“Because,” C-plus said, “it’s exactly the kind of thing that the cops would ask us to do as part of an investigation, and official corporate policy is to tell the cops to go fuck themselves.”
“Hmm, so we’ve been hands-off with the REAMDE guys until now,” said Richard, talking loudly over a surge of hot shame. Furious Muses were beginning to pop up on his emotional radar like Soviet bombers coming over the Pole.
“Yeahhhh…”
“Well, until we can prove that there’s no connection between them and Zula’s disappearance, corporate policy has to change,” Richard said.
THE JIHADISTS’ KIT included several Chinese entrenching tools: bare wooden handles about the length of a man’s arm tipped with shovel-shaped blades that could be rotated into a few different positions, making them usable as picks or as shovels. Through a combination of stomping the snow down with their feet and using these tools to scrape and shovel a path, they created a lane from the plane’s door to the prefab building with the functioning woodstove. They then used it to transfer their baggage from the plane into the building. The jet had been on the ground for a few hours now and the temperature inside of it had been declining the whole time, to the point where Zula had been pulling blankets off the bed one at a time and wrapping them around herself, transforming herself into a semblance of a burqa-clad woman of the conservative Islamic world. She was startled, after a while, to hear loud hacking and ripping noises from inside the plane, then understood that they were wielding their tools to strip its interior of anything they could conceivably use. But this was only a guess since they had kept the cabin door closed, and reacted splenetically when she pulled it open to peek out.
Eventually, though, the time came when Jones shoved the door open, letting in a wash of cold but blessedly clean-smelling air, and beckoned to her, letting her know that her days of private jet travel were finally at an end. And none too soon for Zula’s taste.
She emerged to find the cabin darker than she’d expected, since the interior had been wrecked, and shards of plastic wall-stuff and bats of insulation were dangling in front of the windows. Moreover, the cockpit door was closed, blocking any light from that direction. As Zula proceeded up the aisle, staggering and sliding over debris, she perceived that the door had taken heavy damage, perhaps from the same tree limb that had killed Pavel, and that a lake of blood had seeped out from under it to freeze or coagulate in front of the jet’s main entrance. She had no choice but to walk through it and track it out onto the snow beyond, which was already stained with red for a distance of several meters from the side of the plane. But when she looked up and away from the terrorists’ gore-track, she saw a clean white overcast sky and smelled pine trees and rain. This was not the bitter dry Arctic cold of midwestern winter, with temperatures far below freezing. This was the heavy drenching chill of the northwestern mountains, which somehow felt colder to Zula, even though the temperature was tens of degrees warmer. She drew the blankets tighter around her body and followed the track toward the heated building. No one escorted her. It did not seem that they were even
The building was dark and it was stifling; they had overdone it with the wood-burning stove. The sharp tang of hot iron reminded her of the smell of Khalid’s blood, and it did not hide the musty and mildewy funk of the long-shut-up building. The front room occupied the full width of the structure, which she pegged at eighteen or twenty feet, since this was a double-wide. The back right corner of the room was an L-shaped kitchen. Cabinet doors hung open. At whatever time that this facility had been mothballed, abandoned, or shut down for the winter, it had evidently been stripped of all items worth picking up and carrying away. Remaining was a sparse, motley array of cooking and serving ware, mostly consisting of the cheapest stuff that could be purchased at a Walmart. The woodstove was in the room’s left front quadrant. A banged-up aluminum saucepan, packed with snow, was rocking and sizzling on its top. Behind it was a rectangular table seating six: evidently as much for working as for dining, since behind it, against the wall, were a desk and a filing cabinet. To the right, as she walked in, were a sofa, a chair, a coffee table, and an old television set sitting on top of a VCR—a detail that dated the place more effectively than any other clue. In the back wall was a door leading to a corridor that ran back for some distance. She assumed that a lavatory and smaller offices or bunkrooms might branch off from it.
