Reamde

Day 6

Curtis. Peter Curtis. It had taken Richard many hours of devious googling to pin down the surname of Zula’s boyfriend. The lad’s insistence on using a different pseudonym on every system that he accessed had made this maddeningly difficult. If Peter and Zula had checked in to the Schloss as regular guests, Richard would have been able to access Peter’s credit card data. As it had happened, though, they had stayed in Richard’s apartment as personal guests.

The decisive break in the case had been achieved by Vicki, she of the Grand Marquis ammo run and the bearskin rug anecdote. She was currently a senior at Creighton. She apparently had a serious case of insomnia or a large personal stash of Adderall. Vicki had access to Zula’s Facebook page and to her Flickr photo-sharing page. She also had some of her own photographs that she’d taken during the re-u. She had put together a portfolio of pictures of Peter and then made use of an Internet site that employed facial recognition technology to search the Internet for pictures of the same, or similar, faces. This had produced a lot of false positives, but several candidates had turned up, including a series of photographs taken at DefCon three years ago of a presentation given by a man identifying himself as 93+37. Richard had no idea how to pronounce this, but he could see that if 93+37 were flipped around in a mirror, the “9” would look a little bit like a “P,” the two central “3”s would look like “E” s, the “+” would still look like a “t,” and the terminal “7” would look a little bit like a lowercase “r,” yielding “Peter.” The sum of 93 and 37 was, of course, 130, and so Richard had gone to work googling various combinations of “130” and “93+37” with “security” and “hacker” and “pen test” and “Seattle” and “snowboard” until he had begun to establish some leads, in the form of message boards and chat rooms, that Peter, or a person weirdly similar to Peter, had been in the habit of using. And in this manner he had begun to establish a sense of what Peter was interested in, who he hung out with, and what he did in his spare time. He was, for example, strangely interested in something called tuck-pointing, which was the process of repairing old brick structures by putting fresh mortar — historically correct mortar, it went without saying — into the spaces between the bricks.

Parsing a series of messages posted on a snowboarding site, Richard guessed the name of the shop in Vancouver where Peter had purchased that high-tech snowboard he was so in love with. Some more searching had uncovered the name of the shop’s proprietor. Richard had reached him at an hour of the morning that was apparently considered to be punitively early in the snowboarding world. Richard had explained matters to the shopkeeper and persuaded him to go back into his records and dig up the name on Peter’s credit card. And this had thrown open the Google floodgates and enabled Richard to get the address of Peter’s building in Georgetown from King County real estate records.

At about nine in the morning, almost exactly twelve hours after breaching Zula’s apartment, he found himself circling the block in question. The yellow handle of his sledgehammer was projecting vertically from his passenger seat, all but announcing his intentions to anyone who looked into the windshield; like a fourteen-year-old boy trying to tame an erect penis, Richard kept pushing it down and it kept snapping back up. The building was not hard to identify; it had recently been tuck-pointed.

Since he did not have the benefit of sympathetic neighbors in this case, Richard parked on the street and made his first approach to the building as a pedestrian, sans sledgehammer. It was a brilliant sunny morning of the sort that Seattle would occasionally lay before its desperate residents in the early spring; wild rhododendrons in the vacant lot across the street were showing red blossoms, and hobbyist-pilots were taking off from Boeing Field in their little planes. Richard pounded for a while on what he took to be the front door, then wandered around back. Two large roll-up doors fronted on the alley. Between them was a single human-sized door. Richard was knocking on the latter when a pickup truck pulled into the alley and rolled to a stop, close enough that he could have reached out and touched it. The engine shut down and the door swung open. Out came a lean, close-cropped, stubbled Caucasian male in his thirties, dressed in a scarred brown leather jacket over faded and frayed Carhartts. “Looking for Peter?” he asked, stepping to the roll-up door on the right and inserting a key into a massive tamper-proof padlock that dangled from its hasp. Before Richard could answer, he continued, “I haven’t seen him in a week and a half.”

“Really.”

“Pisses me off too, because he’s my landlord, and I want him to fix my Internet. Do you have any idea where he is?” The man dropped to a squat, gripped a handle on the front of the big door, and stood up, heaving it open to reveal a dark bay filled with welding machines and the paintless steel tools and tables favored by those who worked with unbelievably hot things.

“I’m investigating his disappearance.”

The man straightened and turned to look at him. “You a cop?”

“Private investigator,” Richard said, “hired by the family.”

“So they don’t know where he is either?”

“He and his girlfriend went missing a week ago.”

“Exactly a week, or — ”

“Last they were seen was Monday afternoon.”

“My Internet died Monday night, late.”

“Heard any disturbances, or — ”

“No.”

“But you’re only here during business hours?”

“My hours are irregular,” the man said, “but I don’t sleep here.”

Richard nodded at the roll-up door on the left. It was secured by another massive padlock. “Is that his bay?”

“Yup.”

“I don’t suppose you have a key?”

The welder thought about it. “Yeah, I got one.”

“Mind if I borrow it?”

“Sorry, but I don’t lend out my equipment.”

“I beg your pardon?”

The man stepped forward into the darkness, reached out, grabbed something, and pulled hard, putting his weight into it. He began backing toward the alley. As he came into the light Richard saw that he was towing a two-wheeled cart loaded with a pair of gas cylinders, regulators, a length of hose, and a triple-barreled torch. “My key,” he said. “Opens just about anything.”

While the welder halved Peter’s padlock — a procedure that took all of about three seconds, once he got his torch up and running — Richard ambled around in the alley, looking at the upper-story windows that he supposed belonged to Peter’s living quarters. They were old-fashioned multipaned casement windows with metal frames. He noticed that one of them had a missing pane, right next to the latching handle on the inside.

“It’s all yours,” the welder announced, stepping back. “Mind your hand, it’s going to be hot for a while.”

Keeping well clear of the hot parts, Richard got the door unlatched and hauled it open.

Damn, but there were a lot of cars in here. As if Peter had been running a chop shop. In a few moments he identified Peter’s boxy van — the one he and Zula had taken up to B.C. — and Zula’s Prius, which had been parked as far back in the bay as it would go, apparently to make room for a little sports car that had been shoehorned into the remaining space. The latter had B.C. plates. The keys were still in its ignition.

Hands in pockets, Richard ambled around. The welder remained on the threshold of the big door, perhaps wisely declining to trespass.

“There’s your problem,” Richard announced. He was standing before half a sheet of plywood that had been screwed to the wall and used as a surface for mounting telecom stuff: cable modem, routers, punch-down blocks, phone gear. In two places, cables had been severed, their cut ends carefully pushed back into place so that the damage was not obvious. One was telephone, the other was the black coax line that had formerly run to the cable modem.

This was the first suggestion of actual wrongdoing that Richard had seen. Of course, the fact that Zula (and, apparently, Peter) had disappeared was more than sufficiently alarming that he’d thought of nothing else for the last couple of days. But in all of the investigating he had done so far, he had not seen actual evidence that human maleficence was involved. He suspected it, he feared it, but — as the Seattle detective assigned to Zula’s missing persons case doggedly pointed out — he couldn’t prove it. The appearance of those two severed wires thus struck him as deeply as a pool of blood or a spent shell casing.

He pulled out his phone and texted John: CALL OFF THE MOUNTIES. PETER’S CAR HERE. ZULA’S TOO. He decided not to mention the third car or the severed wires for now.

“You recognize this sports car?” Richard asked. His voice sounded funny to his own ears: dry and tight.

“Nope.”

“Well. I’m going to look upstairs.”

“Yup.”

He’d hoped that last night’s forced entry to Zula’s apartment would be the last time he’d have to expose himself to the possibility of seeing something horrible. Now here he was climbing another staircase toward another possible crime scene. This time he considered it much more likely he’d see something that would scar him for life. But it was his responsibility to shove his face into this particular psychological buzz saw and so he reckoned he should get on with it.

What he found, though, was not what he’d expected. Peter’s apartment contained no persons, living or dead. Nor were there any signs of violence or struggle, with two exceptions. One — which he had anticipated — was the missing windowpane, which had clearly been used by someone to break into the loft. The shattered glass was still sprayed over the floor below it.

The other was a wrecked gun safe standing against the wall in the corner of the loft. Something comprehensively bad had happened to it. Its finish had been burned away in a line that went all the way around its top, as though it had been attacked with a thermonuclear can opener. The entire top of the safe had been sliced off and thrown on the floor, where hot metal edges had burned into the wood. Instinctively Richard scanned the ceiling for smoke detectors and noted that they were all dangling open, their batteries removed.

This part seemed almost like a waste of time, but he stepped forward and looked down into the safe and verified that it was empty.

He walked back down the stairs and found the welder. “I could use your professional opinion on something.”

“Plasma cutter,” was the welder’s verdict, after he had come up the stairs and got a load of the ruined gun safe.

“Do you have one?”

“No!” said the welder, and shot him a look.

“I wasn’t accusing you,” Richard said, holding up his hands. “I was just curious what they look like.”

“It’s a box,” the welder said, holding up his hands to indicate size. “About yay big.”

“Portable.”

“Totally.”

“Portable enough to take it through yonder window?”

“That would be a bit of a stretch. I would recommend stairs.”

“So someone probably used the window to get inside and get a door open, then carried the plasma cutter up the stairs.”

“Yeah,” said the welder, “but I don’t think your average burglar carries one around on his person.”

“Agreed,” Richard said.

The welder looked over his shoulder, a little uneasily, at Peter’s apartment. “Seen anything else … funky?”

“No,” Richard said, “nothing funky.”

“Fuckin’ weird, man,” said the welder, and left.

Richard found his way to the front door, which had a deadbolt, a chain, and a pushbutton lock in the middle of the doorknob. The latter was locked, but the other two weren’t. After breaking in via the window, the burglar must have unlocked this door from the inside and used it to bring the plasma cutter in and out, and used the button to secure it behind him when he’d left.

So, to all appearances, the plasma-cutter gun-safe caper had happened when the place was already vacant.

But how did its being vacant square with the presence of three cars in the bay? And why would the sports car’s owner leave his key chain in the ignition? Generally, people needed their key chains for other purposes, such as getting into their houses.

Turning around, he noticed a red LED gleaming at him from the top of a shelving unit where Peter was in the habit of storing his raincoats, hats, and boots. He walked closer and found a little webcam, mounted there with a web of white nylon zip ties. An Ethernet wire trailed away from it and disappeared into a hole in the wall. Richard traced it back into the shop area where the cars were parked, and found a place, not far from the plywood panel with the telecommunications gear, where a computer must have sat at one time. It had been on the bottom shelf of a workbench. Above it were a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but their cables dangled into the space below. A power cable and an Ethernet wire were there too.

Richard assumed that the computer must have been taken, until a minute later when he literally tripped over it while circling the sports car. The CPU — a simple rectangular box — had been thrown down on the concrete floor and attacked with the plasma cutter: a single pass cutting down the side of it, slicing through the stack of drives.

Richard cursed. He’d imagined he was on to something. Peter had set up security cameras around his place. Perhaps one of them had captured some footage of interest. But the intruder had anticipated this and made sure that the hard drive was destroyed.

He orbited all the cars, peering in through their windows, not wanting to disturb the evidence any more than he already had. Peter’s had not been fully unpacked; whatever had happened must have happened shortly after they’d gotten back to the place on Monday night.

He was jotting down the license plate number of the car from B.C. when his ears picked up a familiar clicking and whooshing noise: the sound of a hard drive coming awake and going to work.

Following the sound, and assisted by some conveniently placed Ethernet cables, he got underneath the flight of wooden stairs that led to Peter’s loft, and found a little box, mounted to an improvised shelf and plugged into an outlet through a string of extension cords. It was a Wi-Fi access point. A little bigger than most nowadays.

It was bigger, he realized, because it wasn’t just a Wi-Fi router. It was also a backup device. It had its own built-in hard drive.

NONE OF THE jihadists was in a great hurry to explain anything to Zula, but she pieced the following data together from looking out the windows and from half-understood Arabic.

They had been saved by the light of dawn, which had shown them a place to touch down: a landing strip that, however, was evidently too short for this kind of plane. It dead-ended in woods. Which seemed an awkward way to lay out a landing strip. But as Zula began to understand, the people who had put it there hadn’t been afforded a lot of choice. This was some sort of valley in high mountains. It was spacious enough, wandering across several square miles of high cold territory, but its shape was convoluted, and its bottom was hacked up by gullies and ridged with outcroppings of hard rock, leaving few alternatives as to where a landing strip might be constructed. And culture shock might have been a factor; maybe Pavel and Sergei, accustomed to big international airports and Hyatts, had not made allowances for north woods bush-pilot dash, and had imputed prudence, or at least sanity, to the architects of this strip.

Or maybe they had just been desperate and unable to make any other choice; or maybe they’d had guns to their heads.

The landing strip was part of an industrial complex that, from Zula’s point of view, wandered and sprawled aimlessly into parts of the valley that were hidden behind trees. Encouragingly, this included a small compound of buildings only a hundred meters or so from the landing strip. These all looked the same, and it was obvious enough that they were prefabricated structures that had been brought in on trucks and bolted together. Some of them looked like storage units, but one had a rust-fuzzed chimney protruding from the three feet of snow that covered its roof. Its south-facing wall was fortified by at least two cords of stacked wood. Zula watched through a window as one of the soldiers slogged over to it, moving at a pace of perhaps ten feet per minute as his legs broke through hip-deep snow on every step. When he finally reached the front door he destroyed its lock with a burst of submachine gun fire and staggered inside. A few minutes later, smoke began to emerge from the chimney.

THE DISCOVERY OF the hard-drive-equipped Wi-Fi unit under Peter’s stairs placed Richard at a distinct fork in the road. He reckoned that this property housed so much evidence of wrongdoing that the police would have to send someone around to investigate. The physical link between this crime scene and Zula — her car was parked right in the middle of it — might pump a bit of energy into the investigation of her disappearance. But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.

And yet on the other hand, if the cops did finally get serious about this, they could do things he couldn’t, such as get access to phone and motor vehicle records.

So he adopted a hedging strategy. He unplugged the Wi-Fi hub and threw it in his car and drove it to the Seattle offices of Corporation 9592. There was an information technology department there, which had a little lab where they assembled and repaired computers. No one was there; it was Sunday. In a manner that would spark outrage tomorrow morning, when his depredations were noticed by technicians coming in for work, Richard opened up toolboxes and pulled computers from inventory and generally made a mess of things on someone’s workbench. He opened up the Wi-Fi hub and removed the drive. Following instructions drawn from all over the Internet, including even a YouTube video, he connected this to a computer and made a copy of all the files on the drive. He then drove the reassembled Wi-Fi device back to Peter’s building, where he plugged it in just as it had been before.

Then he called the cops.

As much as he wanted to hang around and watch them investigate the crime scene, he knew that the first thing they’d do would be to eject him from the premises and surround it with yellow tape. So he hung around only long enough to tell a drastically truncated version of the day’s story to the first cop who arrived on the scene. He admitted to cutting off the padlock and then walking around the apartment for a while, but he said nothing about his other activities.

Then he drove back to Corporation 9592. Along the way, it occurred to him that he had just confessed to breaking and entering; but somehow he didn’t think that Peter would press charges. Wedged in traffic because of an unholy conjunction of a Sounders game and a slow-moving freight train, he called C-plus. He had one of those rigs where his phone Bluetoothed the conversation into his car’s stereo system. The volume was turned up too loud; a blast of noise nearly blew the windows out of his vehicle. Some very unusual mixture of bellowing voices, clashing metal, and heavy respiration. He turned it down hastily.

“Richard.”

“C-plus. Busy?”

“Am I ever not?”

In the background, some guy was screaming single-word utterances in Latin. There was rhythmic tromping.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Maneuvers.” C-plus said. Then there was some kind of interruption, the sound of a hand shuffling the phone around.

“You’re in the National Guard?” But even as he was saying this, Richard was dismissing the possibility; they didn’t speak Latin in the National Guard.

“Roman Legion reenactment group,” C-plus explained.

“So you’re, like, marching around in sandals and a skirt?”

“The Roman caliga is far, far more than just a sandal, at least as that term is construed by modern-day persons,” C-plus began. “To begin with — ”

“Okay, shut up,” Richard said.

C-plus sighed.

“Want to get involved with something way more interesting than what you’re actually being paid for?”

“Richard, if you are trying to trap me into griping about my job — ”

“Furthest thing from my mind.”

“Even so, let me say that my normal work is incredibly interesting and uplifting.”

“It is so noted,” Richard said, “but I need your help with a personal project. Kind of a detective thing.”

“That REAMDE project?”

The question struck Richard as a bit odd and stymied him for a few seconds. “No,” he said. “If it were about computer viruses, I wouldn’t have even tried to con you into thinking it would be interesting.”

“What is it about then?”

“Come down to the IT lab and I’ll explain it.”

Corvallis raised his voice. “My legion has been getting ready for these maneuvers for three months!” he said. “I have responsibilities as the pilus posterior of my cohort — ”

“It’s about Zula,” Richard said. “It’s important.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Richard got to the office about fifteen minutes later, retrieved the computer from the IT lab, and took it to a small conference room, where he got it booted up and hooked into a monitor. Corvallis showed up wearing a tunic of off-white, natural-looking wool that Richard was afraid he might have woven himself on a Roman-style loom. He had swapped his caligae for cross-trainers. With practically no small talk he made himself at home on this computer and began poking around in the files that Richard had copied over from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. The files and directories had nonintuitive, computer-generated names, and Richard didn’t recognize any of the file formats being used.

In the meantime, Richard’s curiosity had gotten the better of him. “Hey,” he said, “how come, when I told you I had a detective problem, you guessed it was about REAMDE?”

Corvallis shrugged. “I know Zula has been working on that with you.”

“Really?” Richard was startled by this; but then he remembered something Corvallis had said a few days ago, in the Prius, to the effect that Zula had somehow helped narrow the location of the virus writer down to Xiamen. “How long have you known of this supposed collaboration between me and Zula?”

“Since Tuesday morning.”

“Tuesday morning!?”

“Oh my God, Richard, settle down.”

“What time Tuesday morning?”

“Earlyish. I could check my phone.”

Silence.

“What the F is going on, Richard?”

“It’s like I said on the phone: Zula and her boyfriend have vanished. No one has seen or heard from them in almost a week.”

This rocked Corvallis back, and he said “Oh my God” in an altogether different tone. “When did they vanish?”

“Well, as it turns out, C-plus, one of the problems with vanishing is that it is difficult to pin down an exact time when it happened. If you had asked me twenty-four hours ago…” Richard paused, groping through the last day’s memories.

Twenty-four hours ago, he had not even been made aware, yet, that Zula was missing.

“Let’s just say that, as far as I know, you are the last person who talked to her.”

“Oh.”

“So what the fuck did you talk to her about?”

“Let go of my shoulders, please.”

“Hmm?”

“It doesn’t help, and it makes it hard for me to type.”

“Okay.” Richard relaxed his grip on the woolen tunic and backed away from Corvallis, hands in the air.

“She had been up all night — Monday night into Tuesday morning — playing.” Meaning, as Richard understood, playing T’Rain. “She said she was researching some gold movements connected with REAMDE.”

“Seems a little unusual right there,” Richard pointed out. “Tracking down viruses isn’t her department.”

Corvallis heard a rebuke in that and colored slightly. “It’s hard to believe, but at the time, I’d never even heard of REAMDE. Had you?”

“No,” Richard confessed.

“So I took what she said at face value. It was a special project you’d asked her to undertake.”

“Really unlike her to just flat out lie,” Richard remarked.

“Anyway, she needed to identify a player who had cast a healing spell on her at some point during her playing session.” Corvallis had his laptop out now and began typing on it between utterances; and as he did, they degenerated from sentences to fragments. “In the Torgai Foothills.” Type, type, type. “Total mayhem.”

“Was it a member of her party?”

“No. Questing with one other. Getting killed a lot. Didn’t understand why at the time.”

“Because you didn’t know about REAMDE and the bandits and so on.”

“Yeah,” Corvallis said absently. After about fifteen seconds of typing, he said, “Okay.”

Richard bent forward, reached into the gully that ran down the center of the conference table, and extracted a video cable, which he threw across to Corvallis, who plugged it into his laptop. The projection screen at the end of the room lit up with a display consisting mostly of a terminal window: just lines of (to Richard) inscrutable text, the results of various queries that C-plus had been typing into a database. At the moment two character profiles were being displayed. These were just long strings of numbers and words. Corvallis typed a command that caused two windows to appear on the screen, each displaying a character profile in a more user-friendly form: a 3D rendering of a creature in T’Rain, the character’s name in a nice little cartouche, tables and plots of vital statistics. Like a police dossier as art-directed by medieval clerics. One of the windows depicted a female character, whom Richard recognized as belonging to Zula. The other was presented in a window whose palette, typeface, and art all said Evil. The portrait was not fixed, but kept shape-shifting among several different species, one of which was a redheaded T’Kesh.

“Who is the Evil T’Kesh Metamorph?” Richard asked.

“That is the character Zula was hanging out with the whole time she was logged on that night,” C-plus said. Speaking slowly and haltingly as he scanned some user’s customer profile, he continued: “Belongs to a longtime customer and heavy user named Wallace, based in Vancouver. But on the night in question” — (typing) — “he and Zula were logged on from the same place” — (typing) — “in Georgetown.”

“That’s consistent with what I saw earlier today. Zula’s car and a sports car from B.C. are both parked at her boyfriend’s loft in Georgetown.”

“So they must have all been there on the night in question — ”

“And that is the place from which they ‘vanished.’ A word I like less the more I use it. Can you tell me anything more about this Wallace?”

“Not without violating the corporate data privacy policy.”

Corvallis shrank from the look that Richard now threw him and went back to typing.

A customer profile appeared on the screen, displaying Wallace’s full name, his address, and some information about his T’Rain playing habits. One stat jumped out at Richard. “Check out his last login.”

“Tuesday morning,” C-plus said. “He hasn’t been on since.” He typed a little more and pulled up a window displaying plots and charts of Wallace’s usage stats, covering the entire time he’d been a T’Rain customer. “That’s the longest he has gone without playing in the last two years.”

“And Zula?”

“Same,” C-plus said. “She hasn’t been on at all. And another thing? Neither of them logged out cleanly on Tuesday morning. Their connections went down at the same time, and the system logged them out automatically.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Richard said, remembering the severed wires in Peter’s shop. “Someone walked into the place and cut their Internet cable with a knife while they were playing.”

“Who would do that?” Corvallis asked.

“Peter was hanging around with creeps,” Richard said.

This now so obviously looked like a classic drug-dealing-related home invasion/mass murder scenario that Richard had to remind himself of why he was even bothering to continue thinking about it. “Zula wanted something from you. Just before this all happened.”

“Actually it was after,” Corvallis said.

“What do you mean?”

“Their connection went dead at 7:51.” Corvallis picked up his phone and thumbed away at it for a few minutes. “Zula called me at 8:42.”

“Okay. That’s interesting. She called you at 8:42 and told you this story about REAMDE investigation and said she needed to know who had cast a healing spell on her character.”

“Yeah, and it turned out to be some Chinese player logged in from Xiamen.”

“Which is how you first became aware that the virus originated there.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re telling me that Zula was the first person to figure that out.”

“Yes.”

“That strikes me as superodd.”

“How so?”

“Because if you leave out the whole REAMDE and Xiamen part of the story, this looks very simple. Peter was dealing in drugs or something. He got into business with the wrong people. Those people entered his loft and abducted him and took him away and killed him, and because Zula happened to be there with him, they did the same to her. But that doesn’t fit with this Wallace guy, and it certainly doesn’t fit in with the fact that Zula apparently traced REAMDE to Xiamen at almost exactly the same moment that she and everyone else in the apartment vanished.”

“Wallace seems to have kept a very low Internet profile,” Corvallis said.

“Yeah.” For Richard had been watching on the big screen as Corvallis googled the man and came up with very little: mostly genealogical sites of no use to them. “I’ll bet I know what he looks like though.” He was remembering the guy Peter had held the mysterious conference with at the Schloss.

“What do we know about the people who created REAMDE?” Richard asked.

“That’s not my department,” Corvallis reminded him. “That’s being investigated by people who specialize in that stuff.”

“Hacker kids in China, that’s what I heard.”

“Me too.”

“It just seems unlikely that they’d have the wherewithal to organize a home invasion in Seattle on a few hours’ notice.”

“Unless they have friends or something who live here. There are some sketchy characters down in the I.D.” By this Corvallis meant the International District, not all that far from Georgetown. As West Coast Chinatowns went, it was small — nothing compared to San Francisco’s or Vancouver’s — but still managed to produce the occasional gambling-den massacre straight out of a Fu Manchu novel.

“But even if the REAMDE gang knew that Zula was on to them, how would they be able to trace her to Peter’s loft in Georgetown?”

“They wouldn’t,” Corvallis said, “unless they had infiltrated Corporation 9592’s China operation and had access to our logs.”

“Noted,” Richard finally said, after thinking about it for a good long while. He pulled out his phone and accessed a little app that helped him figure out what time it was right now in China. The answer: something like three in the morning. He thumbed out an email to Nolan: Orb me when you wake up.

“But look,” Richard said, as soon as he heard the little swooshing noise telling him that the email was sent. “The reason I actually called you was because of this.” He rested a hand atop the PC he’d carried in from the IT lab and told Corvallis the story about the security cameras and the Wi-Fi hub in Peter’s place.

They transferred the video cable from the laptop to the PC and got it hooked up to power and a keyboard. Corvallis opened the directory containing the files copied from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. “Hmm,” he said immediately. “What was the brand name of the hub?”

Richard told him. Corvallis visited the company’s site and, with a bit of clicking around in their “Products” section, was able to pull up a picture of a device that Richard recognized as looking like Peter’s. He copied and pasted the model number into the Google search box, then appended the search terms “linux driver” and hit the button. The screen filled up with a number of hits from open source software sites.

“Okay.”

“What are you doing?” Richard asked.

“You said Peter was a geek, right?”

“Yeah. Computer security consultant.”

Corvallis nodded. “The format of the files from his hub suggests that they were created by Linux. And indeed when I do a little bit of searching I can see that it’s easy to download a Linux driver for this hub. It is Linux-friendly, in other words. So I suspect that what Peter did was set up a Linux-based system to manage his security cameras and perform automated backups and so on. And when he bought that hub, he junked the Windows-based software that shipped with it and reconfigured it to work directly under his Linux environment.”

“Which tells us what?”

“That we’re screwed.” Corvallis used a text editor to open one of the files that Richard had failed to open earlier. “See, the header on this file indicates that it is encrypted. All the files that you recovered from his hub have been encrypted in the same way. Peter didn’t want bad guys breaking into his system and snooping around in his security camera archives, so he set up his system with a script that encrypted all the video recordings before saving them to disk. And those encrypted files were then automatically backed up to the Wi-Fi hub.”

“And those are the files we are looking at now.”

“Yeah. But we’ll never get them open. Maybe the NSA could break this encryption. We can’t.”

“Can we know anything else? How old are the files? How big are they?”

With a bit more typing Corvallis produced a table showing the sizes and dates of the files. “Some are pretty huge,” he said, “which makes me think that they must be video files from the cameras you spoke of. Some are tiny. In terms of times and dates — ”

They both scanned the table for a while, trying to see patterns.

“The tiny ones are regular,” Richard said. “Every hour, on the hour.”

“And the huge ones are totally sporadic,” Corvallis said. “Listen, it’s obvious that the tiny ones are being generated by a cron job.”

“Cron job?”

“A process on the server that does something automatically on a regular schedule. Those files are just system logs, Richard. The system just spits them out once an hour, and they get automatically backed up.”

“But let’s talk about the big files. The video files. It’s a motion-activated system,” Richard said. “Just look at it. There’s a file on Friday afternoon, which is when Peter would have been packing for the trip to B.C. Then nothing — except for the hourly log files, that is — until the middle of the night on the following Thursday. Which is weird. Because we know that a lot was going on in the place Tuesday morning. Why didn’t it get picked up by the cameras?”

“Actually, there is nothing at all — not even hourly log files — between midnight and ten A.M. on Tuesday,” Corvallis pointed out. He drew Richard’s attention to the table and traced his finger down the column listing the time/date stamps. “See, the cron job was functioning properly all through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Monday night, it did its thing at eleven P.M.…”

“But then there’s a gap,” Richard said. “No more little cron job files until ten in the morning on Tuesday.”

“After which,” Corvallis concluded, “it resumes its usual habits until Thursday at two A.M.”

“Coinciding with a big video file,” Richard pointed out. “The reason there’s nothing after that is because the server that was running the whole system got trashed. Someone came back to Peter’s place on Thursday, two days after Peter and Zula had vanished. Bastard probably knew it was empty; he must have been an accomplice, or a friend of one of the bad guys. Broke in through an upstairs window. Went downstairs, triggering the security camera and causing that last big file to be created. Opened the front door from the inside. Carried in a plasma cutter. Opened Peter’s gun safe. Stole something from in there. Noticed the computer that was logging the security videos and used the plasma cutter to destroy its hard drives.”

Corvallis nodded. “That fits,” he said. “As soon as that computer was destroyed, the hourly log files stopped coming in.”

“The only part that doesn’t make sense is the gap on Tuesday morning,” Richard said. “As if the power went out for a while. But that can’t be it. The machine had a UPS.”

Corvallis was shaking his head. “A power outage would have showed up in these logs. I’m seeing nothing.”

“So how do you explain it?”

“There’s an obvious and simple answer, which is that the files were manually erased,” Corvallis said. “Someone who knew how the system worked went in between nine and ten A.M. on Tuesday and wiped out all files generated since midnight.”

“But this is the backup drive we’re looking at,” Richard reminded him.

Corvallis looked up at him. “That’s why I’m saying it had to be someone who was familiar with the system. He knew about the backup drive, and he was careful to erase both the original and the backup files.”

“Peter, in other words, is the one who did this,” Richard said.

“That’s the simplest explanation.”

“Either he was working with the bad guys — ”

“Or he had a gun to his head,” Corvallis said, then winced at the look that came over Richard’s face.

“So where does that leave us?” Richard asked, somewhat rhetorically.

“The data from here,” said Corvallis, indicating the PC, “is all stuff that the cops should be able to analyze, the same way we have been doing. But unless they can get the NSA to decrypt the video files, it won’t go any further than we’ve already gone. The other stuff — the T’Rain logs that we used to make the connection to Wallace — they can’t get unless they come in our front door with a court order.”

“But they can establish a connection to Wallace just from the fact that his car is parked in the loft,” Richard said.

“I think that all you can really do is wait for them to gather more information about Wallace,” Corvallis said. “Let the investigation run its course.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Richard said. “Could you do me one other favor, though?”

“Sure.”

“Keep checking the T’Rain logs. Let me know if there is any more activity on any of these accounts.”

“Zula’s and Wallace’s?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll set up a cron job to do it right now,” Corvallis said.

“Once an hour?”

“I was thinking once a minute.”

“Now, that’s the spirit.” Richard considered it.

“Anything else?” C-plus asked, flexing his fingers, kind of like a boxer jumping up and down in the corner of the ring.

“There must also be, I would guess, a whole complex of many accounts connected with these kids in Xiamen, right?”

“In theory, yeah,” C-plus said. “But they seem to have been pretty savvy about protecting themselves. Like, instead of carrying the gold around on their persons, they have it stashed all over the Torgai Foothills.”

“Which would prevent anyone other than us from knowing where it was,” Richard said. “But because we have admin privileges, we can just search the database and find every pile of gold pieces in that region, correct?”

“Of course.”

“And then we can go back through the log files and identify the characters who moved the gold pieces to those stashes.”

“Sure.”

“So those characters should get placed on some kind of watch list. Whenever they log in, we track them. Watch what they’re doing. Check their IP addresses. Are they still in Xiamen? Or moving around? Do they have coconspirators in other places?”

Corvallis said nothing.

“What am I missing here?” Richard asked, starting to get a bit exercised.

“Nothing.”

“Why didn’t we do this a long time ago!?”

“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 watching her. They knew, as did she, that if she tried to make a run for it, she would bog down in deep snow with her first step and freeze to death before getting beyond rifle range.

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.

The jihadists had brought food with them, in the form of military rations, as well as rice and lentils, which could of course be cooked with melted snow. One of the soldiers seemed to have been put in charge of that project. Two others were exploring a neighboring building that seemed to have been a maintenance shop. They were looking for tools, and they were finding a situation analogous to what obtained in the kitchen: all the good stuff had been taken, leaving only junk that wasn’t worth moving: rusty shovels and worn-out push brooms. But shovels were just what they needed, since the task at hand, apparently, was to turn the jet into a coffin for Pavel and Sergei and Khalid. Zula inferred that they were worried about being spotted from the air. In that case the pilots had done them a large favor by crashing the plane in trees. A long skid mark led to the wreck, but snow had begun to fall during the time they had been here and would soon erase this. It only remained to cover the plane itself with some combination of snow and hacked-off foliage. This project went much faster once they had liberated some tools from the shed, but even so it occupied Jones and the other surviving jihadists for the remainder of the day. They kept themselves warm by working hard, and when they came in for breaks they wanted to eat. Supplying them with food somehow became Zula’s responsibility. This was ridiculous, but no more so than anything else that had happened to her in the last week, so she pretended to go about it cheerfully, deciding that it might improve her life expectancy and enlarge her freedom of action if she made herself useful rather than staying in a fetal position under a pile of blankets, which was what she felt like doing. The front room had windows and therefore views out three sides, and so this also enabled her to move about and look around and try to get some conception of where they were.

During the last couple of hours of the flight, Zula had not followed the plane’s course on the electronic map, and so she did not know in what part of B.C. they had actually landed. In a vague way, she thought of B.C. as being a vastly scaled-up Washington State, which was to say that the western part was rain forest ramping up to snow-covered but not especially high mountains, and the interior was, generally speaking, a big basin, tending to dryness, with hills and mountains generously scattered about, and the eastern fringe was even larger mountains: the Rockies and their tributary ranges. The place where she and the terrorists now found themselves looked dry and rocky to her, which made her think that they must be well into the interior. But Zula’s time in the Pacific Northwest had gotten her used to the concept of microclimates (a considerable adjustment for one who had grown up in a place where the climate was as macro as it could possibly be), so she knew that it was best not to go making assumptions; it was quite possible that they were only a few miles from salt water and that this valley was dry merely because it lay in the rain shadow of coast-facing mountains. From here it might be rain forest in all directions; or it might be desert. They might be hard up against the border of the Yukon or they might be only a three-hour drive from downtown Vancouver. She simply had no idea. And neither, she suspected, did Abdallah Jones.

There was no doubt, however, that this facility was a mine. It would be wrong to call it “abandoned,” since the doors had been locked and some low-value infrastructure had been left in place: just the sort of gear that would be needed to reboot the operation if the owners ever had a mind to do so. Her first guess was that it had been shut down for the winter, but various clues suggested that it had gone unused for a number of years. She knew enough of geology to understand that mineral prices fluctuated, and that, depending on the tenor of the underlying ore, a mine that was profitable in some years might not be worth operating in others. This could be one of those.

Busying her hands with stoking the fire, and occupying her brain with such immediate and practical thoughts, she was almost completely unmindful of what had happened at the end of last night’s airplane journey. When this did come into her thoughts, she was shocked by how little effect it had had on her, at least in the short term. She developed three hypotheses:

1. The lack of oxygen that had caused her to pass out almost immediately after she’d killed Khalid had interfered with the formation of short-term memories or whatever it was that caused people to develop posttraumatic stress disorder.

2. This was just a temporary reprieve. Later, if she survived, the trauma of last night would come back to mess her up.

3. Possibly because of devastating experiences earlier in her life, she was some kind of a psychopath, a born killer; the comfortable circumstances under which she’d been living until a week ago had made it possible for this to go unnoticed, but now stress was bringing it out.

She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn’t feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method.

One thing had certainly changed, though: she had fought back and she had eliminated one of these guys. What was to say she couldn’t do it again?

The answer came to her immediately: after they had landed, Jones had been about to kill her. She had saved her life only by offering herself as a hostage: a resource by which something might be extorted from Uncle Richard. She guessed it was a one-time reprieve and that any future homicides would be dealt with a little more sternly.

RICHARD’S PHONE BEGAN to warble an eldritch, theremin-inspired tune. He picked it up and saw a graphic of a crystal ball with a colored miasma swirling through it, partly obscuring a picture of Exalted Master Yang. YOU ARE BEING ORBED, it said.

He was in his office at Corporation 9592, where he had been preoccupied drafting a status report for his brother John. Since he knew it would end up on Facebook, he had been trying to make it as informative as possible without divulging any of Corporation 9592’s proprietary information. This was not going very well, and so he was glad of the distraction. He activated the Orb app, which put up a screen that made it look as though he were sitting at a plank table in a medieval castle, holding a grapefruit-sized sphere of magically imbued crystal in one hand and stroking it with the other. The hands in question belonged to Egdod. The face in the orb was that of Exalted Master Yang, Nolan’s primary character, the most powerful martial artist in the world of T’Rain, capable of killing a man with his eyebrow. “You called?” he said.

“Isn’t it still way early there?”

“I am in Sydney,” Nolan said, “two hours later.” The cadences of his voice were familiar, but they had been electronically reprocessed by the Orb app to make him sound like Exalted Master Yang, whose age was well into the quadruple digits, and who rarely spoke above a whisper, lest he inadvertently decapitate his interlocutor with his twenty-seventh-level Lion Roar power.

“Why?”

“I felt it was time to be in a place with a legal system.”

“Things too hot for you in Beijing?”

“Not hot. Just … weird. Harri wanted to get out.” Harri, short for Harriet, was Nolan’s wife: a black Canadian lingerie model and power forward. Certain things about China she found a bit odd.

“Related to the REAMDE investigation?” Richard would not have spoken so bluntly had Nolan been in Beijing. The Orb app encrypted all voice traffic, so point-to-point communications were secure; but if anyone were listening in on Nolan’s apartment, they’d have been able to hear what both he and Richard were saying.

“Until yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday?”

“They started asking me questions about terrorists.”

Richard had no answer for that.

“And Russians,” Nolan added helpfully.

“Wait a sec,” Richard said. “You’re saying that the same cops who had been pestering you about REAMDE suddenly changed the topic to terrorists and Russians?”

“No,” Nolan said, “a different set of cops. Like the investigation was handed off to new guys.”

“Did you tell them anything?” Richard blurted out. Then he wished he could haul it back.

“What could I tell them!?” Nolan demanded. “The whole thing was totally bizarre!”

Good, Richard thought, please let it stay that way. He was dumbfounded to hear about the terrorists and the Russians — this made no sense whatsoever — but he supposed that the Chinese authorities must take a rather dim view of both groups; and if they had somehow dreamed up a connection between them and REAMDE, it would in no way simplify the project of getting to the bottom of Zula’s disappearance.

“Are there any terrorists in China?”

“As of the day before yesterday,” Nolan said, “there is one less.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Richard said. For he had done some googling for Xiamen-related news that he could actually read (there was very little available in English) and found all channels swamped by coverage of an event, a couple of days ago, in which a suicide bomber, stopped by security outside the gates of a convention center in Xiamen, had blown himself up and taken two guards with him. He had interpreted the story as sheer noise, of no possible relevance. “But what possible connection could there be between that and REAMDE? Other than the coincidence that they’re in the same town?”

“None at all,” Nolan said, “but that doesn’t stop the cops — you know how they are.”

Richard actually had no idea how Chinese cops were, but he decided to let this go. “How long are you going to stay in Sydney?” he asked.

“Until Harri gets finished shopping,” Nolan said vaguely. “Then to Vancouver.” Meaning their primary Western Hemisphere residence.

A flash of white in the doorway: Corvallis, coming in hot, tunic swinging. His face said that he had news. “Gotta de-Orb you,” Richard announced. “Call me when you get to Vancouver.” He severed the connection. “Yeah?”

“Got some stats on those guys,” said C-plus, and swiveled his laptop around to display a graph: a red line ascending a ski jump and then falling off a cliff.

“Which guys?”

“Like you said. I came up with a sort of watch list of all the da G shou,” Corvallis said. “Or people likely to be associated with them. Added up their clicks per minute.” Meaning the number of times per minute that these players hit a key or a mouse button. The figure would be zero, of course, for a player who was not logged in, and some frighteningly high number for one who was embroiled in combat, and somewhere in between for someone who was logged in but just wandering around or socializing. “This is summed over about a hundred different da G shou — affiliated characters, showing the last two weeks.”

Beyond that, C-plus didn’t have to say much, since the graph spoke for itself. It started at a low-to-middling level, then ascended exponentially over the course of several days, then suddenly dropped to almost zero. After that, a few spikes poked up through the noise floor, but there was basically nothing.

“I can’t read the time scale from here,” Richard said.

“It gets huge last week, when REAMDE was spiking and you were flying over the Torgai,” Corvallis said. “It flatlines around five in the afternoon on Friday.”

“Seattle time?”

“Yeah.”

Richard consulted his time zone app. “Eight in the morning Xiamen time,” he said. “Hold on a sec.” He used his browser’s history menu to pull up one of those English-language stories about the suicide bomber in Xiamen. “That’s a couple of hours before the terrorist blew himself up.”

“Say what!?”

“Never mind.”

“Since then, the da G shou have been losing control over the Torgai region to incursions by more powerful factions,” C-plus reported. “An army of three thousand K’Shetriae is advancing on its northern border as we speak.”

“Bright, or Earthtone?”

“Bright.”

“Hmm. Gold must be lying knee-deep on the ground.”

“Some places, yes. But a lot of it has been Hidden.” A catch in his voice signaled his use of the word’s majuscular form. It had not been hidden in the sense of being stashed under a pile of leaves, but Hidden by the use of magical spells. “Basically, all of the gold that the da G shou could recover before they went dark on Friday is Hidden, and everything that has been deposited since then is just lying there for the taking.”

“How much has been Hidden?”

“You want that in gold pieces or — ”

“Dollars.”

“About two million.”

“Holy Christ.”

“Another three million is lying on the ground.”

“That is just the last couple of days’ ransom money, you’re saying.”

“Yes,” Corvallis said, “but the drop rate is declining rapidly as the infection gets under control. Ninety percent of our users have now downloaded the security patch. So it’s not going to go much beyond that.”

“Okay,” Richard said, “so what is my situation, if I’m a da G shou? I know where two million dollars’ worth of gold pieces is Hidden but I have lost control of the territory where it’s stashed.”

“You have to sneak in,” Corvallis said, “and recover the stuff one stash at a time…”

“… and then sneak out and get to an MC without being ripped off,” Richard concluded. In the back of his mind, he was worrying about how he was going to explain this to John — definitely not a T’Rain kind of guy. “Which could actually be difficult to pull off, if the Torgai falls under the control of people who know what they’re doing. I mean, with that kind of money at stake, there would be plenty of financial incentive to set up a heavy security cordon.”

“A Weirding Ward costs about one gold piece per linear meter,” C-plus said, referring to a type of invisible force-field barrier that could be erected by sufficiently powerful sorcerers.

“Cheaper if you harvest the Filamentous Cobwebs yourself,” Richard retorted, referring to the primary ingredient needed to cast a Weirding Ward.

“Not as easy as you make it sound, given that the Caves of Ut’tharn just got placed under a Ban of Execration,” countered Corvallis, referring, respectively, to the best place to gather Filamentous Cobwebs and a powerful priestly spell.

“Who did that? Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up the last couple of days…”

“The High Pontiff of the Glades of Enthorion.”

“Sounds Earthtone to me.”

“You got it.”

“Some kind of strategic move in the Wor?”

“I’m not privy to the High Pontiff’s innermost thoughts.”

“Anyway,” Richard said, “that Ban wouldn’t prevent Earthtones from getting in there, if they were exempted from the Ban by a Frond of Peace that had been consecrated by the said Pontiff.”

“I forgot about the Frond of Peace loophole,” said Corvallis, crestfallen.

“It’s okay, you’re new here.”

C-plus considered it. “So you’re saying that Earthtones might actually have an advantage over Brights in seizing control of the Torgai.”

“Kind of,” Richard said.

Corvallis raised an eyebrow.

“More to the point,” Richard went on, “this gives us a way to encourage Earthtones. Make them think they have a chance of turning back those three thousand Bright K’Shetriae you mentioned, and getting control of the three million bucks’ worth of gold pieces that they can see — which would go a long ways toward financing the Wor.”

“Could you help me peel back the layers?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Of your Machiavellian strategy? Because I can see that there is way more calculation and cynicism going on here than I can ever possibly comprehend — ”

“It’s simple,” Richard insisted. “There are all of about two layers. We have no way to track down the da G shou. Hell, forget about even tracking them down. We have no way to even gather more data about the little fuckers until we can get them to log on, right?”

“Right. Unless we get into bed with the Chinese police.”

“Yeah,” Richard scoffed, “which for reasons I won’t explain is now even less likely than it was yesterday. So. It seems from your graph that they are scared shitless and unwilling to log on. But they must be aware that they have two million bucks Hidden in the Torgai. Sooner or later, they’ll want to come after that money. If it so happens that the Torgai gets conquered by three thousand K’Shetriae, or whatever, who can use the money on the ground to put up all kinds of walls and wards and force fields and shit, and thereby lock out the da G shou, then the da lose all incentive to try to come back. They never log on. We never see them again. On the other hand, if we can keep things nicely unstable in the Torgai region, and turn it into a chaotic battleground, then that gives the da all sorts of opportunities to sneak back into the place and go rooting around for their Hidden gold…”

“And then they’ll pop up on the watch list,” said Corvallis, nodding, “and we can start gathering data on them.”

“Exactly.”

“Maybe find the Liege Lord,” Corvallis went on. “Only he would have access to the whole two million.”

“Oh yeah, of course!” Richard said. “I had forgotten about that detail.” For, according to the rules of how the Hiding spells worked, if a vassal Hid something, then not only could the same vassal find and unHide it later; but the same privileges were granted to that vassal’s lord, and the lord’s lord, and so on, all the way up to the Liege Lord of the network. The two million in gold might have been Hidden by hundreds of different vassals within the da G shou’s hierarchy, any one of whom would only be able to see and retrieve the gold that he (or his own vassals) had personally Hidden; but somewhere there must be a Liege Lord who would have the power to personally, single-handedly retrieve all of it.

“Do you know who the Liege Lord is?” Richard asked.

“Of course, in the sense of knowing the account number. But the name and address are fake, as with all of these.”

“Okay,” Richard said, pulling his laptop in closer, adjusting the screen angle for action. “I’m going to get in touch with D-squared. Or rather, his troubadour. And I’m going to make sure he understands that there’s enough gold lying around in the Torgai Foothills to finance the Earthtone Coalition for a year. And I’m going to see whether that gets his creative juices flowing.”

“What about those three thousand K’Shetriae?” asked Corvallis, nervously eyeing a map. “Could your man Egdod summon a meteor storm or a plague or something?”

Richard gave him a look that, to judge from his reaction, must have been pretty damned baleful. “Just to slow them down a little,” C-plus said, holding up his hands.

“Of course Egdod could summon a meteor storm or a plague,” Richard said, “but I would prefer to avoid deus ex machina stuff, and so as soon as I get done with this email I’ll call a meeting for tomorrow morning.”

“Agenda?”

“Figuring out some less obvious way to fuck up the Bright invasion of the Torgai Foothills.”

Day 7

The back end of the double-wide was a bunkhouse, divided into half a dozen small rooms each equipped with bunk beds that had been knocked together out of two-by-fours and drywall screws. The beds still had thin foam mattresses. They gave Zula a room of her own, then nailed the door shut behind her and nailed a scrap of plywood over the outside of its window. She spent a long and shivering night under the bare minimum of blankets needed to keep her from perishing outright of hypothermia. When morning came, and they pulled the nails out of her door, she went to the front room, which was warm because of the stove. She curled up on the sofa under as many blankets as she could scavenge and did not move for a long time.

They had destroyed the lock on the filing cabinet and found a lot of papers belonging to the mining company: pay records, receipts, assay reports, hardcopies of spreadsheets. But they also found a survey map of the area, and a road map of British Columbia.

Jones and the most senior-looking of the soldiers, an Afghan named Abdul-Wahaab, took as many of the warm clothes as they could fit on their bodies, bundled themselves up, packed food and water for a couple of days’ journey, and, after a lengthy study of the survey map, trekked off into the woods. Zula, peering out through a gap between blankets, watched them go and thought that she understood their strategy: the snow was less deep in the trees, and it seemed that they were able to move a bit more rapidly there.

Nothing else happened for the rest of the day. Zula did not move much from the sofa. The three remaining soldiers took turns going out in pairs to explore the vicinity, but they couldn’t stay out for long because of the shortage of winter clothing. One was always left behind, presumably to keep an eye on Zula. Sometimes they came back with trophies scavenged from other buildings: tools, first aid kits, dead flashlights, worn-out hoodies, work gloves, pornographic magazines, bars of soap, cans of oil. The scavenging developed momentum as they found more warm things to wear. During the afternoon, they put considerable effort into moving snow away from a travel trailer that had been left parked about a hundred meters from the headquarters building. This had been visible yesterday as an anomalous snow drift. Now it was revealed as an Airstream trailer, Zula guessed between twenty and thirty feet long. It had been jacked up to take the weight off its wheels and a shed roof of corrugated fiberglass had been affixed to one side, creating a sheltered outdoor space that, when cleared of snow, proved to contain a picnic table and some lawn chairs. From its interior they scavenged more kitchen ware, blankets, a foam mattress, packets of instant coffee and quick-cook oatmeal.

Zula had not really slept in a few days, but that afternoon, out of some combination of exhaustion, depression, and jet lag, she finally did fall into a deep slumber that lasted until some time after sundown. Then she got out of bed and took it upon herself to melt some more snow. Her Crocs had been confiscated and so she had to make her snow-collection forays barefoot. The pain in her feet reminded her of just how impossible it would be to get away from these people until she could solve the equipment problem. When she had a full pot of warm water, she carried it into the lavatory and gave herself a sponge bath using a bar of soap that had been left there years ago by departing miners. When she was done, she dried herself off using paper towels (a bale of them had also been left behind) and then emerged feeling weirdly and inappropriately energetic. She cooked some rice and some lentils, which were eaten, though not relished, by all (the kitchen had salt and pepper but no other seasonings).

The three jihadists made for quite a study. Two of them, Mahir and Sharif, were native Arabic speakers who, she collected, had gravitated from their home countries (Mahir looked pure Middle Eastern, Sharif had a bit of a North African look about him) to Afghanistan where they had become part of Jones’s organization. The third, Ershut, was some kind of Central Asian who seemed to speak limited Arabic. Ershut was not tall, but he was stocky and powerful and tended to get saddled with grunt work, which he always seemed to accept as his lot in life. It was he who had loaded much of the heavy gear from the fishing vessel onto the smaller boat that they’d taken into Xiamen, and who had loaded it from the boat into the taxi and from the taxi into the plane. He was pious without showing the demented fanaticism of the late Khalid; during one of her lavatory forays on the jet last night, Zula had found him praying in the aisle of the main cabin, having apparently divined the direction to Mecca by looking at the on-screen map displayed on the flat-screen TV. One of his first acts in this place had been to scavenge a carpet scrap from a back room and get it pointed a little bit south of east.

Mahir and Sharif were almost certainly lovers. If not, then they were certainly taking male friendship to a level rarely seen in Western culture. They always sat together, and when Sharif went out on a scavenging expedition with Ershut, Mahir spent the whole time sitting by the window and sighing.

Zula was free to move around as long as she gave the impression of doing something useful, such as cooking or cleaning. At one point when no one was paying much attention, she took a yellow pad and a few pencils back into her room and hid them under the mattress. Later, when she’d been nailed back into her room for the night (having begged for and been given an extra ration of blankets), she sat by the light of a candle (these, at least, were abundant) and wrote a letter in the same general vein as the one she had scribbled on a paper towel and stuffed into the disconnected drain trap in the safe house bathroom in Xiamen. This one was a little more discursive, since she literally had all night. When she was finished, she slipped it under the mattress. Her body was showing no interest at all in going to sleep. She tried to tire herself out by doing all of the exercises she could think of that would not make a lot of noise: push-ups, dips, squats, and a gallimaufry of half-remembered yoga moves. But this only jacked up her energy level and made matters worse.

Consequently she was wide awake at about four in the morning when the building was slowly pervaded by the rumble of an approaching engine. This was not a steady drone, as of an overflying plane, but a patternless sequence of sharp rev-ups and die-downs. After a while it became loud enough to wake up Ershut. Through gaps around the edge of the wood they’d nailed over her window, Zula could see that they were being strafed by the headlights of, she guessed, some wildly veering and bucking vehicle that was headed toward them. Ershut pounded on the (apparently locked) door of the room where Mahir and Sharif were spooning. Then she heard feet thumping, magazines being jacked into guns, bolts being drawn back.

Then a horn honked just outside the building. A vehicle door opened. Men began to shout in Arabic, but the sound of their voices was buried under an eruption of gunfire. The high-pitched noise was filtered by the walls, but the deep concussion came right through, making her nostrils sting. She dropped to the floor with a thought of crawling under the bed, then came to her senses and understood that this would do her no good whatsoever. But then she heard the men outside laughing giddily and calling out “Allahu akbar!”

They were not in a gunfight. This was celebratory fire. The jihadists had themselves a vehicle; and since it had gotten in to the camp, it must be capable of getting them out.

ZULA WONDERED WHETHER the jihadists were simply out of their minds, firing guns into the air as a way of expressing joy when they were deep behind enemy lines. Or did they understand something about this place that she didn’t? Could they really be so isolated that random bursts of automatic weapons fire in the middle of the night would go unheard by human ears?

She would find out soon enough. When the cops came and turned this place upside down — which she assumed had to happen sooner or later — they’d certainly find her letter. This improved her mood greatly, since she had been fretting the last day or two about the hell her extended family must be going through. They would continue in that state of unendurable not-knowing until the snow melted and the plane was exposed. Someone would notice it. Maybe in a month and maybe in a year. But the letter would ultimately be found and her family would be able to read it and understand what had happened and grieve properly and, she hoped, be proud of her.

They let her out of the room, apparently with the expectation that she’d be happy to prepare breakfast for them. She pretended that this was the case. But it was not until everyone had eaten and she was cleaning things up that the sky grew bright enough to let her see outside and get a load of the vehicle that Jones and Abdul-Wahaab had stolen.

From the axles up, it was simply a pickup truck, albeit of the biggest and heaviest class: the kind that, on her visits back home, she saw driving around in farm country, carrying bags of cement and towing fifth-wheel trailers. From the axles down, though, it looked like nothing she’d ever seen. The wheels had been removed and replaced with contraptions that looked like miniature tank treads. At each corner of the vehicle, where her eye expected to see a round wheel, it was instead baffled by the impossible-looking spectacle of a large triangular object, consisting of a system of bright yellow levers and wheels circumscribed by a caterpillar tread made up of black rubber plates linked together into an endless conveyor belt about a foot and a half wide. This ran along the ground for several feet beneath each axle and then looped up and around the yellow framework that held it all together, which, she perceived, was bolted onto the truck’s axle using the same lug nut pattern as would be used to mount a conventional wheel. So it seemed that these things were a direct bolt-on replacement for conventional tires, made to spread the vehicle’s weight out over a much larger contact area. Just the thing for an environment that was covered with snow for six months out of each year, and mud for another two. And indeed as the day grew brighter, she saw that the truck’s rearview mirrors and upper body were spattered with dried mud. Conditions might be snowy up in this valley, but this truck had been stolen from some place where spring was well advanced.

The whole time that she was tending to food, Jones’s crew were spreading out all the gear that they had brought with them, and everything that they had scavenged from the plane and from the mining camp, and making decisions about what to take and how to pack it. Guns and ammunition seemed to get first priority, followed by warm clothing and blankets. Blue tarps and ropes were deemed of inestimable value; perhaps they’d be camping? They seemed to have a passion for shovels, a detail that she could not help but interpret in the most morbid way possible.

The truck was a crew cab model, meaning that it had a second row of seats. They put Zula in the back, sandwiched between Sharif on her left and Mahir on her right. She felt strangely awkward coming between them, as if committing a social faux pas. But perhaps Jones was fed up with their clinginess and wanted them apart. Ershut rode shotgun and Abdul-Wahaab was squeezed into the middle of the front seat. Jones drove. Zula couldn’t help but think that they would be just a little conspicuous rumbling around British Columbia in this contraption with that particular lineup of faces glaring out the windshield.

But that wouldn’t even be an issue until they actually made it down to a road; and this did not look like it was happening any time soon. During whatever escapades that he and Abdul-Wahaab had enjoyed yesterday, Jones had learned how to drive the thing and had satisfied himself that if he shifted it into a sufficiently low gear (and this truck had some extremely low gears), it would go anywhere. Once the truck was packed, they headed up the valley, avoiding its sloped walls and sticking to its bottom, which was flat, but sinuous and multiforked. Jones seemed to be playing a connect-the-dots game on the map. Every few hundred meters was a cleared area, and these were strung together by a road. Or at least by a lane that had been bulldozed through the trees. The road and the cleared sites were marked on a survey map, which Abdul-Wahaab had spread out on his lap, the better for Jones to follow it. Zula caught glimpses of it during their frequent and voluble disputes as to its interpretation. At one point Jones pointed out the windshield into the sky and glared expectantly into the face of Abdul-Wahaab, and Zula understood that he was pointing out the location of the sun, as a trump card.

They fetched up parallel to a mountain stream, mostly buried under ice with snow on it. In some places it was open to the sky, and there it was possible to see that it was running broad and shallow, easily fordable by the truck. They rumbled and juddered across it, crept up its bank for half a mile, then struck out in what seemed to Zula like a random direction, plowing directly into the woods and attacking a steep uphill slope as a way of getting out of this valley. Tree branches were pushed out of the way by the windshield, bending back until they either snapped off or else whipped in through the open driver’s-side window where Jones had to beat them back with his left arm. She wondered why he would not simply roll up the window until she noticed little blue cubes of safety glass that had been sprayed all over the cab, and understood that the glass had been shattered. It seemed obvious enough that this must have happened when they were stealing the truck yesterday. She hoped that they had merely punched out the window so that they could get in and hot-wire it. Then she noted a key chain dangling from its ignition. They must have stolen it from a person who had been driving it. They must have killed that person.

A CB radio was mounted in the dashboard, and after they had got well clear of the camp and reached a decent stopping place — a flat spot in the forest, where they were well sheltered beneath the trees, and the snow wasn’t too deep — Jones turned it on. Then, after a glance back over his shoulder toward Zula, he flicked his knife open, severed its microphone cable, and hurled the mike out through the vacant window frame. It skittered away through the undergrowth like a furtive mammal. He turned the volume up and began to scan through the available channels.

Nothing. They really were out in the middle of nowhere.

It had been set to Channel 4 when turned on. Jones put it back on 4 and left it running. Occasionally it would cough out some noise, but nothing that could be identified as words.

Jones put the truck in gear and attacked another slope. It seemed that they were going up more than down, which didn’t make sense to Zula. But when they crawled over the next ridgeline, open country suddenly stretched out before them, foothills diminishing and descending into lowlands that were no longer covered in snow.

YESTERDAY, MONDAY, HAD been one of those days when Dodge had got to work early with the intention of getting a hell of a lot accomplished, only to arrive at the realization, just after lunch, that nothing was going to happen. Because it was no longer up to him. He had a whole company — a whole structure of vassals — to drag along in his wake, and it just took them a long time to get mobilized.

He’d have thought that $3 million lying there for the taking would have been able to command their attention. But it took them a long time to grasp this. Egdod had to grab a few vice presidents’ characters by the scruffs of their virtual necks and fly them over Torgai and point out the exposed gold caches for them to really get it.

A companywide memo might have gone some ways toward waking people up, but, as his finger was hovering over the Send button, he realized that this would be a terrible mistake. It would be certain to leak beyond the company network and find its way out into the wild, where it would trigger a gold rush. The one thing they had going in their favor was that no one, outside of Corvallis and Richard and a few others, really had any idea how much money was sitting there. Had this knowledge become public, every T’Rain player in the world would have made a beeline, or rather a ley line, for the Torgai, and things would have gone even more completely out of control. The mere Internet rumor that some gold had been seen there had already triggered a fairly well-organized invasion by those three thousand blue-haired K’Shetriae, which was nothing in the big scheme of things and yet still required strenuous work by Richard to beat it back in some way short of dropping a comet on the head of their Liege Lord.

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.

Day 8

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 Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelves in the living room. So many large books, identically bound except for the volume numbers printed on their spines, had naturally drawn her attention. Patricia, Richard’s sister and Zula’s new mom, had explained to her that these contained anything that you could ever possibly want to know, on any topic, and had pulled one down to look up the entry on Eritrea. Zula, completely missing the point, had assured Patricia that she would never on any account touch those books. Patricia had let out a shocked laugh and explained that no, on the contrary, all of those books were there specifically for her, Zula; they and the knowledge in them were, in effect, Zula’s property.

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 Britannica.

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.

At about three in the afternoon, according to the dashboard clock, they stopped at a place where they could look for miles down a mostly barren, rock-strewn valley. A broad stream ran down the middle of it, many braided channels finding their way across an expanse of glacier-dropped stones. Running roughly parallel to the watercourse, on its right, was a paved road that, several miles down-valley, hopped over the river on a low bridge. They were still in the forest; for the last two hours they had been traveling at little better than a walking pace, smashing down any foliage that could not stand up to the truck’s inexorable advance, diverting around any trees that were too large to knock over, sometimes traversing slopes so steep that Zula braced her hands against the ceiling, ready for the truck to roll over sideways, sometimes avalanching down slopes so steep that little could grow on them. The front end of the truck looked like the inside of a lawn mower, covered with inches of mulch and mud. They had approached this place by following the course of a tributary, sometimes driving right down the middle of the stream and sometimes nosing up into the surrounding woods. They had now stopped at the edge of the trees. Before them the ground dropped away sharply, the tributary leaping down a succession of rapids and waterfalls to the place where it joined in with the larger river. The truck might have survived the plunge to the bottom, and had it survived, it might have been able to make it to the road and go a few more miles before running out of fuel. But if, as seemed likely, it got stuck in boulders or wrecked itself during the descent, it would have been marooned in a place that was utterly exposed to view from the road and from the air. Best to leave it here. Or this was what Zula surmised must be going on in Jones’s mind. He shifted it into reverse and backed it deeper into the trees, then killed the engine.

Apparently this was not the first time that the jihadists had camouflaged a vehicle in mountains. Leaving Zula inside for the time being, they smeared mud over all of its windows and mirrors and any other parts that were capable of reflecting a gleam of sunlight. They unloaded some of the gear from the back — just what they could carry under their own power. They foraged through the woods for ferns and huckleberry bushes and cedar fronds, which they uprooted or hacked off, dragged over, and leaned and stacked around the truck’s sides. At some point, they remembered that Zula was still in there, so they extracted her through the cab’s sliding rear window and dragged her back straight to the open tailgate, many hands on her arms and ankles, trying to stifle even the mere thought of fighting or running. Ershut bent over and braced both hands against her right leg, and Abdul-Wahaab wrapped a chain around her ankle and then snapped a padlock into place. She was shooed and chivied back off the edge of the tailgate and onto the ground behind the truck. The chain was looped around part of the trailer hitch.

There followed one of those comical interludes in which the jihadists were confused about what to do next and fell to bitter recriminations.

It seemed that they were short one padlock. At some point during their scrounging activities around the mining camp they had found this length of chain, and at some other point they had found this padlock and the key that went with it. So they could lock the chain around her ankle. Fine. But they were now wanting the second padlock that was needed to connect the other end of the chain to the trailer hitch. Some of them shouted at each other, some of them rummaged aimlessly through all the piles of junk that they had scrounged.

Ershut said, “It’s not a problem, we can do it with one padlock. Look, I’ll show you.”

He said it in Arabic.

Zula understood it.

Interesting.

Other men might have gathered round to see Ershut’s cleverness, but these guys were all pursuing their own strategies. In the back of the pickup was a toolbox, secured with another padlock, and Abdallah Jones was going through the key chain, apparently on the reasonable assumption that it might contain the key needed to open this thing.

Ershut looped the long end of the chain through the frame of the trailer hitch and brought it back to Zula’s ankle. Then he held out one hand and asked for the key to the padlock that was already there. Then demanded it. Then screamed for it. Finally someone slapped it into his hand. He undid the padlock on Zula’s ankle, swung the body away from the hasp, brought up the loose end of the chain, pushed a link over the hasp, then snapped it shut again.

At the same moment Jones dropped to one knee right next to him, holding up an open padlock that he had apparently just retrieved from the toolbox. Seeing that Ershut had already found a one-padlock solution, he dropped the lock on the ground and walked away.

Zula was left with an arm’s length of slack in the loop that secured her ankle to the trailer hitch. A scrap of plastic, a sleeping bag, a bottle of water, and a short stack of MREs were provided before they finished surrounding the truck in camouflage.

At any other time in her life she would have offered more resistance to such proceedings and would have been correspondingly heartbroken when the padlock clicked shut. But slowly growing in her mind was a feeling that the situation was shifting to her advantage. Which seemed an idiotic thing to say given her current situation: ankle chained to a trailer hitch in the wilderness of northwestern Canada, keys in the pockets of suicide bombers.

But she had begun to see hints that cooperation was slowly working in her favor. It was a hell of a lot better being here than in China. She had taken arms and killed that one guy. Killed him. Unbelievable. She had made her survival the linchpin of Jones’s plan, whatever it might be. Everything was different. The jihadists seemed oblivious to this shift.

The wall of camo being built around her grew dense enough that she could barely make out the men’s movements on the other side of it, as they occluded the slits of light that still shone through here and there. She had the horrifying thought that maybe they were actually constructing a huge bonfire and that they were about to burn her alive. But after a while she noticed she could not hear them anymore. They had shouldered their packs, tromped away, and left her alone.

The trailer hitch had become the center of her personal universe. Above was the open tailgate, providing a kind of shelter from the weather. The ground beneath her was a bed of blunt nails, the sheared-off stumps of mowed-down foliage. She devoted some time to kicking at the stalks, shearing them off level with the ground, and stomping them into the earth. Once it had become passably level, she spread the plastic out on the ground and arranged the sleeping bag on top of that, then climbed inside it. The temperature was well above freezing, but the damp chill would kill her in hours if she did not keep moving and working.

You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov. Jones had said that to her, apropos of nothing, the first evening at the mining camp. I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid. She’d been unable to make any sense at all of these statements and had put them out of her mind until now.

How could Jones possibly know what Sokolov thought of her? Jones and Zula had spent hours going over the events in the apartment building. Most of this had been him extracting information from her. But from the nature of the questions he asked, she had been able to piece together a reasonably coherent picture of how the battle had gone. It was out of the question that Sokolov and Jones could have engaged in any conversation. And if they had, they would not have been chitchatting about Zula; even in the incredibly unlikely event that Sokolov wanted to talk about her in the middle of a crazy running gun battle, Jones didn’t even know that she existed at that point.

Finally, now, she understood. The answer to the riddle had come to her while her conscious mind had been thinking about other things. Perhaps she’d gotten a clue from the way that Jones had kept an ear cocked toward the squawks coming from the CB radio in the truck. She’d seen a similar look on his face before, on the plane, at the FBO in Xiamen. He had received a call on his phone and whipped it open. His face had lit up with delight, which had immediately collapsed into shock and then settled into some kind of intense murderous fascination.

It must have been Sokolov on the other end of that call. Sokolov had killed, or at least overcome, the men Jones had sent out to murder him, and ended up in possession of one of their phones, and hit the redial button. He had made some kind of a little speech to Jones. And he had mentioned Zula. That had to be it; that was the only time that Sokolov could ever have communicated with Jones.

Why would Sokolov mention Zula in that conversation?

(It took a while to work these things out. But Zula had a while.)

Really that was two questions: first, how could Sokolov have known that Zula and Jones were together? And second, given that he knew this, why would he go to the trouble of mentioning her to Jones during their brief phone conversation?

The answer to the first question was already in her head, and she needed only to pull it up from memory. On the boat, a couple of days ago, after the scene on the pier. Jones interrogating Zula. Zula telling him about the safe house, pointing to the skyscraper, calling out the forty-third floor. And wondering whether in doing so she was sending a message to Sokolov, letting him know that she, or some other member of the group, was still alive. Because if Jones’s men went snooping around on the forty-third floor of that building, it would raise the question: How had they learned the location of the safe house?

As to the second question: Jones had answered it, in a way, with his remark You seem to have made quite an impression on Mr. Sokolov.

What the hell did that mean?

Maybe Sokolov had said to Jones: I hope you kill that conniving bitch! But Zula doubted this. Her interactions with Sokolov had been about as courteous and respectful as it was possible to get in an abductor/hostage relationship. She had felt, in a weird way, as though she were partners with him.

Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done it.

She realized this now. Calling out the wrong apartment number, sending them to 505 instead of 405: this was crazy. Suicidal. No wonder Peter had been furious with her. So furious that his next move had been to abandon her to her fate, leaving her handcuffed to a pipe. Csongor had been as shocked as Peter, but he’d taken her side in the matter because of dumb love. Why had Peter and Csongor been so incredulous at this decision that had seemed so easy, so obviously the correct move, to Zula?

Because Peter and Csongor had not been privy to the almost subliminal exchanges of glances and — not even anything as obvious as glances or words, but hidden signals in postures, facial expressions, the way that Zula, getting on an elevator with a group of Russians, had always chosen to stand by Sokolov’s side. Zula and Sokolov were allies. He would protect her from whatever fate Ivanov had in mind for them. And, sensing that she was under his umbrella, she had felt safe enough to send them to 505 when she knew that the Troll was in 405.

And she could do it again. She had been doing it again, this time with Jones. And part of the way you did it was by keeping your emotional shit together, not kicking and screaming, not suffering emotional breakdowns, showing you could handle it, could be trusted. Getting them used to having you around.

That was why she had relaxed and shown no emotion when Abdul-Wahaab had padlocked the chain around her ankle. A little thing. But a little thing that Jones had noticed, even if — especially if — he wasn’t aware that he was noticing it.

Could Jones really be that easily manipulated? He seemed so smart in all other ways.

I couldn’t make out why until you did for Khalid.

That explained it. Jones was at a loss to understand why Sokolov, his personal bête noire, thought enough of Zula to make her a primary topic of their one brief phone exchange. He had not observed the way that Zula and Sokolov had grown accustomed to each other during the days they’d been together; and even if he had, he might not have sussed it out, any more than Peter or Csongor had. Consequently, ever since hearing Sokolov’s voice coming out of that phone, Jones had been chewing on this, trying to figure out what Sokolov saw in her; and when she had killed Khalid, he had reckoned that this was the answer. He believed that Sokolov’s respect for Zula was rooted in an appreciation of Zula’s fighting spirit or her prowess with weapons or some other such quality: the kind of thing that a man like Jones would suppose that a man like Sokolov would hold in esteem.

And this left Jones wide open. Ready to be blindsided by the same tactics Zula had used with Sokolov. The difference being that in the case of Sokolov they hadn’t been tactics, just Zula instinctively trusting the man. The question now was: Could she bring about a similar effect in Jones’s mind by doing similar things in a way that was utterly calculated and insincere?

“ONE DAY, MY son, all of this could be yours,” Egdod intoned, swooping low over the Torgai Foothills. He was addressing an Anthron — a man, basically — whom he was holding by the scruff of the neck. The Anthron was dressed in the most nondescript possible woolen cloak. Between his bare feet (for he had declined to spend virtual money on shoes or even sandals), the mature coniferous forest of the Torgai streamed by, just a few hundred meters below.

“Far be it from me to question your database,” the Anthron replied, “but I still don’t see — ”

“There!” Egdod called out, banking into a tight turn and spiraling down toward an outcropping of basalt. “Just at the base of those rocks.”

“I do see a fleck of yellow, but I assumed it was a patch of eälanthassala,” said the Anthron, easily wrapping his tongue around the hexasyllabic name of the sacred flower of the montane branch of the K’Shetriae.

“Look again,” Egdod said, and he shed altitude until they were poised only a few meters above the “fleck.” This was now revealed as a mound of shiny yellow coins. “I’m going to drop you.” He did so.

“Heavens!” exclaimed the Anthron, then landed on his feet and fell awkwardly onto his arse, creating little gold-coin avalanches.

“If your character had better Proprioception — which you could get by spending some of your Attribute credits, or by sending him off to undertake certain types of training, or by drinking the right potion — he would have landed a little more adroitly and rolled out like a paratrooper instead of taking minor damage to his butt, as yours just did,” Egdod said, sounding a little peevish for a creature of nearly godlike status. For this newly created Anthron had been absurdly stingy with his Attribute credits and still had most of them hoarded in reserve where they were doing him absolutely no good.

The burst of gibberish left the Anthron utterly nonplussed.

“Never mind,” Egdod said.

“Who are those creatures coming out of the trees, over yonder?” the Anthron asked, turning his head to the left. Egdod — who was invisible to everyone in T’Rain except for the Anthron — spun in midair to see a pair of Dwinn marauders headed straight for them. One heavily armed and armored cataphract, unslinging a crossbow, and one mage, clad only in robes, but protected by a swirling nebula of colored lights: force field spells that she had thrown up to protect herself from random slings and arrows.

“You could see the answer for yourself if you had spent some of your Attribute credits on Perceptivity,” Egdod groused, and lost altitude until he had positioned himself directly in the path of the incoming crossbow bolt.

“I can’t see!” the Anthron complained.

“Oh yeah — you’re the only person in the world to whom I am opaque,” Egdod said. He turned around to face the Anthron. “Check it out.”

“Oh my word, you’ve been shot!” For Egdod actually did have a crossbow bolt projecting from the general vicinity of his liver. But as the Anthron watched, the bolt was spat out by the wound it had made. It flipped backward for about a meter and stuck in the grass. By the time the Anthron’s eyes had traveled back up to the wound, it had healed, leaving behind a pink scar that was rapidly fading. “A little trick I picked up about a thousand years ago,” Egdod explained. “Hold on a sec while I deal with these guys.”

“Deal with them?”

“I could incinerate them just by looking at them funny,” Egdod said, “but then they’d know that an extremely high-level character was running around the Torgai, and word might get around. So I’m going to do it the way a lower-level character might.” Egdod turned back toward the interlopers, raised his hands, and uttered a phrase in a dead classical language of T’Rain.

Almost. “You used an incorrect declension of turom,” the Anthron complained.

“It doesn’t seem to have reduced the effectiveness of the spell,” Egdod returned. The meadow between them and the two Dwinn was sprouting a crop of spears. Helmeted heads emerged next, and then the armored bodies of turai, which, in Classical T’Rain mythology, were fast-spawning autochthonous warriors analogous to the spartoi of Greek myth. The Dwinn mage was already waving her hands in the air trying to cast a spell that would throw the turai into confusion and possibly even cause them to attack one another, but there were too many of them and it was too late; the Dwinn had no choice but to retreat into the woods, pursued by the dozen or so turai who had proved resistant to the mage’s spell.

“Okay, let’s get this done,” Egdod said, “because this kind of thing is going to happen over and over again as long as this pile of gold is just sitting here for the taking.”

“Get what done, exactly?” the Anthron asked, standing there knee-deep in specie, clueless to a degree that was somewhere between funny and outrageous.

“Pick up the fucking money and put it in your bag,” Egdod said. “Or just shift-option-right-click on the whole pile.”

“Shift … option … is that some sort of computer terminology?”

“Just hold your horses. I’m coming over there.”

“I thought you were here.”

“In the real world, like.”

RICHARD TOSSED HIS laptop aside onto the mattress and swung his legs down off the edge of the Bed That Queen Anne Had Slept In. Its massive frame of pegged timbers gave out a groan almost as if Queen Anne were still in it now. He rose to his feet and gave his blood pressure a moment to equilibrate, then stalked across the room. Which took a bit of stalking. Other bits of England might be cramped, crowded, and cluttered, but only because all the available space had been claimed by this guest suite. It was situated right in Trinity College, and Richard guessed it had been laid out eight hundred years ago so that noble guests could ride their horses directly into the bedchamber and bring all of their squires and wolfhounds with them too. D-squared was standing with his back to Richard about three hundred feet away. The place lacked television and central heating, but it did have a massive stand surmounted by a four-inch-thick Bible signed by the Duke of Wellington. D-squared had set up a laptop of his own atop the Good Book and was hunched over it, peering and pecking.

During the short drive in from the FBO at Cranfield, Richard had ordered the driver of his black taxi to swerve to a halt in front of the first computer store. The sales clerk, eager to be of service and to make sure that Richard ended up with a machine he’d be happy with, had been solicitous to a fault until Richard had finally got it through the man’s head that he had way more money than time and could they please get on with it. Five minutes later, Richard had strode out the door of the place and climbed back into the taxi carrying the new laptop (he had left its empty box sitting on the store’s counter and a trail of plastic packaging material all the way to the exit) and a boxed set of DVD-ROMs containing the Legendary Deluxe Platinum Collector’s Edition T’Rain software with Bonus Materials. The computer had finished crawling through its interminable boot-up as they were skirting Bedford, and he had jammed in the installation disc somewhere around St. Neots. The bemused cabbie had dropped him off at the Porter’s Lodge of Trinity when the installation progress bar was creeping along around the 21 percent mark and so Richard had just carried the machine in on his hip and kept it perched there, whirring and clicking and trying to force thunderous T’Rain sound track music through its tinny little speakers, as the bowler-hatted staff had dryly greeted him and escorted him to his cavernous lodgings. It was ten in the morning or something. Richard had found his way to the suite’s toilet, which was located somewhere in Oxfordshire, and showered and shaved, then fed another disc into the computer, napped for a couple of hours, enjoyed a liquid lunch with D-squared, and then brought him back here to teach him the rudiments of T’Rain.

“Like this,” he said, reaching in over the Don’s arms in a manner that all but forced the poor man to jump out of the way, and seizing control of the keyboard. Then Richard did the thing that always pissed him off when Corvallis did it to him, which was that he manipulated the keys so fast that it was impossible for any normal person to understand what he had just accomplished. But D-squared, used to having people do things for him, was unruffled. He was far more interested in what had happened to all that money.

“The gold!” he exclaimed. “Where did it all get to? Did those Dwinn take it?”

The accusation was laughable. Far more important, though, was the look on the Don’s face, which was just a bit provoked, and his tone of voice, which could only be described as avaricious.

Good.

“No,” Richard said, “you took it, and put it in your poke.”

“But how could I possibly carry so much gold in that wee bag?”

“That’s the whole point of a poke. It’s magic. Enables you to carry a ridiculous amount of VP and thereby enhances our profit margins like you wouldn’t believe.”

The Don nodded. Even he knew that VP stood for Virtual Property.

“But that is not the point,” Richard went on. “The point is as follows.” And he turned away and hiked back over to the bed. This took long enough that a little band of Var’ skirmishers, almost offensively Bright, had time to scuttle out of the trees to investigate the strange phenomenon of a solitary Anthron, newly created and hence of essentially zero powers, unarmed and unequipped — unshod, even — just standing there like an idiot in possibly the most dangerous region of all T’Rain. It was so uncanny that they were approaching him with a kind of superstitious awe.

As well they might, for Richard, after using certain of his powers to verify his suspicion that they were carrying a lot of money, zotted the whole band into pink mushroom clouds.

“Richard, I’m surprised at you; I didn’t think you were going to stoop to such methods!”

“I’m trying to make a point. I blew them away so fast that they didn’t have time to Sequester any of their belongings.”

“What in heaven’s name does that mean?”

“It means we get to steal all of the VP that they were carrying. Go and pick up all the gold that’s lying on the ground. And while you’re at it, why don’t you grab yourself some fucking shoes?”

“Are you suggesting I loot corpses!?”

“I know. What would Queen Anne say?”

“I’ve no idea!”

“You can take your laptop off that Bible first, if it makes you feel any cleaner about it.”

“No need. I gather this sort of thing happens all the time, in T’Rain.”

Richard resisted the temptation to say people make their livings off it.

Once D-squared had at last solved the user-interface problem of how to pick stuff up and put it in his poke, and had caused the Anthron to loot all the gold, plus some Boots of Elemental Mastery and a Diadem of Scrying that he took a fancy to, Egdod grabbed him (the Anthron, that is) by the scruff of the neck again and flew him, with a velocity that the Don described as “faintly sickening,” about halfway around the planet to visit a moneychanger who, being situated almost at the antipode of where all the action was, was offering fast service and good rates.

It was possible to interact with an MC verbally, and thereby remain “in-world,” which was equivalent to an actor remaining “in character,” but the impatient Richard diverted the Don to a user interface window replete with medievally styled buttons and popup menus. “You want to make a Potlatch to Argelion. It’s the third checkbox down on the right.”

“The god of mammon and lucre!?”

“You know perfectly well what Argelion is.”

“I should have thought so! But I recall nothing about a Potlatch! Why, that is a concept from Pacific Coast Indian tradition! Such a thing has no place in — ”

“It is one of those things that we added to the world so long ago that we forgot it wasn’t your idea,” Richard said. “We can argue about it during dinner, if you like. Half of those guys at High Table are probably playing T’Rain in secret; they’ll enjoy hearing your thoughts on why Potlatches are bad. But for now, if you would just click on the friggin’ box…”

“All right, I have done so. And now new things!” The Don said this in the wondering tone that he always adopted when confronted by unexpected dynamism in a user interface. “‘One-quarter, one-half, three-quarters, all. Or enter an amount.’”

“Giving you options as to how much of your gold is going to Potlatch,” Richard explained. “Click ‘All.’”

This suggestion only triggered the same miserly tendencies that had caused the Anthron, until recently, to spare himself the expense of footwear. “No! All of that gold!? It’s just going to disappear?”

“From the game world,” Richard said. “Just please do it. If you’re unhappy with the results, I’ll get you more.”

The Don, looking scandalized and beleaguered, clicked ‘All’ and then hit the ‘Potlatch’ button. Then he sighed. “Easy come, easy go.”

Richard did not answer for a few moments, as he was busy logging out. “Okay,” he said, closing his laptop, and resuming the journey to the Bible stand. Next time he stayed here, he’d bring roller skates. “I’m going to need your credit card again.”

