“For example?”
“I know of thirty-three.”
“You don’t want to share specifics?”
“I’d be happy to,” he said and began to recite their names and the locations of their murders. “Sandra Harrison, Tallinn; Pak Eun, Daegu; Lorenzo Pellegrini, Cairo; Andy Geriev, St. Petersburg; Mia Salazar, Brasilia . . .”
Li Qide had accepted it, just as he’d accepted the other targets on the list: the recently completed Koolhaas-designed Central Television Headquarters on Guanghua Road, the Dongchen branch of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau in the Daxing Hutong, and one Olympic venue, the main building of the Shunyi Aquatic Park.
It was one thirty, an hour before the moment. He unscrewed the pipe and laid out the rifle pieces. Outside, bicycles filled the street as people took care of last-minute errands before rushing home or to bars to watch the Games on television.
“It has to be before the Games,” Li Qide had said.
“The whole idea was to humiliate them on the world stage, wasn’t it?”
“That was before we knew you wanted to blow up an apartment building. No, we’ll do it a few hours before the Games start, so that the civilian deaths will be minimal.”
Not only were most people out of their apartments at this hour, but the crowds on the street would camouflage the young men and women with canvas backpacks full of C-4 who dropped them in calculated spots along the buildings’ walls. Even Alan, as he tested the scope by examining the perimeter of the building, had trouble keeping track of people. Nor could he find those telltale backpacks against the corners of the building, but with an hour to go he knew better than to panic.
He’d gotten the rifle together when the
rat-a-tat
on his door started and an old woman’s voice asked a hesitant, measured question. He ignored it, rechecking the scope, but the woman tapped again, then banged with her fist, prattling on and then, to his terror, trying the door handle. For an instant, he couldn’t remember if he’d locked it, but he had.
There was a pause, during which she perhaps considered her options, then she banged again, following with a grating Mandarin singsong—some kind of demand. There was a definite sense of entitlement to her unintelligible prattle.
He got up and placed the rifle inside a creaky wardrobe, then stood beside the door. He interrupted her stream with a “Wǒ tīng bù dǒng”—I don’t understand.
Silence.
He gave up on his phrasebook Chinese and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak Mandarin. Do you speak English?”
She began with a long, surprised, “Oooh,” then started up again, louder, angrier. He used the key on the door, pulled it open a crack, and as he moved his face to the opening the door crashed against him. It wasn’t the force of an old woman but of a young man’s boot. The handle struck him just below the sternum, knocking the air out of him as he stumbled back onto the floor, trying to catch air, and when he looked up at the four uniformed soldiers rushing in, shouting in mangled English for him to
Stay dair!
he saw the old woman between their forms, outside his door, against the railing, arms crossed tightly as if holding her old, heavy body together, and her face was filled with hate.
Then the bag was pulled over his head and they began to move.
He was dragged across concrete and dirt, thrown into a truck and driven through streets full of voices and car horns and smells of food that made him queasy, the stink of car exhaust and burning rubber, and then, surprisingly, the smell of fresh grass, and then concrete dust. Again he was dragged, this time into a building and up stairs, before being thrown onto a floor. The hood was removed, and he blinked in the sudden light of an overhead bulb, slowly adjusting to the sight of a small, dirty, windowless room. Concrete walls, concrete floor and ceiling. The soldiers left him there, then closed and locked a simple wooden door.
After about fifteen minutes, he still hadn’t moved from his awkward position on the floor, and he started to laugh. His whole life, he thought, had led to that apartment window and that rifle. It was funny, really, that something you’d worked your whole life toward could be so easily made pointless.
There were tears, too, and he knew he really had spent too long with those amateurs in the mountains. It was the same old story. One or two of them had been letting the police know everything, and they had all made the long journey to Beijing only to reach an ambush. No one had made it through. The mistake had not been theirs, for this sort of thing had to be expected. The mistake had been his, giving them an operation he knew they weren’t ready for, and the whole folly had been the result of his desperation. The only reason he was still alive was because Xin Zhu would want some information from him. The others, the four in their trucks, the other three with their rifles—they were dead. The others who had been assigned to support the operation were probably dead, too, or soon would be. Twenty? Thirty? Thirty-three?
