“If he’s still alive in two weeks,” Olivia said, “I’ll tell you.”
“Good-bye,” he said. “I would give you kiss but do not want to damage professional makeup job.”
“It’s already damaged,” she pointed out.
“Okay then.” He wrapped his arms around her, gave her a long and quite thorough kiss. Then he spun her around and set her back down carefully on the top of the pillar, out of the inrushing surf. Turning his back on her immediately, he pulled the hood of the slicker up over his head, then began wading toward the sound of the boat that was idling somewhere out there in the fog. “Walk now or swim later,” he warned her, as he was disappearing.
In spite of that good advice, Olivia waited, wanting to hear the sound of the boat’s motor throttling up, taking him out of there.
What she heard instead was three short bursts of submachinegun fire. Then a series of sporadic pops. Followed by the sound of the boat screaming away at top speed.
AFTER A COUPLE of hours, Marlon came up to the bridge with tea service and a couple of military ration packets. As they wolfed these down, Csongor showed Marlon the chart of the Pescadores and explained the course he had been following, which he hoped would bring them into the center of the island group in another few hours.
Csongor then went down into a cabin, climbed into a bed, and arranged himself carefully, since he knew that he would fall asleep instantly and not move until awakened.
The thing that awakened him was a sudden heaving and heeling of the vessel. Csongor was unable to tell the time, but he sensed that he had been asleep for some time; his bladder was quite full and he actually felt rested. But daylight was still coming in through the porthole. He got up and staggered into the head and relieved himself, then pushed the cabin door open against the forces of the wind and (because the boat was listing) gravity. Something hit him in the face that was halfway between rain and mist. He could not see more than a few hundred meters in any direction.
The engine was still running. That was good.
He went up to the bridge where Marlon was planted exactly where Csongor had last seen him. According to the digital clock on the bulkhead, it was a little past three in the afternoon, which meant that Marlon had been running the ship alone for seven hours. He turned his face away from the screen of the GPS to look at Csongor, who was unnerved by the look on his face: haggard, wrecked by exhaustion and stress. “This is the worst video game of all time,” he said.
“Kind of a boring one,” Csongor allowed.
“Boring,” Marlon agreed, “and it doesn’t work. The user interface sucks ass.”
“What kinds of problems are you having?”
“It doesn’t shoot where you aim.”
It doesn’t shoot where you aim. What could that mean? Csongor drew closer and looked at the display on the GPS, showing the track they’d been following during the time he’d been asleep. He was expecting to see a straight line aimed directly at the Pescadores. Instead, he saw a track that gradually curved south, then jogged northward, then curved south again. Marlon, it seemed, had been trying to steer a straight line for their destination, but something had been pushing the boat inexorably southward. Once he had noticed this, he had tried to correct for it by aiming the boat back the other way. But the net result was that they were actually a little bit south of the Pescadores’ latitude at this point, perhaps ten kilometers away from the nearest of the islands, driving north-northeast in an effort to work their way back to it.
The mist had developed into rain, which was spattering the forward and port windows. “We are fighting the wind,” Csongor said.
“Now, yes.” Marlon said. “But that is new. Something else was bending us south.”
“There must be a current in the strait,” Csongor said.
“Current?”
“Like a river, a flow of water to the south.”
“Fuck!” Marlon said. “We would have been there by now, if I had known.”
“I thought it was like a car,” Csongor said. “It goes where you point it.”
“Well, it doesn’t,” Marlon said. “It goes where it wants.”
The vibration that they’d been feeling in their feet the entire time they’d been aboard devolved into a series of coughs and chugs, then reestablished itself for a few moments, and then ceased.
“Out of gas,” Csongor said.
“Game over,” Marlon said.
“No,” Csongor said. “Game continues. We just made it to the next level.”
THE HANDLE OF the sledgehammer was bright yellow plastic, a detail preposterous to Richard, who had paced up and down the length of the relevant aisle at Home Depot trying to find something less painfully embarrassing until the department manager had insisted that he make his choice and leave—it was closing time, nine o’clock.
