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“Three men,” Don Fernando said. “The pilot, the navigator, and me. That is the way it will be reported.”
She whirled on him. “And you’ll just what? Disappear from ru
“It’s a leap of faith,” he said, turning away. “Come now. Our time has run out.” He broke out a pair of parachutes and handed one to her. “Or do you want to die in the crash?”
“I can’t believe this is happening.”
“But it is.” He shrugged into his harness, tightening the bands across his chest. As if noticing her hesitation for the first time, he frowned. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“I don’t understand...”
“Then kill me now and have done with it. You’re ru
Her frown deepened. “He said you wanted to take everything away from him.”
“How much do you know about his empire?”
She shook her head.
“Well then, there is no reason for his comment to affect you.”
She thought about her meeting with Maceo Encarnación at the Place de la Concorde, encircled by constant traffic, the shouts and laughter of unknowing tourists. In the shadow of the guillotine and the Reign of Terror. “But it did.”
“And so...” He spread his hands wide. When she didn’t answer, he stepped toward her, taking the parachute out of her hands and manipulating the straps over her shoulders. But when he began to cinch the wide strap across her waist, she gripped him.
“Wait.”
Their eyes met.
“Last chance, Martha,” he said. “You must decide now. Stay with Maceo Encarnación or take the first step into that new begi
He removed her hands and cinched the waist strap tight. “It seems to me that your past has been defined by following a series of men.” He led her to the door, put his hand on the huge metal bar that would unlock it. “Continue or change, Martha. Your choice is as simple as that.”
“You call this a simple choice?”
“Call it what you will, it’s yours to make.” His voice softened. “No one can help you with this decision, Martha. I wouldn’t even try.”
She took a breath. She thought about the lighthouse, her father’s grave, her mother lost in a world where Martha was still a child, still a part of her life. She stared into Don Fernando’s eyes, wanting to read something there, but he was true to his word: he wasn’t going to try to influence her. And all at once, she realized that he was the first man in her life who hadn’t sought to manipulate her.
She nodded then and replaced his hand on the door’s locking bar. “Let me,” she said.
He laughed and kissed her on both cheeks with great affection. “Best I show you something first.”
“You said we were out of time.”
He guided her back up the aisle to the front of the plane, opened the door to the cockpit, and showed her the pilot and navigator alive and well in their seats.
“Better strap in, boss,” the pilot said. “We’ll be landing in five minutes.”
Charles Thorne turned, restless in bed.
The truth of the matter was he hated and feared Li Wan, yet the two men were bound together by the stream of secrets they passed back and forth as if through a delicate membrane. They were conduits; they needed each other. Thorne turned again, trying and failing to get comfortable.
Worse, by far, was that he envied Li Wan. He had been in love with Natasha Illion, the Israeli supermodel, Li’s inamorata. And he could swear that Li knew. Each time they were together, Li presented Natasha as if she were bathed in a follow spot, or so it seemed to him. And Natasha, perhaps being in on Li’s little ru
He was certain that Li, and possibly Natasha as well, were laughing at him on their nights out, as if he were an animal they constantly taunted through the bars of his cage.
The light of the bedside clock penetrated his eyelids. Barely an hour since he had returned from his 4 am rendezvous with Li at the restaurant in Chinatown. The General Tso’s chicken lay in his stomach like a ball of wax, unmoving and indigestible.
He turned once more, then rolled to the side of the bed and sat up. Today there was to be no respite in sleep, no way out of the noose tightening inexorably around him. Of course, he could ask Soraya for immunity from the coming phone hacking tsunami, but that would mean crawling back to her on his knees, groveling like the basest supplicant. He would be in her power forever, and he knew from bitter experience that she could be merciless when she felt she had been wronged. But what if she was his only recourse? Li had made noises about helping him, but he’d rather be tied to a third rail than be in that bastard’s debt.
No, he thought now, as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, Soraya was his last best hope of getting out of the water before the Justice Department investigation sank all boats.
Then he remembered that she was in the hospital, that she was carrying his baby, and all at once, the General Tso’s chicken moved inside him in an altogether unpleasant ma
He jumped up, and, sprinting, just made it across his bedroom, over the bathroom tiles, to the toilet before vomiting with such force that he felt as if his intestines had turned inside out.
Li Wan, luxuriating between the impossibly long legs of Natasha Illion, picked up his enciphered mobile and pressed one button. The sounds on the line went immediately hollow as the call was shunted through a series of encrypted substations that hopscotched across the country, across the Pacific, at last ping-ponging dizzily through a cluster of top secret listening posts within Beijing. The offices of the State Administration of Grain were housed in the massive Guohong Building in the Central Government District. Though the top three floors bore the same SAG logo, none of its workers on the floors below were allowedaccess.Therewasaseparateelevatorthatrosefromthecolossal lobby to those top three floors without stopping at the intervening levels. As far as the workers below were concerned, those floors above them housed the offices of the ministers who directed the State Administration of Grain, co
But for Li Wan, and people like him, those floors were all that existed in the Guohong Building. Their interests did not include grain production, quotas, or yearly allocations. The final destination of the call he initiated that morning in Washington, between Natasha Illion’s silky legs, was a vast office on the very top floor of the Guohong Building.
It was 6 pm in Beijing, but the hour of night or day was of no import, as that office, those three floors, in fact, were fully ma
The High Minister stood at the edge of an immense open-plan room whose fifteen hundred computers, linked through a proprietary intranet, were ma