His hysteria had ebbed by the time a soldier opened the door and Xin Zhu came inside and told the soldier to leave them alone.
He really was enormous. All the reports had said this—Henry Gray had talked on and on about it, and Andrei Stanescu had been in awe of it—but that didn’t prepare him for the way the Chinaman seemed to fill the small room, making Alan feel as if he should press himself against the wall. Yet the anger kept him from showing anything. Thirty-three spots turning from red to blue encouraged him to climb to his feet, step forward a little, and consider how to take the man down with his hands. It was possible, and once he’d even done such a thing in a pomegranate orchard west of Kandahar in the Arghandab district. It had been hard and long and brutal, but he’d done it and after getting sick in the dirt he’d slept that night without dreams. Anything was possible.
Perhaps aware of how he was making Alan feel, Xin Zhu didn’t come close. He remained standing at the door and regarded him with resignation. Then he said, “You’re a lucky man.”
“Not as lucky as you, apparently.”
Xin Zhu didn’t bother replying to that. He said, “The bombs have been tracked and disposed of. Your comrades have been rounded up. Your little operation has been swept clean.”
“Yet here you are. A chancy move.”
“Oh, I’m not worried about myself. Not regarding you, at least. The men on the other side of this door will hurt you before you could ever hurt me.”
It didn’t sound like a bluff.
Xin Zhu said, “Before you go, I wanted to meet you. I wish I could apologize, but we both know I wouldn’t mean it. I did as I thought best at a certain moment, and it’s the nature of things that we have no choice but to live with the repercussions of our actions. I’ll be living with mine for years to come. You’ll probably have to do the same.”
Philosophy in a cell
, Alan thought. “Enough, okay? We’re not here to make friendly. Just get it over with.”
Xin Zhu nodded, looked a moment at his fat fingers, then said, “The favors are finished. I’m not going to live my life giving things to him.”
“Who?”
“He hasn’t earned it.”
“Who?” Alan asked again, but Xin Zhu wasn’t interested in explaining anything. He turned and opened the door and walked slowly out without another word. As he was shutting the door, though, Alan noticed that the corridor beyond it was completely empty. Xin Zhu had been bluffing after all.
By the time they came for him, he’d spent hours going through everything again. He saw his mistakes, saw how his emotions had gotten the best of him, but perhaps it was his military training that convinced him that regrets are to be buried. That which cannot be changed should not be changed. More philosophy in a prison cell. He did not think about what would come next, for that, too, could not be changed. Xin Zhu had made his decision, and everything else was beside the point.
One thing remained with him: his belief that when he was finally declared dead, either with or without the evidence of a corpse, Penelope would suffer the most, and he wished he could send word to her. He wished he had at least asked Xin Zhu for that.
Three men in plainclothes came for him. Two were armed with pistols, while the third only led the way through what he now saw was a bare apartment building. Outside, a nighttime field, the broken teeth of new buildings rising not so far away. The building he’d been in, he now saw, was an unfinished ten-story. Off to the left, over the city, he saw a distant display of fireworks opening the Olympic Games.
They drove him around the city, where the traffic was sparse. Not caring anymore, Alan asked the men if someone was videotaping the Games for them. He asked in English, French, German, and Arabic but received no reply.
Another field, a dirt road rough with holes, and a white twin-engine plane on a hidden runway. His three guides left him at the bottom of the stairs and drove off, and only as he was climbing toward the hatch did he truly understand that he wasn’t going to die. A large, heavily muscled black man was waiting for him.
The man never introduced himself, but he was friendly. He offered Alan a drink and served the water Alan asked for with a modest smile. He had an African accent that Alan couldn’t place, but when he asked the man said, “I’m from the dark continent. That’s all you need to know.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
The man smiled in a way that made him want to laugh. “Strap yourself in.”
While they were airborne, he washed as best he could in the small bathroom, then accepted a charcoal suit and pink tie that fit him perfectly.
