DIRECTLY THE GUNSHOTS were engulfed in the whoosh and clap of the incoming surf, and the drone of the motor dwindled and failed as the boat built distance between itself and the island. Olivia stifled a ridiculous impulse to call out Sokolov’s name. She gathered her feet under her and squatted on the flat top of the stone pillar for a minute or so, cupping her hands to her ears, straining to hear—what?—a call for aid? Screams of terminal agony? Walkie-talkie bursts? But there was nothing, and she was left asking herself whether she had really heard anything at all.
A decent, albeit foolish, instinct told her to wade to the sound of the guns. Looking down, she saw that she would have to swim, rather than wade, and that the surf would bang her around like a pachinko ball among the pillars, foamed with knife-edged oyster shells and barnacles. She had only one course of action, which was to turn her back on whatever had just happened and make her way back toward shore. And she needed to act on it now, before the water got any deeper.
She hitched the skirt of her dress up above her waist—not that it was really going to help—and stripped off her panties and, wanting to keep her hands free, shoved one arm through a leg hole and pulled the garment up to her shoulder where it would stay put. She jumped off the pillar into the water, which came up to her navel, and began wading back in the direction of the shore. This involved some guesswork since the atmosphere had become a dense white fog salted with tiny hurtling raindrops, and it was impossible to see any landmarks, let alone the sun. The surf created swirling and unpredictable currents as it found its way among the pillars and tried to knock her legs out from under her. She moved from one pillar to the next, keeping a hand out for balance, yet trying to avoid any forceful contact between her skin and those serrated, shell-slathered columns. In the early going, she feared she might be headed the wrong way, but soon enough she noticed that the water was now lapping at her buttocks, then her upper thighs, and the going was becoming easier. She was headed back toward George Chow, at least approximately.
She then began to ask herself whether she really wanted to find George Chow.
The most paranoid explanation she could think of for the last half-hour’s events was that Chow was not an MI6 agent at all, but a Chinese agent (or what would amount to the same thing, a double agent) who had bamboozled Olivia into believing that he’d help get her and Sokolov to safety. Instead of which he had sent Sokolov directly into a trap.
The more she thought about it, though, the less she favored this theory. She guessed that Chow was a legit MI6 man but that one of two things must be the case:
1. He had been followed or ratted out during his earlier movements around Jincheng, and some of the Chinese agents who had come over on the ferry this morning had been waiting for Sokolov on the boat.
2. MI6 actually wanted Sokolov dead and had hired some local talent to make it happen.
The latter also seemed a bit paranoid. But there was no doubt that Sokolov was, for MI6, a highly inconvenient and dangerous loose end. Moreover, Olivia could envision a situation in which the Chinese government would get in touch with the British government through some deep, dark channels and say, “We are hysterically pissed off about what went down in Xiamen yesterday and we want to see heads start rolling now; otherwise, we will make things quite difficult for you.” In other words, MI6 might have made a deal to get rid of Sokolov in exchange for maintaining the status quo ante with their Chinese counterparts.
Raising the question, Was Olivia too a loose end who needed to be disposed of as part of the same deal?
She guessed not, for the simple reason that, immediately before Sokolov had kissed her good-bye, he had supplied her with information that MI6 wanted as to how Abdallah Jones might be tracked down.
“DID YOU GET it?” was the first thing George Chow said to her as she approached the car. The directness of this question, so much at odds with Chow’s usual Cambridge/Oxford diffidence, did nothing to ease her suspicions.
She had paused at the water’s edge, out of his sight, to get her underwear on and her dress down where it was supposed to be. So the absolute best that could be said of her appearance was that her fanny wasn’t showing. But Chow, who had been standing there the entire time keeping an eye on her purse and her shoes, tactfully avoided looking directly at her.
“I have all the information he has,” she said. “Or perhaps the correct form of the word is had.”
Chow gawped at her, nonplussed.
She turned her head back out toward the sea, trying to judge whether he was just playing stupid. Was it possible that he could have failed to hear the gunfire? Sound traveled in funny ways on days, and in places, like this. For all she knew, he might have sat down inside the taxi and closed the doors and rolled up the windows just to stay out of the rain, in which case it was completely plausible that he might have failed to hear what she had heard.
In any case, she was not going to give him anything useful until she was in a safe place—preferably London. “Can we please get under way?” she asked, lunging for the door handle of the taxi before Chow could open it for her. “Loitering here seems not a good idea.”
He climbed in next to her and gazed at her curiously as the taxi pulled a U-turn onto the road and headed for the airport. She stared resolutely out the windscreen for a few minutes, then, finally, turned to look him directly in the face. “Do you have anything to tell me?” she demanded.
“You’re going to have to help me out,” he said.
“If you’re working for the PRC, put a bullet in me now,” she said. “Otherwise please try to get a fucking clue because or else you’re worse than fucking useless.”
“Olivia!” he exclaimed, in an offended-professor tone. “To the best of my knowledge, all has gone exactly according to plan. If you have better information, I should be obliged—”
“Of that I have no doubt,” she said. “What I don’t know is what the bloody fuck was the plan!?”