“Third one on the right,” Chet intoned, then coughed and hacked up something dark which he spat against the wall. The physical effort of the coughing left him woozy, and he leaned against the stone for a few moments, then stumbled forward, insisting on leading the way.
Zula wanted to ask Third what on the right? but reckoned she would see soon enough and didn’t want to put Chet to the trouble of talking. She got a clue when they passed a hole in the wall, and she shone her light into it to see another adit leading away into what she gathered was the ore body. They had clearly entered into a sort of rock that was different from what they’d seen at the surface: darker but laced through with veins of color and a-sparkle with crystalline growths, especially in those places where water seeped out of cracks and trickled along the gutter carved into the adit’s floor. Only a few moments later they went by another, similar landmark, and perhaps twenty meters farther along, after passing momentarily through rock of a different sort, they reentered the ore body and came to adit number three. Which Zula could have guessed just by nosing it out, since the odor of spray paint had become strong again. This time several lines of script had been scrawled across the wall next to the side passage.
They stopped here so that Chet could gather his strength. He had been consuming water at an alarming rate and still complained of thirst. “You go down this adit for, I don’t know, a hundred feet, and you’ll come to a shaft in the floor of a chamber. Should be a steel ladder. Used to be a hoist, but it’s busted now. Down the ladder all the way to the bottom. About fifty rungs. That gets you into an adit that takes you out to another intersection like this one.”
“Does this mean you’re not coming with me?”
“Just a figure of speech,” he said, after a pause to consider it. “Just gathering my energy for that damned ladder.”
It was more or less as Chet had predicted. The chamber at the end of this adit contained a surprisingly large machine that must have been brought down in pieces and assembled here. Its most prominent feature was a giant, rusty wheel with cables running over grooves in its rim and descending into the hole below. Obviously the thing hadn’t moved in eons and so Zula, had she been a recreational spelunker, would have given up and turned around at this point. But Chet insisted, and more Day-Glo-green graffiti affirmed, that there was a way down. She followed him around to the back side of the machine. She began to collect that the shaft below them was circular in cross section, but that the circle had been parceled out into a bundle of separate squarish or rectangular passageways. The largest of these was in the middle and was serviced by the giant wheel, but smaller ones seemed to be reserved for other purposes such as cabling, ventilation, dumbwaiter-like rigs for carrying ore, and the ladder that could be used when nothing else was functioning. Chet gave the top of this a good careful look, inspecting for booby traps. Then he undid his belt, threaded it through the wrist loop on his flashlight, and rebuckled it so that the light would dangle in front of his crotch and the beam would shine downward. He began to descend the ladder with such speed that Zula feared he was falling, rather than climbing. She got the sense that he just wanted to get this over with. Perhaps he was expecting to find a booby trap at the bottom and wanted to set it off long before she got there. This didn’t give her a lot of incentive to move quickly. Gripping her flashlight in one fist so that it shone downward, she began to descend the ladder, and quickly found herself in an environment that would have been violently claustrophobic had she been disposed to such feelings. Space in the shaft was apparently precious and the engineers didn’t want to sacrifice any more than was absolutely necessary to this purpose. Her pack kept getting wedged against the wall behind her, or hung up on brackets, forcing her to push back a little wave of panic each time.
“I think there’s another booby trap,” she said, passing by a fresh annotation in green spray paint.
“I saw it too,” he announced. “Hold on for a second.”
She stopped and forced herself to look down. Chet was hanging from a rung near the bottom, unfolding his Leatherman. She heard a crisp snip as it severed a piano wire, and then several seconds of absolute silence as they both waited for a detonation.
“I think we’re good,” he announced.
They had made no effort to hide this one: it was a curved rectangular slab, simply lying on the floor at the base of the ladder, lashed into place with zip ties. “Claymore,” Chet announced. “Aimed straight up. Would have taken out anyone on the ladder.”
“How are you doing?” Zula asked him, since there didn’t seem to be much more to say on that topic.
