Reamde

“He’s a gentleman,” she explained, for want of any better way to put it.

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?” said Uncle Meng.

MUCH OF WHAT happened after that was out of her purview: they got loads of data about Zula. Loads more about the Russian. They guessed, but Olivia refused to confirm, that Mr. Y was Sokolov. They brought in RAF types who knew a great deal about airplanes and radar and put aeronautical charts up on the whiteboards and hooked up a flight simulator programmed to simulate that exact type of business jet and tried flying it out of Xiamen. Olivia looked out of the simulator’s virtual cockpit windows and saw the beach at Kinmen where she had been standing with Sokolov, and almost fancied that if she strained her eyes enough she might see two columns of pixels down there, blurred representations of herself and of “Mr. Y” staring up at this simulated plane. Extremely childish/romantic. The true and serious purpose of this was to investigate possible flight plans that Jones might have followed after taking off that morning. Several of these were “wargamed,” which sounded like fun until it became evident that 90 percent of the wargaming had to do with the internal doings of air traffic control centers and protocols for filing flight plans in various Southeast Asian countries. A faction badly wanted to demonstrate that Jones could have flown the jet all the way to Pakistan, but gaping holes were blasted in this scenario as expert persons pointed out all the restricted military airspace around the disputed border regions of India/China, Pakistan/India, et cetera. Another faction was all for the idea that he had taken the jet all the way to North America. But to justify this they had to piece together a somewhat tangled tale that could explain how he had evaded radar detection while flying up a crowded and well-monitored air traffic corridor, and they had to provide some justification for why the plane had initially taken off southbound—an injudicious use of fuel. They were able to do that by composing an argument having to do with domestic Chinese flight plans. No one could prove that they were wrong, but all were uneasy with the story’s complexity. By far the simplest and most plausible scenario was that Jones had simply dropped the plane down to wavetop level and flown it straight to Mindanao and ditched it. Olivia favored that theory if for no other reason than that, if true, it meant that Jones had already been on the ground and the plane sunk beneath the waves by the time Sokolov had given her the tail number, and so she couldn’t be blamed for having delayed passing it on.

To hedge their bets against the possibility that Jones had flown all the way to North America, they got in touch with their opposite numbers in Canada and the United States and suggested that it might be prudent to keep an eye peeled for the said business jet. The most likely supposition being that it might have landed on some remote airstrip or stretch of deserted road and been abandoned. Having (to borrow a term from the Yanks) covered that base, they then focused all their energies on the Mindanao scenario.

These proceedings extended over some forty-eight hours, during which time Olivia was at work almost whenever she was awake. The very meaning of “awake” was rendered debatable by the most extreme case of jet lag she’d ever experienced, possibly commingled with posttraumatic and/or postconcussion symptoms. At least half of the time she spent in that room pretending to take part in the meeting, she was devoting essentially all her energies and attention to the project of not simply dropping into a deep slumber right then and there. She found herself shifting position irritably every ten seconds or so, just to ward off sleep, and she heard the others discussing momentous and complicated topics as though eavesdropping through a very long speaking-tube on a dreadnought.