Standing on the doorstep of Zula’s apartment at nine fifteen, gripping the ridiculous implement in brand-new, ergonomically designed work gloves (an impulse purchase, yanked from an aisleend display as the manager had harried him toward the checkout counters), he realized why he didn’t like it: the thing looked like a T’Rain sledgehammer. The realization struck him with such force that it queered his first blow, which caromed off Zula’s doorjamb and nearly took out his knee. Then he got a grip, not only on the yellow plastic handle, but on himself, and swung again, getting his hips into it and striking true. The door practically exploded. Supposing Zula turned up all right, he would have a talk with her about the virtues of physical security and devote an afternoon to beefing up her door.
Or her replacement door, to be precise, since there wasn’t much left of this one.
“You can turn down the stereo now,” he said to James and Nicholas, who were five steps below him, cowering as one. James and Nicholas, a gay couple, lived downstairs of Zula and, as it turned out, had taken an almost parental interest in her welfare. Earlier today, back in the—ha!—long-forgotten hours when Richard had attempted to do this through official channels, they had assured Richard that he should get in touch with them at any time of the day or night if there were anything they could conceivably do to help him get to the bottom of Zula’s disappearance. Three minutes ago, Richard had put their offer to the test on multiple levels, knocking them up late in the evening to see how they would feel about some really loud banging and splintering noises from upstairs. As it turned out they had been as good as their word and had even offered to turn up their stereo for a while in case that would help cover any noises that might disturb the nocturnal peace of neighboring properties. A foolish reverence for official cop procedures did not, apparently, go hand in hand with gayness.
And neither did having a missing niece.
“I’d really appreciate it if you could turn it down,” Richard said, and then James and Nicholas understood that he just wanted them gone for a minute or two. They turned their backs on him and padded down the carpeted stairs. They occupied the first two floors, and Zula the third, of a big old house on Capitol Hill: Seattle’s most oddly named neighborhood, in that Seattle was not a capital and had never been graced with anything resembling a capitol.
This bit—walking into the apartment and turning on the lights—was by far the worst for him, just because of what he was afraid he might find. Growing up on a farm had exposed him to a few sudden and unpleasant sights that he had never been able to clear from his memory. But Zula stabbed or strangled on the floor of her apartment would, he knew, be the last thing that came into his mind’s eye at the moment of his death; and between now and then it would come to him unbidden at unforeseeable moments.
Instead all he found was a furious cat, yowling and stalking around an eviscerated cat food bag whose contents had spilled out onto the floor. A toilet drinker, by process of elimination. Other than that, all was orderly: no food left out, no lights left on. He checked her closet and noted that her winter coat wasn’t there, saw no skis or any of the other stuff she’d brought on the trip to the Schloss. All of which
confirmed the suspicion, which had been pretty strong to begin with, that she had never come back to her apartment after that trip.
This didn’t mean she was alive, or even well. But it alleviated the most horrible of his fears. Whatever had happened to her couldn’t be as bad as what he had been bracing himself for ten seconds ago.
And it gave him something to write home about. Or whatever the Facebook-era equivalent of that was.
He pulled out his phone, ignored four new text messages from his brother John, and thumbed one out: IN Z’S APT. ALL NORMAL.
John, still in Iowa, seemed to think that Richard would forget the seriousness of the situation without frequent reminders. The cursed invention of text messaging had removed any inhibitions John might ever have felt about what he still denominated “long-distance” telephone calls. On the upside, it enabled Richard to fire off status reports like this one without having to make personal contact.
To John’s credit, though, he had, after a grumpy word or two from Richard, named himself the family’s single point of contact with Seattle. So at least Richard didn’t have to explain his progress, or lack thereof, to everyone, all the time. That chore was being handled by John, using a Facebook page.
