Jacques stared out the window, slouching with his knees canted sideways. He hadn’t said a word in the last ten minutes — which, Quinn was certain, was some kind of record.
“Something on your mind?” Quinn asked.
“Did I tell you my cousin, Khaki, joined the FBI?”
Quinn shot him a surprised glance. “I thought she just got married to that Beaudine guy.”
“She did,” Thibodaux said. “They both got hired for the same academy. A buddy system or some such thing.” He rolled his eyes. “Weird to think of it… Khaki Beaudine, FBI…”
Quinn shrugged. “The way things are going, it will be good to have someone you can trust on the inside.”
“She’s my cousin,” Thibodaux said. “Who says I trust her?” His face darkened and he got to the meat of his worries. “You think Camille looks like Téa Leoni?”
“Same husky voice, maybe.” Quinn couldn’t help but chuckle at the random things that might be bouncing around in Jacques Thibodaux’s brain at any given moment. “But the looks are 180 degrees off.”
“Yeah.” The big Cajun shrugged. “But I had a dream about Téa Leoni last night. Camille would shit a brimstone brick if she thought I had a thing for Téa Leoni.”
Quinn rolled his eyes. “I think you’ve been away from home too long.”
“I’m sorry, l’ami.” Jacques gave a sheepish grin. For a guy who could bench 405, he had the embarrassed schoolboy thing down pretty good. “But this not being able to call her has me all screwed up. I don’t mind tellin’ you this dream scares my mule. Camille has a way of lookin’ into my skull and finding out about shit like this.”
Quinn shrugged, both hands on the steering wheel. “Good. Then maybe you can channel a little bit of your inner Camille the next time we need to get information out of somebody and pull something out of their skull.”
“Whatever you say, Chair Force, but this is serious business. I haven’t had a dream about any woman besides Camille in years. Wooeeee!” He shook his head as if to purge any unclean thoughts about Téa Leoni. “Anyhow, don’t you fret. I’ll focus on not getting killed now that we’re coming into civilization.”
“Good idea,” Quinn said, breathing a measured sigh of relief when he brought the van off the relatively light traffic of the Karakoram Highway and into the riot of evening commuters. The packed arterial road was a chorus of honks and shouts mingled with braying donkeys and no one took notice of Quinn’s van, swerving or not.
“Funny,” Thibodaux said, staring out the dusty window at the sprawling oasis of 350,000 people. “From the way you talked about it, I pictured this place as some Alibaba-ancient Silk Road caravan stop with magic carpets and shit.”
“Yeah.” Quinn nodded. “The Chinese government’s knocking more and more old buildings down every day to make way for progress.” Quinn sped up to get ahead of a motorized trike hauling a load of fat-bottomed sheep in the rusty bed. Once far enough ahead, he took another lane to turn on Renmin Road toward his old friend Dr. Gabrielle Deuben’s neighborhood. “There won’t be any of the old town left before too long.” He took his eyes off the road long enough to shoot a glance at Thibodaux. “But believe me, there are still plenty of places for the Feng brothers to hide.”
“We’ll find ’em.” Thibodaux grinned, tipping his head at the low sun that cast long shadows through the last pistachio grove before the land gave way completely to concrete and stone. “We got a while until dark.”
Quinn smiled to himself, remembering the shadowed mazes of alleys, dead-end roads, and walled courtyards that made up Kashgar’s centuries-old neighborhoods.
“There are some places,” he said, “where night falls well before dark.”
Gabrielle Deuben’s home was located in an apartment above her the clinic. Quinn parked the van a block down out of habit, backing in so he had plenty of room to drive away unimpeded if he had to leave in a hurry.
He’d not spoken to Deuben since she’d helped him and Garcia get across the Wakhan Corridor into Afghanistan nearly two years before. Any hotel would require a passport and he hoped the doctor would give them a place to rest their heads for a few minutes — along with any information she might have come across from the working girls she treated that would lead them to the Feng brothers. Quinn wasn’t a hundred percent sure that she was even still in the same place, but her missionary zeal when it came to treating the ailments of the prostitutes and other poor in Central Asia made it a pretty sure bet. People like Deuben tended not to even go on vacation, afraid of what might happen to those in their charge if they went anywhere else. Tajik, Kyrgyz, Uyghur, and Chinese traveled for miles to have her treat their various ailments. Stern and to the point, she never held back on her pronouncements, but patients knew she cared about them. Why else would she stay and work with such a forsaken people? Quinn found himself asking himself the same question — and then he got out of the van.
A warm evening wind, heavy with the scent of cumin and roasting lamb, hit him in the face. Two-stroke engines vied for street positions with braying donkeys. Birds chirped in the trees along the cobblestone street as if their volume knobs were turned up twice as loud as normal American or European birds. The smell of baking bread rolled out from under an awning just down from the van, making Thibodaux lick his lips.
“This place don’t need no Aladdin’s lamp to be magic,” the Cajun said, casting a look up and down the bustling street. Women in colorful headscarves, some wearing Western dress, others in more traditional but equally colorful robes, towed kids dressed in T-shirts with American slogans. Fierce-looking men with sharp Turkic features and scraggly beards chatted under awnings along the side of the road. Some sharpened blades against spinning stones. Some sat for haircuts from other men. Others hacked at freshly killed carcasses of goat and mutton. Almost every adult male wore a four-cornered silk hat called a doppa.
The entrance to Gabrielle Deuben’s clinic, a rough timber door, was located down a deserted side street behind a stall that sold hand-thrown pottery. A cardboard sign that said CLOSED in Uyghur and Chinese script hung behind a dusty window. It was dark inside. Quinn glanced at his Aquaracer. “It’s just after eight o’clock Beijing time,” he said. “Hopefully she’s home and not off working in some Kyrgyz village.”
Thibodaux doubled his fist. “Want me to huff and puff or just give it a knock?”
“Stand by a minute. She has another entrance around back, down the alley there.” Quinn took a step back to look up at the second floor windows. He could see a light through the curtains and thought he saw movement, but couldn’t be sure. He half expected to see Belvan Virk, Deuben’s towering Sikh bodyguard, peek out. “Let’s do our knocking around the corner, out of sight.”
Leading the way, Thibodaux ran headlong into a waifish Chinese girl as she scuttled away from Deuben’s back door. She kept her head down like a person who lived around things she really didn’t want to witness. A handful of business cards fell from the pocket of her hand-knit wool vest, spilling across the dusty street.
Quinn stooped to pick them up and handed them back to her. A sinking pit pressed at his gut when he read one of the cards and realized she was a dingdong xiaojie, a “doorbell girl.” At the low end of the hierarchy among prostitutes in China, a doorbell girl went room to room at hotels and apartments, ringing the bell or sliding her card under the door looking for work.
“Cindy Wei.” Quinn read the name printed on the cards. “Are you okay?” He spoke in Mandarin, literally asking why her face color was not excited.