Nothing came in all day from the Isle of Man. But when Richard woke up on Tuesday, he found a lot of company email, subject line “Plot thickens …,” which, when he traced it back to its root, turned out to concern a fifty-thousand-word novella that D-squared had posted on the T’Rain site a few hours ago. This to the evident surprise of his manager/editor here in Seattle, who’d had no idea that the Don was even contemplating any such project. Richard clicked on the link and opened the document. Its opening words were “The Torgai Foothills.” He stopped reading there, closed his laptop, got out of bed, and put on some clothes. He took the elevator down to the parking garage of his condo tower in downtown Seattle, got in his car, and drove straight to Boeing Field. Not until he was ensconced in a comfy seat on the jet, arcing northward over British Columbia on a direct route to the Isle of Man, did he open his laptop again and commence reading in earnest.
She remembered being brought home to her adoptive parents’ house for the first time and seeing, among so many other new and amazing things, a complete set of the
Zula had inherited the set and doggedly lugged it around to a succession of dorm rooms, student flophouses, and studio apartments. Her arrival in the United States had coincided pretty nearly with the advent of full-time high-speed Internet, and she had likewise been encouraged to make free use of that, though it had never been quite the same, to her, as the
From the age of eight onward, then, Zula had been raised in an environment that had been all about the free and frictionless flow of information into her young mind. She hadn’t fully appreciated this until she had found herself in this predicament where no one saw any point in telling her anything at all. Traveling with Jones’s band of jihadists, she almost felt nostalgic for the good old days of Ivanov and Sokolov, who had at least bothered to supply explanations of what was going on. Those two had bought into a Western mind-set in which it was important for things to make sense; and, needing the services of Zula and Peter and Csongor, they had been forced to keep them briefed.
Csongor. Peter. Yuxia. Even Sokolov. Whenever her mind went back over those events in Xiamen it snagged on those names, those faces. The mere fact of Peter’s death would have prostrated her for a week in normal circumstances. She was now asking herself a hundred times a day what had become of the others. Were any of them alive? If so, were they wondering what had become of Zula?
What had become of Zula: this would have required considerable explanation, much of which Zula was not competent to supply, since they weren’t telling her much. Circumstantial evidence (the key chain flailing from the ignition) made it clear that this strange truck with tank treads had been carjacked, as opposed to hot-wired. It seemed simplest to assume that the person they’d stolen it from was dead; it would have been crazy for them to leave the victim alive to call the Mounties. What kind of person drove such a vehicle around in the mountains of British Columbia during the mud season? It was quite obviously a working, not a recreational, vehicle and so Zula guessed it must be some sort of a caretaker or property manager. Perhaps that mine was not as abandoned as they had supposed; perhaps a number of such properties were spread around those mountains and they hired a local jack-of-all-trades to look in on each one of them from time to time.
The question on Jones’s mind must then be: How long would it take for his victim to go missing? Because this contraption that they were driving around in was about the most conspicuous vehicle imaginable, short of a Zeppelin, and having five jihadists and a black girl crammed into it was not going to make it any easier to blend in with ordinary traffic on the byways of British Columbia.