“Why!?” the Don exclaimed, as if this was exactly what he’d been worrying about.

“The same one you used to set up the account. Please.”

By the time Richard got over there, D-squared had worried the card out of what looked like Queen Anne’s wallet and handed it over. Richard flipped the card onto its face, pulled out his phone, set it on Speaker, and then dialed the customer service number printed on its back.

A lovely British voice came on, introducing them to the root of a branching tree of automated service options. Richard navigated to “Check recent transactions” and then punched in D-squared’s credit card number.

The most recent transaction, according to this disembodied robot on the other end of the line, was a credit in the amount of £842.69, time-stamped about five minutes ago.

“I guess you owe me a drink,” Richard said to the openmouthed and bulging-eyed face of the Don, “because you are now eight hundred quid — you call them ‘quid,’ right? — richer. Thanks to that little escapade.”

“That was the Potlatch?”

“Yes. Money disappears from T’Rain, as a burnt offering to Argelion. It never comes back. But that’s just a cover story that we have set up to enable players to extract hard currency.”

“I see!”

“I believe that you do see, Donald.”

“I had known, of course, that such transactions were possible in principle — ”

“But there’s nothing quite like having money in the bank, is there?”

“I believe I just might buy you a drink, Richard.”

“And I would happily accept. But what I would really like to do, while we are hoisting that pint, is to talk to you about what might happen in the next couple of weeks to the other three million dollars’ worth of gold pieces that are just lying there on the ground. Free for the taking.”

ZULA ATE AN MRE, stuffed the empty tray into the tangle of camouflage that had been erected around the truck, burrowed into her sleeping bag, and went to sleep faster than she had thought possible. She dreamed of China: a disconnected and rearranged version of Xiamen that incorporated bits of Seattle and the Schloss and the cave bunkers of Eritrea. It made perfect sense in dream-logic.

She woke up once to a deeply troubling sound that she identified, after a few moments, as the howling of wolves, or perhaps coyotes. Then she was stuck awake for a long time. She ate another MRE, supposing that a full stomach might do her some good. This did not seem to help especially. She was paying, now, for the ease with which she had slipped into sleep earlier. After a while, she gave up any hope of sleeping again and just tried to make herself comfortable. But from the fact that she ended up dreaming later, it followed that she must have drifted away in spite of herself.

The first couple of nights after the thing with Khalid she had not dreamed of it at all, at least that she could remember. But yesterday during the interminable truck ride, she had found herself remembering the moment of those shards being driven into his face by her hands, and the blood, or something, that had been on her fingers after. This night Khalid did come back to her in her dreams, and she devoted some effort to fighting him off. Not physically fighting him but half-consciously trying to erect some kind of psychic defense against ever seeing his image again, sensing that if he appeared in her thoughts during the day and her dreams at night, he would never be gone, she would still be dreaming of him and reliving the moments in the back of that jet in the unlikely event that she lived to the age of ninety.

She was hearing a kind of snuffling, coughing noise and thought that maybe she had begun crying in her sleep and was hearing her own sobs in the disembodied way that sometimes happened around the foggy frontier between sleeping and waking. Something was grabbing her ankle. The chain, of course. Pulling on it urgently. Really it was just her pulling against it as she rolled around in her sleep. But in the dream it was a man pulling on her wrist. Remarkable that, in a dream, a wrist could substitute for an ankle. But she was seeing the face of an old man who had been with them in the caves in Eritrea and who had walked with them on the long barefoot trek to Sudan. The caves were, among other things, a field hospital for casualties from the war against Ethiopia. Young fighters showed up with burns, gunshot wounds, shrapnel. The doctors tried to fix them up. Some of them died. Some of them could not be fixed — they underwent amputations, and hung around until they could find some place to go. But there was this older guy — in retrospect, probably not older than fifty — with a hollow, sucked-in face carpeted with a patchy gray beard, and urgent, avid green-brown eyes, who showed up there, apparently healthy, and never left. They came to understand, in time, that he was a psychological casualty. Any grown-up could see in a few moments that he was not right in the head. Children didn’t have that instinct. The man had things he very much wanted to say, and he seemed to learn, after a time, that adults would veer away from him, pretend not to hear him, even shoo him away. But children unaccompanied by adults — as they quite often were — could give him a few moments’ company, the social balm that all humans, even crazy old war veterans, had to have. His way of getting you to pay attention to him was to grab you by the wrist and tug until you were obliged to look into his crazy eyes.

After which, he didn’t have a lot to say, since he appeared to have suffered a head injury and could not really form words. But he could gesture at things and look you in the eyes and try to get you to understand. And to the extent that young Zula could follow his train of thought at all, he seemed to be trying to warn her, and any other kid whose wrist he was able to grab, about something. Something really big and bad and scary that was out there in the world beyond this valley where they had found refuge in the caves. In this particular dream he was trying to warn her about Khalid and she was trying to explain that she was pretty sure Khalid was dead, but he wouldn’t believe her, wouldn’t let go of her wrist, just kept yanking. The snuffling and coughing: her crying? But she wasn’t crying; the sounds were coming from somewhere else.

The old man insistent. Like she really just weren’t getting it. Had no idea. Needed to wake up.

She was obliged, in fact, to wake up by a crashing noise and a thud, not far away, that traveled through the ground and came up through her ribs.

A few moments’ ridiculous confusion here as her mind, like a passenger caught straddling the gap between a pier and a departing boat, tried to bridge the dream with reality.

Then she was very awake; the Eritrean man was gone and instantly forgotten.

She wanted to call out “Hello?” but her throat had spasmed shut. If it was Jones and his crew, there was no reason to call out to them; they knew where she was and she certainly felt no need to exchange pleasantries with their like. But whatever was out there did not move — did not think — like a human.

It was at least as big as a human, though.

It was circling this strange thicket that had appeared in its hunting grounds, sniffing at it, probing it with swipes of its paws. Discovering that it came apart rather easily.

It was a bear — it could be nothing else — and it was homing in on the back of the truck, where Zula was.

WHEN SHE HAD made the move from Iowa to Seattle, driving a cute little miniature U-Haul loaded with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other things she couldn’t be without, Zula had made a small diversion into northern Idaho to look in on her uncle Jacob and his family: wife Elizabeth, eldest son Aaron, and two other sons whose names she had, embarrassingly, forgotten. She had been warned by most of the family to expect serious weirdness, but she was assured by Uncle Richard that they were perfectly normal people. What she’d found, of course, was somewhere in between; or perhaps those aspects of their life that seemed normal only made the weird stuff seem weirder. Elizabeth going about her housewifely chores and homeschooling the boys with a Glock semiautomatic lodged in a black shoulder holster strapped over the bodice of her ankle-length dress. Or were those culottes?

Anyway, conversing over dinner, they had somehow gotten onto the topic of bears. Uncle Richard had warned Zula, once, that bears were the conversational equivalent of a black hole, in the sense that any conversation that fell into that topic could never escape it. Considering how rare bears and bear attacks were in the real world, Zula, the rational-skeptic college kid, had doubted the veracity of Dodge’s observation. Maybe it just happened to him a lot, she had reasoned, because he had this one bear incident in his past that people never got tired of hearing about. But then she had seen it happen a couple of times, around tables in dormitory cafeterias: nineteen-year-old kids who had never seen bears in their lives somehow straying onto that topic and then sticking with it until everyone got up and left.

Uncle Jacob had been out building log cabins all day and had sawdust in his beard. He was tired and distracted by his energetic boys, who wanted all of his attention, and he looked like he wanted a cold beer: an indulgence forbidden by his variant of Christianity. So it had taken a while for him to slip into avuncular mode with Zula. She had almost begun to wonder whether he didn’t accept her as a real family member. But it slowly became evident over the course of the meal that he was just hungry. So eventually it turned into a real conversation.

The cabin was built three stories high on a small foundation. The cellar was a food storage area giving way to a subterranean bunker that Jake had dug out by hand and lined with reinforced concrete. The ground floor was practical stuff: sort of a garage/workshop with corners dedicated to such practical matters as slaughtering, butchering, canning, and ammo reloading. The floor above that was one big kitchen/living/dining space and the top story was bedrooms. Both the second and third floors had sliding doors and windows giving way to screened-in decks on what Zula thought of as the back side of the house, since it faced away from the driveway; but she soon learned that Jake and Elizabeth thought of it as the front. It looked out over an area of flat ground extending across a couple of acres, sparsely populated by trees, which lapped up against the base of a steep rise, the southern approach of Abandon Mountain. A mountain stream, Prohibition Crick, tumbled down that slope and ran past the cabin, making a beautiful sound, on its way to a beaver pond about half a mile away. Like-minded neighbors had built homesteads around that, forming a sparse community of five families and a couple of dozen souls distributed across two square miles of flattish, semiarable land at the head of a river valley that ran almost all the way to Bourne’s Ford.

During dinner, a storm had come up that valley and washed over them with a few impressive thunder cracks and a sudden gushing of rain from the tin roof. Clear air had blown in behind it, and the sun had come out and made a rainbow that seemed to plunge down into the valley. The scent of rain-washed cedars came in through the screen porch. Jacob spread honey on homemade bread that Elizabeth had pulled from the oven an hour ago. Life was suddenly good. He asked her about how the journey was going and what plans she had for her new life in Seattle and what sorts of things she liked to do in her spare time. She mentioned a number of activities that seemed, since they were sort of urban and high-tech, to go in one of Jacob’s ears and out the other. She also mentioned camping. Not that she was really all that interested in camping. She had done it in Girl Scouts and on family trips. It seemed almost obligatory for a healthy young person moving to Seattle to claim that she was interested in camping. That stirred his interest, anyway, and they talked about that for a little bit, just circling the black hole that was sitting there waiting patiently for them, and then, of course, they were talking about bears. Jacob mentioned that there were very few places left in the Lower Forty-Eight that still harbored grizzly, as opposed to black, bears and that northern Idaho was one of them; they were connected, by the Selkirks and the Purcells, to a vastly larger reservoir of grizzles that ran all the way up the Canadian Rockies into Alaska. Jacob dwelled, a little more than Zula was really comfortable with, on the idea that bears were attracted to menstruating women and that Zula really should not go camping in bear country when she was having her period. The modern feminist college-girl part of her thinking it was all just deeply wrong and inappropriate, the refugee/orphan/Forthrast taking a somewhat more pragmatic view.

It sounded like folklore to her. Not that this would get her anywhere in an argument with Jacob; a lot of what he believed was folklore, and the more folky it was, the more doggedly he believed it. No great insight was needed on Zula’s part to perceive that he had a chip on his shoulder regarding education and science; she’d already been warned not to mention, in his presence, the possibility that the earth might be more than six thousand years old.

All of which was easy for her. She had been dealing with men like this ever since she had come to Iowa. Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn’t go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who wanted to talk to you for hours about the ballistics of the.308 round or the relative merits of side-by-side versus over-and-under shotguns. If you couldn’t stand that heat, you needed to stay out of that kitchen, and Zula had walked right into it by crossing the threshold of Jacob and Elizabeth’s house. She smiled and nodded and pretended to be interested in Uncle Jacob’s bear lore until Aunt Elizabeth finished putting the boys to bed and came and rescued her.

Anyway, she had looked it up on the Internet (of course) when she had reached Seattle and found much (of course) conflicting information posted by people with varying levels of scientific credibility. She had ended up knowing no more about it, really, than she had before the conversation with Uncle Jacob. And yet the connection to menstrual blood struck heavy psychic resonances (which was, of course, why the myth was so widespread in the first place), and so, that early morning when she was chained to the trailer hitch under the pickup truck and she realized that the thing sniffing and pawing around was a bear, her brain went straight to her uterus and she asked herself whether she might have lost count of the days and started having her period in the middle of the night. Certainly didn’t feel that way. It was funny how the brain worked; she even permitted herself a brief excursion into meta/ironical land wondering if anyone else in the world — in history — had been in danger from gangsters, terrorists, and bears in the space of a single week. When would the pirates and dinosaurs show up?

But finally she saw and understood what it was that the bear was actually questing for and saw that the entire train of thought concerning menstrual blood had been a dangerous exercise in self-absorption. The bear was coming for what bears always came for: garbage. The empty trays of the MREs. Owing to constraints imposed by the ankle chain and the surrounding wall of stacked brush, she had not been able to dispose of these in the Girl Scout — approved manner of bagging them and hanging them from a tree far from camp.

The animal sounded, seemed, as if he were only arm’s length from her, but she told herself that her fear was making the distance seem smaller than it was. She had one more MRE left. She peeled the lid back and shoved it in the direction of that snuffling and panting sound, then withdrew beneath the truck’s undercarriage.

On its tank treads the vehicle was jacked up absurdly high, its running boards at the altitude of Zula’s hip. She couldn’t stand up beneath it but she could easily squat on her haunches with her head projecting into the space between its driveshaft and its frame. The volume beneath it was not empty, but choked with undergrowth, a mixture of shrubs and small coniferous seedlings that had passed safely beneath the truck’s bumper as it eased into this position. These remained upright and undisturbed. So she was both hiding in undergrowth and taking shelter beneath a truck, which she hoped would suffice to keep her out of the bear’s clutches. She had the idea that it was a big one. But of course she would think that. Perhaps it was too bulky to want to cram itself underneath the truck; it would be satisfied with the easier pickings of the MRE that Zula had tossed in its direction. This it certainly seemed to be enjoying. She tried to think of what she would do if it crept under here to get her. Punch it in the nose? No, that was what you were supposed to do to a shark. Might not work on a bear. With bears you were supposed to make yourself look big. Don’t try to run away. The not running away part was taken care of. Making herself look big might be difficult. The chain on her ankle was a good twenty feet long. Less than half of it had been used to connect her ankle to the trailer hitch. The remainder just trailed on the ground. She began gathering it up, wrapping it around her left hand, turning it into a fat steel club. The weight of it threw her off balance, and she threw out her right hand to steady herself against the truck’s frame. She thought it would be all solid and strong, and for the most part it was; but something small and flimsy moved beneath her hand there.

She froze and made herself still. The bear was still making hugely satisfied smacking noises, getting the most out of that MRE. But a few moments later, it too became quiet and still, as though listening, wondering about something. Zula’s first thought was that she must have made some noise or that a shift in the breeze had betrayed her presence.

The bear went into movement, and she cringed, thinking it might be moving toward her; but it wasn’t. The light of the morning was coming in now through the wrecked screen of camouflage, and ducking down, using that hand on the frame to steady herself, Zula peered back between the truck’s rear treads to see its hind legs — only its hind legs — planted on the ground. It was standing up to sniff the air and to listen. It let out a kind of indignant barking sound, then dropped to all fours and sauntered away.

There was definitely something under Zula’s right hand. She explored it with her fingertips and found that she could pry it loose from its lodging against the frame. It was a little plastic box.

She let the chain spiral off her other hand, then crawled out from beneath the truck to where the light was better.

The little box was a hide-a-key, with a magnet on one side. She slid it open and found two keys linked together by a split ring. One of them looked like a spare ignition key for the truck. The other was much smaller and looked like it belonged to a padlock. She tried it on the lock that was holding the chain around her ankle, but it would not even slide into the keyhole; this was made for a different brand.

Her eyes went to the toolbox padlock that Jones had discarded on the ground yesterday.

Voices were approaching from down the slope. This was probably what the bear had been reacting to. Zula pocketed the keys, then retreated beneath the truck again and put the box back in its place against the frame.

It was Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif.

The open padlock had been half trodden into the ground. Zula pulled it out, dusted it off, and looked at it for a few moments. Then she hooked its hasp through the last link on the chain and snapped it shut.

Abdul-Wahaab and Sharif were upon her. She expected them to notice the disturbance to their camouflage, the shredded MRE tray with huge fang holes in it. They didn’t. They were exhausted and they were in a hurry. And they only wanted her. They came in through the gap in the camouflage that the bear had made. Sharif dropped to one knee and undid the padlock that held her captive. He released the loop of chain that passed around the frame of the trailer hitch, then snapped it shut again so that it stayed fixed to her ankle. His eyes snagged for a moment on the other lock, the one from the toolbox, dangling from the end of the chain, but he made nothing of it. He didn’t have the key and had no time or need to trifle with it anyway. Zipping the long end of the chain loose from the frame, he stood up, backed away from the truck, and gave the chain a preliminary tug, like a dog’s leash. “Let’s go,” he said in Arabic.

Zula stood up, then turned and bent down as if to collect her sleeping bag. “I’ll do it! Just go!” said Abdul-Wahaab. So she turned back toward Sharif. He turned his back on her and began walking out of the woods and down the open slope toward the river. On the opposite bank, between the water and the highway, a green Suburban was waiting for them. On its door was a picture of a bear.

Day 9

She didn’t have time for a good look at the Suburban before they shoved her into its open rear doors. What came through to her was, for lack of a better term, its art direction: forest green and blazoned with a logo that incorporated a bear’s head and a pair of crossed firearms. She inferred that it belonged to a hunting guide company. This was confirmed by the cargo stored in its back: sleeping bags, tents, camp stove, and the like.

To this, her captors added some of the cargo from the pickup truck camouflaged up in the woods. Much of what they had scavenged from the mining camp was trash, usable only in desperate circumstances; now that the jihadists had gotten themselves an upgrade, they were happy to leave most of the junk behind, taking only the weapons and a few other choice items.

Jones was very keen to get going. They closed the rear doors on her, took seats up front, and peeled out. The five jihadists had all survived the night, but they were dirty and exhausted and had a kind of staring gaze that made Zula not want to meet their eyes. She had the strong feeling that they had committed murder very recently, and she wondered if they were on some kind of drug. As usual, nothing was explained to her, but much could be guessed. They had flagged this Suburban down on the road, or crept up on a campsite where it had been parked, and they had murdered the hunters and the guides, concealed the bodies, and then come back to fetch her. Now they were wondering how much time they had before the victims’ failure to check in would be noticed. They might have no more than a few hours, or as much as several days. It was impossible to know, and so they had to put as many miles as possible between themselves and the scene of the crime without drawing attention to themselves.

They drove in silence for a quarter of an hour, just getting used to their situation. Then Jones, who was driving, got the attention of Ershut, who was in the middle of the backseat, and talked to him over his shoulder for a little while. Zula could tell that he was talking about her.

Ershut turned around and made it clear that he wished to trade places with Zula. There was some awkward moving around, not made any simpler by the long chain trailing from Zula’s ankle.

He rummaged for a while in toolboxes and equipment chests and found, among other things, a roll of black duct tape and some heavy black plastic sheeting. He cut the latter into a strip about an arm’s length wide and a few meters long, then arranged this horizontally like a curtain around the side and rear windows of the cargo area, taping its edges to the head liner and the window frames. The entire back half of the Suburban was now hidden behind black plastic. Anyone looking at it from the outside would probably just assume that the glass had been deeply tinted.

She could see where this was going. They were going to be driving on public highways now. The time would come when they would find themselves close to other vehicles and then they didn’t want Zula gesticulating for help in the rear window.

Or, for that matter, kicking the windows out. As she was easily capable of doing, whether or not the windows had plastic over them.

They took the chain off her ankle and obliged her to climb into a sleeping bag. Then they wrapped duct tape tightly around the outside of the bag, binding first her ankles and then her knees together. “I suppose going to the powder room is out of the question?” she called, as they were doing this.

“You’ll have to just go inside the bag,” Jones announced. “It’s distasteful, but it won’t hurt you.”

They duct-taped her wrists together on the outside of the bag, in front of her waist, and then wrapped more tape around her arms, pinning them down to her sides. Sharif had found a watch cap, or perhaps taken it off a dead hunter, so they pulled this down over her eyes and then sealed it with a blindfold of more tape.

Then they drove forever.

Zula tried to think of some way to gauge the progress of time, but she had nothing other than stops for gas. These occurred three times. Before each one, Ershut climbed into the backseat and jammed a sock into Zula’s mouth and then bound it in place with a bridle of duct tape. He remained poised over her as, just a few inches away from her head, someone — probably Jones, since he could pass for a Canadian or an American of African descent — jacked the nozzle into the fuel filler pipe and pumped in another thirty gallons of fuel. An absence of electronic beeps suggested that Jones was going inside and paying in cash, rather than using credit cards.

Where would they have obtained Canadian cash?

Probably from dead hunters.

Only a few minutes after the second of these fuel stops, the Suburban pulled off the road into a flat paved space, presumably a parking lot, and Zula heard typing and clicking from the front. Jones had apparently found a truck stop or coffee shop with Wi-Fi and was messing about on the Internet. Perhaps seeing if any missing persons reports had been filed.

The web surfing lasted for about fifteen minutes. They got back on the road again, and Ershut removed the gag from Zula’s mouth. Maybe fifteen minutes later, she finally went ahead and pissed herself. This was no picnic, but she felt better — well, less bad, anyway — when she compared it to what had happened to friends in Xiamen: Yuxia’s head in the bucket, Csongor pistol-whipped, Peter dead.

This in a strange way helped her feel better about the gory images of Khalid — half remembered and half dreamed — that kept appearing before her blindfolded eyes. Like it or not, this was the league she was playing in now. Her friends — assuming they were still alive — were playing in it too. And she at least had the advantage that she’d been in it before, or at least in its junior auxiliary, back in Eritrea.

They must have traveled for sixteen hours that day. Zula dozed occasionally, perhaps for twenty minutes, perhaps for three hours — there was no way to guess. They were traveling at highway speeds almost the entire time, which suggested that they were covering a vast distance — something on the order of a thousand miles. It was a long day but, in the end, not radically worse than flying between continents in an economy-class airline seat. And like such a flight, it seemed interminable when she was in the middle of it. At the end of the day, though, it seemed to have taken no time at all, since nothing really had happened.

They slowed suddenly, pulled off the highway onto gravel, and began to descend a relatively steep slope. Ershut scrambled over the backseat and hurriedly reinstated the gag; apparently this was a spur-of-the-moment excursion. The ground beneath the Suburban leveled off, and the vehicle eased through a series of maneuvers, then stopped. She heard a zipping noise as Jones stomped the parking brake down. The engine stopped. A door opened and one person — she assumed Jones — got out. She heard his feet crunching away across gravel. A few moments later, he greeted someone who gave him a cheerful greeting back.

Two greetings, actually, almost in unison: a man and a woman.

A conversation began. Zula could not make out words, but it all sounded cheerful enough. A friendly shooting-the-breeze type of chat. Zula could not hear anything else: no other vehicles, no traffic of any kind, none of the noises of a city. Just a low rushing sound that she was pretty sure came from a nearby river, a fast-flowing mountain stream.

After about ten minutes, the conversation paused, then resumed in much more subdued tones. Less than a minute later, she heard a door swing open and feet ascending a short stairway. Then the door thumped shut.

Two other jihadists got out of the Suburban and walked away over the gravel and there was a repetition of the door opening, the thump-thump-thump on the stairs, the door closing again.

Nothing seemed to happen for ten minutes, to the point where Ershut and Mahir — the two still in the Suburban — began to exchange a few nervous remarks. But then suddenly they both made happy exclamations. That door opened again. Someone jogged around behind the Suburban and opened its rear doors, then grabbed Zula’s feet and dragged her out. She got thrown over someone’s shoulder — Jones’s. He carried her across the gravel for some distance and then, with a great deal of effort, up that short stairway and into a place that sounded enclosed and smelled like a house. He pivoted and carried her down a narrow corridor and through a doorway. Then he bent forward at the waist and launched her. She fell back helplessly, unable to stop herself, imagining that she was about to smash the back of her head against something. But she made a soft landing on a bed and bounced. Jones was already out of the room, slamming the door behind himself. The entire structure rocked slightly beneath his footfalls.

They were in an RV, she realized. An RV parked on a flat gravel lot by the side of a mountain river.

The men were running back and forth between it and the Suburban, moving cargo. Someone started the Suburban and drove it up alongside to expedite matters.

It took them no more than a quarter of an hour to get the gear sorted and then she heard the RV’s engine start up, far ahead, at the opposite end. For this was some kind of a huge RV, one of those bus-length retirement-homes-on-wheels. It began to move across the gravel, slowly as the driver got the feel of it, then picking up speed. She heard the Suburban falling into formation behind and gave up on any thoughts of trying to kick out the rear window.

Only after they had been on the road for half an hour did Ershut come back and remove her gag. Air rushed into her mouth, greatly improving her sense of smell, and she got an unmistakable scent of blood — the cabin in the jet, Khalid bleeding out on the floor.

“Hold still,” Ershut said in Arabic, then cut through the lashings of duct tape around her arms and wrists. “Okay.” Then he walked out of the room, leaving its door open.

Zula devoted a few minutes to getting her blindfold and her leg tape off and kicked off the urine-soaked sleeping bag. It took her eyes a few minutes to work properly again, but when she could see, she saw Mahir and Sharif on hands and knees in the RV’s kitchen area, using rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of 409 to clean blood off its white linoleum floor.

TOWARD THE END of the long day’s drive, there had been an interlude that had posed Zula with a minor brainteaser. The Suburban had been cruising down a highway for some time. She could tell it was a two-laner because of the sound made by oncoming vehicles as they zoomed by a few feet away, and by the fact that it wound from side to side more than a freeway. But at one point they had slowed down, without turning off the road, and descended a long straight slope, losing speed the whole way, and finally come to a halt, still sloping downhill. Nothing had happened for a quarter of an hour or so. Then she had heard the engines of other cars and trucks starting up all around. A series of vehicles had passed them coming up the other way. The Suburban had descended some distance farther, then leveled out, clanking over steel plates, and then parked again. Presently a deep rumbling had started and continued for twenty minutes or so.

By this time, Zula had figured out that they were on a ferry. The obvious conclusion would have been that they were headed over to Vancouver Island. But she’d been on those ferries before and she knew that they were gigantic and that the land approaches to their sprawling terminals would have felt and sounded different. They must be on something smaller. And indeed the crossing had not lasted long, and soon the engines of the Suburban and of the other vehicles around them had started up again and they had ascended up a long gentle slope, building speed as it turned back into a highway.

During the visit that she and Peter had made to B.C., she had learned that the southern part of the province sported a number of long, skinny, deep lakes, oriented north-south, presumably gouges left in the earth by glaciers during the most recent Ice Age. They were too long to dodge around and too wide to bridge, so the east-west highways ran right up to them and stopped and then started again on the opposite side. The dead ends were connected by small ferries.

About an hour after they stole the RV, she got to see one of those ferry terminals. Albeit dimly. It was long after dark. The terminal was closed. The lights — if there were any — had been turned off. Jones switched off the RV’s headlamps as they cruised past a sign warning them that there’d be no more sailings until six A.M. tomorrow morning. A moment later, the Suburban went dark too. They felt their way down the ramp by starlight. It was just a straight gash blasted through the woods down to the shore of the lake. It ramped straight into black water. The connection to the shore was bifurcated. To the right, the road leveled off onto a platform built out over the lake on pilings and equipped with gates and ramps and huge bitts for mating with the ferry. To the left, the pavement just sloped straight down through the waterline. It was incised with a pair of deep straight channels hardened with iron rails. These ran obliquely up across the road to a broad open lot off to the side of the waiting area, surrounded by equipment sheds with heavy lifting equipment and other gear: a maintenance yard, she supposed, for the ferries, which could be winched straight up out of the water on those rails and brought to dry dock on higher ground. She got a reasonably good look at the place out the RV’s windows because that was where Jones got the gigantic vehicle turned around in a long series of back-and-forths. Meanwhile, Abdul-Wahaab — who had been driving the Suburban — had stopped it in the middle of the ramp, nose aimed down toward the water. He had rolled down all of the windows, opened the sunroof, and parted the rear cargo doors, which he now seemed to be wedging open with a stick. She could not see into it from this distance, but she had a good idea as to its contents. In the time she had spent in this bedroom, she had seen copious evidence — in the form of family photographs, toiletries, denture-soaking equipment, and knickknacks — that this RV was owned by a retired couple whose corpses were now in the back of that Suburban.

Having finished his preparations, Abdul-Wahaab made one last orbit around the big SUV, inspecting his work, then reached into the open driver’s-side door. Zula heard a distant thunk as he released the parking brake. The Suburban began to roll forward down the ramp. He walked, then ran alongside, keeping his right hand on the steering wheel, then peeled away from it just before it nosed into the water. It lost most of its velocity in the first few yards, plashing up a concentric wave that spread out into the lake, but it never stopped moving. Air burbled up out of the engine compartment. It slid forward into the lake, instantly filling with water, and disappeared, leaving a trail of bubbles that slowly moved away from shore as the vehicle found its way down to the lake bottom. The terrain all around was rocky and steep, and Zula had no doubt that the bottom dropped away precipitously beyond the end of the paved ferry-ramp. The lake must be a hundred meters deep, and the Suburban would come to rest at the very bottom of it.

Jones pulled out of the maintenance yard and got the RV pointed uphill. Abdul-Wahaab stormed in through the side door to accept the enthusiastic congratulations and prayerful thanks of his colleagues. Abdallah Jones steered the RV out onto the open highway, turned on the headlamps, and proceeded in some random direction at, Zula guessed, a speed well within the posted limits.

Day 10

“I mean, did you see what happened to those three thousand K’Shetriae, beginning of this week?” Richard asked.

Skeletor quickly averted his gaze and pretended to study the pattern of the red Formica tabletop.

Richard continued, “The ones who tried to go in and establish some kind of order in the Torgai Foothills?”

“I know the ones you’re talking about.” Devin Skraelin shook his head and gazed moodily out the window of the trailer. Apparently as a result of Richard’s ducking into this place a week ago, fleeing from Devin’s staff like a camper trying to get in out of the mosquitoes, it had now become the unofficial Dodge/Skeletor meeting place, a Reykjavik or a Panmunjom. It had only been a week since that meeting, and yet it seemed a lot longer. Hell, it seemed to have happened in some parallel universe. The universe in which Zula had not yet disappeared.

“I was there for some of it,” Devin said, snapping Richard’s mind back — if not to reality, then from reality. “Just hovering, invisible.” He wanted Richard to understand that he had not wielded any of his characters’ superamazing powers to sway the battle. “It was carnage, no doubt about it. Not what we — what they — expected.”

“You can say ‘we,’” Richard said quickly. He held up his hands, palms out. “I am so far past the point of thinking that the writers have to be these, like, neutral, dispassionate forces in the world.”

Skeletor was nodding, like he’d been wondering for years when Richard was finally going to get it. “It just doesn’t work,” he said. “We already talked about Good versus Evil and how that failed.”

“Totally ridiculous,” Richard said, as if it were some huge admission. “Just a weak effort on our part. ‘How can we get two groups fighting, competing? I know, we’ll have one group be Good and one Evil.’ Exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to come out of a corporate committee.”

Skeletor was just nodding, still mostly gazing out the window but occasionally flicking his eyes back Richard’s way, perhaps looking for signs of sarcasm.

“We should have just left it to you guys,” Richard concluded.

“The way I see it, it’s really a sport,” Devin said. “Maybe not like soccer, but like some combination of fencing and chess. Now, it has to be story driven, of course.” He held up his hand like a pupil volunteering to erase the chalkboard. “Happy to help out there.”

In exchange for vast sums of money, Richard mentally added. But he just kept nodding. Looking interested. As if there were any doubt as to what would come next.

Devin continued, “But in the end if you don’t have that competitive element, you’ve got nothing, business-wise. And for those who want solo questing and one-on-one competition, it’s there. You can do that. But the real attraction is in the team sport angle, the social thing. Being part of an army. An alliance.”

“Wearing a uniform,” Richard said. “Having a mascot.”

“Yeah, and that is what the Bright versus Earthtone thing turned into. Whether we intended it or not.” Devin was being a bit slippery there. A week ago Richard would have been furious at his treachery, at this blithe admission. Devin might even have sensed this, the potential for an explosion, and declined to reveal what he had just now come out and said so baldly. Now he’d said it because he could sense somehow that Richard didn’t actually give a shit. Richard had moved on.

“I just came from Cambridge,” Richard said.

“Mass?”

“England. Where Donald lives half the time.”

“Ah.”

“I want you to know that he’s fine with all of this.”

It seemed pretty clear that Devin had not been expecting this turn in the conversation, and he got a preoccupied look about him.

“He’s a quick study. You think I’m joking. But no. For a guy who has never played a video game in his life — ”

“Donald Cameron has his own character in the world now!?” Skeletor exclaimed, in somewhat the same tone of voice as a tribune might have said, Hannibal has crossed the Alps with elephants!?

“Very weak, of course,” Richard said reassuringly. “Didn’t even have shoes, for a while.”

“I don’t care about what he’s wearing on his feet! I care about his — ”

“Vassal tree? Yes. I understand. He’s not quite as quick to get going on that front as you’d imagine. Still learning the ropes. I explained how it all works. He was reluctant to swear fealty to a more established character.”

“Why the hell should he!? With a few text messages he could be an Emperor!”

“If he knew how to send text messages, yes.”

“How many vassals does he have? Are they powerful?”

“I haven’t checked since the FBO at Cranfield.”

“The huh?”

“In about ten hours. So I have no idea.”

“Why would he suddenly start? Why now?”

“Between you and me — and really, Devin, this must never leave this trailer — ” Richard leaned in, held up his hands, rubbed his thumb against his fingertips.

“How could he possibly be in need of money?”

“Have you ever paid taxes in the U. K.? Tried to fix up a sandstone castle on the Isle of Man? Not to mention his other properties.” Richard just made the last part up.

“What other properties?”

“Palaces and stuff he inherited, I guess. I’m just saying, he looks like a tattered old professor, but behind that façade he burns through specie like a rap star.”

Devin was thinking. “You’re referring to the money in Torgai. Vast hoards of gold rumored to be just lying there for the taking.”

“Don’t be coy, man; we all know what those three thousand K’Shetriae were thinking. No one is going into the Torgai for its scenic beauty.”

“It is so obvious,” Devin marveled. “So. Friggin’. Obvious. He never cared about playing the game until there was money on the ground. Never went in once. Just wanted to” — and here Devin held his hands aloft and made fluttering motions with his fingers, like an airborne faerie sprinkling dew over rose petals — “craft ancient dead languages. Imbue the history of T’Rain with a grammar and a rhetoric.”

“And cash royalty checks.”

“Egg-ZACT-ly!” Devin snapped, looking around himself in a kind of shocked, prim way, as if he had never accepted one penny of compensation. “But the minute some Troll dumps a few tons of gold on the ground, he gets an account and turns into Ozzy Fucking Mandias.”

Richard’s instincts told him that, having gotten Skeletor into this state, the most effective way to keep him there would be to show exaggerated nonchalance. “Now, Devin,” he said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “you said yourself that it was a team sport. And part of being on a team is having a captain or a pope or what have you.”

“I’ve had characters in the game since the beginning,” Devin said righteously. “Over a hundred of them.”

“So the database says,” Richard said.

“Now I won’t sit here and try to tell you that no one has ever sworn fealty to me. I run vassal networks, sure. Sometimes maybe three deep. You can’t understand the workings of the game unless you’ve played it at that level.”

Richard just kept nodding, raising his eyebrows from time to time in an I’m with you, buddy sort of effort.

“I could be seven deep!” Devin said. “Could have been years ago!” Meaning that his hierarchy of vassals would be seven tiers deep, enough to give him tens of millions of followers. Only one player in the game had ever gotten to that level. Richard had been just hours away from sending Egdod down to liquidate him when the player had choked on a bite of wurst, alone before his monitor screen in Ostheim vor der Rhön, no one around to give him a Heimlich.

“I know that about you, Devin, and I do think it’s testimony to your, if I may say, midwestern sense of plain dealing and self-effacement that you have showed such restraint. Of course, one of the problems with us midwesterners is that — ”

“We just let people run roughshod over us, yeah, I know that,” Devin said, with an involuntary flick of the eyes toward his steel building full of lawyers.

“Well,” Richard said, after a longish pause, “I don’t want to keep you from your training schedule.”

“S’okay, my doctor’s after me to ease up a little.”

“I’m actually on my way up to visit the family, but it seemed only fair to stop by and fill you in a little on my conversation with the Don.”

“Appreciate it,” Devin muttered, and then his eyes refocused. “Yeah, I heard you had some trouble with your niece?”

“Am still having it, actually.”

“She hasn’t turned up yet?”

Richard had vague misgivings about this phrasing, since it seemed to imply that Zula had some choice in the matter. He wondered how many other people were assuming that Zula had just decided to go on the lam and put her family through the torments of hell just because.

“Whatever trouble she’s in,” Richard said, “does not seem to have resolved.”

“Well. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Devin offered.

Richard couldn’t think of a polite way to say, You’re about to go do it, and so he just nodded.

AFTER DITCHING THE Suburban, they drove for three hours. Zula reckoned that they would be heading for the hills, but instead they entered into some place whose roads were equipped, in standard-issue North American style, with streetlamps, convenience stores, and stoplights. After cruising through that sort of environment for about fifteen minutes, Jones swung the wheel and trundled the giant vehicle into a vast parking lot. A neon-lit Walmart logo careered across the windshield. Jones pulled into a parking space, or rather a series of several consecutive spaces, and shut off the engine. After taking a last searching look around the parking lot, he reached up and jerked a curtain across the entire eight-foot expanse of the windshield, affording him and his coconspirators privacy.

Earlier in the evening, Ershut and Abdul-Wahaab had been given the assignment to chain Zula by her ankle to the grab bar in the shower stall. Like so many of the routine chores that filled the day-to-day lives of this roving band of terrorists, this one had occasioned a huge amount of what sounded to an Iowan like violent argument. Ninety percent of this had focused on the mysterious padlock that they had found locked to the last link of the chain. No one seemed to know where it had come from. This, of course, was because Zula had put it there when none of them had been looking. But as she had been hoping, they never cottoned on to it. Jones, becoming annoyed by the sheer volume of their debate, had glanced at it and, after a few moments, identified it as the lock that had formerly belonged to the toolbox from the stolen truck. Rummaging around in the external pocket of a knapsack, he had found that truck’s key chain and thrown it to Ershut, who, after a few minutes’ trial and error (for it had a lot of keys on it) had managed to get the new lock open. He had then used it to fix that end of the chain to the shower stall grab bar and pocketed the key — which, quite naturally, he’d assumed was the only key. The next and final phase of the operation had been to adjust the length of the chain around Zula’s ankle, giving her enough slack that she could get to the toilet, or retreat into the bedroom and curl up on the floor, but not enough to climb up on the bed; for that would have put her within reach of the windows. For this they used the padlock for which Zula didn’t have a spare key.

When it had become obvious that she was going to be kept in this situation for a long time, she had raked blankets and pillows down from the bed and formed a little nest on the floor where she had dozed during the drive. The RV was capable of sleeping at least half a dozen when all of its seats and benches had been folded down and turned into beds, and all the jihadists except for Jones had found places to lie down and were sawing logs, refreshing themselves after a long day of cold-blooded murder and aimless driving around. Curled up in her nest in the back, Zula gazed down a forty-foot-long tunnel to the other end where Jones had pivoted the driver’s seat around to face backward and set a laptop across his knees. Its blue-white light illuminated his face, turning it into a constrasty and off-color mask. No sleeping for him, at least not yet.

She would have been mystified by his decision to park in a Walmart were it not for the fact that her great-aunt and great-uncle, based out of Yankton, South Dakota, were inveterate RVers, forever showing slides and telling stories of their wanderings at the re-u, and she knew from them that Walmart had a policy of rolling out the welcome mat for such people, even to the point of distributing the company’s own rebranded version of the Rand McNally Road Atlas on which the locations of all Walmarts were highlighted. It was a near certainty that a copy of that very document was lodged in the console up next to Jones where this vehicle’s late owners had been in the habit of repositing all such items. Jones, of course, would not know this. But he seemed nothing if not adaptable. It might be that this was a spur-of-the-moment decision: he had blundered into this central British Columbian town, happened to drive by their Walmart, noticed that the only vehicles in the parking lot were overnighting RVs, and decided to adopt a “when in Rome” strategy. Or, what was more likely, he had spent a while interrogating the former owners at gun- or knifepoint before slaying them, had learned about their habits, rifled their wallets, extracted their PIN numbers and passwords by making false promises that he would not harm them.

The laptop was not the same computer that Sharif had been using on the jet. This one was part of the haul of random consumer booty that had fallen into Jones’s hands along with the RV. Jones had evidently been able to obtain a Wi-Fi connection from the Walmart, since he was mostly just mousing and clicking: classic web-surfing behavior. There was a fine moment of comedy when he apparently clicked his way onto the website of some casino in Vegas, and the voice of Frank Sinatra boomed out of the computer’s speakers, stirring a couple of the men half awake before Jones found the volume control and stifled it.

Again the strange fixation on Vegas. So Jones was finally getting down to business. Based on the conversation she had overheard in Xiamen, she had a pretty good idea of his plan: go into a big entertainment complex in Sin City and kill as many people as possible, similar to what those Pakistani terrorists had done in the luxury hotels and railway station of Mumbai. The tricky bit being to get himself, his comrades-in-arms, and his stash of weapons across the U.S. border. Not that you couldn’t buy weapons in the States, but she had witnessed enough loadings and unloadings of their gear, by this point, to have a rough idea of their inventory, and she thought that they had with them certain items like fully automatic weapons and hand grenades that would be difficult to buy even in the Sweet Land of Liberty.

Jones went through a phase of rebooting the laptop several times consecutively, which made her think that he must have downloaded and installed some new software. An obvious guess was that he was rigging the machine in such a way that he could communicate secretly with his fellow jihadists.

The inherently soporific nature of software installation had its way with her, and she closed her eyes and then opened them to find that it was daytime.

Jones had fallen asleep right where he had been sitting, and Abdul-Wahaab was now hogging the laptop. Ershut was up cooking something steamy on the stove; her nose told her it was rice. Presently, some of this was served up to her in a plastic bowl decorated with pastel flowers. She wondered if these guys understood that they were a couple of hundred feet away from a grocery store that was probably a hundred times the size of the largest one they had ever seen in their lives.

As she was eating her rice, a car pulled up and parked next to them, causing the men to twitch curtains and peer out. They looked apprehensive and made reaching-for-weapons gestures, then their expressions became delighted. Mahir began shouting about how great Allah was. This woke up Jones, who took stock of the situation and told everyone to shut up. He pushed himself up out of the big captain’s chair, tottered down the steps on stiff legs, and unlocked and opened the door. Then he backed up so that three men could enter the RV. They had beards and huge grins. Jones shushed them and insisted that the door be hove to and relocked.

Then the place erupted with hearty greetings and laughter and a great deal more in the way of kind remarks about Allah. The only thing that could dampen these men’s spirits, it seemed, was the presence of Zula, which they found shocking and maybe even offensive when they noticed it.

The new arrivals looked Indian or Pakistani and, like Jones, seemed to use Arabic as a second or third language, which meant that Jones ended up speaking English to them. English they spoke very well and with minimal accents. Zula was able to infer that they had received an email from Jones last night and had come here — wherever “here” was — from Vancouver as soon as they had been able. Sycophants were the same everywhere, apparently; their most verbal member, who kept maneuvering to be closest to Jones, kept apologizing for not having arrived even sooner. This man — Sharjeel was apparently his name — looked, dressed, and acted like a Westernized grad student or high-tech employee. Watching him, Zula could only think of all the nonterrorist South Asians, happily assimilated into North American society, for whom an asshole like Sharjeel was their worst nightmare.

Having Sharjeel and his friends in the picture made her feel terrible, and it took a bit of thinking to work out why. Until now it had seemed that it would be only a matter of time before Jones and his crew would make a mistake and get noticed or caught. Jones had lived in the States, so he knew how things worked in North America. He was quite good at talking like an American black guy and was capable of being charming; evidently he had charmed this RV’s owners for a few minutes before pulling a gun on them. But he couldn’t stay awake 24/7, and he couldn’t do everything. His comrades, by contrast, were now deeply implanted in a culture where they did not speak the language and had no clue as to what was normal behavior. They got along okay in the wilderness, but in a place like this they could not even be allowed out of the RV.

This made Sharjeel and his buddies extremely useful to Jones and therefore distinctly unwelcome as far as Zula was concerned.

They made themselves useful immediately. One of them sat down in the huge rotating Captain Kirk driver’s chair at the front. For Jones proposed to venture into the Walmart with Sharjeel and the other of the new arrivals and wanted an English-speaking person to act as their front man. Which was to say that if some gregarious fellow RVer or Walmart security dick came around knocking on the driver’s-side door wanting to chat them up, it would be best if the person responding did not still have the dust of north Waziristan in the folds of his turban.

Jones scrounged a Strawberry Shortcake memo pad from the glove compartment and began to draw up a shopping list. Sometimes he wrote silently, other times he thought out loud. “Cooking oil … mosquito repellent … matches … cordless drill…”

“Tampons,” Zula called out.

“What brand?” Jones asked without skipping a beat. “Lite, Regular, Super, Ultra?”

“You’ve actually had a girlfriend?”

“I’ll get you a multipack and take your snarky answer to mean that you don’t much care,” Jones said. “Anything else, as long as I’m in the pink-and-pastel aisle?”

“Baby wipes, unscented preferably. Underwear. A pair of pants that hasn’t been peed in.”

“Sweat pants okay?”

“Whatever. Some socks, please.”

“Ah, you’re using the magic word all of a sudden.”

“Anything you see that’s made out of fleece.”

“Anything in Walmart that is made out of fleece,” Jones repeated fastidiously, copying it down. “That should be several truckloads’ worth.” Then he looked up at her. “Will there be anything else, or can I get back to planning atrocities?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Sharjeel monitored this uneasily.

After a few more minutes, Jones and Sharjeel and one of the newcomers, who was apparently named Aziz, all tromped down the steps out the side door and went scuffing away across the parking lot.

“Your family is very nice,” said a voice in English, after a while.

Zula had sunk into a sort of semicomatose state, a listless, timeless despondency in which she had been spending increasing amounts of time lately. Like a computer being awakened from its power-saving state, she was a bit slow to spin up her hard drive and unblank her screen and begin responding to inputs.

She gazed up the length of the RV to see the third of the newcomers, the one ensconced in the big Captain Kirk chair. He had seized control of the laptop and was apparently surfing. Zula guessed that he might have googled her or something.

It took all the will and self-control she had been developing during the last week and a half not to lose control of herself. The only thing that prevented it was a kind of instinctive awareness that this was probably just what the guy wanted; he was trying to say the most provocative thing he could think of. Circling around and poking at her, trying to learn what she was made of. Your family is very nice. She couldn’t believe he’d said that. What an asshole.

But she had opened the door to this by her improvisation, a few days ago, just after the jet crash, when she had revealed her full name to Jones. Of course, the first thing he would have done upon getting access to the Internet would be to learn everything about her, her uncle, her larger family. And he had probably left a trail of bookmarks on the laptop for this guy to follow. Maybe even set up a Zula wiki where jihadists all over the world were posting every piece of data they could find.

So that was the situation. Zula chained by the ankle, out of the laptop’s reach. The man in the driver’s seat looking, she had to guess, at her cousins’ Facebook pages, their Flickr albums, the websites they must have put up during the last week in an effort to figure out what had become of her.

Ten seconds with her hands on that laptop and she could bring the wrath of God down on these people and end the whole thing. A fact that they understood perfectly well. Hence the chain. One padlock at her ankle, the other on the grab bar in the shower stall.

The latter was special in that Zula happened to have a key to it in her pocket.

She could take the key out at any time and be free within seconds. Free to move about within the RV, that is. But there was always someone awake, someone watching her. The key was her one chance. She had to use it wisely. Her first move had to be a success.

The man with the laptop stared at her for a while, waiting for a reaction. Then his attention drifted back to the laptop. He poked it and stroked it for a few moments, then glanced up to see Zula looking at him. He spread his hands apart and gripped the machine by its edges, spun it around, and picked it up to aim the screen toward Zula. From almost the other end of the RV she could not see very well, but she could make out several pictures of herself, which she recognized as having been taken during the re-u or other family get-togethers. Above them were words in block letters, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN? and a telephone number with a 712 area code: western Iowa.

The mere sight of this from thirty feet away brought up a welter of emotions. Joy and fierce pride that her family was on the case. Extreme sadness that it had happened at all. Rage that this man was now trying to use it to manipulate her emotional state. Embarrassment that he was, to some extent, succeeding.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“You may address me as Zakir,” he answered.

The man who was willing to be addressed as Zakir was big and doughy compared to all the other jihadists Zula had encountered lately. Probably a cubicle dweller in his professional life. A member of an IT support group for an insurance company, she decided. Bored with his job, unable to get a girlfriend, feeling conflicted about the way he had sold himself out to the Western system, he had somehow made contact with a group of al-Qaeda-affiliated wack jobs during a family visit to Pakistan and ended up on a list of guys to call in Vancouver if ever the global movement needed some assistance on the ground there. And now here he was and loving it. No doubt shocked to have been rumbled at three in the morning and put in a car to this Walmart rendezvous, he was killing some time doing the one thing he was indubitably good at, which was screwing around with computers.

The shoppers began to come back in shifts. Apparently they had split up inside the Walmart, each with his own list. Aziz came back with half a dozen plastic grocery bags dangling from each hand. Women’s work. Mostly these contained food, but he had also purchased a cheap webcam, shaped like a little eyeball, in a blister pack, and an extension cord for its USB cable. The feminine hygiene supplies were in there too; these were hurled disgustedly back down the length of the RV and ricocheted against the bedroom walls and came to rest, on the bed, somewhat dented around the corners. Sharjeel came with even more camping equipment: sleeping bags, tents, tarps, ropes, and various fleece garments. He tossed the clothing back to Zula, then went back into the store. Fifteen minutes later he and Jones came back, each pushing a big flatbed cart. They brought in a Skilsaw, a cordless drill, construction screws, insulation, two-by-fours, plywood. A full four-by-eight-foot sheet would have been awkward in the RV’s confines and so they had presawn them into four-by-four pieces. Aziz was sent back into the Walmart and came back with a roll of black roofing paper and a white plastic package, about the size of a well-stuffed garbage bag, with a Pink Panther cartoon on it: fiberglass insulation.

The group now divided up, the lovers Mahir and Sharif going out and getting into the car along with the miserable Aziz, while fat Zakir and weaselly, efficient Sharjeel remained in the RV. At a command from Jones, Zakir spun his chair around and fired up the RV’s engine, then pulled the great land yacht out onto the open road. Jones unboxed the Skilsaw. The RV had a generator that would produce wall power. He figured out how to get it started. Then he began to take measurements in the back bedroom, scooting politely past Zula each time he went in or out. With a fat Walmart contractor’s pencil he stroked out long lines on the plywood panels, then fired up the Skilsaw and cut them to shape, two at a time, suffusing the RV’s confines with sawdust, smoke, and a screeching din. He carried these back into the bedroom as they were completed, pushed them up against the windows, and then used the cordless drill, with a screwdriver attachment, to screw them into the RV’s walls. This was all done with the curtains closed so that anyone outside would see only curtains, drawn for privacy.

In only a few minutes’ time, he was able to screw plywood over all the windows. He deputized Sharjeel to put in more screws while he planned out the next phase of the operation. Sharjeel went to it with a will, driving the screws in at intervals of no more than two inches. It was a statement. Those panels were not coming off.

In the meantime, Jones had been cutting two-by-fours into lengths. He tossed these in through the door, flying right over Zula’s head like spears, and directed Sharjeel to screw them down on their edges to the plywood underlayment. This he did miserably. The procedure, as Zula could have told him, was called toenailing, and it was tricky.

Abdallah Jones slashed open the package of fiberglass and it began to expand uncontrollably, threatening to completely fill the interior of the RV. Wrestling and stomping and cursing, he cut off batts of it and passed them back to Sharjeel who stuck them up against the plywood with duct tape.

When all of the plywood had been thus insulated, they pulled over to the side of the road where Jones vindictively kicked all of the insulation, save one six-foot batt of it, out onto the shoulder. Once they were back under way, he busied himself again with plywood. When he had cut the first set of panels, he had always worked with double sheets, making two copies of each shape, and keeping half of them in reserve. Now he and Sharjeel put these spares up over the insulation and screwed them down into the studs. The Colorado School of Mines didn’t raise no dummies.

So the whole three-sided bay of the bedroom was now a completely opaque arrangement of insulated plywood walls. Presently it became even darker as Jones and Sharjeel unrolled long strips of black roofing paper and staple-gunned them over the plywood, covering the entire interior surface of the room, including the ceiling, with monochrome black, relieved only by the sporadic glint of staples. A few moments’ work with a box cutter removed a disk of tar paper from around the overhead light fixture, so that some dingy yellow light was shed into the space.

They then unlocked Zula’s ankle and let her know that her place was back there on the bed. She retreated, sat down, and busied herself picking wood shrapnel and loose tufts of fiberglass off the bedspread (a quilt that had quite obviously been hand-stitched by the old lady butchered yesterday) as Jones and Sharjeel applied a similar treatment to the inside of the bedroom door, reinforcing it with plywood and then building it out to a full depth of five inches, with a bat of insulation in the middle. This had the desired side effect of completely covering up the inside doorknob, making it impossible for Zula to open the door even if it were not locked.

Jones chucked a long fat bit into the drill and put a hole all the way through the reinforced door, then fed the little webcam’s USB cable through. Using a web of zip ties, duct tape, and drywall screws, he mounted the little eyeball to the inside surface of the door up near the top. Meanwhile Sharjeel had zip-tied the cable and its extension down the length of the RV’s central corridor to its kitchen table and plugged it into the laptop. A long adjustment procedure ensued in which Jones would close the door, leaving Zula alone in the room, and walk up to view the camera’s output on the laptop, then tromp back and open the door and wiggle the camera this way and that, getting the angle just right so that (Zula supposed) it could see all parts of the room.

The entire procedure had taken perhaps two hours. Like all home improvement projects, it had started with amazing energy and speed and then slowly petered out as Jones and Sharjeel had gotten hung up on details. But now it was done, and Zula was well and truly locked in. They slammed her shut in there and did not bother opening the door for maybe six hours.

Day 15

There was now a train that would take arriving passengers directly from Sea-Tac to a downtown station that was practically in the basement of Corporation 9592’s headquarters. In every way it was faster, safer, and more efficient than the antiquated procedure of driving to the airport in a private vehicle to pick up a visitor. Richard had become somewhat cold-blooded about simply telling people to get on the goddamned train. But today the incoming passenger was John, and there was no question that this called for the ancient, full-dress ceremony: checking the flight’s true arrival time on the Alaska Airlines website, driving to the airport, napping in the phone lot, the long radio silence suddenly broken by one-word text messages blossoming on his phone (LANDED, TAXIING, STILL TAXIING! WAITING TO DEPLANE, FAT LADY BLOCKING AISLE), the carefully timed plunge into the moil of the arrivals curb. John, a legless senior citizen/combat veteran, could have gotten special dispensation from airport authorities on at least three pretexts, but he seemed to find it amusing to stomp out the doors under his own power with his bags slung over his shoulders and to navigate on dead stilts through the vehicular mosh pit to the back of Richard’s SUV. He had packed for a long trip: a trip to China.

It had only been something like four days since Dodge had left Iowa, which was well under the threshold for hugging. And if they weren’t going to hug, there seemed little point in shaking hands. Anyway their hands were busy, pulling the SUV’s liftgate down. John, ever the older brother, initiated the move, and Richard, feeling as if he were being some kind of a bad host, reached up only a fraction of a second later and got his hands on the thing just as it was starting to move down. Four Forthrast hands slammed it shut with much more force than was really called for, and then they parted, each walking up his own side of the vehicle, and climbed into the front seats in unison.

“You can scoot that back,” Richard said, of John’s seat.

“It’s fine,” John insisted, speaking to Richard from across a cultural divide that never got any easier to navigate. The idea being that even if John’s seat were positioned too far forward — limiting his legroom and reducing his level of physical comfort — the mere act of scooting it back a few inches was, by midwestern standards, a gratuitous waste of energy as well as an implicit admission that the scooter was the sort of person who could not handle a little bit of trouble.

Richard paused for a moment, sat back, and asked himself whether he should be driving at all. It was noon. He had not slept at all last night. Then he pulled himself together, looked in both mirrors, checked his blind spot, and accelerated smoothly into traffic. Just like in driver’s ed.

“You’ve got most of a day to kill before we leave for China,” Richard said, once they had made it out onto I-5. He had adjusted to the cultural thing now, so he didn’t say “a few hours to relax” or “freshen up” or “recover from the flight,” any of which would have been construed as Richard implying that John was not up to the stress of modern airline travel. Just “kill” implying that things really weren’t moving fast enough for Richard’s taste. “My condo is just down the street from the office, so you can go there and take a shower if you want, get on the Internet…”

“I’d like to sit down with you and look at it again,” John said.

“You’re not going to see anything new,” Richard said.

“Certain words are difficult to make out on my copy. Zula’s handwriting was never the best…”

“Your copy is my copy, John. Listen to me. We are talking about digital files here. What I emailed you is an exact, perfect copy of what I received from the guy in China. Looking at my copy is not going to help.”

“On the second page,” John insisted, “there’s one line that’s sketchy.”

“It is a handwritten note on brown paper towels,” Richard said. “The guy just spread it out on a counter and aimed his phone camera at it and prayed to his gods. The image quality is poor. But your copy is as good as mine. The only way to extract more information is to go to China, and we’re doing that in eight hours.”

“Why can’t we leave sooner?” John asked, though he already knew.

“The visas,” Richard reminded him.

FIVE DAYS AGO, directly following the meeting with Skeletor, Richard had told his pilots to take a day off enjoying the delights of the K’Shetriae Kingdom and then to meet him at the Sioux City FBO. He had then jumped into a rented Grand Marquis and started driving in the direction of home. He never referred to, or thought of, John’s farm as home unless things were really bad. He imagined that the drive would do him some good. It seemed that his brain needed to be doing something and the drive ought to be a good opportunity. He had been intensely occupied the last few days, playing on the worst character flaws of both Don Donald and Skeletor: the former’s avarice and the latter’s insecurity. A performance that ought to have brought the Furious Muses down on him in full resonance. Yet they were silent. Perhaps they’d at last left him for other ex-boyfriends who stood some chance of being improved by their suggestions. So his brain was strangely empty and inactive during the four-hour drive.

He did not snap out of it until he was on final approach to the farm, driving along the county road where he had gone bicycle riding when he’d been a kid, and staring in fresh amazement at the colossal wind turbines that John and Alice had been putting up. There was a decent breeze today, and the machines were churning along about as fast as they were ever allowed to. All of them were eye-catching because of that movement, to the point where it almost made it a little difficult for him to keep his eyes on the road. But then his gaze fastened on one that happened to be directly ahead, because of a little squiggle that the road had to make to avoid a bend in the crick. It was down for repairs, apparently, because the blades had been feathered and so it was just standing there inert, the one dead thing in this whirling carnival of white blades.

Richard was able to pull over onto the shoulder and stomp the parking brake before he broke down weeping.

That was why his brain had been silent. Because it knew that Zula was dead.

He showed up at John and Alice’s front door with red eyes and found them in the same condition. They did not ask him what he had been doing, why all the flying around. It was just as well. From this remove, the gambit with D-squared and Skeletor seemed ludicrously far-fetched and beside the point.

He stayed there for a night, keeping his eyes on the floor whenever he moved about the house so that they would not accidentally light on a photograph of Zula. John didn’t talk much; he had a database of possible leads on his computer, which he worked at obsessively. But his computer, as Richard could see at a glance, was desperately sick with malware, running at about a hundredth of its normal speed and freezing up a few times an hour. He considered offering to help. But the fact that John was putting up with it was evidence that he knew it was hopeless, was just running in place. Alice was silent, inactive except for occasional bursts of manic energy, in some stage or another of grieving. The only person Richard felt comfortable hanging around with was Dad, so he spent most of the evening sitting next to him in the man cave, listening to the hissing and beeping of his bionic support system, watching whatever TV Dad felt like summoning up with the remote. People kept calling the house, but they didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like an actual death. You couldn’t send flowers. Hallmark didn’t make disappearance cards. It was sort of like the Patricia lightning strike all over again: too bizarre to pass smoothly along the greased channels of grieving and condolence.

Breakfast was better, with the three of them all talking about Zula, telling stories about her fondly, as people did of the dead. Dad listened to the stories and nodded and smiled at the right parts. Richard hugged them, got in the Grand Marquis, drove to the FBO, and was back in Seattle four hours later. That was Friday. During the weekend he stayed home, online most of the time, hovering over the Torgai in one window while, in others, scanning real-time statistics from T’Rain’s databases. He did not care about the details. He doubted that any of this was going to help at all. But he had made a determination, early last week, that it might conceivably help them get more information if the Torgai remained chaotic and did not fall under the control of any one particular Liege Lord. His expedition to Cambridge and to Nodaway had been solely to ensure the requisite level of chaos, and it seemed to have worked. Don Donald, after a slow start, was now five deep, with tens of thousands of tastefully appointed vassals, and he’d apparently had the good sense to delegate military decisions to players who had actually done this before. Skeletor meanwhile had dusted off his most powerful character, which he hadn’t played in several months, and had made a fairly impressive bid to penetrate all the way into the middle of the castle where D-squared’s character was holed up and assassinate him. At the last minute, he had been detected and killed so fast that he hadn’t had time to Sequester all his Virtual Property. So that stuff had fallen into the hands of the Earthtone Coalition (which couldn’t use it because it was so tawdry), and Skeletor’s character had emerged from Limbo naked and impoverished and considerably diminished in power. Which was probably for the better anyway, since Devin had other characters better suited to play the role of warrior king: less powerful but with deeper and more welldeveloped vassal networks.

Such entertainments had prevented Richard from thinking much about Zula all through the weekend and for most of Monday, which had been devoted to long, hairy, poorly run meetings about how the company should deal with this latest turn in the Wor. He had come home late with take-out Thai and slammed into the sofa and tried to watch a movie, but kept drifting from it to the screen of his laptop. This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies — yes, the entire medium of cinema — to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.

It was during one such foray, the movie on pause, some Torgai conflagration burning in a window on the screen, when he noticed he had new email, tentatively flagged as spam. Subject heading: some Chinese characters. He deleted it without looking. But something about it was nagging at him. He didn’t read Chinese. But in the last few days he had been trying to learn some things about this place called Xiamen, hoovering up random stuff on the Internet. Some of the pages he’d found were in English, others in Chinese, many in a patchwork of both languages. But he had grown accustomed to seeing one Chinese character that stood out because of its simplicity: just a square with its bottom side missing, and a little cross-tick in its top side. It was half of the two-character symbol for “Xiamen.” And he might have been imagining things, but he fancied he had seen it in the subject line of that spam email. So he went to his trash folder and retrieved the message and opened it.

It contained no text at all, just three consecutive images, each one a photograph of a brown paper towel with words written on it in black pen.

The first line of the message on the towel was an email address at Corporation 9592 that Richard used only for personal communications. The second line was a date, bracketed in question marks: Friday before last, making it about three days after Zula and Peter had disappeared from the loft in Georgetown. So the note was about ten days old.

… and the note went on to tell a story that, while bizarre in a lot of respects, explained much of what had been puzzling Richard for the last week. The narrative portion of the letter ended in what could only be called a cliffhanger: she and Peter and some other guy had seemingly identified the Troll, and she had the impression that the Russians were making preparations to go and snatch him. Assuming that the letter had been written early Friday morning Xiamen time, this fit perfectly with Corvallis’s statistics showing that the Troll and his minions had suddenly logged off and gone dark on Friday morning.

The remainder of the letter consisted of a series of personal notes directed at various family members, clearly based on the assumption that Zula would never see any of them again. Richard had attempted to read it about ten times and been unable to get through it.

He had awakened John and Alice right away, of course, and John had packed his bags and started driving through the night toward the Omaha airport, Alice calling ahead to arrange a morning flight to Seattle. Richard had called his jet leasing company to set up an ASAP flight to Xiamen, and they had warned him that he’d need a visa. He had stayed up into the small hours of the morning researching Chinese visa policies and learned that it all had to be done through a consulate, of which the nearest was in San Francisco, and so at five in the morning he had dropped an assistant off at Sea-Tac, sending her down with his passport and all the documentation needed to get a visa in ultra-super-expedited fashion. Richard had called John during a layover in Denver and revectored him to SFO so that he could hand his passport over to the same assistant. John had then caught the next flight up to Seattle. Recent text messages from the assistant suggested that all was proceeding according to plan and that she would probably be able to catch a six P.M. flight back to Seattle, which would get the visas into their hands at about eight and enable wheels up from Boeing Field as early as nine.

“I HAVE BEEN watching the Facebook page with I guess you could say trepidation,” Richard said. “No leaks about this yet.” He patted a hard copy of the paper towel message draped over the console between the car’s front seats.

“I’m sure there won’t be,” John said. “Your call came in the middle of the night, no one was in the house but me and Alice, no one knows a thing.”

For they had agreed that they would not divulge the existence of Zula’s note just yet; the news would make its way into the wild very rapidly, where it might complicate the investigation, or whatever this thing they were doing was called.

“Did your friend get any information on the fella who sent the email?” John asked.

“We don’t know that it’s a fella,” Richard reminded him. “Nolan’s on it, but it’s the middle of the night in China right now, and he doesn’t have a lot to go on. He said it’s the equivalent of a Hotmail address.”

“What do you mean?” John asked peevishly. He had a Hotmail address.

“An easy-to-get anonymous account frequently used by spammers,” Richard said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that whoever sent me that email probably wanted to do it in an anonymous, untraceable way.”

“Maybe we could trace him through the skyscraper.”

“We don’t know which skyscraper it is,” Richard pointed out. “Zula didn’t bother to specify that in the note. She probably assumed that, if the note were ever found, it would be obvious to everyone which building it came from.”

John considered it. “Instead what we have here is some kind of leaker or whistle-blower.”

“I would guess so.”

“How about the Seattle cops?”

“I called the detective and left a voice mail message. Told him we had evidence that Zula was alive and not in Seattle on Friday. Which I think takes it out of his jurisdiction.”

“It takes the missing persons part of it out of his jurisdiction,” John said. “But it means that crimes happened in Seattle. Murder and kidnapping and assault and God only knows what else…”

Richard nodded. “And I’m sure that the Seattle detectives who work on those kinds of crimes are going to be really interested in Zula’s note. But none of that has anything to do with us getting her back safe.”

“It most certainly does if the responsible parties can be identified, tracked down, extradited — ”

“Something major happened in Xiamen on that Friday, only a few hours after Zula wrote that note,” Richard said. He had avoided mentioning this to John and Alice until now because he could not be certain it was actually connected to Zula and he didn’t want to confuse and upset them and add a vast number of additional bogus leads to John’s already torpid database.

“Go ahead, I’m listening,” John said, having heard nothing further than the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the washing-machine surge of the windshield wipers.

Richard sighed. “I’m trying to figure out where to begin.” He thought about the sheer level of energy he would have to summon in order to explain the investigations he had been pursuing with Corvallis, the state of the battle for the Torgai, and all the rest. And he felt overwhelmingly tired. “I am about to drive this thing right off the road,” he said. “Let’s get to my place and get some coffee.”

BUT AS IT turned out, when they reached Richard’s condo, they went in opposite directions to start the coffeemaker, use the toilet, check email, make phone calls. By the time Richard was ready to talk again, John was asleep on the sofa, and by the time John had awakened from his nap, Richard had conked out on his bed. Later, both awake at the same time, they made sandwiches and looked out the window at the sun setting over the Olympics; the clouds were still heavy, but the red light was streaming in beneath them as if China itself were lurking just a few miles offshore, glowing red like a vast forge. Richard could not get out of his mind that they would soon be chasing that red light westward, and John did not seem talkative either. It was morning there now. Nolan, ensconced in his place in Vancouver, was sending emails, making phone calls, pulling strings, making arrangements for translators and fixers to meet the Forthrasts at the Xiamen airport, trying to get some idea of what the PSB there had been doing. The situation was impossibly hard to read. Was the PSB even aware of the existence of Zula’s note? Perhaps it had been leaked to Richard by some random plumber who wanted to do a good deed and not be identified. Or perhaps the PSB had known about it all along and had dangled it in front of Richard as a lure to bring him to Xiamen for interrogation. Or perhaps they had meant to keep it secret, but some leaker within the PSB had taken it upon himself to shoot Richard a copy. Nolan vacillated between urging Richard not to set foot in China at all and helping him get there as quickly as possible. Richard felt no qualms whatsoever; a member of his family was in trouble there and he had to go.

Corvallis had been tracking the assistant’s flight up from SFO. He showed up at the condo and helped carry John’s bag down to his Prius, which was waiting in the pickup/drop-off lane in front of the building. Richard and John ended up cramming themselves into the backseat together so that they could talk on the way down to Boeing Field.

He really didn’t want to talk about this, but he owed it to John to give him the information before they got on a plane to China.

“There were two separate incidents that we know about,” Richard said. “They seem to have happened a couple of hours apart. Incident number 2 is better documented: a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security checkpoint outside an international conference. A couple of Chinese cops got killed; there were injuries from shrapnel and flying glass.”

“How is this connected to Zula?” John asked.

“We have no idea. But incident number 1 is murkier and maybe more relevant. An apartment building blew up not far from downtown. It was put down to a gas explosion. That’s the official story. But Nolan has got some sources in Xiamen, sources we may be meeting tomorrow, who have been asking around, and word on the street is that the explosion happened in the middle of a gun battle that took place on the building’s upper floors.”

Silence for a while. Richard, who had been through all of this before, knew what John was thinking: he was in denial, trying to think of reasons why this had nothing to do with Zula.

“Now,” Richard continued, speaking as gently as he could, “we have learned from Zula’s note that she was with these Russians who had come into the country illegally and who were armed. We know that they were looking for the Troll.”

“The hackers who created the virus,” John translated.

“Yeah. If they succeeded in tracking down those hackers, then this Ivanov character might have been crazy enough to go in shooting. Who knows, maybe they even used grenades or satchel charges.”

“Why the hell would you use satchel charges?” John demanded. He had long gotten over the fact that Richard was a draft dodger. But he hated it when Richard strayed into topics of which Richard knew nothing and John had personal experience.

“I don’t know, John; I’m just trying to think of a reason why the building blew up. Because the building is gone. It is destroyed.”

“A satchel charge wouldn’t be powerful enough to bring down a multistory building.”

“Okay, well, maybe it was a gas explosion then, but it was set off as a result of the gun battle.”

“Maybe it had nothing to do with Zula at all!” John protested.

“But John, the thing is — as Corvallis here can explain much better than I — at the same time that this gun battle and explosion took place, the Troll dropped off the Internet. And hasn’t come back since.”

The back of Corvallis’s neck turned red. They drove past Peter’s loft. Everyone observed silence for a while. According to Zula’s note, a man — Wallace — had died in there.

Only a couple of minutes later, they turned off Airport Way into the frontage road that led to the FBO.

Considering the net worth of its clientele, one might have expected a glitzier place. But it was just a boxy two-story office building that faced the frontage road — a public thoroughfare — on one end and the restricted zone of the airport tarmac on the other. The airfield’s tall cyclone fence ran right up to one wall and then continued on the other side. As they pulled off the road, they entered a parking lot with only a few cars scattered about; at its opposite end this was terminated by the fence, or rather by a large rolling gate set into it. Corvallis pulled up to it and stopped. Richard clambered out of the car. As soon as the personnel inside recognized his face, they hit the button that caused the gate to trundle open. Richard waved Corvallis forward, and he drove onto the tarmac and directly to a bizjet that was parked no more than fifty feet away. Richard followed on foot and greeted the pilot by name as he emerged from the cockpit and descended the stairway. Corvallis parked at a respectful distance from the plane’s landing gear and then popped the Prius’s hatchback, and the men formed a bucket brigade to move the luggage up into the plane’s cargo hold. Richard was more than normally aware of these details since he knew that two weeks earlier Zula had passed through the same gate with the Russians.

The pilot, as usual, was ready to go, but they were still waiting for the assistant with the visas. He invited them to come aboard and make themselves comfortable; the flight attendant had brought in some sushi. John, for whom this sort of travel was still novel, took him up on the invitation. Richard strolled back toward the FBO, thinking he might get a cup of decaf and grab a newspaper. The airport-facing end of the building was a lounge, clean and reasonably well appointed but not flagrantly luxurious. At any time of the day or night, one might see a few people, individuals or small groups, sitting there checking their email and waiting for planes. At this particular moment there was only one other person there, an Asian woman in her twenties, short hair, dressed in jeans and sort of a nice jackety getup that made the jeans look slightly more serious. She had been reading a novel and drinking tea. Richard went over to the self-serve latte machine and began pressing buttons. He was keeping one eye out the window, watching for the taxi carrying the assistant fresh in from San Francisco with the visas.

“Mr. Forthrast?”

The words had been spoken with an English accent. Richard turned around, surprised, to see that it was the Asian woman. She was standing about ten feet away in a somewhat prim attitude, wrists crossed in front of her to hold the novel as a shield in front of her pelvis: Sorry, I know this is a bit awkward.

“The same.” Richard could read the signs well enough: this was either a hard-core T’Rain player who wanted to rap with him about the game, or someone who wanted a job at Corporation 9592. He dealt with both types all the time, pleasantly.

“Don’t go to China.”

He had been watching the foam dribble from the latte machine, but now his head spun around to fix on her. She looked apologetic. But quite firm.

“How the hell do you know where I’m going?”

“Zula isn’t there,” the woman said. “It’s a dead end.”

“How would you know any of this?”

“I was there,” the woman said.

IN RETROSPECT OLIVIA had never done more or traveled farther to achieve so little as in the past ten days.

After bidding adieu to “George Chow” in the Taipei airport, she flew to Singapore. Obsessed by the idea that everyone was looking at her funny, she monopolized a sink in the airport for a while, scrubbing away the ridiculous makeup job that Chow’s cosmetician had put on her face in the hotel room in Jincheng. She was itching to attack the haircut too, but you couldn’t have scissors in airports and she didn’t want to make that much of a spectacle of herself. The laceration on the top of her head had never been properly stitched. It tended to open up and start bleeding at odd moments and so it didn’t seem advisable to be getting hands-on up there. Maybe MI6 would have people in London who were good at this sort of thing — combat beauticians, trauma stylists. It seemed likely that her MI6 superiors were making hysterical efforts to get in touch with her and pump her for information during this layover, but she didn’t have any way of communicating with them that she was willing to trust. And even if someone walked up to her in person, right here in the ladies’, someone she recognized as working for the agency, she wasn’t sure how much she’d be willing to divulge. Someone had set an ambush for Sokolov out there in the mist off Kinmen, and she didn’t know who. Best case was that it had just been Chinese intelligence or local gangsters. Worst case was that MI6 actually wanted him dead. Between those two extremes, perhaps MI6 had been penetrated and Chinese intelligence had access to its secrets. In any case, she didn’t feel like spilling any more information about Sokolov until she got back to London and learned more.

Then the nonstop to London. She spent the first bit of it getting drunk and the rest of it sleeping.

The plane landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 at something like six in the morning. Since her immigration status had become impossible to make sense of, she was met, at the top of the jetway, by a man in a uniform and a man in a suit. She had always read of people being “whisked through” certain formalities, but this was the first time she had ever been personally whisked and she had to admit that it had its charms. Particularly when you were hungover and bleeding. In order to get from Terminal 5’s gates to Immigration and Customs, it was necessary to descend a prodigious stack of escalators, beginning well above ground level and terminating deep below. There was a place, about halfway along, where an escalator deposited the newly arrived passengers on a landing that happened to coincide with street level; as you executed a U-turn to get on the next, you could look out through glass doors and walls at a road with cars and trucks streaming along it. Uniformed personnel were forever stationed before those glass doors to make sure that everyone coming down those escalators kept going down into the levels where they were to be processed.

Everyone, that is, except for those lucky few who were being whisked. Olivia was ready to make the U-turn and descend along with everyone else, but her escorts got off that escalator and just kept walking in a straight line. And since Olivia was sandwiched between them, she did the same, expecting that, at any moment, one of the security guards stationed before the doors would wrestle her to the ground and begin blowing on a whistle. Instead of which, a door was opened for her, an alarm was stifled by a series of digits punched into a keypad, and suddenly she was out of doors climbing into a black Land Rover. They were out on the M4 before the stale air of the jumbo jet had even dissipated from her clothes and hair.

Into a London doctor’s office, some sort of exceedingly private and specialized practice, a basic tenet of which was never to evince surprise or skepticism. Where had she come from? South China. Health generally good? Until quite recently. What had happened recently? Hurled against a wall by a blast wave, showered with broken glass, half buried in debris, ran through a damaged building barefoot, makeshift bandages, fled from gunmen, swam in the polluted waters of the Nine Dragons estuary, crawled through minefield, slept on a pile of vines. The doctor just nodded absentmindedly, as if she were complaining of vaginal itching, and then ran her through a scanner the size of a nuclear submarine. That accomplished, he prodded her all over, put his fingers every place he could think of, squeezed bones and organs she didn’t know were externally accessible, peered into orifices with Dr. Seuss — like equipment, asked her probing questions intended to judge her cognitive status. Or other kinds of status. Had sex recently? Oh yes. Any chance of being pregnant? No. He lidocained the thing on the top of her head and put in a couple of stitches and did things that produced a scent of burning hair. Then he turned her over to an “injectionist,” who plied her trade on Olivia’s deltoids, forearms, buttocks, and thighs with unseemly diligence, pulling many wee tubes of blood out of her and replacing the lost fluids with vast, neon-colored inoculations. It was made clear to her that the large muscles in question would hurt later and that she would have to come back for more. All this attention paid to her health made her happy at first, until on further reflection she understood that they were getting ready to work her to death and they didn’t want her gumming things up by complaining of vague pains or chills. What, you say your ribs are hurting? That’s funny, we didn’t see anything on the scan.

Notes were jotted and verbal representations made to the effect that she should see certain specialized doctors and therapists at some vague time in the future. A follow-up was scheduled.

Then, off to MI6 for a surprisingly civil brunch and preliminary round of drinking with persons of gratifyingly high rank. Then the windowless conference room she had been anticipating and dreading. Her primary debriefer was none other than “Meng Binrong,” the Englishman who had been telephonically playing the role of her uncle during her time in Xiamen. He was blond-going-white, blue-eyed, with the classic florid English drinker’s complexion, energetic, mistakable for a man in his fifties or even late forties. But certain giveaways — the fact that he found it necessary to mow his eyebrows, the sheer number of burst capillaries — suggested he was older than that. Not eager to volunteer details about himself, but it was obvious from the sorts of things he knew — and didn’t know — and from the way he spoke Cantonese and Mandarin (the former with perfect fluency, the latter a bit choppily), that he had spent his young life in Hong Kong. To Olivia he had always been a gruff voice on the phone, her uncle and boss, her one connection to what was for her the real world. But never more than a play-actor. From certain things he now said and certain assumptions he made, it now became clear to Olivia that this man — who never quite got around to stating his name — had been responsible for running the operation.

Where did that put him, she had to wonder? Was the operation considered a success or a failure? Or was it naive to think that MI6 would even bother assigning such facile designations to undertakings of such complexity? Supposedly they had garnered loads of intelligence from tapping Jones’s communications. No one could complain about that. The fact that he’d gotten away was unfortunate. But how could they possibly have anticipated —

“What the fuck happened?” asked Uncle Meng, careful to say it in measured and melodious tones.

“Everything I know, I know from talking to Mr. Y,” Olivia said, using the code name that she and George Chow had employed for Sokolov.

“Do you know his real name?”

“Does it matter right now?”

Uncle Meng just stared at her with his amazingly pale eyes.

“It’s just that I thought we were after Jones.”

“You know perfectly well that we are.”

“The whole situation with Mr. Y is extremely confusing to me,” Olivia said. “Because of what happened at the end.”

“Mr. Chow said that you claimed to have heard gunfire from out on the water.”

“The claim stands.”

“Mr. Y seems like quite the trouble magnet.”

“Does that put me in the category of trouble?”

“Why? Was he drawn to you?”

“I’d say it was mutual.”

Uncle Meng considered it. “So. You have feelings for Mr. Y. You think you heard him exchanging gunfire with un-known persons, somewhere out in the mists of the Orient. You are worried about what has become of him. And so here we are circling round each other and talking to no purpose because the conversation has become all about him.”

“Yes.”

“So let’s talk about Jones.”

“All right.”

“The entire point of trying to put Mr. Y on that ship to Long Beach was to secure his cooperation — to get some information he supposedly had as to where Jones was going. Did you get that information from him?”

“Jones was able to get control of a business jet parked at the FBO at Xiamen Airport,” Olivia said. She stood up, turned to the whiteboard, and wrote down its tail number. “Mr. Y observed it taking off at zero seven one three hours local time.” She wrote that down too. “It headed south.”

The conference room was well supplied with younger aides, one of whom, at a nod from Uncle Meng, commenced typing furiously.

Olivia said, “You’ll find that it’s leased to, or maybe even owned by, a Russian national based out of Toronto, and that it had flown into Xiamen a few days earlier.”

“Is this Russian national the same person as Mr. Y?”

“No, Mr. Y worked for him as a security consultant.”

“That being a euphemism for the sort of chap who leaves a pile of corpses in the hall outside of your flat.”

“They deserved it,” Olivia said.

Uncle Meng raised his shorn eyebrows at this, but not in a disapproving way.

“Do we know who else is aboard that plane?”

“I don’t know the ins and outs of flying,” Olivia said, “but I’ve been turning it over in my mind and I can’t but think that its usual pilots must be at the controls. Jones must have coerced them somehow.”

“I don’t disagree, but I was really asking about the bloody terrorists.”

“Not many of Jones’s crew could have survived what happened in that building,” Olivia said. “I’m amazed that Jones did. But he can’t have been acting alone. So he must have had some other safe house or support network that he drew on later.”

“The yacht club,” said Uncle Meng, using a bit of jargon that he and Olivia had devised during the course of the operation. They’d been unable to get many details, but they were fairly certain that Jones had traveled by sea from the Philippines to Taiwan and from there to Xiamen, and that he was getting supplies and personnel through some such connection, probably small fishing vessels passing stuff back and forth, literally and figuratively under the radar.

