Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“All right,” Jones said, “since this is all about you lot now, and what you want, have you considered what is going to happen to you if you get arrested in China? Because you are responsible for having flown some rather bad chaps into the country, aren’t you?”

“Obviously we would like to get out of China,” Pavel allowed.

“And soon, I should think, since before long they’ll be pulling Ivanov’s corpse out of that basement and figuring out who he is, and then they’ll connect him to this plane, which is just sitting here, with us in it.”

“Agreed.”

“We can’t get out on an international flight plan because the immigration officials will want to come on board and check our documents,” Jones said.

“Yes.”

“So we have no choice but to file a domestic flight plan, wait for six hours, and then, for lack of a better word, cheat,” Jones said. “In the sense that we can’t actually land the plane at another airport in China or we’re dead. So we have to divert from that plan, don’t we, and get to some place where we have some chance of surviving.”

“Something like that, yes,” Pavel said.

Jones spread his hands out wide. “Enlighten me, then,” he said. “How can we do that?”

Pavel considered it and discussed it in Russian with Sergei. Zula realized, after a point, that the discussion would go on for a little while, so she got up and used the toilet. Once she’d sat down, she realized that she had sort of ducked past the mirror without looking at it, as if her own reflection were a deeply estranged frenemy with whom she could not possibly make eye contact. So she forced herself to turn her head to the side—for in this high-luxe bathroom, the entire bulkhead was a mirror—and look herself in the eye. She was startled to discover none other than Zula Forthrast looking right back at her. Same old girl. A little bit the worse for wear, of course. Older. Not in the sense of old-old, but rather of having seen more during her life. She wondered what others saw in her; why Csongor, of all people, would go to such lengths to protect her. Why Jones was keeping her around. Why Pavel and Sergei had decided—spontaneously, she thought—to include her in the deal they were striking with Jones. But most of all, why Yuxia would do what she had done. Not nose-diving the van into the boat, for that had been an accident, but ramming the taxi on the pier and taking the airbag right in her face.

Because in a sense the only worthy thing Zula had done all day had been to try to help the hackers upstairs. And Yuxia had not seen that. Neither had “Manu” and the other hackers—the beneficiaries. Only Csongor. But maybe he had told the story to the others?

Or maybe none of it had been that rational. Maybe Yuxia didn’t know about the SOS with the fuse. Maybe this was all down to some supernatural effect, such as grace, that flowed through people’s lives even if they didn’t understand why.

Which led her to a moment, there on the toilet, looking sideways into the mirror, of something akin to prayer. Her earlier thoughts on this topic still stood and so it was not a hands-together, now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep sort of prayer. More of an act of will. Because if there were some power like grace, like the Force, or Providence, or what-have-you, that had been at work in the world today, then it needed to find its way now to the boat where Qian Yuxia was being held captive and it needed to go one step further in whatever mysterious chain of transactions was playing out here. And if it were possible for a conscious effort of will on Zula’s part to make that happen, then she was willing it to happen.

She pulled herself together, splashed water on her face, and came back out into the jet’s cabin. Pavel and Sergei were still talking in Russian, panning and zooming around digital maps of the world on the big screen. Jones was on his feet, phone clamped to his head, finger in his ear, looking dumbfounded. He talked in Arabic for a while, his voice and his eyes dull. Not defeated, she thought, so much as completely exhausted. Then he hung up.

“You’re free to go,” he said, looking Zula in the eye.

“What are you talking about?” she said. Because he could show a kind of mean sarcasm, and this seemed like one of those times.

“The boat,” he said, “with your girlfriend on it…”

“Yes?”

“Has disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dis. Appeared. Without a trace. Not responding on the wireless. Not answering phone calls. No sign of wreckage. No distress call.”

“You know this how?”

“Those lads who dropped us off at the dock,” Jones said. “They went back to the island, and there is simply nothing there.”

Zula badly wanted to show how happy she felt, but certain matters had to be settled first. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because it doesn’t matter,” Jones said. “You’re going to stay on the plane anyway.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. Because you’re in China illegally. You’re associated with people who have committed more murders in a few days than Xiamen normally sees in a year. And there is only one way for you to get out of this country, and it’s to stay on this plane”—Jones extended a hand, in a sarcastic flourish, toward Pavel and Sergei—“with your white knights.”

The racial gibe was not lost on Zula. “I’d take knights of any color,” she said. Substituting wordplay for action. Because she knew Jones was right. This plane was her only way out.

“Okay,” Pavel announced, “we have plan for getting out.”

“How’s it going to work?”

“File flight plan now,” Pavel said. “Explain later.”

“File it then,” Jones said. “I’m going to take a bloody nap.”

A jittery and sometimes outrageous series of misunderstandings led, none too soon, to the following arrangement aboard the fishing boat: Mohammed (for that was the name of the pilot who had been left at the vessel’s controls) remained at his station, steering the vessel on a course that would, he claimed, get them out of Chinese territorial waters as quickly as possible without arousing any suspicion that they might be heading for Kinmen. Csongor, armed with the pistol, remained on the bridge with him, to keep an eye on the little GPS screen and make sure he didn’t do anything tricky. Meanwhile Yuxia and Marlon, accompanied by the cook, who gave his name as Batu, went up and down the length of the vessel, just trying to get a basic sense of where stuff was and how things worked. Batu’s name, appearance, and accent made it obvious to Marlon and Yuxia that he was a member of the Mongolian ethnic minority, and it could be guessed that he had been drawn to Heartless Island as an economic migrant. He had accepted the sudden takeover of his vessel by armed strangers with remarkable serenity and seemed to prefer the new management to the old.

They began by climbing to the flat roof of the superstructure, directly above the bridge. A large white fiberglass capsule was mounted here. Batu said that it contained an inflatable life raft. The hushed voice, cringing posture, and sidelong glances with which he explained this as much as told them that this was some kind of statutory requirement, and hence the epicenter of an elaborate complex of rules, penalties, inspectors, and bribes. Other than that, the vessel didn’t have anything in the way of a dinghy. It seemed that, in the harbors it frequented, small craft were so numerous that one could be hailed in a few moments with a wave of the hand, and so there was no need to carry one aboard. A disk-shaped enclosure mounted high up on a steel mast was said to contain a radar antenna, but Batu was skeptical about its being in any kind of working order. The same mast sported mount points for additional lights and antennas, only some of which were used. Marlon looked warily at the things that seemed to be antennas, and Yuxia could see his eyes tracing the cables down the mast and into fittings in the roof of the bridge.