He never saw the pilots, and when they landed in Hong Kong, the cockpit door remained shut. The man led him down to the tarmac, and they crossed to another twin-engine, a gray Lockheed Martin with French markings. The procedure there was the same—this time, a plate of salmon and mixed vegetables was offered—and he never saw these pilots either.
By then, morning had risen, and he could chart their movement westward over water and mountains. When they descended again it was to a runway half-obscured by red sand in what he thought from his vague navigation might be Pakistan. When he asked where they were, his host smiled and said, “You know? I’m not entirely sure myself. But I think we’d better get on the next one before it leaves without us.”
The next plane was larger, an Airbus A320, with more than a hundred seats, but, as before, they were its only passengers. This time, Alan slept for a few hours before his guide woke him with a gentle shake of the shoulder. “We’re here.”
When he looked out the window, he realized they had already landed on a strip of old runway lined with overgrown grass and boulders. Around them were mountains. Instead of another plane, a red, windowless van awaited them, and it had Italian plates. Two grimy-looking men sat in the front with the engine idling, and he and the African got into the rear through a sliding door on the side. There were two benches, one against either side, and a wall between them and the drivers. When the man closed the door, they were in blackness. The blackness began to move.
“It’ll be a long trip,” he heard the man say. “Just try to bear it in style, okay?”
“Yet you still don’t want to tell me where we’re going?”
“He prefers security over comfort.”
“He?” Alan said, thinking of the
he
to whom Xin Zhu wanted to give no more favors.
“Just a few hours,” said the man; then a small light illuminated the dirty interior as he turned on his telephone. The man made a call, saying in French, “We’re on our way.” Pause. “Yes. Everything.” Pause. “Okay.” He hung up and, back in darkness, said, “He wants you to know everything’s fine. I’m supposed to make sure you know that. Don’t be scared.”
“Why does he care what I feel?” Alan asked after a moment.
“I don’t know if he does, but he seems to think that you’re very good at escaping if you want to.” Pause. “Is that so?”
“Probably the only thing I’m good at.”
As promised, the drive did take a long time—more than four hours—and he felt the van shake over every bump and pot hole along the way. Sometimes they sped down highways, while other times they slowed for traffic, perhaps in cities, and by the time they finally stopped his legs were asleep. The man said, “Are we ready?”
Alan punched at his tingling thighs. “Sure.”
The man pulled open the side of the van and stepped out. Alan squinted painfully, raising his hand to stop the flood of sunlight. All was white for a moment, then it faded to reveal a bank called BHI on a slice of stone sidewalk. “Come, please,” said the man, reaching out a hand.
Alan didn’t want to touch anyone, so he stepped down on his own and smelled water in the air. To the right and left an old European street ran wobbly along the edge of a harbor, and only when the man took him to a carved door beside the bank, the van now fleeing to expose buildings on the other side of the water, did he recognize that he was in Geneva.
His guide rang a bell and waited until it buzzed before pushing in and leading Alan up a narrow flight of stairs. A landing with two doors, then another flight of stairs. They took five sets of stairs to the top level, and on the way up another figure trotted down. As he neared in the semidarkness Alan had to squint to make out the face. When he did, he felt a sharp pain in his chest. The man said, “Hello, Alan.”
“Hoang,” Alan said, catching his breath. “What are you doing here?”
Tran Hoang placed a hand on his shoulder, reminding him of his sentimental question in Ferndale.
Is that what you have with your wife?
Then he was gone, and the pain in Alan’s chest spread like a cardiac arrest before fading. Hoang, he suspected, was the reason Zhu had been prepared for him.
At the top, there was only one door. The African knocked on it, and a familiar voice said, “Come in.”
Even though he could place the voice, he was still unprepared for the sight of Milo Weaver standing, just beyond a cramped foyer, in a living room full of sunlight. Around him, on the floor, were boxes full of files, and more files spread in a mess across a coffee table, a sofa, and two chairs as well as resting on top of a small television. A radio in the corner of the room was quietly playing French pop music. Milo didn’t seem aware of the incongruity of the scene as he walked quickly over, saying, “Thanks, Dalmatian,” and grabbed at Alan’s hand, shaking it. “It
is
good to see you in one piece.”