Ershut looped the long end of the chain through the frame of the trailer hitch and brought it back to Zula’s ankle. Then he held out one hand and asked for the key to the padlock that was already there. Then demanded it. Then screamed for it. Finally someone slapped it into his hand. He undid the padlock on Zula’s ankle, swung the body away from the hasp, brought up the loose end of the chain, pushed a link over the hasp, then snapped it shut again.
At the same moment Jones dropped to one knee right next to him, holding up an open padlock that he had apparently just retrieved from the toolbox. Seeing that Ershut had already found a one-padlock solution, he dropped the lock on the ground and walked away.
Zula was left with an arm’s length of slack in the loop that secured her ankle to the trailer hitch. A scrap of plastic, a sleeping bag, a bottle of water, and a short stack of MREs were provided before they finished surrounding the truck in camouflage.
At any other time in her life she would have offered more resistance to such proceedings and would have been correspondingly heartbroken when the padlock clicked shut. But slowly growing in her mind was a feeling that the situation was shifting to her advantage. Which seemed an idiotic thing to say given her current situation: ankle chained to a trailer hitch in the wilderness of northwestern Canada, keys in the pockets of suicide bombers.
But she had begun to see hints that cooperation was slowly working in her favor. It was a hell of a lot better being here than in China. She had taken arms and killed that one guy. Killed him. Unbelievable. She had made her survival the linchpin of Jones’s plan, whatever it might be. Everything was different. The jihadists seemed oblivious to this shift.
The wall of camo being built around her grew dense enough that she could barely make out the men’s movements on the other side of it, as they occluded the slits of light that still shone through here and there. She had the horrifying thought that maybe they were actually constructing a huge bonfire and that they were about to burn her alive. But after a while she noticed she could not hear them anymore. They had shouldered their packs, tromped away, and left her alone.
The trailer hitch had become the center of her personal universe. Above was the open tailgate, providing a kind of shelter from the weather. The ground beneath her was a bed of blunt nails, the sheared-off stumps of mowed-down foliage. She devoted some time to kicking at the stalks, shearing them off level with the ground, and stomping them into the earth. Once it had become passably level, she spread the plastic out on the ground and arranged the sleeping bag on top of that, then climbed inside it. The temperature was well above freezing, but the damp chill would kill her in hours if she did not keep moving and working.
You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov. Jones had said that to her, apropos of nothing, the first evening at the mining camp. I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid. She’d been unable to make any sense at all of these statements and had put them out of her mind until now.
How could Jones possibly know what Sokolov thought of her? Jones and Zula had spent hours going over the events in the apartment building. Most of this had been him extracting information from her. But from the nature of the questions he asked, she had been able to piece together a reasonably coherent picture of how the battle had gone. It was out of the question that Sokolov and Jones could have engaged in any conversation. And if they had, they would not have been chitchatting about Zula; even in the incredibly unlikely event that Sokolov wanted to talk about her in the middle of a crazy running gun battle, Jones didn’t even know that she existed at that point.
Finally, now, she understood. The answer to the riddle had come to her while her conscious mind had been thinking about other things. Perhaps she’d gotten a clue from the way that Jones had kept an ear cocked toward the squawks coming from the CB radio in the truck. She’d seen a similar look on his face before, on the plane, at the FBO in Xiamen. He had received a call on his phone and whipped it open. His face had lit up with delight, which had immediately collapsed into shock and then settled into some kind of intense murderous fascination.
It must have been Sokolov on the other end of that call. Sokolov had killed, or at least overcome, the men Jones had sent out to murder him, and ended up in possession of one of their phones, and hit the redial button. He had made some kind of a little speech to Jones. And he had mentioned Zula. That had to be it; that was the only time that Sokolov could ever have communicated with Jones.
Why would Sokolov mention Zula in that conversation?
(It took a while to work these things out. But Zula had a while.)
Really that was two questions: first, how could Sokolov have known that Zula and Jones were together? And second, given that he knew this, why would he go to the trouble of mentioning her to Jones during their brief phone conversation?
The answer to the first question was already in her head, and she needed only to pull it up from memory. On the boat, a couple of days ago, after the scene on the pier. Jones interrogating Zula. Zula telling him about the safe house, pointing to the skyscraper, calling out the forty-third floor. And wondering whether in doing so she was sending a message to Sokolov, letting him know that she, or some other member of the group, was still alive. Because if Jones’s men went snooping around on the forty-third floor of that building, it would raise the question: How had they learned the location of the safe house?
As to the second question: Jones had answered it, in a way, with his remark You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov.
What the hell did that mean?
Maybe Sokolov had said to Jones: I hope you kill that conniving bitch! But Zula doubted this. Her interactions with Sokolov had been about as courteous and respectful as it was possible to get in an abductor/hostage relationship. She had felt, in a weird way, as though she were partners with him.