“Come in very low, of course,” Olivia said, “which burns fuel at an insane rate. Or else fly in formation with a passenger aircraft. Right under its belly.”
He held his hands up. “Why is that so difficult? Why is it so hard to get people to believe that Jones could do something like that?”
“Occam’s razor,” she said. “The Mindanao theory had fewer moving parts. So it has to be done away with before anything else can even be discussed.”
THEY SAID GOOD-BYE with chaste cheek pecks and went their separate ways: Seamus out into traffic, Olivia up to her room where she began trying to change her flight plan. She didn’t want to fly back to London. She wanted to go to the northwestern United States.
She wasted a day in that hotel room. First she had to wait a few hours for people to wake up in London. Then she had to push the idea that her time would be better spent following the Jones-went-to-North-America hypothesis. No one that she talked to was overtly hostile to the idea, and yet she could not seem to make any progress. Procedures ought to be followed. It wouldn’t do for her to suddenly touch down on U.S. soil and begin doing intelligence work; contact really ought to be made with counterparts in the American counterintelligence establishment. But no one was awake in America yet, so this would have to wait for another few hours. She fired off spates of emails, went down to the fitness center, got exercise, came back, did more emailing, made phone calls. Played T’Rain. Surfed the Internet for more about Zula and the Forthrast clan. Checked out the heartrending Facebook page that they had set up in an effort to find her. Did more emails.
At last, completely blocked on all fronts, she used her own money to purchase a ticket to Vancouver. She had friends and connections there, it was a Commonwealth country, not too many feathers would be ruffled by her parachuting into the place, and from there she could easily get down to Seattle if occasion warranted. It was certainly better than hanging around in Manila, which, she had come to believe, was about as far as she could get from Abdallah Jones without leaving the planet.
Having grown wise in the ways of Manila traffic, she allocated four hours for the three-mile taxi ride to the airport and found herself airborne at nine o’clock the following morning. A vast number of hours later, the plane landed in Vancouver, at eleven A.M. on what she was informed was Tuesday (they had crossed the International Date Line, occasioning some confusion as to this).
Her plan had been to crash and burn at a hotel in Vancouver, but she found herself strangely pert and eager upon landing. Partly it was a consequence of having spent a hell of a lot of money on the plane ticket. All the economy-class seats had been taken, so she had flown business class and actually managed to get some sleep. Awakening from a long nap somewhere over the Pacific, she found that a new idea and a resolve had materialized in her head: she would go talk to Richard Forthrast. She had been reading all about him and had more or less memorized his Wikipedia entry. He seemed like an interesting and complicated man. He must be thinking about his missing niece quite a bit, and obviously he would have insights about REAMDE and T’Rain that would never occur to Olivia.
Waiting in line at Immigration, she checked her messages and received word that contact had indeed been made with American counterintelligence and that they were receptive to the idea of her paying a call on them and that she should go ahead and book a ticket to Seattle. The message was time-stamped only an hour ago, meaning that if she had waited in Manila for official go-ahead she would only now be calling the airlines there. So she had saved herself a full day by taking action. Of course, getting reimbursed for the ticket might not be so easy.
Once she had passed through formalities, she rented a car and began driving south. She’d been reluctant to share with her new American counterparts her idea of talking to Richard Forthrast; like anyone else who works in an organization and who has just come up with a pet idea, she considered it her property and didn’t want to share it out. And she was afraid that it would get slapped down or, worse yet, co-opted. But crossing the border a day ahead of schedule and making solo contact with an American citizen probably was not how to get the relationship off on the right foot, and in any case, she had to keep in mind that talking to Forthrast was just a sideshow to the main project, which was looking for Jones in North America. So she pulled over to the side of the road and made some calls.
At about five in the afternoon, she found herself in a secure office suite in a federal office building in downtown Seattle, making friends with her officially approved contact, an FBI agent named Marcella Houston, who was all about tracking down Jones but who said nothing about Richard Forthrast. Olivia spent a couple of hours with her before Marcella went home for the evening with the promise that they would get cracking on the Jones hunt first thing in the morning.
After checking in to a downtown hotel, Olivia found a secure email waiting for her from London, passing on the information that Richard Forthrast and his brother John had, just a few hours ago, obtained single-entry visas to China, and moreover that a flight plan had been filed that would take them from Boeing Field to Xiamen, departing rather soon.
It was, she realized, all a matter of bureaucratic lag time. By jumping on the plane to Vancouver and then bombing down to Seattle, she had appeared in the FBI’s offices a full day ahead of when they had been expecting her and, moreover, just at the close of normal business hours. Marcella had stayed late to give her a polite welcome and to promise that something would happen tomorrow. All of Marcella’s attention had been focused on the Jones hunt. Olivia’s proposal to contact Richard Forthrast—supposing it had been noticed at all—had been forwarded to some other person’s inbox and probably hadn’t even been read yet. Because if anyone of consequence had read it, they would have forbidden her to talk to Richard Forthrast, or they would have insisted on sending one of their own with her.
But as it happened, Richard Forthrast’s jet was idling on the tarmac at Boeing Field; and there was nothing preventing her from going down there to talk to him.