They ended up drawing a time line on the whiteboard. There was a gap of many hours between the explosion of the apartment building and Mr. Y’s startling and timely arrival — which seen from this remove had a touching Romeo-esque quality — on “Meng Anlan’s” balcony. This was at least tangentially relevant to Jones’s movements, since it was assumed that the men who’d been sent to her apartment had been acting at Jones’s behest. Olivia made her best guess as to the time of the phone conversation between Mr. Y and Jones, of which she had overheard Sokolov’s half while they’d been out on the stolen water taxi. Sokolov had known somehow that Jones was at the airport. He had guessed that some female named Zula was with him. He had threatened to find and dispatch Jones in some exceptionally cruel style if he did anything to Zula.

After that, the time line sported another white space until 0713 in the morning yesterday, China time, when the jet had taken off. Then a very long blank space encompassing the thirty-six hours between that moment and “NOW.” A few tentative marks were later drawn into that space, denoting when Olivia had made contact with George Chow, when Sokolov had disappeared into the mist, and the spans of time occupied by Olivia’s flights from Kinmen to Taipei, Taipei to Singapore, Singapore to London.

Then a difficult pause.

“It might have been convenient for us to have known,” said Uncle Meng, “just a bit earlier than now, that Abdallah Jones was in the air, in a jet with such-and-such tail number.”

Olivia was ready for this. Had been thinking about it. “By the time I got that information out of Mr. Y, Jones had already been in the air for eight hours. Because of what happened — the gunfire — I considered the operation blown and no longer trusted George Chow, so I didn’t give him the tail number. We had to get out of Kinmen anyway. By the time we reached Taipei, Jones had been in the air for at least ten hours. I had no secure line of communications from there by which to reach you. By the time I reached Singapore, it had been long enough that Jones’s plane was almost certainly no longer airborne.”

Uncle Meng seemed unconvinced. But before this awkward topic could be developed further, one of the younger, laptop-smacking analysts piped up with the following news: “Yesterday a missing persons report was filed on someone named Zula. A Yank. Adopted from Eritrea, hence the unusual name. Female, early twenties, lives in Seattle, which is where the report was filed.”

“Get us more on her,” said Uncle Meng. “I’d love to know how she ended up on a hijacked business jet in Xiamen with Abdallah Jones. Not to mention how it is that Mr. Y, so bloodthirsty in other respects, cares how this random person is treated.”

“You’re reading Mr. Y all wrong,” Olivia said.

They all just gazed at her, hoping she’d say more.

“He’s a gentleman,” she explained, for want of any better way to put it.

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?” said Uncle Meng.

MUCH OF WHAT happened after that was out of her purview: they got loads of data about Zula. Loads more about the Russian. They guessed, but Olivia refused to confirm, that Mr. Y was Sokolov. They brought in RAF types who knew a great deal about airplanes and radar and put aeronautical charts up on the whiteboards and hooked up a flight simulator programmed to simulate that exact type of business jet and tried flying it out of Xiamen. Olivia looked out of the simulator’s virtual cockpit windows and saw the beach at Kinmen where she had been standing with Sokolov, and almost fancied that if she strained her eyes enough she might see two columns of pixels down there, blurred representations of herself and of “Mr. Y” staring up at this simulated plane. Extremely childish/romantic. The true and serious purpose of this was to investigate possible flight plans that Jones might have followed after taking off that morning. Several of these were “wargamed,” which sounded like fun until it became evident that 90 percent of the wargaming had to do with the internal doings of air traffic control centers and protocols for filing flight plans in various Southeast Asian countries. A faction badly wanted to demonstrate that Jones could have flown the jet all the way to Pakistan, but gaping holes were blasted in this scenario as expert persons pointed out all the restricted military airspace around the disputed border regions of India/China, Pakistan/India, et cetera. Another faction was all for the idea that he had taken the jet all the way to North America. But to justify this they had to piece together a somewhat tangled tale that could explain how he had evaded radar detection while flying up a crowded and well-monitored air traffic corridor, and they had to provide some justification for why the plane had initially taken off southbound — an injudicious use of fuel. They were able to do that by composing an argument having to do with domestic Chinese flight plans. No one could prove that they were wrong, but all were uneasy with the story’s complexity. By far the simplest and most plausible scenario was that Jones had simply dropped the plane down to wavetop level and flown it straight to Mindanao and ditched it. Olivia favored that theory if for no other reason than that, if true, it meant that Jones had already been on the ground and the plane sunk beneath the waves by the time Sokolov had given her the tail number, and so she couldn’t be blamed for having delayed passing it on.

To hedge their bets against the possibility that Jones had flown all the way to North America, they got in touch with their opposite numbers in Canada and the United States and suggested that it might be prudent to keep an eye peeled for the said business jet. The most likely supposition being that it might have landed on some remote airstrip or stretch of deserted road and been abandoned. Having (to borrow a term from the Yanks) covered that base, they then focused all their energies on the Mindanao scenario.

These proceedings extended over some forty-eight hours, during which time Olivia was at work almost whenever she was awake. The very meaning of “awake” was rendered debatable by the most extreme case of jet lag she’d ever experienced, possibly commingled with posttraumatic and/or postconcussion symptoms. At least half of the time she spent in that room pretending to take part in the meeting, she was devoting essentially all her energies and attention to the project of not simply dropping into a deep slumber right then and there. She found herself shifting position irritably every ten seconds or so, just to ward off sleep, and she heard the others discussing momentous and complicated topics as though eavesdropping through a very long speaking-tube on a dreadnought.

When they took pity on her and sent her “home,” she went to a safe house in London: a perfectly anonymous Georgian town house that had been taken over and bent to this purpose. During the very limited amount of time that she was not working or sleeping, she found herself with nothing to do. She could not resume being Olivia Halifax-Lin just yet, could not begin facebooking or whatever it was people did now. She found a hairdresser who catered to Asians and got that business taken care of, ending up with something pageboyish, straight out of a porn film, that she never would have taken a risk on had circumstances not forced her hand. She rubbed her sore, immunized muscles. Warned to expect foreign travel, she bought clothes: enough lightweight, quick-drying synthetic garments to fill a carry-on bag and a blazer that she could throw on when she wanted to make a symbolic nod in the direction of greater formality. A new passport showed up, which made her wonder just now MI6 did these things: Did they have a passport factory of their very own? Or just a special room at the Central British Passport Factory where they could nip in and bang out a few as the occasion demanded?

There was another session with the injectionist, perhaps a bit ahead of the normal schedule, and she was given antimalaria pills and a stern talking to about why mosquito repellent was such a good thing. Uncle Meng picked her up in what appeared to be his personal car and took her out to Heathrow, though they stopped halfway there for a cup of coffee and a scone.

“You are bound for Manila,” he said, “by way of Dubai.”

“I presume Manila is not my final destination?”

“It is as far as commercial airlines are concerned,” he said. “When you are there, you’ll have one night in a hotel to pull yourself together and then you’ll find yourself in the company of one Seamus Costello, Captain, U.S. Army, retired.”

“So he is, what, just a gentleman of leisure now?”

Uncle Meng did not wish to dignify her witticism with a direct response.

“Mostly,” Olivia said, “I would just like to know whether he’s working for some other branch of the government or a private security contractor.”

“Oh no, we wouldn’t set you up with a mercenary,” said Uncle Meng, a bit pained.

“Right then, so he was a snake eater. They decided he had talents beyond his station in life. They kicked him upstairs.”

“The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex,” was all that Uncle Meng would say. “It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.”

“He must have other duties.”

“Oh yes. He spends most of his time on Mindanao, looking after the Abu Sayyaf crowd.”

Here, as Olivia knew perfectly well, Uncle Meng was referring to Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines who had hosted and succored Abdallah Jones for several months. U.S. special operations forces, operating hand in hand with their Filipino counterparts, had launched a raid against a jungle encampment where Jones had been positively sighted. They had found the place abandoned but extensively booby-trapped. Two Americans and four Filipinos had lost their lives. Weeks later, Jones had been traced to Manila, where he had set up a bomb factory in an apartment building and created explosive devices that had been used in a precisely timed series of car bombings. From there his trail had consisted of nothing but hints and rumors until Olivia had found him in Xiamen.

“Costello has been after Jones for a long time,” Olivia guessed. “He takes pride in his work, or used to. Jones got the better of him more than once. Killed members of his team in sneaky and cowardly ways. Blew up civilians on his watch. Then left the country — went where Costello couldn’t get to him. Leaving Costello stuck in a backwater.”

“He is just your type,” Uncle Meng said gently. “Please do try not to fuck him.”

“How come it’s okay for James Bond?”

THE FLIGHT TO Dubai was all rich Arabs and City types. The Dubai-to-Manila leg was almost entirely Filipina domestic servants headed for home. The racial and cultural crossrip was far too heavy for Olivia to get thinking about, so she watched movies and played Tetris, finally falling asleep thirty minutes before they began their descent into Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It was late afternoon. Four days had now passed since she and Sokolov had parted ways at Kinmen. A car picked her up and took her to a business hotel in Makati where she ate room service steak, cleaned up, took her malaria pills, and went to bed.

She slept through three alarms and wake-up calls and made it down to the lobby fifteen minutes late. Seamus Costello was in the restaurant eating bacon and eggs, over easy. The reddish-yellow color of the runny yolks perfectly matched that of his beard, but even so he self-consciously wiped his chin before standing up to shake Olivia’s hand. He looked like a slightly over-the-hill backpacker, the kind of guy you’d strike up a conversation with on a rattletrap bus in Bhutan or Tierra del Fuego, borrow a joint from, ask for advice on where and where not to stay the night. He was lean, like a strip of bacon that had spent too long in the pan, and a bit north of six feet tall. He had green eyes that seemed just a little too wide open — though, she had to admit, any nonblack eyes looked that way after you’d been living in China for a while — and he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover. But he’d been to school — anyone in his job would probably have a master’s degree or better — and he could dress up his speech when he remembered to make the effort.

Which he didn’t, now. “Ya came this close,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger an eighth of an inch apart.

Delivered in the wrong tone, it would have been a rebuke or even mockery. But he had a trace of a smile on his face when he said it. The tone was philosophical.

He was congratulating her.

She shrugged. “Not close enough, I’m afraid.”

“Still. What was that like? Sittin’ there, day after day, listenin’ to yer man and his crew…”

“I don’t speak Arabic, unfortunately.”

“I’d not have been able to contain myself,” he said ruefully, staring out the window and getting a sort of mischievous-boy look on his face as he imagined (she guessed) going across that Xiamen street and walking up to Apartment 505 and gutting Abdallah Jones with a knife. “Ah, that fucking bastard.” He turned his eyes back to her. “So. You think he’s on Mindanao.”

“There is a cove not far from Zamboanga, sheltered enough that it would be a good place to ditch, deep enough that a plane would sink rapidly and become invisible to — ”

“I’ve swum in it,” he said.

“Oh.”

Olivia was looking a little startled. “I read the report,” he explained. “I know what your working theory is. They ditched, just where you said, and went ashore. That whole area is lousy with Abu Sayyaf, it would have been easy for them to hook up with their brothers.” He chose to turn the Boston accent all the way up to eleven when pronouncing the word “brothers.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think I’m going to take you down there and we are going to check it out.”

“But what do you really think?”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Tell you what, let’s go down there, I’ll show you around, and in another couple of days, once we’ve gotten to know each other, established a trust relationship, then we can each tell the other what we really think.” Then he pitched forward a bit. “What!? What!?” for a look of amusement had crept onto her face.

“I thought you were here,” she said, “because you were no good at politics.”

He put his palms together, fingertips nestled in his beard, like a Southie boy going to his First Communion. “I like to think I am here,” he said, “because I’m good at acquiring new skills. Which comes in handy in Zamboanga. Want some breakfast?”

“Are we going to miss our plane?”

“They’ll wait for us.”

THE REASON FOR his lack of urgency became plain when they got out the door and into Manila traffic, for which simple words like “bad” or “horrendous” were completely inadequate as descriptors. Two hours into the journey, they had traveled less than a mile from the hotel.

“Up for a stroll?” Seamus asked her.

“I would be up for just about anything that wasn’t this,” Olivia said. So he paid the taxi driver and they set out on foot, Olivia feeling inordinately proud of herself for having packed light and, moreover, done so in a bag that could be converted into a backpack. Seamus chivalrously offered to carry it for her but she shrugged him off, and they began walking between lanes of stationary traffic for a while until he steered them off to the edge of the road. The heat was fantastic, whooshing out from beneath the stopped vehicles and baking her bare legs. It abated somewhat as they worked their way out of the traffic jam and onto smaller streets. Seamus purchased two flimsy umbrellas from a street vendor, handed one to Olivia, and snapped the other open to keep the sun off his head. She followed his lead in that. Navigating by the sun, he maneuvered them into a residential neighborhood that started out seeming reasonably affluent and became somewhat less so as they got farther from Makati. But she never felt in any danger, out of a possibly fatuous belief that no harm could come to her when she was walking next to someone like him. They were noticed, and watched carefully, by hundreds of people, and followed by dozens. “Miss? Miss?” some of them called.

“It’s freaking them out that you’re carrying your own bag,” Seamus said, and so she finally surrendered it to him, leaving herself with nothing but a belt pack that was now serving in lieu of purse and the parasol. She’d assumed they were trying to get to the airport, which was definitely off to their left, or south; but Seamus kept taking them west, cutting across the occasional cemetery or basketball court, until they struck water: a very unappealing stagnant creek, half choked with plastic debris and smelling of sewage. Olivia couldn’t tell which way it was flowing, but Seamus made an educated guess and led her along its bank, occasionally holding out an arm to prevent her from toppling into it, until they got to a place where it widened into a little basin where actual boats were to be seen: long, slender double-outrigger canoes equipped with outboard motors. Seamus had no difficulty hailing one of these and inducing its owner to take them in the direction of Sangley Point. The hull was so narrow that Olivia could bridge it with her forearm. They sat amidships under an awning of sun-blasted canvas, Olivia in front, leaning back against her pack, and Seamus behind.

She knew that word “sangley,” at least; it was Chinese, from the dialect that was spoken around Xiamen, and it quite literally meant “business.”

They maneuvered down progressively wider channels for a quarter of an hour or so, the densely packed neighborhoods giving way to giant industrial zones and expanses of flat empty territory, then abruptly turned into a blunt channel that disgorged them directly into Manila Bay. For the first time Olivia was able to look about and get a clue as to where they were. They were headed for a claw of land reaching out into the bay a couple of miles ahead of them. A running conversation between Seamus and the pilot, in a mixture of Tagalog and English, led to a series of increases in the throttle, to the point where they were bounding and bouncing over chop, sending occasional gouts of spray into Olivia’s face. “He’s worried you don’t like it. Wants to go slow for you,” Seamus explained, and Olivia twisted around until she could make eye contact with the boatman, grinned, and gave him the thumbs-up.

The spray and the cool sea air were a fine antidote for the killing heat of the traffic jam, and so they arrived at a dock on Sangley Point salty and in need of showers but somewhat refreshed. It was a military installation: an airbase, Seamus had explained, formerly of the United States, now of the Philippine Air Force. A pilot in uniform met them at the dock — Seamus had called or texted ahead, apparently — and walked them to a waiting Humvee that took them directly onto the tarmac of the base’s single, very long runway. They pulled up next to a simple two-engine passenger plane with military markings and were airborne a few minutes later. They took off to the west, headed straight for the narrow exit of the gigantic bay, and soon banked left and began the long flight south to Zamboanga: something like five hundred miles, which they expected to cover in a couple of hours. Seamus spent most of it sleeping. Olivia looked out the windows and tried to see the archipelago’s countless islands, inlets, and channels through the eyes of an Abdallah Jones.

“What do you think?” Seamus asked her, just as she was finally about to nod off. She jolted awake, looked across at him — they were seated on opposite sides of a small table that occupied most of the plane’s cabin — and tried to snap out of the jet-lag torpor that had crept up on her. She wondered how long he’d been watching her. His decision to leap out of the taxi in Manila and set off on foot had been made to look like the spontaneous act of a free spirit, but she had little doubt that it had been calculated as a way of putting her to the test. Not by any stretch of the imagination a difficult or strenuous test, but an unscripted moment in which she might let her guard down and reveal aspects of her personality otherwise difficult to see. By sleeping for most of the flight, Seamus seemed to be telling her that she had passed the test, whatever it was. Now they were starting to get down to work.

“A million places to hide, once you get down on the surface,” Olivia said. “But flying in on a business jet in the middle of the day, you’d be absurdly conspicuous.”

With the tiniest suggestion of a nod, Seamus broke eye contact and looked out the window. “There it is,” he said. “Welcome to the GWOJ.”

“GWOJ?”

“Global War on Jones.”

THE ZAMBOANGA OUTPOST of the GWOJ turned out to be one corner of an air force base that had been constructed on flat coastal land, otherwise occupied by rice paddies, outside of a middling regional city. The base as a whole was moderately well fenced and defended. The corner occupied by Seamus and his team was a fortress unto itself, surrounded by high chain-link and razor wire bolstered by stacked steel shipping containers. Approaching vehicles had to run a slalom course through containers that Seamus assured her had been filled with dirt so that they could not simply be bashed out of the way by an onrushing truck bomb. Once inside that perimeter, though, they found themselves in a tiny simulacrum of America: a compound of modular dwellings surmounted by howling air conditioners fed by cables from a huge diesel generator situated downwind. Several of the modules were barracks for Seamus and members of his crew, one was guest quarters for people like Olivia, and there was a double-wide with kitchen and dining facilities at one end and a conference room at the other.

Here as everywhere else in the world, everyone hung out in the kitchen. So after Olivia had dropped her stuff in the guest quarters and taken a shower, she went into the double-wide to find Seamus and two other members of his crew hanging out there, lounging on sofas or sitting with erect postures at the dining table, focused on their laptops, sipping American soft drinks. The whole scene in fact looked quintessentially American to her, which, as she would’ve been the first person to admit, meant nothing, since she had spent practically no time in the United States. Seamus’s crew was multiracial to a fault and looked somewhat uneasy in their cargo shorts and T-shirts, as though they’d all much rather be in uniform. They all had lots of stuff strapped to them: holsters with semiautomatic pistols, knives, radios. Even their eyeglasses were strapped to their heads. Earlier, they’d all been perfunctorily introduced to Olivia; none of them now gave her more than a glance and a nod. They were intensely focused on what they were doing: some sort of pitched battle.

“Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!”

“I see ’em and am pulling. Need backup though.”

“Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back. Someone finish the bastard off. A few Kingly Strokes would take care of it, Shame.”

Seamus said, “Okay, I’ll need to rearm, cover me for second … got it … Fuck!”

All of the men leaned back from their screens in unison and let out roars of anguished laughter so loud that Olivia’s ears crackled. “Fuck, man!” called a compact African American. “He toasted you.”

“We’re all fucked now,” said a Hispanic guy. “Sequester your shit while you still can.”

Fierce clicking and typing, punctuated by roaring, anguished laughter, as (Olivia guessed) each man’s character died in the game world.

Planted around the dining area, on windowsills and kitchen counters, were plastic dolls: troll-or elflike fantasy characters decked out in elaborate costumes and armed to the teeth with fanciful, quasi-medieval weapons. Each one stood on a faux-stone pedestal with a name chiseled into it. Olivia picked one of them up — very carefully, since it seemed that they were important — and flipped it over. Marked on the underside of the base was the logo of Corporation 9592.

So that answered the question she’d been afraid to ask, for fear of seeming like the stupidest person in the whole world: Are you playing T’Rain? Because Olivia was not a gamer and could not tell one such game from another.

“Olivia?”

She looked up and locked eyes with Seamus, who was staring at her over the rim of his laptop screen. Seamus spoke with exaggerated calm: “Put … the troll … down … and slowly back away.”

Okay, he was joking. She carefully put the doll back and then clasped her hands innocently behind her back. The other men let out loud fyoosh! noises as if an IED had just been successfully defused.

“I’m sorry I touched your doll,” she said. “I had no idea how important Thorakks was to you.”

Silence, as none of the men knew how to cope with her tactical use of the word “doll.”

“I’m not a big T’Rain expert,” she continued. “Is Thorakks like a major character in the world?”

“Thorakks is my character,” Seamus said.

“Wow, how do you rate having a doll made of your personal character?”

“It’s called an action figure,” he said, “and it’s nothing special. If you’ve got a character in T’Rain, all you have to do is fill out a web form and send them fifty bucks and they’ll make you one of these on a 3D printer and ship it to you. Discount for active-duty military.”

“Are you active-duty military?”

“No, but we have ways of finagling the discounts.”

“Are these your own personal laptops?” Olivia asked.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Seamus, wary that she was about to accuse him of misusing government property.

“Never mind,” she said. “I was only wondering if there might be a spare computer around here that I might use.”

“For, like, secure email?”

“No. For playing T’Rain.”

“I thought you said you didn’t play.”

“I don’t,” she admitted, “but this needs to change.”

“Needs!?”

“Professional reasons,” she said.

For she now knew that the missing person called Zula was connected to Corporation 9592 — was, in fact, the cofounder’s niece — and that her abduction from Seattle to Shanghai had been somehow related to the activities of the nest of hackers who had lived in the apartment below Jones’s. While she did not feel the need to spend a huge amount of time on T’Rain, and certainly didn’t want to go to the point of having her own personal doll created on a 3D printer, she needed to know a little more about the game.

Twelve hours later, she knew more than she needed to — and yet she still wanted to know more. What was the secret hiding place of the Black Pearls of the Q’rith? What combination of spells and herbs was needed to rouse the Princess Elicasse from her age-long slumber beneath the Golden Bower of Nar’thorion? Where could she get some Qaldaqian Gray Ore to forge new Namasq steel arrowheads to shoot with her Composite Bow of Aratar? And were those the right kind of ranged weapons, anyway, to use against the Torlok that was barring her passage across the Bridge of Enbara? She could have obtained answers to all these questions from Seamus and his band of lost boys, but she knew that any answers provided would only lead to more questions, and she had already pestered them far too many times. They seemed terribly busy, anyway, planning something.

Something violent.

Something in the real world. Not far away.

She collected these impressions during brief moments of lucidity when she pulled herself out of the game to ask a question, fetch more junk food, or go to the W. C. At these times the men would all clam up and pointedly look the other way until she had once again ensconced herself in front of the game.

It was something like three in the morning. She went back to her trailer, tossed and turned until dawn, seeing images of T’Rain whenever she closed her eyes, then finally went to sleep and was awakened in midafternoon by Seamus pounding on her door.

He had even more things strapped to him than usual: a Camel-Bak; extra magazines for his Sig; hard-shell knee pads.

He invited himself in and squatted down, leaning back against the wall. Stretching his quads.

“People are going to die tonight because of that theory you and your colleagues spun up in London,” he said.

“The theory that Jones flew the jet down here,” she said.

“Yeah. That theory. So before people die for it — keeping in mind one of them might be me — I just thought I would pay a little social call, shoot the breeze, and eventually, you know, get around to asking you whether you still believe in that theory. But it turns out that when I am getting ready to go on one of these operations, I’m not much in the mood for small talk.”

Olivia nodded. “He took off southbound. If he had turned it into a martyrdom operation — crashed it into something — we’d know. If it had landed somewhere and been noticed, we’d know. So he didn’t do either of those things. He flew it somewhere he could land it and hide it without being noticed. This place is easily reachable from Xiamen, he knows it well, has friends and connections here…”

“You mentioned all those things before,” Seamus said.

Olivia was silent.

“All I’m saying: here I am. Seamus. Alive and well. Not your best friend, but someone you know a little. As far as I can tell, you don’t hate me. You tolerate my presence. Maybe even like me a tiny little bit. I’m about to leave. Let’s say I come back in a body bag tomorrow morning. Let’s say that happens. You get on a plane and fly back to London. As you are sitting on that long, long airplane flight, at some point when you’re over India or Arabia or fucking Crete or something, are you going to go, like” — he smacked himself in the face and adopted a look of chagrin, shook his head, rolled his eyes — ” ‘Shit, you know, that theory actually sucked. ‘Is that going to happen?”

“No,” Olivia said. “It’s the best theory we have.”

“We being the guys sitting around the table in London?”

“Yes.”

“How about you, Olivia? Is it the best theory you have?”

“Does it matter?” That answer had sprung to her lips surprisingly quickly.

His face froze for a few seconds, and then he smiled without showing his teeth. “No,” he said, “of course not.”

Then he pushed himself away from the wall, rose to his feet, spun on the balls of his black-on-black running shoes, and walked out.

She sat there without moving for twenty minutes, until she heard the helicopters taking off.

Then she went to the empty dining area and opened up Seamus’s laptop — he had given her a guest account — and played T’Rain for the rest of the afternoon, through into the evening, and then all night. Every so often she would stop and try to adjudge whether she was tired enough to go to sleep. But she knew perfectly well that no such thing would happen until Seamus and his men had come back.

They were back at about nine in the morning. Olivia had passed out on the sofa, gotten perhaps three hours’ sleep in spite of herself. All six of them came in together, filthy and sweaty and in some cases bloody; but none of them was seriously injured. She got the sense that they had been speaking very loudly and uninhibitedly, but the volume dropped to almost zero as soon as her sleepy head popped up from behind the back of the sofa. She caught Seamus’s eye. He was staring at her fixedly, peeling things off himself, dropping them on the floor.

The other men drifted out and tromped off to their barracks. She couldn’t avoid the impression that they had wanted to throw down their stuff and relax here and that her presence in the room had ruined it.

Seamus sidestepped around. He was carrying a gray plastic laptop under one arm. Not his usual machine. He set it on the coffee table, then sat down in a chair arranged at ninety degrees to the couch. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and carefully placed the tips of his fingers together and flexed his hands against each other, as if checking to see whether all the little joints in the fingers still worked. Some of his knuckles had been bleeding.

He looked Olivia straight in the eye and said, in a mild but direct tone of voice, “Do you want to fuck?”

She must have looked a little surprised.

“Sorry to be so blunt,” he went on, “but surviving one of these things always makes me incredibly horny. This, and going to funerals. Those are the triggers for me. So I just thought I would ask. I feel like I could rip off a great one just now. Tip-top. So I’m just checking. Just on the off chance you might be in the mood for something, you know, totally hot and meaningless.”

Olivia could well imagine it: the mischievous grin spreading across her lips, scampering back to the guest cabin, crowding into the shower, and getting banged senseless by this hormonally enraged man-child.

“Um, I sort of am actually,” Olivia said earnestly, “but I think it’s a temptation I can resist for now.” Feeling that this required more explanation, she added, “I was specifically told not to, actually.”

He looked impressed. “Really!”

“Yeah.”

“Someone actually bothered to issue you an order forbidding coitus with me.”

“Yeah. More I think directed at me and my reputation than yours.”

He looked crestfallen.

“But I’m sure yours is amazing! Your reputation, that is.”

He nodded.

“Did it go all right then?” she asked.

“Yeah! Why do you ask?”

“Just coz you’ve got blood all over you.”

“Do you know what I do for a living?”

She no longer felt like bantering back.

Seamus leaned back, reached into a cargo pocket, pulled out a little black case, unsnapped it to reveal a set of tiny screwdrivers. He flipped the laptop upside down, selected a tool, began to undo little screws. “The objective was to enter one of their encampments and grab at least one subject for interrogation. And to get any other evidence that might be useful along the way. Like this.” He patted the laptop. “Not really a good helicopter-gunship-assault kind of mission. We had to land some distance away and go in on foot and surprise them.”

“‘Surprise’ being, I guess, quite a mild term for how you approached these blokes.”

“It’s an incomplete term. They were definitely surprised.” Seamus had removed all the little screws he could find. He paused, looking at the laptop, still all together in one piece. “Jones has been known to booby-trap these things and then leave them lying around,” he said. “But this one was not left lying around. It was being used when we entered the hut.” He popped the back off. Olivia couldn’t help flinching. But there were no lumps of plastique inside. Seamus chose another screwdriver and began to remove the screws that held its little hard drive into place. “I’ll upload this to Langley while I’m taking my shower.”

“What about the other part of the mission?”

“Grabbing a subject?”

“Yeah.”

“Done.”

“Where is he?”

“In the hands of our Filipino colleagues.”

SEAMUS DOCKED THE little hard drive into a gadget that inhaled all its contents without altering them and squirted them down a high-bandwidth connection to the United States for, she guessed, decryption and analysis. Then he went back to his quarters and took a shower. Olivia took one of her own, not because she was dirty but because she had that cottony, icky feeling that came from lying on a sofa for a whole day playing a stupid game. She wanted to get some exercise but didn’t see how it was possible. In the courtyard of their little compound, Seamus’s team had set up some kind of body-weight exercise system involving ropes, and she’d seen them out there going at it yesterday. But that was exercise with a purpose — This might give me a tiny edge on the next mission — whereas she wanted to do something wholesome like go for a walk.

There was a couple of hours’ hiatus. Food was eaten, email checked. Then Seamus spun his laptop around. It was playing a video window: a reasonably high-definition feed from a small, windowless, brightly lit room. A man, stripped to the waist, was sitting in a wooden chair, hands behind him as if cuffed. His features were Malay/Filipino, but he had been growing a scruffy beard. One eye was closed off by a huge shiner, and at the places where bony ridges had once sat close beneath the skin, butterfly bandages were straining to hold lacerations closed. The swelling extended down toward his chin, and she wondered whether his jaw might have been broken. He was mumbling in some language that Olivia didn’t recognize.

One of Seamus’s men, whom she had previously pegged as Hispanic, scooted closer, plugged in a pair of large, expensive-looking headphones, and leaned forward to listen. After a few moments, he began to rattle off sentence fragments in English: “It’s like I said before … honest to God … I’ll tell you anything you want to hear, you know this now … but you want the truth, don’t you? The truth is we didn’t see him. Didn’t hear anything until a few days ago. Then we got word … send out emails, you know. They could be anything, just random.”

Seamus explained, “According to the analysts at Langley, that laptop was used to send out a bunch of junk emails starting a few days ago.”

“Like spam?” someone asked.

“They were just cutting and pasting random scraps of text from instruction manuals, encrypting it, sending it out. Trying to create the illusion of traffic. False chatter.” Seamus swiveled his eyes to look at Olivia. Then he made a little jerk of his head toward the door. She got up, headed for the exit, and he followed in her wake, all the way to her quarters.

“This is not about fucking, I assume?” she asked.

He rolled his eyes. “No, I’m in a completely different state of mind now; I regret what I said earlier.”

“Very well,” she said levelly.

“Though that is a cute haircut.”

This was certainly an attempt to bait her, and so she remained silent and, she hoped, inscrutable.

“What I really wanted to tell you was that … you’ve got what you came here for,” Seamus said.

“What did I come here for, do you imagine?”

“Evidence to support the theory you really believe.”

“Which is?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I thought I would get your opinion,” Olivia said, “before showing my hand.”

He stuck his tongue in his cheek and thought about it.

“It’s not poker,” she said. “There’s no disadvantage in your telling me what you think. We’re both trying to get the same rat bastard.”

“If Jones had something as awesome as a bizjet,” Seamus said, “would he use it to scurry like a mouse back into the nearest hole? I think not.”

“He’d do something really cool, like fly it into a building,” Olivia said, nodding.

Seamus held up one admonishing finger. “Oh, no,” he said, “because that would involve dying, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose very likely, yes.”

“And he doesn’t want to die.”

“For a man who doesn’t want to die, he puts himself in some quite dodgy situations,” she pointed out.

“Oh, I think he’s conflicted,” Seamus said. “Someday he’s going to be a martyr. Someday. This is what he keeps telling himself. Then he looks around himself, at the wack jobs and goat fuckers he has to work with, and he sees how much more he has to offer the movement by staying alive. Putting his expertise to work, his languages, his ability to blend in. And so the day of martyrdom keeps getting postponed.”

“Convenient for him, that.”

Seamus grinned and shrugged. “I actually don’t know whether the man is a coward, or really trying to use his skills in the most productive way by staying alive. I’d love to ask him that someday. Before sticking a knife into his belly.”

“So. He didn’t come here. He didn’t crash it into a building. He didn’t get caught. Where’d he go?”

“All of his instincts,” Seamus said, “would move him in the direction of the United States.”

THEY SPENT THE rest of the day writing reports to their respective higher-ups. The next morning, Seamus and Olivia flew back to Manila. Seamus had business there at the U.S. embassy, and Olivia needed to make arrangements to fly home. The route back to Olivia’s hotel was almost a perfect reversal of the trip out, complete with the sweaty hike across the city to get around traffic. They reached the hotel at 10:12 A.M. and the hotel bar at 10:13, and after dutifully gulping down glasses of water for technical rehydration purposes, they moved on to alcohol.

“You can’t tell me that bizjet doesn’t have enough fuel to reach the States,” Seamus said.

She twiddled her hand in the air. “Northern tier,” she said.

“Bang! Mall of America,” Seamus proposed, reenacting the dive and crash with the hand that wasn’t holding a drink.

“Northwest corner much more likely,” she said. “Seattle, of course.”

“Bye-bye, Space Needle.”

“But the Space Needle’s still there, last time I checked. So if your theory is right — ”

“My theory and yours, lady.”

“All right, all right. If our theory is right, he somehow got in without being picked up on radar and landed out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Do your analysts have any ideas as to how he could avoid radar?”

“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 jihadists 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 nonimmediate 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.

“Most of this is self-explanatory, if one is willing to put a bit of thought into it,” Jones remarked. “As an example, in this snapshot of Peter donning his snowshoes, there’s a mountain peak in the background, wooded on its lower slopes, but with a barren face — I’m guessing scree beneath the snow. According to the time-stamp, it was taken right around noon — indeed, I can see the remains of your lunch on the seat of the ATV. The shadows should therefore be pointing north. And strangely enough, when we look at the Google satellite image — which was taken during the summer, evidently — we see a peak here, with a scree-covered face turned toward the pin on the map, which is more or less to its south. So it all fits together. Schloss Hundschüttler’s website could hardly be more descriptive; I have already taken the virtual tour of the property and had a virtual pint in the virtual tavern. Virtual pints being the only kind that I, as a devout Muslim, am allowed to have…” Jones had become somewhat rambling, perhaps because Zula was being a little slow to snap out of this combination of cell-induced ennui and the shock of seeing familiar places and faces so displayed. He slid a page across the table at her, then bracketed it between two more. Each contained an image from her phone. “But there are still certain mysteries that require explanation. What the bloody hell is this?” he asked. “I know where it is.” He tapped a location on the map, a few miles south of the Schloss, sprouting a cluster of stickpins. “But what the hell? It’s not mentioned on the Schloss’s site, and even WikiTravel is silent on the matter.”

“It was an abandoned mine.” Zula paused, a little taken aback by the unfamiliar sound of her own voice. Then she corrected herself: “It is an abandoned mine.” She had grown accustomed to thinking of her life and everything she’d ever experienced as dwelling solely in the past.

“What were they mining? Trees?”

She shook her head. “Lead or something; I don’t know.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “What sort of mine requires a million board feet of timber?” For the overwhelming impression given by the photographs was of planks and beams, thousands of them, silver with age, splayed and flattened in some sort of slow-motion disaster that ran all the way down the side of a small mountain. As if the world’s biggest timber flume, a waterfall of rough-sawn planks coursing down the slope, had suddenly been deprived of water and had frozen and shriveled in place.

“Mines are supposed to be below ground, I’d thought,” Jones continued.

“Aren’t you a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines?” Zula asked.

Jones, for once, looked a bit sheepish. “They should probably change the name. It’s not just about that. I only went there to learn how to blow things up. I don’t know squat about mines really.”

“All of this wood was some kind of structure that they built aboveground, obviously. For what purpose I don’t know. But it runs up and down the slope for quite a distance. It’s got to be some kind of mineral separation technique that uses gravity. Maybe they sluiced water down through it, or something. In some places, it’s just these big chutes.” Zula pointed to the wreckage of one such in the background of a photograph of Uncle Richard. Then she shuffled papers around until she found a photo of something that looked like a very old house pushed askew by a shock wave. “Other places you’ll see a platform with a shack, or even something the size of this, built on it. But they are mostly just flattened, as you can see.”

“Well, whatever this thing is, it’s eight point four kilometers from the Schloss, and almost exactly the same elevation,” Jones said.

“Because of the railway,” Zula said.

He looked interested. “What railway?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t exist anymore. But there used to be a narrow-gauge railway that ran from Elphinstone south into this valley. Closest to town was the Schloss, which was the baron’s residence and the headquarters of the whole empire. Farther back up the valley were the mines he made his money from…”

“And this is one of those,” Jones said, flicking his eyes down at the photos they’d been looking at. “But why did you say because of the railway?”

“The elevation,” Zula said. “You noticed that there’s very little difference in altitude. That’s because — ”

“Trains aren’t very good at going up and down hills,” Jones completed the sentence for her, nodding.

“Yeah. Neither are bicyclists and cross-country skiers. So — ”

“Ah, yes, now I understand. The trail up the valley, so proudly described on the Schloss’s website.”

Zula nodded. “That trail is just the right-of-way of the old narrow-gauge mining railway, paved over.”

“Yes.” Jones considered it for a bit, paying more attention to the convolutions of the terrain shown on the map. “How does one connect with that trail, I wonder?”

Zula propped herself up on her elbows, leaned over the table, tried to focus on the map for a while. Then she shook her head. “This is too much information,” she said. “It’s not that hard.” She flipped one of the photographs over to expose its blank back. Then she swiped the fat carpenter’s pencil that Jones had picked up at Walmart. She slashed a horizontal line across the page. “The border,” she said. Then a vertical line crossing the border at right angles. “The Selkirks.” Another, parallel to it, farther east. “The Purcells. Between them, Kootenay Lake.” She drew a long north-south oval, north of the border. “Highway 3 tries to run parallel to the border, but it has to zig and zag because of obstructions.” She drew a wandering line across the Selkirks and the Purcells. In some places it nearly grazed the border, in others it veered considerably to the north. At one such location, south of the big lake, she penciled in a fat X, bestriding the highway. “Elphinstone,” she said. “Snowboarders and sushi bars.” Because of the highway’s northward bulge, a considerable bight of land was here trapped between it and the U.S. border. Into the middle of it she slashed a line that first headed southwest out of town but then curved around until it was directed southeast: a big C with its northern end anchored at Elphinstone and its southern end trailing off as it approached the United States. Then she sketched in a series of cross-hatches across this arc, cartographic shorthand marking it as a railway line.

Finally, somewhere down south of the border, below the hook-shaped railway, she made another X and told him that it was Bourne’s Ford, Idaho. “My uncle is quite the expert on the history of this railway,” she said. “He could explain it better.”

“I’ll ask him when I see him,” Jones said.

This hit her like a baseball bat to the bridge of the nose. It took her a few moments to get going again. “Bourne’s Ford is in a river valley,” she said.

“Most fords are,” Jones pointed out dryly.

“Right. Anyway, it’s well served by rail and river transport. So it was thought for a while that the way to make the baron’s mine profitable was to run the line over the border and connect with other mining railways that had been run up into the mountains on the U.S. side.” She sketched in a few lines radiating up toward Canada from Bourne’s Ford. “Abandon,” she muttered.

“Abandoned mines?”

“Abandon Mountain,” she said. “It’s up here somewhere.” She made a vague circle between Bourne’s Ford and the border.

“Nice name.”

“They had a talent for these things. Anyway, so there was this competition as to whether all the ore was going to end up going south to Bourne’s Ford and Sandpoint, which would have turned this whole region into a dependency of the United States, or whether they were going to tie it into the Canadian transport network instead. It led to sort of a railway-building contest. The baron was smart enough to play both sides against each other. Americans were trying to punch a line up from the south, and he was at least pretending to run his narrow-gauge line down to the border to connect up with it.” She tapped the lower arc of the C. Then she moved the pencil up and scratched at its northern end. “At the same time the Canadians were desperately trying to build the last set of tunnels needed to connect Elphinstone with the rest of the country. The Canadians won. So the baron connected his line at the northern end, and Elphinstone developed into a prosperous town. The southern extension of the line — which was probably just a feint anyway, to make the Canadians dig those tunnels faster — was abandoned.”

“But it’s still there,” Jones said.

“It was surveyed all the way to the border,” Zula said. “They only graded it to within a few miles. At that point you run into the need for trestles and tunnels, and it starts getting really expensive to actually build it. So the bike-slash-ski trail goes up basically to the face of a cliff, five miles short of the border, and stops.”

“But there’s a way through.”

“Evidently,” Zula said. “When my uncle was carrying the bearskin south — ”

“Bearskin?”

“Another story. Not in the Wikipedia entry. I’ll tell you some other time. The point is that he needed to walk into the U.S. but didn’t know how. He followed the old narrow-gauge railway line up out of Elphinstone, walking on the railroad ties.”

“A nice gentle climb.”

“Yes, for the reason mentioned. He got to the end. And then he found some way around, or through, the wall of rock that was blocking his path, and covered the last miles south across the border, and picked his way south — ”

She sketched a faint, wavy, speculative line down through the circle she’d drawn earlier for Abandon Mountain, and thence down into Bourne’s Ford.

“He didn’t exactly pioneer it.” She glanced up to see Jones staring at her intently. “He was following traces left forty, fifty years earlier by whiskey smugglers during Prohibition.”

Prohibition Crick. She wondered if that would show up on Google Maps.

“And later by marijuana smugglers.”

“That’s the rumor, certainly.”

Jones was impatient with that. “Rumor or not, he made a lot of trips along this route.” He leaned forward and traced it with his finger. “He passed by the ruin of the baron’s house many times, and that was how he conceived the idea to buy the property and fix it up into a legitimate business.”

“That much of the Wikipedia entry is correct as far as I know,” she allowed.

“YOU MEAN, YOU were there in China?” Richard asked the woman.

“I mean, I was there when the apartment building blew up.”

Richard just stared at her.

“The one with your niece in the cellar.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t imagine you were talking about some other blown-up apartment in China.”

“Sorry.”

He looked at her for a while. “You’re not going to tell me who you are, are you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. But you can call me … oh, Laura, if it helps to have a name.”

“What is your interest in all this, Laura? What do you have to gain from talking me out of going to Xiamen?”

“Laura” got a wry look on her face. Trying to work out what she could say and what she couldn’t.

“Is this to do with the Russians?” he asked. “Are you somehow connected with that investigation?”

“Not in the way you mean,” she said. “But just a few days ago I was with one of them. The leader.”

“Ivanov, or Sokolov?” Richard asked. And was immediately gratified to see frank shock spread across Laura’s face.

“Very good,” she said. “I had the feeling that unexpected things might happen if I talked to you.”

Richard knew the two Russian names because Zula had mentioned them in her note. But he could see that the woman Laura didn’t know about that note. “So which of them were you with?” he asked.

“Sokolov,” Laura said. And she must have seen some look of hope on Richard’s face, because caution then fell down over her own visage like a shutter. “But I’m very sorry to tell you that this doesn’t actually help, where finding Zula is concerned. Not directly, anyway.”

“How can it not help? My understanding is that Ivanov abducted her and that Sokolov is his henchman.”

“Ivanov’s dead. Sokolov, if anything, was prepared to help Zula once Ivanov was out of the way. But because of the way it all went down … nothing happened right. Zula is no longer with the Russians.”

“Who’s she with?”

Laura clearly knew the answer but was uncomfortable blurting it out. “Is there another place we can chat?” she asked.

“Not until you talk me out of getting on that plane and flying to China.”

“Zula hasn’t been in China for something like ten days,” Laura said.

“Where is she then?”

“It is my considered opinion,” Laura said, “that she’s quite nearby.”

Day 17

Even after land finally hove into view on her port side, Szélanya glided along parallel to a dark coast for the better part of a day before the winds finally shifted round and enabled them to steer her in to shore. The coastline was fractally scalloped, consisting of shallow bays, miles wide, themselves indented with smaller indentations. The big bays were frequently demarcated by headlands or little isles that were connected to the mainland at low tide. Having cleared one of these, the crew of Szélanya — unused to navigating in the presence of land, or, for that matter, any solid object — trimmed her sails and adjusted her rudder to make her cut into the next bay. This one eventually hooked around, perhaps ten kilometers ahead of them, into a little island that was linked to the mainland by mudflats, and once they got themselves pointed into it, there was no doubt that they would make landfall somewhere, and soon. They could not now escape from the bay even if they tried. For Szélanya had not been designed as a sailing vessel. It had become one almost two weeks ago, but only in the sense that any floating object, devoid of other propulsion, was wind driven. Actually making it into something that would sail had involved a lot of trial and error; mostly the latter.

She had been well supplied with plastic tarps, but they learned soon enough that these could not stand up to the stresses imposed on them by the wind. Fishnets were much stronger but would not hold air. And so they had improvised sails by combining the two: laying fishnets out over tarps and then sewing them together with zip ties, piano wire, needle and thread, tape. The resulting composites were strong enough to stand up to the wind, but their edges and corners — where the wind’s power had to be transmitted into lines attached to the ship — ripped out whenever the breeze was appreciable. So there had been a lot more learning and improvising connected with those edges. The results were very far from being pretty, but nothing had torn out in a long time. It was only after they had solved that problem and hoisted their first little sail up on the yards and the rigging intended for manipulating fishnets that their Engineer had fetched a bottle of beer from the ship’s stores and, to the consternation of his fellow officers, smashed it against the boat’s prow while christening her Szélanya, the “Mother of the Wind.” “If such a being exists,” he explained, “she might be flattered, and decide not to completely fuck us.”

The Straits of Taiwan ran northeast-southwest. As they had learned during the first few hours of their journey, a steady current flowed down it, bending all courses southward. And as they learned over the first few days, that current was strongly assisted by the prevailing winds, which blew vigorously and consistently out of the northeast, pushing them down out of the strait into the South China Sea.

The Skipper had never been on a boat, other than passenger ferries, until the day the adventure had begun. Nonetheless he had, during the first, critical forty-eight hours, acquired a command of basic sailing principles with a speed and fluency that had struck the Engineer as being almost supernatural. Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn’t work and moving aggressively to exploit small successes. A profusion of ideas spewed forth from his mind. There was no such thing as a bad idea, apparently. But, perhaps more important, there was no such thing as a good idea either, until it had been tried and coolly evaluated. It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake. Once he and his fellow officers had built sails that would not immediately fall apart, and once he had learned to make the ship sail after a fashion, the Skipper had begun perusing some of the charts that had been left beyond on the bridge by the vessel’s previous owners. Making some rough calculations from the GPS, he had reckoned that the consequences of just letting the wind and current push them around would be landfall in Malaysia or Indonesia in a few weeks’ time. Tacking upwind, or even sailing at right angles to the wind, would be out of the question with what primitive rigging they could improvise from found objects on the boat. But the Engineer, who had done a bit of sailing on Lake Balaton, believed that by setting a sail at the correct angle and angling the rudder just so, they could use the northeasterly winds to drive them south and east toward the island of Luzon, and thereby shorten their voyage by one or two weeks. So they bent their course for the Philippines, and though the first day’s results were discouraging, they taught themselves over time to make Szélanya track south-southeast more often than not.

Then it was just waiting, and watching the sky, and wondering how it was all going to go down when the inevitable storm hit. It occurred to them — far too late, obviously — that they shouldn’t have run the fuel tanks completely dry, since it would be nice to be able to operate the generator that supplied power to the bilge pump. A battery system seemed to be keeping the GPS unit and other small electronic devices alive, but none of the energy-hungry stuff was available to them; when they had to haul on a line, they would use a hand-cranked winch, or, if none was in the right location, jury-rig strange aboriginal-looking snarls of cables and levers to get the job done. The entire vessel began to look as if it were lashed together with metal tourniquets.

They rode out a storm that, in retrospect, had not been a storm at all, but just a rainy day with large waves. For some reason the Pilot was least susceptible to seasickness; she tended to spend more time than anyone else up on the bridge, where the pitching and rolling and yawing ought to have been worse. When the sea was flat, the Skipper and the Engineer would go up there and visit her, but they had come to think of it as the Pilot’s own private wardroom and hesitated before entering. When the sea was rough, of course, they tended to be busy setting the sails and fixing things that had just broken. The Engineer’s response to seasickness was to expose himself to the weather, lying out on the foredeck staring fixedly at the horizon and letting rain and wave crests wash over him. The Skipper’s style was to retreat to his cabin where he could revel in his misery without being observed. Neither strategy would have been possible had it not been for the Pilot’s ability to stand planted in the bridge for many hours without letup, managing the wheel and keeping an eye on the compass and the GPS.

The rainy-day-with-waves had at least served as a sort of rehearsal for an actual storm. The Engineer, who had a vague recollection of his tiny sailboat being swamped by a motorboat’s wake on Lake Balaton, was fairly certain that the correct way to manage such situations was to keep the ship perpendicular to the wave crests. This made it less likely to get capsized when struck broadside. If they’d had engines, of course, they could have pointed Szélanya any direction they liked. As it was, the Engineer had reckoned, they’d have to put up a small sail, just enough to drag her downwind, not so large as to be ripped to shreds by thwarted winds. He had set to work crafting such an object out of tarps and nets and other junk that they hadn’t already used for other purposes. The mere act of doing this had seemed to revive very old buried memories, fragments of nautical lore that he had picked up when younger, reading Hungarian translations of books like Moby-Dick and Treasure Island. He woke up with the vague conviction solidifying in his mind that it might be a good idea to throw something big and draggy off the stern and tow it through the water behind them; as the wind pushed Szélanya along, this drogue would torque her stern backward and keep her aimed in a consistent direction, which in general should be perpendicular to the wave crests. He sacrificed a small table to the purpose, enveloping it in a cradle of ropes and then shoving it off the transom at the end of a cable. The initial trial, conducted in calmer conditions, suggested that the thing wouldn’t last very long in an actual storm and so he and the Skipper, who had come around to his way of thinking, devoted the better part of a day to reinforcing it.

They certainly had nothing else to do.

It had turned out that the calm day spent working on the drogue and the storm sail had been calm precisely in a calm-before-the-storm sense, and so the following couple of days had been spent in a condition of extreme misery. The storm sail and drogue had been deployed as soon as it became obvious what was about to happen. The Skipper and Engineer had scurried around and closed all hatches where it seemed water might get in, and then they had gone up to join the Pilot. The vessel’s steering gear consisted of a system of chains joining the wheel on the bridge to the actual rudder, and when things became rambunctious, it sometimes required more strength than the Pilot could muster — especially when she was exhausted from a long shift. At such times the Skipper would take over until such time as his arms wore out or the torque simply became too much, whereupon the Engineer would take the wheel and do battle, mano a mano, with the Mother of the Wind. There was no time during the storm when the Engineer was unable to supply the requisite amount of brute force. The problem lay in mixing it with intelligence. They could not see a thing. The bridge’s windows were sheeted with rain and windblown spume. The one that faced forward, just above the wheel, had a motorized disk set into it that was supposed to spin at great speed and throw off water, but they could not get it to work. So during the part of the storm when they most badly needed to see the waves, so as to make informed decisions about steering, they were blind and had to judge the shape of the sea by feeling the tilting and heaving and plummeting of the deck plates beneath their feet. By that time, of course, it was too late to effect any useful response. The best that the Engineer could do was assume that the next wave would be moving in roughly the same direction as the current one, and steer accordingly. He had just about convinced himself that all his efforts were a complete waste of time, based on sheer fantasy, when he lost concentration for a few moments and they got broadsided by a crest that laid Szélanya on her side for several moments. All three of them, and all the loose stuff in the bridge, telescoped into what had been the port bulkhead and was now the floor, and lay there like crumpled refuse for several moments until the vessel lazily rolled upright again. She was not beautiful but she was, apparently, well ballasted.

It abated and they discovered, to no one’s surprise, that the storm sail and the drogue were long gone.

It was six days after the storm that they sailed her into that bay on Luzon.

Giant water-skating insects had begun to clutter the flat, sparkling waters of the bay. Some of them made buzzing noises. Upon closer observation, these proved to be long slender boats with double outriggers. At first they tended to set parallel courses at a safe distance, but as it became evident that Szélanya was going to run aground, they began to draw in closer, apparently trying to make sense of what was happening. Each of them carried between one and half a dozen persons, lithe and brown and keenly interested, verging on celebratory.

CSONGOR HAD IMAGINED running her right up onto the beach, but she hissed to a stop in water a few meters deep, a stone’s throw from shore. This made it possible for the small boats, which drew much less water, to surround them. Within a few minutes, Szélanya had been girdled by a complex of rafted-together boats, and at least two dozen people had invited themselves aboard. They were all so cheerful, so well behaved in a certain sense, that it took a few minutes for him to understand that they were here to sack Szélanya. The GPS had disappeared before he even understood what was happening. The bridge was rapidly denuded of electronics, the mast of antennas, the galley of pots and pans. Hacksaw blades were droning all around, ratchet wrenches chirping like crickets. He experienced a welter of incompatible feelings: outrage that his stuff was being stolen, then the sheepish recollection that he and Marlon and Yuxia had stolen the entire vessel to begin with, committed piracy, killed a man. Giddy relief that they had finally reached dry land, combined with rapidly growing alarm that they had found themselves in a strange foreign place among larcenous, albeit polite, natives. Stabbing, paranoid fear that said people might be stealing his own personal possessions at this very moment, followed by the realization that he had no possessions other than what he was wearing on his body and carrying in his pockets.

Except for the shoulder bag. Ivanov’s leather man-purse.

He had been pacing about aimlessly on the deck but now turned on his heel and stormed to the cabin where he’d been sleeping, just in time to confront a young man who was just stepping over the threshold with the said bag slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. The youth twisted his body as if to dodge around Csongor, but as Csongor kept coming he blocked nearly the entire opening for a moment before suddenly going chest to chest with the interloper and body-slamming him back into the cabin. This was already drawing attention from passersby on the gangway outside, trafficking in coiled-up wire rope, plastic fish bins, MREs, and other goods they’d fetched up from the hold. Csongor pulled the hatch shut and dogged it, then turned around to see the young man clutching the bag possessively with one hand while brandishing a knife with the other.

He was better dressed than Csongor, in an immaculate Boston Celtics T-shirt and flower-patterned surfer jams with gravid cargo pockets that made his legs look even skinnier than they were to begin with. Until a couple of weeks ago, Csongor would have found it all quite alarming. As it was, with a sour and contemptuous look on his face, he grabbed the hem of his ragged and salt-stained shirt and pulled it up just high enough to expose the butt of the Makarov protruding above the waistband of his shorts. This had less impact, at first, than he’d hoped for, since for several moments the man simply could not get over the spectacle of Csongor’s huge, hairy torso. This was not as convex, nor as pasty-white, as it had been two weeks ago, but even in its slimmed and tanned condition, it was a sort of Wonder of the World or sideshow spectacle to this young Filipino, who in any case did not know what to make of the odd gesture: Was Csongor offering his belly to be stabbed? In time, though, the scavenger’s eyes wandered down and focused in on the butt of the gun. It was, Csongor knew, a somewhat hollow threat. If the scavenger were serious about using the knife, he could do serious damage to Csongor, maybe even inflict a fatal wound, before Csongor could pull out the pistol and get it ready to fire. But his sense was that the scavenger was not making a serious promise to use the knife, just trying to bluff his way out of a bad situation, and that all Csongor need do was raise the stakes with a bigger bluff.

Anyway, no attack came. Csongor continued to stare into the man’s eyes until finally he put the knife away. Then Csongor pointed at the bag and crooked his finger. The man rolled his eyes, sighed, and slung it off his shoulder, then kicked it across the deck plates. Csongor scooped it up, then moved sideways and let the scavenger go out.

Thirty seconds later, they were aboard one of the boats, having accepted the offer of a ride ashore. Thirty seconds after that they were standing on dry land, haggling with the skipper, who professed to be shocked that they had not expected to pay for his services. Communication was difficult until Yuxia — who, since they’d made landfall, had alternated between jumping up and down on the sandy beach, as if testing its structural integrity, and dropping to her knees to kiss it — realized that the man was speaking a recognizable dialect of Fujianese. She rolled up and pitter-patted over and began to try out words on him, framing syllables with sandy lips. Csongor could see that communication between the two was far from perfect but that they were getting a few concepts across. Marlon — who until a few moments earlier had been lying spread-eagled on the sand, screaming exultantly — sat up, cocked an ear, listened for a bit, but didn’t seem to understand what they were saying any better than Csongor did.

Csongor moved several paces away so that the boatman would not be able to look directly into the bag, then set it down on the sand, dropped to his knees, and unzipped it.

A shadow fell. He looked up to see a girl of perhaps eight years, holding a baby on her hip, staring down curiously. Csongor hooked his arm through the bag’s shoulder strap and stood back up, elevating it up above the level where she could see it, and then pulled it open. She edged around, standing up on tippytoe, trying to look in, and the baby reached out with one saliva-drenched hand and got a grip on the bag’s edge and pulled it down, as if trying to help his big sister satisfy her curiosity. The situation was impossible; Csongor couldn’t very well lay his hand on someone else’s baby. But he really did not want any of these people finding out how much Chinese money they were carrying around.

The sun shone down into the bag’s central cavity, revealing nothing except a few loose magenta bills. All the cash had disappeared.

Csongor remembered now the young man in the cabin. How his cargo pockets had bulged. He turned to look back out toward the beached hulk of Szélanya. A hundred people were on it now, and more were on the way. Others had already finished taking whatever they wanted and were dispersing on their little boats. The situation was impossible. Even if Csongor bought passage back to the wreck, or swam to it, and somehow managed to impose his will on a large number of people, most of whom were probably armed with (at least) knives, the odds were very small that the young man who had taken the bricks of money was still anywhere near the thing.

Csongor checked his wallet and found a lot of Hungarian currency and a few stray euro notes.

He glanced up at the boat pilot, who, by the standards of Filipinos, looked almost totally Asian in his racial makeup. What sorts of connections did people here have back to China? Just a vague awareness that their ancestors had come from there, centuries ago? Or did they go back and forth all the time?

“What kind of money is this guy willing to accept?” Csongor asked Yuxia.

“He is willing to take our renminbi,” Yuxia reassured him.

“Any other kind?” Csongor asked.

She asked the question and Csongor heard him say, “Dollars.”

The girl, seeing that there was nothing marvelous to look at in Csongor’s bag, had lost interest, pried the baby’s fingers loose from it, and backed away to make further observations. Ambling back toward Yuxia and the boatman, Csongor groped his way into one of the bag’s internal side pockets and pulled out the Ziploc bag containing Peter’s effects. He extracted and opened Peter’s wallet, which was made of ballistic nylon. Flipping it open, he observed what he took to be Peter’s state of Washington driver’s license, trapped beneath a window, and a number of cards and slips of paper stored in a fan of transparent plastic envelopes: some kind of insurance card, a voter’s registration card, a rectangle of white paper with several long strings of random letters, digits, and punctuation marks printed on it: passwords, probably. No photograph of Zula, which only confirmed certain uncharitable opinions that Csongor had been harboring about Peter since the moment they had met. Pockets with credit cards and debit cards. A billfold containing two American dollar bills and a great deal of some other, more colorful currency that Csongor did not immediately recognize: Canadian, he now saw. Very odd to be handling this carefully preserved relic of a dead man’s life in a completely different world, here on a beach in Luzon.

The conversation between Yuxia and the boatman had lapsed as the latter gazed into the billfold.

As long as he had the fellow’s attention, Csongor said to Yuxia, “We need to get to some kind of city where it would be possible to get a hotel room, get on the Internet, buy a bus ticket to Manila or something. How far away is the nearest city like that? Is it easier to go by boat or on land?” For they could hear occasional trucks storming down a road, a kilometer or two inland, raising clouds of brown dust that rose up from the jungle like heavy smoke.

“He’s not stupid,” Yuxia pointed out. “You know what he’s going to say.”

“Use any words you like,” Csongor returned, “as long as it gets us out of here.”

This at least gave Yuxia and the boatman something to talk about while Csongor opened the Ziploc bag that contained Zula’s stuff. Opening her wallet laid him open to a kind of shotgun blast of diverse emotions. Shame at his ungentlemanly behavior. Horror at the thought he might be rifling the possessions of a dead person. Intense curiosity about all aspects of Zula’s life. A piercing sense of loss followed by a resolve to get on with this and try to find her, supposing she was still alive. Trepidation that he wouldn’t find any money, then a ridiculous sense of gratitude when he discovered, commingled with Canadian bills in various denominations, several crisp new American twenties.

“There is a city south of here along the coast with a hotel where tourists go,” Yuxia announced.

“Internal Filipino tourists or — ”

“He says they are all white men.”

“How long to get there?”

“On his boat, three hours in this weather. Or we can walk to the road and try to hitchhike.”

Marlon had rolled up to his feet and drawn closer to the conversation. He was covered with sand and grinning. Csongor exchanged looks with him and with Yuxia. There seemed to be a consensus that they should go by boat. So Csongor snapped a twenty out of Zula’s wallet, held it up in the air, and handed it to the boatman.

The boatman looked quite pleased, but: “He wants more,” Yuxia said, in a frozen voice that told Csongor he had already been outmaneuvered and outhaggled.

Csongor turned and looked back toward the wreck surrounded by boats, many of which were at least as seaworthy as this fellow’s. “Tell him he can have another when he gets us there,” he said. “And if he doesn’t like that, ask him what is going to happen if I wade out there waving twenties over my head.”

“Why are you paying with American money?” Marlon asked.

While Yuxia was translating, Csongor showed Marlon the empty bag. In response to Marlon’s shocked look, he nodded in the direction of Szélanya. “One of those people was a little too clever for me,” he admitted.

The boatman put up enough of an argument to save some face, then moved toward his vessel, making gestures to indicate that they were welcome to step aboard.

This boat was of appreciable size, the hull perhaps twelve meters long and a meter in breadth at its widest place, deeply vee-shaped in cross section, so that the planks that made up its hull rose up to either side of them like walls. It seemed an absolute rule in these parts that all watercraft, no matter what their size or purpose, must have double outriggers, and this was no exception; its outriggers were nothing more than skinny logs that, like most of the rest of the boat, were painted blue. Three more blue logs of comparable dimensions had been thrown crosswise athwart the hull, reaching far out to either side to support the outriggers. The boatman’s crew, consisting of a boy of perhaps twenty and another half that age, scampered around on the outriggers and the thwarts with the aplomb of tightrope walkers, smiling all the time; it was difficult to know whether this was their normal level of cheerfulness or a reaction to having been hired on favorable terms. They tended to various chores while the patriarch sat in the back and operated the motor. Marlon, Yuxia, and Csongor made themselves at home beneath a blue tarp awning stretched over the middle part. Now that the hard bargaining was in the past, their hosts became almost embarrassingly hospitable, the younger plying them with bottled water and brightly colored sugary drinks in flimsy plastic bottles, the older stoking up a small concrete brazier and using it to cook up a pot of rice.

The journey took closer to two hours than the projected three, in spite of the fact that most of it was done under sail. For as soon as they had motored clear of the shallows and of the crowd of boat surrounding Szélanya, the skipper killed the engine, and he and the boys raised some canvas. These were only a little more polished-looking than the ones that Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia had improvised, but they seemed to work a good deal better and they soon had the boat skimming efficiently down the coast.

Csongor spent most of the journey replaying in his mind the encounter with the young man in the Celtics shirt, savoring all the different ways in which he had been stupid and cataloging the opportunities he had missed to turn the situation around and get their money back.

Marlon seemed to read his mind. Finally he grinned, reached out, and chucked Csongor on the shoulder. “It’s cool,” he said.

Csongor ought to have been old enough by now not to be affected by cool kids telling him that he was cool, but even so this had a powerful effect on his mood. “Really?” he said. He glanced at Yuxia, but she had slipped into sleep during the journey and was slumbering deeply, her lips slightly parted. She was, he realized, very beautiful, like a madonna in a church. When she was awake, her energy and the force of her personality shone through her face and made it difficult to know anything about what she really looked like, somewhat in the same way that you couldn’t see the glass envelope of a lightbulb when it was turned on. In some other universe he might have been attracted to her, but in this one she would forever be his kid sister.

He glanced back up to find Marlon watching him. During the voyage of Szélanya, Csongor thought he had observed some tender moments between Marlon and Yuxia; and he had wondered whether the two of them might end up involved romantically. But the ruthless environment in which they had been living had ruled out anything actually happening. Was Marlon hoping, now, that this would change? And if so, might he feel jealous when he saw Csongor gazing for a long time at the sleeping Yuxia? Csongor didn’t see anything of the sort in Marlon’s face. He, Csongor, had never been especially good at hiding his emotions, and he hoped that Marlon would be able to read him correctly.

“How is it cool?” Csongor asked. “You have a plan?”

“I have to get to a wangba,” Marlon said, “and see what is happening in the Torgai. But I think I can get a lot of money.”

“Enough to get us to Manila?”

Marlon grinned broadly. Sort of an affectionate reaction to Csongor’s naïveté. “Much more than that,” he said.

RICHARD FORTHRAST took her a short distance up Airport Way to a neighborhood he called Georgetown. He swung around a corner and slowed down in midblock to draw her attention to a building that, he said, was the very one from which his niece and the subject named Peter Curtis had been abducted a little more than two weeks ago. Then he proceeded to a nearby drinking establishment, in front of which was parked a long row of Harley-Davidsons. The barmaid in chief, an intense woman with many tattoos, greeted him by name and asked him “Any news yet?” and then got a brooding look when he shook his head no. They occupied the last available booth. The waitress already knew Richard’s order but brought menus for Olivia and John. Olivia had been steeling herself for a bottle of watery yellow American beer but was surprised to find a dozen and a half beers, ales, and stouts of various descriptions, all available on draft. She requested a pint of bitter and a salad. John Forthrast ordered a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a hamburger. This triggered some kind of ancient sibling grievance between the two brothers. “You’re in a city where you could eat anything,” Richard reminded him. “Would it kill you to — oh never mind.” The latter clause with a glance toward Olivia and a reckoning that this wasn’t the time to revive what showed every sign of being a worn-out argument.

“I don’t like spicy food,” John muttered doggedly.

“Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?” Olivia asked.

“Both,” Richard said. “It started out as a pure simulacrum, a few years ago, before the economy crashed, when it was hip for twentysomethings to move down here and dress in Carhartts and utili-kilts. But they did such a good job of it that actual blue-collar people began to show up. And then the economy did crash, and the hip people discovered that they were, in actual point of fact, blue collar, and probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.”

“Do a lot of people stop by here on their way to the private jet terminal?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Food and drink arrived, precipitating a lull, and then Olivia began trying to explain herself with great care to avoid saying who she worked for, though this must have been obvious, and how she knew what she knew. “Since I can’t say much,” she concluded, “I had been rather hoping that I might get some clues or some insights from you. And the fact that you already know the names of Sokolov and Ivanov suggests to me that I am not barking up the wrong tree.”

Richard pulled out an iPad and brought up images of the note that Zula had written on the paper towels, which Olivia, of course, read with fascination.

There was a sense in which all things to do with Zula and the Russians were a red herring. MI6 couldn’t care less about them. They just wanted Jones, and any intelligence that they might be able to glean as a by-product of hunting for him. They’d had a quite satisfactory arrangement going in Xiamen, which had been destroyed by the Russians’ intervention. Everything to do with T’Rain and REAMDE was a distraction; for Olivia to hang out in a biker bar with the founder and chairman of Corporation 9592 was acceptable as an off-hours diversion but should under no circumstances be confused with actual productive work. Thus the official line. But having just finished a very long and expensive wild-goose chase to Zamboanga, an officially sanctioned mission that had put Seamus’s men to a lot of effort and danger and apparently led to several deaths, Olivia was now inclined to view the party line with a great deal of skepticism. She had a vague sense that drinking with Richard Forthrast might in the long run be more productive than flying to Manila had been. But she couldn’t explain how, yet, and so she didn’t think she’d be filing an expense report. Which turned out to be a nonissue in any case, since Richard picked up the check before giving her a lift back to her hotel.

It was not until eleven o’clock the following morning that she was really able to get down to work on the NAG, the North American Gambit, which was her name for the theory that Jones had found some way to fly his stolen business jet directly from Xiamen to this continent. Here in the Seattle office of the FBI, signs were obvious that her local contacts were being controlled by persons in Washington, D.C., who were quite serious about working this theory in a systematic way. This was both good and bad. Obviously it was helpful that they liked her theory well enough to take it seriously and devote resources to its investigation. But whoever was running this project in D.C. was an Organization Man or Woman, someone with a studious engineer-like mind-set, who spent a lot of time worrying about accountability. No Seamus Costello, in other words. It seemed that a lot of duplication of effort was going on in which that hypothetical flight was being wargamed and flight-simulated in precisely the way that had already been done at MI6 more than a week ago. Ever newer and better “resources” were being “brought online” and ever more “scary-smart” analysts being “looped in” and “brought up to speed.” These developments were relayed second- and thirdhand to Olivia, and it was obvious from the tones of the emails and the expressions on people’s faces that she was expected to be gratified by each of these improvements. And yet from this remove, thousands of miles from whatever Beltway conference room where all the action was taking place, all these enhancements yielded zero results other than additional delays. It was not until about twenty-four hours after her meeting with Richard Forthrast that she finally began to get access to some of the data she needed to evaluate the NAG in a serious way: lists of the tail numbers of private airplanes that had landed at U.S. airports around the time in question (a week and a half ago now, long enough to give her the sense that she was pursuing a hopelessly cold trail) and high-resolution satellite images of out-of-the-way bits of the northwestern United States where computer-image-processing algorithms had detected white shapes that looked like they might conceivably be jet airplanes.

Early in the afternoon she received a text message from Richard Forthrast informing her that he was just a few blocks away, killing time at the Greyhound station, and would she like to grab a cup of coffee? The honest answer was that she was right in the middle of something and she didn’t have time, but the message was tantalizingly mysterious, and coffee sounded good, and Richard was generally fun to hang out with. So she took the elevator to the ground floor and walked to the Greyhound station and found Richard and John sitting on a bench, reading the New York Times and Reader’s Digest, respectively, waiting for a bus from Spokane that had been delayed by weather on Snoqualmie Pass. Jacob Forthrast had decided to come out from his compound in Idaho and spend a little time with his two older brothers. “He feels useless” was Richard’s explanation — just the sort of bleak and pitiless analysis that could only happen between siblings — “and when he found out we weren’t going to China after all, he hopped on a bus.” He was looking up at Olivia over his reading glasses and his New York Times and must have seen in her face certain questions she was too polite to ask: Does he not have a car? Is he too poor to pay for an airline ticket? Richard folded up his newspaper and treated Olivia to a brisk little explanation of Jake’s belief system, delivered in a way that made it seem like he’d done it lots of times before and wanted it done properly. His tone was studiedly noncommittal, making it clear that he didn’t agree with Jake about anything, but there was nothing he could do about it, and so there was no point getting hung up on the essential ridiculousness of it all.

Not long after this little orientation session came to an end, the bus pulled in, and Jake climbed off in the middle of a long stream of senior citizens, ethnic minorities, people too young to drive, and hard-luck cases. Feeling very much the odd woman out despite the Forthrast brothers’ efforts to make her feel welcome, Olivia strolled down the street with them to a bookstore that Jake wanted to visit. Given the fact that Jake believed a lot of crazy stuff, Olivia found it intriguing that the top item on his list was to visit a bookstore. If nothing else, it served as an icebreaker. She had no idea how such a man might react to her as a nonwhite female, but he was quite cordial, even easy to talk to, and went out of his way to describe himself as a “wingnut” and a “wack job,” apparently thinking that this would help put Olivia — or “Laura,” as she was still calling herself — at ease. It was clear that he had been brought thoroughly up to speed on the latest news regarding Zula, and how “Laura” fit into the picture. He had been thinking about it during the bus ride and come up with any number of questions and theories, most of which seemed like the products of an acute and active mind. He was, Olivia realized, at least as intelligent as Richard, and possibly more so.

“Why do you live out there, the way you do?” she finally asked him.

By this point she was sitting across the table from him in the bookstore’s coffee shop. Jake had immediately found the book he wanted: a manual on organic farming. Richard and John had wandered off into other parts of the bookstore, aimlessly browsing, and there was no telling when they’d be back. She had bought Jake a cup of coffee, and he had returned to making self-deprecating jests about his lifestyle, which Olivia was now starting to find a little boring — dancing around the unmentionable. Better to just ask him flat out. As a stranger in a strange land, she reckoned she could get away with it.

“I guess I started with Emerson’s essay ‘On Self-Reliance’ and just followed the trail from there,” he said. “‘Behold the boasted world has come to nothing … Let me begin anew. Let me teach the finite to know its master. ‘I’d already been having thoughts along those lines when Patricia died …Dodge might have told you about that?”

She shook her head. “But I did see something about it…”

“In his Wikipedia entry, sure. Anyway, at the time I had nothing else going for me, and so I decided to spend a summer trying to build a life around that.”

“Emersonian self-reliance, you mean.”

“Yeah. The summer turned into a year, and during that year I met Elizabeth, and after that, well, the die was pretty much cast. Dodge had this property in northern Idaho, which he had acquired years before, during a phase of his life that I believe is also covered pretty well in the Wikipedia article.”

Olivia smiled at the polite evasion, and Jake seemed to draw confidence from her reaction. Olivia said, “As I understand it, this was the southern terminus of his … route. Or whatever you want to call it. Just a few miles south of the Canadian border. But within reach of the U.S. highway network.”

“Exactly. But it also just happens to be one of the most beautiful places you can imagine: the head of a little valley, just where the land gets flat enough to build on and cultivate, but only a few minutes’ walk from mountains full of wildlife and waterfalls, huckleberries and wildflowers.”

“You make it sound marvelous.”

“When I got off the bus in Bourne’s Ford — which is the closest town — an old man told me ‘Welcome to God’s country.’ I thought it was kind of hokey, but once I had found my way up the valley to Dodge’s property, well, then I understood. At first Elizabeth and I were just living in a backpacking tent. I wrote to Dodge and asked him if he wouldn’t mind my trying to improve the place a little, and so we began to build, and things just happened.”

“But where does the whole Christian right-wing thing enter into it? What’s that about?”

Jake’s blissful expression became somewhat guarded. “When we had children, religion came back into our lives, as it does for many people, and Elizabeth has been my pathfinder as far as that is concerned. For me it’s about being part of a community that is not based just on geographical proximity or money, but on spiritual values. There are no cathedrals in the mountains. You create your own church just as you hunt or grow your own food, split your own firewood. And just like those things, it might seem simple and rude to people who live in places with cathedrals and schools of theology.”

“What about the politics?”

He considered it for a moment. The look on his face was a bit hopeless, as if he despaired of ever explaining it to a cosmopolitan outsider like Olivia. “Again,” he quoted, “‘behold the boasted world has come to nothing … let me begin anew.’ What you’re seeing isn’t politics. It’s the absence of politics. It’s us trying to live in a way where we never have to put up with politics and politicians again. That means that when the politicians come after us, try to interfere with our lives, we have to defend ourselves, with passive and nonviolent measures when we can, but, failing that…”

“With guns?”

“We take full advantage of our 2A rights.”

“2A?”

“Second Amendment.”

“Are you carrying a gun now?”

“Of course I am. And I’ll bet there’s ten other people within a hundred feet of us who are doing the same. But you’d never be able to guess who by looking around.” For Olivia had instinctively begun looking around. She did not see any obvious pistol-packers. But she did catch sight of Richard and John, who had fallen into conversation near the store’s exit and were looking at them significantly.

“Looks like we are leaving,” Olivia said, beginning to get up.

“Come and visit us,” Jake blurted out.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know it’s out of the way. You may never come within five hundred miles of Prohibition Crick, unless you’re flying over it. But if you do, I invite you to come up into our little valley and stay with us. Sincerely. You’ll see. It won’t be weird. It won’t be uncomfortable. No one will be rude to you for being foreign, or not looking like us. You’ll enjoy it. We won’t try to convert you.”

“That is very kind of you,” she said, “and it actually sounds like something I might rather enjoy.”

“Good.”

“Now I just need an excuse to visit — what? Spokane?”

“Or Elphinstone. Or Richard’s Schloss. There’s lots of nice places within a day’s drive.”

OLIVIA WAS TOUCHED by Richard’s including her in the reunion of the three brothers, until she reflected that Richard was anything but a sentimental fool and that he must have done it for tactical reasons. After that, she only pretended to be touched. She told the Forthrasts she could see plainly enough that they had things to discuss. And Olivia had an investigation to pursue. So she parted ways with them at the bookstore and went back to the FBI offices to resume the NAG investigation.

She was still at work late that night, waiting for things to open up in London so that she could confer with some of her colleagues there and suggest some leads for them to pursue while she slept. Her mobile rang and she saw Richard’s name on its screen. “Just calling to check in,” Richard explained. An awkward pause followed as she waited for him to go on. But then she understood that he was really just trying to find out whether she had unearthed any leads, found any scrap of hope, during the hours since he’d last seen her. She could only mumble corporate-sounding buzzwords: drilling down, expanding the envelope, going into the corners of the search space. If those phrases sounded as bad to Richard as they did to her, it was a wonder he didn’t just borrow his brother’s sidearm and put himself out of his misery.

Richard informed her that he and John and Jake had spent the entire day sitting around his condo in a helpless and despondent condition, “driving each other crazy,” and that rather than waste any more time thus, they had agreed that they would leave town first thing in the morning, flying direct to Elphinstone so that they could drive one another crazy in the more beauteous environment of Schloss Hundschüttler. Olivia, who had quite enjoyed the drink in the cerulean-collar bar, expressed sincere regret that she would not get another opportunity to see him. But data were now coming in thick and fast from all those resources and scary-smart people in D.C., and since she had devoted much of the preceding day to complaining, albeit politely, about the lack of progress, she could not very well leave the office at this time to go and have another beer with the decidedly irrelevant Mr. Forthrast.

And after that, another twenty-four hours blew by as if it were nothing. It must have been because she was working now, or, like a cerulean-collar worker, putting on an ironical performance of work, and when people worked, time went by fast.

MI6 higher-ups were asking her to supply daily updates on the progress of the NAG, and before going to bed she wrote one that she did not enjoy writing at all. All day she had, in her mind, been “making progress” according to some artificial metric of what that meant: emails read and written, databases scanned, checklists ticked off, images pondered over. But since none of that work had actually led to the identification of the business jet in question, or to any evidence whatsoever that it had entered the United States, it was only progress in a negative sense. Another day of such progress and the NAG would be dead and buried, and she would be on a flight back to London.

And so as she lay awake in bed in her hotel room, her mind wandered north across the Canadian border, all of a hundred miles from here.

It wasn’t as if they hadn’t discussed this. Canada was bloody enormous, of course. Everyone knew it, but it never really sank in until one spent time looking at the maps. British Columbia alone was one-eighth the size of the whole Lower Forty-Eight. But they hadn’t been able to construct a sensible narrative as to why Jones, given his own personal business jet, would choose to land it there. Nothing against Canada, of course, which all agreed was a perfectly lovely country, but there simply wasn’t anything in it that would make for a sufficiently juicy target to make the journey worth it for a man like Jones. If Canada had been selling arms to Israel and pounding Pakistan with drone strikes, Jones would take delight in knocking over the CN Tower or car-bombing a hockey game, but as matters stood he would have to get into the United States or else make a laughingstock of himself.

Getting across that border at a legitimate crossing would, of course, be out of the question. He would have to sneak across somewhere. And so if he were barreling south in a business jet, flying below the radar or else shadowing a passenger plane, pulling up short and setting it down north of the border would be nonsensical.

But, but, but. Plans didn’t always go perfectly. It was a mistake to get in the habit of thinking of Jones as a superman. Perhaps he’d run short of fuel. Perhaps something had gone wrong en route and forced them to truncate the journey. Both hypotheses were sound. But both brought the NAG into the realm of free-form speculation. Every clever analyst in the CIA and MI6 could probably spend the next year dreaming up scenarios along such lines, none of which could be disproved, all of which were, therefore, equally worthless.

The next day was Friday, the beginning of her third full day in Seattle and, she suspected, her last. The FBI agents and the analysts in D.C. would happily work through the weekend and expect her to do the same, but her early-morning emails from London clearly suggested that if she had not, by the end of the day, been able to dredge up even a single shred of evidence in support of the NAG, then perhaps her talents could be put to other uses.

She still had intelligence contacts up in Vancouver: the nice people she had occasionally taken tea with during her “spy Disneyland” years at the university there. She reached them and began doing a little bit of gardening around the idea of the SNAG, the Shortened North American Gambit; and when they did not turn her down flat, she began to push on it. Her methods were utterly mendacious. When talking to Canadians, she suggested that their national security was being given short shrift by Yanks who believed that nothing north of the border really mattered; and when talking to Brits, she made lots of reference to the frightfully clever American analysts and all of the whiz-bang technology they’d used to search for evidence.

UNDER A VAST blue sky that offered generous space for lively cumulus clouds to gambol and clash, the double-outrigger boat slid southward with little more than a faint burbling noise of bow wave against hull planks, and the occasional slap as the sharp prow reached out over a breaker and dropped into the trough behind it. The coastline to port gradually became more settled-looking, with radio towers breaking the profile of the coastal hills and occasional villages: mosaics of brightly colored tarps and awnings right along the waterfront, and birds’ nests of slender brown poles woven among frail pilings in the water before them and festooned with green fishnets. Hilltops had been denuded of trees in some kind of draconian logging campaign and left covered with a khaki-colored pelt of low vegetation gashed with eroded gullies that had stained the formerly white beaches below them with shit-colored muck. A point came when they could no longer remember the last time they had been unable to see any buildings along the shore, and then they rounded a small headland, a beat-up prominence of brown rock shaped like a clenched fist, and came in view of a town of some size: a crescent-shaped beach, still several miles ahead of them, lined with buildings as much as eight stories high, which they gaped at as if they were lifelong jungle dwellers, and, nearer to hand, the usual agglomeration of smaller habitations and makeshift open-air markets along the waterfront, interrupted in the middle by a big pier reaching out into the sea and connected by hinged spans of diamond-tread steel to a facility on the shore that was obviously a ferry terminal. Obviously, anyway, to Yuxia and Marlon, who saw them all over the place in their part of the world, and easy enough for Csongor to figure out even though he had been raised in a landlocked country. The road leading into it was wide, and congested just now with several buses and some smaller vehicles. The boatman gestured out to sea, drawing their attention to a larger vessel that was lumbering up the coast from the south, wreathed in a black nimbus of smoke: a passenger ferry from Manila. This explained the crowd of vehicles that had gathered at the terminal.

