His failure was not in his inability to match pace with the Toyota, but rather in choosing the motorcycle for the pursuit. In the urban environs of Mandalay, it was perfect for shadowing someone. How could he have known that the target would go for a drive in the country?
He was scanning the highway ahead so intently that he completely missed the narrow dirt road that veered off to the south. He did notice a cloud of dust settling, but he was half a mile down the road before it clicked.
Dust cloud.
They turned off.
He geared down, resisting the urge to squeeze the brakes. At seventy miles per hour, that was a good way to lose control, and he had no desire to end up smeared across a stretch of Burmese blacktop. Instead, he waited until he was only doing about forty, and then leaned forward and squeezed the front brake.
The front tire left a streak of rubber, but the back end of the Rebel lifted off the ground, the drive wheel spinning free. With a little wiggle of his hips, Shin swung the bike halfway around, pivoting on the front wheel, and as the rear tire touched down, he twisted the handlebars the opposite way and goosed the throttle again, accelerating out of the turnaround.
He felt a surge of excitement that was partly due to the realization that he hadn’t lost the Toyota after all, but mostly because of having pulled off a near perfect “stoppie.”
Too bad there’d been no one around to see it.
He raced back down the highway, and this time he had no difficulty spotting the dirt track. He also saw that the road was blocked by a metal gate. An old Bamar man wearing what looked like military fatigues, stood at the gate and watched Shin approach with unveiled distrust.
Shin weighed his options as he turned toward the gated road and brought the motorcycle to a stop a few feet away from the old man. He was a park ranger, Shin decided, or at least he was meant to look like one.
Putting on his most sincere smile, he addressed the man in Mandarin Chinese. “Is this the entrance to the botanical gardens?”
The old man blinked at him and then tried his best to reply in the same language. “No Chinese speak. Go away.”
Though conversationally fluent in the Burmese language, Shin was trying to pass himself off as a misguided traveler. Chinese visitors were about the only tourists who came to Burma, and some parts of the country had as many Chinese inhabitants as Burmese. Shin was Korean, but he doubted the Bamar man would be able to make the distinction.
“English?” Burma had been a British colony until 1947; the old guy might even remember the Colonial era.
The man nodded, but remained wary.
“I looking for gardens,” Shin continued in his best attempt at broken English.
The man pointed back down the highway. His own command of English was passably good. “The gardens are that way, five kilometers.”
Shin knew he was reaching his limit of questions, but he thought he could get away with one more. “What this place?”
“It is a wildlife refuge. No one is allowed inside.”
“Wildlife? What kind? Good for pictures?”
“Buru,” the man answered.
“Buru?”
The man nodded as if the question somehow signified Shin’s comprehension. “Nagas. Very dangerous. No pictures.”
Well that clears it right up. First buru and now nagas?
Shin knew of an ethnic group called the Naga that lived in the northwestern region of the country, but he didn’t think the old man was talking about them. Naga was also the name of a serpentine demon in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. The term was also sometimes translated as ‘dragon,’ which didn’t make much sense either. Maybe it was a spooky story concocted by the government or someone else with a desire to keep people off this road. Regardless, it was time to be moving on.
He thanked the old man and pulled back onto the highway. This time, he kept his speed to a nice safe forty mph, and as soon as he was out of the gatekeeper’s line of sight, he let go of the throttle altogether. He coasted the bike off the road and parked it in a stand of trees.
He shrugged out of his backpack and dug inside to retrieve his Garmin GPS unit and a paper map of the country. Neither showed the dirt road, much less indicated a wildlife refuge, but the map did show both the curves of the highway and the course of several rivers and streams that meandered through the valleys between the plateaus. He quickly plotted a course into the GPS that would eventually cross the dirt road — well away from the old man standing guard at the gate — and entered the waypoints into the device.
In addition to the navigations aids, his backpack contained what he had come to think of as essential equipment for any mission. There was enough gear to set up a hooch — a rainproof poncho and a quilted poncho liner, and some elastic bungee cords. There was food — a couple of granola bars, two MREs, a liter bottle of water and some iodine tablets for field-expedient purification if the need should arise, and it was looking like it might. What he didn’t have was a weapon, at least not in the backpack.
After checking to make sure no one was around to observe him, he wiggled the motorcycle’s seat cushion until it came free, revealing a hollow space underneath, which contained a few items of gear that he preferred not to have to explain at a police checkpoint: a SIG-Sauer 9 mm pistol, two fifteen-round magazines, a small set of binoculars and a PVS-14 night vision monocular. He loaded a magazine into the pistol and slipped it into his waistband, at the small of his back. The spare magazines went into a pocket and the PVS-14 went into the backpack.
The idea of the cross-country trek didn’t bother him in the least. Though he didn’t know exactly how far he would have to travel, he had a feeling he would catch up to the Toyota — and discover its occupants’ final destination — before nightfall. Dirt roads were difficult to travel, especially in this region, which was plagued by seasonal monsoon rains. It might take hours to negotiate the crevices and craters created by erosion. The vehicle might not be able to travel much faster than he could run.
But before he set forth, there was one last thing he needed to do.
He took out his phone and dialed a number. It rang once, and then he heard a familiar voice — her voice. “Hello?”
“Giselle, mon cheri. I am so sorry…”
FOURTEEN
4163…
Sasha ran through the factors in her head. She discounted three out of hand; the individual digits did not add up to any multiple of three. Seven? No. Eleven?
She ran through the division. Forty-one minus thirty-three leaves eight…eighty-six minus seventy-seven is nine…ninety-three… No.
Seventeen?Nineteen? Twenty-three?
Yes… Twenty-three from forty-one leaves eighteen, for one hundred-eighty-six. Eight times twenty-three is one-eighty-four…which leaves two…twenty-three!
4167…
The digits added up to eighteen. Three was a factor. Next.
4169…
Sasha already knew that the number was not a prime — she had memorized the first two thousand prime numbers — but when she was faced with a problem for which the solution was not readily apparent, she would work her way down the number line, testing every number to see if it was prime, a number that was divisible by only itself and one. The activity helped sharpen her mental subroutines and gave her brain a chance to process the problem in the background. Once in a while, the problem might relate to her work — a particularly tricky code that would not yield to a brute force attack — but more often than not, the problems that confounded her the most had nothing to do with codes or numbers or anything that could be expressed in the precise language of mathematics. Instead, her consternation arose from the chaos of human interactions. She would use the technique to stave off boredom, such as when forced to sit in a doctor’s waiting room. She was always punctual, and could never understand why medical professionals could not afford their patients the same courtesy. Other people would read magazines or play games on their cell phones… Sasha worked out the primes.