“Not bad!” Chet said, sounding a bit surprised. “Going to sit down and take a little rest. I’ll meet you at the drift intersection up thataway.” He waved his flashlight beam down one of three adits that radiated away from the base of the shaft. “Go about a hundred feet, we’ll be taking the second adit on the left.”
Zula had been noticing that Chet’s condition improved markedly when something happened to trigger an adrenaline surge and declined during uneventful parts of the journey. At the moment he seemed quite energetic, so she was surprised that he was now requesting a break; but perhaps this was just his polite way of saying that he wanted her to leave him alone so that he could take a leak. Certainly he had been drinking enough water. So she walked up the adit to the second hole on the left and smelled and saw more graffiti. But she smelled something else as well: a current of fresh air coming down from that direction.
She tried shutting off her flashlight and letting her eyes adjust, and she convinced herself that she could see faint gleams of daylight ricocheting from the tunnel’s moisture-slickened walls.
Which was obliterated by a wash of glare from Chet’s flashlight. He had finished his potty break, or whatever, and was bringing up the rear. Moving heavily again, lurching frequently to the side, as if he needed the wall of the adit to hold him up. He had zipped up his leather jacket as if to ward off a sudden chill.
“This is the way out,” Zula said, announcing as much as asking it.
“You can find the way out from here,” Chet confirmed. “Just go slow and look for booby traps.”
He allowed her, now, to lead the way. She moved forward about fifty feet, then waited for him to catch up, then did it again. She came to another intersection, but it was obvious which way to go, for light and air were unmistakably coming up the tunnel now. She began to proceed at an extremely deliberate pace, just barely staying ahead of Chet. There was no point in getting too far out in front of him, since she just had to wait for him to catch up, and going slowly gave her more time to look for booby traps. They came to what must be the main adit leading southward out of the mine and found a flatbed car that was still capable of rolling down the rails bolted into its floor. Zula, after inspecting it for piano wires and Claymore mines, insisted that Chet sit down on it. She got her hands on his shoulders and pushed him along down the rails for a surprisingly long time, the brightness ahead of them increasing every time they came to a bend in the tunnel, and finally came around a curve and were blinded by the almost direct light of the sun shining into the mine’s southern entrance. It seemed an obvious place to put a third booby trap, and they were too dazzled to see, so they waited there for a few minutes, eating snacks and letting Chet guzzle another bottle of water. Then Chet got to his feet, and they took the tunnel’s last hundred yards one cautious step at a time.
The last booby trap was a simple tripwire stretched from wall to wall at ankle level, just a few yards short of the exit, where hikers impatient to get out of this place would be tempted to break out into a long stride. Chet insisted that Zula step over it and then get all the way out of danger before he snipped it with his Leatherman. He was afraid that it was some sort of particularly fiendish IED that would detonate when the wire was cut. But nothing happened, and Chet staggered out of the tunnel a few moments later looking like the ghost of a miner who had died in the heart of the mountain a hundred years ago.
They had traveled less than a mile as the crow flew, but entered into a different world. Zula inferred that the prevailing winds must bring wet air from the Pacific up from the south to deposit loads of rain in the valley that now stretched out before them. For the air was palpably moister than what they’d been breathing on the Schloss side of the ridge, and the vegetation was of an altogether different biome. They had entered the mine in an arid wasteland of talus and emerged in the middle of something that was close to being a rain forest.