The crew struck the sails as the skipper got the motor started again, and a few moments later the boat’s prow was knifing into the sand of the beach, and local boys ranging from toddlers to teenagers were running up to it and putting on a great cheerful pantomime of being helpful, perhaps in the hope of earning, or at least receiving, tips. Marlon and Yuxia and Csongor vaulted over the gunwale into warm, knee-deep water and sloshed ashore and then went through an interminable ceremony of smiling and handshaking and nodding and good-byeing, which used up almost all of the time remaining before the large ferry pulled into the terminal. Finally they disengaged themselves and walked up the beach, followed by a fascinated crowd of youths helloing them, and clambered up a low seawall of broken-up concrete rubble and into the paved area before the terminal. The temperature had gone up by ten degrees, and suddenly they were all perspiring. For the first time in weeks, the smells of crowded human places — charcoal and diesel, incompletely treated sewage, cigarette smoke, garlic — came into their nostrils. Marlon raised the question of whether they should just get aboard that ferry right now and ride it into Manila, which was a place where he reckoned he could make connections with his cousins. But a look at the schedule told them that it would not be departing for some hours yet, and they had all seen, on their way in, that row of buildings along the beach south of here, which showed every sign of being hotels. Since they had no real plan and were in no particular hurry, they agreed to ride a bus into the town and find hotel rooms, which would undoubtedly be cheaper here than in the metropolis, and see if this beach town sported any Internet cafés where they might (if Marlon was to be believed) reap enough gold to pay for suites at the Manila Hotel and purchase first-class tickets to whatsoever destination they chose. So they merged with the crowd streaming off the ferry — perhaps a couple of hundred people all told — and tried to sort out which bus they should get on.

Among those passengers was a far higher proportion of Caucasians than one would expect in a somewhat remote provincial town, and it seemed reasonable to guess that they were headed for the hotels along the beach. Most of them acted as if they’d been here before and knew where they were going. These headed, not surprisingly, for the larger buses idling before the terminal. The smaller vehicles — colorful, largely homemade van/bus hybrids — drew a clientele consisting exclusively of Filipinos. Csongor overheard a white man speaking in English as he shouldered his way across a current of passengers toward a bus, and so caught up with him and asked him whether that bus was going to the hotel district. The man turned and looked him up and down carefully, then informed him, none too warmly, that it was so. Csongor nodded back to Marlon, who stood head and shoulders above most of the crowd, and Marlon relayed the news to Yuxia, who was lost in it, and they followed Csongor up the stairs and onto the bus.

It smelled of perfume, diesel, and cigarettes. At least half of the people on the bus were white. But it was now obvious that this population was crazily out of whack demographically: 100 percent of the white persons were males, and most of them were over fifty. They tended to dress as if they thought they were going on some sort of safari, and they liked to wear sunglasses even when they were sitting behind tinted windows on the bus. Their English was accented in a way that Csongor could not place at first. His first guess was that they were British, but that wasn’t quite right. “These dudes are from Oz,” Yuxia said, after she and Csongor and Marlon had crammed themselves together into the rearmost row of seats. When that made no impression, she explained, “Australia. Or maybe New Zealand.” Apparently she knew this because of her experience dealing with backpackers in her former life. So Csongor gazed up the bus’s aisle at the Australians-or-maybe-New-Zealanders and tried to figure out what was going on. Maybe some sort of trade convention — a batch of retired plumbers or jackaroos, or something, who had commandeered a block of hotel rooms for a week of very inexpensive fun in the sun. But it didn’t feel that way. None of these men was acquainted, none talked to another — which perhaps explained why the guy Csongor had accosted had given him such a look. They tended not to sit next to each other on the bus. Instead, each sat alone, or else shared a seat with a young Filipino woman. The demographics of the bus’s Filipina population were just as crazy: all female, every one of them either quite young or well into middle age. The young ones could be mistaken for women in their twenties because of the way they were dressed and made up, but on closer inspection seemed to be in their late or even middle teens. Some of them seemed to be on their own, but most were accompanied, though at a distance, by mature women, old enough to be their mothers, who, by and large, were making no strenuous effort to seem glamorous.

All these impressions sunk in over the course of a fifteen-minute ride to the waterfront district that they had glimpsed from the boat. Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia all stared fixedly ahead, as if each was afraid to make eye contact with the others and reveal what was going through his or her mind. When the bus pulled up to a terminal in front of a hotel, they waited until it had nearly emptied out, and then got up as one and marched down the aisle with Yuxia sandwiched closely between Csongor and Marlon. No discussion, no exchange of looks, had been necessary to decide upon that arrangement. When Csongor presented himself in the exit of the bus, blocking most of its door as he paused at the top of the steps, he was greeted by the sight of half a dozen Filipina girls looking up at him with widely varying levels of enthusiasm: some flashing big smiles, others pouting and bored or even openly hostile. But as he came down the steps and it became obvious that he was being followed by a petite Asian female who was, in turn, being followed by an Asian man, they all seemed to jump to the same conclusion, and they turned their backs on him and drifted away in the direction of other buses that were pulling in.

And yet it was an orderly place, and none of them felt any particular sense that they had stepped into a slum. To Csongor it felt very little different from Xiamen. The built environment was cheaply constructed three-to six-story buildings jammed in next to one another to form contiguous blocks, separated by crowded streets and fronted by a mixture of colorful signs and makeshift antitheft measures. It was, in other words, the classic streetscape of emerging Asian economies, and the only thing that made it unusual was that the signs were in English. Or, farther from the main drag, a hybrid of English and something that he did not recognize.

There was a strong argument for getting the hell out of there and taking the next ferry to Manila, but Csongor had become fixated on the idea that, only a few yards away, looming above them, were a large number of reasonably modern hotel rooms with beds and showers. It was anyone’s guess what they’d have in the way of telephones, but on the opposite side of the waterfront drive, facing the row of hotels, he was able to count three Internet cafés in the space of a single block. So, without much discussion, the three gravitated in the direction of the hotel that seemed largest and newest, and presently found themselves in its dark and cramped lobby, being evaluated by young females in tight dresses who were lounging on the few available seats, as they checked in to a room. The plan at first was to get one room for Csongor and Marlon and another for Yuxia, but halfway through the check-in process, when it became evident that the rooms were going to be situated on different floors, Yuxia changed her mind and announced that she would be sleeping on the floor or the sofa of Marlon and Csongor’s room. Which meant, of course, that she would have a bed and Marlon or Csongor would sleep on the floor. So they got only one room. As it happened, this brought the price down low enough that they were able to pay for it using American dollars from Zula’s wallet, and thereby avoid using Csongor’s credit card. Csongor had no idea whether any authorities — Chinese, Hungarian, or otherwise — had put a trace on his card, but still it seemed wisest not to use it unless he had to.

The room was up on the fourth floor, small and dark, with stained shag carpet, smelling of tobacco, alcohol, and sex. Yuxia stormed directly to the window and opened it as far as it would go — about six inches — to let in a bit of a sea breeze.

It seemed as though the shower would be busy for a while, and so Csongor went back down to the street and walked to a bureau de change that he had noticed earlier and changed all of the euros from his wallet and the Canadian dollars from Peter’s into local currency. He was slightly offended, but hardly surprised, that they would not accept Hungarian forints. He also ducked into four different Internet cafés and found them well patronized by Caucasian males who were generally using them to look at dirty pictures. They varied in size, quality of equipment, hours of operation, and general level of friendliness. Only one of them, NetXCitement! claimed to be open twenty-four hours, which Csongor thought might be useful given that the evening was already wearing on and they would probably be busy, for a few hours yet, getting cleaned up and fed and clothed.

He bought some Chinese food from a stall on the street and took it up to the room, trying to fight back the almost overpowering urge to rip the garlic-scented containers open and plunge his face into them. A hand-lettered DO NOT DISTURB! sign was up on the door of the room, held in place by the door having been slammed shut on it. Csongor opened the door, brought the food in, then went back and carefully replaced the sign. “Why do we need this?” he asked Yuxia, who was sitting on one of the beds with a towel wrapped around her body just below the armpits. Marlon was still finishing up in the bathroom.

“Hos,” she announced, “keep coming around to ask if we want anything.” Making air quotes around the final two words.

Csongor felt as if he should be abjectly apologizing in the name of every white male who had ever lived, but he didn’t know quite where to begin. He still had not quite gotten his mind around the nature of this place and what went on here — particularly the middle-aged ladies, who seemed to be acting in approximately the same role as pimps, but who didn’t seem like professionals. They seemed almost like chaperones. But singularly ineffectual ones.

“I’m sorry that this is the first place outside of China that you have ever seen,” Csongor said. “It’s not all like this. Someday I will take you to Budapest and show you around. Very, very different.”

“First we have to get the eff out of here,” Yuxia pointed out.

“I got some local money,” Csongor said. “Enough to buy this.” He nodded at the food, whose aroma, by now, had drawn Marlon out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “We can all get some cheap clothes and pay for maybe one more night here.”

“Aren’t you going to get in touch with your mother?” Yuxia asked, sounding a bit shocked. “Can’t she send you money?”

Csongor considered it. You would think that by this time he and Yuxia and Marlon would know everything there was to know about one another, but the rigors of the voyage had left little time for getting acquainted; Yuxia knew that Csongor’s father was deceased, but little else about his family. “My mother is a nice lady with high blood pressure who has little strokes all the time. I will send her a note saying I’m out of the country on business, but I can’t possibly tell her what has been going on — it would be like throwing her off a bridge. My brother is in Los Angeles working on his dissertation and I talk to him maybe four times a year.”

Yuxia seemed taken aback that any family could be so small and poorly organized.

“What I really want to do is some research,” Csongor said. “I want to see if there is any information about a black, English-speaking Islamic terrorist whose code name or real name might be Jones.”

I’d like you to have a look at the pistol that Mr. Jones is holding up to my neck, Zula had said on the pier.

“For all we know,” Csongor went on, “there are pictures of Mr. Jones up on the Internet, and if I can identify him by name, then I could consider going to the authorities and telling them ‘So-and-so was in Xiamen a couple of weeks ago and he has a hostage.’”

“Which authorities?” Marlon asked.

“I have no idea,” Csongor said.

“Whoever cares,” Marlon suggested.

They dove into the food, almost literally, and did not speak much for a while. It was the finest meal of Csongor’s life, and he cursed himself for not having bought ten times as much of it.

“Do you want to get in touch with your family, Yuxia?” Csongor asked, when he was able to speak again. This created a pang that was obvious on her face and that left both of her companions somewhat aghast. “It is all I think about,” she said eventually, “but I want to wait until we are somewhere that feels safer.”

Csongor went into the bathroom and found Yuxia’s and Marlon’s damp clothes strung up all over the place. All of them had been wearing the same garments for two weeks, rinsing them occasionally in salt water. He turned on the shower and climbed in fully clothed, using bar soap to squeeze lather in and out of the fabric, then stripped down and left it all on the floor of the tub while he washed himself, letting the soapy water run off his body and down into the clothing, treading on it with his feet. Finally he spent a minute squeezing rinse water through them, then turned off the shower and began toweling himself off. He was a hairy man, a living advertisement for the body waxing industry, and it seemed as though his pelt was capable of holding a liter of water. He wrung out his clothing as best he could and hung it up wherever he could find a place, but despaired of its ever getting dry. But under the sink was a hair dryer stashed on a little ledge, which he pulled out and used to dry his underwear, then his trousers — which he had long ago cut off at the knees to make into shorts — and then his shirt.

After he was dressed, Yuxia and then Marlon rotated through the bathroom, drying out their clothes and putting them on, and then they went downstairs and across the street to NetXCitement! where they devoted a little time to getting themselves situated. The standards and practices here were radically different from what prevailed in a Chinese wangba, and this took Marlon a bit of getting used to. Here there was no need to show ID, and there were no PSB cops hanging around to keep an eye on things. The place might be large by the standards of this provincial town but it was tiny compared to a Chinese wangba; it had no more than twenty terminals, plus counter space where perhaps another twenty patrons could plug in their own personal laptops. And instead of being filled with Chinese teenagers mostly playing games, it played host to a smattering of old white men mostly looking at racy pictures.

Having negotiated these cultural rapids, Marlon claimed the fastest and most expensive computer in the place, on the grounds that running T’Rain consumed a lot of memory and processing power, and Csongor rented a run-of-the-mill one nearby.

There was yet more culture shock as Marlon discovered that T’Rain was not even installed on his computer and that he would have to download it, a procedure that in some precincts would have consumed a great many hours. Here it took twenty minutes. For whatever reason, NetXCitement! had an extremely fast Internet connection.

Meanwhile Csongor had been thinking about Yuxia’s predicament. “I think I know of a way you could send a message to your family without giving away our location,” he said.

He had been clicking around on the computer he’d rented and found that it was so riddled with spyware, trojans, and viruses as to be nearly unusable. And so he had begun a project of rebuilding the machine from scratch. He divided its drive into two partitions, a big one and a small one, and reinstated its existing bootleg copy of Windows, and all of its other bootleg software, viruses, and so on onto the big partition. Then he set about downloading Linux onto the small partition. This entailed a seemingly endless number of reboots, during which he had plenty of time to explain matters to Yuxia. “We’ll get Tor running on this thing,” he said. “It will anonymize all of our IP traffic, provided we use the right browser … as long as you don’t come out and tell your family where we are, no one will be able to trace us using IP addresses.”

The news that she’d soon be able to check in with her family had powerfully affected Yuxia. Csongor was preoccupied for a time with explaining to her why the procedure was taking so long, why he had to keep rebooting the machine, why he insisted on opening up many small files filled with cryptic Unix jargon and making small edits to them, what it meant to get Tor configured and installed. When he finally got the machine up and running a fully secure, firewalled, anonymized installation of Linux — a feat for which he might have charged a commercial client lots of euros — he handed the machine over to her and then got up and strolled five paces over to where Marlon was just in the final phases of getting T’Rain online.

“How does it work?” Csongor asked. “Your character goes to this place — ”

“He has been there the whole time,” Marlon said, “waiting in his HZ for me to log in again.”

“Okay, but anyway he has vassals?”

“About a thousand of them.”

“Wow.”

“Only twenty, thirty actual players,” Marlon said, “members of the da G shou. But each one has a few toons — ”

“Toons?”

“Characters. And they have vassals — low-level toons who are basically nothing more than robots running around the world. Anyway. I am the LL–Liege Lord — of all of these. Any gold that they have hidden, I can see, I can pick up — it belongs to me.”

“So your toon can go to this place — ”

“Torgai.”

“Yeah. Where you live. Where the Troll lives.”

“He doesn’t have to go there. He’s there already. His HZ is in a cave, in the middle of it.”

“Okay, so he can pop out of his cave and run around and see gold that would be invisible to anyone else. He can pick that gold up and put it in his bag.”

“Maybe. If he can go outside at all.” Marlon had, Csongor noted, opened a browser window instead of logging immediately into T’Rain. He seemed to be scanning Chinese-language chat rooms. Csongor could not read the text, but it was obvious from the artwork surrounding it that this chat room was all about T’Rain; it was some kind of board where players hung out to exchange information and opinion, and the Chinese text was studded here and there with “LOL,” “FFS,” “w00t,” and other staples of text messages.

“Why would you not be able to go outside?”

“Someone might be waiting for me. Or the whole place might be conquered by an army who came to grab all the gold. They would pounce on me as soon as I came out of the cave.”

“Can’t you hide yourself? With invisibility spells or something?”

“It depends on their power. If you let me read for a minute, I can find out what has been happening around this place.”

Having been given the brush-off, Csongor went back over to check in on Yuxia, who was composing a message in a browser window. He was eager for her to finish so that he could do some anonymous browsing of his own, but she was taking her time about it. As well she might. How would she go about explaining herself to her family?

“Remember,” he suggested, “even if the cops in China can’t trace your location, they can read your email. So don’t tell them anything you wouldn’t want the cops to know.”

“I am not stupid,” Yuxia said levelly.

Doubly brushed off, Csongor drifted back to Marlon, who seemed to have made short work of his reconnaissance. “We are lucky,” he said. “It is all total chaos there. No one has hegemony. Perfect for me.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“I can fight off bandits and raiders,” he said coolly, “just not an army.”

With that he launched the T’Rain application proper and typed in a username and a password. A gallery of characters was displayed on the screen, all blinking and breathing and scratching themselves. Beneath each one was a parchment-textured scroll labeled, apparently, with its name. Most of these were written in Chinese. Csongor’s eye was drawn to one of these, which he had seen before, depicted in the original ransom note. It was a troll. Its name, neatly printed in Latin letters, was REAMDE.

Marlon double-clicked on Reamde. The image grew to fill the screen, taking on resolution and three-dimensionality as the others faded and flattened. Reamde spun around, turning his back on them. They were now looking over the troll’s shoulder. He had been sleeping in a cave and had just now stood up to look about his surroundings. In a quick series of preprogrammed movements, Reamde pulled on clothes, armor, weapons, and boots and slung a bag over his shoulder. Then, responding to commands from Marlon’s fingers, he broke into a trot, headed down the cave toward the exit: a starry night sky, showing through a rough aperture. A few moments later Reamde stepped out into the world of T’Rain.

Day 18

“Bingo,” Corvallis said. “He is on the system. He just stepped out of his cave. It looks like he’s going to be active for a while.”

It was 8:23 A.M. Richard was standing next to his Land Cruiser beside the runway at Elphinstone’s tiny airport, watching a Cessna climb into the sky and bank south. He had just stuffed John and Jake into it and handed a couple of ancient C-notes to its pilot.

Just twenty-four hours ago, John and Richard and Jake had landed here. A single day of sitting around had been quite enough, so John had volunteered that he might rent a car and drive Jake back across the border and spend a little time with Jake’s family in Idaho. Richard — hoping it didn’t seem as if he were rushing his brothers out the door — had called a bush pilot of his acquaintance and made it happen on about thirty minutes’ notice. The roar of the Cessna’s takeoff run had drowned out the sound of Richard’s phone ringing, but he’d felt it vibrating against his butt and whipped it out moments before it had gone to voice mail.

“Do we know where he is?” Richard asked.

“Still working on that, but we think the Philippines.”

“That would kind of make sense,” Richard mused. “The shit hits the fan in China, he gets out of the country, lies low for a while, finally pops his head up when he needs cash.” The Cessna was just a faintly droning mote in a cloudy pink sunrise. He let his bottom slam down into the ragged seat of the Land Cruiser.

“Shit,” Richard said, glancing back and forth helplessly between his phone and the gearshift lever. “I can’t drive stick and talk on the phone.”

“Probably just as well,” Corvallis mused, “on those twisty mountain roads.”

“Just keep track of what he’s up to, okay? Don’t do anything that would spook him.”

“I’m not even logged in,” C-plus said. “Just tracking him with database queries.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Mostly looking for his friends. Putting a posse together.”

“So that he can go and gather gold,” Richard said. “I’ll be at the Schloss in half an hour. Call me if that seems warranted.” He hung up, stuck his phone into his jacket pocket, then opened the door and dumped tepid coffee out of his travel mug and got that stowed. There was some crap on the dashboard; he swept it off onto the floor, where it was going to end up anyway. Then he peeled out of the parking lot and began to haul ass in the direction of the Schloss.

CSONGOR, WHO WAS no T’Rain player, was struck by how little screen real estate was actually devoted to viewing the world of the game. From what little he could see, it was quite a beautiful place, with highly detailed, realistically rendered landforms, scattered clouds drifting overhead illuminated by a full moon, and trees whose leaves and branches stirred convincingly in the wind. A bat was orbiting in the clear space before the cave’s entrance, and crickets, or something, were singing in the undergrowth. But he had to perceive all these things through a sort of rectangular porthole, not much larger than his hand, in the middle of a screen that was otherwise claimed by windows: one showing a full-length portrait of Reamde himself, with an array of statistics plotted in diverse colorful, ever-fluctuating widgets. Large-scale and small-scale maps showing where he was in the world. A sort of radar plot with bogeys of different colors moving about on it. Three different chat windows in which conversations, 75 percent in Chinese and 25 percent in English, streamed upward in fits and starts, like steam rising from boiling pots. Gridded displays that apparently depicted the inventory of weapons, potions, and magical knickknacks that Reamde was carrying on his person. A sort of roster, tall and skinny, running the entire height of the monitor on its far left, each entry consisting of a thumbnail portrait of a T’Rain character; the character’s name, sometimes in Chinese and sometimes in European glyphs; and various fields of data that, Csongor guessed, indicated whether that person was logged on, where they were, and what they were up to. Perhaps three dozen entries were packed into the list, and all but three of them were grayed out. Even as Csongor was noticing this, Marlon moved the cursor to the top of the list and clicked a column heading that caused it to be rearranged: the few who were shown in full color were all moved up to the top. He clicked on one of them and began typing in a pop-up window that suddenly appeared next to the character’s icon. The process of typing in Chinese was completely mysterious to Csongor; as Marlon’s fingers hopped all over the keyboard, a little window flashed onto the screen as some piece of software tried to guess what Marlon was trying to say and suggested possible completions. The sheer quantity and variety of data being rammed into Marlon’s face by, Csongor guessed, at least a thousand discrete user-interface widgets on this huge screen, was overwhelming to his tired brain. But Marlon seemed to have been banking his energies during their sea voyage and was at last getting an opportunity to do what he did best.

A red bogey had been approaching on the radar display and Csongor had been worried that Marlon, preoccupied with his chat windows, was not noticing it. But then he fired off a complex command key combination that caused almost all of the windows to vanish, leaving only the ones that were relevant during combat. Something happened very fast, making no sense at all to Csongor, whose ideas as to what video-game combat should look like were, he guessed, hopelessly old-fashioned. The few times he had tried to play popular video games in Internet cafés in Budapest he had been vanquished in microseconds by opponents who, to judge from the nature of their taunting, were very young, possibly still in the single digits. Csongor now got the sense that Marlon was one of those kids who had grown up without losing any of his skills. In any case, the foe who had been sneaking up on Reamde was dead, and his corpse looted, in less time than it would have taken Csongor to reach out and get a sip of coffee from a cup next to the keyboard, and then all the windows verged back on the screen and Marlon resumed his chat.

Csongor had been assuming that absolute, respectful silence was the correct behavior for him to be engaging in, but Marlon seemed so adept at multitasking that this now seemed like ridiculous, fusty, Old World etiquette. “Getting in touch with the da G shou?” he asked.

“Yes,” Marlon said.

“So they are okay?”

“At least some of them.” He typed for a while. “They have been waiting.”

“For you?”

“For a way to get the money out.”

“How is that going to work, anyway?” For Csongor had learned enough to know that the da G shou all used self-sus accounts, which was to say that they were not linked to credit cards. This was convenient for Chinese kids just starting out, but made it harder to transfer profits out of the world.

“It can be arranged,” Marlon said. “There are money transfer agents who do it. Normally we work with ones in China but we can find others, anywhere in the world. They can send us money here, by Western Union.” Marlon looked up from the screen for the first time since he had logged in. “I saw a Western Union sign as we were coming in on the bus. It is only half a kilometer from here.”

“So tomorrow morning, when they open up, we could have cash waiting for us.”

“I could have cash waiting for me,” Marlon corrected him, “but I will be glad to share it with you and Yuxia.”

Csongor flushed slightly but kept on talking through his embarrassment: “What is the procedure?”

“Try to find some more of the da G shou and get them logged on,” Marlon said. “One of them can go looking for a foreign money transfer agent and the rest of us can create a raiding party and collect gold.”

“You have never dealt with non-Chinese money transfer agents before?”

“Why would we?” Marlon asked.

“Let me make some contacts,” Csongor proposed, looking over at the computer he had secured earlier. Yuxia had finished typing and now appeared to be web surfing. “I can probably find one in Hungary. If not there, then Austria.”

“Are those near — I don’t know the name — dot C H?”

It took Csongor a moment to put this together. Then he understood it as a reference to Internet domain names ending in “.ch.”

“Switzerland,” Csongor said. Confoederatio Helvetica.

“The place with the banks,” Marlon said.

“Yes, Switzerland is close to Austria and Hungary.”

“Try Switzerland,” Marlon suggested gently, then turned his attention back to the game; for at almost the same moment, two more creatures’ faces had flashed from gray to color and leaped to the top of the roster. Csongor had an image of teenaged boys all over south China — terrified refugees who had spent the last two weeks staying one step ahead of the cops, hiding out in flophouses or cadging spare beds from shirttail relatives in the country — receiving bulletins on their phones, sprinting to the nearest wangbas, slamming their arses into chairs, cracking their knuckles, and going into action.

Csongor moved toward Yuxia and looked over her shoulder. She had opened up a web browser and was looking at a Wikipedia page. The title of the article was “Abdallah Jones.” It sported a photograph of a man Csongor had once tried to shoot in the head on a pier in Xiamen.

“Motherfucker!” Csongor exclaimed.

Yuxia turned around slowly and looked at him. “Fate has given us a totally awesome foe,” she observed.

“Then we should do something totally awesome to him,” Csongor suggested. “In a bad way.”

“Not so easy, from the pervert capital of the world.”

She said it loudly. Faces bobbed up and popped around the edges of various computer monitors around the café, but Yuxia took no note of them. She had turned back to face the computer. Taking in some of Jones’s exploits, his death statistics, she shook her head convulsively. “This guy really sucks ass.”

“But you knew that,” Csongor said.

“No foolin’.”

RICHARD MADE NO friends during his drive through Elphinstone; but the dirty little secret of Canadians was that they drove like maniacs, so his speeding and light-running were not so far out of the norm as they might have been south of the border. The road that ran up the valley toward the Schloss had, in recent years, become a vector for sprawl and was now lined by the sorts of businesses that were excluded from the middle of town by its famously prim historic-preservation fatwa. But at the end of the day, Elphinstone wasn’t that big and could only support so many car dealerships and Tim Hortons, and so this kind of development petered out in the dead zone around the abandoned lumber mill. Beyond that the road funneled to two lanes and angled upward, then, a few miles later, began to wind like a snake and buck like a mule.

So it was inevitable that he would close in on the tail of a gigantic RV no more than thirty seconds after he’d reached that part of the road beyond which passing was completely out of the question. It was not quite the size of a semi. It had Utah plates. It needed a trip through the RV wash. Its back end was freckled with the usual bumper stickers about spending the grandchildren’s inheritance. And it was going all of about thirty miles an hour. Richard slammed on the brakes, turned on his headlights just to make it obvious he was there, and backed off to the point where he could see the rearview mirrors. Then he cursed the Internet. This sort of thing had never used to happen, because the road didn’t really lead anywhere; beyond the Schloss, it reverted to gravel and struggled around a few more bends to an abandoned mining camp a couple of miles beyond, where the only thing motorists could do was turn around in a wide spot and come back out again. But geocachers had been at work planting Tupperware containers and ammo boxes of random knickknacks in tree forks and under rocks in the vicinity of that turnaround, and people kept visiting those sites and leaving their droppings on the Internet, making cheerful remarks about the nice view, the lack of crowds, and the availability of huckleberries. Normally Richard and the Schloss’s other habitués would have at least another month of clear driving before those people began to show up, but these RVers had apparently decided to get a jump on the tourist season and be the first geocachers of the year to make it to the sites in question.

Richard allowed a decent interval of perhaps thirty seconds to pass, then laid on the horn, and kept laying it on until, less than a minute later, to his pleasant surprise, the RV’s brake lights came on and it eased its right wheels over onto the road’s meager shoulder at a place where it was only a little dangerous for him to pass. Not that anyone was ever coming the other way; but Richard had been taught the rudiments of passing in Iowa, where if you could not see an open lane all the way to the horizon, you bided your time. He barreled past the RV, and he would have rolled the window down and given the driver a friendly wave if he hadn’t been preoccupied. As it happened, he did not even look back at it; its driver was ensconced about thirty feet off the ground, and it was difficult to see into its bridge from where Richard was sitting.

Fifteen minutes later he was at the Schloss. He was feeling a powerful urge to get on the computer right away, but he figured he might be busy for a while, so he decided to get his affairs in order first. In normal times, he’d have done this in his private apartment, but this was the middle of Mud Month and no one was here. So he decided to make himself comfortable in the tavern, which had a huge screen that could be connected to a computer. Since the machine had been rigged up for use during Corporation 9592 retreats, it was powerful, fully up-to-date, connected to the Internet by a fat pipe, and assiduously maintained, from Seattle, by the IT department. Its audio outputs were plumbed into the tavern’s excellent sound system, and the seating in front of it consisted of very comfortable leather recliners and sofas. Richard raided the kitchen and stockpiled a few thousand calories’ worth of snacks and soft drinks, sending the Furious Muses into Condition Red. In his apartment he could have placated them by walking on the treadmill while playing, but the tavern was not so equipped. He deployed his laptop on a side table and got it hooked up to its charger. He made a last trip to the toilet. On his way out, he noticed a bucket that had been left under the counter by Chet or someone while tidying the place. Following an old instinct, he snatched this up and took it into the tavern with him, setting it next to the place where he would be playing. It had been a long time since he had played a game with such commitment that he needed to pee into a receptacle, and it might very well be overkill here. But he was alone in the Schloss, no one would ever know, he was a man in his fifties, and there were a lot of caffeinated beverages within easy reach.

He turned everything on and booted T’Rain. While it was starting up, he noticed an annoying gleam of window light on the screen and went over to drop the wooden blinds. Then, just for good measure, he went all around the room and dropped the blinds on all the windows. For the sun might have the bad manners to move around and shine in from other directions. As he was finishing, movement caught his eye outside, and he noticed the RV he’d passed earlier, creeping up the road, slowing down even more so that its occupants could admire a roadside view of the Schloss. He gave it the evil eye, trying to use some kind of ESP to tell them to get lost. Sometimes such people would come up the drive and want to enter the place and use the facilities. Richard didn’t care as long as staff were in the place to deal with them, but he could see it getting unpleasant in a hurry if affable, retired RVers with vast amounts of time on their hands managed to get a foot in the door. To his relief, the giant vehicle picked up speed, leaving the Schloss’s driveway behind.

“I’m strapping in,” he announced to Corvallis over a Bluetooth earpiece that he had just worried into the side of his head. He slammed down into a leather sofa, glanced around to be sure that all he might need was within arm’s reach, and pulled the wireless keyboard onto his lap.

“He’s still there,” C-plus answered, “assembling a war band.”

“How many so far?” Richard asked. But Corvallis’s answer, if there was one, was drowned out by a cataract of awesome fanfares, kettledrum solos, pipe organ chords, and pseudo-Gregorian chanting emerging from subwoofers, tweeters, flat-panel speakers, and other noise-making technologies arrayed all about Richard.

“I take it,” Corvallis finally said, when it seemed safe to crawl out from under his desk in Seattle, “that you are logging on as Egdod.”

“If ever there was a time…”

“You know that if the Troll gets the slightest hint that Egdod even knows of his existence…”

“Egdod isn’t even going to pick his nose until he has surrounded himself with every disguise and cloaking device known to our servers.”

“He’s really smart. And fast. I’ve watched him take down a few wandering bad guys. And the kids in his posse are every bit as formidable.”

“Ever make a raccoon trap?”

“No,” C-plus said. “I was told they carried rabies, and I couldn’t see why it would be desirable to catch one.”

“You drill a hole into a tree stump, or something, big enough to admit the raccoon’s hand. But you drive some nails in around the edge of the hole and bend their heads inward so that he has to thread his little paw between them to get it into the hole. Then you leave a piece of bait in the hole. The raccoon insinuates his hand into this thing and grabs the bait. But he can’t pull his hand out between the nails unless he lets go of it. He ends up trapped by his refusal to let go, you see.”

“Have you ever actually done that? I mean, I know you had a very rural childhood and everything, but…”

“Of course not,” Richard scoffed. “What the hell was I going to do with a rabid animal welded to a tree stump?”

“That’s why I was asking…”

“It probably doesn’t even work. It’s just a metaphor.” But Richard did not follow up on this statement because he had become rather preoccupied with setting up the many layers of shields and disguises and wards that Egdod needed in order to venture out of the house.

“So,” Corvallis finally said, “the application of the metaphor, I’m guessing, is as follows. Right now the Troll could log out and lose nothing. He’s like a raccoon who hasn’t put his hand into the stump yet. But it looks like he’s fixing to go out with his posse and Find and unHide a lot of the gold they’ve stashed around the Torgai. Then he’ll try to carry it out to a moneychanger. At that point, he’s like a raccoon who has grabbed the bait. If you attack him and he gets killed, or just logs out, he doesn’t get the money he needs.”

“You got it,” Richard said. “And so it’s at that moment that I’ll try to pin this little prick down for a minute and have a conversation with him.”

CSONGOR HAD ALWAYS done his best thinking while pacing irritably back and forth: a trait that probably explained why he had not performed up to his full potential in traditional academic settings. It served him well now. What Marlon was doing was fascinating. More for its intricacy, and for Marlon’s fierce attention to its microscopic details, than for what was actually happening on the screen. For Reamde had not moved more than a few virtual paces from the cave exit. In a way, Csongor could not take his eyes off it, but in another way he could not stand to watch for more than a minute or two at a time, and this led to pacing.

The other computer, the one with the clean Linux install and the anonymized Net connection, was five steps away. Csongor kept wandering back to it. Yuxia seemed to have established some kind of chat-room connection to someone she knew back in China and was carrying on a sporadic exchange of messages. This relieved a huge emotional burden she’d been carrying ever since the beginning of their adventure. But there was a lot of downtime during which she was able to surf the web for information on Abdallah Jones and (as her investigation continued, and she developed leads) Zula Forthrast and Richard Forthrast and, for that matter, Csongor himself and Csongor’s brother in L.A. She had probably never used an Internet connection that was not hobbled by the Great Firewall, and she was already finding it addictive.

Csongor almost had to resort to impoliteness to get her to relinquish the machine for a few minutes. Then he carried out some Google searches, looking for pages that contained both “Zula” and “Abdallah Jones.” He pulled up a few pages about terrorism in the Horn of Africa, making reference to the Red Sea bay and the Eritrean port after which Zula had been named, but nothing about Zula Forthrast.

So nothing had happened. No information had made it out into the public sphere yet that established any link between those two names. He tried Jones’s name in connection with Xiamen and found nothing. With Yuxia’s help he was able to find some news stories in the Chinese media about a gas explosion and a failed terrorist attack that had taken place in Xiamen on the morning in question, but none of these made any reference to Jones or Zula or any of the other people Csongor knew to have been involved. So there had been some sort of totally effective clampdown on news.

“A FLARE JUST went up,” said a familiar voice on the phone.

Olivia recognized him, after a moment’s disorientation, as “Uncle Meng,” presumably calling from London.

She was disoriented because she had been talking to Mounties in Vancouver and hadn’t expected London calling.

“Hello?”

“I’m here. Sorry,” Olivia said. “What sort of flare?”

“We have a new actor in the GWOJ,” said Uncle Meng, who had adopted Seamus Costello’s acronym for the struggle in which they all — MI6, FBI, Mounties, the Forthrast family — were jointly engaged.

“What’s the new actor doing?”

“Google searches linking names like Zula with names like Abdallah Jones. Xiamen. Csongor.”

“Who the hell is Csongor?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Uncle Meng, “which makes me wonder whether this new actor has inadvertently identified himself.”

“Where is the new actor?”

“No idea,” said Uncle Meng. “Whoever he is, he is savvy about computer security, has set himself up with a clean and well-defended Linux installation of extremely recent vintage, is using some kind of hacker software to anonymize his packets. So we can’t guess where he might be.”

“Is anything showing up on public sites?”

“Not that we’ve noticed.”

“So the new actor isn’t blabbing.”

“No. Just fishing. Looking around to see if anyone else knows what he knows. And so far I would say that the answer is no.”

“Is there any action you would like me to take?” Olivia asked.

“You’ve already helped by letting me know you have no idea who Csongor is,” said Uncle Meng. “If I need anything else, I’ll let you know.” And he rang off, which was good since another call was coming in from a number that, judging by area code and prefix, was in the Vancouver offices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Her cross-border telephonic activities had been a sort of repeat, in miniature, of what she had gone through during her first day or two in the United States: starting with people whose names she knew and whose telephone numbers she had, obtaining other names and numbers, blindly groping through labyrinthine org charts until she actually managed to establish relationships with people who didn’t think she was crazy and to whom she could divulge a bit of sensitive information. In contrast to the United States, with its Tower of Babel — like security/intelligence apparatus, Canada offered a straightforward one-stop shopping arrangement in the form of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There was also an intelligence agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but when they had got wind of the sorts of questions Olivia was asking, they had simply referred her to the Mounties, who were better equipped to answer.

As she had hoped, this call was from one Inspector Fournier, whom everyone seemed to think was the man she really ought to be talking to. She excused herself from the room where she had been going over aerial photographs with FBI agents and wandered out into an empty office nearby, gazing out the window over the blue waters of Elliott Bay — for it was a perfect spring day, the sky was clear, the mountains were out — and staring at, without really seeing, containerships being jockeyed around at the port. After some polite chitchat with Inspector Fournier, she asked for, and received, permission to use up a quarter of an hour of his valuable time and launched into a summary of the SNAG theory and its possible relevance to Inspector Fournier’s sphere of responsibilities.

AFTER THE INITIAL spate of Google searching, Csongor went into a deep funk for a couple of hours. All during the desperate voyage of Szélanya he had been imagining that, if he could only get to a computer with an Internet connection, he’d be able to make things happen. In retrospect, it had not been a realistic assumption at all. But it had given him a reason to keep going through the occasional typhoon.

They had never really decompressed from the voyage. That was the problem. If they had beached Szélanya in an isolated cove and spent a little while eating coconuts and swimming in limpid waters, Csongor might now be psychologically ready to pivot into whatever the hell was going to happen to them next. But when Szélanya had ground to a halt, Csongor had allowed himself to relax for all of about thirty seconds — and during those thirty seconds, virtually all their money had been stolen. Since then it had been nonstop action; and now he was learning that his precious Internet was completely useless in tracking down Zula.

He was taken by sleep as suddenly and as completely as a man being swept off a deck by a wave.

A FEW HOURS into the Troll hunt, Richard’s Bluetooth headset began to bleat out a pathetic low-battery warning. He severed the phone connection to Corvallis, which was becoming less and less useful as Richard got up to speed. Embedded in a complex of spells and disguises about twenty deep, he had made his way to the Torgai Foothills by actually flying there directly, eschewing the crowded ley line network, which would have forced him to emerge at a place where his character — or rather the disguised version of it — might be noticed. Here he was fighting certain ineluctable features of the rule system. He didn’t want it understood that Egdod was on the move, and so he had disguised himself as one Ur’Qat, a K’Shetriae warrior mage of much lesser powers — but still powerful enough to survive alone in the war-torn Torgai Foothills.

Another reasonable step might be to make himself invisible. Egdod was capable of putting up invisibility spells that almost no one in the game could penetrate. And yet there was always a small probability that such a spell might fail. This was one of the ways they kept the game interesting: low-level characters always had a chance to defeat high-level ones. Even an Egdod could be detected. Better to disguise himself first as the less powerful Ur’Qat, and then have Ur’Qat cast an invisibility spell. Any spell that Ur’Qat could cast would be much less puissant and hence much more likely to be penetrated than one of Egdod’s. So there was a good chance that when Ur’Qat rode the ley line into the Torgai, he’d be noticed, invisibility spell or no; and then he might be attacked outright or, what would probably be worse, be covertly followed as he went sneaking around after Reamde. And perhaps the person following him would be one of Reamde’s minions. Egdod could always get to the Torgai in a big hurry, if he decided that this was warranted; but all signs pointed to that Reamde was slowly and patiently effecting a battle plan that was going to stretch out over many hours. As long as that continued to be the case, Egdod would content himself with flying from his fortress to the Torgai. Even moving at supersonic velocity, this took a while. But during the flight, Richard had been able to refamiliarize himself with certain spells and magical items that might soon come in handy. And, at least until Richard’s Bluetooth headset had croaked, he’d been able to get updates from Corvallis and to learn something about the minions that Reamde was summoning from, it appeared, all over south China.

CSONGOR WOKE UP nagged by the vague sense that there was something useful he could be doing and, after a few moments, remembered what it was: he was supposed to be locating a T’Rain moneychanger, preferably in Switzerland, but potentially anywhere in the world outside of China. It was 3:41 A.M.; he had been sleeping upright in a chair for almost three hours. He looked over at Marlon and found him in exactly the same pose as before. Yuxia was sitting in front of the other computer, but she was nodding off. He tried to move, discovered his neck had gone stiff, devoted a minute to stretching himself out. Then he strolled over for a look over Marlon’s shoulder. He was astonished to discover that the troll Reamde still had not moved from the cave entrance. But it would be wrong to think that nothing had happened this whole time, for the roster window on the left side of the screen was now filled from top to bottom with character portraits in full color, each with its own little continually-fluctuating-and-updating status display. While Csongor had been sleeping Marlon had recruited several dozen other players to help him. Marlon slapped a function key, and the roster window expanded to fill most of the screen, then rearranged itself into a sort of hierarchical tree structure with Reamde ensconced at the top.

“Your org chart?” Csongor asked.

“Orc chart,” Marlon said.

INSPECTOR FOURNIER GOT back to Olivia at about three thirty in the afternoon, letting her know that they had conducted a simple search of police records and found nothing about weird private jet landings or roving bands of Middle Eastern terrorists. The only thing that had been flagged as even moderately peculiar was that a group of hunters had gone missing in north-central B.C., about ten days ago.

Forty-five minutes later — having made a quick raid on her hotel room to grab her stuff and check out — Olivia was northbound on Interstate 5, stopped almost totally dead in the inevitable Friday afternoon rush hour jam-up. But she was moving. She was moving, she was convinced, in the general direction of Abdallah Jones.

IN SOME RESPECTS, Abdallah Jones’s jihadists were so hapless that they almost — almost — aroused feelings of sympathy in Zula’s breast, exciting what little she had in the way of maternal instincts. But certain things they were quite good at and went about with commendable efficiency. One of those was camping out. And after more than a week of aimlessly wandering about the highways and byways of British Columbia in an RV, they were clearly so ready to camp out.

She had flattered herself that, as they drew closer to the Schloss, they’d move her up to the front of the RV and consult her for directions. But it seemed that they had scored a GPS from one of the many Walmarts they had raided during their wanderings and were now simply using it to zero in on the coordinates of the place where she had taken photographs of the collapsed mining structure a few weeks ago. They closed and locked the door of her cell so she’d not be a distraction; and so she spent the last few hours of the journey alone in the dark, running through the exercise program she had invented for herself and trying to guess their location from what few sensory cues penetrated the insulated walls of the room. They passed through a town; she guessed Elphinstone. They bought groceries; she guessed at the Safeway. Then they left town and began to ascend (her ears were popping) on a winding road. Almost certainly the one that ran up the valley toward the Schloss. Someone honked furiously at them for a while, then sped past; as a little joke to herself, she imagined it might be Uncle Richard. Then she suddenly knew with certainty that it must have been Uncle Richard.

They reached a place where the road became gravel and then shut off the RV’s engine. Nothing happened, from her point of view, for an hour; she could feel the suspension rocking as men climbed off, presumably going to reconnoiter. Muffled discussions were going on up ahead of her, and stuff was being unloaded. Almost had to be given that the RV had become so crammed with camping gear during the last week that it was difficult to move around in it.

Then she heard the sound she’d been waiting for ever since they’d constructed this prison cell and put her in it: the heavy clinking of the chain as someone dug it out of whatever storage bin it had been heaped in.

Scrabbling at the door. Then it was kicked open. Zakir — the big soft-bodied Vancouverite — was standing there, eyeglasses slightly askew, the chain all piled up in his arms. Shaving and bathing had not been such a priority with him these last several days.

“I’ll be needing your neck,” he announced, with elaborate, sarcastic fake-politeness.

CSONGOR DIDN’T HAVE the faintest idea how to go about making contact with a T’Rain money-laundering specialist, but he supposed that the direct approach couldn’t hurt. He began generating some appropriate Google queries and soon enough began to get a sense for the correct buzzwords and search terms.

The problem turned out to be that none of these people had websites per se. They were post-web and post-email. You got in touch with them by catching up with their toons in T’Rain.

So Csongor began downloading the Linux version of T’Rain to this computer; and while that was going on, he began reading up on the game, trying to learn some of the basics so that he would not be utterly helpless when he entered the world.

The download process was a very slick one that had its own theme music, which blasted out of the machine’s speakers for a few moments before Csongor figured out how to turn down the volume. Marlon noticed it. “Are you going in?” he asked. He sounded a bit uneasy.

“To find moneychangers.”

“But you don’t have a toon.”

“That is true, Marlon.”

“You’ll have to start a new one. That’s not going to work. He’ll just get killed over and over again.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“My homeboys and I used to make our living selling toons to guys like you.”

“They weren’t like me.”

“Anyway, I’ll lend you one for free.”

“WE HAVE VERY probably identified Csongor,” came the voice of Uncle Meng through Olivia’s phone, with no preliminary helloing or chitchat about the weather. “Your email was helpful.” For Olivia, following their earlier conversation, had sent Uncle Meng an email describing the contents of Zula’s paper towel codex.

Nothing then for a few moments. An aid truck, lights flashing, was trying to force its way through the traffic jam, laying on its horn and obliging drivers to creep aside.

“Everything all right?” Uncle Meng asked.

“Fine. I’m on a freeway traveling much more slowly than walking pace.” She had been on the road for half an hour and had not even passed out of the city limits of Seattle. “What did you find?”

“Csongor Takács, twenty-five years old, freelance Internet security consultant and sysadmin, based out of Budapest. Known connections to organized crime figures. Has not logged on to any of his usual servers, Facebook, et cetera, in three weeks.”

Olivia probably should have been thinking about something else, but she was wondering whether she should call Richard. For the one detail she couldn’t get out of her head was that this Csongor had been doing Google searches on Zula’s name. He knew who she was. But he didn’t know where she was. Was it reading too much into a Google search to say that he was worried about her?

That he was, in other words, a good guy?

“Where does this get us?” she asked.

“Like all the other intelligence concerning the Russians, it gets us nowhere,” Uncle Meng said. Not harshly. Sounding a bit regretful. “It is interesting background material, helping explain the events leading up to Jones’s flight from Xiamen. But the nature of Csongor’s Google searches tells us that — ”

“He’s as in the dark as we are,” Olivia said. “Please do let me know if that changes.”

“Oh, I most certainly shall,” said Uncle Meng, and rang off as abruptly as he had started the conversation.

Olivia chewed on her thumbnail for perhaps thirty seconds, wondering if she ought to just pull over and run this investigation from the shoulder of the road for a while. But there was nothing she could do about the traffic. She picked up her phone, navigated to the “Recent Calls” list, and punched in Richard Forthrast’s number.

It rang a few times. But then finally his voice came on the line. “British spy chick,” he said.

“Is that how you think of me?”

“Can you give me a better description?”

“You didn’t like my fake name?”

“Already forgot it. You’re in my phone directory as British Spy Chick.”

“I was thinking of you,” she said, “and thought I should check in. How are you and your brothers doing?”

He laughed. “We were about to kill each other, so I put them on a plane to Bourne’s Ford this morning.”

“Ah. It sounds charming.” Olivia heard herself dribbling out meaningless words, trying to make a decision as to what she should or shouldn’t tell Richard.

“The Troll is logged on,” he announced.

“He is!?”

“And he’s on the move. And I’m tracking him. Which means I’m busy. I want you to call this number” — he rattled off a number with a 206 area code — “and talk to Corvallis and get the details.”

“Which details are those?” she asked distractedly, trying to impress the number into her memory.

“The Troll’s IP address,” Richard said. “So you can track him. He’s in the Philippines. With your resources you can probably get his exact coordinates and hit him with a drone attack, or something.”

“No comment on that.”

“But don’t,” Richard urged her, “because I want to get some information out of him first. After that, you can hit him with all the Hellfire missiles you want.”

She didn’t know what to say. Was having trouble with Richard’s sense of humor.

He tried again: “Track him all you want. Just don’t spook him. Most important of all, don’t try to follow him in T’Rain. Because he’ll know. He’ll be on to you in a second.”

She hung up and punched in the number of Corvallis about a tenth of a second ahead of the moment when it slipped from her memory forever.

A new voice came on: “British spy, er, woman?”

“You can say ‘chick’ if you want, I shan’t file a complaint.”

“We tried to get him to take sensitivity training, but he kept blowing it off.”

“Oh, compared to some I deal with, your boss is exquisitely refined. Don’t worry about it.”

“Richard said you might call.”

“Yes. You think that the Troll is in the Philippines?”

“Yeah, but we don’t have the resources here to nail it down better — his IP address is part of a batch that is allocated over a pretty wide geographic area. Would you like to write down the dotted quad?”

“Love to,” Olivia said, “but I’m driving. Sort of. So I’m going to do something else instead.”

“Uh, okay, what’s that?”

“I’m going to give your number to a colleague of mine who is actually in the Philippines. Seamus Costello is his name. He’ll know what to do with it.”

“Happy to help out.”

“And then he’ll probably ask you a lot of questions about how to make his character more powerful.”

Corvallis had been typing. “Looks like Thorakks is pretty friggin’ powerful already.”

“How did you know about that!?”

“T’Rain is one big database,” Corvallis said, “and it is my — well, let’s just say that I am its master.”

“Please don’t tell me Seamus is logged on right now.”

“He signed off three hours ago,” Corvallis said. “It is about seven in the morning there.”

“Where? Can you tell where he was logged in from?”

Typing. “The Manila Shangri-La Hotel. Club Level. Would you like his room number?”

“I have his cell,” Olivia said, “but if I want to fuck with him — which I do — it would be better to call his landline, wouldn’t it?”

“THIS FRICKIN’ PHONE is attached to the wall by an actual wire,” said Seamus Costello, with a mix of horror and disgust, when he became awake enough to understand such facts. “How the hell are you reaching me over a wire!?”

“You have a few things to learn about spycraft,” Olivia said sternly. “Really, I’m surprised. I hope you can be trusted with the information I’m about to give you.”

“What information is that?”

“I’m not sure actually,” Olivia admitted, “but it’s a lead. In the Philippines. Which is where you happen to be stuck.”

“I check into hotels like this,” Seamus said, “specifically not to be reminded of this fact.”

“Well, get on this, and maybe it’ll be your ticket out of there.”

“GWOJ-related?”

“Of course.”

“Where the hell are you, anyway?”

“Northbound on Interstate 5 at the blistering velocity of three miles per hour. Whoops, I take it back, now I’m stopped.”

“Like Manila all over again, eh?”

“Except I can’t just abandon the vehicle.”

“Northbound from … San Diego? L.A.?”

“Seattle,” Olivia said, and gave him a brief summary of what she’d been doing since she’d left Manila.

“All righty,” Seamus said, once he’d taken all of this in. “So the main thrust of the investigation, as far you’re concerned, is the SNAG, and you’re going to Vancouver to follow up a possible lead there … but what does that have to do with me?”

“Seamus, you are a highly trained operative with an exceptional skill set. Catlike reflexes and a killer instinct second to none.”

Seamus already suspected that he was being set up in some way, so he refused to say a single word.

Olivia continued, “Thousands of foes have fallen under the swingeing impact of your Targadian Bladed War Mace.”

“Any time you want to start making sense, I’m ready.”

“There’s a mission now that requires a warrior of your skills.” And Olivia went on to describe what was going on involving the Troll. Most of the important bits were contained in the first few sentences; after that, she sensed herself trailing off to insignificance. Traffic was beginning to loosen, she found herself changing lanes, multitasking more than she really wanted to.

Finally Seamus interrupted her: “Am I to understand that this kid was living ten feet away from Jones for months? And that he was right in the middle of the Xiamen ‘gas explosion’?”

“Yes on both counts.”

“That’s all you had to tell me. Where is the little fucker?”

“That’s for you and your stupendous national intelligence apparatus to figure out.” And she gave him the IP address.

“I’m on it,” he said.

“Just one thing…”

“Yeah?” Seamus, who had been sweetly confused and sleepy-headed early in the conversation, was fully awake now, and impatient, and didn’t care if Olivia knew it.

Actually, sort of wanted Olivia to know it.

“The kid is good. Don’t try to take him on.”

“Thorakks can handle the kid. Good luck with the SNAG.” And he hung up.

Which was fine because Uncle Meng was calling back.

It occurred to her that it was now something like one in the morning in London. Uncle Meng sounded some combination of drunk and tired. He was in his club or something.

“We have indications that Csongor — assuming that’s who our Tor-using Googler is — might be trying to establish links with a T’Rain moneychanger.”

It took Olivia — trying to think, now, of so many things at once — a few moments to understand. “They’re together,” she blurted out. “Csongor and the Troll.” Then, after a couple of lane changes: “Why would they be together?”

“Unknown,” said Uncle Meng, “but perhaps your contact can simply ask them. I myself am going to bed.”

IT HAD TAKEN Zula a certain amount of time simply to get used to having open space around her, and a sky above.

They were at the turnaround at the end of the road, a few miles past the Schloss, at the base of the avalanche of planks that was the ruin of the old mining complex. It sloped up above their heads at what seemed like a forty-five-degree angle, though she doubted it could really be that steep. Sprays of boards, snaggled at their ends with bent, wrenched-out nails, made black sunbursts against the sky. Blackberries and ivy were trying to lash together what carpenter ants and gravity had torn asunder. A few hundred meters up the slope, she knew, the old railway bed cut across the middle of this wreck. A month ago she and Peter had been snowshoeing on it. A month in the future, mountain bikers would be riding on it. But now it was a mud sluice channeled by seasonal runnels that would have to be packed with gravel and pounded smooth before anyone could use it for anything. In a few weeks, the work crews would be along to begin that maintenance, but for now it was as abandoned as it ever got.

This was exactly where she’d thought they were going, but even so it seemed surreal and dreamlike to her: the sensation of cool fresh air on her skin, the smell of the cedars and of the mud, and, of course, the fact that she was surrounded by jihadists and that she had a chain padlocked around her neck. Now that they were out in the middle of nowhere, the jihadists had finally gone native and begun to carry weapons more openly. One of them was sitting cross-legged on the roof of the RV, which had been parked across the road, barring access to the turnaround loop, which was where they had dumped out and were sorting through their camping gear. This man had a rifle in his lap and a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck, which he picked up from time to time and used to gaze down the valley. To Zula it was clear enough that if any geocaching tourists or local cops came up the road to investigate, he would wait until he could see the whites of their eyes through the windshield and then shoot them dead.

There had been some turnover during the last week. Zula was beginning to lose track of all the players. Of the three who had come out from Vancouver the morning after they’d stolen the RV, Zakir was still here, of course, holding the end of Zula’s neck chain as if walking a dog; and Sharjeel, who was the snappy, efficient, vaguely weasel-like one, seemed to have become one of Jones’s most important deputies. Ershut, the burly blue-collar man who had come over on the jet, was playing his accustomed role, moving piles of stuff around and sorting things into stacks. Mahir and Sharif, the lovers, were not in evidence. Neither was Aziz, the third of the Vancouverites. Abdul-Wahaab was strutting around, staring into the distance and talking importantly on multiple phones, checking his wristwatch. But at least four new guys were in evidence: the sniper on top of the RV, another openly armed man who seemed to be pulling guard duty on the ground nearby (he had found a place of concealment in the trees, but Zula could see him), and two wiry, bearded fellows who looked as if they had come for a long big-game hunting expedition. Even then Zula sensed she had not seen all of them, and that others were riding around, somewhere in this general vicinity, in the small fleet of cars that Jones’s network had managed to scare up during the almost two weeks he’d been in the country.

They kept faltering in whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, and Sharjeel kept exhorting them to get off their asses and make some progress. Over the course of an hour they packed several backpacks as full as they would go, and roped and lashed and bungeed more stuff to the outsides of them, and put yet more stuff into garbage bags and plastic coolers that they carried in their arms, and then they trudged off into the woods, following a path that one of the more nimble members of the group had scouted. This took them up along the side of the ruin. They made extremely slow progress because of the steepness of the ground, the undergrowth, and the mud. But in perhaps half an hour — though it seemed longer — they emerged, sweating, into a patch of relatively level ground about the size of a badminton court, sparsely occupied by big old trees that, being evergreens, would give them some cover from the air, but open and flat enough that tents and tarps could be pitched and sleeping bags rolled out. Zakir’s first act was to pass the free end of Zula’s neck chain around a large tree in the middle of this space and padlock it. This freed him to lie down on his back on a blue foam pad until he was rebuked for laziness by Abdul-Wahaab. He got up and went to work. Zula filched his pad and sat down on it. Until now she had tried to pay as little attention as possible to the padlocks at the ends of the chain, since she was afraid that if she showed too much interest in them she’d be giving something away. Hopeless apathy was a much better stance for her to feign. But no one was paying her much attention now, so she let her gaze travel down the length of the chain to the place where it was locked around the tree trunk. There were two padlocks in Zula’s universe. One was a big heavy brass thing, made to stand up to the elements, which they had taken from the mining camp. The other had been removed from the toolbox in the back of the pickup truck; it was smaller, made of steel, with a blue rubber ring molded into its base to keep it from banging and clattering as the box was moved around. Zula had a key to that one. For a while she had simply kept it in her pocket, but as it had become clear that something was about to happen, she had found herself lying awake worrying about the possibility that she might be searched and it might be confiscated. She had soaked a tampon in water until it swelled up, then shoved the key into the middle of it and shoved it right up her ass. It was there now.

The padlock fixing the chain to the tree was the big brass one. She couldn’t see the one at her neck, but she could explore it with her fingers and feel the rubber ring around its base. This was the lock that she could open.

WHEN THE DA G shou created a new T’Rain character for possible resale to a rich lazy Westerner, they didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking up a clever name for it, so they just mashed together a few word fragments perhaps skimmed from random Google searches and spam; or at least that was Csongor’s best guess as to why he was now wandering around T’Rain in the guise of a fat merchant named Lottery Discountz. It was possible to change the name — as well as take care of the fatness — for a modest fee, but he sensed that if he succumbed to the temptation to begin fiddling with such trivialities so soon, hours would pass without his actually getting anything done. He had his hands full just learning how to make his character move around the place.

He had shimmered into existence in a rented room upstairs of an inn at an important crossroads just outside the southwestern gate of Carthinias, which, as he had learned in a spasm of googling and wiki trawling, was one of the five largest cities in T’Rain. It tended to get left alone during wars, since its markets were useful to everyone, and it never took sides — it was too fractious a place to arrive at a firm political consensus on anything, and the last ruler who had tried to involve it in foreign intrigues had been defenestrated and deposed by a well-organized mob of …

There he went again, getting all caught up in seductive details. None of this mattered. The point was that Carthinias was a commercial entrepôt. It was the best place to connect with moneychangers. This would happen in a place called the Exchange. Just a few minutes after waking up in the inn, Lottery Discountz had passed through the city’s gate in the halting, meandering gait that marked him as an absolute newbie, and since then he had been caroming drunkenly along its narrow streets, trying to find this Exchange. Or rather trying to work out how the navigational user interface worked, which amounted to the same thing.

From all that he’d heard of such games, Csongor was astonished that he had not yet been jumped and killed for sport. There were certainly characters in the streets who looked capable of it. They ignored him. Every so often another merchant, or some lower-status character such as an errand boy, would bow to him, doff his hat, and utter some sort of polite greeting. It appeared that Lottery Discountz had status. One of the ways this was manifested in the game was that characters of a generally nonviolent sort would greet him respectfully. Perhaps it also explained why no one had gutted him in the street yet. But he had the idea that he was getting less and less respect the more he blundered about, so after another spate of wiki checking and turning over rocks in the user interface, he found out that indeed his general level of respectability had been declining steadily since the moment he had left his room at the inn. Apparently this was because he’d been failing to bow and doff his hat in return. The people he’d been inadvertently snubbing had been sending in bad reports of him. So he learned how to bow and doff his hat — it was a simple command-key combination — and ran up and down the street for a bit being extremely polite to everyone he met and rebuilding his reputation before he got killed.

Which he did anyway. Forcing him to learn the procedure for getting a character out of Limbo and back in the world of the living. But after that, in fairly short order, he was able to make his way to the Carthinias Exchange and stroll up and down its gilded colonnades, bowing and doffing, and listening in on the almost totally incomprehensible exchanges of chitchat among its denizens. For everything was couched in a highly compressed jargon optimized for non-native-English speakers who liked to type with the Caps Lock button engaged. It was, he realized, the T’Rain equivalent of the cryptic hand signals employed by commodities brokers who needed to communicate pithy instructions across a riotous trading pit.

Being in any virtual world, of course, required some ability to suspend one’s disbelief and enter into the consensual hallucination. So far Csongor had only experienced a few moments of this, and it had mostly been during simple activities such as bumping around his room at the inn or walking down the street. In this place he was finding it completely impossible, partly because he couldn’t follow what was going on and partly because, of all places in T’Rain, the fictional premise was most threadbare here. The entire point of this market was to move money back and forth between the virtual economy of T’Rain and that of the real world. When money moved out, it had to be destroyed — permanently and irrevocably removed from the T’Rain universe. This was accomplished by sacrificing it to gods. The amount of gold to be transferred would be taken to one of several temples that stood on craggy acropoli around the limits of the city and handed over to priests or priestesses who would employ some sort of ritual to make it cease to exist: in some cases, hurling it into cracks in the earth to be deatomized by supernatural forces; in others, piling it up on elevated sky altars from which it would, after the proper incantations were intoned, simply disappear. Repulsed and dismayed by the jargon-spouting traders in the Exchange, Csongor wandered up into those rocky hills and observed some of those rites. They did everything out in the open, in full view of sparsely attended observation galleries, probably to make it clear that it was all on the up-and-up and that none of the priests was sneaking a bit of extra gold into the pockets of his toga. Over the course of a quarter of an hour’s watching, Csongor saw something like half a million gold pieces ceasing to exist on one such altar, which — taking into account the fact that it was just one of half a dozen or so such establishments, and that it appeared to run at this pace around the clock — suggested (doing some math in his head, here) that on the order of $10 billion was passing out of T’Rain every year.

Ten billion a year.

Marlon needed to transfer $2 million out.

Csongor put his face in his hands, which was what he always did when thinking hard about something. Back at the hotel, he had taken the trouble to shave, and it was strange to feel his smooth cheeks. This arithmetic wasn’t that difficult, but he was tired and disoriented.

Ten billion a year worked out to something like a million dollars per hour. So they were going to have to monopolize the Carthinias Exchange for something like two solid hours. Either that, or eke the money out in smaller increments over a longer span of time.

Which, he realized, was what the merchants thronging the colonnades must be doing for a living: aggregating tiny transactions into big ones, or taking awkwardly huge ones and breaking them up into chunks of more convenient size, so that the holy money-furnaces could run at a steady pace day and night.

Understanding this much helped break him out of the state of hopeless despair into which he had been plunged by his initial stumblings about. Lottery Discountz was, for a moment, alone and safe on a marble bench in the viewing gallery of a temple where gold was being swallowed, digested, and shat out as worthless manure by a giant mutant beetle. It was safe to be Away from Keyboard for a few minutes.

Csongor got up and paced around to stretch his legs. Yuxia was perched on a chair in a fetal position, sleeping. Marlon was engaged precisely as he had been for a great many hours. But when Csongor circled around behind him to look at his screen, he saw that the “orc chart” had become as ramified as a two-hundred-year-old maple tree. Marlon had mobilized an army. At a glance, Csongor guessed that it couldn’t be less than a thousand strong.

Noting a strange glare coming from one end of the café, Csongor turned to look and realized, after a few moments’ disorientation, that the sun was coming up.

INSPECTOR FOURNIER WAS startled, and perhaps slightly irritated, that Olivia had made the decision to go bombing up the road to Vancouver without even mentioning it to him. She sensed him wishing that Commonwealth immigration policies could be tightened up a bit, so as to make it more difficult for inquisitive Brit spies to jump back and forth between nations. The Friday aspect of this certainly wasn’t helping; presumably Fournier had plans for the evening, even for the whole weekend, and now he was learning that he would be at least nominally obligated to act as this woman’s host.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“Waiting in line at the border crossing.” The electronic signs were claiming that she’d be through in another ten minutes, which seemed pessimistic. That would put her directly into Vancouver’s outer suburbs; she’d be downtown in an hour. This fact embarrassed her. It had taken maybe fifteen seconds after the end of her first conversation with Fournier to realize that she had to go to Canada now, and she had gone into action without explaining to anyone — not even her FBI hosts — what she was doing. It would take too long for her to explain matters to everyone. She would make phone calls from her car as she was driving, explain it then. But then she had ended up managing matters with Richard and Uncle Meng, Seamus and the mysterious Csongor, and had quite forgotten to call ahead. No wonder Fournier was irked. It was a couple of hours past the normal close of business, he was in the office late, delaying his dinner and thinking about getting into a glass of wine, giving her a courtesy call to let her know what was going on — only to learn that she trying to penetrate his borders at this very moment.

“Listen,” she said, “I just want to be positioned in Vancouver so that I can follow up on this lead at the next opportunity.”

“Truly, it’s not a lead,” he pointed out, “and the next opportunity will be on Monday; for voilà the weekend begins.”

She decided not to press on this for now. “Has anything new been learned?”

“This was a bear hunting party, two guides and three hunters and all the equipment you would expect, packed into an SUV. They departed eleven days ago. They were supposed to be gone for a week. So they are now late by four days and unheard from, disappeared with no trace.”

“The first time we spoke, I thought you said they had been missing for ten days.”

“Perhaps you heard such a thing, but I did not say it. The trouble might have started for them as early as eleven days ago, or as late as four.”

“Because you see the plane I’m looking for would have landed about thirteen days ago.”

“So the dates do not match,” he pointed out.

“But if they landed and holed up somewhere for a couple of days …”

“Where? Why is there no trace of this landing? Of the holing up somewhere?”

Silence. Olivia inched her car forward another length, stopped at the red light. She was next in the queue to cross the border.

What would Jones do? If he found himself stuck north of this imaginary line on the map?

If he had an SUV full of camping equipment?

He had lived in the wilds of Afghanistan for years at a time. Compared to that, a hike down the Cascades would be a piece of cake.

“He’s up there,” she insisted. “If he hasn’t crossed the border already, that is.”

Fournier sighed. “If you suppose he might have crossed the border, why do you not stay to the south of it?”

“Because all I can do is follow his trail,” she said, “and I’m going to pick that up in Canada.”

Silence. She imagined him pulling his glasses off, rubbing tired eyes, thinking of that glass of wine.

The light went green, the car ahead of her glided into another country.

“I must ring off,” she said. “I’m crossing the border.”

”Bienvenue à Canada, Ms. Halifax-Lin,” said Inspector Fournier, and disconnected.

EGDOD HAD JUST been joined by one of Corvallis’s favorite characters, a K’Shetriae Vagabond aligned (as of a few days ago) with the Earthtone Coalition. A longtime student of the game, Corvallis had developed a keen appreciation for luck, as in the odds of getting a propitious roll from Corporation 9592’s random number generators. Some character types and alignments were luckier than others. K’Shetriae Vagabonds were the luckiest of all. Recently Richard had placed his thumb on the scales and made all members of the Earthtone Coalition slightly luckier than their counterparts in the Forces of Brightness, and Corvallis had not been slow to take advantage of it, trading in all of his Bright kit for more tasteful and understated duds.

“He’s on the move,” Richard announced, speaking now into his computer. This was the only way he had left of communicating with C-plus. The demise of his Bluetooth headset had been followed, a few hours later, by that of his phone; and a man who had been peeing into a bucket for six hours certainly did not have the time to go rummaging around for a charger. But as long as Clover (for that was the name of Corvallis’s uncannily fortunate character) was within earshot of Egdod, Corvallis could hear whatever Richard said, albeit digitally transmogrified into the awe-inspiring timbre of Egdod.

“I notice you’re not referring to him as ‘the little fucker’ anymore,” said Clover, in a somewhat reedy, high-pitched voice that sounded nothing like Corvallis. Clover had an Irish accent to boot, this being a menu item commonly selected by American players who wanted to sound more like characters in movies.

“Okay, okay, he stopped being a little fucker when he raised an army of twelve hundred high-level characters and deployed them in battle array around his projected route of advance,” Richard admitted. “I have to admit I was wondering why he was taking so long to move away from that cave. I didn’t reckon that he was going to set the whole thing up like Sherman’s march to the sea.”

“Did you notice his leapfrogging cavalry screens?”

“Yes, I fucking noticed them.”

“I just thought it was a nice detail,” Clover added weakly.

“Well, before you get lost in admiration of the virus-writing son of a bitch, know that he might have information about my niece.”

“How can I be of service?” Clover sniffed.

“Feed me a running count of how many gold pieces he’s snarfed up. No, better yet, convert it into dollars.”

“A hundred and fifty. Dollars.”

“But that’s just floor sweepings he stumbled across. He hasn’t really gotten started.”

“Agreed. Anything else?”

“Call your buddies and see if you can put together a high-level raiding party. It doesn’t have to be as big as what the Troll has got. A few dozen people who know what they’re doing.”

“That should be easy enough.”

“When you’re ready, let me know; we’ll attack his flank and observe how he reacts. I’ll watch from above.”

“Like a god of Olympus,” Clover said.

“You think that’ll be a problem?”

“For a bunch of veteran T’Rain players to go into action, knowing that the eyes of Egdod are upon them? No, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

“Good.”

“By the way, he now has thirteen hundred dollars.”

LONG AGO, ZULA had got to a place where she could not be surprised, let alone outraged, by anything the jihadists did. This, she reckoned, must be the story of all radical groups, be they Taliban, Shining Path, or National Socialist. Once they had left common notions of decency in the dust — once they had abandoned all sense of proportionality — then it turned into a sort of competition to see who could outdo all the rest in that. Beyond there it was all comedy, if only you could turn a blind eye to the consequences. Anyway, they set up the camp stove and the coolers of food, the portable water bags and the sacks of Walmart groceries squarely in front of the tree where she was chained up, and expected her to do the cooking and cleaning.

The same thing had happened at the abandoned mine two weeks ago. Then, however, it had felt different to her. They had just survived a plane crash and their future had seemed uncertain; they had been holed up together in a cozy refuge; and, as ridiculous as it might sound, there had been a sense of shared hardship that had made Zula feel like pitching in. Now, of course, matters were rather different. There was a chain around her neck, for one thing. But the quality of the personnel had declined precipitously from those days. There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to seine up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas. Zula almost felt as if she’d seen the whole ABC devolution happen in microcosmic form during the two scant weeks she had been rattling around western Canada with Jones and his crew. Jones was indisputably an A, and, in retrospect, those he had chosen to accompany him on the business jet had been As too in their own ways. Sharjeel was the very prototype of a B and he had brought with him Zakir, precisely the kind of C that people who quoted the “As hire As, Bs hire Cs” maxim dreaded bringing into their organization.

But Jones, being an A, seemed to understand this well enough and had sorted matters out accordingly. Their first few hours at the camp had been so quiet that Zula had actually dozed off on her camp pad for a little while; swathed in four layers of cheap fleece, she could sleep practically anywhere without the need for blankets or sleeping bag. She had awakened to find Zakir eyeing her in a manner that, at any time in her life prior to the advent of Wallace and Ivanov, she’d have found creepy. As it was, she found herself wondering whether Zakir could maintain that state of arousal once she had gotten her chain wrapped around his throat and her knee on his spine. During her confinement in the back of the RV, she had done many push-ups and many squats.

Anyway, the thing that had awakened her had been the advent in camp of a sizable contingent of jihadists, something like ten in addition to the three who had been left here to hold the fort. It seemed that several of the cars had arrived at the turnaround point at about the same time, disgorged this cast of characters, and then been driven away by persons who had been deemed redundant by Jones: Cs, or perhaps even Ds. So all of them were now literally at the end of the road, bereft of wheeled transportation (for the RV had been taken away) and supplied with much more in the way of camping equipment, weaponry, and ammunition than they could plausibly carry. The light was growing dim. Zula pulled the hood of her fleece over her head to hide the movements of her eyes and tried to carry on an inventory without being obvious. She did not see any weapons beyond what they had brought on the bizjet and acquired from the bear hunters. That, she reckoned, made sense; much easier to get weapons where they were going, and less weight to carry across the border.

Probably it was more useful to inventory the men than the gear.

All of the original five were now present: Jones, Abdul-Wahaab, Ershut, and the lovers. The A-team, as it were. Of the Vancouver contingent there were still weaselly Sharjeel and podgy Zakir. The third member of that group, whose name she had forgotten, seemed to have been sloughed off; perhaps he was one of the bit players whose job had been to drive a vehicle away from this place and make himself scarce. So that was seven. But the total number of jihadists now present was thirteen — a figure she was not able to pin down, exactly, until she was made to serve them all dinner.

The additional half dozen were mostly men she had glimpsed or heard at least once during the interminable wanderings of the RV as they had all zeroed in from, she guessed, diverse parts of North America. Two of them were completely new to her. She gathered from the way these were greeted that they had only just managed to join up with the caravan. Most of those present either hadn’t seen them in years or had no idea who they were. She pegged them as As. Partly this was because Jones treated them with special respect. But only partly. She could just tell. Erasto was from the Horn of Africa, probably Somalia. He spoke perfect midwestern-accented English and enjoyed looking at her slyly as he was doing so, glorying in her reaction: he must be an adoptee like her, someone who had been raised in some place like Minneapolis but who unlike her had decided to go back to his homeland and dedicate his life to the cause of global jihad. He was six foot four, built like a greyhound, baby-faced, didn’t need to shave. A Benetton model.

Abdul-Ghaffar (“Servant of the Forgiver” — she had remembered that much Arabic by this point) — was a blond, blue-eyed American man of perhaps forty-five, though he might have been ten years older than that and in good shape. He had close-cropped hair, was burly but trim, and appeared to work out a lot. A soccer player or a wrestler — a practitioner of some sport, anyway, that didn’t require height, for he was maybe five seven. His native language was of course English, and he followed the others’ conversations even more poorly than Zula, who could catch perhaps a third of what they were saying. The obvious question that was posed by his choice of name — what was he seeking forgiveness for? — would go unanswered for now. But it seemed clear that he had converted to Islam late in life and was eager to make up for lost time. She got a clue when he turned his head to expose a skin graft on the top of his head, about the size of a postage stamp. She had seen similar damage on her fair-skinned, farm-dwelling relatives. He was under treatment for malignant melanoma, and he probably had less than a year to live. Until she’d seen that, she’d wondered why a man like Jones would look upon this all-American newbie as anything other than an FBI plant.

The power of laziness was a continual wonder to her. Not that jihadists had any monopoly on that. But with so much manpower up in this camp, could they really not cook their own food? Not set up a little buffet line, pile it on their plates without feminine assistance? All the while leaving Zula chained to some other tree, out of earshot. But it seemed huge to them that their captive female perform this work for them. She was being put on display, she decided, like Cleopatra being towed through Rome. Jones wanted the others to see how the infidel girl had submitted to his mastery.

Which she hadn’t, of course. But for purposes of this one meal she was happy to act that way. She even kept her hood up over her head like a sort of chador. And she listened to what they were saying, astonishing herself by how much of their conversation she could now understand.

They ate together for a while, satisfying their appetites, chatting and joking. And then Jones began to address them in a now-let’s-get-down-to-business tone. And what he said was that he would be hitting the sack very soon, since he needed to rise long before sunrise to begin the next phase of the operation. He would not see them again for several hours after that. In the meantime, they needed to sleep well but rise in good time and make all ready to divide into two camps: the base camp and the expedition. The latter group would be larger than the former and would be moving out on a great adventure. But this in no way diminished the importance of the base camp crew or detracted from the glory that they would achieve and the heavenly reward that they would reap …

(It was, Zula realized, just another business meeting. The only thing missing was the PowerPoint presentation. Some of the group — presumably the Cs — were being given the shit work, and Jones had to soften them up first with the meal and the fake camaraderie.)

Staying behind to enjoy Zula’s excellent campfire cuisine would be Zakir, Ershut, and two others. One of these, Sayed, Zula had mentally classified as a graduate student: a quiet man, closer to forty than thirty, who seemed markedly uncomfortable in the camping and hiking milieu. It was obvious to Zula why he and Zakir were being left behind — she’d have made exactly the same choice — and both of them looked some combination of disappointed and relieved.

Ershut, though, was dumbfounded. The same went for Jahandar, an Afghan whom Zula had last seen perched on the top of the RV with a sniper rifle and a pair of binoculars. Zula herself had to make a modest effort to hide her own astonishment, for if ever there was a man cut out for a long trek down the length of a mountain range in hostile territory, it was Jahandar. To the point where Zula had some difficulty in imagining how they had smuggled him this deep into a Western democracy. They must have drugged him, packed him into a crate, shipped him over by air freight direct from Tora Bora, and kept him pent up on a mountaintop until now. Everything about his appearance — the hat, the beard, the glare, the battle scars — should have got him arrested on sight in any municipality west of the Caspian Sea. Anyway, never mind how they’d managed it, Jahandar was here, and he was pissed. And this encouraged the normally taciturn Ershut to voice objections of his own to Jones’s plan.

They kept glancing over at her. As if to say, How many people does it take to keep tabs on a girl chained to a tree?

Jones gave her a glance too: a knowing look, as if to say, I can tell you understand more than you let on. He pushed his dirty plate in her direction, then rose to his feet and made gestures indicating that Ershut and Jahandar should come with him. They strolled away from the campfire until they had reached a place from which they could not be easily heard, where they continued the conversation in lower tones. Jones was filling them in on some aspect of the plan that did not need to be shared with the entire group just now.

Or perhaps it was only Zula with whom they did not wish to share it. For at some point, a few minutes into their discussion, the three of them all turned their heads to look her way, paused in their deliberations for a few heartbeats, and then looked back together, turning their backs on her to continue the discussion in a more reasonable timbre. All the tension was gone from their body language.

They had decided to kill her.

It would not happen right away. But at some point after the main group had been launched toward the border, Ershut or Jahandar would cut her throat — not, she guessed, before she’d cooked them a meal and done the dishes — and then they would set out in pursuit of the main body. And knowing the two of them, they’d have little difficulty in catching up. Zakir and Sayed, she guessed, would be left behind to throw dirt on her corpse.

The meal broke up, and the men scattered into the darkness beyond the reach of the firelight, leaving her with a pile of dirty paper plates and some pots that needed scrubbing. Most of them went to bed. Jahandar made himself tea with the water she had been heating for dishes, then retreated to a position a short distance up the hill, whence he could survey the whole camp and all below it. He took his rifle with him.

Zula did the dishes. Imagining Jahandar’s crosshairs on her forehead.

SEVERAL HOURS OF despair had given way to the vague notion, more in Csongor’s heart than his head, that he was beginning to make sense of the Carthinias Exchange and its diverse actors. There was a trading pit in the middle of the place, a full 360-degree amphitheater of polished stone steps, perhaps thirty meters — the limit of shouting distance — at its top, funneling in and down to a tiny, flat floor no more than three meters across. The thing was split neatly in half through the middle, though there were no screens or fences or visual cues to make this obvious; it could be inferred by noticing that different sorts of people tended to congregate on each side: on the one, merchants who were trying to get money out of the world, and on the other, priests from the temples, trying to make full use of their money-annihilating capacity by undercutting the competing priests.

So much for the side-to-side split. Csongor sensed that there was some kind of top-to-bottom stratification as well, and he was developing a theory that the people down toward the bottom were trading in larger blocs of money, while the upper levels were for small-timers. To outward appearances, none of these merchants was carrying much gold into the pit and none of the priests was carrying much out of it. Accordingly, he had guessed at first that they were only trading in paper and that the actual transfer of specie was happening in a bank or warehouse somewhere. But then he noticed small, sparkly objects trading hands, generally making their way from the small-timers at the top down toward the heavy hitters in the lower pit. Some wiki searching told him that T’Rain had several types of metal even more precious than gold, though the vast majority of characters in the world never even laid eyes on the stuff; it was used only to effect colossal transactions. One sort of coin — Red Gold — was worth a hundred gold pieces. A Blue Gold piece was worth a hundred of those, and Indigo Gold, or Indigold for short, worth a hundred of those; which meant, if Csongor’s mental calculation was accurate, that a single Indigold coin had a value, in the real world, of something like $75,000.

It seemed of the highest importance to T’Rain’s art directors that these coins look as flashy as their high value implied, and so they gleamed, sending out flashes of colored light as they were passed from hand to hand. Plain old yellow stuff was changing hands in the plaza around the amphitheater, frequently being bulk converted, by strolling moneychangers, into Red Gold coins that were making their way over the rim of the pit and transacting lively commerce in its upper reaches, making a flashing red constellation, as if LEDs were blinking all over the place. But farther down, the predominant color was Blue; and at the bottom it deepened to Indigo.

The transaction that Marlon hoped to pull off would amount to something like thirty pieces of Indigold, or three thousand of the Blue stuff. Since carrying around three thousand pieces of anything was not practical, Csongor had little choice but to set up a relationship with one of the big traders down in the bottom of the pit who, (a) dealt in Indigold all the time, and (b) was controlled by players who could wire funds to the Philippines. But precisely because such characters were carrying around such immense amounts of money, security here was suffocating, with the innermost and lowest ring of the amphitheater guarded by a ring of extremely fearsome-looking guards, standing shoulder to shoulder and looking outward, and walled, roofed, and domed by nested layers of shimmering light that Csongor recognized, vaguely, as magical spells. In T’Rain, figuring out how powerful another character was was a far more complicated proposition than in other such games where you could merely compare levels. Csongor lacked the experience to judge another character’s abilities, but he knew a few rules of thumb and had little doubt that even the small-time traders around the rim could strike Lottery Discountz dead just by giving him a cross look.

