Only after they reached highway speed did Cao finally speak. “Close.”
“No kidding,” Wells said. “What time is it?”
Cao flicked on his little digital watch and showed it to Wells—9:15. He’d been asleep at least two hours.
“How much longer?”
Cao shined his flashlight over Wells. “Five hours, maybe. Okay?”
“I’ll get by.” Wells coughed a little black clot of blood and phlegm into his hand. “General, what made you—” Wells stopped, wondering if he was overreaching. He settled on a more neutral formulation. “Why did you decide to leave? After all these years.”
Cao turned the flashlight to his own face, as if interrogating himself. “Why I betray General Li, you mean?” Wells was silent. “I tried to say once.”
“What you thought.”
“What I thought. He never listen.” Cao tapped the flashlight against the stump of his leg. “Li forget what war is like. I don’t forget.”
“Some wars you have to fight,” Wells said.
“Not this one.”
“Not this one.”
THE TRUCK ROLLED ON. The road turned smooth, a blessing, and the compartment cooled as the night air rushed in. They were probably taking a chance on an expressway now, Cao said. The danger had lessened now that they’d reached Shandong Province.
“But why doesn’t Li just shut everything down?” Wells asked. “Put in a countrywide curfew.”
Cao’s explanation stretched the limits of his English, but eventually Wells understood: Li was afraid to tell the Standing Committee that Cao had defected. Cao was Li’s closest aide, so Cao’s treachery would reflect badly on him. Li’s opponents might use it to undo Li’s grip on power, which was still tenuous.
But without the approval of the Standing Committee, Li couldn’t simply shut all of China down. So the roads were still open. Li was depending on roadblocks to catch them, and the Navy if they somehow got to the Yellow Sea.
“So there’s a window.”
“Yes. Window.”
And with that, Wells closed his eyes uneasily. He tried to imagine what would happen after he handed the papers over and explained what they meant. Treasury would connect the Banco Delta Asia accounts with Kowalski’s accounts in Zurich and Monte Carlo. The Pentagon would give the State Department the confession from Sergei, the Russian Spetsnaz that Wells had captured in the cave.
Then the American ambassador would ask Li’s enemies on the Standing Committee for a secret meeting. There he’d give Minister Zhang the proof of what Li had done.
Zhang and the rest of the committee would know they had to act. They’d know that if the United States publicized China’s support for the Taliban, world opinion would turn in America’s favor. After all, American soldiers weren’t the only ones fighting the Talibs in Afghanistan. By supporting the guerrillas, China had committed an act of war against all of NATO.
Zhang wouldn’t need much convincing, anyway. He and Li’s other enemies on the committee were looking for any excuse to stop Li. This was a good one. They wouldn’t care that it had come from the United States.
For the first time, Wells allowed himself to believe that they might actually get out of this mess. He pressed his hands together in front of his face. Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the door and there’s the people. He and Exley wouldn’t have a church wedding, though. Not a mosque wedding either. They’d go down to city hall and do it quick and dirty. Exley liked it quick and dirty….
He knew he was drifting and didn’t mind. Drifting made the shooting pains in his belly easier to take. And so he drifted, dozed, woke, drifted again. All the while, the truck rolled on. Eventually they left the highway and passed along a series of narrow switchbacks, rising and falling, not mountains exactly but certainly good-sized hills. Wells snapped awake as the truck took a turn too hard, its left rear wheels briefly leaving the pavement.
“Shandong,” Cao said. “Back roads.”
“How long?”
Cao lit his watch—12:45. “One hour, maybe two. No more.”
It was 12:45 P.M. in Washington, Wells thought. The attack on the Decatur had happened about twelve hours before. He wondered whether Exley had persuaded Duto and the White House to hold off. Surely the president would be speaking to the country tonight, and politicians on both sides would be pushing for action. God. Until now he hadn’t even considered the possibility that they’d make it to South Korea and still be too late.
THEN THE TRUCK SLOWED, HARD, pushing forward on its shocks—
And stopped.
Again the engine went quiet. Again voices shouting in Chinese. Again the back panel slid up.
But this time two men stepped into the truck. This time the flashlight searched the compartment much more thoroughly than it had before.
This time the cops smelled something wrong, Wells thought. Maybe the fact that the truck had two drivers. Maybe the route they were taking, running back roads in the middle of nowhere at 1:00 A.M. Maybe the cops were just having a little fun, looking for a television or something to steal. Whatever it was, these guys weren’t giving up until they turned the compartment inside out.
Wells wondered how many there were. How many he’d have to kill. A country roadblock in the middle of the night. Two cops, maybe? Two in the truck, two out? Four at most.
Now the cops were shouting and throwing furniture out of the back of the truck as the drivers yelled. Cao leaned forward and whispered to Wells.
“They say, ‘You four have no right.’ Four. Understand?”
“Four.”
Crash! A couch landed on the ground. The flashlight closed in. Wells drew his.22, cocked the hammer, pulled himself to a squat, braced himself against the side wall. The empty bookcase scraped sideways and started to tip. The compartment echoed with shouts in Chinese. Not so long ago, Wells had told Exley the secret to surviving these moments: Shoot first. Don’t wait. He was about to follow his own advice.
He pushed himself up, ignoring the agony in his stomach. As the bookcase tipped, Wells saw the cops, five feet away, tugging at the case. They reached for their guns as they saw him. Too late. He squeezed the pistol’s trigger, twice.
And then they were dead.
The bookcase fell. Wells dropped behind it. The other two cops stood at the back of the truck. They should have gone for cover. Instead, they were shooting, but wildly, high. A mistake, the last they would ever make. Wells focused and fired, hearing the pfft of Cao’s silenced pistol beside him. One of the cops twisted, his head turned at an unnatural angle, and dropped. The other doubled over, his hand on his stomach, beginning to yell. Wells moved his pistol a fraction of an inch and fired again. This time the shot caught the cop in the shoulder. He dropped his gun and fell, still yelling.
Wells staggered out of the cargo compartment. He took aim at the moaning cop at his feet and then lowered his.22 without firing. Let Cao do it. Let someone else. Anyone.
Then he raised his gun again, took aim. He was what he was. No point in pretending otherwise. No point in making someone else do his dirty work. He fired. The cop’s body twitched and went still.
The roadblock had been in front of a bridge over a narrow canal. A police car and a jeep sat at the edge of the road, their emergency lights still flashing. Wells leaned against the truck, looked around. The hills behind them were forested and seemed empty, but a couple of miles ahead Wells saw the beginnings of a town, red smokestack lights blinking in the night. Fortunately, the two-lane road was silent. For now.