Once they got to the end of the photos, there was general discussion for a while, which did not seem to lead anywhere. Nor would it. There was nothing interesting on the phone. Only the numbers of some dead men.
Then one of them began speaking in Chinese. Haltingly. As if reading.
Sokolov clearly heard the word “Gulangyu.”
It was the piece of paper: the one that had fallen to the table alongside the phone. It was the scrap on which he had copied out Meng Anlan’s address.
This got them excited in a way that the phone hadn’t and actually led to one of them taking out his own phone and making a call to someone. There was discussion in a language that Sokolov recognized as Arabic. Of this he knew a few words, but again the only thing he could distinguish through the ceiling tiles was “Gulangyu.”
That, and “Okay,” repeated several times.
Some calculation here. He could just slide the ceiling tile out of the way and begin shooting. No doubt he’d be able to get a few of them before they got their weapons off safety and began to shoot back. But when they did shoot back, it would be very difficult for him to move from this incredibly exposed position; and all they’d have to do would be to empty clips toward his general direction and he’d be dead soon.
Moreover, he was certain now that Jones was not among the men down there. These men were speaking a Central Asian language that Jones wouldn’t know. But when they made the phone call, they switched to Arabic. They must have been talking to Jones at that point. So even if, by some miracle, Sokolov could kill every man down there, he wouldn’t get Jones.
Now, maybe they were now planning an expedition to Olivia’s apartment. If so, he wanted to stop them before they got there.
Maybe he could wait until they were out of the room, then let himself down, track them to some place from which he could launch an attack, and get them all.
But they had just given Olivia’s address over the phone to Jones. So that cat was out of the bag. Even if he could stop all of these guys, that might not protect Olivia, if Jones was now on his way to her place independently.
Now there was a thought. If Sokolov went to Gulangyu now, was there a chance he might be able to intercept Jones there, and finish this thing tonight?
His mind was made up as soon as this thought entered it.
The men below were moving purposefully now, in a hurry to be quit of this place and to embark on their next mission. Sokolov waited until he was fairly certain that they were gone, then moved the tile a little and looked around. Nothing.
But they might have suspected he was up there, left someone behind to kill him when he emerged.
So he grabbed the steel girder, pulled himself up, got his legs free, swung them down and simply dropped straight through the ceiling tile, landing on the conference table and then executing a dive and roll from there toward the doorway. Somersaulting through that, he came up in a low crouch, weapon up, and turned and looked both ways. Nothing. But—
Scared the hell out of him. A man was lying on the floor no more than ten feet away.
But he was motionless, hands zip-tied behind his back. And he was naked.
On second thought, not exactly motionless. Still twitching. A huge stain was spreading out from the vicinity of his head, which was tilted back at a funny angle. His throat had been cut.
Sokolov retrieved his spare clip and other goods from the wreckage now strewn around the conference table, but paused on his way out of the suite to shine his flashlight over the dead man’s face. He was ethnic Chinese.
Why had they taken his clothes?
Because something about them made them useful.
A uniform. The guy was a cop, or a security guard.
“NI YAO GAO de tamen ji quan bu ning.” Easy for Marlon to say. Hard for Yuxia to accomplish, locked as she was in a steel-walled cabin where everything of consequence seemed to be welded down. There was little in here that a person could smash or break. She tried smacking the glass of the porthole and nearly broke her hand. But there was a wooden chair that wasn’t nailed down, and she found that she could pick it up by its back and smash it into things. Her first few attempts went wild and crashed into the steel door, hard enough that the chair itself began to disintegrate and to send fragments of dry, broken wood bouncing back into her face. She brushed kindling out of her hair, then shifted to a double-handed grip on the largest part of the chair that was still in one piece and went back to work, finally beginning to strike home on the glass of the porthole itself. The glass wasn’t impressed. She hit it harder. Still nothing. Somehow this made her more enraged than Ivanov’s deception, being handcuffed to the steering wheel, Jones abducting Zula, being shoved facefirst into salt water.