Which gave him the notion that he might be able to get close to the center of the action precisely because he was so harmless. He tried the experiment of simply walking across the plaza to the edge of the pit and then clambering down on to the topmost bench. No one cared. He moved down another. No reaction. Things began to get crowded and he had to sidestep this way and that to find gaps in the crowd of traders, but no one paid him any particular note. He was close to the dividing line between the merchant side and the priestly side, and he heard priests calling out “Benison!” and coming together with merchants to exchange money. Benisons, as he’d learned, were a way for players to transfer real money into T’Rain; the character would pray to a god, a charge would be placed on the player’s credit card, and the gold pieces would simply appear on an altar somewhere, or turn up at the end of a rainbow in a mountain glade controlled by this or that faction of priests, and then they would transfer it through markets like this one to the prayerful recipients. Csongor eavesdropped on a few such transactions and noted that they were typically in the thousands of GP range, which was to say, a handful of Red Gold pieces. But after he had worked his way down into the middle reaches where Blue Gold changed hands, he still, from time to time, heard a priest calling out, instead of “Benison!” the phrase “Miraculous Benediction.” He looked this up and learned that, every so often, when a character prayed for a Benison, he got a hundred or a thousand times as much as he had asked (and as his player had paid) for. It was a lucky break, like finding a hundred-dollar bill in a box of Cracker Jacks.

And this gave Csongor all he needed to form a sort of plan. He worked his way down as close as he could to the ring of guards, the dome of spells. Once he descended to the point where the magic barriers were inflicting damage on Lottery Discountz and the guards were turning their eyes his direction and reaching for their weapons, he backed off a step, sat down, and began to observe the transactions taking place in the innermost circle. Flashes of purple were going off all over the place. He was watching millions of dollars changing hands. The total number of traders within that ring was perhaps twenty, and any one of them could handle the transaction he had in mind.

He was beginning to hear words coming from Marlon’s mouth, which pulled him out of the imaginary world and brought him back into the Internet café in the Philippines. Marlon, who had played almost silently for the last couple of hours, was now communicating directly, in Mandarin, with one of his lieutenants. Or perhaps they were generals. Csongor could only speculate at the size of his army now. Marlon’s voice was calm, quiet, but insistent, and his hands were prancing around the keyboard like spiders on a hot skillet.

Since Lottery Discountz was doing nothing except observing the trade pit, Csongor rose, stretched, and strolled over to have a look. Yuxia too seemed to have been stirred awake by the sound of someone speaking in Mandarin and opened her eyes slightly, then stiffened, remembering where she was. Her eyes fixed and focused on something across the room. Csongor followed her gaze and saw that the morning shift, if that was the right word for it, was filtering into the café. For the last few hours they’d had the whole place almost to themselves, but there were a couple of new arrivals who had ensconced themselves behind terminals in Yuxia’s line of sight. One of them was just in the act of glancing away. Csongor, hardly a stranger to girl-watching, reckoned Yuxia must have caught him looking and was now giving him the evil eye. Not wanting to get caught up in that exchange, Csongor got to where he could look over Marlon’s shoulder and view his monitor.

The last half-dozen times Csongor had checked, he had seen nothing on Marlon’s screen that looked remotely like a virtual sword and sorcery world. Instead it had been countless overlapping panes containing ramified orc charts, bar graphs, fluctuating statistical displays, and scrolling columns of chat. All that was gone now, replaced by something that looked a little more like it: a melee at the throat of a narrow pass between foothills. Several members of Marlon’s army — not the main group, but one of his flank guards — had been attacked as they forded a stream that ran through the pass. It looked like a carefully laid ambush, and half a dozen of them were already lying dead in the shallows. But reinforcements were hurtling into the combat zone on land, in the air, and over the water, engaging the ambushers in many single combats that merged and divided as one fighter came to the aid of another, then wheeled about to contend with some new threat.

“Problems?” Csongor asked.

“No,” Marlon said, “we will kick their asses.”

“Are you going to do any ass kicking?” Csongor asked. Because he had noticed that Reamde was just biding his time on a boulder in the middle of the stream.

“Not needed,” Marlon said. “I am observing.”

“What do you see?”

Marlon took a long time to answer. Then he spoke as if these observations were just coming into his awareness: “They are very good. Experienced characters. Not just kids. But they have not fought together before.”

“How can you tell?”

“They don’t know how to help each other as an experienced raiding party would. And they look different.” Marlon raised his hand from the keyboard for the first time in, Csongor guessed, several hours to point out one of the attackers. “See? Definitely Bright.” Then he moved to indicate another. “Him? Earthtone. Why are they fighting together?”

Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he brought his hand sharply down to the keyboard and used the keys to spin his point of view around and up. He was looking up into the starry sky now. Hovering up there were two characters, suspended magically in midair, gazing down. Clicking on them brought up little windows showing their portraits and their names. Csongor could not read, from this distance, the microscopic type.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Not who they say they are,” Marlon said.

“What does it mean?”

“This is not the real attack,” Marlon said. “Real attack is later.”

“How much money do you have?”

“Of gold pieces, two million.”

Marlon converted it. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Five thousand, roughly, for every member of the ambushing party.

Why would that not be the real attack? Who expected to get more than $5,000 for a few seconds’ fighting in a video game?

“You are still hoping for the amount we discussed earlier?” Csongor asked.

“We can’t stop now,” Marlon said. “We get it all or nothing tonight.”

“Actually, the sun has been up for hours.”

“Whatever.”

BY THE TIME Olivia had reached her hotel in downtown Vancouver, she had thought herself into a deep funk about Inspector Fournier and what she feared was his obstructive attitude toward the investigation. She was therefore pleasantly surprised when the desk clerk, while checking her in, noticed something interesting on the screen of her computer, and then looked up brightly to inform Olivia that she had a message waiting. A manila envelope was produced. Its heft suggested it might contain ten or twenty pages of material. Once she had checked in to her room and sorted herself out a bit, she opened it up and found that it contained faxed copies of police reports, both local and Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Her higher-ups at MI6 were insistent that she always keep them apprised of her whereabouts. She had been delinquent about that ever since leaving Seattle, so she checked in with them. It would be something like six in the morning in London now.

Then she settled in to read the reports of the missing hunters: a retired oil industry engineer from Arizona and his two sons, aged thirty-two and thirty-seven, from Louisiana and Denver, respectively, all experienced hunters, who had traveled up to B.C. to celebrate the old man’s sixty-fifth birthday by bagging a grizzly. They’d hired a guide company that prided itself on catering to serious old-school hunters. To judge from the tone of certain promotional passages on its website, this was to set it apart from competing firms that offered a posher, and presumably much more expensive, experience. Clients were offered a money-back guarantee that they would actually kill a bear at some point during the weeklong expedition.

Apparently this pitch had been convincing to the two sons, who had pooled their cash to purchase the trip as a surprise for their dad. From the police reports, and from the brutally depressing website that the missing men’s family had put up, beseeching the universe for information, it was clear that these were no dilettantes; the father had lived all over the world during his career and had lost no opportunity to hunt big game wherever it was to be gone after, frequently bringing his boys along with him. The guides were no tenderfeet either: one of them — a cofounder of the company — had been doing this for three decades, and the other was a First Nations man whose people had been living in the area for tens of thousands of years. They were in a two-year-old, four-wheel-drive Suburban well equipped with tire chains, winch, and anything else that might be needed to drive out of trouble or survive when hopelessly stuck.

Which was part of their method, and part of the problem now faced by the police. For since the guides were not anchored to a cushy lodge, they could roam wherever hunting was best, and since they were offering a money-back guarantee, they had something of an incentive to do just that. In the course of a week’s hunting, they might move among several favorite bear-hunting sites distributed over an area hundreds of kilometers on a side, almost all of which was mountainous, and only just becoming passable without snow machines. By far the most reasonable theory was that they had taken the Suburban one kilometer too far, skidded off the road, and become hopelessly lodged in a streambed or snowbank.

Or at least that had seemed the most reasonable theory during the first couple of days that they had been reported overdue. Consequently the search-and-rescue efforts had been all about crisscrossing the region in light aircraft, looking for a crashed vehicle or a distress beacon, and scanning the radio frequencies on which they might send out a distress call. Phone coverage in most of the region was out of the question, but the Suburban had a citizens’-band radio, and presumably they’d fire it up and call for help as soon as they saw an airplane. Or heard one.

“Heard” being more likely, since weather had been overcast almost the entire time. The pilots were by no means convinced that they’d achieved anything like a proper search of the area. Consequently, the investigation had been at a standstill for the last few days. The families — who had flown up to B.C. and who now seemed to be operating some sort of crisis center out of a hotel in Prince George — the nearest conurbation that even remotely resembled a major city — were insistent that something must be wrong and were coming dangerously close to saying impolite things about the RCMP’s conduct of the investigation.

Reading between the lines, it was easy enough to make out what was going on. The police — though they wouldn’t dream of saying so openly — were almost certain that the hunters and guides were all dead, probably as a result of driving over a cliff in fog. If they were merely stuck, they’d have made their situation known on the radio, or they’d have hiked out to a major road, something they were more than equipped to do. But the police couldn’t just come out and say that. So they had to manage the situation by expressing confidence that the aerial search would turn something up sooner or later. Beyond that, there was little that they could do other than make comforting and reassuring noises when cornered by reporters or distraught wives.

Olivia, needless to say, had a different theory altogether. It was difficult to imagine anything crazier-sounding than that a nest of international terrorists had stolen a business jet from Xiamen, crashed it in the mountains of British Columbia, murdered a Suburban-load of bear hunters, and headed for the border.

On the positive side, though, it should be an easy enough hypothesis to investigate. The Suburban might be four-wheel drive, but it was unlikely that Jones and company had driven it off-road for a thousand kilometers. They’d have taken the path of least resistance.

Actually, she reflected as she googlemapped British Columbia, it wasn’t merely the path of least resistance. It was the path. This region did not have a road grid. It just had a road. Unless they had taken an extremely circuitous route along logging tracks in the mountains — unlikely, this early in the year — or looped around far to the east, into northern Alberta, they’d have had to proceed south on Highway 97.

And why not? If Jones had managed to hijack the Suburban out in the middle of nowhere, he’d have understood perfectly well that he had only a few days — perhaps just a few hours — in which to do something useful with it before some kind of alert was sent out. He would have headed straight for the U.S. border along Highway 97, through Prince George (actually right in front of the hotel where the families of his victims had set up their base camp), and down into the more ramified system of highways that spread across southern B.C. If he didn’t make it across the border right away, he’d look for a way to ditch the Suburban where it wouldn’t be noticed, and he’d transfer to some other vehicle.

And then he’d think up a way to cross the border, probably out in the middle of nowhere. Something that would be difficult to prevent even if they knew it was going to happen and had a full-scale manhunt under way.

They wouldn’t need to buy food, since they could eat camp rations stolen from the hunters. Hell, for that matter they could just go hungry for a day; it wouldn’t be the first time.

The only thing they would need would be petrol. Gas.

Another look at the map.

If they had acquired the Suburban up in the region where the search was going on, and if its tank had been reasonably full, they’d have been able to make it all the way to Prince George before having to refuel. Of course, there were other refueling stations scattered along the road north of there — people had to buy gas somewhere — but Jones would have avoided those instinctively, not wanting to make a memorable impression on the proprietors, who might have recognized the Suburban as belonging to a local guide service. No, he’d have taken it all the way to the relative anonymity of Prince George and then he’d have bought his petrol in the largest, most impersonal gas station he could find.

Tomorrow she would be driving north to Prince George. Somewhere in that town there must be a surveillance camera that had caught the image she needed. And if she could only sweet-talk its owners into giving her a copy of that image, then she could use it as a sort of sluice gate to divert a great deal of misdirected Jones-hunting energy into a more profitable channel

Tonight, though, she had to sleep. Was, in fact, sleeping.

MOST OF CSONGOR’S time in T’Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a systems administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented him from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin’s knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he’d be able to break through in the end. The advances he had made in understanding the Carthinias Exchange had raised his spirits a bit. On the other hand, watching Marlon run a small war was crushing his morale. The immense power of Marlon’s character, his inventory of spells, weapons, and magical items, the size of his army, and his facility in soaking up relevant data from the boggling array of displays and interfaces on his screen and acting immediately upon that information, all bespoke many years’ experience playing the game and made it clear to Csongor that he was as out of his league here as he would have been on the field at a World Cup soccer match. Nevertheless, the dogged sysadmin in him would not concede defeat and kept gazing stupidly over Marlon’s shoulder, trying to make sense of what was happening and to pick up a few tips as to how he might make better use of Lottery Discountz’s cruelly limited set of powers.

For that reason he was completely surprised and utterly unprepared when Qian Yuxia stormed across the Internet café and hurled a cup of water into the face of a man who had been sitting there for approximately the last half hour. “I am not a friggin’ T-bird!” she exclaimed.

Then she said it again.

“You want a T-bird, go look some other place!”

Csongor had never heard the English expression T-bird before, but Yuxia had now uttered it three times, so he was pretty certain he was hearing it correctly. He had no idea what it meant.

The victim of the assault was a tall, lanky white man with a scraggly blond beard and green eyes that looked alert and more bemused than angry. He had been surprised by the water in the face, but after that he had sprung to his feet and turned to face his assailant. Not in a threatening manner — he was careful to keep some distance — but in a way that made it clear he was ready to address any follow-up assault should Yuxia care to mount one. He was looking at her interestedly and was by no means afraid or even embarrassed. But the moment Csongor went into movement, this fellow noticed it, and he shifted his position as if to make ready for any threat from that quarter. The green eyes gave Csongor a quick head-to-toe scan and locked in immediately on the right front pocket of Csongor’s baggy trousers, which happened to contain a loaded Makarov. Somehow he seemed to guess what was banging around in that pocket. And this fact changed everything. The man showed both of his palms to Csongor, a gesture that said both Look, my hands are empty and Stop where you are. Csongor faltered, not so much out of obedience as because he was nonplussed by the stranger’s behavior.

“It’d be a good thing for all of us,” the man said in strangely accented English, “if you could keep your hands north of your navel, as you’ll note I’m doing, and maintain a little distance. Then we can have a productive conversation. Until then, it’s going to be all about what we’re carryin’. And since you are new to these parts, let me tell you, we don’t want to go there.”

If Csongor had heard this correctly, the man had just threatened to pull out a gun and shoot him.

As if to confirm that his interpretation of matters was correct, the two other customers in the café bolted, leaving only Csongor, Yuxia, Marlon, and the newcomer.

While taking the threat quite seriously, Csongor was not as intimidated as he might have been prior to events in Xiamen. “My life has already ‘gone there,’ so I am not afraid to ‘go there’ again if you are causing a problem for my friend,” he said.

Yuxia, sensing that the situation wasn’t what she’d assumed at first, had backed off a couple of paces and sidestepped a bit closer to Csongor. Meanwhile the Filipino man running the front desk had stuck his head into the room to investigate. Csongor’s eyes darted toward him. The blond man, noting this, pivoted that way, relaxing his hands, and rattled off a sentence in what Csongor gathered was the Filipino language. He sounded and looked quite cheerful. Whatever he said erased the apprehensive look from the manager’s face and caused him to nod and back out smiling.

“What did you say to him?” Yuxia asked.

“Since you are so sensitive about being mistaken for a T-bird, I probably shouldn’t tell you,” the man said. “But I told him that you and I were having a little tiff, a common sort of dispute in a place like this, and that we had settled it.”

“What is a T-bird?” Csongor asked.

“A tomboy,” said the man. “In this context, a real or fake lesbian who caters to mongers who get off on that sort of thing.”

Far from wanting to pull a gun and shoot the man, Csongor now wanted to stand here and ask him questions all day. It was such a pleasure to be around someone who actually knew what the hell was going on.

“What is your name?” Yuxia asked.

“James O’Donnell,” the man decided.

“Are you a monger?” she asked.

“No. But please don’t tell anyone.”

Yuxia laughed. “Why? You are ashamed to not be a disgusting pervert?”

“Because that’s the only reason to be here?” Csongor guessed.

The man calling himself James nodded. “Any Western male in a town like this who is not a sex tourist will only arouse suspicion and curiosity. I’m guessing the locals are fascinated by him.” And he nodded toward Marlon, who had glanced up from his monitor once or twice during all this but, since there’d been no gunplay, had not seen fit to interrupt his work.

“You should talk,” said Yuxia, looking at James’s monitor. James had also been playing T’Rain. Csongor was interested to note that James’s character seemed to be tromping around in an environment very similar to the Torgai Foothills. As a matter of fact, the mountain peak in the background looked awfully familiar; James’s character was within a few kilometers of Marlon’s.

“You’re following us,” he said, “in two worlds at the same time.”

James nodded. “I cannot tell a lie. I been doing it for a few hours.”

“Do you want some of the gold?” Yuxia asked.

“Fuck the gold,” said James. “I want to know anything you might know about Abdallah Jones.”

“YOU ASKED ME to tell you when he got over the one-million-dollar mark,” Clover mentioned, “and I think it just happened.”

“You think!?”

“It fluctuates up and down as raiding parties steal money from him. He has got a lot of raiding parties coming after him right now.”

“Anything major?”

“No, nothing as big as the party we put together. There hasn’t been time. But I’d say that word is getting around that something big is happening in the Torgai. Within an hour I’d expect to see some fairly well-organized hundred-man raids homing in on him.”

“I think that’s actually a good thing,” Egdod said, after thinking about it for a while. Richard had been playing T’Rain for something like fourteen consecutive hours, and his conversational skills weren’t everything that they could be. “I think it gives him more incentive to get it done now. He’s unHidden a million bucks’ worth of gold…”

“One point one million,” Clover corrected him. “He just raked in a big score.”

“Anyway, the point is that for him to re-Hide all of it now, with so many people watching him, would be difficult. Easier to make his strike tonight.”

“So what does that mean for us? Or for you, rather, since I am about as puissant as a bacterium living in Chuck Norris’s bowels.”

“It means that the time has come.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Are you wearing headphones?”

“Yeah.”

“I suggest you take them off.”

“I WAS EXPECTING one Chinese virus-writer kid, alone,” said the man calling himself James, with a nod in Marlon’s direction. “I didn’t realize he’d have a girlfriend, and a Hungarian bodyguard with a pistol in his pocket.”

They had withdrawn to a corner of the Internet café where they could speak privately and google things. The place was filling up with mongers.

“I’m not his girlfriend,” Yuxia said. “I don’t think he likes tomboys.”

“De gustibus non est disputandem,” said the man.

“What does that mean?”

“It means he’s a fucking idiot.”

Csongor, a bit taken aback to realize that James and Yuxia were flirting with each other, felt himself receding to the periphery of relevance.

“I like him,” Yuxia said, “like a brother. But…” and she held out her hand, fingers splayed, and wiggled it in the air.

“Gotcha,” said James, looking at her fascinatedly. But then he seemed to remember his manners, and his gaze strayed to Csongor. “What’s your story, big guy? Fish out of water, huh?”

While not immune to James’s insouciant charm, Csongor could only think of Zula, so he broke eye contact and looked out the window in a way that must have seemed brooding. He noticed that he was drumming his fingers on the counter, each calloused, sun-dried tip bashing the Formica like a ball-peen hammer.

“I shot him in the head,” he said finally.

He turned to look at James, who had shut up for once. “I. Shot. Him. In. The. Head.”

“Hold on a sec, are you talking about Jones?”

“Yeah. But it was only, what do you call it?” Csongor pantomimed a bullet caroming off the side of his head.

“A graze,” James said. “I fucking hate that.” He pondered it for a few moments. “You shot Abdallah Jones in the head.”

“Yeah. With this.” Csongor slapped the heavy thing in his pocket.

“From how far away?”

“Too close.” And Csongor related the story. This ended up taking a while. He got the impression that this was the longest span of time that “James” had gone without saying anything since he had obtained the power of speech as a toddler.

But before James could follow up on some of the story’s very remarkable features — which was something that he clearly wanted to do in the worst way — they were interrupted by a sharp exclamation from Marlon: “Aiyaa!”

It was the first time since all of this had begun that Marlon had expressed even mild concern about anything. But this was more than that: it was a pang of dismay. He had taken both hands off the keyboard — a completely unprecedented lapse — and clapped them to the sides of his head, and was staring at the screen in astonishment.

His face was illuminated by flickering white light.

“James” was on his feet. He ran around to where he could see the screen. “Holy crap,” he exclaimed. “This could only be one spell. But I don’t think it’s ever been used before.”

“One time,” Marlon said, “it was used to kill a whole dynasty of Titans.”

“Who used it?”

“Egdod.”

“I’m going to Yank you,” said James, running over toward the terminal where his T’Rain session was still open.

“I have wards and spoilers in effect,” Marlon warned him. “You can’t Yank me.”

“Turn them all off and let me do it. My name is Thorakks.”

By now Csongor and Yuxia had edged into the space vacated, moments earlier, by James, and were looking over Marlon’s shoulder. Marlon had pushed all the little chat windows and status displays to the periphery of his screen, so they were seeing the world of T’Rain over the shoulder of Reamde, which was to say that they were now looking over two shoulders, Marlon’s and the Troll’s. The latter was standing on open ground in the floodplain of a river, with the tail end of a mountain range visible on the right, giving way to rolling bottomlands tiled with green fields and speckled with villages. He had, in other words, almost made it out of the Torgai Foothills and seemed to be well on his way to reaching some inhabited place where amenities such as moneychangers and ley line intersections could be found. Csongor, who by now had learned how to make sense of the user interface, observed that Reamde was carrying on his person 9 pieces of Indigold, 767 pieces of Blue Gold, 32,198 pieces of Red Gold, and 198,564 of plain old yellow gold pieces: numbers that boggled the T’Rainian mind, since even a few hundred pieces of yellow gold was rated a considerable fortune and well worth fighting over. This absolutely had to be the largest amount of money ever carried by a single T’Rain character at one time. At a quick calculation it was well over a million dollars in real money, probably closer to two million.

Accordingly, Reamde was surrounded by a phalanx of other characters, too numerous for Csongor to count or even to see. The entire formation was marching across the plain as a bloc, so tightly coordinated in its maneuvers that Csongor reckoned they must all be linked together by some sort of computer algorithm; the other players must have slaved their characters to Reamde’s movements and taken their hands from the controls, allowing Marlon to drive the entire formation.

These things alone — the vast amount of money in play, the colossal size of the formation — would have absorbed the attention of even the most experienced and hard-core T’Rain player. And yet the scene was visually dominated by something even huger and more attention-getting: an incoming comet. At its core it was as bright as the screen of Marlon’s computer was capable of shining, and its brilliance was lighting up all that faced it with ghastly white brilliance while casting everything else into impenetrable shadow. An interesting psychological phenomenon kicked in here, having to do with perception of light and color. They were looking at a monitor screen in a dimly illuminated room. The monitor was a tray of black plastic with some fluorescent tubes in its back and a window covering its front. The window was etched with a few million microscopic light valves, made of liquid crystals, that could be turned on or off, or to various gradations in between. If every single one of those valves was opened up to let 100 percent of the light through, then they would simply be looking at a tray with some fluorescent tubes in the back, and it wouldn’t be all that bright. It would be like staring up at a light fixture in the ceiling of an office: certainly an ample amount of illumination, but nothing compared to the amount of light that the sun shed on the ground, even on the most heavily overcast day. Anyone walking indoors and staring at that tray of light going full blast would not perceive it as bright. They might not even be able to tell whether it was turned on.

And yet Marlon and Csongor and Yuxia were all squinting and averting their gazes and even holding up hands to shield their retinas from the light of the imaginary comet being depicted on the screen of this computer monitor. They perceived it as intolerably bright. Admittedly, this was partly because they were in a dark room and so their pupils were dilated. But beyond that, there was a psychological factor at work. They had been habituated to avert their gaze from extremely bright objects that did what the light in this fictional scene was doing, that is, shining out of the sky and casting deep shadows on the ground, and these instincts were kicking in as the comet drew closer. Moreover, the subwoofer attached to Marlon’s computer had gone into some kind of serious overdrive and was causing visible nervousness among the porn-watching clientele of the café, who had probably been warned that there were lots of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis in the Philippines. One of them even jumped up from his monitor and made a run for the door, fearing he might in the next moment be buried in a lahar. Csongor, snapping out of suspended-disbelief mode, stepped forward and twiddled a knob on the speaker, cutting the bass to a more manageable level.

This made it possible to hear James, who was hollering from across the café: “Dude. It is Comet Rider. And it is targeted on your ass. You are going to die. Let me Yank you.”

Marlon’s hands flickered like firelight over the keyboard, changing some of the interface settings. Csongor was familiar with what he was doing, since he’d been forced to learn similar tricks in order to perceive all the warding spells that were permanently installed around the trading pit at the Carthinias Exchange. These suddenly became visible — though badly washed out by comet-light — around Reamde and his phalanx: at least a dozen concentric layers of colored force fields, some dome shaped, some conical, some open-topped cylinders, all depicted in different hues and shimmering with various textures. Spells for turning aside projectile weapons, for stopping magical fireballs, for making hidden characters visible, and for inflicting damage automatically on any foes who tried to penetrate to the center.

And for preventing the beneficiary from being Yanked. Yanking was a spell, normally used with hostile intent, that abducted the target character and sucked him across space at unthinkable velocity and deposited him at the feet of the spell caster.

Marlon began bringing down the curtains of protective spells. In doing so, he was exposing himself and the members of his army to attack; but his army was dissolving anyway, fleeing on a menagerie of winged, four-footed, and six-footed mounts, magic carpets, numinous motorcycles, and magical currents of air, trying to put as much space as possible between themselves and him upon whom the comet was unmistakably crosshaired.

Just as the screen was going completely white and the subwoofer trying to turn itself inside out, a translucent image of Thorakks appeared square in the middle, reaching toward him with one gloved and mailed fist. The screen became considerably darker, and they were treated to an animation that made it seem as though they were being vomited up an esophagus of eerily colored smoke and twining tendrils.

And then they were on a rocky ledge on the side of a mountain somewhere, looking at Thorakks, who was lit up a blinding white on one side and completely black on the other.

Marlon spun the point of view around so that they were looking in the same direction as Thorakks, that is, into the valley below them. A fireball the size of Staten Island was just that second slamming into the ground. Marlon had to turn the subwoofer totally off.

They stood there for a minute or so just to enjoy the spectacle: a shock wave spreading out from the middle like a ripple in a pond, eventually freezing to create the rim of a crater. Columns of steam rising up from the vaporized river. Rocks and trees raining down (both Thorakks and Reamde cast warding spells to keep from getting crushed by falling debris). The vast bubble of light and smoke gradually focusing into a column, the column resolving into a bipedal figure: a man with a long white beard, gazing about the crater somewhat in the manner of someone who has just turned on the light in his pantry and is looking for cockroaches. For — as Csongor now understood — this being had literally rode in on the comet, like a child descending a hill on a trash can lid.

“Egdod,” Marlon said in an interesting combination of reverence, disbelief, and pants-pissing fear.

“Never thought I’d see him in-game,” said James indistinctly from across the room. A moment later the words were repeated, in a harsh metallic voice, and with a different accent, by Thorakks.

Marlon was busy invoking new spells, trying to rebuild the defenses he had shut down in order to allow himself to be Yanked and trying, Csongor suspected, to make himself invisible. Noting this, Thorakks said, with mild amusement: “Seriously? You’re going to put up a fight?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to go on the lam from Egdod.”

“I have no choice.”

“Do you know who his player is?”

“Of course I know.”

“Do you know he’s the uncle of your friend Zula?”

Marlon froze for a moment, and Csongor imagined that, in Marlon’s mind’s eye, he was seeing the image he had described to them during the voyage: a moment, just after Ivanov had been shot and Csongor knocked out, when Zula’s face had met Marlon’s through a dirty windowpane, and their eyes had connected for a few moments.

Then his eyes refocused on the screen.

“I will talk to the uncle of Zula when I have the money,” Marlon said, “and have given it to my friends. Their home has been exploded and they are running from the police and from everyone else, and they are depending on me to finish this.”

“Then let’s haul ass,” James suggested.

Marlon poised his fingers on the keyboard, then glanced up at Csongor. “Are you ready?”

“I will be,” Csongor said, “by the time you get there.”

“HEY, BIGFOOT,” CORVALLIS said. “You are rearranging the planet faster than our servers can update the caches.”

“It’s good for you,” Richard muttered. “Call it a stress test and get on with it.”

“It doesn’t help that you’re doing it at one in the morning when most of our senior staff are asleep.”

“It’s Saturday. They’re partying. What do you think phones are for?”

“I’ll try to reach them but — ”

“Before you do that, tell me where the little fucker is.”

“So he’s back to being a little fucker now?”

“There are a lot of crushed and incinerated remains underfoot … but he should have survived … I cast a protective ward on him immediately before impact.”

After a lot of typing, C-plus answered: “He’s not there. He got Yanked just in time by one Thorakks. I can give you general coordinates, but they are moving fast and the database is going to lag.”

“Just give me a place to start tracking them,” said Richard, sounding more and more like Egdod himself with every moment. “No, scratch that.”

“Come again?”

“They have to be heading for an LLI,” Richard said, using the ingame jargon for ley line intersection. “There’s only one place they can move this amount of gold.”

AS LONG AS Zula kept herself busy cleaning up the aftermath of dinner, she was able to avoid thinking about keys and padlocks. They had eaten the food from disposable plastic plates, which she collected and stacked, scraping any residue into a garbage bag. She placed the stack of scraped plates into a second garbage bag. The cooking pots she washed using water that she heated up on the camp stove. She left those out to dry. The chain, naturally, confined her to a circular area, and she’d already made up her mind that she would sleep as far away as possible from where she put the garbage, in case it drew vermin or worse. For now, she placed the garbage bags — which were not yet very bulky — into a cooler, just to keep them safe from small critters such as mice. She considered explaining to the men that they should hang their food from tree limbs, then thought better of it. Instead she dragged the cooler as far as she could go in the direction of the tents where the men were sleeping and left it there. Let them deal with the local wildlife. At worst it would give her some entertainment; at best it might cover her escape. Moving as far as she could go in the opposite direction, 180 degrees around the circle from the food dump, she began to arrange her own little campsite. This consisted of a tiny one-person camp shelter, just large enough to house a sleeping bag.

They hadn’t said anything about toilet facilities. As far as she could make out, they were just wandering off into the woods when they needed to eliminate. Does a terrorist shit in the woods? Apparently. But Zula did not have that option. They had equipped her with a large steel serving spoon. She went to a place at the end of her chain, equidistant from the garbage place and the sleeping place, and used the spoon to dig out a shallow pit. The going was easy at first, but then she came to a depth, only a few inches below the surface, where interlocking roots of trees and shrubs made it impossible to go any deeper. She stood above it and wrapped a green plastic tarp around herself for privacy, then dropped her pants and squatted over it, creating a little tent lit up on the inside by her flashlight. She hunched her shoulders and drew the tarp over her head so that she could see what she was doing. The pill of damp cotton came out first, and she was able to pluck it clear before the rest came. When she was finished, she pulled the key out and placed it in a zippered pocket on the leg of her trousers before standing up, getting fully reclothed, and tossing the tarp to one side. Then she used the shovel to fill the hole back in and kicked some more loose pine needles and pebbles over the top for good measure. The men had all long since gone into their tents, the only exception being the sniper Jahandar, who had retreated up into the trees after dinner to, she assumed, keep watch while the others slept. Since Zula was the only person moving in the camp, she had to assume that he was watching her. If so, he was seeing her as a little blob of light bobbing around and tending to chores. After she had finished going to the toilet, she kicked off her Crocs — still the only footwear she was allowed to have — and climbed into her sleeping bag fully clothed and zipped the tiny tent closed, except for a gap down at the bottom where the chain emerged.

She lay there for several minutes just listening. Wondering whether Jahandar or one of the other men might bother to come and check on her. But nothing happened. She could hear Jahandar moving occasionally, but he was just shifting his position, standing up to stretch his legs, pacing around, stretching.

Moving as quietly as she could, she slid a hand down to the side of her thigh, slowly worried the pocket’s zipper open, found the key with her fingers, and drew it out. She brought it up to her neck, wrapped one hand around the padlock to muffle any mechanical clicking noises that might come out of it, and got the key inserted. The padlock snicked open, and she felt the chain go slack around her throat. Not exactly a surprise; but one of her nightmares had been that for some reason it would fail to work.

It was a mistake, in a way, to have done this. For now she was overcome by an almost physical longing to squirm out of this sleeping bag and make a run for it.

She seriously considered it until, far off in the darkness, she heard the hiss and snick of a lighter, Jahandar’s lungs filling with cigarette smoke.

If she got out, went to the end of the chain as if she had to use the toilet again, and then suddenly made a run for it, would he be able to put a bullet in her before she had vanished into the trees? As he sat up there on his perch, was he keeping her in his crosshairs the whole time or just hanging out with the rifle across his lap, keeping casual watch over the camp?

It seemed unlikely that he would be able to plug her on the first pull of the trigger, given that it was dark and that he would be surprised. But the mere fact that he might do so focused her attention. Even if he missed, he would wake the entire camp, and then thirteen men with flashlights and guns and good boots would be pursuing her. At least some of them were experienced in hunting and mountaineering. She’d have the choice between remaining still, in which case they could catch up with her and surround her, or moving, in which case she would make obvious crashing and twig-snapping noises.

From nearby, the sound of a long zipper, somewhat muffled. A sleeping bag, she guessed. Then a second long zipper, sharper. A tent being opened. The swish of someone sliding out of his bag. Probably going to take a leak. Footsteps. Someone made himself comfortable on a camp chair. Some plasticky clicking noises and then the whooshy, saccharine jingle made by Windows as it was booting up.

She rolled onto her stomach, propped herself up on her elbows, and opened the tent zipper a minute amount, worrying the pull upward one tooth at a time so as not to make noise. Peering out through the hole just made, she saw Jones, sitting in the camp chair about thirty feet away, his face ghastly in the light of the laptop’s screen. He screwed himself around in his chair, thrust out a leg, got a hand into a hip pocket, and pulled out something tiny which he inserted into the side of the machine: a thumb drive. And then he went to work.

Had he not been right there, wide awake, with a pistol strapped into his armpit, this would have been the most difficult decision in her life. As it was, she had little choice: she snapped the padlock shut again. Then she replaced the key in her pocket and zipped it securely closed.

Despair would have been reasonable. But she reminded herself, again and again, that they could not, all of them, remain together in this camp indefinitely. Most of them would soon be leaving, with only a skeleton crew to keep an eye on Zula, and then her odds would go up accordingly. Jahandar could not be expected to stay up all night, every night, keeping watch over the camp. Sooner or later Zakir’s turn would come up, and Zakir would fall asleep immediately.

So she tried to rest. Sleep did not seem realistic, but she could at least lie still and give her body an opportunity to relax muscles, digest food, and store energy.

She must have dozed off, since she was awakened by a tinny Arabic pop song coming from someone’s phone: an alarm, not an incoming call. There was no way for her to judge time, but it was definitely still dark and she didn’t feel that she had been out for very long. She heard shifting around from one of the tents and low voices.

Peering out through her spyhole, she saw Jones exactly as before. But now pools of light were bobbing and veering across the ground as Ershut and the white American Abdul-Ghaffar — emerged from one of the tents. Sharjeel crawled out from another and scurried over to Jones to suck up to him some more, but Jones, deeply involved in whatever he was doing, told him to bugger off. Gradually they formed a little circle on the ground, anchored by Jones looming above them as on a throne. Occasionally they shone their flashlights across her tent, and she had to resist the temptation to flinch away. There was no way that they could possibly see her through this tiny crevice in the zipper. They gathered around the stove, only a few yards from her tent, and began banging pots. She felt an absolutely ridiculous flash of annoyance that they were somehow invading her territory, making a mess of her kitchen. Strange how the mind worked. They filled a pot with water, lit the stove, began making tea, snacking on bananas from a grocery bag.

After everyone had come fully awake, Jones began to talk, saying everything in English and Arabic so that Abdul-Ghaffar could understand it. Sharjeel was another whose Arabic could use some improvement. But Jahandar spoke nothing but Pashtun and Arabic, so the conversation had to be bilingual.

Actually it was not a conversation so much as a briefing.

“It’s 3:30,” Jones said. “We’ll be under way in moments. I estimate half an hour to get there, half an hour to reconnoiter the place and get in and show him this.” He yanked the thumb drive out, held it up as if they could all see what was on it, then put it into the breast pocket of his shirt and smoothed a Velcro flap over it. “Then he’ll have to pack some items, I should imagine, which might take another half an hour, and then another half hour to get to the rendezvous point below. So figure we meet there at 5:30 and get under way. Sharjeel, give the men another hour to sleep. Wake her up at 4:00 so that when you rouse the men at 4:30, water will be hot and breakfast ready. That’s time for eating, for morning prayers, and for packing. Jahandar and Ershut will, inshallah, come up here at around 5:30 to let you know that we are ready to go; when you see them, lead the rest of the expedition down to the trail. Ershut, we may need to display her.”

A minute later Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, Ershut, and Jahandar got up and walked away into the woods, headed downhill into the mining complex, leaving Sharjeel the only one keeping watch over the camp. Zula was tempted to make a run for it then. But then she’d be bracketed between the aroused camp and Jones’s contingent. Not a good situation. After five thirty, though, most of these men would be gone for good, leaving her with only four guards, two of whom were incompetent. That would be the time to make a break for it.

To be precise, she needed to make her break during the interval between five thirty and whenever it was that they were supposed to kill her. No schedule had been set for that yet, or if it had, they’d been discreet enough to do it out of her hearing.

Even if they intended to keep her alive indefinitely, she had an obligation to get free as soon as possible. After the jet crash, with Jones’s gun in her face, she’d blurted out the one thing she could think of that might keep her alive. And she didn’t imagine that Richard or anyone else in the family would fault her for it. But soon, as consequence, Richard was going to be in their power; and if he ended up taking Jones down his usual pathway into northern Idaho, it would lead them straight to the cabin where Uncle Jake and his family lived. She was obligated to do whatever she could to help them out of the mess she’d put them in.

To bears, she added boots as something to be thinking about. Zakir was a big lumbering man, but Sayed the graduate student was a good inch shorter than Zula. She made up her mind to have a look at what was on his feet the next time he emerged from his tent.

LOTTERY DISCOUNTZ HAD now spent enough time loitering just above the lower reaches of the trading pit to give his owner a loose understanding of how it all worked. He’d been foxed, at first, by the fact that T’Rain was wired for sound. The easiest way to communicate with characters in one’s immediate vicinity was simply to talk. But there was, in addition, an old-school chat interface. You could type little messages, like the Internet pioneers of yore, and they would appear in scrolling windows on the screens of anyone who was listening. It was plainly the case that Marlon and the rest of the da G shou couldn’t live without it. So the next time Csongor focused his attention on the money-trading pit, he experimented with turning on the chat interface. For one thing he’d noticed about the place was that, for a trading pit, it was strangely quiet. It was visually loud, and ridiculously active, but almost no one was speaking.

It all became clear when he interrogated the chat interface and discovered that there were no fewer than a dozen discrete channels to which he could listen here. Doing so, he was treated to waterfalls of jargon-laden statements in as many separate windows.

Opening a browser window atop his view of the game, he did some googling and learned how to translate such utterances: “WTS” meant “want to sell,” “RG 50” meant that the quantity for sale amounted to fifty or so pieces of Red Gold, “BUX” meant that Snarph’s player wanted American dollars (other commonly seen options being “EUR,” “LBS,” “YEN,” and “RMB”), “PP” meant that he wanted to clear the transaction using PayPal, and “NOW” meant the obvious.

Working laboriously from a translation key that he found on a wiki, he typed in

Which meant “I wish to exchange a yet-to-be-divulged amount of Indigold for dollars in about one hour, settling the transaction by means of a Western Union wire transfer.”

But he did not hit the return key, which would have broadcast the message to all the heavy-hitter gold buyers in the deepest recess of the pit — the channel into which he’d been typing. He, a complete nobody, was proposing to launch a transaction worth (at least) hundreds of thousands of dollars, using Indigold pieces that he did not actually have in hand yet. He had already seen other would-be sellers, making much less unusual propositions, being hounded down as mere mischief makers and slain on the spot. Worse yet — since death, in T’Rain, was only a temporary inconvenience — he might get exiled permanently.

So he waited and watched. Because there was an alternative to broadcasting on a channel: you could send the message privately to a specific individual. He only needed to find the right one. And now that he had discovered the chat interface and broken its code, he was beginning to feel he had some plausible hope of doing so. To begin with, he could ignore all the channels except the ones used by the highest of high rollers. Once he had closed all those windows, he began to look for lines that had the right sorts of codes in them. A particularly appealing one being

By mousing over the characters in his field of view, Csongor was able to identify this Dogshaker, a distinguished-looking K’Shetriae merchant in gleaming purple robes — perhaps a fashion statement intended to emphasize the fact that he dealt in the ultra-high-value Indigo coins. After a minute or so, this Dogshaker was approached by another character who apparently had Indigold to sell, and it became plain from their body language that they were whispering to each other. This meant that they had established a private chat channel and were now using it to negotiate terms. The negotiation appeared to stretch out over several minutes, which made Csongor somewhat anxious. But in due time they shook hands with each other and went their separate ways, the seller climbing up out of the pit and wandering off while the buyer remained where he was.

All of this reconnaissance had consumed a considerable amount of time, during which Marlon and James had been shouting at each other almost nonstop across the café, apparently helping each other negotiate some incredibly challenging set of obstacles, ambushes, and setbacks. Their epic adventure seemed to have driven away business at first, as the sword-and-sorcery-themed quest seemed to have destroyed the erotic ambience being sought by the mongers. Csongor had been a bit concerned that they might be thrown out of the establishment. But Yuxia had been at work distracting the proprietor, not so much by charming as by confusing him. When that began to wear thin, she had moved on to plucking money out of James’s wallet and purchasing “LDs” — Lady Drinks — shockingly overpriced beverages that were apparently the fiscal mainspring of the local hospitality industry. Thus Marlon and James had been left free to prosecute their virtual adventure. But of late there had been a lull, and when Csongor finally pulled his head out of the game for a moment to ask why, James informed him that they had fought their way to a ley line intersection and were even now in transit to Carthinias.

Now or never. Csongor created a new chat window, an invitation to set up a private conversation between Lottery Discountz and Dogshaker.

“How many Indigo do you have?” he called out.

“Twenty,” Marlon answered.

After a few moments’ pause, he saw a response:

Csongor, a bit nonplussed, typed back,

(For one of the reasons the Carthinias Exchange stood where it did was that it was within a couple of thousand meters of not just one but four major ley line intersections.)

Csongor repeated the question aloud.

“Who wants to know?” asked James.

“A possible buyer.”

“He wants to rob us,” Marlon said.

“He seems respectable. He’s doing big transactions in the Exchange. He’s worried you’re going to get ripped off.”

“So am I,” said James.

“Me too,” said Marlon

In the chat window, Csongor’s interlocutor was becoming impatient.

Csongor announced, “He has guessed you’re coming from the Torgai.”

“Of course,” James said. “These guys must all know that something big is going down there.”

“Comet Rider spell is attention getter,” Marlon added, perhaps for comic effect.

Dogshaker the moneychanger, apparently fed up with Lottery Discountz’s coyness, began to climb up out of the amphitheater, headed (Csongor guessed) in the direction of the ley line intersection that would tend to be used by visitors from the Torgai Foothills. “He’s headed for your LLI,” Csongor said. “I’m following him.” And he got his hands on the keyboard and sent Lottery Discountz running in pursuit.

“Does he have muscle with him?”

“No.”

“What class of character is he?”

“Merchant.”

“Then we’re probably okay,” said James, “unless he’s only pretending to be a merchant.” During this exchange, he had been sitting back from his keyboard, taking the advantage of a lull to stretch his arms luxuriously. Csongor guessed that nothing much happened during a ley line ride. But suddenly his eyes snapped back to the screen, and he sat forward, bringing his hands back to the keyboard. “We’re sort of committed now anyway.”

“You’re at the LLI?”

“Just popped out,” James confirmed. Csongor glanced over to see that Marlon too was once again fully engaged with his computer.

“Then I’ll lead him to you.” And Csongor typed into the chat window:

To which the moneychanger responded immediately with “K,” that being the chat abbreviation for the unwieldy two-letter message “OK.”

This LLI was a busy one, an area about the size and shape of a cricket oval surrounded by market stalls mostly occupied by small-time moneychangers. Upward of a hundred characters were scattered around it, some just standing there alone, others gathered in social clusters, still others engaged in duels that were frequently accompanied by spectacular magical light shows. Lottery Discountz stumbled to a halt in the middle of it and turned around several times.

He turned to look the way Dogshaker was looking and identified Reamde and Thorakks coming their way. He replied with a Y, but Dogshaker was already running toward them. Csongor ran after. Their chat window went through some kind of reconfiguration: apparently the moneychanger had added the newcomers to the chat list, so that they could all see one another’s messages. This drew Csongor’s attention for a few moments. Another one of those crazy light shows flourished on the screen: some high-level character, locked in a duel, must be invoking a powerful spell.

“O M G,” said Marlon out loud.

Csongor looked at the screen. The ground was dropping out from beneath Lottery Discountz’s feet. Something was lifting him into the air. The others were coming with him.

James just laughed ruefully. “Oh man,” he finally said, “we are so fucked.”

Reamde, Thorakks, and Lottery Discountz were all together, standing on something translucent and bluish white, a platform that seemed to be about a hundred meters in the air above the ley line intersection. Csongor turned his point of view around and was startled to see a giant face glowering down at them. Utterly confused, he zoomed way out so that he could see his character from a greater distance.

He now perceived that he and Reamde and Thorakks were literally in the palm of a hand the size of a tennis court. The hand belonged to a towering, godlike figure standing like a colossus above the city of Carthinias, one foot planted at the ley line intersection, the other about a kilometer away near the Exchange.

Having gotten over his initial astonishment, Marlon was now furiously hitting keys, apparently trying to invoke various spells. Bubbles of light bloomed around his hands, but each was snuffed out by some sort of counterspell from the giant figure. Csongor finally had the presence of mind to mouse over the giant’s head and learned that this was a character named Egdod.

“Asshole,” Egdod proclaimed in a voice that once again obliged all three players to grope in panic for their volume knobs, “I could just kill you and take the gold — if that was what I wanted.”

Marlon sat back in despair and clapped his hands to the side of his head.

“Let’s go somewhere a little more private,” Egdod continued, and Csongor noticed that cloud formations were zipping past them, moving downward. He shifted his point of view down and saw that Carthinias was dropping away beneath Egdod’s sandaled feet. He was taking them up into the air like a Saturn V. Lottery Discountz’s health indicators were dropping at least as rapidly as their altitude was rising: hypoxia and hypothermia, as it turned out, being the main culprits. But then he noted that spells were being cast on him — and presumably the others too — such as “Heavenly Warmth” and “Breath of the Gods,” and his indicators began to climb again.

“Aiyaa!” Marlon exclaimed, having moved his hands around to cover his face altogether.

“Let me hear your voices,” Egdod commanded.

James, Csongor, and Marlon all reached for their headsets and slipped them on. Meanwhile, Egdod was explaining: “I’ll go through with the transaction just as I said. But first I want to hear everything you know about Zula.”

“I know nothing,” James announced, and a moment later Thorakks said the same thing in a different voice.

“I’ll deal with you later, Seamus Costello!” Egdod thundered.

Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia all turned to look at “James,” who was blushing vividly.

Marlon knew more than Seamus, but he was still too taken aback — and perhaps exhausted — to speak coherently. He looked across the café at Csongor.

“Okay,” Csongor said. “The story so far.” And he launched into an account of what had transpired in Xiamen two weeks ago. Richard Forthrast (for Csongor had googled Egdod and learned that the owner of this godlike character was none other) knew a surprising amount about the safe house that Ivanov had set up in Xiamen and about the cast of characters. Csongor couldn’t guess how he might have come by that information and did not want to interrupt the narrative to ask. Until, that is, Richard said, “You must be the Eastern European hacker.”

“We think of ourselves as Central European,” said Csongor. “How did you know of me?”

“Zula mentioned you in her note.”

This silenced Csongor for long enough that Seamus had to break in and explain, “We’re still on the line, big guy … he’s just taking that in.”

“You have heard from Zula!?” Csongor finally exclaimed, exchanging a wild look with Marlon and Yuxia.

“She wrote a note,” Richard said regretfully, “before it all went down. Nothing since then, unfortunately.”

Having allowed his hopes to rise, Csongor had now to observe another silence as his spirits plunged. He looked up to see Seamus giving him a knowing look. “Well then,” Csongor finally said, and he went on to relate a brief account of the storming of the apartment building, Zula’s trick with the fusebox, and how that had all played out.

Richard listened in silence until a certain point in the story when he said, “So Peter is dead.”

“Yes,” Csongor said gently.

“You’re sure of this.”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Well, that is a shame,” Richard said, “and sooner or later I’ll get around to feeling like crap about it. But right now — focusing on practical matters — it is a problem for me because it prevents me from pursuing the only independent lead I have.”

“What lead is that?” Seamus demanded.

“Peter had surveillance cameras in his apartment. They probably recorded video of what went down there the night Wallace was killed and Peter and Zula were abducted. Unfortunately, those files were erased. Later, though, someone came back — probably an accomplice to the original crime — and got caught on video. I have a copy of the file. Unfortunately, it’s encrypted. I was hoping I could get the decryption key. But if Peter’s dead — ”

“Hold on for a moment,” Csongor said. For Ivanov’s leather man-purse was sitting on the floor between his feet. The money had been stolen from it, but Peter’s and Zula’s wallets and other personal effects were still in there, sealed up in Ziploc bags. In a few moments, he was able to get Peter’s wallet out and find a certain compartment, sealed behind a tiny zipper, with a scrap of paper inside.

Something moved on the screen, and he noted that they had been joined by another character named Clover — apparently an invited guest of Egdod’s.

Five lines had been written on the paper. Each began with what was apparently the name of a computer and ended with what was obviously a password.

“Do you have a hostname or something for the system you are trying to crack?”

Clover answered: “This was not a server per se, just a backup drive on a network.”

“Brand name Li-Fi, by any chance?”

“The same.”

“Then here is the password,” Csongor announced and read out the corresponding series of symbols.

“On it,” said Clover, and then became still, a sure sign that its owner — whoever he was — was tending to something other than playing T’Rain.

“Pray continue,” Richard said, and so Csongor went on telling the story. He got some assistance now from Marlon, who was able to relate parts of it that Csongor had not seen or during which he had been unconscious. But just as they were trying to explain the explosion, and Marlon’s rescue of Csongor from the cellar, Clover woke up and interrupted: “That was the correct password. I was able to decrypt the file.”

“Can you email it to me?” Richard asked. From which Csongor inferred that Richard and whoever was playing Clover were not in the same place.

“I did it on your server,” Clover answered. “The files were already there. All I had to do was send the command.”

He rattled off the name of a directory.

Csongor and Marlon now resumed the narrative, a bit uncertainly as they sensed that they no longer had Richard’s full attention. This suspicion was borne out a few minutes later when Richard broke in: “I can see him.” His voice was husky and he spoke slowly, as if mildly stunned. “This guy finds a way to break in. I can’t hear anything — it’s all just body language — but let me tell you that I have hired a lot of guys in my time, and this guy is a schlub. A palooka. An epsilon minus.”

Csongor did not know the meaning of any of these terms, but Richard’s tone of voice was easy enough to read.

“I was half hoping it might have been Sokolov,” Richard explained. “But I guess that’s impossible — you guys were all in Xiamen by this point. A day later he goes missing off Kinmen.”

Csongor looked at Marlon and Yuxia, who both threw up their hands. “You think Sokolov survived the explosion?” he asked.

“We know he did,” Seamus announced.

“That is hard to believe,” Yuxia said. “If you had been there — ”

“We have the most direct and convincing possible testimony that he lived through it,” Seamus assured her, with a little wiggle of the eyebrows that made Yuxia blush.

“Sokolov is still alive,” Csongor repeated, trying to make himself believe it.

“I didn’t say that,” Richard put in. “He was involved in a gunfight off Kinmen the next day.”

“Let me tell you something,” Csongor said. “If he was in a gunfight, I am more worried about the people he was fighting against.” This drew an approving look and a nod from Seamus.

Richard continued, “The palooka comes in the front door carrying a piece of equipment that, based on other research I’ve been doing, matches the description of a plasma torch. He takes it upstairs and sets it up next to Peter’s gun safe and runs a huge extension cord down the stairs to Peter’s shop where he plugs it into a big-ass industrial outlet.”

“Gun safe?” Csongor asked wonderingly.

“Not from around here, are you?” Richard asked. “Believe it or not, they are as common in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave as, let’s say, bidets are in France. Anyway, the picture now gets completely fucked up as this guy turns on the torch and slices the safe open. Just takes the top right off. Fast-forwarding here — I think he’s waiting for the metal to cool down. Then he reaches into the top and pulls out — oh, for goodness’ sake. Who knew that our Peter was a gun nut?”

“What are you seeing?” Seamus asked.

“A nice metal case. Inside of it, a really tricked-out AR-15,” Richard said, and then he rattled off a lot of verbiage that seemed significant to him and to Seamus but meant nothing to Csongor: “Picatinny rails on all four sides, mounted with Swarovski optics and what might be a laser sight. Tac light. Tactical bipod. Yes, whatever other shortcomings he might have had, Peter was very good at adding items to his shopping cart.”

“So this goon must have noticed the gun safe during the snatch and made up his mind to come back later and see what was inside.”

“If so, he hit the jackpot. I’m looking at probably four thousand bucks’ worth of rifle. Want to see a picture?”

“Sure.”

There was a brief interlude for clicking and typing, and then Seamus said, “Got it,” and began paying attention to something on his screen. Csongor, having nothing else to do at the moment, got up and walked around behind him to see what it was. Evidently T’Rain contained some sort of facility for mailing image files back and forth, and Egdod had used it to send this JPEG to Thorakks. It was a surprisingly well-resolved picture of a bulky man with a shaved head, holding an assault rifle, sans clip, and examining his action. “Not my cup of tea,” Seamus said after inspecting it for a little while, “but I concur that Peter was a gun nut and that Mr. Potatohead is feeling very pleased with himself at the time this picture is taken.”

“Do you recognize him?” Richard asked.

Csongor was obliged to return to his post and put his headset back on. “No,” he said. “In none of my dealings with Ivanov, in Xiamen or otherwise, did I ever see this man.”

“He’s a local freelancer, Richard,” Seamus pronounced. “A temp.”

“Maybe I’ll send the picture to the Seattle cops, then,” Richard said. “Help them clear up some loose ends.”

“Save yourself the trouble,” said Seamus. “I can get it to the cops, and then some. But it’s not going to help finding Zula now.”

“I know that,” Richard said.

And then there was silence for a few moments. Csongor was unwilling to admit this to himself, but, although the last couple of hours’ machinations in T’Rain had been diverting, and the opportunity to exchange information with Richard had felt, for a few minutes, like an enormous breakthrough, it was all turning out to be a dead end. The most it might lead to was that Mr. Potatohead would be arrested, and the story of Zula and Peter’s abduction, and Wallace’s murder, would be explained to the satisfaction of the Seattle Police Department. But none of this would be of any help in finding Zula now or in stopping Jones.

Richard seemed to be reaching the same conclusion. “Interesting,” he finally said, “but all kind of useless.”

Seamus was ready for it. “You don’t know that,” he said. “The way it works is, you follow these leads and you work them until something breaks. Everything we have done here is extremely constructive whether or not you can see a way through to the end.”

“All I know is, I’ve been sitting on my ass for close to twenty-four hours,” said Richard, now sounding as bad as Csongor felt. “Thinking, hoping, you guys would know where Zula is. Now it’s something like four, five in the morning, I’m at the end of my tether, we have come up with nothing very useful. And some asshole tourist is knocking on my door, probably wanting to empty his holding tank or get directions to the geocaching site. So I’m going to break off for a little.”

And indeed Csongor now noticed that the clouds were rushing up past them and the city of Carthinias growing larger and larger as they plummeted toward it. Presently they came to a soft landing exactly where they had started, and Egdod shrank to human size.

“The money?” Marlon asked. “Not for me — for my friends in China.”

“Clover will see about making the da G shou whole,” Richard said, “at competitive rates. Good luck getting the money into China.” As he spoke, it was possible to hear a doorbell ringing in the background. The sound radiated incongruously over downtown Carthinias.

RICHARD STRIPPED OFF his headset and threw the keyboard off his lap, leaving Egdod mute and motionless for the time being. He reached down between his knees and found the pee bucket with his hand, then moved it well out of the way so he wouldn’t kick it over. He stood up slowly, partly because his body had stiffened up and partly because he didn’t want all the blood to rush out of his brain at once. He checked the time: 4:42 A.M. Who the hell was ringing his doorbell? In addition to which they had been pounding the hell out of every door and window they could find for the last couple of minutes. All the signs pointed to some sort of minor emergency: drunken teenaged mountain bikers who had flipped over their handlebars, or campers chased out of their tents by bears, or an RV gone off the road. It happened a few times a year, though rarely so early in the season.

He shambled out of the tavern and into the lobby, moving awkwardly, trying to make out if all of that had been worth it. From Zula’s paper towel note he had already known the first part of the story, and from British Spy Chick he’d learned some of the last bit. So all that he’d gained from nearly twenty-four hours’ solid game playing was a picture of some asshole stealing Peter’s rifle, more detail about what had happened in that apartment building in Xiamen, and a very large quantity of Indigold.

Overall, he decided that it had been worth it. He knew a great deal more now of how Zula had comported herself during the apartment building showdown and in the hours afterward, and all of it made him proud and would make the rest of the family proud when it went up on the Facebook page and when, in future years, they retold the story at the re-u. And that was all true whether Zula was alive or, as seemed likely, dead.

“All right already,” he shouted. He approached the main entrance and hit a switch that turned on the lights in the driveway.

Two men were standing there, sort of wrapped around each other. They looked like backpackers. One of them, a burly middle-aged man, was supporting a taller fellow who was all bundled up in warm clothes with a hood pulled up over his head. The latter’s leg was encased, from the knee down, in a splint that had been improvised from tree branches, duct tape, and climbing rope. His head was bowed as if he were only semiconscious or perhaps doubled over in pain.

Nothing Richard hadn’t seen before. He unlocked the front door and pulled it open.

“Thank God you’re here, Mr. Forthrast!” the man exclaimed, very loudly, as if he wished to be heard by someone else — someone who was not standing directly in front of him.

The lights went out.

The injured man, who until this moment had been draped over his comrade’s shoulders, stood up straight and took his full weight evenly on both feet.

Richard by now knew that something funny was going on but was too fuzzy-headed from sleep deprivation and T’Rain playing to do anything other than watch it play out before him like a cut scene in a video game. The tall man reached up and stripped the hood away from his face. But Richard could not see much of him because of the darkness.

“Good morning, Richard,” he said. His voice sounded like that of a black man, but his accent told that he was not from around here. His companion had unzipped his jacket and pulled something out. Richard heard the sound of a round being chambered into a semiautomatic pistol. This man backed up a pace and aimed it at Richard’s face. Richard flinched. In all the time he had spent messing around with guns, he’d never had one aimed at him before.

“You’d be Jones?” Richard said.

“That I would. May we come inside? I’ve been tracking your website — the one that keeps asking whether anyone has seen Zula — and I’ve come to give you news and claim the reward.”

“Is she alive?”

“Not only is she alive, Richard, but you have the power to keep her that way.”

“WELL, THAT HAPPENED,” Seamus announced. He crossed his arms over his chest and used his legs to shove his chair back from the computer.

Csongor had already logged out. Never again, he suspected, would Lottery Discountz walk the streets of Carthinias. Marlon was still engaged, typing chat messages — apparently aimed at the character called Clover, who seemed to be Egdod’s bagman. On his screen it was possible to see Clover and Reamde standing so close that their heads were almost touching. Thorakks loitered a few meters away and Egdod — suddenly poignant in his smallness and aloneness — just stood there.

Yuxia was perched on a counter near Seamus. “What’s next for you guys?” the latter asked. Grammatically, the question was aimed at all of them, but he was looking at Yuxia when he asked it.

Which was just as well since Csongor hadn’t the faintest idea how to answer it. Apparently they were going to get some money now. At least enough to buy an airplane ticket. But to where? And could Csongor even get out of this country legally? The last stamp in his passport was from Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow. Since then he’d entered and left China illegally and sneaked into the Philippines. He might be wanted for God only knew what sorts of crimes in China. Did the Philippines have an extradition treaty with China? Did Hungary?

He could only brood and worry and listen to Yuxia giving Seamus the third degree. “Who the heck are you?”

“I already told you,” he said innocently.

“A cop? A spy?”

“I’m a sex tourist.”

Yuxia laughed in his face. “You would have to travel much farther,” she said, “to find someone willing to do it with you.”

This seemed to Csongor shockingly rude, and his head swiveled around just to be sure that such words had actually come from Qian Yuxia’s mouth. They had.

And Seamus was eating it with a spoon. “Okay. Not a sex tourist.”

“Why do you ask what is next for us?”

“Oh, I just feel that we have established the beginnings of a friendship here, and I want to make sure you are all taken care of, that’s all.”

“You can take care of me,” she said, “by getting me back home.”

Seamus made a face. “Now, that’s going to be tricky,” he said. “I didn’t know much about you until just now.”

By “just now” he meant the conversation that had occupied much of the preceding hour, in which Csongor, assisted somewhat by his comrades, had narrated the remainder of their story.

“So? Now you know all about us,” Yuxia said, trying to sound insouciant. But Csongor knew her well enough, by now, to tell when she was troubled. Her eyes wandered and her face fell.

“I know enough to charge you with a list of crimes as long as my arm, if I were a Chinese prosecutor,” Seamus said. Reacting, apparently, to a look on her face, he became dismayed and held out his hands as if trying to tamp something down. “Not that they would. What do I know? All I’m saying is, think hard before you go running back to China.”

“I’m not going back,” Marlon scoffed. “It is my country and I love it, but I can’t go back.” And he returned to his money-shuffling activities.

“Mystery man,” Csongor said, “what can you do to help us?”

“In the next half hour or so, not so very much,” Seamus returned. “I need to make at least one phone call about our goon with the rifle. And I want to keep an eye on Egdod. He is worrying me a little. But after that, I will try to put something together. Maybe you guys can help us.”

“Who is ‘us’ and what do you think we can help you with?”

“The good guys and killing Jones.”

“I am all about killing Jones,” Yuxia volunteered, holding up her hand like a little girl in school.

Csongor, raised from birth to be a little more cautious in his utterances, only took this under advisement. But he did ask, “Why are you worried about Egdod?”

“He has reverted to his bothavior.”

“Which is?”

“Trying to walk home,” Seamus said. “And home, for him, is, like, five thousand miles away.”

“What does this mean?” Yuxia asked.

“It means that Richard Forthrast’s computer crashed, or he lost his Internet connection.”

“Maybe he just went to sleep,” Yuxia said.

“Yes, or maybe he’s having coffee with whoever was ringing his doorbell, and his computer went to sleep,” said Seamus. “But in the meantime, the most powerful character in all of T’Rain is wandering around the world on autopilot.”

“So what are you going to do?” Yuxia asked.

“Maybe tag along. Like escorting a drunk president home after a long night in the bar.”

“Didn’t you say you had to make a phone call?”

“I have been trained by the United States government,” Seamus said, “to do more than one thing at a time.”

“TURNABOUT IS FAIR play,” said a disgustingly cheerful voice, with a South Boston accent, on the other end of the line.

Olivia groaned. “What time is it?”

“Something like five, where you are. Not that bad. Up and at ‘em.”

“What is happening?”

“Just a little update for you. I can’t say everything I’d like to, because of where I am. But I found them, and I’ve been hanging out with them, and oh so much has happened in the magical world of T’Rain while you have been getting your beauty sleep.”

“You physically found them,” she said, sitting up in bed. Outside, it was still dark, and she could see the lights of downtown Vancouver out the windows of her room. “You’re where they are.”

“Yeah. Courtesy of the Philippine Air Force and a lot of favors that had to be called in.”

“That is splendid work,” she said. “I knew you were smarter than you looked and acted.”

“Just as dumb as everyone thinks, actually. Just a matter of following a big fat easy lead.”

“Have you had a chance to talk to them?”

“In a manner of speaking. I’ve heard their story. Quite a yarn. That’s not important now, though.”

“What is important now, Seamus?”

“There may be some action at your end today. Thought I’d let you know.”

“In Vancouver?”

A pause. “Shit, I’m sorry, I forgot you went to Vancouver.”

“So … the action is going to be in Seattle?”

“Maybe. As a by-product of what just happened, we got a photograph of one of Sokolov’s henchmen there. A few days after the main thing went down, he went back and broke into Peter’s place and stole a rifle out of a gun safe.”

“What does that have to do with — ”

“Nothing,” he said.

“That’s what I thought.”

“It’s a total red herring, as far as finding Jones is concerned.”

“So why are you waking me up to tell me about it?”

“Because I thought you were still in Seattle, working with those FBI agents,” Seamus said, “and I just wanted to let you know…”

“… that they were going to be dealing with this.”

“Yes.”

“That the investigation down there is going to get derailed and distracted by this red herring.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you,” she said. “As it happens, I’ll be doing something else today, though.”

“And what might that be?”

“Driving up to Prince George to look for strategically located security cameras. Begging their owners to let me see footage.”

“Have fun with that.”

“What’s on your agenda, Seamus?”

“Figure out what to do with this traveling circus.”

RELUCTANT AS SHE was to give the jihadists credit for anything, Zula had to admit that they showed commendable restraint when it came to talking on the radio. Perhaps it was a Darwinian selection thing. All the jihadists who failed to observe radio silence had been vaporized by drone strikes.

There was no walkie-talkie or phone chatter from the time Jones left the camp with his three comrades until two and a half hours later, when Ershut and Jahandar trudged up the hill, looking winded but satisfied. In the meantime, the other members of the expedition — everyone except for Zakir and Sayed — breakfasted, prayed, and packed. The latter activity seemed to consume a great deal of emotional energy. It looked like every family-leaving-on-vacation meshuggas Zula had ever witnessed in the developed world, blended with a healthy dollop of desperate-refugees-striking-out-for-Sudan. The only thing missing was yelping dogs and crying kids. These men were not being helped any by the fact that each of them was obliged to carry lots of weapons. Washing the dishes and tidying the kitchen area at the base of her tree, Zula had a central viewpoint on the resulting arguments and the ruthless prioritization that flowed from them. It all seemed to come down to: pound for pound, what would kill the largest number of people? Bricks of plastic explosive ended up being given high priority. Guns too were highly thought of. Ammunition, somewhat less so; it seemed that they were expecting to purchase a lot of it in the States. Which Zula had to grant was a very reasonable plan. Unless their weapons used really weird bullets, they’d be able to pick up everything they needed in sporting goods emporia. Bullets, being made of lead, were heavy; and it seemed that heaviness was very much on their minds as they hoisted their packs off the ground, staring off into the distance, thinking about what it would be like to carry this up and down mountains for several days.

In another sample of the weird and profoundly distasteful emotional involvement that had been coming over her of late, Zula actually became anxious that they wouldn’t be ready in time. She didn’t think she had Stockholm syndrome yet, but she was beginning to understand how people got that way.

In any case, Ershut and Jahandar trudged back into the camp to find their comrades perhaps 75 percent finished with packing; and the intensity of their outrage was sufficient to make the remaining 25 percent come together rapidly. Even so, a quarter of an hour must have expired before the others were ready. During that interval, Zula was, for lack of a better word, exhibited. Ershut was the custodian of the keys. He opened the padlock that secured the end of the chain around the tree, then used it as a very long and heavy dog-leash to prevent Zula from straying as he led her down the hill for a short distance. Below their campsite, but above the uppermost reaches of the plank-avalanche, a lump of granite, about the size of a two-story house, protruded from the slope. It saw, and could be seen from, much of the valley below. Much of the Blue Fork’s course could be seen from it, beginning in talus-and snow-covered mountains some miles to the south, or left, and running beneath the cliffs of Bayonet Ridge, directly below, to its junction with the White Fork at the Schloss, off to the right. The slope was heavily forested, but when the angles were right, it was possible to get a clear view of the road and of the turnaround at its end.

Standing in the middle of the turnaround were three men. She could not really see faces at this distance, but she knew them from their shapes as Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, and Uncle Richard. And she knew that they could see her.

A childish thrill shot down her arm, telling her to raise it and wave at her uncle. She controlled that impulse and lost sight of the men below through a screen of tears. Turning her back on her uncle in shame, she began to trudge back to the campsite, heedless of the tug of the chain. Ershut let her go and locked her back up and left her to sit at the base of the tree, curled up and sobbing. A pathetic state of affairs. But better than she deserved. She had just betrayed her own uncle. He was now in the power of men who would certainly kill him as soon as he was no longer useful.

SOKOLOV HAD A moment’s irrational fear that he was never going to strike the water, but he mastered the urge to look down, since this would have led to getting punched in the face by the ocean. He wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. He kept his toes pointed and his ankles together, not wanting any water hammer effects on his testicles either, and then suddenly there was a shock in his legs and a searing whoosh immediately snuffed out by a deep mechanical throb: the screws of the freighter, churning away just behind him. An old habit told him that he should begin swimming now. But he was zipped up from ankles to neckline in an orange survival suit that knew how to find the surface. He waited. The frigid water, churned into a foaming sluice by the screws, streamed over him.

His head broke the surface and he was breathing again. To get his bearings, he spun in place, treading water as best he could in the unwieldy suit, until he could see the transom of the freighter receding. It was already impressively far away.

He turned his head to the right and saw what he’d seen a few seconds earlier from the ship’s fantail: brassy light reflecting against the underside of low clouds. The lights of a city, and perhaps of an impending sunrise. Brighter, sharper lights gleamed along a slope perhaps a kilometer distant, a bluff rising out of the sea, carpeted with trees but densely settled with houses, and a few big avenues aglow with the logos of strip malls and fast-food places.

He drew a bead on a KFC sign and began swimming.

THE APLOMB WITH which the boatman had helped Sokolov throw the dead men off the deck of his vessel, in those misty waters off Kinmen two weeks ago, had convinced Sokolov that here was a fellow with whom he could really do business. He had wondered where “George Chow” had found this man and had begun to develop a hypothesis that this was not just any random boatman who had been, as it were, hailed off the street, but was actually some kind of a local fixer who ran various errands for the local espionage community. Either that, or he was a clinical psychopath, of whom Sokolov was more afraid than anyone else he had dealt with on that day.

It happened sometimes that in the early part of one of these projects, it felt as if you were going up hill into a headwind. Everything was against you; luck was always bad; nothing fell together, nothing worked out right. But beyond a certain point it changed and it was all easy, everything went your way. Thus here. He had rid himself of Olivia, who was an alluring and yet highly inconvenient person to have in his life. He was no longer in the PRC, no longer in the crowded city center of Xiamen, and, to boot, shrouded in dense fog and being assisted by a peppy boatman who, if he had been impressed or scared by the three gun-toting agents who’d commandeered his boat, must have been even more so by the way Sokolov had vaulted aboard and machine-gunned them. Since he seemed to have passed over that watershed, it had not really surprised him when he had found himself, only a little while later, ascending a rope ladder toward an open hatch near the stern of a big containership bound for the open Pacific. He had easily come to terms with its Filipino crew and bought passage, and even a bunk of his own, using the remaining cash in his pockets. The next two weeks had been a sort of vacation on a steel beach, and a welcome opportunity to rest up and heal from various minor injuries suffered during the events in Xiamen. Only during the last couple of days had he really stirred himself from his bunk and begun to exercise again, practicing his falls and rolls on the ship’s deckplates to the great amusement of the crew.

A TIDAL CURRENT seemed to drag him alongshore. A beach came into view, and he made for it as best he could in the suit. He did not need it for its flotation properties, but dared not shed it lest he die of hypothermia within sight of land. The sun was far from being up yet and would be hidden by dense clouds when it got around to rising above the horizon; but the sky was definitely growing lighter, enabling him to pick out a few details on the beach: strewn logs, and fire rings, and a public toilet.

Wrestling and kicking his way through a forest of brown kelp, he got to a place where he could feel a rocky bottom under his feet and trudged carefully toward a beached log, taking his time, not wanting to turn an ankle in a moment of thoughtless haste. When the water became knee-deep, he crouched in the lee of the log, in case he was being watched from one of the dwellings on the slope above, and stripped off the suit. Stuffed inside of it he had been carrying a set of clothes wrapped up in a garbage bag. He changed into these, all except for socks and shoes, which he carried a-dangle around his neck for the time being. The survival suit might garner attention if he left it here, so he stuffed it into the black garbage bag and slung that over his shoulder. Then he climbed a little higher on the strand and began to make his way south. He had no idea where he was, but the freighter had been headed south and so it seemed reasonable to assume that port facilities and a larger city were to be found in that general direction.

Half a dozen teenagers, boys and girls, were huddled together around the remains of a campfire. The empty beer bottles and fast-food wrappers all around them gave a fair account of how they had spent the preceding evening. They’d had enough foresight to bring blankets and sleeping bags and make a night of it. As Sokolov approached, one of them rose and staggered down the beach until he felt he had gone far enough to fish out his penis and urinate without giving offense to any female members of his party who might be awake. In this he seemed to be erring on the side of caution, glancing back frequently over his shoulder. Sokolov approved of this.

He was still pissing, with the enviable vigor of the young, as Sokolov approached within hailing distance. His eyes traveled up and down Sokolov’s body. His face bespoke alert curiosity but not fear; he had not identified Sokolov as a derelict or criminal.

“What is this place?” Sokolov asked him.

“This is Golden Gardens Park,” the young man answered, in the touchingly naive belief that this would mean something to Sokolov.

“What is name of city, please?”

“Seattle.”

“Thank you.” Then, as Sokolov went past him, he asked: “You just jump off a train or something?” For, as Sokolov had noticed, this beach was separated from the city by a railway siding.

“Or something,” Sokolov affirmed. Then he pointed with his chin down the beach. “Is bus?”

“Yeah. Just keep going to the marina.”

“Thanks. Have nice day.”

“You too. Take it easy, man.”

“Is not my objective. Nice thing to say though. Enjoy piss.”

Day 19

Olivia’s plan to bolt out of the hotel and get a hot start on the day turned out to be embarrassingly, stupidly optimistic in more than one way. The night before she had fallen asleep in her clothes and left several things undone, such as taking a shower, checking her email, and touching base with Inspector Fournier, who’d been so kind as to send her those police reports. After Seamus woke her up, she set about doing those things. The shower went quickly and according to plan; nothing else did. What she’d envisioned as a quick check of her work email turned into a slough of despond. The next time she looked at the clock, an hour and a half had disappeared, and she was only getting in deeper; emails she had sent at the beginning of this session had spawned entire threads of responses in which she was now profoundly entangled, and people were threatening to set up conference calls. Her hasty departure from the FBI offices in Seattle had left her colleagues there variously confused and irritated, and these had to be brought up to speed or calmed down. At the same time, these same people were being made aware of the decrypted video images from the security cameras in Peter’s apartment, and so she got to watch as awareness propagated across their networks of email lists and they began to discuss what they should do next. It was Saturday morning and FBI agents were thumbing emails from the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. “Out of office” responses were bouncing around the system like pachinko balls. The channel through which these images had reached them was extremely confusing (decryption key pulled out of a dead man’s wallet by a Hungarian in the Philippines communicating with an American in Canada, the conversation taking place on an imaginary planet), and Olivia had to intervene and explain matters.

And that was just the Seattle FBI part of it. She had made the mistake of mentioning the idea of the Prince George security cam gambit to some of her colleagues in London, and this had spawned volumes of useless debate and counterproductive efforts to help her.

The only thing that kept her from being stuck in email all day long was a telephone call from Fournier, who had suddenly become hospitable and now wished to have coffee with her. She agreed to meet him in the lobby of her hotel in half an hour, then packed her bags — not much of a chore, since she hadn’t unpacked, and half of her crap was still down in the rental car anyway — and, almost as an afterthought, used Google Maps to check out the route to Prince George.

The results caused her to do a double-take. It was 750 kilometers and it was going to take her eleven hours, not counting eating and peeing breaks. The numbers were so enormous that she suffered a spell of disorientation, thinking that Google must have mistakenly routed her on some ridiculously convoluted route. But no, the map showed a reasonably straight course. It really was that far: the equivalent of driving from London to John o’ Groats. She was going to spend the entire day driving, and she was not going to get there until after dark. Tomorrow was Sunday.

She checked the flight schedules, hoping that there would be hourly shuttles. The result: there were a few flights during the day, including one that she might be able to make if she canceled her breakfast with Inspector Fournier and then made a dash to the airport. Politically, this was not the best move, and so she booked a seat on a late-morning flight instead.

Then down to the lobby to have coffee and a scone with Fournier. For some reason she had been expecting a middle-aged, rumpled Quebecois version of Columbo, but Fournier was trim, probably in his early thirties, and wore a stylish set of eyeglasses that made him seem younger still. What she’d mistaken for hostility had, she suspected, been a Continental formality that contrasted with the American frat boy ambience she had been immersed in during the previous days. She immediately suspected, and Fournier soon confirmed, that he’d spent a few years living in France, which was where he had picked up his professional manners and his taste in eyewear. Olivia’s status as MI6 agent, operating on foreign soil, had probably done nothing to loosen him up. But in person he could not have been more charming and attentive.

Under the circumstances, Olivia couldn’t not tell Fournier about her plan to go to Prince George and look for strategically located security cameras. He sat back, stroked his fashionably stubbled chin, and gave it serious consideration. “In a perfect world,” he said, “you would not have to go there in person and look for such things.” Then he gave a hugely expressive shrug and cocked his head to one side. “Matters being what they are, I fear you are correct. Having such a thing done through the usual channels, when we have no evidence that Jones ever came within thousands of miles of Canada, and no particular reason to suspect foul play in the case of the missing hunters, would be … how shall I say this politely? … time-consuming.”

It seemed clear that Fournier had come here expecting to find a sort of madwoman, but that meeting Olivia in the flesh and hearing her side of the story had begun to tell on him. His confidence that the hunters were merely lost, or innocently frozen to death, had been shaken a bit. He was now finding a few minutes’ diversion in entertaining Olivia’s theory. If nothing else, he seemed to think, it would enliven an otherwise dull investigation.

Olivia, for her part, was finding it exasperatingly difficult to maintain her focus. She should never have checked her email. All she could think about was the torrent of messages even now coming into her inbox. Her adversaries were framing counterarguments that were going unanswered, her collaborators were requesting help and clarification that she was failing to supply. She ought to have been grateful, and gracious, to Fournier, and so have savored every minute of their discussion. Instead of which she was relieved when he glanced into his empty cup and began the end of the conversation with “Well…”

She promised to check in from Prince George, shook his hand, and headed for the airport. She made a willful effort not to take out her phone until she had checked in her rental car and was on the shuttle bus to the terminal.

Then she was confronted by a queue of unread messages whose length exceeded even her worst expectations. Subject headers had become completely deranged by this point, making it difficult to guess what these people were even talking about. But one of them, at the top of the stack — only received a few minutes ago — had the succinct heading “Got him.” It had come from one of the FBI agents in Seattle.

She called him directly on the phone. Agent Vandenberg. A redhead from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“I’m declaring email bankruptcy,” she said.

“Happens to all of us, Liv,” said Agent Vandenberg, who was decidedly not of the Continental, Inspector Fournier style.

“Just tell me how it all comes out.”

“Don’t know yet,” he said puckishly.

“But I’m seeing ‘Got him’ in the subject line. Whom did you get?”

“I guess that should have been ‘recognized him,’” said Agent Vandenberg after a slight, embarrassed pause. “One of our guys immediately recognized the subject who stole the rifle. We know all about this guy. Igor.” He snickered at the name. “Igor has been the subject of many investigations. He’s a legal immigrant. But that’s the only thing about him that’s legal. This is the first time we have got him so dead to rights, though.”

“So are you going to pick him up?”

“We don’t see him as a flight risk. We don’t think he’s about to go do something bad. It’s been a week and a half since he stole that gun, and he’s been pretty inactive that whole time. So we blasted a judge out of bed, got ourselves a court order, and instituted surveillance on his domicile. It’s a crappy little house in Tukwila.”

“Where’s Tukwila?”

“Exactly. He shares it with another Russian, who has been his roommate there for, like, four years.”

“Gotten anything good yet?”

“It’s taking us a little while to rustle up an interpreter, so we don’t know what the three of them are saying.”

“Three?”

“Yeah. There’s three Russians in the house.”

“I thought you said two. Igor and his roommate.”

“They have a visitor. Just arrived. Surprised the hell out of them, apparently. We don’t exactly know what’s going on. Igor and his roommate were lounging around in couch potato mode, watching a hockey game on the satellite, and suddenly there was a knock on the door. Then they’re all like, ‘Who the hell could that be?’ I’m just guessing from their tone of voice. Then one of them goes and looks out the window and says something like, ‘Holy shit, it’s Sokolov!’ and then they sound kind of scared for a while. But eventually they let him in.”

It was fortunate that Agent Vandenberg was such a loquacious soul, since he then went on talking long enough to give Olivia a chance to get her composure back.

“I think I get the general picture,” she said, when Vandenberg paused to draw breath, and she felt she could keep her voice steady. “Did you say that the name of the surprise visitor was Sokolov?”

“Yes, we’re pretty sure of that. Why? Mean anything to you?”

“It is a very common Russian name,” she observed. “But you said that they were surprised to see him?”

“Surprised, and pretty seriously freaked out. Sokolov had to ring the doorbell three times. They left him cooling his heels on their front porch for, like, five minutes while they discussed how to handle the situation. I don’t know who this guy is — but he ain’t no Avon lady.”

“Thanks,” Olivia said. “That is interesting.”

ZULA ENDED UP retreating into her tiny tent and pulling her sleeping bag over her head. A natural reaction to shame. All she wanted was to have a bit of privacy while she finished her blubbering. This had the unintended, but useful, consequence that the others forgot she was there.