Richard hadn’t checked the page yet—it seemed wrong to be facebooking at a time like this—but he supposed it must contain a lot of detailed information about just what the Seattle Police Department were and were not willing to do in response to a missing persons report. For Richard had made what now seemed like an unrecoverable error by contacting the authorities first and filing same. This had placed him into a mode where all he could really do was nag the officer who was responsible for the case; and said officer had already explained that, unless there was evidence of an actual crime, there was not much they could do in the way of direct, proactive investigation.
He thumbed out a P. S.: Z NEVER CAME BACK HERE AFTER B.C.
John was back at him fifteen seconds later: CONTACTING RCMP. For Richard had already mentioned to him—and perhaps this had been a mistake—that a winter couldn’t go by in the Pacific Northwest without at least one car skidding off a mountain road somewhere and getting trapped in a snowbank, where the inhabitants, if still alive, had to survive on snowmelt while awaiting a rescue that, in many cases, never materialized. Snow was gone at lower elevations, but if Peter and Zula had decided to take the northern route, across the Okanagans, they could be marooned off the apex of any of a hundred hairpin mountain turns.
Next step: figure where that little fuck Peter lived, and take the sledgehammer to his door.
Too bad Richard couldn’t remember his last name.
NIGHT CAME OVER the jet suddenly, from which Zula guessed that its trajectory had turned decisively eastward, diving over the terminator into the shadow of the world.
During her occasional runs to the lavatory she spied a new chart on the table, covering a vast swath of the earth with Newfoundland in the upper right, Florida in the lower right, the Aleutians in the upper left, and Baja California at the bottom. Both nations’ Pacific approaches were carved up into polygonal swatches labeled in block capitals: ALASKAN DEWIZ and DOMESTIC ADIZ and PACIFIC COASTAL CADIZ and so on.
A line of pen marks, updated every few minutes, was marching northeast, off the east coast of Siberia and then roughly parallel to the Aleutians. It tallied with what Zula could see on the television monitor back in the cabin.
Khalid and Jones were paying close attention to certain details of Yukon and British Columbian geography, which couldn’t have been very rewarding given the extremely small scale of this map.
The Aleutians and mainland Alaska were all encompassed in the region labeled DOMESTIC ADIZ. South of that was a swath of blank ocean labeled ALASKAN DEWIZ, which ran all the way east into what she thought of as the armpit of Alaska, where its southeastern panhandle was joined to its main land mass by a corridor only a few miles wide.
The entirety of southeast Alaska lay exposed to the Pacific, not encompassed in any of these ADIZ or DEWIZ polygons. Zula guessed that “IZ” must stand for something like “Intercept Zone” and that it was a military designation. She had read about the Distant Early Warning line in a Cold War history class, and so guessed that DEWIZ was Distant Early Warning Intercept Zone and ADIZ was Air Defense Intercept Zone and CADIZ was its Canadian equivalent.
The CADIZ didn’t begin until roughly Prince Rupert, which lay just to the south of the southeast Alaska panhandle, and so it seemed that there was a vast gap in the IZ system, at a rough guess maybe five hundred miles wide, between the Canadian and the American zones. Which, from a national defense standpoint, was not such a big deal, since it would only give the Russian bombers access to the upper bit of British Columbia, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories. They could use their nukes to melt snow or kill mosquitoes, depending upon the season, but they couldn’t penetrate to the cities of Canada or the United States without passing through IZs farther south. And to reach that gap in the first place, they’d have to fly along an awkward southerly course that would burn a lot of fuel.
