They were now peering at each other through a little gap under the edge of the tarp. Sokolov made a finger-crooking motion. The carter reached his hand under the tarp. Sokolov handed him the phone. The carter pulled it out and looked at it for a few moments, then nodded and thrust it back underneath. Sokolov took it and shoved it into a small external pocket on the CamelBak.
He had worked out a way that he could look out from under the edge of the tarp and thus keep an eye on where they going. From the heavy traffic of the boulevard they moved off onto a smaller and quieter frontage road that ran between it and the shore and got to a place where there was surprisingly little traffic. He could hear water lapping and smell the unmistakable stink of waterfront. He risked pulling the edge of the tarp back, but the carter, without looking back, shook his head and spoke some kind of warning that made Sokolov freeze. A few seconds later, a bicyclist whizzed past them from behind.
But a minute later the carter diverted onto a ramp that ran down onto a rickety pier, brought the cart to a stop, and lit a cigarette. After puffing on it for a minute or so, he suddenly peeled the tarp back and muttered something.
Sokolov rolled out onto his feet, pulling the garbage bag behind him. He executed a 360-degree pirouette, scanning in all directions for witnesses. Seeing none, he completed another spin, moving faster, and let go of the garbage bag. It flew about four meters and sank in water that probably would not have come up to the middle of his thigh, had he been so unwise as to wade into it. But that was enough to conceal the bag perfectly, since this water was not easy to see through, and the bag was black.
Turning his back on the splash, Sokolov noted that the carter had already discovered his tip waiting for him in the bottom of the cart: another brick of magenta bills. This disappeared instantly into the man’s trousers. He was saying something to Sokolov. Thanking him, probably. Sokolov ignored him and broke into an easy jog. In less than a minute he was out on the waterfront, headed for the hotel tower, loping from one patch of shade to the next, and trying not to listen to the screaming alarm bells that were going off in his mind. For he had spent the entire day hoping that no one would see him. And now he was being watched, pointed out, remarked on, gawked at by a thousand people. But they were not—he kept reminding himself—doing it because they knew who or what he was. They were doing it in the same way they’d stare at any Western jogger crazy enough to go out in the midday sun.
OLIVIA MADE IT all the way down to street level before she fully took in the fact that she was barefoot. She had been blown out of her shoes. They were up in the office with the Russian dog-of-war.
In a hypothetical footrace between Olivia barefoot and Olivia in high-heeled career-girl shoes, over uneven, rubble-strewn ground, it was not clear which Olivia would stand the best chance of winning. It probably depended on how long it took barefoot Olivia to step on a shard of glass and slice her foot open. Not very long, unless she was careful.
The building had an old front that faced toward the building that had just blown up, and, on the opposite side, a new front, still under construction, facing toward a commercial district in the making. Access to the latter was complicated by its being an active construction zone, but she knew how to get there, because the people who had trained her in London had drilled it into her that she must always know every possible way of getting out of a building. So instead of taking the obvious exit through the front, which she envisioned as an ankle-deep surf zone of broken glass, she doubled back and followed the escape route she had already scouted through the construction zone. This changed from day to day as temporary barriers were erected and removed between the various shops and offices that the workers were creating. Today, though, they had left all the doors open as they had fled the building, so all that Olivia really needed to do was pursue daylight while scanning the floor ahead of her for dropped nails.
There were none. Western construction workers might leave dropped nails on the floor, but it seemed that Chinese picked them up.
And so she made it out into the relatively undevastated side of the building, which backed up onto the rim of a man-made crater several hundred meters in diameter, guarded by temporary fencing. Visitors to China often spoke of a “forest of cranes,” but this was more akin to a savannah, being largely open ground with a few widely spaced cranes looming over it. Its natural fauna were construction workers, and right now, a couple of dozen of them were gazing, with horrified expressions, in her general direction.
No, they were gazing in her exact direction.
Feminist thinkers might argue with social conservatives as to whether women’s tendency to be extremely self-conscious about personal appearance was a natural trait—the result of Darwinian forces—or an arbitrary, socially constructed habit. But whatever its origin, the fact was that when Olivia walked out of a building to find a large number of strange men staring at her, she felt self-conscious in a way she hadn’t a few seconds earlier. Lacking a mirror, she put her hands to her face and her hair. She was expecting them to come away caked with dust. They came away glistening and red.