Not literally, of course. The friggin’ chain trailed across the ground and went right into her tent. Everyone knew exactly where she was. But some kind of irrational psychological effect caused them to act as if she weren’t right there, just a few yards away from them.

She wasn’t sure whether that was a bad or a good thing. It might cause them to blurt out useful information they’d never divulge if her eyes were on their faces. On the other hand, maybe it was easier to command the execution of someone you couldn’t see.

Abdul-Wahaab, Jones’s right-hand man, was the last of the hikers to depart the camp. Before hoisting his pack onto his shoulders, he gathered the stay-behind group around him: Ershut, Jahandar, Zakir, and Sayed. They were all of about twenty feet from Zula, standing around the stove and drinking tea.

“I’ll speak Arabic,” said Abdul-Wahaab. Somewhat redundantly, since he was, in fact, speaking Arabic.

Trying not to make obvious nylon-swishing noises, Zula pulled the sleeping bag off her face and rolled toward them, straining to hear as much as she could. She had been in the company of men speaking Arabic for two solid weeks and was continually frustrated that she hadn’t learned more of it. And yet she had come a long way; her time in the refugee camp had planted some seeds that had been slow to sprout but that were now growing noticeably from day to day.

“I have spoken with our leader,” said Abdul-Wahaab. “He has learned some things about the way south from the guide.”

Zula’s mental translation just barely kept up. Fortunately Abdul-Wahaab was not a torrential speaker. He uttered short, pithy sentences and paused between them to sip tea. Zula’s understanding was largely based on picking out nouns: leader. The way to the south. And this word “dalil,” which she had heard frequently in the last few days and finally remembered meant “guide.”

“The path is difficult, but he knows of shortcuts and secret ways,” Abdul-Wahaab continued, actually using the English word “shortcuts.”

“He thinks two days for us to cross the border. After that, one more day before we could reach a place with Internet. Maybe two days.”

The others listened and waited for Abdul-Wahaab to give orders. After sipping more tea, he went on: “After four days, if you hear nothing, kill her and go where you will. But we will try to get a message to our brothers waiting in Elphinstone. They will then come here and find you. We will send GPS coordinates showing the way south. God willing, you can then join us for the martyrdom operation.”

“In that case, should we kill her?” Zakir asked.

“We will give instructions. She might be useful to us.” He sipped his tea. “The guide states that there will be no phone coverage, unless we climb to the top of a mountain and have good luck. If this happens, perhaps you will get a text with other instructions.”

Beyond that, the talk turned to what they would all do once they had crossed the border: the challenges they would face there and their eagerness to pursue various opportunities for mayhem. Abdul-Wahaab discouraged all such talk, though, insisting that they maintain their focus on getting through the next few days. He seemed to become aware that he was holding up the rest of the group, and drained his tea, and accepted Ershut’s help in hoisting his heavy pack onto his back. Then, after exchanging embraces with the four stay-behinds, he turned away and began tromping down toward the trail.

Zula decided that she would make her move after dark tonight.

WHEN SOKOLOV HAD been a little boy growing up in the Soviet Union, he had been exposed to more than a few magazine articles and television programs depicting the misery of life under capitalism. A reporter would travel to some squalid place in Appalachia or the South Bronx and take a few depressing photographs, then jot down, or make up, some equally depressing anecdotes and package it into a story intended to make it clear that people back in the USSR didn’t have it so bad. While no one was stupid enough to take such propaganda at face value, all but the most cynical persons assumed that there was some truth to them. Yes, the standard of living could be higher in the West. Everyone knew this. But it could be lower too.

Both ends of that spectrum were on display during Sokolov’s hour-long journey from Golden Gardens to the home of Igor. He waited for a bus near a marina crowded with yachts. The bus took him to a sleek modern downtown, where he did a bit of shopping and then boarded a light rail train headed in the direction of the airport. During that journey, the view out its windows became steadily more like a photo spread from a Soviet propaganda article. The railway line had been threaded through the poorest neighborhoods. The urban part was a complex and densely packed mixture of black people and pan-global immigration; it wasn’t pretty, but at least it was striving. Then there was a light-industrial buffer zone that separated it from a sort of white ghetto in the suburbs. The train ran high above this on towering reinforced-concrete pylons, and he looked almost straight down into the backyards of tiny, rotting bungalows strewn with detritus.

He climbed out at the last station before the airport and then walked for a mile and a half, wending his way into a neighborhood full of houses like that. He had not acquired a phone yet, but he had been able to purchase a street map at a bookstore downtown, and he had Igor’s address written down in a little book that had been with him through all his adventures.

Igor’s house stood at the end of a cul-de-sac, backed up against a freeway embankment held together by a felt of blackberries and ivy. This mat of vegetation had covered and killed several trees and was making a bid to take over a shed in the back. But the house that Igor shared with his friend Vlad was actually tidier than many on this street: the two vehicles parked in its driveway both appeared to be in working order, and neither of them had turned green with moss. They did not store junk on their front porch, and they had taken sensible precautions, covering the front windows with expanded steel mesh and beefing up the locks on the front door.

Igor’s fear caused Sokolov nothing more than mild irritation at first, since its sole effect was to slow everything down. But he could hardly blame the man for being cautious. Sokolov took his hands out of his pockets and held them out wide, palms up. “A couple of hours,” he insisted, “and then I will be gone. Forever.”

HIS CHOICE TO come to this place was debatable, to say the least. He had been thinking about it all through the sea voyage.

He had to go somewhere and do something. His only real means of making a living was doing what he did: security consultant. The fact that he was fluent only in Russian and that he carried a Russian passport placed certain limits on where he could ply that trade. He could make his way back to Russia and retreat into the woods and spend the rest of his life chopping wood and hunting deer, but he had grown rather accustomed to living in big cities and being paid a decent amount of money and, for lack of a better word, being respected for who he was and what he did. Most of his clients had been nothing like Ivanov, and, after this, he would never work for such a person again. But the regrettable incidents of the last few weeks would need to be explained to the owners of the obshchak from which Ivanov had stolen the money, and to the families of the men who had been slain by Abdallah Jones. And Sokolov was actually confident that it all could be explained. For the owners of the obshchak were, at bottom, reasonable people. Courtesy went a long way with them. In what had happened to Wallace and Ivanov, they would perceive a kind of poetry and a kind of justice. Ivanov had, in effect, obtained just the fate he had wanted, in that he had died while trying to get the money back. The story worked perfectly well as a cautionary tale: look what happens to those who steal money with which they have been entrusted. It would all work out just fine if Sokolov could merely relate the story to the people Ivanov had betrayed.

Not that Sokolov had any certainty of being forgiven. There were no guarantees. But this way he had a decent chance. Whereas if he sneaked around and tried to avoid them, they would surely take note of his lack of courtesy and approach him in a more suspicious frame of mind.

That much he had decided during the first half of his voyage across the Pacific. The question, then, was how to go about making contact with the people in question. Simply calling them from a pay telephone on the beach would be indiscreet and would suggest a kind of desperation.

On the other hand, if he climbed on a bus and went straight to Igor’s house, it would seem reasonable enough. For this was not the act of a desperate person. Certainly not that of one with something to hide, since it was to be expected that Igor would spread the news of Sokolov’s arrival via the grapevine. No, this was a good low-key way to say to those whom Ivanov had betrayed: I survived, I got out of China, I am not on the run, I have nothing to hide, you’ll be hearing from me once I have got my feet on the ground.

So in a sense this was a make-work visit. Sokolov still had enough dollars in his pocket to pay for a motel room and a bus ticket. He really needed nothing at all from Igor.

It was a social call.

And yet Igor sensed at some level that this made no sense. Which was why he was so worried. So suspicious.

Anyway, he consented, finally, to let Sokolov in his front door. A decidedly awkward exchange of greetings followed. He and Vlad and Sokolov ended up sitting around the kitchen table, which was strewn with Russian-language newspapers, mugs half full of cold coffee, and dirty cereal bowls. The chilly silver light, so characteristic of this part of the world, washed in through a mesh-covered window and made it possible to see everything without actually illuminating it.

“I just got off a containership from China,” Sokolov said. For if Igor conveyed nothing else to the grapevine, Sokolov wanted it known that this, and no other reason, was why he had been incognito for two solid weeks. “No Internet, no phone. I’ve been totally out of touch.”

“Made any phone calls?”

“I don’t have a phone. I’m telling you, I literally jumped off the fucking ship two hours ago and came straight here.”

“So you have heard nothing in two weeks.”

“Closer to three. It’s not as if we were doing a lot of communicating when we were in Xiamen.”

“Well, you need to check in. There are a lot of people confused. Pissed off.”

Sokolov grinned. “Heard from them, did you?”

“I thought I was a dead man,” said Igor, completely unamused. Sokolov glanced at Vlad, hoping to draw him into the conversation, but Vlad, a somewhat younger man than Igor — skinny, with long unkempt hair — had scooted his chair into the corner of the kitchen and was sitting there with his hands in the pockets of a bulky leather jacket, implicitly threatening to drill Sokolov with whatever was in his pocket. Vlad had been a minor player in the takeover of Peter’s apartment, but he was as deeply implicated as anyone else. Sokolov suspected him of being a meth user.

A plane took off from Sea-Tac, flying directly over the house, and made conversation impossible for a little while.

“Well, you look alive to me,” Sokolov said finally.

Igor nodded. “There was a sort of investigation, I guess you could call it. Certain people wanted to know where Ivanov had gone, what he had done. They were very suspicious. I tried to explain to them about Wallace. About the virus.” Igor shrugged his huge shoulders, a great rolling movement like a barrel falling off a truck. “What do I know about such things? I just told them what I had overheard. The hacker in China. T’Rain. Zula. Tried to make sense of it. After a while they calmed down.”

“There you have it,” Sokolov said. “I expected as much. Once they had it all explained. You did well.” This not so much for Igor’s ears as for those he might spread the story to later.

Igor now got an expectant look on his face. Rather than wait for him to say it, Sokolov said: “I’ll take care of it from here.”

“Good.”

“I just need to make my way back to them, you know, without getting in trouble with Immigration, with the law.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Which is why I came here,” Sokolov said. “I won’t be much trouble. Just need to take a shower. Get a bite to eat. Pull myself together. Then I’ll be on my way.”

“You need money?” Igor asked suspiciously.

“Not really.”

Igor softened. “Because I can lend you some if you need it.”

“As I said, I just need to collect myself for a few minutes. I’ll count my money and perhaps take you up on that offer.”

“The shower is that way,” said Igor, pointing with his eyes.

THE HOUSE’S FLOOR was spongy and uneven — being consumed from beneath, Sokolov guessed, by some combination of insects and rot. The frame of the bathroom door had sagged into a parallelogram, the flimsy hollow-core door was still a rectangle; he bashed it shut with his shoulder and then used the hook-and-eye lock that had been added onto it when the lockset had stopped working. This seemed to be ground zero for the mildewy scent that pervaded the entire bungalow. Sokolov turned on the shower, then jerked the curtain across its front so water wouldn’t splash out onto the floor. He took a seat, fully clothed, on the toilet, which was located behind the door, and got out his Makarov and chambered a round. That Igor would kick the door down and Vlad fire blindly into the shower stall was unlikely. But neither was it out of the question; and if it happened, Sokolov would be quite disappointed in himself if he had failed to be ready for it.

He checked his watch and made himself comfortable for fifteen minutes, during which time he thought about Olivia and Zula, Csongor and Yuxia and Peter.

Since Zula was the only one he’d seen escaping the building, he had been assuming that Csongor and Peter were dead and that Yuxia was in the custody of the Public Security Bureau. These facts were unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do about them.

Of Zula’s situation, he could only speculate. He had scanned some newspapers in the bookstore downtown where he had purchased the map. He’d seen no reference to Abdallah Jones. Then he had moved on to some weekly newsmagazines, where he hoped he might see some stories summarizing events of the last week or two. Nothing.

In several places he had noted posters bearing Zula’s face, sometimes alone, sometimes paired with Peter’s. They were stapled to telephone poles and bus stop bulletin boards, looking a bit yellow and starting to be encroached upon by advertisements for lost dogs and maid services.

A Google search would have told him much more. But he had seen — more to the point, not seen — enough in the newspapers to suspect that Jones was still lying low somewhere and that Zula, if alive, was still with him.

As for Olivia, he hoped and trusted that she had found her way safely home and was well on her way to forgetting about him. He had been reassured, back on Kinmen, to see a kind of intelligent guardedness on her face. I can’t believe I’m fucking this guy. He’d have been worried, on the other hand, if she had thrown hopeful or adoring looks at him. Now that they had been apart for a while, her rational mind would have seized the controls from whatever part of her brain found a man like Sokolov attractive and wrenched her back onto a safe and reasonable course.

He was not entirely happy about this. Under other circumstances, perhaps, it would have been worth pursuing. Sad that it was impossible. Not as sad as many other things in this world.

The bungalow’s walls were thin, and beneath the hiss of the shower he could hear Igor’s voice as a kind of indistinct throbbing, difficult to make out except when he pronounced distinct words like “Da, da!” During the intervals when Igor was silent, Sokolov heard nothing from Vlad. Apparently Igor was talking to someone on the phone. This was not surprising, and, as a matter of fact, Sokolov was pretending to take this shower precisely to give Igor an opportunity to make a next move: try to kill him, or else call people in his network and begin spreading the news.

He turned off the shower, turned on the faucet, pulled a disposable razor out of his bag, and shaved using a sliver of soap that had been left on the edge of the sink. He kept the Makarov handy. But if they’d been going to do it, they’d have done it while they thought he was in the shower.

While he was shaving, he heard Igor place another phone call, this one in English. Igor seemed to be ordering a pizza from Domino’s.

This did not seem to be the act of a man who was about to murder his guest, so on one level Sokolov relaxed a little bit. It did raise new questions, though. Why was Igor now showing hospitality? Any man in his right mind would want Sokolov out of the house pronto. Had he been ordered, by someone on the telephone, to stall Sokolov? Keep him in the house until someone else could be sent out to deal with him?

Anyway, he rinsed his face, splashed water into his stubbled scalp to make it look as if he’d actually showered, pulled his stuff together, wrenched the door open, and stepped back out into the bungalow’s living room. Vlad was playing a video game on a tricked-out PC that was connected to a large flat-screen monitor. Igor was watching and supplying commentary, but tore his attention away to greet Sokolov. “Please, make yourself comfortable,” he said, rolling forward as if he intended to rise to his feet. He had a beer in his hand. “Would you like a beer? I’ll get one for you.”

“No thanks, not now.”

“I ordered pizza. It should be here in forty minutes. I thought you might be hungry.”

“Thanks, that sounds delicious. It’s been forever since I had pizza.” These words came out of his mouth somewhat mechanically; his mind was going too fast to make genuine conversation.

“Noodles and rice for two weeks, eh?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“On the freighter — Chink food only, I’ll bet.”

Sokolov shook his head. “The crew was Filipino; they eat different stuff. It was fine. Just no pizza, that’s all.”

“How the hell did you talk your way on board that thing? From what I’ve heard, the Chinese cops must have been going crazy.”

Sokolov shrugged. “It’s a big port. Famous for smuggling. It’s always possible to find a way out of such places.”

“But you were alone — and you don’t speak Chinese?”

So, one thing at least was obvious, which was that whomever Igor had been talking to on the phone had asked him to wheedle more information from Sokolov on how he had made his way from a gunfight in a collapsing apartment building in Xiamen to Igor’s house in Tukwila, and to probe for inconsistencies in the story — to the extent that Igor even had the intellectual equipment for such an undertaking. Perhaps the pizza stalling maneuver was solely to keep Sokolov in the house long enough for Igor to ask a series of such questions. Or perhaps a carload of men was on its way to the house right now to fetch Sokolov and subject him to a more rigorous examination. In either case, it wouldn’t look good for Sokolov to bolt out of the house, spurning the pizza, as much as announcing that he had something to hide.

He had, of course, been surveying the place for exits and had noticed that, for such a small structure, it was actually rather difficult to get out of. There seemed to be a lot of property crime in the neighborhood, and it was obvious enough that Igor and Vlad were not above dealing in stolen goods, and possibly in drugs as well, so they had been assiduous about putting bars or steel mesh over their windows. The only exits were the doors.

“What the hell,” Sokolov said. “I think I will have a beer. It’s okay, I can get it myself.” For Igor had already sunk back into the depths of his black leather sofa and was not the sort to get up again quickly. Sokolov went back into the kitchen and confirmed his memory that it led to a sort of back porch with an exit to the yard behind the house. He stepped into the porch and examined the door, a flimsy thing that had been beefed up with more steel mesh and a number of extra bolts. He opened all of these and confirmed that he could now yank the door open with a single quick gesture.

Then back to the living room with his beer. He had been a little worried that Igor would be suspicious at the amount of time he had taken to fetch a beverage, but his host was deeply absorbed with the progress of the video game. Sokolov dragged a chair into a position where he could look out the front window of the house and straight down the length of the cul-de-sac.

There followed about forty-five minutes of desultory conversation. Occasionally Igor would ask him a question about what had happened in Xiamen and Sokolov would relate a bit of the story, but sooner or later they always drifted back into video-game watching.

A small car came up the street, but it was just the pizza delivery. “I’ll get more beer,” Sokolov said, and went into the kitchen. He found a large pot in the cabinet next to the stove, put it in the sink, and began running hot water into it. Then he went to the fridge and got more beers and ferried them out to the living room. Igor was on his feet, undoing the front door locks, greeting the pizza delivery boy. Sokolov set the beers down on the coffee table. Then he went back into the kitchen and took the pot, now containing several liters of warm water, and placed it on the range and turned the burner on high. When the water was boiling, it might serve as a sort of weapon or at least a distraction.

They ate pizza and drank beer. Vlad had paused his video game. This was not running on a console, such as an Xbox; it ran on a personal computer. Not a boring beige box such as you would see in an office. A PC made specifically for young male game players with a tech fetish, all tricked out with multicolored LEDs and complex molded shapes recalling the hull of an alien spacecraft. When Sokolov had first seen this thing, just after walking into Igor’s house a couple of hours ago, his mind had snagged on it for a moment, then moved on. Ever since, something about it had been nagging at him. But he’d had other things to think about.

Now, finally, it came to him. He remembered where he had seen this thing before.

This was Peter’s computer.

They must have come back to Peter’s place at some point while Sokolov had been embroiled in China and stolen whatever looked good to them.

It must have been very soon after they had gone to Xiamen, because once Peter and Zula had been reported missing, the cops would have gone there, turned it into a crime scene, made it a very hazardous place to carry out a burglary.

Which meant that the cops must have gone there after Vlad and Igor had ransacked it.

Which meant that, instead of finding the carefully cleaned-up, evidence-free scene that Sokolov had arranged, they would have found evidence of said ransacking.

“You are making me nervous, with this look on your face!” Igor complained.

Sokolov glanced up to see that Igor was, in fact, looking a little edgy.

Sokolov cleared his throat. “You went back to that place,” he said, “and took some things.”

Here, Sokolov would not have been surprised to see Igor dart a guilty look at the fancy PC, which was sitting on the floor so close that he could have set his beer on top of it. But instead Igor threw a nervous look into the corner of the room behind Sokolov. By dint of a supreme effort of will, Sokolov resisted the temptation to turn around and look at whatever it was. Some loot from the apartment, obviously, that Igor considered more valuable or that in some sense loomed larger in his imagination than the PC.

What would a man like Peter have in his place that could be that interesting to Igor? It was easy to understand the attraction of the PC. All young men liked to play video games. What else? Peter didn’t do drugs.

Then Sokolov remembered Igor standing at the top of Peter’s stairs, examining a gun safe. Assuring Sokolov that it was locked.

“I won’t deny it,” Igor said, with a shrug to say it was really nothing, and a nervous laugh that argued to the contrary.

“Ivanov didn’t pay you well enough?”

“Nothing’s enough for a job like that one. Shit, I just thought it was going to be security. Bodyguard shit at the worst. Then it turned into — ”

Sokolov nodded. “Of course, I can sympathize. I was as surprised as you were. I am just asking. It is important for me to know the facts. That’s all. When did you go back to the place?”

“Two days later, maybe,” said Igor, and glanced over to Vlad for confirmation. “We staked it out the night before. Made sure there were no cops, no surveillance. Found a way in. Nice and quiet.” Another glance into the corner.

“How did you get the safe open?” Sokolov asked, just guessing. “Quietly?”

“Plasma torch,” Vlad blurted out. Igor threw him a killing look, but Vlad didn’t even understand that he had stepped into a trap that Sokolov had put out for him.

“Weren’t you worried that it would damage the gun?”

“He kept it in a metal case,” Vlad said, and nodded into the same corner. This gave Sokolov an excuse, finally, to turn around and look. Resting on the top of a bookshelf at about head level was a long case of burnished aluminum, just the sort of thing a gun fancier would use to carry around an especially prized rifle. One end of it was marred with flecks and streaks of darker stuff: molten metal that had sprayed onto it and congealed.

Sokolov turned back around. “This torch didn’t set off the smoke alarms?”

Igor said, “We went around, found them all, pulled their batteries.”

“When you were going all over the place looking for those smoke alarms,” Sokolov went on, “you might have seen some security cameras.”

“Two of them,” Igor said. “We cut the wires, of course.”

Sokolov, who knew that there were actually three cameras, bit down hard until the urge to scream had passed. “Of course. But up until the moment you cut those wires, you were visible to the cameras.”

“Vlad’s good at computers,” Igor volunteered.

Vlad nodded, as if to confirm the validity of Igor’s assessment. “Obviously we had cut the Internet the first time we went there,” he said, “so we knew that the cameras couldn’t send data outside of the building.”

“What about inside the building, though?”

“Vlad traced the wires,” Igor said.

“I traced the wires,” Vlad confirmed, “to the server in his workshop. That’s where the video files from the camera were being stored. We used the plasma torch to completely destroy the hard drives in that server.”

“Did you also trace the wires to the wireless router under the stairs?”

“Of course,” Vlad said.

“Did you know that this router had a hard drive built into it? Used to back up all files on the network?”

Silence.

Vlad the computer expert was turning red. Igor noticed this and held out a hand to steady him. “It has been, what, two weeks,” Igor said. “Nothing has happened. The police know nothing of these things. They will never think to collect such evidence.”

Sokolov sat there impassively, waiting for Igor to figure it out.

“If they had found this, why have they not come to arrest us?” Igor demanded, sounding almost like a self-righteous, upstanding citizen, scandalized by the complacency of the local cops.

“Unless,” Vlad said, “they have put us under surveillance.”

“Why would they bother if they already have evidence?”

Vlad said, “It would be a major investigation. Not just of burglary but kidnapping, murder, other things. International spy shit. They don’t give a shit about people like us. A couple of burglars!” he scoffed. “They would put on the surveillance and hope that sooner or later someone more important would get in touch with us.”

Four eyes turned toward Sokolov.

There was a long pause. Igor raised the fingertips of both hands to his temples, making his huge fat hands into blinders, tunneling his vision at Sokolov.

“Fucking asshole!” Igor finally said. “Why did I let you into my house?”

“Stupid, greedy motherfucker,” Sokolov said. “The money wasn’t enough. You had to go back. Steal some more.”

“Hey, calm down!” Vlad squeaked. “We don’t even know if the cops found the video.”

“The uncle of Zula is a billionaire, moron,” Sokolov said. “He would bring in investigators of his own. There is nothing they would not find.”

Something occurred to Igor and he exclaimed “Fuck!” then made a grab for his phone. Sokolov’s hand jerked toward the Makarov in his jacket pocket, but he restrained the urge to draw a weapon — as did Vlad, watching him attentively.

Igor made a one-button call: a redial. “It’s better that you don’t come,” he announced into the phone. Then listened to a blast of verbal abuse that forced him to pull the device away from his ear. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’ll explain later. Turn the car around. Don’t come.”

“You invited some others to the pizza party?” Sokolov asked, after Igor had shut off his phone, terminating more furious denunciations.

Igor held his hands out. “I am sorry, Mr. Sokolov, but I must answer to certain people; and when you showed up, I had to make them aware of the fact that you were here.”

“Are there any other ways you have fucked me that I have not been made aware of yet?”

The fat hands became flesh pistols, index fingers aiming at Sokolov’s eyes. “I never should have worked with you. Now, the cops will come, I’ll do time. Be deported.”

“Doing time. Getting in trouble. All very normal for a man who breaks into another man’s house and steals his computer and his rifle. If you had just followed my orders — ”

“Why should I take orders from you, motherfucker?”

“Because I actually know what I am doing.”

“Then how did you end up in this fucking situation?”

It was a fair question, and it rocked Sokolov for a moment.

In that interval, Vlad noticed something. “They’re coming,” he said.

Sokolov looked up at him to see that Vlad was gazing out the house’s front window.

“Who’s coming?” Igor asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” Vlad said.

Instinctively, Sokolov dropped to a crouch and peered over the sill of the front window, down the length of the cul-de-sac. A dark SUV, headlights on, was headed up the street, moving at little better than a walking pace.

“Why headlights?” Vlad asked.

“To blind us!” Igor said.

“It’s a rental,” Sokolov suggested. “The lights come on automatically.”

“Who rents a car for a bust like this?”

“Not cops,” Vlad supposed. “Guys from out of town.”

“What kind of guys?”

“Maybe private dicks? Hired by billionaire uncle?”

“Fuck!” Igor said, and stomped over to the corner of the living room. He hauled the rifle case down from the shelf.

“What were you thinking of doing with that?” Sokolov asked him. The two options he could think of were to hide it, so that it couldn’t be used as evidence, or to take it out and start using it.

“I am not going back to Russia,” Igor said. As if this answered the question. Which it didn’t. “I’ve got an escape route out the back.”

“Asshole, they’ll be covering the back exit!” Vlad pointed out. No doubt correctly. “You won’t get more than a couple of steps!”

The SUV came to a stop, directly in front of the house, headlights glaring brightly enough, on this dull overcast day, to make it impossible to count the number of people inside.

Its driver’s-side door opened and a pair of blue-jeaned legs dropped to the ground. The driver stepped out from behind the door and slammed it shut. Short hair did nothing to hide the fact that this was a woman. An Asian woman. She stepped out farther from the SUV’s headlight glare.

It was Olivia. And she had apparently come here alone.

“What the fuck!?” Vlad shouted, holding up his hands. He would have been ready for a whole carload of heavily armed federal agents. But not this.

Sokolov spun around to face Vlad and raised an index finger to his lips, shushing him. Glancing up toward the ceiling in a gesture that any Russian would recognize: Remember, someone is listening to us. Vlad, wide-eyed, seemed to take this in. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. Okay, I’ll shut up.

They were distracted by a crisp mechanical clunking noise from the other side of the room. Sokolov looked over to see that Igor had pulled the rifle out of the case. It was some sort of AR-15 variant. The sound had been made by him drawing the bolt carrier back, locking the action into an open state. As Sokolov watched, Igor plucked out one of several loose cartridges that had been rattling around loose inside the case, manually fed it into the breech, and slapped the side of the weapon, releasing the bolt and letting it slam the cartridge into firing position.

Sokolov noticed that his Makarov was in his hands, aimed at Igor.

Olivia rang the doorbell.

“Get down!” Sokolov shouted in English. Unsure whether she’d heard him, he pivoted and fired a round through the door, far above Olivia’s head. That should give her the general idea.

“Kill him!” Igor shouted, apparently to Vlad. Then he raised the rifle and aimed it at the front door.

Vlad was fumbling in his pocket. But he was poorly trained and was having trouble getting the weapon out. “Run out the back door,” Sokolov suggested. “There’s no one there.”

“How would you know?” Vlad asked.

“Do it or I’ll fucking kill you,” Sokolov said, aiming his Makarov at Vlad.

“I told you, he’s setting us up! Motherfucker!” Igor shouted, letting the barrel of the rifle drop and using his free hand to pull a revolver out of the waistband of his trousers.

Sokolov pivoted and fired two rounds into Igor’s midsection, waited for him to hit the floor, then fired one more.

Vlad was crouching on the floor next to the PC with his hands on top of his head, completely unmanned. An utterly ruthless, animal instinct within Sokolov told him to simply execute this miserable person, who could only cause trouble for him. But he could not bring himself to do it.

“I suggest you run. Fast,” Sokolov said.

“Why bother? Didn’t you say we were under surveillance?”

“By someone,” Sokolov said. He had crossed the room and picked up the rifle. Setting his pistol down for a moment, he hauled back on the rifle’s bolt carrier, ejecting the round that Igor had chambered, then set the rifle into its case, which he slammed shut. He carried it to the front door, which he opened. Olivia was no longer there. The SUV was in motion, making a three-point turn in the middle of the cul-de-sac, getting turned around into position for a getaway.

Then it stopped.

Nothing happened for a few moments.

Then she kicked open the passenger door.

EXCEPT FOR THE part about his niece being held hostage and he himself being the captive of murderous jihadists, this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one’s normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one’s mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true — the way small children experienced things — precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life.

Which Richard was totally incapable of, normally. Looking back, he could see that the majority of his breakups with the women who lived on in his superego as the Furious Muses had occurred in conjunction with attempts to go on vacation. He had never gone on vacation in any place that did not have high-speed Internet. Even the private jet in which he flew to those vacation sites had its own always-on Net connection. This probably qualified him as a serious head case, but he liked nothing more than to sit on a beach underneath a palm frond cabana in Bali, stripped to the waist, sipping an exotic drink from a coconut shell, watching waves roll in from a blue ocean, while wandering around T’Rain via the computer on his lap, firing off memos and bug reports to his technical staff. He could think of nothing more relaxing.

Except for what he was doing now. If only the bad parts of it could be done away with. He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.

JONES AND COMPANY had done a creditable job of it, maintaining the injured-hiker pretense until the moment Richard had opened the door, then instantly cutting the power and the Internet. Apparently they had scoped out the property and found the utility shed up by the dam, broken into it, and stationed a man there with bolt cutters. Probably Ershut. Richard had been observing Jones’s men, learning their names and qualities, and had identified Ershut as a Barney. This being a term from the original Mission: Impossible television series that only made sense to people of Richard’s vintage, or hipsters who liked to watch primeval TV shows on YouTube. Anyway, if ever there was a man who would be stationed in a utility shed with bolt cutters, it would be Ershut. The other one, Jahandar, had probably been perched in a tree watching the action unfold through a telescopic sight. But once the door was open and the cables severed, Jahandar moved to another perch closer to the building, with a view across the dam and down the road to Elphinstone, while Jones and Ershut and Mitch Mitchell made themselves at home in the Schloss.

Mitch Mitchell was Richard’s secret and unspoken name for the gringo who wanted, in the worst way, to be addressed as Abdul-Ghaffar. Having no idea what the man’s actual birth certificate name might have been, Richard — who simply could not bring himself to take the Abdul-Ghaffar thing seriously — had to make one up that went with his face and personality.

“How long you got?” had been Richard’s first question to Mitch Mitchell, when he’d taken in the melanoma scar.

“Inshallah, long enough to strike a blow for the faith,” he had responded. Richard had just barely managed to not roll his eyes, but Mitch seemed to have detected some faint trace of mockery. “But it depends,” he had added, “on whether it has gone to the brain.”

“No comment on that,” Richard had said.

“I hate to break in,” Jones said, “just when the two of you are getting off on the right foot. But I need to show you an MPEG, if that’s all right.”

“Is this MPEG going to answer any of my questions about Zula?” Richard asked.

“Many of them, undoubtedly,” Jones said.

Until that point Richard had been engaging in a staredown with Mitch Mitchell, who apparently wanted Richard to believe that the melanoma had very much gone to his brain, and perhaps wiped out some of his behavioral inhibitions; but this seemed important enough for Richard to shift his gaze to Jones. He had seen various pictures of the man on the Internet and in the pages of the Economist and was still experiencing some of that disorientation that sets in when you find yourself in the actual presence of a famous person.

“Well, let’s withdraw to the tavern then, if you don’t mind being in a place that serves alcohol.”

“As long as you’re not serving it now,” Jones said.

“Are you kidding? It’s five in the morning.”

The jest fell flat. Richard led them into the tavern, where T’Rain was still displayed on the big screen. A sizable crowd of people had gathered around Egdod. They were all exhibiting minor bothaviors such as breathing, scratching, and shifting their weight from foot to foot. But nothing was happening. This because (as a large dialog box superimposed on the screen was proclaiming) Richard had lost his Internet connection, and so nothing he saw here reflected what was “actually” (whatever that meant) going on in the T’Rain world. He fired off the command-key combo that shut down the game and was greeted by the usual Windows desktop. Jones meanwhile had shoved a thumb drive into a USB slot on the front of the computer. This showed up as a removable drive. Richard opened it to find one file: Zula.mpeg.

“This isn’t going to infect my computer with a virus, is it?” he asked. Again, it was difficult to get a laugh out of these guys.

He double-clicked the icon. Windows Media Player opened up and showed him crappy webcam footage of his niece, sitting on a rumpled bed in a black room, reading yesterday’s issue of the Vancouver Sun.

“Tried to get the Globe and Mail,” Jones said apologetically, “but they were all out.”

So that was it. Jones wanted to be the guy making the smart-ass quips.

Richard broke down weeping, and they had to leave him alone for a couple of minutes.

“FOR NOW, YOUR assistance in getting across the border would do nicely” had been Jones’s answer, when Richard had got his composure back and had asked them what they wanted.

This surprised him a bit. He was so accustomed to people wanting his money. Being asked for his services as a smuggler filled him with a kind of pride, and almost made him grateful to Jones — as if Jones had done him a favor by showing respect for certain of Richard’s hidden qualities that no one else gave a shit about anymore.

“You’re almost there,” Richard said. “Go south. You can’t miss it.”

“I have been led to believe,” said Jones through a thin smile, “that it’s a bit more difficult than you make it sound, and that you are especially good at getting across without drawing unwanted attention.”

The helpful, earnest Iowa Boy Scout in Richard made him want to sketch Jones a map and provide detailed instructions, right on the spot. But that wasn’t what Jones wanted. The terms of the transaction didn’t really need to be spelled out, and Jones probably didn’t want to say them out loud: he had retained at least that amount of British understatement. But he must have left Zula under the control of some people who were supposed to kill her if Jones and his party failed to make it across the border safe and sound.

Which meant that Richard was going on a little hike. Throwing in his lot with these guys, sharing their fate.

“I guess I’d better pack then,” he said.

“We have a good deal of what you’ll be needing,” Jones said. “But if there is any particular equipment you require, clothing, pharmaceuticals — ”

“Weapons?”

The thin smile came back. “I believe we have that adequately covered.”

WHEN THEY HAD displayed her, up at the top of the hill with a chain around her neck, he had gone into another weeping fit. They were tears of joy. A bit odd, that. But knowing was so much better than wondering; and knowing that she was still alive was sweeter yet.

The first day’s hike was straight south along the rail line. It got steeper as it went, until it began to push the limits of what nineteenth-century locomotive technology was really capable of. For the watershed of the Blue Fork was terminated, to the south and east, by a vaguely Cape Cod — shaped range of mountains: a beefy bicep projecting eastward from the Selkirks, and a bony forearm running generally north-south, eventually merging into a branch of the Purcells. They were traversing along the flank of the latter, gradually putting more and more vertical distance between themselves and the Blue Fork. The trail began going on little excursions, elbowing its way into mountain valleys to spring over tributaries, then feeling its way around projecting ridges that separated such valleys. As these became more precipitous, the builders had resorted to constructing trestles across the valleys and dynamiting short tunnels through the ridges, which must have been maddeningly difficult and insanely expensive at the time, but now provided the bikers and skiers who used the trail with amusing distractions.

Eventually they got trapped in the crook of the elbow, where progress was barred by the bulging bicep that ran roughly east-west, several miles north of the border, high enough that its upper slopes were devoid of vegetation: just towering, sand-colored ramparts with snow on the tops. They might have been mistaken for craggy dunes. Richard, who had been all over them, knew them as exposed buttresses of granite whose outer surfaces had spent the last few million years being slowly shivered and whittled away by the ridiculously unpleasant climate. Every small victory of element over mountain was celebrated by a small avalanche as a boulder, the size of a house, a car, a pumpkin, or a teakettle, exploded loose and headed downhill until stopped by older ones. The result was a large terrain of slopes, all at roughly the same angle, ramping up to the high, nearly vertical cliffs from which the rocks were being shed. Nothing much would grow in rubble, so there was no shade from the sun or shelter from the elements, and (perhaps just as important, for the psychological well-being of hikers) no variety to relieve the tedium. Walking across it was a nightmare, not just because it was steep but because its irregularity made it impossible to get into any sort of rhythm; indeed, the term “walking” could not even really be applied to the style of locomotion that the place forced on anyone stupid or unlucky enough to find himself in the middle of it.

It was up in this country where the baron had finally given up on his railway project. He had only run the line this far south as a feint, threatening to extend it into Idaho to spur the Canadians to more decisive action around Elphinstone. But here he had reached a point where he could go no farther unless he bored a mile-long tunnel southward through the ridge. To sell the bluff, he had made some progress, widening an existing mine tunnel for some distance, but had abandoned the project once he had gotten what he’d really wanted: a better connection to the Canadian national system at Elphinstone.

The first day of the journey, then, consisted of walking up to the place where the trail terminated at the head of this aborted tunnel project. Jones could have done this much without Richard’s help. Zula had apparently explained that to him already. Richard’s special knowledge of the terrain would come into play tomorrow.

And so it was an easy enough hike that day, and a sort of vacation: a chance to let his mind, unshackled by the Internet, roam wherever it willed. Mostly he thought about the reactions he had been having to the discovery that Zula was still alive. For during the last several days he had, as it were, been trying the idea that she was dead on for size, and trying to get his head around what that meant. Certainly he was no stranger to people he knew dying. He had reached the age where he had to attend a couple of contemporaries’ funerals a year, and even had a special suit and pair of shoes that he kept handy for such events. But all deaths were as different as the persons who had died. Each death meant that a particular set of ideas and perceptions and reactions was gone from the world, apparently forever, and served as a reminder to Richard that one day his ideas and perceptions and reactions would be gone too. It was never good. But it seemed particularly unfair in the case of Zula. If he was now trading his death for hers, well, that was much better overall, and a trade that — as Jones knew perfectly well — he would gladly accept.

But the notion that it might be coming soon brought to the front of his mind a thing that of late he had been pondering, typically while staring out the windows of private jets at the landscape passing beneath him. His religious beliefs were completely undefined. But whether it was the case that his spirit would live on after his body or die with it, he had the nagging sense that, at his age (and especially in his current circumstances), he really ought to be growing more spiritual. For he was certainly closer to being dead than to having been born. Instead of which he was only becoming more connected to the world. He could not even imagine what it would mean to be a whole and conscious being without the smell of cedar in his nostrils. Seeing the color red. Tasting the first swallow of a pint of bitter. Feeling an old pair of jeans as he drew them up over his thighs. Staring out the window of an airplane at forests and fields and mountains. With all of that gone, how could one be alive, conscious, sentient, in any way that was worth a crap?

It was the sort of rumination that on any other day would soon have been cut short by the arrival of an email or a text message, but as he hiked up the valley of the Blue Fork at the head of a column of sweating and muttering jihadists, none of whom especially wanted to talk to him, he had plenty of leisure to consider it. Which seemed to be getting him absolutely nowhere. But he did try to enjoy the smell of the cedars and the blue of the sky while he still had the equipment to do it with.

OLIVIA PROCEEDED WITHOUT incident to a freeway on-ramp. They drove north through a sparse industrial zone that led into the southern outskirts of downtown Seattle. There they joined with I-5, the main north-south freeway, which they took all the way through the city. Half an hour later, after they had passed through another belt of suburbs and entered another, smaller city, she flicked on her turn signal and exited onto an east-going highway of lesser importance that proceeded across an endless series of tidal sloughs on long straight causeways. A range of mountains erupted from the flatlands directly ahead of them. Once it had gotten up onto slightly higher and drier land, the highway diverted south and began to wind to and fro, as if unnerved by the colossal barrier stretched across its path, but after a while it got funneled into a broad valley, clotted with small communities. The valley became narrower, the air colder, the towns smaller, the trees taller, and then it was clear that they were ascending into a mountain pass.

Both of them relaxed. There was no particular reason for this. No reason why, in today’s world, they were safer, more anonymous on a winding highway in the mountains than they were on a freeway in the heart of a major city. But some atavistic part of their brains told them that they had effected some kind of escape. Gotten away with something.

“I don’t fancy your friends,” Olivia said. It was the first thing either one of them had said since Sokolov had climbed into the SUV in front of Igor’s house.

Sokolov ignored it. “How did you know where I was?”

“As long as we’re asking nervous questions, I’ve got one: Did you, or anyone else in that house, happen to say anything out loud when I showed up? Like, ‘Holy shit, that looks like the MI6 agent Olivia?’”

“Of course I did not say such things.”

“Of course not. But the others? Anything such as ‘Who is that Chinese chick in the black SUV?’”

“Nothing; I made this gesture,” Sokolov assured her, showing her the finger-across lips move and the upward glance.

“Well, that might help. A little.”

“Again. How did you know where I was?”

“This morning I was in the Vancouver airport, on my way to Prince George to go looking for Abdallah Jones, when I was made aware that your friend’s house had been placed under surveillance.”

“Because stupid idiot went to apartment of Peter and was seen on video camera.”

“Exactly. And then I was made aware that someone named Sokolov had just made a surprise visit.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. I felt a bit responsible.”

He turned his head to look at her; she kept her eyes dutifully on the road. “How responsible?” he asked.

“The video files were encrypted, you see. No one could open them. Then, because of some things I did this morning, the encryption key was found.”

“Found where?”

“In Peter’s wallet.”

“Peter is dead though?”

“Yes, Peter is dead. Turns out Ivanov shot him in Xiamen. Then Jones shot Ivanov and ran off with Zula.”

“So where is wallet of Peter?”

“Csongor took it to Manila.”

“Csongor is in Manila!?”

“As of a few hours ago, yes, he should be. Along with Yuxia and Marlon.”

“Who is Marlon?”

“The hacker who created the virus.”

A bit of silent driving, now, as Sokolov took all of this in.

“Anyway,” Olivia continued, when Sokolov’s body language suggested he was ready to hear more, “I sort of got everyone talking to one another. Dodge supplied the video file — ”

“Dodge?”

“Richard Forthrast.”

“Rich uncle of Zula.”

“I hadn’t pegged you for a T’Rain fan.”

“I read about her in newspapers, magazines, this morning at bookstore. I am not surprised that a man of this type would have obtained video file. So. He supplied file, Csongor supplied key…”

“And then lots of cops and spies were looking at video of Igor stealing that.” Olivia gave her head a little toss, indicating the rifle case in the backseat. “Why did you bring it, by the way?”

“I shoot moose. We have barbecue.”

“I would love to have a moose barbecue with you. But we should probably be figuring out our next move.”

“Our? We are together? Partners?” Sokolov’s tone was rough and skeptical.

“That’s what we need to figure out.”

Her phone went off. She answered it and spent the next couple of minutes getting an earful from someone on the other end of the line. “All right,” she finally said, “I’ll check in with you when I’m north of the border.” She hung up and handed the device to Sokolov. “Could you destroy that for me?”

“With pleasure.” Sokolov began by figuring out how to eject the battery. In case it had some residual power source, he then laid it out on the dashboard, drew out his Makarov, verified that it was in a safe condition, and raised its butt like a hammer.

“Belay that,” Olivia said. “I need to send one last message.”

Sokolov set the Makarov down on the floor between his feet and slid the battery back into its socket.

Olivia was navigating an especially curvy part of the mountain pass, so she talked Sokolov through the process of getting the phone turned on and navigating its menus. “In ‘Recent Calls,’ you should see one, early this morning, to someone named Seamus.”

“Yes, I have it,” he said after a few moments.

“If you would be so good as to send a text to that number. ‘Blown and going dark.’ Something like that.”

Sokolov looked at her incredulously.

“Exactly like that,” she corrected herself.

Sokolov spent a few moments thumbing it out and sending it. Then he removed the battery again, placed the device on the dashboard, and picked up the Makarov. He looked at her.

“Go for it.”

The butt of the Makarov came down on the black plastic puck, producing a nice splintering noise. Sokolov hit it a few more times and then began to sift through the resultant debris, looking for anything that might possibly be still alive. “Someone mad at you?”

“My boss in London,” Olivia said, sounding a little tense. “People are talking.”

“You were seen at house of Igor?”

“No. But my presence in the States is a bit of an open secret. I’ve been collaborating with local FBI on the search for Zula and for Jones. They know the name I’m using — the name on my passport. This morning, after I heard that you had showed up at Igor’s house, I walked right across the concourse and got on the next plane for Seattle. It is a fifty-minute flight. I was there in no time. Walked out, grabbed a rental car, drove to Igor’s.”

“How did you know address of Igor?”

“I accessed a PDF of the court order using that.” She nodded at the wreckage of the phone, which Sokolov was now primly scooping into a litter bag. “As you know, Igor’s house is less than a kilometer from the airport. Elapsed time, from me getting the news in Vancouver to me showing up on the front stoop of Igor’s house, less than two hours.”

“Why?”

She gave him a look. “What do you mean, why?”

“Is crazy thing to do. Blowing the operation of the FBI.”

“They would have gotten everything. All the stuff that went down in that apartment — kidnapping, murder — it all would have come to light and you’d have spent the rest of your life in prison.”

“Maybe it will happen anyway,” Sokolov said, thinking of Vlad, cringing on the floor.

“You and I had a deal,” Olivia said, “back in China. Which was that, in exchange for your assistance in helping track down Abdallah Jones, my employer would get you out of trouble. Something went wrong. I don’t know what.”

Sokolov shrugged dismissively. “Network of so-called George Chow was penetrated by PSB.”

“I am still trying to honor the general spirit of that agreement,” Olivia said. “And it’s to our advantage — MI6’s advantage — to keep you from getting hauled into an American court for a sensational trial. Because then a lot of other stuff would come out too.”

“China stuff.”

“China stuff. With repercussions for international relations among China, the U.S., the U.K. So you had to be gotten out of that house.”

“You acted well,” Sokolov agreed. “I was afraid — ” Then he shut up.

A little too late. “You were afraid I was being a crazy, love-sick stalker chick.”

“Yes.”

Olivia sighed. “If only I had the time for such recreations.”

“Now you are in deep shit?” Sokolov inquired, shaking the bag of phone debris.

“I left enough circumstantial evidence — flying to Seattle, renting the car — that sooner or later the FBI is going to figure out that I went to Igor’s house and blew the operation. They have already begun asking difficult questions of my higher-ups at MI6.”

“What is best course for you then?”

“It’s going to be an awkward pain in the arse no matter what,” Olivia said, “but everything would be a hell of a lot better if I were in Canada. This would put me out of the FBI’s jurisdiction, and in a country with Commonwealth ties to the U.K. — easier to grease the skids from there, get me home discreetly.”

“To Canada then!” Sokolov said. “Canada is better for me too; I have work visa there. Byiznyess connections.”

“We’ll have to cross the border illegally.”

“You know place?”

“I don’t know a place, exactly. But I know a family that can get us across.”

“Smugglers?”

“It’s not so much that they are smugglers,” Olivia said, “as that they deny the validity of borders altogether.”

BLOWN AND GOING DARK.

Seamus had to hand it to the girl. He was getting to the point where he could not get his day started without a dramatic early-morning text message or phone call from Olivia. If he continued working with this person, he was going to have to get into the habit of going to bed early and perhaps even sober.

They had arrived in Manila at midnight and crashed in a chain hotel just up the street from the U.S. embassy, which was where Seamus intended to be the next morning, just as soon as the visa section opened its doors. So this cryptic message served as a convenient wake-up call.

He had laid his credit card down and secured a suite, employing fake credentials that had been issued to him for use when he needed to travel without throwing his real name around. He had given the bed, which was in its own separate room, to Yuxia. Seamus was sleeping on the floor near the suite’s entrance with a pistol under his pillow. Marlon and Csongor had flipped a coin for the sofa, and Marlon had won, so Csongor had staked out a patch of floor in the corner.

Seamus had no idea what level of precautions was appropriate here. Apparently these three had left half of the surviving population of China seriously pissed off at them, as well as making mortal enemies with a rogue, defrocked Russian organized crime figure. In their spare time they had stolen money from millions of T’Rain players, created huge problems for a large multinational corporation that owned the game, and, finally — warming to the task — mounted a frontal assault on al-Qaeda. Had their coordinates been generally known, no amount of security would have been adequate. Seamus’s sidearm was a nice gun and everything, but it would not be much use should China invade the Philippines, or should one of Abdallah Jones’s minions decide to Stuka a fuel-laden 767 into the roof of the Best Western. He had decided to proceed on the assumption that no one knew where the hell they were, and to hustle them into the embassy first thing in the morning. Perhaps something could be sorted out there.

He’d had a talk with Csongor before going to bed: a little private man-to-man in the hallway, while Marlon and Yuxia had been taking turns using the bathroom. The subject of the talk had been guns. Seamus’s instincts had told him to confiscate Csongor’s pistol, since more bad than good things could come of his having it. But the Hungarian had been carrying it around now for a couple of weeks and had already used it in anger on two occasions, and so it seemed like not the best idea, from an interpersonal relations standpoint, to demand that it be handed over. And, just as a matter of principle, Seamus could not relieve a man of a gun he had used to shoot Abdallah Jones in the head. Seamus had spent enough time with Csongor by this point to get a sense of who he was, and he felt confident that Csongor would behave sanely and discreetly. His only concern was that some bump in the night would wake them all up and that Csongor, disoriented, would freak out, draw the weapon, and do something fucked up.

So that was what they had talked about. The corridor had been empty, so Seamus had stood well back, keeping his hands in plain sight, and had asked Csongor to take the gun out and demonstrate that he knew how to check the action for live rounds, how to make it safe, how to load and unload it. Csongor had done all those things without fuss or hesitation. Seamus had complimented him on his skill, being careful not to make it gushy or patronizing, since Csongor was not some coddled American kid who needed positive feedback all the time.

“I’m going to keep a light on. Dimly. So we can see each other if we wake up in the middle of the night. No mistakes. No shooting at vague forms. Got it?”

“Of course.”

“Glad we settled that,” Seamus had said.

Then: “What are your plans?” Since the bathroom had still been unavailable.

Csongor had looked extremely tired.

“You know Don Quixote?” Csongor had finally asked, after thinking about it for so long that Seamus had nearly fallen asleep on his feet.

“Not personally, but — ”

“Of course, but you know the idea.”

“Yeah. Tilting at windmills. Dulcinea.” Seamus hadn’t read the book, but he’d seen the musical and he remembered the song.

“I have a windmill. A Dulcinea.”

“No shit, really?”

“No shit.”

“Who is she, big guy? Not Yuxia.”

Csongor had shook his head. “Not Yuxia.”

“That’s good, because I kind of like Yuxia.”

“I noticed.”

“Who is she?” This had partly been about making friendly conversation with Csongor but also partly a matter of professional interest; before he spent much more time wandering around in strange places with this armed Hungarian man-tank, it seemed important for Seamus to understand what made him tick — what motivated him, for example, to run about China engaging major international terrorists in gunplay.

“Zula Forthrast.”

“Wow.” Seamus considered it. “You picked a tough one. Let me see. She lives in a country that’s hard for you to get to. She’s the niece of a superrich guy. She’s being held hostage, in a part of the world we can only guess at, by an incredibly dangerous terrorist who totally hates you for shooting him in the head.”

Csongor had spread out his hands, palms up, as if surrendering. “Like I said. Windmill.”

Seamus had stepped around beside him and given him a companionable thwack on the shoulder. “I like windmill tilters,” he had said.

“Do you have any ideas at all?” Csongor had asked.

“As to where Jones took her?”

“Yes.”

Seamus had then supplied Csongor with a brief explanation of the theories that had been investigated so far: the obvious southern Philippines route, which had been exploded; the North American Gambit, which was still under investigation; and Olivia’s new SNAG concept, which (as Seamus was quite confident) she was checking out, at this very moment, in Prince George, British Columbia. None of which had seemed entirely satisfactory to Csongor. But he had obviously been comforted to know that people were working on it and discussing it in places like London and Langley.

“How can I get there?” Csongor had asked.

“You mean, to the northwestern U.S.?”

“Yeah.”

Strangely, this was the first time they had discussed what they were actually going to do. It had been obvious enough that they needed to get to Manila, so they had done so without putting any thought into what would happen next. Seamus had a vague idea of getting the three wanderers into the United States, and he had taken them to this place near the embassy. But he hadn’t actually sat down and talked to them about it yet.

“Got your passport?” Seamus had asked.

“Unbelievable but yes.”

“Hungary is a visa waiver country, right?”

“Yes.”

“So you just need to fill out the web form, ditch the loaded gun, and you’re in. No problem. As for our Chinese friends … that’s going to be interesting.”

“Does it help,” Csongor asked, “that Marlon has two million dollars?”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

NOW IT WAS five in the fucking morning and he was wide awake, surrounded by people who were sleeping as soundly as it was possible for humans to sleep without being etherized. And Olivia — who was supposed to be pursuing her crazy SNAG theory in Canada — had made the announcement that she was blown and going dark.

How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?

Not that Seamus, in general, had any great problem with the Great White North. But to be an MI6 agent in that country seemed about as close to a milk run as you could get in the espionage world.

He fired up his laptop, found a wireless network, set up an encrypted connection, and got in touch with Stan, a colleague and former comrade-in-arms in the greater Washington, D.C., area. It was quitting time there, and Saturday to boot, but Stan was known to work odd hours. Seamus asked Stan whether it wouldn’t be too much of a challenge to his intellectual faculties to track down the provenance of a certain instant message, and wondered whether Stan was too much of a pussy to get it done discreetly, without setting the whole counterterrorism network alight.

Then he took a shower. When he came back, a message was waiting for him from Stan, asking what all this had to do with Seamus’s metier, viz., eating snakes and molesting ladyboys in the southern Philippines. The message went on to claim that, as a result of Stan’s making the inquiry, the Department of Homeland Security’s Terror Alert Status had been elevated to Red, and POTUS had been evacuated to a secure facility in Nebraska. Those preliminaries out of the way, Stan divulged that the message had been sent via a cell tower near the summit of Stevens Pass, northeast of Seattle, and squarely within the borders of the United States. Judging from cell-tower records, the phone in question had been eastbound at the time. Nothing more was known, since the device had not popped up on the network since the message had been sent. Was there anything else?

Why yes, Seamus responded, if it wouldn’t interrupt Stan’s busy schedule of watching gay bondage pornography videos on the taxpayer-provided high-speed Internet connection, he would very much like to know whether a certain young lady had bought any airplane tickets or rented any cars in Washington or British Columbia of late.

A few minutes later came an email assuring Seamus that the lap dancer in question had indeed left an electronic trail a mile wide and that Seamus might be able to make use of the following data in tracking her down and getting his stolen kidney back: she had flown from Vancouver to Seattle this morning and rented a navy blue Chevy Trailblazer.

Seamus sent a polite note back reminding Stan to zip his fly when finished and promising to buy him a drink during Stan’s next visit to Zamboanga, supposing that Stan had the testicular fortitude to come within a thousand miles of such a challenging locale.

Then he pulled up a Google map of Stevens Pass. It was on a minor highway, a two-laner that Google didn’t even bother to draw on the map once he had clicked the Zoom Out button a couple of times. Seattle, then Vancouver came into view on successive clicks, and then Spokane, farther to the east, near the Idaho border.

Why had she rented a large SUV? Was it the only thing left in the lot? Or was she expecting to do some off-road work?

Something Csongor had said earlier was eating at him. Had been tunneling into his brain during the scant four hours he had managed to sleep: Does it help that Marlon has two million dollars?

The flip answer — always the first thing that would come into Seamus’s head — was, Why yes, with that kind of money he could lease a bizjet and fly there directly.

Which got him thinking about flight paths and border formalities.

This was an asinine idea, worth thinking about only as a thought experiment, but: Supposing they did exactly that? Leased a bizjet and flew it to the Pacific Northwest?

Then they would still have the minor problem that Marlon and Yuxia lacked visas. Which would be a showstopper if they landed at Sea-Tac or Boeing Field or any other international airport with immigration barriers.

Why not just land out in the middle of nowhere? Avoid those barriers altogether?

Answer: they’d be noticed on radar. In theory. But what if they did something tricky to avoid that? What was to stop them, really? Other than the fact that their pilot would refuse to do it because he wouldn’t want to get caught and thrown into prison.

So it was just a crazy thought experiment. But it was a thought experiment with a side effect, which was that it forced him to think exactly the same thoughts that Abdallah Jones had been thinking two weeks ago. Jones must have looked at the same Google map, traced the mountain ranges, zoomed in and out on promising border-crossing sites.

He was now, for some reason, fully and utterly convinced of Olivia’s theory. Jones must have flown to North America. It was so doable.

And he must have stopped short for some reason, landed in Canada. It didn’t really matter why, exactly. But if he’d landed in the States, he’d have done something by now. The fact that he’d been silent for so long suggested that he had been maneuvering toward the Canadian border, looking for a discreet way to cross it.

How would he do it, exactly?

“What are you looking at?” asked a voice from behind him. Csongor, lying there awake, gazing dully at Seamus’s laptop.

“I’ve got a windmill of my own,” Seamus said.

“Jones?”

“Yeah. And I think he’s somewhere on this map.” He was looking at the bottom hundred miles of British Columbia, most of Washington State, and the Idaho panhandle. “And I’ll bet he’s got your Dulcinea with him. Sweet sovereign of your captive heart.”

“What are we waiting for?” Csongor asked.

“The embassy to open. And…”

“And what?”

Seamus grabbed his hair with both hands and pulled. “A fucking clue as to where exactly he wants to cross the border. Shit man, once you get past the suburbs of Vancouver it’s wilderness all the way to fucking Sault Ste. Marie.”

And that was when it came to him. Maybe because he was really smart. Maybe because he was lucky. Maybe because, down in the little toolbar at the bottom of his screen, a little tab labeled “T’Rain” was flashing on and off, trying to get his attention.

He clicked on that tab. The window expanded to reveal that Thorakks was under attack. He was out in the middle of a desert somewhere, walking along in a large crowd of characters who had all been following Egdod. That crowd was being assaulted by a horde of horse archers.

“Are you actually going to play video games now?” Csongor asked incredulously.

“Give me a minute to kick the shit out of these guys and then I’ll answer your question,” Seamus said, going into action, breaking Thorakks out of his robotic stupor, shouldering a shield, throwing up a protective spell. Cutting down one horse archer with a thunderbolt and another with a stroke of his sword.

But Thorakks wasn’t the target. Egdod was.

They were riding in to count coup on Egdod. They couldn’t hope to actually hurt a character of such power, of course. But they could earn the fantastic distinction of having struck a blow against the oldest and most powerful character in all T’Rain.

Egdod was doing nothing. Making no move to defend himself. He was still following his bothavior: trying to walk all the way to his HZ, thousands of miles away.

“Where are you?” Marlon asked. He had been awakened by the sounds of T’Rainian combat.

“How the fuck should I know?” Seamus responded. “When we left that place I stayed logged in and told Thorakks to follow Egdod. So we are wherever Egdod wandered to. How long since we left?”

“Something like twelve hours,” Csongor said.

“So. Richard Forthrast gets up twelve hours ago to answer the doorbell and never comes back. Never logs out properly. Egdod goes into his bothavior. What does that tell you?”

Csongor shrugged. “Nothing.”

“He’s sleeping,” Marlon suggested. “He was awake for a whole day.”

“Goddamn it,” Seamus said. “I was afraid one of you would come up with a reasonable explanation such as that.”

“You have an unreasonable explanation?” asked Yuxia, who had emerged from her private bedchamber looking sweet and sleepy and heard the last part of the exchange.

“Yeah,” said Seamus, after a brief pause to admire Yuxia. He minimized the T’Rain window, brought up his Google map again, and zoomed in on a stretch of border between the Idaho panhandle and a town called Elphinstone. “Abdallah Jones is crossing the border here, now. And Richard Forthrast is helping him do it.”

AS THEY DROVE down out of the pass and into more settled areas in the river valleys on the dry side of the Cascades, Olivia began to feel oppressed by the sense that they were absurdly conspicuous, driving along together in this rental car.

She did not have the faintest idea what the police and the FBI might be thinking. But it seemed best to assume the worst and to start behaving as though she and Sokolov were in a hostile country, cover blown, being hunted by the police. In which case, doing what they were doing was the dumbest possible way to proceed, and it was a miracle they hadn’t been pulled over and handcuffed yet.

They could ditch this car easily enough and find some other way to proceed eastward. But the mere fact of “short-haired Asian woman traveling with lean, close-cropped blond man” was enough to make them conspicuous, should an APB go out to all the local cops and highway patrol cruisers.

“We have to split up,” she said.

“Agreed.”

“At least for now,” she added, because some ridiculous instinct was telling her that her first sentence had sounded a little too harsh and she didn’t want to hurt Sokolov’s feelings. She glanced over at him. He did not appear to be hurt.

“The place we’re going is in the general vicinity of Bourne’s Ford, Idaho,” she said.

“Bourne’s Ford, Idaho,” he repeated.

“I can’t give you a specific landmark. I’ve never been there.”

They had become stuck in traffic behind a semitrailer truck that said WALMART.

“Just find the nearest Walmart,” she suggested. “There’s got to be one within thirty miles. I’ll meet you in the sporting goods department between noon and half past. I’ll just keep going there every day until you turn up.”

Sokolov pulled the long gun case out of the backseat and laid it across his lap. He opened it up to reveal the weapon. By popping out two pins he was able to break it down into two pieces, neither of which was more than about a foot and a half long, and by collapsing the stock he was able to make it shorter yet. He placed both pieces of it into his knapsack — a new purchase from the Eddie Bauer store in downtown Seattle — and then transferred a lot of other odds and ends that were rattling around loose in there: a few cartridges, two empty clips, some cleaning supplies.

“You really think you’re going to need that?”

“Is matter of responsibility,” Sokolov said. “Can’t leave in abandoned car. Anyway, is evidence too — fingerprints of Igor.” He zipped the pack shut and looked at her. “You get out at bus stop, I will liquidate car.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“In the forest, back up there, are, what do you call them, places where hikers pull off road, go to beginning of path.”

“Trailheads.”

“Yes. I think it is normal to park a car in such place for several days. It is legal. Will not draw attention. But it is off the road. Not obvious. I will go back, park at such place, hike down.”

“Then what?”

“Hitchhike.” Sokolov paused for a moment. “Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers. With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous.”

They had been passing signs on the road that appeared to designate bus stops. After a few more miles they found one that was conveniently situated next to a parking lot where they could pull out of traffic. Olivia walked over to the bus stop and checked the schedule and verified that a bus would be along in another twenty minutes to take her into the nearby town of Wenatchee. She went round back of the SUV and rapped on the rear window. Sokolov had already moved laterally into the driver’s seat. He popped the tailgate. She hauled it open and pulled her bag out of the back. For a moment, their eyes locked in the rearview mirror.

“See you,” she said.

“See you.”

She slammed the tailgate, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, and walked to the bus stop. Sokolov put the car in gear, got the SUV turned around, and headed back up the way they had come, keeping an eye peeled for trailheads.

GIVEN THE REMARKABLE length and diversity of Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia’s enemies list, the five-block stroll from the hotel to the U.S. embassy was one of the more stimulating experiences of Seamus’s recent life. Not because anything actually happened — he’d have known how to behave, in that case — but because he had no way of telling whether any of the people who passed them on the sidewalk or cruised past them in cars, jeepneys, and motor scooters were gun-toting assassins bent on retribution. He reckoned he could have covered the distance in about half the time if he had simply slung Yuxia over his back in a fireman’s carry and hoofed it with the long-legged Csongor and Marlon keeping pace. Not a one of them was under six feet two, and they all seemed to get the idea that hanging around in the open was not the preferred strategy. Yuxia was a different matter, not because she was tiny (she could move as fast as any of them when she had a mind to) but because she insisted on viewing this as a fascinating exploratory junket into a new and unfamiliar world, and an opportunity to establish cross-cultural relations with as many as possible of the hundreds of people she encountered on the street. Most of these conversations were gratifyingly brief, possibly because Yuxia’s interlocutors kept stealing uneasy glances at Csongor and Seamus, who tended to bracket the girl and stand with their backs to each other and their hands in their pockets scanning the vicinity with disconcerting alertness. Meanwhile Marlon did his bit by chivvying her along, muttering to her in Mandarin, as though playing the role of a nervous, irritable boyfriend.

The embassy was huge, a city within the city, and given the number of active Islamic terrorist cells in the Philippines, it was not the sort of place you could just stroll into. Seamus came here frequently enough that most of the marine guards recognized him. But his three companions would have to ID themselves and pass through metal detectors like anyone else. Seamus managed to squeeze the whole party into a gatehouse where they could stand and wait in air-conditioned comfort until the duty officer arrived, which took all of about thirty seconds. Seamus was then able to explain the unusual nature of his visitors and his errand. Csongor was briskly but politely disarmed, and everyone was metal detected and frisked. Seamus was then allowed to lead his guests out into the embassy grounds, which sprawled for many acres across reclaimed land along the shore of Manila Bay. Both Americans and Japanese had, at various times, controlled the Philippines, and run major wars, out of this compound. There was an older chancery in the middle, hemmed in from both sides by more recent buildings that housed the embassy’s thousands of American and Filipino employees. A great deal of space was given over to all things having to do with visas. Seamus hoped that he could get Marlon and Yuxia in to see some of those people today.

First, though, he had to get them interested in visiting the United States. Seamus was enough of a naked chauvinist to assume that any non-American in his or her right mind would want to come to America. But he had not spent half of his adult life in strange parts of the world without picking up a few diplomatic skills. He strolled into the shade of a large tree in front of the chancery and convened the others in a little circle around him.

“I’m going to America,” he said, “as soon as I can get on a plane. I’m going there because I think that our friend Abdallah Jones is there and that Zula might be with him, as a hostage. Csongor is coming with me; he can get permission to enter the U.S. by filling out a web form, so it’s easy for him. You guys, Marlon and Yuxia, are free to do whatever you want. But I feel I should point out that you are in this country illegally. Chinese citizens need a visa to enter the Philippines, and I’m going to take a wild guess that you didn’t get visas before you stole that fishing boat from the terrorists and blew away the skipper. I don’t recommend that you just go back to China. You really need to get to some country that is not China and where you have some sort of paperwork so you can’t be arrested and deported back to China on sight — which is what would happen if you went out there” — he waved his arm vaguely at the traffic on Roxas Boulevard — “and got noticed.” He aimed this last comment at Yuxia, who had spent the last half hour doing everything she conceivably could to get herself noticed. She took the meaning and got a slightly pouty look about her, which was quite unlike Yuxia, and nearly killed Seamus.

Marlon and Yuxia were watching Seamus carefully now. They might, or might not, find the idea of a trip to the United States appealing on its own merits. But he’d gotten their attention by mentioning Jones and Zula, and then scared the hell out of them by elucidating their dilemma regarding paperwork.

“Now, I believe that I might be able to arrange something.”

Rapt silence.

“I’m going to assume that neither one of you has a Chinese passport.”

Marlon shook his head.

“We only get them when we are going to travel outside of China,” Yuxia said, “and I have never done so.”

“Actually you have,” Seamus pointed out, throwing his hands out to direct her attention to the fact that she was in Manila. She smiled. “Anyway, not having a passport will certainly throw a monkey wrench into the process of getting a visa to enter the United States.” He was trying to employ dry understatement here and wasn’t entirely certain that they were fully appreciative of his sense of humor. “But I know some people here in the embassy who can make it all right in no time.”

“ARE YOU OUT of your fucking mind?” the CIA station chief was asking him a few minutes later.

Marlon and Yuxia and Csongor were cooling their heels in a café in a relatively nonsecure part of the embassy. Seamus and the station chief, an American of Filipino ancestry named Ferdinand (“Call me Freddie”), were conversing in a part of the building that was very secure indeed. They had known each other for a while.

“Freddie, you know that this room is so secret, so well shielded, that I could strangle you here and no one would ever know.”

“No one except for the two marines with submachine guns right outside the door.”

“Drinking buddies of mine.”

“Seriously, Seamus, what are you asking me to do? Produce forged Chinese passports?”

“Real American ones would be a hell of a lot easier.”

Freddie actually considered this. “I suppose we could claim that they were American citizens, visiting Manila, whose passports were stolen by pickpockets. That farce would be uncovered the moment the State Department actually bothered to check the records.”

“Freddie. Work with me here. The global war on terror leads us into many strange situations. We do stuff all the time that’s not technically legal. Hell, my very presence in this country is a violation of Philippine sovereignty. As is yours.”

“So you want to play the GWOT card?”

“Yes. Come on, Freddie. That’s the whole point of this conversation.”

Freddie gave him an I’m waiting look. In retrospect, Seamus should have seen this as the trap that it was.

“I know where Jones is,” Seamus said. “I can narrow it down to maybe ten square miles. Or kilometers, for our Canadian friends.”

“Would this be related to the work you have been doing with” — and here Freddie picked up a folder marked as containing secret information — “that British girl? Olivia Halifax-Lin?”

“That brave, brilliant British girl who single-handedly tracked Jones down in Xiamen and collected priceless surveillance data on him and his cell for months? Yes, I believe we are talking about the same Olivia.”

“Maybe she should have taken a little more time off,” Freddie said. “Perhaps that sort of work didn’t suit her, lifestyle-wise.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“In the last day or so, she seems to have gone totally off the rails. She skipped out of a large and expensive FBI counterterror investigation. Just walked out of the room without explaining anything. Hightailed it up to Vancouver, leaving quite the electronic trail. Including communications with you. Crashed in a hotel room there and was bothering some poor Mountie about this same theory.”

“By ‘this same theory’ you mean the excellent theory that she and I have been developing.”

“Ah, so you have been working with her.”

“Go on.”

“Claimed she was headed to some place in B.C. called Prince George. Bought a ticket. Checked in for the flight. Never boarded it. Instead bought a ticket with cash, on short notice, and went back down to Seattle, still not bothering to explain to anyone what the hell she was doing. Did not give the FBI the courtesy of a call. Then, around the time that her plane was landing at Sea-Tac, there was a shootout in a house full of Russians, low-level criminal types, less than a mile away. An FBI surveillance operation was blown. No one knows where the hell she is. One of the guys who was under surveillance has disappeared. Russian security consultant, ex — special forces, apparently related to the whole Xiamen thing.”

“Sounds like you’ve been talking to the FBI quite a bit.”

Freddie made no comment, just rolled his eyes up from the secret documents and stared at Seamus over his glasses. “Yes?”

“Anything from the intel community?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because they can get information that the FBI can’t. And sometimes they’re not very nice about sharing.”

“This Olivia person,” said Freddie, “sent you a text message this morning, didn’t she?”

Seamus laughed. “I knew it.” He sat up, leaning forward across the table. “So the FBI, the cops, they’re clueless. They have no idea where she might have gone. But the intel community was tracking her phone. They have a rough idea.”

“Very rough,” said Freddie. “And getting rougher with every passing minute. But the presumption is that she wants to get across the border into Canada where she’ll have a better shot at clearing up her amazingly tattered visa status and getting home in one piece.”

“Which is what the intel community would like to happen,” Seamus said, “and so no one is going to drop a dime on her.”

“As long as she keeps her wits about her, I would guess she’ll be back in London in a couple of weeks, looking forward to, oh, about four decades of working behind a desk.”

“Okay,” Seamus said. “That’s all quite amusing. But what I really want to talk about is Jones.”

“Yes. You know where Jones is. You figured it out, apparently, while spending all night playing a video game in a provincial Internet café patronized by Australian sex tourists.”

“That is pretty much the size of it.”

“And the break that enabled you to put all this together came in the form of a telephone call from Olivia Halifax-Lin, made during her previous sudden disappearance from the FBI’s radar screens.”

“There’s no PowerPoint presentation, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Seamus said.

“If there were, would it have Olivia’s name on it?”

“Only if that would be advantageous.”

“It was a rhetorical question. Everyone knows that the idea came from her.”

Seamus said, “I’m guessing that is viewed as a bad thing?”

“Unless you have some hard evidence as to Jones’s whereabouts, it’s going to be treated as a highly speculative theory that was talked about, but never exactly written down, by an agent whose reputation could hardly sink any lower.”

“So it is about the PowerPoint.”

Freddie ignored this. “Seamus, you are a living example of the Peter Principle.”

Seamus looked down, mock shocked, toward his own genitalia.

“Not that one,” Freddie said. “Never mind. The point is that you have risen as high as you can get in the hierarchy without having to behave like a responsible manager.”

Seamus was half out of his chair, but Freddie calmed him by holding up one hand. “I will be the first to attest that you are as responsible as any man who ever lived when it comes to those in your command. If I had to go back to being a snake eater, I would want to be your subordinate. But above the level where you are now, you have to be able to justify your actions and your expenditures by supplying documentation, and you have to engage in all sorts of political maneuvers to make sure that the right people see your PowerPoint presentations at the right times. And you are a million miles away from being able to do this in the case of whatever theory you and Olivia have been cooking up. And consequently no one above you in the hierarchy is going to stick his or her neck out by supporting your theory.”

“Even if I were that kind of guy, Freddie, there isn’t time. We need to act now.”

“Give me something,” Freddie said.

“I got nothing to give, Freddie!”

“What you’re asking for right now is a nightmare from my point of view. Handing out fake passports to two random Chinese kids. What are you trying to achieve, Seamus? You want to make these two into American citizens? Put them in the Witness Protection Program?”

“Look,” Seamus said, “I just have to fucking get there. So I can check this out.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

“But these kids are with me, and I can’t just abandon them here.”

“I’m listening.”

“I could get in a taxi and go to the airport now. If they had an ounce of common sense, they would apply for asylum. Now, that would be a nightmare.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I’m just saying, they’re here, Freddie, and I ain’t sending them back to China. Either they go with me, now, or they camp out on your front yard and request asylum. They are very Internet-savvy.”

Freddie was frozen solid. Beginning to perspire a bit.

“If I wanted to threaten you,” Seamus continued, “I’d hit you where you live.”

“Where do I live?”

“Abdallah Jones killed a bunch of your guys.”

“They were your guys, Seamus.”

“I’m your subordinate. You gave the orders. Let’s call them our guys. Now I know where Jones is. I can get him. But I have this waif problem.”

“Wraith?”

“Waif. Waif. I’m being followed around by Chinese waifs. And one not-so-waiflike Hungarian. Prevents me from getting to Jones. Your personal fault.”

“You’re making this too hard,” Freddie said, after thinking about it for a while. “You just need some way to get them on a plane in Manila, and off the plane Stateside, without them being snatched by Immigration.”

“That would do, for now,” Seamus admitted. “We could work on the details later.”

“It’s too bad we can’t get them on a military flight,” Freddie said.

“How would that help us?”

“It would depart from an airbase here and land at a base in the States. Not that they don’t check papers. But we could finesse it much more easily.”

“Finesse it?”

“For me to get Immigration at a place like Sea-Tac to look the other way while you smuggled a couple of undocumented Chinese into the country, I would have to get a hundred fucking people involved, from several agencies,” Freddie said. “People would drag their feet, raise objections, screw it up.”

“I thought this was what you were good at. PowerPoint presentations. Consensus building.”

“Only when you give me something to work with. And lots of time. But if we could turn it into a military thing, that would be much easier.”

“What does it cost to charter a business jet?”

“How should I know? Do I look like the kind of person who charters business jets?”

“No, but Marlon does.”

“Who’s Marlon?”

Day 20

Once the main party had gone south, the camp was much reduced in number of tents (only two left, not counting Zula’s little one-person shelter) but hugely expanded in its solid waste footprint. Much of what they had brought up here had been carried straight from grocery stores or Walmarts, and during the morning’s last-minute packing frenzy, they had pulled everything out of its sacks and packaging material, which they had simply dropped on the ground. Now the wind was blowing it around, much of it tumbling away until it snagged in shrubs or tree branches. Zula wondered if it was stupid for her to be offended by this desecration of the natural environment, given the larger goal of the jihadists’ mission and the number of people they’d already killed.

Ershut and Jahandar spent much of the afternoon napping. Zula couldn’t tell whether this was in consequence of having awakened early or in the expectation of staying on watch tonight.

While they slumbered, Zula went to work cutting up some mutton to make kebabs. Sayed spent his time reading and praying, and Zakir, supine on a camping mat in a patch of sunlight, either stared at Zula from under the brim of his hat or snored. When he was snoring, Zula took trimmings of fat, bones, and even whole pieces of red meat, and put them in paper grocery bags and tossed them down the slope in the direction of the tents. In any proper grad-student-run campsite this would have led to an inquisition on the scale of the Salem witch trials, but here, given the jihadists’ insensitivity to litter, it would go unnoticed save by wild animals. Last night had been bear-free, but, given that this wasn’t a frequently used campsite, the animals would have no reason to visit the place until they came to associate it with the availability of food.

All the while she was doing this, she was maintaining, in her head, a debate as to whether it was a good idea. If they didn’t execute her before sundown, she stood a good chance of getting away from these men, even without the assistance of the local Ursus arctos horribilis community. It wasn’t as if she were going to sit up all night long, padlock key in her hot little hand, waiting for the arrival of bears before making her move. If they did show up, they’d be as likely to wake up her captors as to help cover her escape; and if they were of a mind to kill and eat humans, they’d be at least as interested in her as in them. But she did it anyway, because it seemed a fine way to show her contempt for these men.

Afternoon seemed to stretch out forever. The nappers awoke when the sun was only about a hand’s breadth above the ridge of the Selkirks and began hanging around her little kitchen area in the timeless manner of hungry persons who expected others to prepare their food. Zula displayed the spitted, ready-to-cook kebabs and let it be understood that they would taste better cooked over coals than on the blue flames of a camp stove. Soon Ershut and Sayed were tromping around in the nearby woods gathering firewood.

Zula grew accustomed to hearing their heavy, crashing movements in the trees and so didn’t make much of it at first when her ears picked up the faint crunch of dried pine needles being trod upon, the rustle of shrubbery being pushed out of the way by something making its way through the forest. When it did finally break the surface of her awareness, she had the immediate feeling that she had actually been hearing it for quite some time. In the back of her head she’d been thinking, Why is Ershut creeping along so slowly? He’ll never gather much firewood that way. But then she saw Ershut stomping into the campsite from the opposite direction, carrying a double armload of dead branches. So it must be Sayed? But Sayed emerged from the trees only a few paces behind Ershut.

Zakir, then, the creepy one, was sneaking up on her through the woods. But why bother? She was chained to a tree. She’d already been caught.

Was it Jahandar, getting into position in a new sniper’s perch? No, she’d seen him going off into the woods toward the Blue Fork, carrying an empty water bag.

It must be Zakir then.

Two minutes later, as Zula was putting new fuel onto the nearly burned-out remains of the campfire, she heard a loud zipping noise, and looked up to see Zakir dragging himself out of his tent, where he had apparently gone to change into some warmer clothes. Getting ready for temperatures to drop. For the sun was just a red bubble on the Selkirks now.

So who, or what, had been creeping around in the woods up there?

She became very excited for a moment, imagining that it was a rescuer. A sniper from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sent to infiltrate the camp in advance of a major, helicopter-borne rescue operation. On that illusion, she made a point of not staring into the woods, not showing any curiosity about what might be back there.

But after a little while, as the fire blazed high and then began to die down, forming beds of coals in the interstices among the tangled logs, she shook her head in a kind of self-embarrassment that she’d ever been so naive as to imagine such a thing. No one was coming to rescue her. She had to do it herself. And it was probably better that way. Running through woods in the dark, she had a chance. Chained to a tree in the middle of a pitched automatic weapons duel, she wouldn’t last long. Worse, she wouldn’t have the power to change her situation.

None of which answered the question.

She permitted herself to look out into the woods now. None of the men noticed; none of them cared.

But she’d waited too long. The sun was behind the mountains. The fire almost cast more light, now, than the sky. But she was patient, keeping her back to the sunset and the fire and waiting for her eyes to adjust as she stared into the almost perfect blackness of the woods.

She saw nothing. There was nothing to see.

And yet something was bothering her. After all she’d been through at the hands of humans, it seemed inconceivable that anything of the natural world could hold any terrors for Zula. But there was something out there, and it did terrify her. Not in the intellectual way of I hope Jones didn’t order them to kill me but at a much deeper level.

She could feel a tingle at the back of her scalp. This was something that had happened only a few times in her life. Her hair was attempting to stand up on end, like that of a dog who senses it’s staring into something big enough to kill it and wants to look bigger.

But no matter how long she stared into the deepening shadows she saw nothing more. Finally she made up her mind to tear herself away from it and attend to the cooking. She planted a heel and spun around it.

A pair of sparks drew faint red traces across the corner of her eye.

She was relearning ancient lessons here: the peripheral vision was more sensitive to movement than the central. She turned back, shaking her head from side to side like a wolf casting for a scent, and caught glimpses of the twin sparks again.

There they were. She had them now. Two points of red light.

She had missed them before because they weren’t down at ground level, where she’d been looking. They were up high in a tree.

She had almost convinced herself that they were just drops of sap reflecting the light of the fire when they winked out for a moment and then came on again.

FOR BETTER OR worse, the “attract wildlife to the campsite” strategy bore fruit some hours later. Zula had no idea of the hour — a timepiece would have come in handy — but the eastern sky was not beginning to get light yet. Maybe three in the morning.

She had dozed off but was now awakened by rustling noises in the vicinity of the jihadists’ tents.

She reached up and undid the padlock, then made a little prayer or resolution that she’d never have it on her again.

This made it possible for her to peel off some of the fleece pullovers she had been wearing ever since they had put the chain on. On top of those, she had also been wearing some zip-up garments that could be put on and taken off even with the chain in place, but she had removed those a few hours ago when she had gone to bed. Stripped down, now, to a set of navy blue synthetic long johns, she stuffed the bulky fleeces into her sleeping bag, trying to make it look as if she were still in it.