And a wilderness. There was no graffiti, no party trash at this end. A fire ring stood nearby, and around it were some flat spots where it looked as though backpackers might pitch tents when they ventured up here. But compared to the other side, only a short drive from the town of Elphinstone and a short hike from the comforts of the Schloss, this place was out in the middle of nowhere, a shred of territory caught between the U.S. border and the nearly uncrossable barrier of the ridge that now rose up behind them. Had the views been more spectacular, it might have attracted backpackers and mountain bikers anyway. But better vistas were to be had for less work in places like Glacier and Banff, not so many hours’ drive away, and so this place had been left alone, save by cross-border smugglers and international terrorists. Patches of snow, rounded by the spring melt, spread in the trees all around them and lapped up the slopes of the mountain, contributing to a general runoff that seeped through mud and trilled down small watercourses into cold gurgling brooks that came together, perhaps a mile below, into a river that hurtled south down the valley; and though they couldn’t see it from here, they could hear the roar of the cataract that almost coincided with the border, not marked on maps, but known to the few people who lived in these parts as American Falls.
OLIVIA HAD BEEN warned, of course, that working for MI6 would not be romantic. Not, in other words, the way it was in the movies. It was a bit embarrassing that this needed to be mentioned at all. No one who was worldly and intelligent enough to work for MI6 would really think it would be like a James Bond movie, would they?
So she had expected grinding tedium and deeply unromantic situations from the very beginning. For the most part, her time in Xiamen had amply fulfilled those expectations. The flashy bit at the very end had been anomalous to say the least.
And yet none of this careful hope deadening and expectation crushing on her trainers’ parts had fully prepared her for the job of traveling from Wenatchee to Bourne’s Ford on public transportation. She’d been lucky to reach the bus station in Wenatchee just a few minutes before the coach to Spokane was scheduled to depart. It was running half an hour late. No big deal. She bought a ticket with cash and climbed aboard a tired intercity bus reeking of mildew and air freshener and sat on it for several hours, watching the high desert of central and eastern Washington State go by, trying not to make too much of an impression on the down-at-heels senior citizens and migrant laborers sitting around her. A few hours later she disembarked at the bus and train station in downtown Spokane: a city she was certain had fine characteristics but that looked bleak and anonymous from street level at nightfall. It was ten degrees colder here than it had been on the coast. The next bus for Bourne’s Ford didn’t leave until tomorrow morning. She couldn’t check into a hotel without presenting ID and thereby sending up a flare, so she walked to a reasonably nice Italian restaurant and had a long slow dinner that she paid for with cash. Then she walked to a cinema and caught the last showing of a comedy that, she guessed, was aimed at teenagers. This disgorged her into a parking lot at one in the morning. Everything was closed. Not even bars were open. Caught in the open, she just kept walking, trying to look purposeful. If she had to walk for five hours, it wasn’t the end of the world. She was wearing comfortable flats and the energy expended by walking would keep her warm enough, despite the fact that she was underdressed for the weather. But after about two hours, as she was trudging up a seemingly endless commercial strip, she noticed a Perkins Family Restaurant that was open twenty-fours. She went into it and ate the most colossal breakfast she had ever had in her life, spent about an hour reading a single used copy of USA Today, then paid for the meal, went out, and hit the streets again.
By six in the morning the sky was getting light, joggers were out, and Starbucks cafés were beginning to open their doors. She killed another hour in one of those and then hiked back to the bus station, where she caught an 8:06 bus headed for Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. This was much like the first one, except with a certain hard-to-pin-down air of Wild West mountain-man craziness about it. The Wenatchee-Spokane run had been a simple matter of getting across a sparse desert, irrigated in some places, therefore with a generally farmlike vibe. She had noticed, as they’d drawn closer to Spokane, that trees were beginning to survive, just isolated specimens at first, then clumps, then small forests. But northward from Spokane the forest cover became continuous, the highway began to bound up and down considerable slopes, and the businesses and dwellings along it stopped feeling like farms and began feeling like outposts. Decidedly eccentric signage began to show up: billboards inveighing against the United Nations, and hand-lettered jeremiads about the existential threat posed by the federal budget deficit. But of course she just noticed those things because she was looking for them; it was mostly fast-food joints and convenience stores like anywhere else in America, interspersed with clusters of vacation homes (wherever there was a lake or a nice stretch of river), ranches (where the land was open and flat), or outbreaks of Appalachian-style rural poverty. Sometimes they’d jump over a ridge and pass through what she thought was out-and-out wilderness, until she saw the zigzagging tracks of the logging roads.
