on her,” said Uncle Meng. “I’d love to know how she ended up on a hijacked business jet in Xiamen with Abdallah Jones. Not to mention how it is that Mr. Y, so bloodthirsty in other respects, cares how this random person is treated.”

“You’re reading Mr. Y all wrong,” Olivia said.

They all just gazed at her, hoping she’d say more.