She had prepared a fake head by stuffing handfuls of pine needles into a plastic shopping bag until it was round and head-sized, then stretching a stocking cap over it. She placed that in the hood of a pullover and snugged the drawstring around it, then pulled the top of the sleeping bag over it, arranging things so that a flashlight beam shone into the tent and played over this scene would make it look as if she had curled up and pulled the edge of the sleeping bag over her face. She stuck the end of the chain into place beneath it.

The little tent’s exit was already unzipped; she had seen to that earlier. Only after she’d made all these arrangements did she reach up and part the flaps a fraction of an inch to look out.

In the light of the moon, she could see at least two creatures waddling around gathering up the food scraps she’d left. From the amount of noise they’d been making, she’d guessed bear cubs. But they were only raccoons.

She saw, now, too late, that leaving food out had been a mistake. It had attracted animals that were large enough to wake the men up but not large enough to pose an actual threat to them.

In any case, she could not just squat there in her tent’s entrance. Sooner or later the men would wake up. She emerged from the tent. The damp air struck a chill in her limbs, but she knew that soon enough she’d be perspiring. Trying to ignore the cold, she walked in a straight line, moving deliberately, toward the tent shared by Zakir and Sayed. The latter’s hiking boots — brand-new from Walmart — were standing at attention in front of it. She plucked these off the ground with a quick motion of the hand — a motion she’d been rehearsing in her mind all night long — and pivoted away. She was headed now for the front of the tent shared by Ershut and Jahandar. Her next intention was to grab their boots as well and carry them off into the woods. Zakir she wasn’t as worried about, but it would help her immeasurably to leave those two barefoot.

Something streaked across her vision about twenty feet away, dark gray moving fast against darker gray. There was a tussle and then a scream, like a toddler being backed over by a car. Zula froze.

To stop moving was a bad idea, but her mind wasn’t working at the level of ideas.

Some kind of struggle was taking place, rattling the walls of Ershut and Jahandar’s tent, tumbling across the ground, sending sticks and litter flying.

A raccoon had been attacked by some other creature. Something that had been stalking it.

Zula lit out and ran.

SHE’D NEVER KNOW, and didn’t especially care to know, in what order things had then happened in the camp. Ershut and Jahandar could not possibly have stayed asleep. They’d have climbed out of their tent, guns drawn, to see some kind of Wild Kingdom melee in progress, or perhaps just its bloody aftermath. Not knowing that a hundred meters away Zula was sitting on the ground in the trees, pulling Sayed’s boots onto her feet. Their adrenaline would have been pumping madly. They might have laughed upon realizing that all the fuss had been nothing more than wild animals banging around in the night. Perhaps that laughter would wake up Zakir and Sayed, if they hadn’t been awakened already, and perhaps Sayed would look out and notice that his boots had gone missing. Or perhaps Ershut would go up to Zula’s tent with a flashlight, look inside, and notice the deception, or not.

All she knew was that, within perhaps a quarter of an hour of her departure, flashlights were bobbing down the plank-avalanche behind her, making their way toward the trail along which Zula was running as fast as she could.

She ran faster.

A wave of nausea came over her, and she had to stop to throw up. Her hands were tingling. She wasn’t taking in enough oxygen. She had been running anaerobically. She had no choice but to take the next couple of miles at a more measured pace. Behind her — something like a mile — she could see a flashlight bobbing rhythmically as its owner sprinted along the trail. This gave her a rough idea of how much time she would have, when she reached the Schloss, to get inside and call the police. Right now it was looking pretty favorable. Shaking a little from the nausea but feeling better as her heart and lungs caught up with oxygen debt, she built speed until she had reached the quickest pace she could maintain.

In her mind the distance from the camp to the Schloss had grown larger with every hour that had passed while she’d been chained to that tree, and so she was startled when she glimpsed one of its roofs in the moonlight. She had covered the distance in very little time. She took the risk of slowing down a little bit so that she could look back over her shoulder and saw the bobbing light still in pursuit, perhaps a bit closer than last time, but still a few minutes away.

She tried the front door just to see whether it was open, but Uncle Richard had apparently locked it on his way out. That was okay. She’d been visualizing the place in her mind and had already decided where to break in. She ran around to the side facing the dam, which was the least scenic part of the property and consequently where they had situated things like utility sheds and parking lots. The rooms facing that direction tended to be meeting rooms and offices. She picked up a round river rock, about the size of a cantaloupe, from some landscaping. Carrying it in both hands she ran toward an office window and projected it into the glass. It burst through with a noise that must have been audible in Elphinstone. She stood on one foot and used the other to kick away projecting shards, then reached around through the opening and unlocked the window.

A few moments later she was inside the office, holding the telephone to her head, hearing nothing.

The lights didn’t work either.

All the power, all the phones, all the Internet were dead.

Jones must have cut the lines when he had come to call on Richard.

A very powerful impulse was now pushing her to burst out crying, but she turned her back on it, as it were, snubbing it like an unwelcome guest at a party, and tried to think.

Her whole plan had been predicated on the assumption that she would be able to make a phone call from here. Or at least trigger the alarm system. Flash lights on and off. That was all she needed: to get someone’s attention down the valley. Chet being her best hope; he lived in a little homestead about five miles down the road. On a quiet night it might be possible to hear an alarm from that far away.

This bank of the river — the right bank — was impassable beyond this point, because of Baron’s Rock, which turned the shore into a vertical stone wall scoured by icy water in violent motion. To get to Elphinstone she would have to cross to the left bank by running across the dam, following the road that ran over its top. From there she’d have twenty miles of bad road between her and Elphinstone. Jahandar — she was pretty sure that the fast-running jihadist was he — was only a short distance behind her at this point, and was running faster. If she merely followed the road, he could drop her with a rifle shot, or simply catch up with her and put a knife in her back.

She would have to run up into the trees and conceal herself.

Two things would then happen. One, the jihadists would control the road. In order for her to get into town, she’d have to clamber up into the forested hills that rose above the left bank and then bushwhack all the way into town. Two, she would start to get cold and to suffer from the effects of hunger and thirst. For she’d gambled everything on this sprint, leaving behind her warm clothes, not bringing water or food.

The only way she could think of to get attention was to set fire to the building and hope that someone might notice the smoke and flames.

Which might or might not work. But it would take a while. And she couldn’t wait in a burning building. Again, she’d have to run into the woods and stay alive there for a few hours, possibly more.

She had only a few minutes in which to equip herself for a wilderness survival trek of unknown duration.

She couldn’t even see in this place. She had groped her way to the telephone by following dim moonlight-gleams. The only source of light in this room was a red LED, down low on a wall, at the height of her knee.

This brought up a vague memory: the Schloss had emergency flashlights plugged into wall outlets, one in each room, charging all the time, except when the power went off.

Forcing herself to move in slow, careful steps — she didn’t want to trip and sprawl on broken glass — she crossed the room, felt her way down the wall, and found the flashlight. It came on, dazzlingly bright. She clapped her palm over it, not wanting to present an obvious target for someone peering through gunsights into the building, and allowed a blade of light to escape between fingers, illuminating the path out of the office.

She exited into a corridor and headed away from the main entrance. To the right was a row of offices and of storerooms that mostly contained kitchen equipment. To the left was the main food prep area for the tavern. Making a quick pass through there, she risked taking her hand off the light — the kitchen had no windows — and plucked a long sharp-pointed butcher knife and a smaller paring knife from a magnetic strip on the wall. These she dropped into a white plastic pail that was sitting on the floor beneath a sink. Using that as a kind of shopping basket she swiped a few odds and ends that might come in handy — two oven mitts, for example, that might serve to keep her hands warm if she couldn’t find anything better. There was, of course, no perishable food stored in the place, since it had been shut down for Mud Month. From a fridge she collected a bottle of canola oil that had been left there so it wouldn’t go rancid, and scored some twenty-ounce plastic bottles of water. Cabinets yielded some sacks of potato chips and other snacks, as well as rice, raisins, pasta. The bucket was approaching full, and she reckoned she had enough calories in there to keep her alive for days, provided she could find a way to cook the stuff.

Which led her to the idea of camping stoves, and other equipment. Was that too much to hope for, in a ski lodge in the mountains?

Someone was banging on the lodge’s front door in an exploratory way, trying to figure out how much force would be required to break it down.

Why didn’t they just shoot out the locks? They certainly had the means.

Because they were afraid that gunfire might be heard down the valley.

Uncle Richard had guns here. A fine thought. But impossible. They were stored in a safe in his apartment.

She had the general sense that outdoor gear tended to be stored in the building’s basement. An emergency map posted on the wall told her where the stairways were. She found one and descended it.

A window shattered somewhere in the front of the building.

She was almost overcome, for a moment, by the impulse to flee. But that would just end up with her being dead of hypothermia.

Her nose told her that she was right about the camping equipment. It wasn’t a bad smell exactly, but all camping gear smelled the same after a while. She shone the light around and found the stuff she needed, strewn all over the floor.

Of course. If Jones had forced Richard to accompany him, Richard would have needed his own backpack, warm clothes, sleeping bag, tent. They must have come down here and ransacked the place.

So this, at least, was going her way. She nearly tripped over an empty backpack: a big rig with an external aluminum frame. She set the pail down, snatched up the pack, and verified that it was in decent repair. She grabbed a sleeping bag, already jammed into a stuff sack, and lashed it onto the frame with a couple of bungee cords. She dumped the pail into the top compartment indiscriminately and was reminded that there were a couple of knives in the bottom. Storing those would be tricky, so she set them aside for now.

Green nylon tarps, neatly folded into rectangles, were stacked on a shelf. She grabbed three of them. One, if she cut a hole through the middle, might serve as a rain poncho. Another could be a ground cloth, the third a makeshift tent. She pawed some hanks of rope from another shelf, a CamelBak from a hook where it had been stored upside down to drain.

The lodge had collected so many old used ski parkas, pants, and gloves that they were stored in garbage bags in the corners. She ripped two of these open and kicked through them, selecting a coat and some snow pants more for their color (black) than their size (too large), and grabbed two pairs of gloves in navy blue. A stocking cap. A pair of ski goggles, since she didn’t have sunglasses, and might find herself on snow.

The backpack was stiffening up as she jammed stuff into it. She circled back to the knives and figured out a way to insert them carefully between the pack’s aluminum frame and its nylon sack. They’d stay put there, but the blades weren’t in a position to hurt her, or damage the other gear. The handles protruded from the top of the pack; she’d be able to reach back over her left shoulder and grab them if she had to.

A sharp scent was in her nostrils: stove fuel. She opened the nearest cabinet door and found a compartment where they kept camp stoves and supplies.

The jihadists seemed to be giving her all the time in the world. Someone was banging around upstairs, but only one person, as far as she could tell.

Then she guessed why. Jahandar had arrived first. But he hadn’t entered the building. Instead he had posted himself on the road, on or near the dam, to prevent Zula from crossing over to the left bank. Jahandar might be a fish out of water in British Columbia, but he had more than enough of the Afghan equivalent of street smarts to understand that, if Zula couldn’t cross over to the left bank, she couldn’t go down the road to Elphinstone. Ershut, probably, had made it to the scene a few minutes later; he’d be the one banging around, trying to root her out of the Schloss so that Jahandar could plug her with a rifle shot. The out-of-shape Zakir and shoeless Sayed would not be here for a little while longer.

The stoves were of the type that screwed directly onto a fuel bottle; they didn’t have tanks of their own. Zula threw a stove, a box of waterproof matches, and a handful of candles into a side pocket of the pack. A little cooking kit — a small pot, a frying pan, and a plate, all cleverly nested and locked together — went into the main compartment. Hard to make use of the stove without that.

Fuel bottles — pods of spun aluminum with narrow necks plugged by screw-in plastic stoppers — were strewn around the cabinet like bowling pins after a strike. She opened one, dropped to the floor, pinned it upright between her knees, then grabbed a brick-shaped gallon can of stove fuel from the lower shelf, spun its cap off, and learned just how difficult it was to decant white gas from one narrow-necked receptacle into another with violently shaking hands. Half of it spilled onto her knees and soaked into her long johns, a detail she would have to keep in mind if she found herself in the vicinity of fire any time soon.

Which she had every intention of doing. Only about a quarter of the big can’s contents sufficed to fill the bottle. The rest was available for other purposes.

First she was careful to get the lid screwed firmly back onto the bottle and stow that in her pack. Then she fished out a couple of the matches she’d packed earlier and stuck them into her mouth. She stood up and hoisted the pack around onto her back. During all of these exertions, she had come upon an old flashlight with nearly dead batteries, so she set it on the floor, aimed toward the stairs, and left it turned on. That enabled her to turn off her own flashlight. Gas can in one hand, she ascended the stairs as quickly as she could without making a lot of noise. Being chased around the Schloss by Ershut would be bad, and being cornered in the basement would be worse, but being caught by him in midstairway was the worst she could think of.

She stopped at the top of the stairs, appalled for a moment by the unpleasant thought that Ershut might be right on the other side of the door, waiting for her. That was enough to make her reach up above her shoulder in an exploratory way and verify that the handle of the big butcher knife was in a place where she could grab it.

She waited there in the dark until she was certain she heard a boom from farther away in the Schloss: probably Ershut kicking open a door in one of the guest wings.

She pushed the door open and waited for some kind of disaster, or at least nearby movement; but the place was quiet except for the crunching boom of another door being kicked in.

She felt her way around two corners and entered the tavern. By the faint red glow of her flashlight shining through the flesh of her hand, she found her way through the dining area to the end of the room that was dominated by the bar and the TV and the plush sofas and chairs arranged before it. A nest of empty chip wrappers and soda cans told her where her uncle had been vegging out at the moment Jones had come to pay a call on him.

She hated to do it, for she knew how Uncle Richard loved this place. But the foam in this furniture would burn better than anything else, once it got going. She spilled a long trail of stove gas down the length of the sofa and across the laps of the adjoining chairs, then dumped what was left in a puddle on the floor.

Before lighting the match, she stepped over to a window that afforded a view to the north side of the property and verified her suspicion that Jahandar — or at least someone with a flashlight — was posted there, right in the middle of the road, at the place where it ramped down to the top of the dam.

Ershut was continuing to make his location obvious. He was nowhere near her.

She pulled a match from her mouth, lit it, and threw it. Too fast, for it missed the target and went out on the carpet. The second one caught and the flames spread with shocking effect, blinding her night-adjusted eyes. To Jahandar or anyone out on the road, it would be as bright as sunrise, even with the blinds drawn. It seemed inadvisable to emerge from a door anywhere near that, so she made her way round to the guest wing where Ershut did not seem to be. This was just a long straight hallway, aimed generally southward, lined with doors to guest rooms on both sides. Moving at the best jogging gait she could manage with the heavy pack on her back, she went straight to its end, punched out through the emergency exit there (fighting a ridiculous feeling of good-girl shame that it should never be used except in an actual emergency) and moved as directly as she could in the direction of the nearest cover: the edge of the forest along the banks of the Blue Fork, about a hundred feet away.

She was finding it surprisingly easy to see where she was going without benefit of flashlight and thought for a second that this was because of the fire light shining out from the tavern’s windows. Then she understood that the eastern sky was beginning to brighten. Whoever had written “the darkest hour is before the dawn” apparently had not spent much time in the Northwest, where, for hours before it actually breached the horizon, the sun scattered vague blue light off the underside of the cloud cover.

A bell started ringing. She wondered if she’d caused this to happen by using the emergency exit. But the power was off, so it couldn’t be that. The bell was not an electrical device. It sounded like an actual, physical piece of metal being struck by a flailing hammer. The sound was thready and faltering, as though whatever contraption drove it was already on its last legs. For all that, it carried clearly through the still air of the valley.

A stocky man — Ershut — was silhouetted against the glowing windows of the tavern as he ran in front of them. He had gone outdoors when he’d realized that the building was on fire. He was headed for the front, zeroing in, she guessed, on the source of the noise. She lost him in the darkness. Then she returned her gaze to the windows, noting a dramatic fall-off in the intensity of the light.

The sprinklers must have come on inside the tavern. They were rigged up to some kind of device on the front of the building: water rushing through the sprinkler pipes turned a little wheel that smacked the bell, sounding the alarm even when electrical power was shut off.

The big windows of the tavern began to explode: someone attacking them with a sledgehammer or a rifle butt, venting smoke. Dim flares of orange light shone through in places that weren’t covered by the spray patterns of the sprinkler system. A few minutes later Zula heard the roaring hiss of a fire extinguisher being operated in short bursts and saw those little fires being snuffed out one by one. The bell continued to sound even after the fire had been put out, and it would keep doing so until the system ran out of water or was shut off by operating a valve somewhere.

She had made these observations while moving furtively through the woods, favoring north-facing slopes so that she could get a view down over the Schloss. The sky was getting appreciably brighter. When she had arrived, she’d been able to see nothing except dim gleams of moonlight on roofs, and the pools of illumination cast by flashlights, but now she could see the entire compound, albeit in faint gray on gray, and she could see Ershut and Jahandar moving around even when they weren’t using their lights.

All of which worked to her advantage but told her that she had better move deeper into the woods before it became light enough to making tracking her easy.

She moved another hundred yards back, troubled by the amount of noise she made as she forced herself and the bulky pack through undergrowth. Then she turned back and looked again, since she had picked up bright lights in her peripheral vision.

A car was coming down the road, approaching the dam. She was thrilled to see it and then horrified by the certainty that whoever was inside it was about to be gunned down.

Instead, though, Jahandar approached, waving arms, bringing it to a stop at the far end of the dam. His rifle was slung on his shoulder. He bent down to engage the driver in conversation.

This must be the scrubs — the backup team. The day before yesterday, they must have driven the RV back to Elphinstone and parked it in a campground somewhere. When Zula had made her break, Jahandar or Ershut must have reached these people by phone or walkie-talkie or something, told them to come quick. The car’s rear doors opened up, and a man got out from each side, pulling a bag out behind him, slinging it over his back.

After a few minutes’ more conversation, the car went into movement again, pulling around in a U-turn, and headed back down the road toward Elphinstone.

She heard a pop behind her: the snap of a twig.

She turned around to see Sayed stealing up on her, about thirty feet away.

He was looking right at her. On his feet he was wearing the pink Crocs she had left behind at the campsite. He was movingly awkwardly because of the Crocs and because his hands were occupied by a black pump-action shotgun.

Her movements were no less awkward. But she knew she had to stay out of the range of that weapon, and so she backed away from him. Realizing he’d been sighted, he picked up his pace and began to stumble forward, flailing the gun around dangerously, dropping to his knees as the Crocs slipped on the steep loose ground, spitting and making little exclamations as branches caught him in the face.

The straps of her pack suddenly jerked violently at her shoulders. She thought she’d backed into a tree, that its branches had snagged the pack, spun her around.

Then she went down facefirst. She threw out her hands in an attempt to break the fall, but the palms of her hands skidded outward and she ended up spread-eagled on her belly. The weight of the pack was on her back. A moment later, this was joined by a weight much heavier. A weight that was moving.

“Got her!” said Zakir. His voice was coming from high above her; he was kneeling on her backpack or something. But then there was a sudden violent reshuffling and his entire weight bore down on her with force that might have cracked her ribs. It was certainly squeezing all the air out of her lungs.

“Bitch, how does it feel to be dead?” he asked her.

She only had one move, which made choosing much easier.

Bending her elbow sharply, she brought her right hand back to her left shoulder, groped upward a couple of inches, found the handles of the knives, picked the big one. It was almost wedged in place by Zakir’s weight, but she jerked it free with a convulsive movement. Then, without pause, she reversed the movement and stabbed straight backward, aiming for the sound of his voice.

He gagged on his own scream and rolled off her. As he moved she felt the knife handle twist in her hand. She maintained her grip on it, jerked it out, felt blood spray. She planted both hands and pushed herself up on hands and knees, then rolled away from him, ending up seated on her haunches.

Zakir was kneeling on the ground with both hands clapped over his mouth. His forearms were turning red. Blood began to stream off one elbow, then the other.

She heard an exclamation. Not from Zakir, who had been robbed of the power of speech. She looked up to see Sayed standing there in his Crocs, no more than ten feet away, holding the shotgun slack in his hands, staring in horror at Zakir.

She was definitely within that gun’s killing range now. She had half her own weight strapped to her back, and she was sitting down, immobilized by the pack.

For the first time in quite a while she didn’t have any particular idea as to what she should do. She was tired of coming up with ideas.

She and Sayed stared at each other for a few moments. He glanced down at her hand and saw the bloody knife.

He probably wanted to go to the aid of Zakir, who was slumping back against a tree, deflating as blood and breath ran out of him. But he didn’t want to come in range of the knife. He ought to just blow her away with that shotgun. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

So it was a standoff.

Something flashed through the air behind him. Sort of like a bird, except that it weighed about as much as Zula. But the quality of its movement — a strange, almost supernatural combination of speed and silence — was akin to that of a bird.

Sayed went down on his face as if he had been struck by a car. The shotgun flew out of his hands and went bouncing and rolling across the ground toward Zula.

She was so preoccupied with that one detail that she saw nothing else until she had jerked her arms free from the pack straps and flung herself forward to scrabble the weapon up out of the thick layer of old brown pine needles and leaves in which it had come to rest.

Then she stared up into the golden face of a huge feline, regarding her from perhaps six feet away. The animal had blood on its fangs. It had planted both of its feet on Sayed’s back; each of its claws was embedded in a spreading disk of blood. But most of the blood came from the back of Sayed’s neck, which had been destroyed; the animal had struck him with a flying leap, and bitten all the way through his cervical spine, in the same instant.

She remembered that she had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed it at the cougar. For her mind, belatedly switching into animal taxonomy mode, had identified this as one. The same one, no doubt, that had been skulking around the camp last night and going after the raccoons earlier. She wondered if Sayed had had the presence of mind to chamber a shell and flick the safety off. She pulled back with her right hand, saw the yellow gleam of a shotgun shell in the breech, pushed it closed. Glanced back up at the cougar. Found the safety with her thumb, glanced down to see it had been left on, flicked it up until a red dot showed. Red, you’re dead. Looked back up at the cougar. It was making no effort to come after her, but it was definitely paying close attention, snarling, making it clear she wasn’t wanted.

It was guarding its kill.

Keeping the shotgun in her right hand, aimed at the cougar, she squatted down, thrust her left arm through a pack strap, and heaved the burden up onto her back. This irritated the cougar, sending it into a little fit of squawling and posturing. But Zula was definitely backing away now, increasing the distance.

Something caught her knee. She saw with horror that it was Zakir’s bloody paw, not so much trying to hold her back as imploring her for aid. She kicked loose from him and moved away. Not until she was perhaps a hundred feet distant did she shoulder the pack properly and fasten its hip belt.

Her hearing had gone all funny during this, but when it went back to normal, she noted that Ershut or someone seemed to have gotten to the bell and stifled it. It was still making a dim pocking noise, but the bell wasn’t clanging anymore and probably couldn’t be heard from more than a few hundred yards’ distance.

This made it possible to hear two sounds that had previously been obscured by the ringing of the bell. One, behind Zula now, was Zakir screaming. Apparently he had got his voice working again. His cries had an inchoate gargling sound. The other was a motor coming down the road from the direction of Elphinstone.

Zula was pretty sure it was a Harley-Davidson.

Chet was coming. He had heard the fire bell and was coming to see what was the matter.

Zula had drawn him here by setting the fire, and now they were going to kill him.

She heard Jahandar’s voice, shouting into a walkie-talkie or a phone. As he spoke, Zula caught sight of him retreating from the dam, taking up a position behind a corner of the main Schloss buildings.

Chet wasn’t in view yet, but the headlight of his chopper was illuminating the trees along the road perhaps half a mile away, and she could hear the engine throttling up and down as he took the familiar curves.

FROM THE DAY that Chet had made the decision to settle down and bind his fortune to that of Dodge and his crazy Schloss project, not an hour had gone by without his thinking, and usually worrying, about some aspect of the building and its grounds. This was his life now. It was not a bad life. But part of the job was getting up in the middle of the night and running into the place to put out fires.

Not literally. There had never been a serious fire in the place and he doubted that there ever would be, given the capabilities of the sprinkler system that they had, at shocking expense, installed in every room of the complex. But it was useless against metaphorical fires: petty burglaries, leaky roofs, starlings in the eaves, bears and raccoons getting into the Dumpsters. Once the staff had grown to a size where he could delegate a lot of that, he had acquired the property a few miles up the road and built his own cabin on it, so that he could live close enough to the Schloss for convenience, but far enough away to get his mind off its myriad chores and troubles.

The one exception was Mud Month, when all the staff went on vacation. Nothing could be delegated then; either Chet or Dodge had to be on call 24/7 until they all came back.

Dodge was there now. Had been for a few days. This had given Chet an opportunity to relax, catch up on his reading, go on a few motorcycle rides with the surviving members of the Septentrion Paladins. He had just returned from one such ride, up the west shore of Kootenay Lake, a few hours before sunset. After grilling a steak and killing half a bottle of cabernet, he had collapsed into bed early and slept well. But in the hour before dawn he had found himself lying awake, convinced he was hearing something from up the valley: a jangling bell.

That fucking sprinkler system had sprung another leak.

It couldn’t be an actual fire. Had there been an actual fire, the alarm system would have detected it, summoned the fire department, and sent a text message to his phone. Sirens would be screaming by his cabin already. And Dodge would be calling him.

No, something must have whacked a sprinkler head and set the thing going. Right now water was spraying in torrents around one of the Schloss’s rooms. It had happened before. It was always a huge mess. It was probably Dodge, up early in the morning, chasing a stray bat around with a badminton racket, flailing in the dark, not thinking about the delicate sprinkler heads. Now he was alone in the Schloss in the wee hours, dark and wet and furious and humiliated, too proud to call for help.

Chet dragged himself out of bed, peed, and pulled his motorcycle leathers on over his pajamas. Not very dignified, but only Dodge would see him, and he had no secrets from Dodge. He strode out into the patch of gravel between his cabin and the road. The chopper was there. It was dirty and tired, needed to have its oil changed. Riding it through the dark, he would be uncomfortable and cold. A sane man would take the SUV that was parked right next to it. But Chet on a whim had decided to ride the bike. What the hell, he was up anyway and about to spend the whole day dealing with Dodge’s mess. It couldn’t get a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than that.

He bestrode the Harley, kicked it into life, fishtailed it around in the gravel, and headed out onto the little access road that led down to the highway from his property. This was a former mining road, bladed once a year after the spring thaw had finished turning it into a rutted gully. So it would never get any worse than it was today. Feeling his way into the hyperbola of light cast by the chopper’s headlamp, he put all his attention, for the first couple of minutes, into staying out of the deepest channels that had been carved into it during the weeks since the snow had begun to thaw. His slow progress was a blessing in disguise; if he went any faster, clots of semifrozen mud would hurtle up from the tires and glue themselves onto the insides of the bike’s fenders.

As he neared the bank of the river, the trees thinned out and afforded him a clear view of the eastern sky, which had gone all pink and pearly. He was tempted to shut off the headlamp and run dark, the way he had used to, back in the old days. Back before the accident. But the accident had put sense into him, if having cornstalks shoved into your brain could be so called. And living in these parts he had learned that this was the very time of day when critters were about: it was light enough that they could see what the hell they were doing, but not so light as to make it easy for predators to spot them, and so this was the hour when a lone biker was most likely to kill himself by T-boning a moose in the middle of the road. Predators would be out too, looking for crepuscular prey with their big glowing eyes and listening with their twitching radar-horn ears. The Selkirks were oversupplied with apex predators: bears of two types, wolves, coyotes, cougars and various smaller cats, just to name the four-legged ones — to the point where their station on the food pyramid no longer seemed like an apex so much as a plateau or mesa. If striking a deer on your chopper was bad, what adjective could be applied to striking a grizzly who was stalking a deer?

So he kept his light on as he turned south onto the road and built his speed only slowly, giving the tires a quarter mile of free running on the clean blacktop so that they could shed their furry husks of cold mud. Then he opened up the throttle and began to carve the turns toward the Schloss, picking up speed when there was a long clear stretch of road ahead of him, throttling it back a little when he approached blind curves where deer might be grazing in the low rich undergrowth that came to life, at this time of year, in the sunlit ditches and verges that lined the road cut.

In a few minutes — not long enough, really, since he had begun to enjoy the ride — he swept around the broad leftward curve into the shadow of Baron’s Rock and felt the road angle downward beneath him as it made its plunge for the dam. It broadened, here, into a turnaround for vehicles too long and heavy to cross, and a sort of informal parking area for motorists who wanted to fish in the river or picnic on their tailgates while enjoying the view of the Rock, the river, and the stone turrets of the Schloss rising up above the trees on the other side.

Because of trees and landscaping, the view of the Schloss did not really open up until one was halfway across the dam. At that point, Chet — who was not going very fast anyway — relaxed his throttle hand and let the bike drop to an idling pace. He had noticed some things that struck him as a bit odd. The alarm bell was still ringing, but it had a flat, muffled sound, as if something had been jammed into it. Why hadn’t Dodge just shut the valve, and turned the thing off, to prevent further water damage to the building? Another thing was that there were no lights on in the place at all. Of course, since Dodge was here alone, you wouldn’t expect a lot of lights to be burning. But you’d expect at least some, especially if Dodge were scurrying around the place trying to deal with a busted sprinkler head.

But what really got his attention, and told him that something was seriously out of whack, was the smell. The smell of burnt plastic that he associated with house fires. Moreover, there was enough light now to make it obvious that milky smoke was lingering in the trees and the river valley.

So there actually had been a fire.

Why hadn’t the alarm system — the electronic one — sent out a call?

For the same reason that the power was out?

But the alarm system had battery backup that was supposed to keep running for a whole day.

Maybe the phones were out too?

Chet’s first thought was to run into the Schloss and try to find Dodge, but he’d heard too many stories of people who did that, trying to be heroes, and succumbed to smoke inhalation and died along with the people they were trying to save. He had to at least summon help before doing anything else. He brought his chopper to a stop at the Schloss end of the dam and pulled his phone out of his pocket.

NO SERVICE said the screen.

Another oddity. The Schloss had its own cell tower. The coverage here ought to be fantastic. But apparently it had gone dead too.

What could account for so much going wrong all at once?

He was pondering the question when he heard a clear gunshot.

It was some distance away, and he was pretty certain that it was a shotgun, not a rifle.

His instinct was to get the hell out of there, so he got his hand on the throttle, twisted it up, shifted into gear, let go the clutch. The rear tire started spinning in the loose dirt and dead needles that covered the pavement, and he took advantage of that to fishtail the bike’s rear end around and get it pointed back across the dam.

He was just about to let her rip and go blasting across when he noticed two figures running toward him across the turnaround. They had emerged from hiding places in the trees. Something was weird about their gait. Their legs were moving properly, but their arms weren’t pumping.

Their arms weren’t pumping, he saw, because each of them was carrying a handgun in a two-handed grip. And they were looking right at him.

To get across the dam he would have to ride directly at these guys, whoever they were, as they stood in his path. They would have plenty of time to empty their magazines at him.

He’d already done a one-eighty. He kept the momentum going and turned it into a three-sixty, which was to say that he got himself turned back around with the dam behind him and the Schloss to the front. Fleeing into the Schloss itself wasn’t going to work. Whoever these guys were, they’d already gone into the place, done whatever they wanted to do to Dodge — some old drug-running grievance? — cut the power and the phone lines, set fire to it. He needed to put some distance between himself and them. He aimed the bike, not at the Schloss, but down the road that ran past it, and wrenched the throttle to max and popped the clutch and actually stood her up on her rear wheel, doing a wheelie as he accelerated onto the road.

As he went by the Schloss he saw in his peripheral vision a shape like a lily, made out of yellow-orange light, and realized that he was staring into the muzzle of a rifle that was firing at him: a rifle with a flash arrester on the end of its barrel, channeling the flame into six equiangular jets, like petals. The rifle let loose one, two, three, four rounds, producing a hammering noise with each one, and behind him he could hear the sharp poppity-pop of those gunmen on the dam, letting loose everything they had in their magazines.

A rightward bend in the road put some trees between him and the crazy men who were trying to kill him. He finally had the presence of mind to shut off the bike’s headlamp. His arm moved heavily. He had a vague memory of taking a blow a few seconds ago, a rock thrown up by one of his tires or something. It must have deadened a nerve. His body was old and overused and suffered strange infirmities from time to time.

A light was flashing in the trees, and bobbing as it flashed. Coming down a slope. Headed, not for him, but for a point on the road ahead of him.

The light bounded onto the road, then swung upward to illuminate the bearer’s face. It was too far away for him to resolve it clearly, and he didn’t want to get much closer. He was out of shotgun range and out of pistol range, but if this person had a rifle —

“Chet! It’s me! Zula!”

He gunned it forward and stopped next to her. As he drew closer, he noted with interest that she was carrying a pump shotgun.

“We thought you were dead,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“Where’s Dodge?”

“Not here. Come on, we have to get moving.”

“No shit.” Because he could now hear the voices of the gunmen, who were running after them.

Zula safetied the shotgun. She was wearing a large, haphazardly made-up pack. She got a foot on one of the passenger pegs, then swung her leg over and sat down. As soon as he sensed the weight of her body against his back, he let out the clutch and began moving down the road again, just at a running pace at first — so the gunmen wouldn’t be able to gain any more ground — then faster, once he felt as though Zula had got her balance and wasn’t liable to flip off the bike backward.

There was a while, then, when all they did was ride. Chet liked that part of it, riding along the road in the dark, a salmon-colored light spreading over heaven’s vault above, Zula’s arms around his waist.

They didn’t talk at all until they reached the turnaround just short of the wrecked mine complex where a million old gray planks were trying to avalanche down into the river. From here they could ride up a short ramp to the bike and ski path, which the Harley could easily negotiate. But it seemed reasonable to stop.

“I don’t see any choice but to keep going,” Zula said.

“There’s nothing there,” Chet said, nodding down the trail.

“Except the U.S. of A.,” she pointed out. “And you know how to get there, right?”

“Not on this thing! This’ll only take us as far as the tunnel.”

“But that’s a few more miles between us and the jihadists,” she pointed out.

“What did you call them?”

“And you know how to go beyond that point. On foot. Right? You used to do it with Richard.”

“Oh, it’s been years, girl.”

“But you know. You know the way. And they don’t. So we can outdistance them.”

“We should wait for them to pass us. Then double back.”

“They’ll be looking for that. They’re smart. They’ll post someone to guard the crossing at the dam.”

“Still, if we stayed up in the trees, moved through the woods — ”

“Listen. Some of those guys have Richard. They have Dodge.”

“Dodge is okay?”

“As far as I know. Anyway, they’re south of us. They don’t have a motorcycle. We can just about catch them.”

“Why the hell would we want to catch them!?”

“All I have to do is show myself to Uncle Richard — let him know they don’t have me hostage any more — and then he’s free, he can run into the woods, get away from these guys.”

Chet said nothing. Not because he didn’t agree. But because he was having difficulty concentrating.

“I have to go save his life,” Zula said. Sounding almost matter-of-fact. Ah, I see I failed to make myself clear … here’s the situation … I have to go save his life.

It gave him something to focus on. “Well, since you put it that way, I’ll take you to the tunnel,” he said, and he let the bike rumble off the end of the road and onto the loose gravel of the trail.

By the time they made it to the end, he was aware, somehow, that he had blood coming out of him. He couldn’t remember how he knew this, how he’d first been made aware of the fact. There was a dim dreamlike memory of the girl on his back — Zula — mentioning it to Chet, and Chet laughing it off and just cranking up the throttle a little higher.

Then he noticed that he was lying on the ground staring up into a blue sky.

Had they crashed?

No. The Harley was parked next to him. Zula had rolled out a camping pad. He had been lying on it, dozing. Covered with a sleeping bag.

She squatted next to him and pulled the sleeping bag away to expose the right side of his torso. His shirt was missing. Bare skin shrank from the cool air. She regretted what she saw, but she wasn’t surprised by it. She’d been looking at it while he lay there.

“How long have we been stopped here?” he asked.

“Not too long.”

He was too embarrassed to come out and ask what was wrong with him. He felt that it must be obvious.

She did something involving a bandage. She had a pathetic little first aid kit.

“Stop it,” he said gently. “It’s a waste of time.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

“Send you on your way. Save Dodge. I’ll follow.”

“You’ll … follow?”

“I can’t go near as fast as you. But there’s no reason for me to just stay here. I want to die on the forty-ninth parallel.”

She was squatting on her haunches with her arms crossed over her knees. She looked south, into the sunlight, toward the border. Then she dropped her head onto her forearms and sobbed for a while.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“No, it’s not. People are dead.” She raised her face, let herself tumble back onto her bottom, stretched her legs out next to Chet. “I didn’t kill them. But they’re dead because of things that I did. Does that make sense? Peter. The pilots. The people in the RV. They’d all be alive if I’d decided differently.”

“But you’re not helping the killers,” Chet said. Something about lying on the ground, combined with her outburst, had revived him a little, made him feel almost normal.

“Of course I’m not helping them.”

“You fired that shotgun, didn’t you? To warn me.”

“Jahandar — the sniper — was drawing a bead on you. Yes. I warned you by firing the shotgun.”

“So you’re fighting against them.”

“Of course I am. But what’s the point, if it just leads to a different set of people getting killed?”

“Too heavy a question for me,” he said. “You just do what you can, pretty lady.”

She tried to fight it, but the corners of her mouth drew back into a smile. “You call all women that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s been a while since I heard that kind of talk.”

Chet shrugged demurely.

“Well,” Zula continued, “all those people died for nothing unless I help Richard escape. And then we can go for help. But I have to get to the border first. And I need your help for that.”

“American Falls,” Chet said. “That’s where we’re going.”

“How do I — do we — get there?”

He turned his head, raised his good arm, gestured at the ridge that rose above them to the south: a blade of cream-colored granite, patched with snow, skirted by a ramp of boulders that had been flaking away from it and thundering down into the valley for millions of years. The trail had taken them up onto the ridge’s middle slopes, flying on creosoted stilts over the rubble fields, and terminated at a place where a wall of sound rock jumped out of the talus. The tunnel had been blasted straight into it, aimed horizontally through the heart of the ridge.

“We use the mine tunnels to get past this bad boy. See, we don’t have to hike over the top. That would take days. It’d kill me. Hell, it’d kill you. No. We use the tunnels. That’s what Richard discovered. That’s his secret. We go out the other side. Then down the river to the falls. Latitude forty-nine north. That’s where I stop, and you keep going.”

“Then let’s go,” she said, “if that’s what you want.”

“Yes. It’s what I want.”

THE TUNNEL WAS large enough to accommodate a narrow-gauge train, which was to say that a car could have driven into it with room to spare. To prevent just that sort of behavior, the owners had fabricated a massive steel gridiron, bolted into the rock, that blocked the passage. The barrier was situated about ten meters inside the entrance of the tunnel. That ten meters was a tornado of lurid graffiti and an ankle-deep trash heap of discarded beer bottles, chip bags, knotted condoms, and drained batteries. Just at the entrance was a fire ring; Zula, acting in Sherlock Holmes mode, verified that its ashes were still blazing hot. They were only a couple of hours behind Jones and company.

In the middle of the gridiron was a man-sized door. This had clearly been locked and vandalized, chained and vandalized, welded shut and vandalized, so many times as to threaten the integrity of the entire structure. Now it stood slightly ajar and Zula’s flashlight, shining through the grid, revealed that the graffiti and trash on its opposite side were only a little less prevalent. Her nose caught a pungent and familiar odor: fresh spray paint. Playing her flashlight over the steel plate on the door, she saw a few characters in Arabic. She couldn’t read them. She touched one of the glyphs and fresh green paint came away on her fingertip.

“Careful!” called Chet, strolling along slowly in her wake.

“Why?”

“They used to booby-trap it.”

“Who did!?”

“Back in the day,” Chet said, “the business got a little competitive. A little nasty. Crazy people got into it. People who’d kill you. That’s when Dodge and I decided to go straight.”

Zula painted the light beam up and down the length of the door crack, and noticed, way up at the top, a steely glint. Piano wire. It had been made fast around the vertical bar that served as the edge of the door, and routed horizontally across the gap between door and frame, across the grid and all the way to the tunnel wall. There it disappeared into a mound of trash that had been piled up in the corner formed by the wall and the steel grid.

By the time she finished piecing this all together, Chet had caught up with her and was following the wire with his own eyes as he leaned against the gridiron, breathing raggedly and gurgling as he did so. “Holy crap,” he said, “I didn’t actually expect to see it.”

“You think there’s something hidden in that trash pile?”

“Must be.”

In a pocket of his leathers, Chet was carrying a Leatherman that included pliers and a wire cutter. After insisting that Zula go back outside and stand with her back to the mountain, he reached up, snipped the wire, and pushed the gate open — she could hear the massive hinges groaning. “All clear,” he announced, after counting to ten. “But before we go through, I’m going to take a little rest here while you go back to my bike and get something.”

The something turned out to be a massive cable lock. Zula fetched it back into the tunnel and helped Chet thread it through the bars of the gridiron and the gate, locking it securely behind them.

After that, they proceeded with extreme caution, which was not that difficult anyway since Chet couldn’t move very fast. Once they got past the drifts of party trash that cluttered the floor near the grid, there weren’t that many places to hide booby traps. And if the first one was anything to go by, Jones would have marked them all with spray-painted warnings so that the follow-up group — presumably Ershut, Jahandar, and anyone else deemed worthy to follow — wouldn’t run afoul of them. So her nose became extremely sensitive to the sharp perfume of spray paint, and her eyes keen for the fluorescent green color that Jones had been using.

After a few minutes, they came to a place where the tunnel terminated in a rock wall pierced by a mouse hole just big enough for Chet to walk upright. “See, this thing was an adit,” Chet was explaining, “which is what the miners call a tunnel that runs horizontal, flat enough that you can run rail cars on it. Straight into the ore body in the heart of the mountain. Only this first part of it, here, got expanded for the railway. But now we’re going into the adit proper.” There was another pileup of trash and another steel door, barring the entrance to the adit, that had been jimmied open and left hanging askew. It would have been a natural place to put another booby trap. But Zula did not see or smell spray paint, and Chet’s minute inspection of the trash and the door revealed nothing suspicious. They stepped into the much more confined space of the adit and discovered that, as always, revelers and graffitists had been there first.

“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 customers 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.

She worked her way in close enough to see the banners across the bottoms of the screens:

A ground-level camera angle showed Canadian and American flags streaming in the breeze right next to each other. This seemed to be the favored backdrop for on-the-scene reporters, who, Olivia inferred, must be all standing right next to one another talking into their microphones. With several of them going at once, she found it difficult to tell one sound bite from another. She was hearing a lot of the coded phrases uttered by “Breaking news” reporters to admit that they didn’t really know what was going on. But from time to time, one of them would launch into a recap “for viewers just joining us.” Olivia inferred from a couple of these that the explosion had taken place in Canada, just a few meters short of the U.S. border, and that the thing she’d mistaken for a tollbooth was actually the border crossing. A vehicle stopped there, waiting for inspection, had exploded with what was obviously terrific violence. The death toll was already pushing a hundred, not counting bodies that had been completely vaporized, and rescue workers were still prying open smashed cars with the Jaws of Life and searching the collapsed wreckage of both Canadian and American buildings.

The studio-bound anchorpersons, interviewing the correspondents on the scene, asked the obvious questions: Do we have a description of the vehicle carrying the bomb? Of its passenger or passengers? But it was pretty clearly hopeless. The vehicle and its occupants would have been invisible, anonymous to all except those who were stuck in traffic near it; and anyone who’d been near it would be dead.

“I’VE NEVER BEEN so sad to be right,” Olivia said to Sokolov, when she found him pushing a cart down an aisle in the camping and outdoors section. She fell in step next to him and cast an eye over the contents of his cart, wondering whether this was totally random stuff that he had thrown in there to perfect his Walmart shopper disguise or things he actually intended to buy: 5.56-millimeter cartridges, a water purification device, jerky, bug repellent, a camouflage hat, heavy mittens. Freeze-dried meals. A roll of black plastic sheeting. Parachute cord. Batteries. A folding bucksaw. Camouflage binoculars.

“You refer to explosion?” Sokolov said.

“Yes. I refer to explosion. Did you have any trouble getting here?”

In response, Sokolov just looked at her warily, uncertain whether she was asking the question tongue-in-cheek.

“Never mind,” she said, and walked with him for a few more paces. “I’m just trying to work out whether I’m to be the hero or the goat, when I get back to London.”

“Goat?”

“The one who gets blamed for screwing it up.”

Sokolov merely shrugged, which she did not find comforting. There are always fuckups, and there is always a goat. Sometimes the goat is you.

“Is diversion,” he announced.

“Ooh, that’s an interesting thought. Why do you think it’s a diversion?”

“Extreme size of explosion. Ridiculous. Purpose is to turn bodies into vapor, destroy evidence.”

“You think Jones sent some guys to blow themselves up in a conspicuous place, drawing all of the attention — ”

“Jones is crossing the border right now,” Sokolov said, “in Manitoba.” He shrugged again. “We are wasting time.”

It turned out that Sokolov really did want to buy all that stuff. Not because he envisioned any particular use for it. He just believed in stocking up on such things, on general principles, whenever an opportunity presented itself.

He would fit in well here.

What he really wanted to buy was mountain bikes. He’d already cruised the bicycle aisle — evidently he had gotten here hours ago — and made his selections. She couldn’t argue with his logic. They needed to get to Jake Forthrast’s compound on Prohibition Creek — or “Crick” as the Iowans insisted on pronouncing it. It was thirty miles as the crow flew, longer on the roads they’d be taking. There were no buses. But on bicycles, they could make it before nightfall if they set a decent pace.

Olivia now understood what Sokolov meant by We are wasting time. He was saying, I could do this ride in two hours. With you, pumping away on your little girl-bike, it will take four.

Anyway, buying the stuff was no problem — if there was anything spies were good at, it was carrying lot of cash — and so it all led to a kind of festive scene out back of the Walmart in which they removed the new mountain bikes from their big flat boxes, put them together, and heaved the corrugated cardboard into a Dumpster. Sokolov, spurning the very idea of purchasing bottled water, filled several of his new containers with water from a hose bib, and put parachute cord and bungee cords to work strapping the other gear to the bikes’ cargo racks. She would have found it fun had she not seen what she’d seen on all those televisions.

Then they were on their way, pedaling north. Heading for the proverbial hills.

THE CLOUDS PARTED just long enough to show them incontrovertible evidence that it was cold down there.

Seamus had forgotten about cold.

He was going to have to buy four jackets. One of them an XXXL. Four hats, four pairs of gloves.

When was the last time he had paid his credit card bill?

Never mind, Marlon would spring for it. How much of a dent could four jackets make in his net worth, compared to chartering this jet? Not only would Marlon buy the jackets, but he would make sure that they were stylish. Cutting-edge ski parkas, or something. Maybe all in the same style and color, so that they could look like the Fantastic Four.

Dumbfounded with fascination, Seamus began to explore that analogy as they made their final approach. The stewardess — each bizjet came with one, apparently — made a final pass through the cabin, picking up half-eaten plates of sushi and empty cocktail glasses.

Quite obviously, Csongor was the Thing. Seamus was Reed Richards, the gawky father figure, weirdly flexible, always scurrying around arranging stuff. Marlon was a Human Torch if ever there was one. Yuxia was —

Invisible Girl? If only.

The jet touched down and came to a brisk stop. Seamus sensed a little wave of depression sweeping through the Four. Chartering this jet, climbing onto it illegally at the air base outside of Manila, and blasting into the sky — for these jets really hauled ass, once they got going — had been the most exhilarating thing ever. Even Seamus, who went into combat against terrorists for a living, had been thrilled. Actually landing in the sodden gray landscape of Joint Base Lewis-McChord was a corresponding letdown.

Long experience flying around the world on airplanes had conditioned him to relax, for it would be another half hour before they actually made it off the plane. But of course, this was not true in the case of a bizjet. He smelled damp, piney air coming in through the open door and realized that nothing was preventing him from climbing off.

“Thanks for the ride, Marlon,” he said, standing up and bashing his head on the ceiling again.

“Thanks for getting me out of there,” Marlon returned, grinning, and climbing up into a prudent stoop.

Seamus held up his index finger. “Don’t thank me until we get through the next fifteen minutes.”

“LET ME GET this straight,” Freddie’s boss had said, over the hyperencrypted voice conferencing link from Langley. Never a great thing to hear from the lips of someone considerably above you in chain of command.

“We’re not asking for any money,” Seamus had broken in, before Freddie could say anything.

“Noted,” the boss had said. “Always a plus.”

“Not asking you to print passports or diddle any paperwork.”

“The whole point,” Freddie had put in, perhaps a bit nervously, “is to leave no paper trail at all.”

“Two Chinese and a Hungarian, just basically parachuted into CONUS with no paperwork whatsoever.”

“The Hungarian is legit, he has a visa.”

“Two Chinese then.”

“Yeah.”

“Given that Chinese illegals are being shipped into the Port of Seattle by the containerload, it seems like it would hardly make a dent.”

“That’s the spirit!” Seamus had said. “And these are not your baseline economic migrants. They’re going to be running major corporations inside of a fortnight.”

“Not without green cards.”

“I think I’m going to marry the girl. That would take care of her status.”

Freddie had turned to look at him incredulously. “Does she know this?”

“She has no idea. Just a feeling.”

“A feeling on your part.”

“Halfway there. Pretty respectable progress.”

“What I’m really getting at,” the boss had said, “is whether you have any kind of long-term plan for these people — other than matrimony — that would lead to complications down the road.”

“Let’s not focus on hypothetical complications,” Seamus had said. “Let’s focus on the fact that these people have been in physical contact with Abdallah Jones, rammed his vehicle, shot him in the head, been tortured by him, in the very, very recent past. Seems worthy of a free ticket to Langley, don’t you think? Can’t we buy these kids a cup of coffee at least?”

“We can buy them a cup of coffee in Manila,” the boss had pointed out.

“Only at the risk of them getting arrested,” Seamus had returned. “At which point information is going to start gushing out like Jolly Ranchers from a ruptured piñata.”

“It would be easy at this end,” the boss had said, “provided they land at a military base. Getting them on a plane at your end, without passing through formalities, is outside of my scope.”

“Disavow all knowledge of our actions,” Seamus had said, “and we’re home free.” He glanced for confirmation at Freddie, who turned the corners of his mouth down — he was very good at this — and nodded.

“Easiest decision I ever made. Consider yourself disavowed.”

NONE OF WHICH really gave Seamus any idea of what to expect, twenty hours later, descending the wee, steep staircase to the hangar floor. Joint Base Lewis-McChord, was a combined army/air force facility, actually rather important to the global war on terror in that it was the home of the Stryker Brigades so heavily used in Afghanistan, as well as being an important special forces base. Seamus knew it well. It was about an hour’s drive south of Seattle, on a huge tract of forest whose soil and climate made Seattle’s seem arid by comparison.

What he was seeing now was like something from a David Lynch film in its surreal starkness. The jet, apparently on orders from the tower, had taxied directly into a small hangar that was otherwise completely empty. Powerful lights were on, as if trying to drive away the misty gray dimness flooding in through the hangar doors, which were rumbling shut, apparently driven by electric motors.

Nothing else was in here except for a maroon minivan with a BABY ON BOARD sticker in the window and an assortment of SUPPORT OUR TROOPS ribbons scattered around its liftgate. Standing next to the minivan was a man in civilian clothes. His bearing and haircut would have marked him as a military man even if Seamus hadn’t already known who he was: Marcus Shadwell. A major in a locally based special forces unit. Seamus had been in some funny places and situations with Marcus.

None funnier than this, apparently. “Where are they?” was how Marcus greeted him.

“They’re on the fucking plane, Marcus. What did you think, we bungeed them onto the roof rack?”

“Let’s get a move on,” Marcus said. “My orders are to get you off this base and into the civilian world.” He held up his hands, palms out, and pantomimed backing away. Then he whisked his hands together as if washing them.

THEY ENDED UP at a regional airport a few miles away, outside of Olympia, only because it was big enough to support a couple of car rental agencies. Seamus went in and grabbed an SUV. His credit card was good for that much, anyway. Marcus helped them transfer their absolutely minimal baggage from his minivan into their new ride as Marlon and Yuxia huddled in the backseat, chafing their arms and shivering. Csongor, by contrast, seemed very much in his element and looked around at everything curiously to a degree that Seamus found slightly irksome. There was a U.S. customs office at the airport, and Seamus was troubled by a paranoid fear that some armed and uniformed agents would swarm out of it and demand to see papers.

But no such thing happened.

“I’m out of here,” Marcus said.

“Appreciate it. Maybe we can catch up later,” Seamus said. But Marcus already had his back turned and was hustling toward the open driver’s-side door of his family van as if he expected gunfire to break out at any moment.

Driving at exactly the speed limit — difficult for him — Seamus got them out onto the interstate and backtracked a few miles to a strip mall complex out in the middle of nowhere, which he had noticed, and taken the measure of, as Marcus had driven them out into the civilian world. It was anchored by a Cabela’s outdoor superstore, where he reckoned they could get warm stuff. But this, like every other Cabela’s, was surrounded by restaurants and other small businesses that fed off the stream of Cabela’s traffic without actually competing with the mother ship.

They ended up in a teriyaki joint, confronted by live news coverage of the car bomb explosion on the Canada/U.S. border, showing on a flat-panel above the cash register with the sound turned down.

This, then, became the topic of the conversation Seamus had with the boss at Langley. He spent most of it outside, strolling up and down before the windows of the teriyaki place, watching the Thing, the Human Torch, and Not-so-Invisible Girl snarfing their teriyaki. Above them, pictures of the crater and the body bags on the TV. Out here, the rain was spitting into his face, which seemed fitting somehow.

“I’d say this operation is all over,” said the boss, “except for writing reports.”

“I don’t believe that,” Seamus said. “This thing with the car bomb is obviously…”

“… a diversion that Jones used to draw attention from his real plans.” the boss said, finishing his sentence.

This left Seamus speechless, an unusual state of affairs for him. “You got that too?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” said the boss. “You are not the only person in the world who knows what a diversion is.”

“But in that case…”

“It is of no practical relevance, at least for the next ninety-six hours — probably more like a week — because it worked, Seamus. Like it or not — whether it’s a diversion or not — the fact is that when a terrorist blows himself up at a border crossing and takes a hundred and fifteen U.S. and Canadian citizens with him, then that is what the FBI and the Mounties and everyone else in the chain of command are going to be focusing all their energies and personnel on for a while.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“You’ve got a car?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got money? Credit cards? Everyone’s healthy?”

“Everyone’s fucking great.”

“Then start driving east,” the Boss said. “Show the kids Mount Rushmore along the way, and by the time you make it here, maybe I’ll be able to devote some resources to debriefing your friends. And Little Bighorn, while you’re at it. Foreigners eat that shit up.”

“What about Olivia? What’s she up to?”

“Olivia!” the boss exclaimed. “She’s lucky that guy blew himself up.”

“Why does that make her lucky?”

“Because, (a) it proves she was right, and (b) it gives the FBI and the local cops something to focus their energies on besides complaining about what she did in Tukwila.”

“What is Tukwila, and what did she do there?”

“I’ll explain when you get here.”

“What’s she doing now?”

“I have no idea,” said the boss. “And believe me, that’s a good thing.”

THE CABELA’S SHOPPING spree went down pretty much as Seamus had envisioned it, except that they all ended up in camouflage. Because camouflage was what they sold at Cabela’s. If you wanted ski parkas in sleek designs and eye-catching colors, you had to go somewhere else.

Seamus inferred that hunting culture in China was not well developed. “Is this where the soldiers go to buy their uniforms?” Yuxia inquired, gazing at rack after rack, acre after acre of floor space devoted to all manner of clothing in several distinct state-of-the-art camo patterns. Her confusion was understandable; she’d just entered the country through a huge military base, and Seamus had not been very diligent about explaining where the boundary lay between it and the civilian world. He had to spend a few minutes explaining to her and Marlon that lots of people hunted here, and even more liked to cop a certain stance or attitude about it, using camouflage as a cultural signifier, and this was where those people came to buy clothes. Marlon, Csongor, and Yuxia could, in other words, buy anything they wanted in this store without laying themselves open to the accusation that they were improperly wearing the uniforms and insignia of the armed forces of the United States. Once she had pushed through an initial barrier of culture shock, Yuxia found this amusing.

The Fantastic Foreigners were also dumbfounded by the size and variety of the gun section, and in this way they lost another forty-five minutes to culture shock, pure and simple. Seamus could tell that Csongor was lusting after a 1911, but fortunately the paperwork would have made purchasing such a thing impossible, and so the relationship had to remain platonic for now. Because of the unusual way in which they had entered the country, Seamus had been able to carry his own sidearm — a Sig Sauer — the whole way, but he had ended up with only one clip, and so while the others were distracted with running in and out of dressing rooms, he purchased two additional empty clips and four boxes of rounds, as well as a holster that he could use to carry all of that crap around under his jacket. He did not really expect that he would have to use, or even draw, his weapon while driving these people across the country and showing them Mount Rushmore. But the fact was that he had the gun, and he needed a way to carry it around safely and securely and not too obviously. It wouldn’t do to have it rattling around loose in his backpack.

Having settled all of that, he rounded up Yuxia, who was mugging in front of a mirror in a ghillie suit that made her look like the Littlest Ent. She had gotten a little giddy, which he put down to a combination of jet lag, culture shock, and emotional trauma over having been ripped from the bosom of her family and homeland. On this side of the Pacific there were, of course, many persons of Chinese ancestry whose ancestors had come over to this country in the most fucked-up circumstances imaginable, and he supposed that if this adventure were better organized, maybe with some psychologists on its advisory board, he’d be getting Yuxia in touch with the relevant support groups. But as it was they were just going to have to get in the SUV and start driving, and she was going to have to suck it up for a while, and he was going to have to keep an eye on her.

So that was what happened. Csongor rode shotgun. Yuxia crept into the way back, burrowed into a deep warm nest of newly acquired camo gear, and crashed. Marlon sat in the center of the middle seat, blocking Seamus’s line of sight out the rearview and watched America go by with all due curiosity. Seamus felt vaguely like one of those ex-military guys who gets a job as a celebrity bodyguard and finds himself driving rock stars around.

He was feeling some unaccountable need to get clear of the Seattle-Tacoma metro area, so he headed east over the mountains and then down into the desert. At which point it seemed as though nothing stood between him and the Atlantic Ocean, and so he went into serious road-trip, put-the-hammer-down mode, and bombed down I-90 as if there was no tomorrow. White line fever got him most of the way across the state. But then certain real-world issues — the limited size of his bladder and of his fuel tank — began to interfere with the dream. He was seeing a lot of signs for some place called Spokane. He’d heard of it. It turned out to be a decent-sized city with the usual complement of strip malls and chain hotels. None of them looked absolutely perfect, and so he kept driving anyway, and found that he had passed into Idaho without really leaving Spokane; the city had thrown a pseudopod of exurban development across the border, groping out in the direction of a place called Coeur d’Alene. It was there that Seamus finally spotted the inexpensive chain hotel of his dreams, embedded roughly in the center of an eight-hundred-mile-long development that included, within a few hundred yards of the hotel entrance, a twelve-pump gas station/convenience store complex and a restaurant that looked as if it might have microbrews on draft. Presenting his credit card — which, unbelievably, had not been canceled yet — he rented three rooms: one for Yuxia, because she was a girl. One for Marlon, because he was, ultimately, paying for everything and so it seemed that he ought to have his own room. And one that he would share with Csongor, since he and the Hungarian seemed to have developed an understanding that verged on friendship.

They agreed to meet in the lobby an hour later and walk over to the restaurant-that-might-have-good-draft-beer.

Seamus happened to come down to the lobby first and found himself with nothing to do except scan the rack of travel brochures by the registration desk: promotional literature for ski areas, amusement parks, gold mine tours, fishing and jet-skiing on the nearby lake. He grew bored and sat back down. But his mind was troubled in a way that it hadn’t been when he had entered the lobby. He got back up and went over to the rack and scanned it again, trying to make out what he’d seen there that had subliminally irritated him.

He found it, finally, on the third slow pass through the rack: the word “Elphinstone.”

It was on a cartoonish, schematic map of something called the International Selkirk Loop: a circuit of American and Canadian highways, straddling the border, that, to judge from the numerous pictures, passed by lots of pretty lakes and through some nice mountain scenery. This brochure badly wanted Seamus to understand that a person could drive this loop on a motorcycle or an RV over the course of a leisurely day or two, see a lot of natural beauty, eat tasty food, buy cool stuff. It was, in other words, a tourist brochure, and fundamentally of no interest whatever to Seamus.

Except for that one word “Elphinstone.”

That was the name of the town where Richard Forthrast had his cat skiing resort. The place where he had gone missing a couple of days ago.

Correction: Seamus had no proof that he had gone missing per se. He had abruptly stopped playing T’Rain. Pretty thin evidence, that. But it had been something like twenty-four hours — difficult to tell exactly, what with the time zones and all — anyway, a hell of a long time — since Seamus had checked in on Egdod. And to judge from what the boss had said, Olivia had been dealing with troubles of her own, related to someone, something, or somewhere called Tukwila. Jones, or more likely his minions, were blowing shit up on the border, drawing every cop in the world to the epicenter. So it seemed a good bet that no one had been attending to the somewhat Mysterious Case of the possibly Missing Online Gaming Entrepreneur in a while. Seamus hadn’t been thinking about it, at least not at a conscious level, since getting these people illegally into the country had been foremost in his thoughts, and he had just been going on instinct and impulse for at least a day. When stuck in the American embassy in Manila with three illegals liable to be arrested and deported at any minute, it’s hard to focus on hypothetical events that might be taking place near the Idaho/B.C. border.

But now he was here. Literally, he was on the map. For when he pulled the Selkirk Loop brochure out of the rack, Coeur d’Alene became visible on the map, down toward the bottom. His eyes began jumping back and forth, top to bottom: Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene. Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene.

The only problem being that horizontal line drawn through the middle of the Loop: the Canada/U.S. border. No way was he getting Marlon and Yuxia across that.

But maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe what he was looking for was coming to him.

“Seamus?”

He looked up. Csongor was there, and Marlon, and Yuxia, all freshly showered and looking like the Xiamen branch of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Fan Club. He had the sense that they’d been looking at him for a while, wondering when he was going to snap out of it.

“Are you hungry?” Csongor continued. Not that he gave a shit; Csongor was hungry.

Now, some part of Seamus was wondering why these kids didn’t just walk over to the restaurant and order food, if that was what they wanted. But he had dragged them to this place and created a situation in which they were totally dependent on him — appointed himself the Dr. Reed Richards of this little band of superheroes — and he had to step up to his responsibilities.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just thinking about tomorrow’s program of activities.”

“Yay,” Yuxia said. “Activities!” She translated this abstraction into Mandarin, and Marlon nodded, a little uncertainly.

Csongor was unsure to what degree Seamus was being sarcastic, and he was now watching with heightened vigilance. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

“Well,” Seamus pointed out, “we’re dressed for hunting.”

“We don’t have guns.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Csongor was now watching very carefully. Seamus broke eye contact and returned his attention to the rack for a minute. “Just kidding,” he said. He scanned an index finger across a row, looking for something he’d noticed earlier.

There it was. He snapped the brochure out, then turned toward the exit. “Let’s eat,” he said.

But the others were having none of it. They bunched behind him, peering over his shoulder or around his elbow to read the cover of the brochure he’d just pulled from the rack: SELKIRK HELICOPTER TOURS.

AFTER HE’D LED the terrorists through the mine and out the other side, Richard was aware, at some level, that he really needed to start in on the sell job of his life: he needed to get Abdallah Jones to believe that making it past American Falls would be no picnic and that his skills as guide were still — in the parlance of old what’s-his-name, the CEO of Corporation 9592 — mission critical. That Richard still had world-class value-added here.

But Richard could not bring himself to do this, for exactly the same reason that, when Corporation 9592 had grown to a certain size, he had become listless during meetings and allowed himself to drift to the periphery of relevance. Richard was, at bottom, a guy who did stuff. A farmer. A plumber. A Barney.

What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.

Hence his recent surge of reinvolvement in the company, sorting out various troubles attributable to the Wor. The Wor had given him something to do and he had just gone out and done it. Likewise looking for Zula. As long as there had been doors to hit with sledgehammers, he’d been all over it. Later in that project, when it had become a matter of maintaining the “Where’s Zula?” Facebook page and politicking with cops, he had become listless and of no use.

And now this: Jones had wanted help finding his way through the mine tunnels or else he would kill Zula. Richard had packed a sleeping bag and some spare clothes and applied himself to getting that done. They had punched through it while the sun was rising and emerged on the south slope to enjoy a view that in other circumstances he’d have found immensely pleasing: the low sun setting fire to torn diaphanous curtains of mist rising from stands of ancient cedars, the distant roar of the falls, swollen by snowmelt, the Selkirks and the Purcells and other ranges of mountains rambling off into the distance, affording peeks at deep blue lakes and cavernous valleys. The granitic mass of Abandon Mountain rising out of its rampart of talus, just a few miles south of the border, its sheer eastern face glowing in the rich golden light of the early sun.

Mission accomplished. Jones, or any idiot for that matter, could see right across the border now, would understand that Richard could simply be shot in the head and left here and they’d find some way of getting down past the falls and into the United States without his assistance.

It was time, in other words, to call out the sales force, take Jones to lunch, begin gardening personal contacts, shape his perception of the competitive landscape. Forge a partnership. Exactly the kind of work from which Richard had always found some way to excuse himself, even when large amounts of money were at stake.

Yet now his life was at stake, and no one was around to help him, and he still wasn’t doing it. He simply couldn’t get past his conviction that Jones could go fuck himself and that he wasn’t going to angle and scheme and maneuver for Jones’s sake.

Maybe because all that behavior ultimately seemed like groveling to him. That was really his problem: deep down, he believed that all such people were grovelers.

They took a little break at the mine’s exit to enjoy the view, to set the last booby trap, to brew tea, to pray, and to try to get phone reception. Reasonable enough; it seemed as though the whole Idaho panhandle were directly visible from here, and there had to be a cell tower somewhere in that. The experiment would have been over very quickly if there’d been no reception at all, but it seemed that some of the jihadists were able to get one bar if they stood in a particular attitude in a particular place and held the phone a certain way and invoked various higher powers. Richard was tempted to make a sour analogy to pointing oneself in the direction of Mecca, but he didn’t think it would do much for his life expectancy. Their rituals became ludicrous after a certain point. Because none of these guys had an ironic modern attitude, none saw the humor.

No, strike that. Almost all of them had been living under cover in the Western world and were as capable of seeing the humor as any fourteen-year-old American sitting on his couch watching South Park reruns and sending snarky tweets to his friends. But they’d made a conscious decision to turn their backs on all that. Like smokers or drinkers who’d gone straight, they were more dogmatic about this than anyone who’d come to that place naturally. Only Jones had the self-confidence to let himself be amused, and that was how he and Richard ended up making eye contact.

“So,” Richard said, after he and Jones had enjoyed the moment, “you going to put a bullet in me now, or should I show you the easiest way to get past American Falls?”

“I’m happy with the arrangement in its current form,” Jones said. “If that changes, you’ll be the first to know. Assuming you see it coming.”

“Well, you raise an interesting question there, Abdallah. Would I see it coming? Is it going to be one of those slow beheadings? Or just an unannounced shot to the head?”

Richard now watched in some degree of fascination as Jones actually mulled it over. “Other things being equal,” he said, “I’d prefer to give you some opportunity to pray first, perhaps write out a statement. But if we find ourselves trapped in some awkward situation, there may not be time for that.”

“Is that a little incentive program you just laid out for me? A built-in penalty for awkward situations?”

“The incentive program, as I’m sure you understand, is all about Zula. Because of the regrettable lack of phone reception, we have not been able to check in with our comrades. You may assume that she is still alive and that you may keep her in that condition by keeping us out of awkward situations and doing other things for us.”

“Does that mean that if you’d been able to get bars, you’d have given the order to kill her?”

“There is no fixed plan. We assess our situation from hour to hour.”

“Then assess this: we’re sitting in an exposed place up here. Anyone down there in those valleys could see us. What are we waiting for?”

Jones acted as if he hadn’t heard this. “Is that Abandon Mountain?” he asked, nodding south.

“Yes.”

“Roads connect to its opposite side.”

“The lower slopes, yes. That’s the way out.”

“Let’s go then,” Jones said, rising to his feet and dusting off his bum.

Richard had just tasked him: told him that they had to move away from this exposed position. Jones, not wanting to bow to Richard, had pretended not to hear it. But a few moments later he had done what Richard had suggested, as if it had been his own idea. Now that was the kind of psychological program that Richard could get involved in, if he could only find, or create, more opportunities to develop it.

Such an opportunity came along rather soon, as they came to a place where they could see an obvious way to traipse off in the general direction of Abandon Mountain. Every greenhorn pot smuggler who came this way tried it, only to find himself in difficulties two hours later when he learned that this easy-looking trail led to a cul-de-sac. In order to prove that it was a cul-de-sac, it was necessary to expend another few hours probing for a way out of it, thereby wasting most of a day. And so here Richard actually did have to perform a little sell job, convincing Jones that it would really be much better for them if they turned aside from the obvious and easy path and instead spent the next couple of hours picking their way down a slope that, had it supported a proper trail, would have been an endless succession of densely packed switchbacks. But no one could have built a proper trail on this thing without using tactical nuclear weapons. It was a junk pile of fallen logs strewn over primeval talus and covered with a loose slippery froth of moss and decaying vegetation. After leaving a green spray-paint annotation at the top, they devoted four hours to clambering down it, covering all of about half a mile on the map.

Richard, back in his dope-carrying days, had made this trip three or four times before he had lost all patience with it. He had come here with nothing on his back except for food and a bedroll and devoted several days to finding a quicker and easier way down: the proverbial Secret Shortcut: an abrupt and chancy descent into a dry wash followed by a relatively quick and easy hike down a gully leading to a spot near the top of the falls. Had it not been for that discovery, his nascent smuggling career probably would have been snuffed out by the sheer unattractiveness of this part of the journey. But he felt no particular need to share the shortcut with Jones and his men. For now, they were stuck in a place that had no phone reception: a state of affairs that seemed to limit the amount of damage that Jones could do. The longer this lasted, the greater the chance that someone would notice the signs of his hasty departure from the Schloss and launch a proper investigation.

And there was also the fact that, like it or not, Richard was leading these people directly toward the place where Jake lived. He was doing all of this to save the life of his niece. It had all seemed easy until he had looked out from the mine’s exit and seen Abandon Mountain. Now he was thinking pretty hard about the fact that, to save his niece, he was leading a band of terrorists straight toward a remote cabin containing two brothers, a sister-in-law, and three nephews.

The plan that took shape in his head, then, as they devoted the entire morning to clambering down into the valley of the river, was that he would slip away from camp tonight and make his way to Jake’s place and warn them.

They took a long siesta at the side of the river, prayed some more, cooked lunch, rested sore muscles, and wrapped bandages around twisted ankles. Richard pulled his hat over his face and pretended to sleep, but in fact stayed awake the whole time working out the plan in his mind. They would make one more push after this break, and he would show them how to get around the falls: yet another surprisingly difficult operation. After that they would set up the evening’s camp, and Jones would kill him or not. If not, Richard would try to get out of there after dark. The falls were deep in a rock bowl, covered with mist-fed vegetation so dense that not even GPS signals could get through. Forget about phones.

If only he had a flashlight.

Then he remembered that he did have one, a pinky-sized LED light attached to his key chain.

Water he could get from the river. Some energy bars might be useful, and he had a couple of those in his pack that he could slip into his pockets when no one was looking.

He had gone, over the course of a few hours, from utterly hopeless cynicism to toying idly with this nutball idea, to seriously working it out, to deciding that it was doable. That he was going to do it. When they got moving again, working their way down the river toward the falls, he was already thinking several miles ahead, trying to remember the way he would take tonight up out of the gorge and into the lower slopes of the mountain.

They crossed into the United States, a fact discernible only because of a moss-covered boundary monument that one of the jihadists nearly tripped over. The falls were just ahead of them and to the right. They worked their way downstream of the falls by crossing a high shelf of rock that looked down upon it from its east side. This terminated in a cliff that obliged them to descend to the riverbank in order to make any more southward progress. As Richard now explained, there was a way to scramble down from here; there had to be, or else it would never have been possible to make the return trip. But when going in this direction, the descent was considerably easier if you just used ropes. Richard had warned Jones of this well in advance, and so Jones had made sure to bring some good long ropes along. They paused up there for a short while so that some could enjoy the view down while others, who were good at such things (or claimed to be) made the rope fast to a giant cedar growing near the edge of the cliff. Half the men went down to reconnoiter. Then they sent Richard. Then the rest of them went down. He got the sense that this had been carefully thought out; they were becoming nervous that he might make a break for it and wanted to make sure that there were a few people at each end of the rope to keep an eye on him.

As soon as they reached the bottom, Jones gave an order to Abdul-Ghaffar, the white American jihadist, and nodded significantly at Richard. Richard was still absorbing this when Abdul-Wahaab (“the other Abdul” to Richard; apparently Jones’s most senior lieutenant) drew his pistol, chambered a round, and aimed it at Richard’s chest from maybe eight feet away. “I’d like you to stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart,” said Abdul-Ghaffar in his flat midwestern accent. Out of his pack he was pulling a sheaf of black heavy-duty zip ties: not the skinny ones used to restrain unruly Ethernet cables in office environments. These were a quarter of an inch wide and a couple of feet long.

None of which seemed like the beginnings of an execution. Richard, tired and taken by surprise, had been caught flat-footed anyway. He stood as Abdul-Ghaffar had asked him to, and Abdul-Ghaffar knelt behind him and zipped four of the big zip ties around the top of each of his boots, stacking them to build a heavy cuff around each ankle. He slipped more zip ties under those cuffs and linked them in a chain, joining Richard’s feet with a sort of hobble. When he was finished, Richard could move in six-inch steps, provided the ground was level. A similar treatment was then inflicted on his wrists, leaving maybe eight inches of space between them, but in front of his body, presumably so that he could open his fly to urinate, or convey food and water to his mouth.

This had all happened fast enough that his brain didn’t really catch up until it was all over. They weren’t going to kill him, at least not yet. But they seemed to have read his mind and anticipated that he might have thoughts of escaping. They searched him thoroughly now, presumably to make sure he wasn’t carrying a pocketknife or nail clipper that he could use to cut his plastic bonds during the night.

And night came soon, for they were deep in a bowl and the sky was a slot above them, traversed by the sun for a mere few hours each day. They pitched their shelters on a flat shelf of rocky ground a quarter of a mile downstream of the falls and used river water to cook up a generous repast of instant rice and freeze-dried backpacking chow.

Richard could think of nothing else to do and so he went into the tent that been assigned to him, wriggled into his sleeping bag fully clothed and booted and, without much trouble, went to sleep.

THEY PEDALED THROUGH Bourne’s Ford, slowly getting warmed up, pausing twice to adjust the bicycles and tighten up the loads. Like most American towns, this one had grown in a thin sleeve on a highway. Farmland took over behind the strip malls and fast-food outlets. Olivia had gotten the general picture that they were riding north in the valley of a river, which was off to their left, sometimes close enough to the road that they could get a good look at it, other times wandering off into the distance. It was not a fast-running mountain chute but a slow stream that meandered all over the place, but to judge from the intensity with which it was cultivated, it was excellent land. To their right, low hills developed out of the floodplain, blocking their view of what she knew to be much higher mountains in the main ranges of the Rockies beyond. To their left, the picture was altogether different, as green mountains rose abruptly from the flats just on the other side of the river. Traffic on the highway was light, and it seemed as though the majority of the license plates were from British Columbia. Except for the dark mountains brooding over it to the west, it might have been some idyllic midwestern landscape, and Olivia could see perfectly well why people who only wished to be left alone and live uncomplicated lives might come here from all over the continent and establish homesteads.

The farmlands were served by an irregular network of rural roads. One of these led to a bridge across the river. They turned onto it and crossed over the stream, heading now directly toward the mountain wall. Olivia now saw the wisdom of trying to make good time, since the sun was going to set at least an hour earlier as it fell behind the high ridgeline of the Selkirks.

The bridge connected with a north-south road set just inside the tree line, at an altitude where it would not be inundated by seasonal floods. Olivia was referring more and more frequently to a map that she had drawn by hand on a Starbucks napkin. For Jake Forthrast had given her some rough coordinates, but he did not seem to have an address per se; or if he did, he denied the authority of the U.S. government to make such assignments. They did not have to ride far before they came to an intersection with a blacktop road that plunged steeply down out of the west. It seemed to correspond to one Olivia had sketched on the napkin, so they shifted into much lower gears and began to ride up it. Tall trees closed in to either side. Half a mile later the road devolved into gravel. At the same time, it became considerably less steep, as it had taken to following the course of a tributary stream rushing down out of the mountains toward the big lazy river.

Olivia was continuing to be quite sensitive, or so she imagined, to the Crazy that she imagined must lurk up in these places. The Canadian border had become in her mind something like the end of the world, a sheer, straight cliff descending straight into the pit of Abaddon; as they crept asymptotically closer to it, the scene must become more and more apocalyptic and the people who chose to live there correspondingly strange. Which was, of course, utterly ridiculous, since what actually lay on the other side of that imaginary line was British Columbia, a prosperous and well-regulated place of socialized medicine, bilingual signage, and Mounties.

And yet the line was there, drawn on all the maps. Or rather, it was the upper edge of all the maps, with nothing shown beyond it. Since people — at least, before Google Earth came along — could not actually hover miles above the ground and see the world as birds and gods did, they had to make do with maps, which substituted for actually seeing things; and, in that way, the imaginary figments of surveyors and the conventions of cartographers could become every bit as real as rocks and rivers. Perhaps even more so, since you could look at the map any time you wanted, whereas going to look at the physical border involved a lot of effort. So perhaps it might as well be the end of the world, as far as some of the locals were concerned, and might affect the way they thought accordingly.

But now that they were actually riding up into those hills she found that human beings, and what they thought and did and built, were the least part of the place. It didn’t matter how odd the locals were when there were so few of them, scattered over so much space that was so difficult to move around in.

Road signs, riddled by shotgun blasts and the occasional hunting round, insisted that they were on National Forest Service land and that the same agency was responsible for these roads. And indeed they frequently saw steep gravel ramps launching up into swaths of mountainside that were being logged or had been logged in the recent past. But from place to place they would enter upon a stretch of road that ran through relatively flat and manageable territory, frequently in proximity to river crossings. Small ranches occurred in such places, and sometimes several dwellings were collected into a sort of hamlet scattered through the pines and cedars. They were not close enough to call each other neighbors, but still there was a definite sense of placeness, even though these were not named and did not appear on maps. Some of the dwellings reflected a degree of poverty that Olivia associated with Appalachia, or even Afghanistan. But as they worked their way deeper and higher up the valley, such places became less frequent; or perhaps the elements had already destroyed them. For it was clear that, while one need not be rich, or even affluent, to survive in this environment, it was necessary to have some of the qualities that led to affluence when they were applied in more settled places. The cords of split wood neatly stacked under corrugated roofs, still amply stocked even at the end of the long mountain winter, and many other such details told Olivia that the same people, transplanted to Spokane, would soon be running small businesses and chairing civic organizations.

They rode into dusk and found their progress up the valley blocked by a pair of large dogs who had classified them as intruders. Each of these animals probably weighed more than Olivia. One seemed to have a lot of Newfoundland in him, but she could easily convince herself that the other was largely, if not entirely, a wolf. But both of them had collars, and both were well fed. “Do not look them in eyes,” Sokolov suggested, dismounting and getting his bicycle between him and the animals. “Turn bike around, ride away if it gets bad.” Olivia, feeling no urges whatsoever to behave heroically, reversed her bicycle’s direction and kept one leg thrown over the saddle. Sokolov stood his ground. She knew that he could put these animals down with bullets to the brain from the pistol that he was carrying somewhere on his person, and that he was refraining from doing so only out of a desire not to offend their owners.

The dogs’ barking eventually drew the notice of a man who came riding out from a nearby compound on a four-wheeled ATV. He did so, Olivia suspected, because he was too heavy to move about conveniently on his feet. He was armed with (at least) a large flip-knife and a semiautomatic pistol in a hip holster. He began shouting at the dogs as he drew closer, but it was difficult to get them calmed down, and so there had to be rather a lot of shouting and alpha-male drama before he could get them to sit down and shut up. The whole time he was keeping a sharp eye on Sokolov and, to a lesser extent, on Olivia.

She had no idea how these people would think about race. She had seen many more Native Americans than Asians today and guessed that she might be mistaken, by such people, for a member of one of the local tribes. But it didn’t seem to be an issue with this guy; or at least it didn’t make him any more suspicious and hostile than he was to begin with.

How he’d react to a man with a heavy Russian accent was impossible to guess.

Olivia set her bicycle down in the middle of the road, approached Sokolov, and tucked herself in under his arm. A woman who had been claimed by a dominant-looking male was a whole different organism from a woman who seemed to be up for grabs. Flattening her vowels and trying to sound as American as possible, she said, “We’re looking for Jake Forthrast’s place. He invited us to come and pay him a visit.”

This changed everything. The man, who introduced himself now as Daniel (“as in The Book Of”) wouldn’t hear of letting them finish the journey on their bicycles; he rode back into his compound and emerged a few moments later driving a huge diesel pickup truck. Sokolov threw the bicycles into its back and rode with them while Olivia sat in the passenger seat with Daniel. From the way he had talked, she was expecting a long journey, but the distance covered, from there, was no more than a few miles. Somewhat adventuresome miles, as the road became steeper and worse the farther they went — giving Olivia the vibe that they really were approaching the End of the World. But then they penetrated a narrow slot between a granite cliff face, astream with snowmelt, and a furious river and entered into a little dell, no more than a mile across, where four distinct homesteads had been built around a little body of water that Olivia guessed was there because of beavers. Directly across the water, and reflected in it, was a lone mountain, so close to them that they could be said to be on its southern approach.

The pond was ringed by a dirt road. In one place, another road led away from it, between two of the homesteads and farther up into the woods that grew on the mountain’s southeastern flank. Daniel proceeded up that, moving slowly and being sure to exchange friendly waves with all the children, dogs, and homesteaders who had taken note of them.