Then suddenly they were passing through a rather nice town, which she learned was Sandpoint, and which had all the indicia—brewpub, art gallery, Pilates, Thai restaurant—of a place where Blue State people would go to enjoy a high standard of living while maintaining nonstop connectivity and assuaging their guilty consciences in re global warming, fair trade, and the regrettable side effects of Manifest Destiny. The bus stopped there for a bit; many passengers got off, and only a few got on. For, as was obvious from looking out the windows, northern Idaho was not a place where anyone could sustainably live unless they had access to a vehicle of some description, so the market for public transit was correspondingly tiny and mostly limited to juveniles, very old people, shaggy men who appeared to be one step above vagrants, and women in ankle-length Little House on the Prairie–style dresses—apparently members of some very traditional religious sect.
An hour later she was in the considerably smaller and less Blue Statish town of Bourne’s Ford, and half an hour after that—for it turned out to be a bit of a walk—she was in its Walmart.
She had been waiting for the point in the journey where the crazy would begin: when she’d step over some invisible threshold separating commonsensical America from the subculture where Jacob Forthrast, his family, and his neighbors lived their lives. So far, it had been more of a slow blend than a threshold. The Walmart definitely made her feel that she was getting warmer. She happened to enter through the part of it that was a huge grocery and drug store: all by itself, probably larger than any store in the United Kingdom. It was the sort of place that encouraged its customers to buy in bulk, and the shopping carts were sized accordingly. Still, they were not large enough for some of the customers: a hulking Grizzly Adams type, openly wearing a semiautomatic pistol on his hip, was pushing one overloaded cart and dragging another behind him, both piled with huge sacks of dog food, beans, bacon, macaroni. The next aisle had been all but taken over by a family of those long-dress-wearing people: Mom, two teenaged daughters, a smaller girl, a toddler boy strapped into the basket and another being chased around by a young man who was either the father or an elder brother. The men wore normal clothes: no funny hats or facial hair for them. They were running a train of three carts, and Mom was checking her way through a laser-printed list that ran to four pages. But none of the other cu
stomers was really distinguishable from what you’d see in a grocery store anywhere else in the United States, or the United Kingdom for that matter.
So she hadn’t really found the crazy yet. But with a little introspection—and she had lots of time for that, as she made her way across acre after acre of machine-buffed Walmart floor space—she saw that what she was really looking for was a way for this journey to be something other than utterly and perfectly banal. If the police had chased her and Sokolov away from the shooting scene in Tukwila; if they’d been forced to abandon the car in the Cascades and make their way north through the mountains; if she had been pursued through the dark streets of Spokane by members of a drug gang; if the mountains of northern Idaho were infested with crazy Nazis; then all of this would have been more than what it was. But none of those conditions obtained, so this was nothing more than the most tedious imaginable way to spend two days, getting across one of the easiest-to-cross borders in the world between two relatively calm and docile countries.
Or so she had just about convinced herself when she strayed into the part of the store where the flat-panel TVs were displayed, and she noticed a hundred shoppers all standing still with their backs to her, gazing at live television coverage of some event.
The TVs were not all tuned to the same channel; some were showing Fox, some CNN, some local channels from Sandpoint or Spokane. But all of them were covering the same story and broadcasting similar images: a road, seen from a helicopter, in a generally green and open landscape. The road was broadening from two to several lanes as it approached a structure that looked like a tollbooth. All the lanes were filled with stopped cars. In the middle of this traffic jam was a gray hole. A crater. Like a meteor strike. Cars around the edge of it had been crushed, shredded, punched away from the center, and were still smoking despite streams of water being played on them from nearby fire trucks. The traffic jam was surrounded by flashing aid vehicles and infested with stretcher bearers. Still forms in body bags were lined up to one side.
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