WHEN ZULA’S MOBILE prison cell was complete and the door slammed shut on her, time stopped moving for several days. This gave her plenty of time to hate herself for having failed to escape when she’d had a chance.
Sort of a chance, anyway. During the time they’d been parked in the Walmart, before the plywood had been bought and the cell constructed, she could theoretically have gone into the shower stall and unlocked the end of the chain that was looped around the grab bar. She could then have made a dash for the side door and perhaps got it open long enough to scream for help and attract someone’s attention. Or she might have gone back into the bedroom, kicked a window out, and jumped. Once she had been locked into the cell, she found it quite easy to convince herself that she ought to have done one of those two things, and that having failed to do so made her into some kind of idiot or coward.
But—as she had to keep reminding herself, just to stay sane—she’d had no idea that they were planning to turn the back of the vehicle into a prison cell. She’d assumed that the chain would be in place for much longer and that she could bide her time, waiting for a moment when everyone was asleep or distracted. Making an impulsive run for it might have blown her one and only chance.
On the day following the Walmart stopover, she dimly heard additional sawing and banging noises on the other side of her cell door.
Leading forward was a narrow corridor perhaps eight feet in length, with doors along its side walls giving access to the toilet and the shower. These were separate rooms, not much larger than phone booths. Of the two, the toilet was farther aft. The next time they opened her cell door, Zula discovered that Jones and Sharjeel had constructed a new barrier across the corridor, situated forward of the toilet and aft of the shower stall. It was a sort of gate, consisting of a hinged frame of two-by-fours with expanded steel mesh nailed across it. Now Zula could obtain direct access to the toilet whenever she wanted. The gate prevented her going any farther forward. This relieved the jihad
ists of the requirement—which they pretended to find most burdensome—of opening the door to let Zula come out and use the toilet from time to time. By the same token, it prevented them from getting into the toilet themselves, unless they undid the padlock on the steel mesh door and entered into Zula’s end of the vehicle. This happened only rarely, though, since they had gotten into the habit of using the shower stall as a urinal, and flushing it by running the shower for a few moments. So they only needed to come in through the mesh door for number 2.
This innovation made for a large improvement in Zula’s quality of life, since it enabled her to sit in the middle of the bed and look down the entire length of the RV and out its windshield as they drove endlessly around British Columbia. The field of view was not large; it was comparable to looking through a phone screen held out at arm’s length. But it was preferable to staring at plywood.
She could not see any faults in Jones’s strategy. These men dared not park the RV in a campground or a Walmart for any length of time. RV encampments were, by definition, transient. But they had many of the social dynamics of a small town. Essentially all the residents would be white middle-class retirees. Jones’s crew of Pashtuns and Yemenis would draw attention. But an RV in movement on a highway enjoyed a level of isolation from the rest of the world that was nearly perfect. All its systems—electrical, plumbing, propulsion, heating—were self-contained and would continue working indefinitely as long as fuel and water were pumped into its tanks and sewage removed. They stopped occasionally to take on or discharge fluids, and though Zula couldn’t see much, she assumed that Jones was careful to select fueling stations out in the middle of nowhere and to pay at the pump, obviating the need to go inside and interact with any humans. He seemed well supplied with credit cards. Some of these had presumably been stolen from the dead RV owners, others perhaps contributed by the trio from Vancouver.
As long as the RV kept running, B.C. was the best place to hide in the whole world. They often drove for many hours without seeing another vehicle. The road was an endless stripe of light gray pavement curving and weaving and undulating across a countryside that was all mountains. Occasionally, for an hour or two, they would parallel railroad tracks, lightly rust filmed. Sometimes they’d run along rivers caroming through zigzag channels of brown-gray rock topped with acid-green moss that looked knee-deep. Rivers and railways came and went, but the road went on eternally. Every so often she would glimpse a gas station, a cabin, a faded Canadian flag snapping in a turbulent cold breeze, ravens flying overhead, a house sitting inexplicably at a wide spot in the road with senseless suburban touches grafted onto it. Intersections with other roads were so remarkable that they were announced beforehand with all the pomp of bicentennials. Sometimes it was rain forest; other times they drove up valleys with great expanses of rocky, bare red soil studded with sagebrush and supporting sparse growths of scrub pines and open meadows of ranch land that might have been in the approaches to the Grand Canyon. Valleys full of Indians, driving old pickup trucks, gave way to valleys full of cowboys, trotting around on horses with their herding dogs. Newborn calves suckling from their mothers’ udders. Huge geometric reshapings of mountainsides that she guessed must be mining projects. Canyons lined with marble the colors of honey and blood. Spindly steel-wheeled irrigation systems poised at the edge of barren cleared fields, like sprinters at the starting line, waiting for the season to begin. Mountains marching in queues from directly overhead to the horizon, one after another, as if to say, We have more where these came from. Deciduous trees budding out on the mountains’ lower slopes, engulfing the lone dark spikes of conifers in a foaming, cresting wave of light green. Above that, the mountains’ upper slopes jumping asymptotically into curling cornices of fluffy white clouds, as opaque as cotton balls. Sometimes the clouds parted, giving glimpses of places higher up, the trees dusted as if the fog were condensing and freezing on them, just letting her know that they were only scurrying around on an insignificant low tier, and that above them were stacked many additional layers of greater complexity and structure and drama, both sunlit and weather lashed.
