“I beg your pardon?”
Pavel sighed, then held his hands out in front of him as if gripping a globe about the size of a pumpkin. “You see—”
Jones interrupted: “I know what a bloody great circle route is.”
“Okay, good. Is much easier to explain then.”
“Then explain it.”
“If you draw a great circle from here to Calgary, it passes up along the coast of China. South Korea. Sakhalin Island. Kamchatka. Then along the coast of Alaska and British Columbia for some distance. Then it cuts across the mountains and down into Calgary. All of this is a very commonly used air travel corridor, you understand? All of the jets between Asia and North America follow such a route. It does not pass over any sensitive areas. However. If you draw a great circle from here to Toronto, is totally different. It goes up across China. Then North Korea—very bad. Then a large part of Siberia that is definitely not a normal air traffic corridor. To get approval for such a flight plan is impossible. So we must follow the normal corridor until we are over western Canada. From there things get easier. But then we are so far from following a great circle route that it becomes necessary to refuel. Most efficient place to refuel is Calgary. That is where we filed the flight plan.”
“You say it has already been filed?”
“Of course.”
“You say ‘of course,’ ” Jones said, working it out, “because of that six-hour delay you mentioned. Ivanov was a man in a hurry. He wanted to be ready to get out of here at a moment’s notice. Which is a difficult thing for you to reconcile with the six-hour delay mandated by the Chinese government. So you had a flight plan all set up and ready to go in advance.”
“This is what I do,” Pavel said, “when I am waiting in hotel. My job.”
“So it would be possible for you to go directly to the airport now and get on that plane and start flying in the general direction of Calgary immediately.”
“Not in general direction. Exact direction. But yes. No problem for us to get clearance for this.”
“But that is obviously an international flight.”
“Yes.”
“So the immigration officials will want to come on board and stamp passports.”
“Yes.”
“Did you say something about a passenger manifest before?”
“Yes. We supply such document to officials.”
Jones winced. “I’ll bet it has the names of a lot of Russians on it. That would be unfortunate, since all those Russians except for one are now dead.”
“Not a problem,” Pavel said. “Passenger manifest is separate document from flight plan. Goes to different officials. Does not have to be filed in advance. You see, manifest changes all the time. Someone changes plans at last minute, decides not to fly, or someone is added. We file manifest immediately before departure.”
“All right,” Jones said, “so the worst case is that by playing some games with the manifest we might be able to take off and head in the direction of Canada.”
“Maybe. Depends on officials and passports.”
Jones waved this off. “We’ll worry about that later. Right now I want to talk about flight plans.”
Another long period of him thinking.
“I would really like to make a stopover in Islamabad,” he concluded. “Let’s go over the steps involved in the Kashgar gambit.”
“This depends on what you want to do after Islamabad. If you just want to abandon plane there, then your plan would work fine. We could file a plan for Kashgar and divert to Islamabad and no one could stop us.”
“Ah, but Islamabad is not the final destination,” Jones said. “After a brief stopover there, I would most definitely want to fly somewhere else.”
“What is brief?”
“A day or two. Maybe three.”
Pavel considered it. “Could work,” he finally allowed.
But Pavel had been thinking about it for so long that he had attracted the attention, and then the suspicion, of Jones, who now drew something out of his pocket and reached down and did something that made Pavel jerk uncomfortably. Zula looked down and saw a passing streetlight reflected in the polished metal of a blade, which Jones was holding against the side of Pavel’s hand. “You can fly an airplane with nine fingers, can’t you?” Jones asked.
Pavel said nothing.
Jones went on: “I’m just a bit concerned. Until now, you’ve been answering my questions without hesitation, which is how I like it. But the last answer was a long time in coming. Which makes me think that you are starting to play chess with me. I don’t want you playing chess. You need to understand that the success of my endeavors, and your personal survival, are now one and the same thing, Pavel. It would be a terrible shame, and a very bad thing for you personally, if I found out, a few days from now, that you had done something clever and fucked me. Fucked me, that is, by exploiting some technical nicety in the world of private jet travel that I can’t possibly know about.”
“I was thinking about consequences of staying in Islamabad for several days,” Pavel allowed.
“And that is very good,” Jones returned, “provided you share all those thoughts with me honestly.”
“It is a modern airport. You cannot simply fly a jet airplane into such an airport and park it like a car at a shopping mall. It will be noticed. Records will be made of it.”
“I encourage you to keep alerting me to such complications,” Jones said. “But the fact of its being noticed might not be a bad thing. After Islamabad, I only need to make one more flight.”
“To where?”
“Almost any major city in the United States of America would do. I rather have my heart set on Vegas, but I’m prepared to be flexible.”