The whole northwestern third of British Columbia seemed to lie above the Canadian IZ and below the American, and this was where Abdallah Jones seemed to be focusing all of his attention. At a glance it appeared to be impossibly mountainous and desolate, but since this was an air chart, very few features were labeled, roads didn’t appear, and towns were not marked unless they sported significant runways. So maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Khalid’s attention span did not seem to extend beyond about thirty seconds, and so it was his lot to roll his eyes and sigh hopelessly as Jones devoted hour after hour to his cartographic research. Zula had met any number of men like Khalid and so, even though they’d spent very little time together, she felt she knew the man and his ways. The only thing that could hold the attention of this kind of person for very long was direct interaction with another human being. What kind of interaction didn’t really matter. Since three of the four soldiers had dozed off and the fourth was still fixated on his flight simulator, and since Jones was absorbed in the map and the two pilots were intensely focused on this project of flying in close formation beneath the belly of the 747, there was no one for him to interact with except for Zula. And Zula was spending most of her time in the aft cabin with the door closed. Whenever she opened the door, it was to find Khalid’s burning eyes staring directly at her in a way that seemed to demand some kind of a response. Those eyes tracked her every movement. Khalid couldn’t help but notice when Zula glanced over Jones’s shoulder at the map.
This show of curiosity on Zula’s part had astonished Khalid the first time and offended him the second time. The third time he flew into what she thought was a pretty well-rehearsed rage, getting to his feet and invading her space in a way that all but forced her to back away from him. She couldn’t parse the grammar of his sentences, but she was able to recognize a few none-too-flattering nouns; if Khalid had been a gangsta rapper, he’d have been calling her a bitch and a ho. This went on until it disturbed Jones’s train of thought, at which point he spoke up and told Khalid to pipe down and put a lid on it. Jones spoke in a tired, even dispirited tone of voice, which seemed to match the overall mood of the jihadists.
Returning to her cabin, Zula considered it. A few hours ago, back in Xiamen, Jones had been convinced that they would be able to fly the jet to some friendly location in Pakistan, pick up a cargo of Bad (perhaps a dirty bomb?), then turn the jet around and fly it straight to some kind of Armageddon in Las Vegas. Instead, because of the intricacies of the international rules around flight plans and restricted airspace, and because of the way Pavel and Sergei had shown some backbone at a critical moment, he had been forced to settle for a hastily patched-together plan that had gotten them safely out of China but that would apparently lead to their running out of fuel many hundreds of miles short of the U.S. border. They would have to touch down in the middle of nowhere and then improvise. He had to be feeling as tho
ugh he’d been handed an incredible opportunity, then squandered it; but there was little else that he could have done. Zula could clearly perceive a struggle in Jones’s head between the Western, university-trained engineer and the Islamic fundamentalist; the former wanted to execute carefully laid plans while the latter just wanted to wing it and trust to fate. Most of his comrades were fatalists and looked askance at the decisions he had been making.
She began considering what she might need to survive in northern Canada at this time of year. Though winter was over, it was still going to be cold. She did not know whether the jihadists had packed winter clothes among the gear in the plane’s cargo hold. It seemed unlikely, given that they’d been planning to carry out an operation in Xiamen, a hyperurban zone at the same latitude as Hawai’i. On the other hand, they’d been hanging out on a fishing boat, and such vessels usually had foul weather gear.
So they might have something; but Zula had nothing except for the bed linens in this cabin. Which the others would confiscate anyway, as soon as they felt a need for them. And in any case, she had nothing to wear on her feet except for the pair of ersatz Crocs that had been issued to her in Vladivostok, and if she went outside in those things she would, in short order, be crippled and then maimed by frostbite. The best she could do was rip up the blankets and wrap them around her feet, then slip the Crocs over them. This was better than nothing. But it would have been a lot easier with a knife.
She had always found her gun- and knife-obsessed male relatives to be faintly ridiculous. But she would go so far as to admit that a knife was a good thing to have, in a whole lot of different ways. She had, therefore, been looking around for things in her environment that might be convertible into knives. Plan A had been to shatter the glass screen of the television monitor, pull out a shard, and then fashion a handle by wrapping one end in a strip torn from a bedsheet. She reckoned that this would work but that it would be loud and difficult to hide and might produce knives of highly variable quality.
Reamde: A Novel Page 61