Other people entered the picture. She guessed that Jones had sent out some kind of an email blast as soon as he’d been able, using a trusted, encrypted electronic grapevine. The first to respond had been Sharjeel, Aziz, and Zakir, only a few hours’ drive away in Vancouver. But a couple of days later she began to hear other voices and to see other faces going in and out of the shower stall. Jones’s email must have reached other jihadist sleeper cells in eastern Canada, and they must have jumped into cars and started driving west to connect up with the caravan. Or, assuming that they had solid cover stories and all the right documentation, they might have been coming up from cities in the United States. The ethnic diversity of the crew was increasing all the time, and so all business was conducted in either English or Arabic. The latter was preferred, but the former was becoming more commonly used as the RV filled up with people who had been living for years in North America. Sometimes, when they were verging on certain topics, they would send someone back to slam the cell door in Zula’s face, and it would then remain closed until someone felt like opening it again.
A certain amount of the discussion had to do with mundane topics such as the management of people, vehicles, food, and money. Only so many could fit comfortably in the RV. Excess bodies had to be placed in cars. Occasionally one of these would be visible through the windshield; Zula had the vague idea that there were at least three of them. Sometimes they drove in procession with the RV, but more often they would strike out on some other road for a while and meet up with the RV a few hours later at a campground or a Walmart. And it appeared that one car was acting as a shuttle between the RV and a safe house in Vancouver; Aziz had turned his apartment into a crash pad where tired, grubby jihadists could go and do their laundry and sort themselves out before rotating back to caravan duty.
Each new member of the crew, it seemed, had to spend a certain amount of time standing at the mesh door, staring at Zula, appraising her. The first few times she just stared right back, but after a while she learned to ignore them.
Jones had acquired a printer during one of the Walmart forays and had been printing up images from Google Maps and taping them together into great irregular green tapestries. Discarded empty ink cartridges littered the floor. Housekeeping was not the jihadists’ strong point.
There came a time when Jones shooed most of his comrades off into other vehicles and invited Zula forward to the RV’s dining area, which had become, quite literally, a war room. Centered on the table was one of those stuck-together maps. The image was festooned with little colored Google stickpins. Taped to windows and walls all around were photographs, also generated by that hardworking printer.
They were Zula’s photographs. Many of them featured Peter or Uncle Richard. She had taken them during the visit to the Schloss two weeks ago.
“I found your Flickr page,” Jones explained. “Evidently you downloaded the app?”
“Huh?” Zula was too disoriented by the images to muster anything more coherent than that.
“The Flickr app,” Jones said patiently. “It automatically syncs the photo library on your phone with your Flickr page.”
“Yeah,” Zula said, “I did have that app.” Past tense, since she thought her phone was somewhere in China, buried in rubble or maybe in a police lab.
“Well, anyway, your story checks out,” Jones said, as if she were to be commended for this.
“Why wouldn’t it check out?”
Jones chuckled. “No particular reason. All I mean is, I can go right to your Flickr page and see photos that went up there two weeks ago when you and Peter were visiting Dodge at Schloss Hundschüttler.” He rolled his eyes and used air quotes at the name.
“How’d you know his nickname was Dodge?”
“It’s mentioned in his Wikipedia entry.”
This was the first time they had discussed Richard—or any nonimmedia
te topic, for that matter—since the very brief conversation immediately after the jet crash, when Jones had been about to put a bullet in her, and she’d revealed that she had an uncle who, (a) was very rich, and (b) knew how to smuggle things across the Canada/U.S. border. She had expected further interrogation. But Jones was a thorough man, a self-starter, a strategizer. Zula had slowly come to understand that every action he had taken in the days since had been centered around Uncle Richard and the possibility of using him to sneak across the border. The war room he’d constructed in the RV had nothing to do—yet—with a Vegas casino massacre. That could all be seen to after they’d crossed the border. This here was all to do with Richard, and Schloss Hundschüttler was its epicenter.
Her brain was slowly making sense of the virtual stickpins printed on the map. Each one of them corresponded to one of the photos that Jones had printed up from her Flickr page. After several days in the cell, it was taking her a little while to get back into the Internet-based mind-set in which she had lived most of her post-Eritrean life. But she remembered she had once had a phone and that it had a GPS receiver built into it as well as a camera, and those two systems could talk to each other; if you gave permission—and she was pretty sure she had—the device would append a latitude and a longitude to each photograph, so that you could later plot them out on a map and see where each picture had been taken. During the visit to the Schloss, she and Peter and Richard had spent a couple of afternoons wandering around the vicinity on ATVs and snowshoes. The pins printed on the map were breadcrumb trails marking out the paths they had taken, a crumb dropped every time Zula had tapped the shutter button on the screen of her phone.
Her face was flushing hot, as if Jones had caught her out in something acutely embarrassing.
And yet, at the same time, it was strangely pleasurable to be reminded that she had once had a life that had included such luxuries as a boyfriend and a phone.
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