Khalid, who had been sitting quietly in the front seat this entire time, now made a remark over his shoulder, entirely in Arabic, except for the words “Mall of America.”
“My comrade makes an excellent point,” Jones said, “which is that, if we don’t have the range for Vegas, Minneapolis would be brilliant. That would be easier, right? Because farther north.”
“Depends on great circles,” Pavel said stolidly. “May I use laptop?”
Jones considered it. “This is going to take longer than I had hoped,” he said. “We have a bit of business to attend to first. But after that, yes, you may use your laptop.”
They arrived at the dock they’d used earlier. The boat had been loitering out in the channel but came in to meet them again.
The driver of the second taxi was ushered onto the boat at gunpoint, and his place behind the wheel was taken by the bomb vest wearer who’d been riding in his passenger seat. The trunks of both taxis were stuffed with cargo. The last two Middle Eastern–looking jihadists, who had been cooling their heels aboard the boat this entire time, climbed into the second taxi along with Sergei. The two taxis pulled back onto the ring road and proceeded to the airport and then to the private jet terminal—what Pavel had referred to as the FBO. Access to this was controlled by a gate with a security guard, but Pavel, in his pilot’s uniform, seemed to know the right things to say, and so they were allowed to pull through and drive right up to the side of the jet. Jones and Zula and the two pilots went directly aboard while Jones’s men, under the direction of Khalid, began loading gear from the taxis into the plane’s cargo hold.
The interior of the jet had been cleaned and spruced up to the level that people who could afford to travel in this style would naturally expect, complete with flower arrangements, chocolates, and drinks in wee fridges. The wood-paneled interior gleamed softly under artfully designed halogen lights, and after the rigors of the last few days, the leather seats gave one the feeling of nestling in a giant baby’s lap. Jones did not sit down right away but spent a few minutes walking up and down the length of the thing, alternating between awe, outrage at the sheer level of luxury, and cackling amusement.
He was up in the cockpit, ogling the state-of-the-art displays, when his phone rang. He checked the screen.
“Ah,” he said, “the only thing that could possibly make this moment sweeter.” He flipped it open, raised it to his head, and spoke in a delighted tone of voice. Zula didn’t understand his Arabic, but she could guess what he was saying: “Hey, man, you’ll never guess where I’m calling from!”
Then he spun on his heel and stepped back out of the cockpit, a look of astonishment on his face. He moved into the plane’s open doorway, as if trying to get better reception. Switching to English, he demanded: “Who’s this?”
“SOKOLOV,” SAID THE Russian into the phone. “We met earlier when I killed half of your men. Ten minutes ago I killed the other half. Now there is just you, motherfucker. A fucking piece of shit who uses phone to send better men to die. Then runs away to airport.”
Olivia, watching interestedly from the opposite side of the boat, wondered how Sokolov knew that the person he was talking to was at the airport. Maybe he could hear jet engines in the background. As it happened, they were just now swinging around the northern end of Xiamen, where the airport was; and realizing this, Sokolov started looking around, just in time to see a 747 come rocketing up off the tarmac and angle up into the night sky. Sokolov’s arm jerked toward the place where he had stashed the submachine gun and Olivia shrank down lower on the fiberglass bench, anticipating with a mixture of terror and awe and delight that he might pick up the weapon and try to bring down the plane. But then his rational mind seemed to get that particular bad idea under control. “Running away like fucking rat while brave men are dead in city below. What a fine man you are, Jones. Still have Zula? Are you being nice to her? I suggest you be nice to that girl, Jones, because when I find you, I will kill you fast if you have treated her well and if you have harmed her in any way, I will do it in a way that is not so nice. I have sent a thousand jihadists to heaven to be with their virgins, but you I am going to send to hell.” And he hung up the phone and threw it into the sea.
Now there was a few minutes’ lull during which Olivia tried to review in her mind all that had happened today. Perhaps this was a mistake. She suspected that men like Sokolov did not devote much time to this sort of introspection. It seemed, though, to be part of her academic/analytical programming, which was all that she really had to offer to this ad hoc partnership. Sokolov’s talents and abilities had been on conspicuous display during the last half hour and had made Olivia feel, from time to time, like a side of beef that he was obligated to carry around with him as part of a hazing ritual (though she had saved his life by hiring the water taxi and then talking its driver into driving it to a place where Sokolov could jump on board, and she wondered whether Sokolov understood that fact). There was a temptation to just dissolve her will into his and look on while he did stuff. But the kinds of things Sokolov was extremely good at were useful in specific, limited circumstances that, in normal life, simply didn’t arise that often. A time was coming when he would be as helpless and as dependent on her as she had been on him during the escape from the mysterious assailants on Gulangyu.