The landscape now changed dramatically, becoming moister and cooler and cedar scented. A few hundred meters up the road they came to a gate, bolted together out of massive timbers, completely blocking the way. Posted on it were several documents, preserved under clear plastic. Olivia only glanced at these as she approached it, undid the latch, and hauled it open. For Daniel had assured her that it was permissible for them to do this. One of the documents was the U.S. Constitution, with several passages highlighted. Another was some kind of manifesto, apparently placed there for the edification of any federal agents who might come calling to collect taxes or gather census data. There were some favorite Bible passages as well, and a page of the Idaho State Code explaining precisely what a citizen was and was not allowed to do to an intruder in the defense of his own dwelling.

All of which was quite intimidating, and probably would have prevented her from going into the place at all, had she come here without a local guide; but Daniel seemed to think that he could make it past all Jake’s defenses simply by honking his horn a lot. Dogs came out at a run. Olivia closed the gate behind the truck and leaped up onto its rear bumper; Sokolov hauled her up over the tailgate with several moments to spare before the arrival of their canine escort. They drove along for another minute or so, since Jake apparently didn’t believe in having his front gate inordinately close to where he actually lived. The road bent around a spur of rock, and then the actual house came into view: tall and narrow by the standards of log cabins, perched on the opposite side of a creek bridged by a homespun log-and-plank span. The truck crossed it and pulled around to the back side. Spreading away from the cabin was a flat, partially cleared space complicated by livestock enclosures, gardens, and sheds. This rambled over some acres of ground until it came up against the base of a forested slope.

A boy with an axe was emerging from a woodshed. A woman with a long dress was stepping out onto a deck above them. Jacob and John Forthrast came around the corner of the building wiping black grease from their hands.

“Picked up a couple of strays,” Daniel joked, jerking a thumb toward the back. Olivia stood up, since the truck had come to a stop. Automatic lights had been triggered by the truck’s thermal signature and shone warm on her face. She was about to remind them of who she was when she heard Jake explain, “It’s Olivia.” Guessing, maybe, that John’s eyes were not good enough to recognize her in the sudden light. She found it odd that she was considered to be on a first-name basis with this family.

“Oh, hello again, Olivia!” John exclaimed. “Who is your friend?”

“That’s a long story — but he came here because he wanted to help Zula.”

“Then he’s a friend of ours,” Jake said. “Welcome to Prohibition Crick.”

Day 21

Richard went to sleep with ease and then woke up a couple of hours later feeling bad that he had done so. After several days’ absence, the Furious Muses had hunted him down in this remote place and come after him with a vengeance. It made for a very crowded tent.

The jihadists might kill him in the morning. But it seemed unlikely. If that had been the agenda, they would have done it already and saved themselves all those zip ties.

If they weren’t going to kill him, then in the morning they would make him guide them up the old smugglers’ trail to Abandon Mountain and Prohibition Crick. In order for that to work, they’d have to remove the zip-tie hobbles. He would then have the option of trying to run away from them. It seemed likely that this would lead to pursuit, capture, and ceremonial decapitation.

So he was going to have to look for a place where he could get away from them suddenly, out of rifle shot range, in some manner that would make it difficult to track him.

A movie hero would have jumped off the cliff into American Falls yesterday. After a few tense moments, his head would have broken the surface of the river some distance downstream. Richard knew that this was not really a practical strategy. But there might be stretches of the river that he could conceivably use in a similar way, body-surfing through rapids.

The problem was that their route didn’t really follow this river. The river ran south and west. Their destination was more easterly, and so their plan today was to hike down the east bank for about a mile and then clamber up an endless slope until they broke out above the tree line and found themselves on a rocky spur thrown out from the mountain. From there they’d traverse a talus field that constituted the peak’s western slope and finally drop into the valley of Prohibition Crick. The only way Richard could make a quick getaway in that sort of country was to let gravity take him and skid or roll down a slope. Which might have been fun, or at least survivable, on a sand dune or a snowfield, but in this territory would just lead to slow death from broken bones and ruptured organs.

Still, he kept pondering it through the long hours of the night, since it was the only way to keep the F.M.s off his back. He readily agreed to their basic premise, which was that, since he was about to lead a band of heavily armed terrorists straight to the homestead where several of his close relatives were minding their own business, his own life was forfeit to begin with.

The obvious dodge was to lead them somewhere else instead. But there were limits to how far he could mislead them. Jones had quite obviously done his homework, interrogating Zula in considerable detail, poring over Richard’s Wikipedia article, printing out hard copies from Google Maps. He had a very clear idea of where they were going. As a matter of fact, Jones could easily find his way all the way to Pocatello from here with no help at all from Richard, which made Richard suspect that he was now being kept alive, not as a guide, but as a hostage and possible subject of a gruesome webcam execution. He could already picture the YouTube page, Dodge kneeling on a rug with a sack on his head, Jones behind him with the knife, and, underneath the little video pane, the first of many thousands of all-capital-letter comments sent in by all the world’s useless fuckwits.

No, at this point the only card he really had to play — the only way to help Jake and John and the others save themselves — was to warn them. Because until now Jones had shown no awareness whatsoever that the valley of Prohibition Crick was inhabited. He must have seen a few roofs peeking out of trees in the Google satellite photos, but he might have made the reasonable guess that these were just summer cabins for Spokane orthodontists, boarded up and quiet at this time of year. Even if he had known that people were living in them year-round, he couldn’t have guessed — could he? — that these were the most heavily armed civilians in the history of the world — gun nuts on a scale that made Pathans look like Quakers.

Even gun nuts could be taken in a surprise attack, but if Richard could somehow make them aware that they were in danger, then they would be able to give a very good account of themselves.

The plan he finally arrived at, then, just as the roof of his tent was beginning to shed a few stray photons into his wide-open eyes, was that he would proceed docilely until he was within audible gunshot range of Jake’s place, and then make a break for it. The jihadists would shoot at him, and probably hit him. But everyone in the valley would hear it.

And then all hell would break loose.

He actually dozed for a little while, maybe an hour or so, and woke up to see more light filtering through the tentcloth and to hear the hiss of a backpacking stove being lit up.

Something told him to get moving. He wriggled out of the sleeping bag, spun around on his butt, got his booted and hobbled feet out the door, and then inchwormed out onto the ground.

Only two of the nine jihadists were out here: the tall Somalian-Minnesotan named Erasto, and another guy whose name Richard could not seem to keep in his mind. An Egyptian with a dark, callused spot in the middle of his forehead, caused by contact with the ground during prayer. They were heating a pot of water, presumably to cook up some porridge. Richard waddled closer to the stove and held his zip-tied hands out near the pot to catch some of the warmth. Erasto was eating an energy bar, the Egyptian just staring off aimlessly into the distance.

Richard realized that he had to take a crap, and he had to take it now.

He stood up. Erasto watched him carefully. He looked over toward the crap-taking place, which was a hundred or so feet away at the base of the cliff they had yesterday descended with rope.

“You guys have any toilet paper?”

No response.

“Dude,” Richard said, “I really gotta go. No fooling.”

Erasto seemed incredulous-verging-on-disgusted that he was having to deal with such matters. “Jabari!” he said. This seemed to get the attention of the Egyptian. Richard seized on it as an opportunity to finally learn the guy’s name. Jabari. As in jabber. As in jabbing someone with a knife.

Erasto was asking some kind of question. Jabari bestirred himself and began to sort through a nearby pack, apparently looking for the bumwad supply.

Richard was hopping from foot to foot, as best he could when hobbled. It was very much open to question whether he was going to make it to a suitable place in time.

“I’m going to start hopping toward a suitable place to take a crap,” he announced. He was speaking as calmly as possible, since he didn’t want to shout and give non-English speakers such as Jabari the wrong idea. “You can follow me, you can shoot me in the back, whatever. But something’s got to give.” The sentence was punctuated with an impressive fart, which proved a much more effective communication than anything that had been escaping from Richard’s other end. Richard toddled around until his back was turned to Erasto and then began mincing across the campsite, moving away from the river and into the undergrowth that grew profusely between the bank and the base of the cliff. In about half a minute’s hopping, cursing, farting struggle through the shrubs — which grew densely here, watered by the mist drifting from the falls — he came to a clear place, dotted with turds and flecked with used bumwad, at the base of the cliff.

“Cliff” was too simple a word to denote the geological phenomenon rising above him. It was not a sudden vertical wall so much as a rapid increase in the slope of the ground that became fully vertical, and even developed into a bit of an overhang, twelve or fifteen feet above. And it was not a simple monolith, but a junk pile of boulders, tenacious vegetation, and packed soil that just happened to be really steep. Its top was out of view, but he knew it to be about fifty feet above. Anyway, it was now sheltered enough that he felt he could take a decent crap and so he hopped up and down several times, reversing his direction by degrees, and began to fumble with his belt.

A roll of toilet paper in a Ziploc bag struck him in the chest, underhanded by Jabari from perhaps twenty feet away, and bounced to the ground at his feet. “Thank you,” Richard said, stripping his trousers down. Jabari turned his back and retreated somewhat. Richard, looking at him through the tops of the shrubs as he squatted to obey nature’s call, saw the Egyptian raising both hands and waving cheerfully to someone back in the camp; apparently someone, probably Abdul-Wahaab, wanted to know what the hell was going on and needed to be reassured that all was well.

Richard was just in the middle of letting it all go when a dark object dropped out of the sky and thudded to the ground right in front of him. He assumed at first that it was a short bit of a stick that had tumbled out of a tree on the top of the cliff. But on a closer look he observed that it was neatly rectangular.

It was, he now saw, a pocket multitool — a Leatherman or similar — in its black nylon belt holster.

“THIS IS ALL about making a case,” Seamus said.

The automatic waffle machine emitted a piercing electronic beep, signaling it wanted to be turned over. Seamus reached out and flipped it. The Four were standing at the complimentary breakfast bar of their hotel in Coeur d’Alene. None of the others had ever seen an automatic self-serve waffle machine before, and so Seamus was giving them an impromptu demo of the best that America had to offer.

“I’m not sure how that phrase translates into Chinese or Hungarian,” he went on. “What I’m trying to say is this. We are going to see my boss, who happens to live on the other end of the country. We have to drive because I can’t get you guys on a plane without IDs. We happen to be in striking distance of a place where I think Jones might be crossing the border. Last time I logged into T’Rain — which was about half an hour ago — Egdod was still wandering across the desert, followed by a couple of hundred coup counters and curiosity seekers. Which supports my theory.”

“It does?” Yuxia asked.

“Okay, never mind the part about Egdod. You either believe it or you don’t. I happen to believe it. Anyway, I called this dude who has a chopper.” Seamus patted the brochure for the dude in question, which was sticking out of his back pocket. “He is willing to take me up there to fly over the area. I’ll only be gone for a couple of hours. We’ll be on the road by midafternoon. Chances are we can still make Missoula tonight. You guys can hang out here, see a movie, whatever. Just don’t get arrested or do anything that would call attention to your complex immigration status.”

“I want to come with you,” Yuxia said.

“There’s not enough room in the helicopter.”

“The brochure says it can carry up to four passengers,” Yuxia said, and pulled another copy of the same brochure out of her jacket pocket.

During the awkward silence that followed, Seamus happened to look up and see Csongor and Marlon gazing at him expectantly. The waffle seemed to have been forgotten.

“The big one can take four,” Seamus admitted. “I had my eye on the little one.”

“What is it exactly you think you’re going to be doing?” Csongor asked.

“Flying over the area I’m interested in. Taking pictures. Getting a feel for it.”

“How would our being in the helicopter prevent you from doing that?” Marlon wanted to know.

Seamus shrugged. “Maybe it wouldn’t.”

Yuxia asked, “Are you just lying to us?”

“Why would I lie to you?”

The waffle maker squealed again.

“You’re acting weird,” Yuxia said. “Are you expecting to, like, land the chopper and have combat with Jones?”

“No, I am not going to have combat with Jones. That is not what this is about.”

“Good,” Yuxia said, “because if that is your plan, you should warn the pilot.”

“YOUR WAFFLE IS DONE!” shouted a peevish breakfaster from across the room.

Yuxia elbowed Seamus out of the way, figured out how to open the waffle iron, and deposited its steaming load onto a plate. The squeal stopped.

Csongor wanted to try it now. He picked up a minicarafe of waffle batter and poured it into the appliance and watched broodingly as it infiltrated the valleys between the bumps.

“Of course,” Seamus said, “if I believed that there was any chance whatsoever of getting into a firefight with jihadists, it would behoove me to say so to the pilot.”

“Behoove it would!” Yuxia agreed.

“So it is totally safe,” Csongor said.

“As safe as flying around in a chopper can ever be,” Seamus agreed. He did not actually believe a word of this, but he had been cornered.

“Whereas if we stay here, there’s a chance that we’ll get into trouble,” Csongor pointed out. “You are responsible for us.”

“Alas, yes.”

“If the chopper has a breakdown, you get stuck up north, then we are here with no car keys, no hotel room, no ID…”

“Okay, okay,” Seamus said. “You can come with me and stare at trees from a great height all morning.”

RICHARD HAD SEEN that tool and its holster before. He was pretty sure it was the one Chet always wore on his belt.

It was about five feet in front of him. When he was finished emptying his bowels, he rolled forward onto his knees, then to all fours, stretched out, and coaxed it up off the ground with the tips of his fingers. Then he pushed himself back to a squat. He set the multitool down on the ground next to his foot, then picked up the Ziploc bag containing the roll of bumwad and pulled that open.

He could hear some of the other jihadists emerging from their tents in the campsite, a couple of hundred feet away. If they behaved true to form, they would begin the day by estimating the direction of Mecca, then kneeling on their camping pads and praying.

When he was finished using the toilet paper, he stuffed the roll back into the Ziploc bag. With one hand he wadded and rattled the bag, making noise that he hoped would cover the crackling sound of the Velcro on the Leatherman’s holster — for he was using his other hand to jerk that open. He pulled out the tool and turned it inside out, making it into a pair of pliers with built-in wire cutters. These would make short work of the zip ties while producing a characteristic sound — a crisp pop that Jabari would certainly recognize, if he heard it. The roar of the American Falls and the rapids downstream of it might cover some of that sound, but still Richard was careful to cut the zip ties with the bare minimum of force required, sort of worrying the cutters through the plastic instead of severing them explosively. He removed only the ties joining his ankles and the ones joining his wrists, leaving in place the ones serving as cuffs.

He then closed up the multitool and was about to pocket it when he realized that a knife might come in handy. The device had several external blades, files, rasps, and so forth. Richard found the one with the sharpest and most traditionally knifelike blade and opened that up until it snapped into the locked position.

He set it on the ground, rose to a half squat, pulled up his trousers, and fastened his belt. Remaining in a crouch, he picked up the knife and began to walk along the relatively clear space that ran along the base of the cliff. Until now he had not bothered to look up because he knew that all he would see was an overhang several feet above him. But as he moved along the cliff’s base he came into a zone only a short distance away where the overhang receded, and at that point he looked up, expecting to see Chet’s face gazing down at him.

Instead he saw a frizz of black hair exploding out from beneath a stocking cap.

It took him several moments to understand that the person he was staring at was Zula.

She extended one arm and pointed, drawing his attention to something on the ground behind him: Jabari, who was coming to investigate.

Richard looked back up and saw her waving frantically, telling him to move farther away along the base of the cliff. She herself had risen from a squat and was beginning to move that way, exhorting him with gestures to follow.

Until now he had moved slowly, to hide the fact that he had removed his hobbles. But Jabari was closing in on the place where Richard had been taking his dump and would see the cut zip ties soon enough. Richard broke into a run.

Within a few moments he understood that Jabari was coming after him.

It was difficult to run, to keep an eye on Jabari, and at the same time to keep casting glances upward toward Zula. But at some point he realized that she was holding both hands out, gesturing at him to stop.

Which didn’t make sense. Why would he want to stop?

He looked back and saw that Jabari was much closer than he’d expected. The Egyptian had drawn a semiautomatic pistol but not aimed it yet; he was still using both hands to flail away at undergrowth that was impeding his progress.

Richard looked up again and saw Zula at the very lip of the cliff with a bundle of sticks in her arms. She heaved it out into space.

Jabari stepped out of the undergrowth. He was perhaps ten feet from Richard, looking him up and down, amazed that he had gotten out of the zip ties.

Richard looked up again and saw a rickety construct unfolding in the space above them: two thin lines of parachute cord with sticks lashed between them at regular intervals.

A rope ladder.

Jabari had seen it too. He seemed only slightly more dumbfounded than Richard.

It had been all rolled up and was now falling and unrolling in a tangledy mess. The rung in the middle of the bundle was the longest and heaviest of them all, and its weight was helping to pull the whole roll downward and keep it straight. Richard understood that it was coming right at his head, and so he stepped back against the wall of the cliff, allowing it to fall down in front of him.

The ladder bounced to a stop, yawing and sashaying. Jabari was looking up toward the top, trying to see who had thrown it. He aimed his pistol nearly straight up in the air.

Richard couldn’t see what Jabari was aiming at. But he did now notice a curious fact, which was that the bottom rung of the ladder — the heavy thing that had made it all unroll — was a black pump-action shotgun.

While Jabari was preoccupied with trying to identify threats at the top of the cliff, Richard stepped forward, got the weapon in his hands, flipped off the safety, and pulled the forepiece back slightly so that he could see into its breech. A shell was already chambered.

Maneuvering the weapon was not made any easier by the rattletrap skein of parachute cord and tree branches from which it dangled, but, at a range of three yards, this wasn’t going to be a precision operation anyhow. He brought the stock up to his shoulder and drew a bead on Jabari.

The movement finally drew the Egyptian’s notice. He looked down at Richard. At the same time he was beginning to lower the pistol. Not fast enough to make a difference.

“Sorry,” Richard said, as they were making eye contact. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Jabari’s head off.

SEAMUS HAD DEVELOPED a set of instincts around timing and schedule that owed a lot to his upbringing in Boston and his postings in teeming Third World megacities such as Manila, which was to say that he always expected it would take hours to get anywhere. Those habits led him comically astray in Coeur d’Alene at six thirty in the morning. They reached the municipal airport in less time than it took the SUV’s windows to defog. The chopper place was just inside the entrance. Two helicopters, a big one and a small one, were parked on the apron outside a portable office. A pickup truck was parked in front of it, aimed at the big chopper, headlights on, providing supplementary illumination for a man in a navy blue nylon pilot’s jacket who was sprawled on his back under the instrument panel, legs dangling out onto the skid, messing with wires. “Never a good sign,” Seamus remarked, and parked in front of the portable office.

It was evident from the look and style of the place that it was not, first and foremost, an operation for making tourists happy. Their bread and butter was serving clients in the timber industry. When that flagged, they were happy to take people on joyrides. A hundred percent of their budget for that part of the operation had gone into the printing of the brochure. Which was a completely rational choice, since by the time their clients showed up here to discover what a bare-bones operation they were dealing with, the decision had already been made. No one, having come this far, was going to storm out simply because they weren’t serving lattes and scones in a tastefully decorated waiting area.

Yuxia was all for dragging the man in the blue jacket out by his ankles, but Seamus talked her around to the point of view that everything would go better in the long run if they left him alone to finish his work. It was surprisingly chilly. They sat in the car and let the motor run until it got warm. Eventually the man oozed out of the chopper and climbed to his feet, holding an electronic box with a connector dangling from it.

Seamus got out of the SUV and greeted him. “Morning, Jack.” Last names were not much in vogue around these parts.

“You’d be Seamus? I can tell from your accent.” Jack was probably ex-military, now with a neatly trimmed red-brown beard slung under a round, somewhat pudgy face.

“Sparky trouble?”

“I thought this’d be a quick fix and we’d be in the air by now,” Jack said, waving the box around, “but the connectors don’t match up.”

“Technology fails to work the way it’s supposed to. What a shock.”

“Anyway — how many you got?” Jack’s eyes flicked over to the SUV. “I was going to put you in the 300.” He half turned and jerked his head toward the smaller of the two choppers. “It’s a little less comfortable but if you don’t mind — ”

“Not at all,” Seamus said. “But how many passengers will it carry?”

“Two. Maybe three in a pinch.”

“And the big one is definitely down.”

“The 500 ain’t flying today.”

“Give me a sec.”

Seamus got back into the SUV. “Change of plans,” he announced. “Big chopper is busted. Little chopper can only take two or three of us. One or two have to stay behind here and wait.”

“Obviously I cannot fit into that thing,” Csongor volunteered, looking incredulously at the 300. “I would not enjoy it anyway.”

Yuxia had taken to bouncing up and down in her seat, worried that she was about to be left behind. She looked as if she were about to jump out of the car, run over, and cling to the chopper’s skids. Marlon, observing this, looked at Seamus and said, “I will stay and use Wi-Fi.” For during the wait he had borrowed Seamus’s laptop, logged on to a guest account that Seamus had set up for him, and discovered an unsecured network emanating from the portable office.

Seamus twisted the SUV’s keys to the off position, killing the engine, then moved it to the accessory position so that the laptop could suck juice from the cigarette lighter jack. “No joyriding!” he warned them. Then he nodded at Yuxia, who jumped out onto the tarmac.

Before they departed, there was a discussion of flight plan and travel time. Jack estimated forty-five minutes each way to cover the eighty miles to the area that Seamus wanted to see, plus half an hour to forty-five minutes actually circling the area and looking around. It was now about quarter to seven. They should be back by nine, nine thirty at the latest.

The backseats of the 300 were decidedly short on legroom, and Seamus was glad Marlon had elected not to come. After a very cursory safety briefing, they crammed Yuxia into the back and Seamus took the copilot’s seat up front. This would not win any prizes either for spaciousness or comfort, but was no worse than situations that Seamus had to put up with all the time when pursuing his career.

Jack walked around the chopper going through some preflight checks. Csongor emerged from the SUV to watch the takeoff. Jack climbed in, handed beat-up but serviceable headsets to Seamus and to Yuxia, then donned a somewhat nicer one of his own. He got these plugged into the chopper’s intercom system and did a little sound check.

After a terse conversation with local air traffic control, Jack throttled the engine up and things got very windy and noisy for a few moments. Watching from not far away, Csongor hunched his shoulders and averted his gaze. The ground fell away below them. The 300 angled forward and began to pick up speed and altitude, headed north.

THERE WERE SOME nonobvious questions as to how Richard should manage ladder climbing while maintaining possession of the shotgun and the semiautomatic pistol — a Glock 27 — that he had obtained from the dead Egyptian at the base of the cliff. Not the sort of challenge that would leave him scratching his head all day, but enough to slow him down a little. The Glock had no safety lever — the safety was built into the trigger. Theoretically it wouldn’t fire accidentally. Richard shoved it into his jacket pocket and then zipped the pocket shut, not wanting the weapon to fall out during the climb. At some point during the excitement, he had dropped the knife; he was reminded of this when he felt something hard under the sole of his boot. He moved his foot and pried the tool up out of the cold damp loam, then set about slashing through the two lengths of parachute cord that secured the shotgun to the bottom of the ladder. One of them was tied around the end of its barrel, just behind the little brass bead that served as the weapon’s sight, and the other around the narrowest part of its black plastic stock, near the safety. Dangling from the weapon was a complex of black nylon webbing that his overburdened mind processed and identified as some kind of tactical strap or harness. He did not have time to sort it out now and so he merely thrust one arm through it and confirmed that it wasn’t going to fall off. Then he raised a knee, reached up, and applied his weight to the rope ladder.

This struck him as dicey in the extreme, and something he would never have done had a pack of furious, heavily armed jihadists not been running toward him through the woods. Or at least he assumed they were doing so; the blast of the shotgun had left his ears ringing, and he couldn’t gather much information by listening. The parachute cord was all of about an eighth of an inch thick. Its rated strength, he knew, would probably be high enough that two strands of it would support his weight — somewhere north of 250 pounds — in theory. But if it had been damaged, or if Zula’s knots didn’t hold —

Never mind. He started climbing. Or rather, he started to pull rungs down toward him. The cord was stretchy and would not bear his weight at first. But after a couple of tries the rungs began to push back against his feet and to pull back against his fingers and he noted that the cliff face was moving downward. Once he had gained about ten feet of altitude, he was tempted to swivel his head around and look out over the space between here and the river to judge the progress of the jihadists, whom he assumed must have started running in this direction when they had heard the boom of the shotgun. But he didn’t think it would do him any practical good and so tried to focus on climbing. He scaled a few more rungs and then risked a look up. The top of the cliff was dishearteningly far away. He had lost sight of Zula. But then something moved up there and he realized he’d been looking at her all along; she was lying on her belly with just her head sticking out at the ladder’s top, lost in the visual noise of the forest towering over her head. Light gleamed in the lenses of her eyeglasses. She was looking out over the territory below and behind Richard, and what she saw was making her nervous.

“Throw me the handgun!” she called.

Richard stopped, leaned against the damp rock of the cliff face, patted his flank until he felt the hard heavy shape of the gun in his pocket, then unzipped it, pulled out the weapon, and lobbed it, swinging his arm as far outward as he could and putting a lot of oomph into the throw. He didn’t want to see the thing clattering back down past him a moment later. Zula’s face elevated as she tracked it, and then she was up on hands and knees and she disappeared from his view.

Until now Richard had been held against the cliff face — which was not completely vertical — by gravity. Now he arrived at a concavity, created by a heavy brow of rock that protruded slightly, perhaps fifteen feet above him. Climbing the rope ladder became much more difficult as his feet thrust forward into the empty space, causing his whole body to lean back, hanging from nearly straight arms. His progress slowed considerably, and he found himself escalating into something that approached panic, so eager was he to get past this part of the climb and get over that brow, where he fancied he might be sheltered from anyone shooting upward from the cliff’s base. His movements became jerky and he started to swing. He saw too late that the strand of cord on the left side was being sawed at by a sharp edge of rock on the prominence above him.

The rock was nearly within his reach, about two rungs above him, when the left cord snapped. The ladder collapsed into a single strand of parachute cord with a series of sticks dangling from it. He swung to the right and his entire body rotated helplessly, causing the world to spin around him and giving him a view of the riverbank below: undergrowth thrashing madly all over the place as jihadists sprinted through it, calling out the name of Jabari. Farther distant he could see a tall figure clambering up onto a huge fallen log to gain some altitude and get a better view of the proceedings. It was Jones. His gaze went right to the bright spray of blood where Jabari had fallen, then traveled up the rope ladder until he locked eyes with Richard.

Richard was not one to back away from a staredown, but he had other concerns at the moment and so he kicked his legs to get turned around, then flailed them until he had trapped a fallen rung between his ankles, and straightened his knees while pulling as hard as he could with both arms. He hand-over-handed his grip to a higher position, raised his knees, reestablished the ankle grip, and repeated the procedure.

Something whined past him and in the same instant made a sharp whacking noise against the rock back in the little concavity. Then it happened a couple more times, and he heard the reports of a gun from down below. There was no rational reason why this should make him stop climbing. On the contrary. But he couldn’t help freezing up for a few moments.

A series of bangs sounded from closer, up above him. He looked up to see flashes of light spurting from the barrel of the Glock, just at the top of the ladder.

Another leg thrust, another hand-over-hand, and a desperate adrenaline-fueled reach gained him enough altitude to grip the first rung above the rope break. He got both hands on it, performed a chin-up, did more desperate pawing and kicking, finally got to a place where he could get his feet planted against the rock prominence. Then he covered a few rungs very fast.

The ladder had begun to jerk and dance madly, and he realized that someone at the base of the cliff was either climbing it, or else yanking on it trying to break the rope. He paused in his climbing long enough to pull out the knife and sever the remaining cord just beneath the rung that was supporting his feet. The ladder sprang out away from the cliff and fell from view. Watching this was a mistake, since it gave him vertigo. He saw muzzle flashes from below. But at the same time he drew courage from the fact that many of the sight lines connecting him to the flat ground between here and the river were blocked by the dense foliage of evergreen trees. Most of the jihadists were shooting blindly, or trying to draw beads on him through small gaps between branches, or running around trying to find a position from which they could do so.

It would not be accurate to say that a man of his age and weight could scamper, but he felt as if he scampered the last ten rungs and finally hurled himself on his belly at the top. Zula withdrew from her perch almost in unison with him and they ran for a hundred or more feet into the forest, side by side, before stopping. As if the bullets could chase them over the lip of the cliff and hunt them through the woods. But they couldn’t, of course. Only Jones and his men could do that. And as Richard had understood the moment he’d seen it, the ladder had given them a long head start on the jihadists.

Then Zula got in front of him and pulled a sharp U-turn and body-slammed him and wrapped her arms around his torso and ratcheted them down like enormous zip ties. Her face was in his chest and she was sobbing. Which Richard almost felt was his prerogative, since she had saved him; but he wasn’t about to make an issue of it. He was still so astonished by all that had happened in the few minutes that had elapsed since he had hopped away from the campsite to answer the call of nature that he could do very little but stand there dumbfounded and await the cardiac arrest that seemed as though it ought to be inevitable. He got the back of Zula’s head in the crook of his elbow and pulled it firmly in against his chest, planted his feet wide, and breathed.

IT WAS SHE who recovered first. He heard muffled noises and realized that she was trying to talk. He relaxed his grip on her, saw her face turn up toward him. A miracle. Every time he saw that face for the rest of his life he would call it a miracle.

Her lips were moving.

“What?” he said.

“Chet’s up above the falls,” she said. “He’s hurt badly.”

“Crap,” Richard said. “You know we have to get over to Prohibition Crick and warn Jake.”

“Yes,” Zula said, “I do know that. But I’m just saying.” In her tone was a kind of incipient, Furious Muse — like shock that Dodge would even consider not going back to check in on Chet.

“Did those fuckers shoot him?” Richard asked, jerking his head back the way they had come.

“Different fuckers,” she said. “But all part of the same group, as you may have guessed.” She added, “I’m not even sure if Chet is still alive, frankly. He was looking pretty bad.”

“Do you think you can find your way to Jake’s from here?”

This set her back on her heels for a second. “You’re saying we should split up? That I should run ahead to Jake’s while you circle back and see how Chet is doing?”

“Just a thought. I know a shortcut; I can get back to where Chet is in no time.”

“I think it’s the only way,” she admitted, looking like she was going to start crying again. A whole different kind of crying. The last jag had been letting go of terrible pent-up emotions. The coming one was sadness that she would have to go out on her own again so soon.

“The only thing is,” Zula said, and stopped, looking embarrassed at what she’d been about to utter.

“I have to get word back to the re-u.”

“Yeah.”

“I have to tell the story that you survived Xiamen, you survived whatever the hell you’ve been through the last couple of weeks, and you went on alone to warn the others.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Which means you have to survive.”

“I have to survive,” he corrected her, “if you don’t.”

“That’s true,” she said, as if he had made some cogent point during a business meeting.

“The flip side is — ”

“I have to survive if you don’t,” she said. “But you will. You always do.”

“No one does always,” he corrected her. “But I will try very hard to do so, knowing that only by surviving will I have the joy and privilege of telling your story to the world.”

“It’s not that great of a story,” she said shyly.

“Bullshit. Hey, look. Chet’s dying. The fucking terrorists are headed for Jake’s. We have to put this plan into execution. Even if that is a miserable fact that would never obtain in a good and fair world. Agreed?”

“Yeah.” She held up one gloved hand, palm out.

He met it with his hand. They clasped them tight for a few moments. “You’ve always been a sort of herolike figure to me,” he told her.

“You’ve always been my … uncle,” she answered.

“Honored.”

“See you.”

“Haul ass,” he said. “And remember, if you just get close and then empty that clip into the air, that’ll be enough to put Jake and his fellow wack jobs on red alert. Because it doesn’t take much.”

“Noted.” And she turned her back on him and began to walk away. After a few steps, she broke into a run.

“This must be kind of obvious by now,” he called after her, “but I love you.”

She turned her head and gave him a shy look over her shoulder, then bent to her work.

CHET WAS VISIBLE from half a mile away, sprawled on a boulder like a skydiver whose chute had failed to open. A stream of blood was running down the side of the rock. Something ungainly dangled from one hand. As Richard trudged up the mountain — a procedure that seemed to take forever — he resolved it as a pair of binoculars.

All that time on the elliptical trainer was paying off. Any other portly man of his age would have dropped dead a long time ago. He couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t been panting and sweating.

He had quite satisfied himself that Chet was dead when the arm moved, the body sat up, the binoculars rose to his face. Richard came very close to screaming, just as anyone would who saw a dead man taking action. It almost made him not want to come any closer. But the agonizing slowness of travel on talus gave him plenty of time to get his primitive emotions under control as he got closer.

“Hey, Chet,” he said, when he was close enough to be heard. Chet had lain down again and not moved in a while.

“Dodge. You came.”

“You say that like you’re surprised.”

“I know you’re busy. Got a ton of stuff on your mind.”

“There’s always time for you, Chet. I’ve always tried to be clear about that.”

“It’s true. Appreciate it. Always have.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Aw, Dodge, you know I’m a dead man.”

“But you were a dead man once before — in the cornfield. Remember?”

“No. Had amnesia. Remember?” Chet laughed, and Richard grinned at him.

“That was when understanding came to me,” Chet went on, “about the parallels and the meridians. The fact that we live in curved space. Parallels run straight. Meridians bend toward each other and at their beginnings and their ends they are all one. When the Nautilus — the first nuclear sub — reached the North Pole, it transmitted a message. You know what the message was?”

“No,” Richard lied, even though he had heard Chet tell this story a hundred times to dumbfounded members of the Septentrion Paladins.

“‘Latitude ninety degrees north,’” Chet said. “See, they couldn’t specify their longitude, because there, all the meridians are one. They were on all the meridians, and so they were on none of them. It’s a singularity.”

Richard nodded.

“Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.”

Richard kept nodding. He was afraid his voice wouldn’t work.

“Do you realize where we are?” Chet asked him.

“Somewhere pretty damned close to the border,” Richard finally got out.

“Not just close. Look!” Chet said, extending an arm in one direction, then swinging it over his head like the blade of a paper cutter to point exactly the opposite way. Following it, Richard noticed a line of widely spaced surveyor’s monuments tracking across the landscape.

“We’re on the forty-ninth parallel,” Chet said. “My feet are in the U.S. of A. and my head is in Canada.” The look on his face said that this was enormously profound to him, so Richard only nodded and tried to maintain a straight face. “I’m barring the path. Their meridians are going to end here.”

“Who are you talking about?”

Chet gestured vaguely to the north and then offered Richard the binoculars. Richard picked them up, adjusted them, planted his elbows on the border, and aimed them north toward the talus slopes angling down from the ridgeline. Gazing over them with his naked eyes, he was able to pick out a pair of human figures, spaced about a hundred feet apart, picking their way down over the rocks. With the aid of the binoculars he saw them clearly as armed men with dark hair, answering generally to the stereotypical image of jihadists. The one in the lead was burly and had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. The one trailing behind was wiry and had a longer rifle slung diagonally across his back. A sniper.

“The rear guard,” Chet said. “Trying to catch up with the main group.” He chuckled and coughed wetly. Richard had a pretty good idea of what he was coughing up and so he avoided looking. Chet continued, “They’re so focused on catching up they haven’t bothered to look behind them.”

Richard drew back from the binoculars in surprise, and his aging eyes struggled to pull focus on Chet. Chet was nodding at him, casting suggestive glances upward. He had coughed a thin mist of blood out onto his chin, where it had caught in the gray stubble. Richard found the jihadists again and then tracked higher up the slope until he saw something in motion. Difficult to make out because its coloration blended in with the tawny hue of the weathered rock. Moving like a drop of glycerin oozing from one boulder to the next. Maintaining a fixed gaze on this target, he raised the binoculars and inserted them in his line of sight. With a bit of searching he was able to focus on the thing and see it distinctly as a mountain lion making its way down from the ridgeline. Its eyes glowed like phosphorus in the light of the rising sun. Those eyes were fixed upon the two men struggling down the slope below it.

“Holy crap,” Richard said. Chet went into another laughing/coughing fit. “These guys are so out of their element. Let’s hope it catches up with them soon.”

“It already did,” Chet answered. “Zula told me that it already took down one of their stragglers.”

“Huh. Man-eater.”

“They’re afraid of humans. Don’t bother them, and they won’t bother you,” Chet said, mocking what a sanctimonious tree hugger would say. Cougars attacked humans all the time in these parts, and the obstinate refusal of nature lovers to accept the fact that, in the eyes of a predator, there was no distinction between humans and other forms of meat had become the subject of bitter hilarity around the bar at the Schloss.

In this Richard now perceived an opening. “Well, shit, Chet, that settles it. I can’t just leave you here. That thing has probably smelled you already.”

“Do I stink that bad?”

“You know what I mean. I can’t just leave you here defenseless. If the jihadists don’t get you, that mountain lion will.”

“I ain’t defenseless,” Chet said. He unzipped his motorcycle jacket, which fell away to reveal a ghastly and peculiar state of affairs. His bottom-most garment was a thermal underwear top, now soaked with blood all along one side, and lumpy, either from bandages or from swelling. He had thrown his leather jacket on over this. But in between those two layers, he had affixed a large object to his chest: a thick metal plate, slightly convex, lashed to his body and suspended around his neck by a crazy and irregular web of parachute cord. Words were stenciled on the plate in Cyrillic.

“I think it says something like ‘This side toward enemy,’” Chet said. Then, seeing incomprehension still written on Richard’s face, he added, “It’s a Russian claymore mine.”

Richard had nothing to say for a few moments.

“If they can do it,” Chet said, “so can I.”

“You mean, blow yourself up?”

“Yeah.”

“I never really saw you as a suicide bomber.”

“It’s not suicide,” Chet said, “when you’re already a dead man.”

Richard could think of nothing to say to this.

“Now listen,” Chet said. “It’s time for you to get the hell out of here. You’re already in range of that one with the rifle. Get you gone. Your meridian isn’t finished yet, you’ve got a ways to go south yet. Me, I’m curving under to the pole. I can see it before my eyes. Those guys up there, they’re going to reach it at the same time as I do.”

“I’ll see you there” was all Richard could get out.

“Looking forward to it.”

Richard hugged Chet, trying to be gentle, but Chet hooked one arm around the nape of his neck and pulled him in tight, hard enough to press the claymore mine against his chest and scrape Richard’s face with his bloody whiskers. Then he let him go. Richard spun away and began to move south. His vision was fogged by tears, and he practically had to go on hands and knees to avoid turning an ankle on the strewn rocks.

He knew that Chet was correct about the range of the sniper’s rifle, and so his first instinct was to get out of the line of sight and of fire. This was easily enough done by taking advantage of the ruggedness of the terrain and occasional clusters of desperate trees. He wouldn’t be able to move freely, though, until he reached the edge of the woods, which was about half a mile down the slope. On his way up to Chet’s position, he had trudged and scrambled wearily up the broken and boulder-strewn terrain, various muscles screaming at him the whole way, since they had already taken enough abuse during the previous days’ hiking. He had taken a somewhat meandering course between areas of melting snow. Now it seemed to him that those snowfields would afford him a quick way down. Quick, and a little dangerous. But now that he had said good-bye to Chet, he was feeling an almost panicky imperative to work south and warn Jake, perhaps reconnecting with Zula en route. So he crab-walked to the edge of a large area of snow that sloped down all the way into the woods. His feet lost traction immediately. Rather than letting himself fall on his ass, though, he leaned forward carefully and allowed himself to skid down the slope on the soles of his boots, a procedure known as a standing glissade. Essentially he was skiing without skis. It was a common enough practice, when slope and conditions allowed it, and his involvement in the cat skiing industry had given him many opportunities to practice. He covered the distance to the tree line in a small fraction of the time it would have taken him to pick his way down from rock to rock. En route he fell three times. The last fall was a deliberate plunge into a snowbank to kill his velocity before he slammed into the trees.

The snowbank was soft, and now sported a Richard-shaped depression that cradled his tired and battered body in a way that was extremely comfortable. The cold had not yet begun to soak through his clothing. He swiveled his head around and verified that the jihadists with the guns could not see him.

He was tempted to just lie there and take a nap. He stuffed a handful of snow into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. His heart had been beating very fast during the glissade, and he saw no harm in relaxing in this safe place for a few moments, pacing himself, giving his body a little rest, letting his pulse drop to a more moderate level.

Which it didn’t seem to be doing. He could feel a steady whomping in his chest and wondered if he was finally succumbing to some sort of cardiac arrhythmia.

But this seemed to be the opposite of that, since it had nothing but rhythm. Almost mechanical in its perfection. He pressed a hand to his chest under his left nipple and observed that this beating sensation had nothing to do with his heart.

It was coming from outside his body.

It was in the air all around him.

It was a helicopter.

He rolled up to his feet and staggered out into the open, waving his arms.

THE MOUNTAINS THAT now filled the windscreen, rising up from the flat valley to an altitude somewhere above their heads, looked familiar to Seamus. Not because he’d ever been here before; he hadn’t. But he had been in mountain ranges like these all over the world. These were the sorts of mountains that insurgents loved to hang out in.

Insurgents did not care for spectacular snow-covered mountain ranges. Snow impeded movement and implied harsh cold. “Spectacular” meant “easy to see from a distance,” and insurgents did not like being seen. Insurgents liked mountain ranges that sprawled over large reaches of territory. That crossed national borders. That were high and rugged enough to discourage casual visitors and impede the operations of police and of military forces, but not so high as to be devoid of tree cover or bitterly cold all the time. Many of the features that tourists liked, insurgents found positively undesirable — most of all, the presence of tourists. But Seamus could see at a glance that tourists would not choose to visit these mountains when the Rockies were a few hours’ drive to the east and the Cascades an equal distance to the west. These were low, forgettable mountains, no good for skiing, carved up by logging roads, partly deforested in a way that provided employment to the locals but was considered unsightly by tourists.

No wonder all the right-wing wack jobs came here. No wonder smugglers loved it.

Seamus felt weird. It wasn’t hard to understand why. He always felt this way when he was riding a chopper into mountains like this. Because it usually meant going into combat. He had to keep reminding himself that all the adrenaline flooding into his system was going to be wasted. That if it weren’t wasted — if something actually did happen — it would be a very bad thing given that the people he was with were not geared, physically or mentally, for combat.

Assuming, reasonably enough, that these tourists would want to see the highest mountains, the pilot carved a long sweeping turn up a valley with a white thread snaking down its bottom: a river violent with snowmelt. After a few minutes, this frayed into several tributaries draining a few miles of high Selkirk crest. All the mountains along the crest proper were above the tree line and presented a bleak prospect of barren rocky snags and crags reaching high above vast talus fields where nothing would grow except the occasional freak tree. They burned a lot of fuel in a short time gaining altitude and thudded over a low saddle between peaks, suddenly giving them a view of many more insurgent-friendly mountains beyond, stretching to the horizon, interrupted only by a long north-south lake in the middle distance. Turning north again, the pilot made for the border, following the slow curve of the ridgeline, passing some especially prominent peaks. But during the last few miles to the border, the ridgeline lost a couple of thousand feet of altitude and plunged back below the tree line again. One bald peak jutted out of it a few miles south of the border — Abandon Mountain, the pilot called it — but other than that, it was scrub trees, patchy snowfields, and talus ranging northward well into Canada. In the far distance, the Selkirks leaped upward and became a truly magnificent range, but that was in British Columbia, where, plainly enough, everything was bigger and better.

Seamus, though, had eyes only for the dark valleys that wriggled through the lower country below. This was out-and-out wilderness. A few old roads wandered through it, connecting to widely spaced mineheads or logging camps. But it was as wild and as untouched by humans as anything you could expect to see in the Lower Forty-Eight. And as the pilot, responding to Seamus’s directions, slowed the chopper down and allowed it to shed altitude, those valleys began to take on depth that he hadn’t noticed from farther above. As if he had just put on a pair of 3D glasses at a movie theater, he saw into the gorges of the rivers now and understood the steepness of the terrain. The fury of the rivers told the same story.

“What would you like to see?” the pilot asked him. For they had just been hovering there for a couple of minutes, admiring a jewel-like waterfall set in a deep misty bowl.

Seamus had been looking for paths. The spoor of insurgents sneaking along secret ways through the forest.

“The border,” he answered.

“You’re looking at it,” said the pilot, pointing northward. “I don’t want to cross it, but I’ll take you right up to it if you want.”

“Sure.”

They passed over a partially forested slope rising up from the waterfall toward a wildly uneven plateau of boulders and snowfields and clustered trees. Above that rose a much broader and higher talus slope that, according to the pilot, was a mile or two north of the border and roughly parallel to it. The rock wall rising out of that was pierced in one place by a man-made opening, evidently the adit of an old mine.

“Someone painted the rock,” Yuxia observed.

“Where?” Seamus asked.

“Right below us,” Yuxia said.

Seamus’s gaze had been directed horizontally and north, but he now looked straight down and saw that Yuxia was right. What he had identified, a few moments ago, as a gnarled tree, branches covered with brilliant green sprigs of new leaves, was, on closer examination, a snarl of acid-green spray paint on a rock. Like graffiti. Except impossible to make sense of.

He could see now the faint traces of a trail, leading down to the graffiti from the north, coming from the approximate direction of that old mine tunnel. On the talus it was nearly imperceptible, but from place to place he saw tufts of fresh litter, and in one location it was absolutely clear that someone had glissaded down a snowfield, carving two parallel tracks, still crisp at the edges, not yet blurred by a day’s, or even an hour’s, exposure to the warmth of the sun.

He followed the track upward and was shocked to see, some distance above it, a dead man spread-eagled on a rock.

“Holy shit,” the pilot said, seeing it too.

“Let’s get a better look at that,” Seamus said, feeling that weird sensation again: the adrenaline coming back into his system. The chopper pointed its nose down and accelerated north.

They were passing over that grooved snowfield when Yuxia let out a gasp that was almost a scream. “He’s waving at us!” she called.

“Who’s waving at us?” Seamus returned skeptically. For the man on the boulder definitely wasn’t doing any waving, and that was the only man Seamus could see.

“I think it’s Zula’s uncle,” Yuxia answered. “I saw him on Wikipedia.”

A crack, explosively loud, sounded from above them. Then two more.

“What the hell?” said the pilot in the weird silence that followed. Silence being, in general, a bad thing in a helicopter.

“We’re being shot at,” Seamus said. For he had heard similar noises before. In general, military choppers stood up to the treatment a little better than this one had. “They have taken out the engine. Bite down.” He twisted around so that Yuxia could see his face, opened his mouth, inserted the helicopter company brochure, and bit down on it, keeping his lips peeled back grotesquely so that she could see his jaws clenched together.

Staring at him fixedly, she reached up with one hand, bit down on the end of her camouflage mitten, then pulled her naked hand out of it.

“Brace for impact,” the pilot said. But halfway through this utterance, Seamus stopped hearing his voice in the headphones, because another round seemed to have gone through the middle of the instrument panel and fucked up the electrical system.

The pilot, to his great credit, knew what to do: he manipulated the controls in such a way as to make the chopper autorotate, converting some of the energy of its fall into passive spinning of the rotors that broke the descent marginally. That, and the fact that they landed at an angle on the snowfield, saved them. Even so, the impact was so sharp that Seamus felt his teeth jumping in their sockets. Because he was biting down, they didn’t slam together and they didn’t bite his tongue off and he hoped that the same was true of the others.

The chopper planted its nose in the snow and began to skid downhill like a big out-of-control toboggan. Directly in front of them were trees. Standing in front of the trees was — just as Yuxia had been trying to tell him — Richard Forthrast. A.k.a. Dodge.

He dodged.

The trees didn’t.

THE TEN OR fifteen seconds between the appearance of the chopper in the sky above him and its coming to rest in the trees, only a few yards away from where he had thrown himself to the ground, presented Richard with an unbroken chain of never-before-experienced sensations that, in other times, he’d have spent several weeks sifting through and making sense of. There was something in the modern mind that would not stop saying, If only I had caught that on video, or This is going to make the coolest blog entry ever! Barring which, he at least wanted to just lie there for a few moments asking himself whether that had really just happened.

People were stirring behind the cracked and spalled windshield of the chopper. At a glance he guessed two. On further consideration, three: there was a small person, a woman, in the back. The pilot seemed unconscious or at least unwilling to move. The passenger next to him was a lanky man with strawberry-blond hair and a beard, and he was flailing around like a spider in a bathtub, trying to get free of several entanglements while being belabored from the rear by the backseat person, who couldn’t get out until he did. And she — the voice, speaking what he guessed was Chinese, was clearly that of a female — very much wanted to get out. The man was dressed from head to toe in camouflage gear, which suggested that he had flown up here to get in some hunting. Wrong season for it, but perhaps he was a poacher who had come to this area specifically to get away from game wardens.

Richard looked up the slope, just to see whether the jihadist with the sniper rifle had come into view yet. Either he hadn’t, or he was taking sniperlike care not to be seen. Anyway, they’d be in his sights soon enough, and Richard wanted to make the newcomers aware of that fact and get them free of the chopper. He staggered to his feet and sloshed through snow and undergrowth toward the downed machine’s right side — only to be greeted by the muzzle of a semiautomatic pistol, which had appeared by some sleight of hand in the passenger’s right hand and was now aimed right at him.

“Okay,” Richard said, letting his hands be seen, “if I’d just been through that, I’d be a little jumpy too.”

“It’s not so much that,” said the passenger. “It’s the Mossberg 500 on the tactical sling.” He nodded at said weapon, which was dangling from Richard’s shoulder.

“Fair enough,” Richard conceded.

“You’re Richard Forthrast,” said the passenger, and dropped the pistol’s muzzle. Then he was distracted by a series of vicious kicks directed against the back of his seat.

“T’Rain player?” Dodge asked.

“Yeah, actually. But there’s more going on here than just a random fan encounter. We have information about your niece. Or rather she does.” He nodded toward the back. “I have never met her, but I hear she is a fine young lady.”

“I just saw her an hour ago.”

The kicking and thrashing stopped. A face peeked out from behind the rear seat.

“She’s alive?” the young Asian woman asked.

GETTING OUT OF the chopper required some knife work, since parts of the instrument panel had been crushed upward, and sharp sheet-metal edges were catching on seat belts and on camouflage clothing. But eventually the man, who gave his name as Seamus, and the woman, Yuxia, extricated themselves and went around to the other side to look in on the pilot. He was awake now. Richard, conditioned by long exposure to Hollywood, was wondering when the chopper was going to burst into flames, but this seemed less and less likely as time went on. The fuel tank was not leaking, and there were no sources of ignition that Richard could see.

The pilot was reporting, rather calmly, that all parts of his body from his navel on down felt as though they had gone to sleep. Not in the sense of being totally numb, for he could move them and feel sensations, but in the sense of tingling like crazy. His spinal column, obviously enough, had been jammed by the force of the impact and perhaps suffered some vertebral damage that was messing with his spinal cord. He wasn’t paralyzed. But he might be if they tried to move him around “like a bunch of fucking do-gooder shit-for-brains” as Seamus put it.

Yuxia and Seamus both seemed to have come through the crash with little trauma other than a good deal of hard banging around that would leave them stiff and bruised tomorrow. Adrenaline seemed to be taking care of the rest. That, and, in Yuxia’s case, what looked like a serious endorphin rush generated by the awareness that Zula was alive — or at least had been an hour ago. While Seamus interviewed the pilot and tried to figure out what to do, Yuxia focused on Richard. “Your niece honors you very much.”

“I just figured out who you are,” Richard said. “She wrote about you on a paper towel.”

Once he had made up his mind that the chopper was not going to explode, and taken into consideration the fact that they now had two firearms between them, he had begun to feel quite optimistic — as if it were all over now except for rounding up the bad guys and buying people plane tickets home.

“Are others on the way?” he asked Seamus.

“Other what? What are you talking about?”

“Like … reinforcements?”

“We’re on our own,” Seamus said.

“But you knew I was here … that the jihadists were here.”

“If we’d known they were here, we would have showed up with the entire fucking Idaho National Guard. And once we got here, we would not have hovered in a place where we could get shot down by one asshole with a rifle.”

Richard just stared at him.

“I’m doing this on my own,” Seamus said. “Checking out a hypothesis. No one else believes me. I had only a vague suspicion Jones might have come this way until rounds started going through our engine block.”

“Were you able to send out a distress call or — ” Then Richard shut up, realizing he was making an ass of himself. He had seen the shoot-down. They had not had time to send out a distress call. “Okay, but at some point someone is going to notice that the chopper hasn’t come back.”

“It is a one-man operation. It might take hours. By then, it’s all going to be over.”

“What’s all going to be over?”

“Whatever is going to happen now,” Seamus said. “Where the hell is Jones, by the way?”

“The guys who just shot you down are the rear guard. Jones is farther south. I’m happy to show you the way. But first may I suggest that we think about the ones who are actually shooting at us?”

As Richard was saying this, Seamus’s eyes wandered up the slope in the general direction of the bad guys in question. Then they snagged on something. “It looks like someone else is already on that particular case,” he pointed out. “Dead man walking.”

THE HIKE SOUTH to the border had involved a number of events that Ershut might have accounted disappointments, hardships, and setbacks had he grown up in an effete Western democracy. As it was, he could hardly be bothered to notice them. The only thing that had really disturbed him had been what had happened to poor Sayed. A long bloody trail through the woods had led to a small tree where Sayed’s body had been dragged up three meters off the ground and stuffed in a fork between two branches. His head lolled forward, nose pressed against breastbone, since all the structure had been removed from the back of his neck. A neat hole had been carved in the front of his abdomen and his liver removed. The very weirdness of the spectacle had made it much more troubling to him than the body of Zakir, who had expired in a way that was extremely bloody but much more conventional.

From there, they had hiked back to their campsite, staying always on the path to prevent the man on the motorcycle from turning around and escaping from the valley. Ershut and Jahandar had taken turns: one guarding the path so that the other could trudge to the campsite above and gather all the things that he would need to complete the final phase of the journey. Then they had hiked up the valley, following the track of the motorcycle, dotted with occasional drips of blood. This had been the source of great satisfaction to Jahandar, who had been convinced that he had gotten one good clear shot off at the motorcyclist.

The trip through the ridge had not gone well, since the way through the tunnels had been barred by a motorcycle lock on the gate, and Jahandar’s attempts to shoot it off had been unavailing. But only a soft and corrupt infidel would imagine that this would really prove an obstacle to two men such as Ershut and Jahandar. They had withdrawn from the mine and simply climbed over the top of the ridge, camping near the summit, where they could get a clear view in all directions, and then proceeding south as soon as it had become light. Ershut had slept poorly, remembering Sayed up in that tree, and wondering who or what had carried out the atrocity. Ershut was burly and abnormally strong, and yet he doubted that he could have carried the limp burden of Sayed that far up a tree that was lacking in convenient side branches. Its bark had been marked with deep gouges made by four parallel claws, causing Ershut to form the opinion that this had been the work of a predatory beast, stashing its kill in the tree fork to keep it up away from jackals or whatever jackal-like beasts might inhabit these mountains. Jahandar scoffed at the theory. He was convinced that this had been the work of a human, trying to put a scare into them by mutilating Sayed’s body and leaving it up where they could not help but notice it.

In any case, they had slept lightly and kept their weapons near to hand. During his watch, Ershut was convinced he sensed something prowling around their camp, and once, sweeping his flashlight beam around him, he was certain that he saw, for a fraction of a second, a pair of gleaming eyes shining out of the darkness. But when he swept the beam back, they had already disappeared.

It might have made sense, then, for them to have kept a sharp eye behind them as they descended the ridgeline in the light of the early morning. But two things fixed their attention forward. One, a fusillade of gunshots that echoed from valley walls all around shortly after they began their hike. And two, a man lurking on a boulder down below them, occasionally visible for a few moments when he came awake and peeked over the top with binoculars. Jahandar occasionally drew a bead on this fellow through the telescopic sight of his rifle and reported that he did not seem to be armed. He was drunk or otherwise impaired, lying still for long periods of time and then moving about unsteadily. Jahandar might have set himself up in a sniper’s perch and then waited for a good shot to come along and gotten rid of this man before they came anywhere near him, but the man seemed so helpless that there did not seem to be a compelling reason to do so. Perhaps they could get some information out of him when they descended to his altitude.

That discussion, anyway, was cut short by the approach of the helicopter and all that happened after Jahandar fired upon it. To their considerable frustration, it slid out of direct view, and so it was not possible for them to see if any had survived, or to fire upon them. First they would have to shed a good deal of altitude. They began to do so as quickly as they could manage, throwing off their packs to give themselves greater freedom of movement and hopping from rock to rock, occasionally surfing on small avalanches that they touched off in steep patches of finer-grained scree. Their general plan was that Jahandar would hang back and try to work around into a position where he could cover the downed helicopter; Ershut, who was carrying a submachine gun that would be effective only at much shorter ranges, would get down closer until he had reached a point where he could shoot from another direction. Once Ershut opened fire, the survivors — again, assuming that there were any — would naturally move into positions of cover, hiding behind rocks or trees, and Jahandar would be able to pick them off from his place of concealment high in the rocks. It was difficult to judge the direction from which sniper fire was arriving, so it was likely that they would all be dead long before they could figure out where Jahandar was — or even come to the understanding that they were being shot at from another direction.

So intent was Ershut on executing his part of the plan that he quite forgot about the strange loiterer with the binoculars until he had descended to near the bloodstained boulder where the man had been hanging out. But he was not there now. What had seemed from high above like a single piece of rock was actually an outcropping of stone that had been shivered into a number of huge slab-sided chunks that had tumbled onto the slope below, forming a little debris trail. Ershut recognized this as a convenient place for him to make his way down the slope without exposing himself to view from below, and he traversed over to it.

And that was when he realized that the man in the black leather clothing had not gone down the hill to investigate the chopper crash but merely concealed himself in a space between two of the boulders. The man came out as Ershut approached, holding his hands up above his head to show that he was unarmed.

He looked almost more horrible than Sayed. Sayed, at least, had been dead, and therefore in a state of repose. There had been no worries that Sayed was going to climb down out of his tree and advance upon them. But this man was staggering toward Ershut with a huge grin on his face. One side of him was all bloody, and his skin would have seemed white had Ershut not been seeing it against a background of snow; instead his flesh looked gray.

The man was saying something in English, which Ershut barely spoke at all. As he raved, he staggered forward, one unsteady pace at a time, closing the distance. Ershut was not especially troubled by this since the man was still a few meters away, and still keeping his hands up, and Ershut was covering him with the barrel of the submachine gun. He rather wished that the man would stop, however, simply because there was something disturbing about his color and the look on his face and the way he was talking.

Ershut glanced down the slope, trying to get a view of the crashed chopper. He could see the bent-back tips of rotor blades dangling above the end of the long skid mark in the snow. People were definitely moving around down there, looking up at him.

The gray man said something about America.

Ershut looked up and noticed that the gray man was gripping, in one hand, the end of a piece of string that disappeared into the sleeve of his motorcycle jacket. He straightened his arm, jerking at the string.

IT WAS A good thing that Olivia enjoyed looking at Sokolov, because his reactions had given her a lot to enjoy since their arrival at Jake’s cabin. Clearly he had never even imagined that there were people in the world like this, living out in the middle of nowhere, disconnected by choice from the grid, surrounded by weapons, and living each day as if it might be civilization’s last. During the bicycle ride from Bourne’s Ford, she had tried to explain what they were getting into. Sokolov had nodded occasionally and even made eye contact from time to time. She had sensed, though, that he was only doing so to be polite. He did not really believe until he saw a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress with a shoulder holster strapped over the bodice carrying a semiautomatic pistol and two extra clips. From that point on, his reaction to everything was fascination and bemusement. Noting this, and choosing to interpret it in a favorable way, Jake gave him a quick tour of the place, showing off the water purification system, the ammo reloading bench, the stockpiles of food and antibiotics and gas mask filters, and the safe room — a reinforced-concrete bunker — under six feet of earth in the backyard. Sokolov watched Jake carefully, and Olivia watched Sokolov, and John, the elder brother, stomping along a few paces behind them on his artificial legs, watched Olivia watching Sokolov, occasionally sharing a wry look with her. Sokolov began to notice these exchanges of looks and to share in them, and so by the time they had gone inside, sat down around the table, held hands to say Grace, and tucked into a simple but generous and nutritionally balanced dinner, they all seemed to have arrived at a wordless understanding. Jake was a true believer. Elizabeth perhaps even more so. But Jake understood that not everyone saw the world as he did — not even his own brothers, with whom he was nonetheless quite close. This did not especially trouble him. In fact, he was even capable of making little self-deprecating jokes and drawing humorous comparisons between this part of the world and Afghanistan. John, for his part, seemed to have developed a facility for shutting his ears off whenever Jake began to talk what he deemed nonsense. If Jake needed to change the oil in his generator or fish wire through a wall to hook up a new electrical outlet, then John was right there with him, helping him get it done. And he had unlimited time and patience for Jake’s sons, who clearly loved him. Olivia suspected that John was making a conscious effort to tell the boys, without explicitly saying anything, that if, when they grew older, they decided they wanted to rejoin the civilization that their parents believed to be utterly corrupt and doomed, they would always be welcome in his house.

In any case, John’s ability to relate easily to these people without actually believing in any of what they believed provided a sort of template that Olivia was able to use in order to maintain cordial and even warm relations with them during the evening and through breakfast the following day. Because in most of their social interactions they were like any other basically happy and stable family.

Olivia provided a vague explanation of why she and Sokolov were here. Anywhere else, it would not have gone over very well. But Jake, no great respecter of borders and laws, readily agreed to show them the way to the Canadian border in the morning. The first few miles, he explained, could be a bit tricky, even if they had a GPS. As a matter of fact, the GPS could actually be more trouble than it was worth in that it would induce them to go in directions that would turn out to be dead ends. As a man who enjoyed hiking anyway, he was more than happy to guide them to a point along the flank of Abandon Mountain from which they would be able to see all the way to the border. They could do much of the journey on their mountain bikes. In places, they would have to carry them, which would be tedious work, but it would pay off later when they crossed over and made it through the old mine and found themselves on a nicely groomed trail leading all the way into Elphinstone. “On foot it’s a three-day hike,” he said. “With your bikes you can be sipping your lattes in downtown Elphinstone tonight.”

Jake had a sturdy, unspectacular mountain bike of his own. So in the morning, after they had risen, showered, eaten a huge pancake breakfast, and packed their things, they set out in a caravan of four: Olivia, Sokolov, and Jake on their bicycles and John trundling along behind them on a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle. The ATV carried the baggage at first, which made for rapid going during the first hour as they switchbacked up a trail that took them out of the valley of Prohibition Crick. This petered out as it reached the tree line. Jake began to lead them along a circuitous and, as advertised, completely nonobvious route on terrain that rapidly became almost impossible. Soon they had to traverse a long steep talus bank that was impassable for any wheeled vehicle, so at that point John shut off the ATV’s motor and helped them load their gear onto the mountain bikes. John then switched off the engine, made himself comfortable on the ATV’s saddle, and enjoyed a little snack while Jake led Olivia and Sokolov across the traverse, sometimes pushing the bikes, sometimes carrying them, but never riding them. They were clearly making for a spur of cream-colored granite thrust out westward from the summit of Abandon Mountain. Perhaps a thousand feet below them, in the lee of that spur, were the remains of what Olivia took to be an abandoned mine: a roadhead, some old shacks devastated by weather, some rusted-out trucks and abandoned equipment. She understood Jake’s warning now: if they’d had a GPS, they probably would have made for that site. But the road leading away from it went in the wrong direction and would take them miles out of their way. They only way to get past it was this arduous traversal of the slope high above. The spur seemed to bar their way, and she wondered how they would ever get past it, but Jake assured her that it was not as forbidding as it looked. And indeed as they struggled closer, Olivia was able to make out a series of natural ramps and ledges that seemed as though they would give much better footing than the loose talus. Seen from a distance, the spur had been foreshortened in a way that made it look very steep — almost a vertical cliff. But as they drew closer, she perceived that this had just been a trick of the eyes and that its slope was actually quite manageable.

This pleasing prospect only made the trip to it seem that much longer. But in due time they reached a place where they could finally stand on hard and reasonably level ground. Olivia was all for stopping there and having a little snack, but Jake talked her into clambering up over the spur. This they did easily, even riding the bicycles for part of the way, and finally attained the flattish top of the great outcropping, from which they could look back the way they’d come and see John still sitting on the red ATV a couple of miles behind them, as well as enjoy a previously hidden vista to the north.

Several miles away, their path was barred by a high ridge running approximately east-west that Jake assured them was north of the border. Far below them, and a little closer, was a dark green kettle in the terrain, producing a dim roaring noise and partly shrouded in humidity. This, Jake said, was American Falls, which, as the name implied, was just south of the border. Between those two landmarks, and making use of a compass, it was easy to envision the east-west line of the forty-ninth parallel running between them.

All they had to do was get there; and that, Jake said, was straightforward from here on out. He had printed out some maps of the area and added hand-drawn notations showing them useful landmarks and telling them what to avoid.

This, in other words, was where they would be parting company. Olivia thanked him, and even hugged him, hoping that she was not trespassing on any moral/religious boundaries by doing so. Sokolov shook his hand and thanked him politely but, as she thought, a trifle coldly. Later, maybe, she could find out what he really thought of Jake and his people. But maybe she was misreading the situation; perhaps the Russian’s coolness, his evident haste to be finished with the pleasantries, was just him being focused on the mission (he would probably think of it as a mission) at hand: getting out of this country and figuring out what was going to come next. And for a man in that state of mind, being able to look out and see the border engendered a powerful urge to get moving and get it behind him.

So Jake turned back and coasted on his bicycle down the side of the spur to a place where it became positively dangerous and then hopped off it and resumed the arduous trudge back across the talus slope. Olivia, who had been known to harbor slight feelings of resentment when she found herself obligated to give a friend a lift to Heathrow, felt ashamed by comparison.

But she was with a man who had little time or patience for such ruminations, so they were on their way as soon as they could down a few swallows of water and finish their candy bars. The north side of the spur was a different proposition from the one they had just climbed, being flatter, smoother, and easier to move on at first. They were pushing and sometimes carrying the bicycles, picking their way down among huge shivered boulders, headed for a stretch of talus that would take them down into the tree line a couple of hundred meters below.

Olivia had been hearing a dim whacka-whacka-whacka noise for a few moments.

“Helicopter,” Sokolov said, and drew into the shadow of a boulder, indicating with a look at Olivia that she might want to do the same. They laid the bikes on their sides and then squatted down.

A minute later, a small helicopter, moving at a leisurely pace, traversed across the broad valley to the west of them, headed generally north. It slowed and descended as it drew closer to the falls and hovered there for a couple of minutes. Then its tail elevated, and it began to head north.

“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Olivia asked. “They’re not cops.”

Sokolov seemed to have been thinking quite hard about the same question. He shrugged. “It is not how I would do it,” he said. “But someone is looking for something. It is better that we not be seen.”

“In a few more minutes, we’ll be down in the trees,” she pointed out, tapping a notation on Jake’s map.

“Then let us go that way while they are looking at something else,” Sokolov suggested, and rose to his feet and picked up his bicycle.

The chopper, flying quite close to the ground now, had disappeared from view among the convolutions of the ridges and valleys. Sokolov now set a pace that Olivia was barely able to keep up with. He was too much the gentleman to leave her far behind, but she did not want to make him stop and wait any more than was strictly necessary. They soon emerged from the boulder field and began to pick their way straight down the talus slope toward the trees.

The footing was treacherous and demanded all her attention. So she almost rear-ended him. He had pulled up short and was holding out a hand for silence.

“What?” she asked. She had veered to the left to avoid a collision and now found herself nearly abreast of him.

“Shooting, maybe,” he said.

They stood absolutely silent for a minute, then two, then three. Finally Sokolov began to breathe more deeply and to show interest in things around them. He hitched his bottom up onto the seat of his bicycle, got a foot on a pedal, and eyed the slope below. Wondering if he could take it on wheels. Olivia was praying he wouldn’t.

“Interesting that there is no more helicopter,” he pointed out.

“Maybe they landed.”

“Blades would still be moving, I think.”

His sentence was punctuated by a sharp bang, impressively loud even though it was at a great distance. Echoes continued to reach them, reflecting from various slopes, for what seemed like a full sixty seconds afterward.

Sokolov’s eyes met Olivia’s. He saw the uncertainty on her face. Read her mind, perhaps, as she got ready to put forth the theory that it was a big tree branch snapping, or a stick of dynamite going off in a mining operation.

“Ordnance,” Sokolov said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We are in some kind of little war.” Then, seeing a look of incomprehension or disbelief on her face: “Jones is here.”

SEAMUS DID NOT have a direct line of sight to what happened above, but his eyes saw a sort of blood comet hurtling upward just a moment before his eardrums were all but staved in. The comet expanded and faded to a bank of pink fog that, mercifully, was blown in another direction by the light breeze coming up out of the valley.

Yuxia was standing next to the helicopter, where she had been bantering with the pilot, trying to get his mind off his troubles. She had belatedly clapped her hands over the side of her head and was standing there with her mouth in an O, eyes darting around uncertainly. Richard Forthrast seemed to have been taken by a dizzy spell and sat down roughly on the ground and hugged his knees, staring in an unfocused way in the general direction of the explosion. Seamus noted with approval and interest that, even as Richard had been semicollapsing to the ground, he had taken care to manage the shotgun hanging from his shoulder, making sure that its barrel did not dig into the ground and get jammed with dirt.

“Care to fill me in on anything?” Seamus asked, when he felt as though he had some chance of being able to hear the answer.

“That was my friend Chet,” Richard answered.

“The casualty on the rock?”

Richard nodded. “He had a claymore mine strapped to his chest. He was going to use it on those guys, if he got an opportunity.”

“Well, I guess an opportunity presented itself,” Seamus said. It was not an exquisitely sensitive thing to say. Richard’s eyes jumped quickly toward his face, checking for signs of archness. But Seamus had said it, and meant it, quite seriously. Richard broke eye contact and squinted up the slope.

“The question is how many did he get?”

“There were two jihadists?”

“And one man-eating cougar.”

Now it was Seamus’s turn to look at Richard for signs of sarcasm. But the latter had deadpanned it.

“If the jihadists had a lick of sense,” Seamus said, “they wouldn’t have been standing right next to each other. We had better assume that at least one of them is still alive. And it is safest to assume that he is the sniper.”

“And here we are with a shotgun and a pistol,” Richard pointed out.

“What is that thing loaded with? Slugs or — ”

“Buckshot,” Richard said. “Four shells remaining.”

“What are these words?” Yuxia asked.

“All the guns we have,” Richard explained, “can only hit things that are close. Up above us, we think is a man with a gun who can hit things from far away.”

Seamus considered it. “If there’s anything to your Wikipedia entry, you know the way from here.”

“That much of it is actually true,” Richard said.

“If the three of us go together, the following will happen,” Seamus said. “The sniper will come down here and — ” He nodded toward the chopper and flicked his thumb across his throat, indicating the likely fate of the crippled pilot. “Then he will track us down the valley and try to pick us off one by one. So that’s not what we’re going to do.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Richard asked him.

“A man in his element. Here’s how this is going to go. I am going to find a blind where I can hang out. You two, Richard and Yuxia, are going to get out of here and try to find your way to safety. If the sniper comes here, I will kill him. If he follows you, then I will follow him. That’s good for the pilot” — he nodded toward the chopper — “because he’s got enough warm clothes and water and stuff to stay alive here for a little while as long as fucking jihadist snipers aren’t coming after him.”

“What about the man-eating lion?” Yuxia put in.

“Fuck!” Seamus said, and then immediately felt bad since it made Yuxia flinch. “I don’t know. I’ll warn the pilot. Tell him to keep the door closed.”

A moment passed.

“What are you guys waiting for?” Seamus asked.

JUST BEFORE AWAKENING, she had dreamed of the flight from Eritrea, the six-month barefoot march into the Sudan and the quest for a refugee camp willing to take her group. The faces had faded from her memory, but the landscape, the vegetation, the feel of the march had stayed with her and become the continuo line underlying many of her dreams. Usually it was northern Eritrea, which they had marched through during the first days of the journey, when her mind had been fully open to the new sights and impressions that, once they hiked free of the caves in which she had spent her earliest years, seemed to present themselves to her every moment. The terrain was endless brown hills separated by the arroyos of seasonal streams and barely misted with scrubby vegetation. Nothing like the terrain she was running through now, densely grown with huge cedars and carpeted with ferns. But she knew that if she gained enough altitude, she would find herself in territory like what she and Chet had traveled through yesterday: steep, wide-open country where you could see for miles. And going there was not optional. If she stayed to the low moist valley of the river that flowed south from American Falls, it would lead her off in the wrong direction, taking her down into the basin of a major lake system that drained southward. It might be two days’ hiking down into those lakes before she could reach a place where she could summon help. To reach Uncle Jake’s, she would have to climb out of the valley and above the tree line to the lower reaches of Abandon Mountain, which she would have to traverse for several miles until she came to the headwaters of Prohibition Crick. That bit, she already knew, was going to be the desperate part: that was where she’d have to summon whatever it was the leaders of her refugee group had summoned on the worst days of their trek, when they were tired, short on food and water, and being pursued by men with guns.

The only thing that was going to make it possible was that she had a head start. The jihadists would have to climb farther out of the valley than she would. Even so, it was a long climb; and she feared that they would be able to narrow the gap, or even catch up with her, before she broke out above the tree line and into country where it would be impossible to hide.

So there was only one thing for it, and that was to run like hell and not stop for anything. She had grabbed all the water she had — the CamelBak pilfered from the Schloss, about three-quarters full — and as many energy bars as she could stuff into her pockets, and then simply lit out in the direction Richard had indicated. Down below, the jihadists were making it easy for her by shouting to one another and communicating on loud walkie-talkies.

Her first objective — which she achieved perhaps half an hour after parting from Richard — was to make contact with a trail that switchbacked up out of the gorge. The idea of following a marked trail was ridiculous in a way, since the jihadists would use the same route, and therefore be on her tail the entire way. But the terrain left no choice; the slope seemed nearly vertical when viewed from below, and it was a wildly uneven jumble of fallen, rotting logs. To bushwhack to the top would have taken days, if it were possible at all. Switchbacking up the trail, Richard had assured her, could be done in hours by a man carrying heavy cargo on his back.

She didn’t reckon she had hours.

She slammed to a halt when the trail came into view, then retreated several paces and squatted in ferns to listen and think for a moment. While she was doing that, she sucked water out of the tube of the CamelBak and forced herself to eat a food bar. The sounds being made by the jihadists had become fainter during her run, which was of course better than the alternative, but still no reason to relax. If they knew what was good for them, they were talking less and running more, working their way down the bank of the river and looking for the head of this trail, just a few hundred yards below where she was now perched.

She had been peeling off layers as she ran, tying them around her waist, and was now dressed in a black tank top and cargo pants with the legs rolled up to expose her calves. She understood now that she would have to discard the outer layers. They would do nothing but slow her down. And they were bright pastel colors that could be seen for miles. The Girl Scout in her was screaming that it was a bad idea, that she’d become hypothermic the moment she stopped running.

But if she stopped running, she would be dead much sooner from other causes. So she dropped all those layers of fleece that Jones had bought for her at various Walmarts, stuffing them under a rotten log where men running up the trail would be unlikely to notice them, and went on with nothing except the clothes on her body and the water pouch slung on her back.

And then it was just switchbacks and switchbacks, seemingly forever. She struggled, every second, with the desire to slow down, to stop and take a rest, reminding herself over and over that the men behind her were used to scampering around Afghanistan like mountain goats. For all she knew, Jones was putting guns to their heads to force them to go faster. So she tried to remember what that was like — Jones putting a gun to her head — and to use that to eke out a little more speed. As much as fear told her to keep looking down, her brain told her to keep looking up, trying to make out the next leg of the switchback on the slope above her. For sometimes these things were designed as much for erosion control as for hiking efficiency, and there might be places where she could dash straight up the slope for, say, fifty feet and thereby cut off hundreds of feet of a switchback’s apex. She perceived a few such opportunities and took them, arms flailing and legs scrambling as some part of her mind told her, If I had only stayed on the trail, I’d already be long past this point! Listening to that voice, then, she ignored a couple of such opportunities and then heard another voice saying, If you had taken the shortcut, you’d be way ahead. There was no getting away from those voices, so she tried to take each opportunity that looked worth it. The jihadists, she knew, didn’t have to make such choices; they could split up and send half the group one way and half the other, let the best men win.

Which, if true, must mean that they were getting widely spread out on the trail below her. She wouldn’t have to contend with all of them at once.

Thank God Jahandar had stayed behind. But she’d been taking a silent inventory of their weapons and seen other guns perfectly capable of killing at long range.

She had no concept of time’s passage and had forgotten to count switchbacks. But she had the clear sense that the canopy overhead was thinning out, the light growing brighter, the switchbacks becoming less acute as the slope abated.

She got to a point where she simply could not run anymore, so she permitted herself to drop into a brisk walk while she drank more water — she hadn’t been drinking enough, the CamelBak was only half empty — and ate another couple of bars. She was now on something that almost felt like a proper hike through the woods. Still gaining altitude but no longer with the sense of clinging to a cliff face. Gazing ahead and up-slope through increasingly common gaps between trees, she saw the high terrain that she had both longed for and dreaded all through the ascent, and towering above it the bare scarp of Abandon Mountain, which had nothing to recommend it as a tourist attraction unless you were a big fan of bleak. It looked like a science-fiction magazine cover, a mountain on some dead moon of Jupiter.

It was during this little respite that she heard the sound of a helicopter somewhere and debated whether she ought to run out into the open and flag it down. But it was hopeless; the chopper was a good distance away and the sight lines obscured by trees.

If only she had saved some of those bright pastel garments so that she could wave them in the air.

Speaking of which, the air was now bitingly cold on her shoulders. She bolted the last of her energy bar and forced herself to accelerate into a trot, then slowly build that up into a run.

She was just hitting her stride when she heard a sharp cracking boom. Because of the way it echoed around all the neighboring slopes, she found it difficult to judge direction. She was fairly certain, though, that it had sounded out of the direction from which she had just come. Miles away.

There was no one moment, no one place when she made the decision to go for it. The trees became thinner and thinner, the sight lines became clearer and longer, the ground angled more and more steeply under her feet. Minutes ago, she had been running across nearly level ground. But now she noticed that she was scrambling, almost on all fours, up a talus slope; looking back and down to judge her progress, she saw a good quarter of a mile of perfectly open ground behind and below her, terminated in the distance by a fringe of scrubby undergrowth that shortly developed into proper forest.

Down in that forest she could see movement. At least one man, possibly two of them. They were at most five minutes behind her: a sufficient head start to keep her alive in the dense forest down below, but, up here, just enough to make it a challenging shot.

She snapped her head back around to scan the slope above her, hoping she might see a place to take cover.

In most ways, this place could not have been worse. During her geoengineering studies, she had learned all about the angle of repose, which was the slope that a heap of particulate matter naturally adopted over time; it explained the shape of an anthill, a mound of sugar, a pile of gravel, or a mountain of scree. The angle was different for each type of material. Its exact value was not important here. What was important was that the angle was everywhere the same, and so slopes made of such materials tended to be ruler straight. There were no mounds or bulges to hide behind.

And — as she kept being reminded — they were inherently unstable. As long as she remained on areas of larger rocks, her weight was not sufficient to break anything loose, but when she strayed into sandy or gravely areas she set off little avalanches. Nothing big enough to be dangerous, either to her or (unfortunately) those below her, but enough to give her the impression that she was climbing on a treadmill, burning energy but, like Sisyphus, going nowhere.

She had made it about two-thirds of the way up this sharpshooter’s paradise when she began to hear guns firing from below. At first, a loose and irregular string of four or five pops, probably shots from a pistol. One of them whanged off a football-sized rock perhaps ten feet away from her and dislodged it. It went tumbling down the slope, neither picking up speed nor slowing down, occasionally loosening smaller stones but not setting off anything like a proper avalanche. So the shooter had missed her by a mile, which was to be expected with that sort of a weapon at this distance; but the mere fact of being shot at and of seeing bullets hit things nearby had frozen her in a low crouch for several moments — moments that, she knew, the slower members of Jones’s crew were using to make up for lost time. She forced herself to keep scrambling, heading for a patch about twenty feet above her that seemed to include a few larger rocks — perhaps just enough that she could flatten herself behind them. This worked for all of about three seconds, until a hellish racket started up from below, so startling her that she planted a foot wrong, lost her footing, and fell hard, banging one elbow and nearly planting her face. The air around her was full of sharp dust and zinging fragments of rock. Someone down there had opened up with a fully automatic weapon. She hazarded a look down and saw, through a cloud of kicked-up rock dust, one of the jihadists planted there with a submachine gun braced on his hip. Not one of the bigger assault rifles, which fired high-velocity rifle rounds. This would be loaded with pistol rounds. Still perfectly capable of tearing up her body, of course, but intended for short-range work. Urban combat. Mowing down commuters on buses.

The shooter’s companion — the one who had been firing the pistol a few moments earlier — shouted some advice at him, and he sullenly raised the weapon from his hip to his shoulder. Yes, he was actually going to try aiming it this time.

Zula got up and scrambled as hard as she could.

More shouted debate from below. The man with the submachine gun had been persuaded that he would get better results if he deployed its collapsible stock and braced it against his shoulder.

While this was being done Zula was putting everything she had into a frantic series of leaps and pounces. When frantic pawing didn’t work, she paused, breathed, planted feet and hands on big rocks, and hurled her body upward.

The noise began again and then stopped; a hail of rock splinters peppered her back. Another burst then struck the slope above her, sending a few stones tumbling down, forcing her to dodge sideways for a couple of yards. Something tugged at the loose fabric of her cargo trousers, behind her thigh, and she dared not believe that a bullet had passed through it. A brief silence, and then several rounds chattered against a mosaic of bigger rocks, perhaps watermelon sized, just ahead of her: the shooter had figured out where she was going and was trying to drive her back. But she had already launched herself and could not have changed her course even if she’d had second thoughts. Something whacked her in the mouth. She landed on her belly and flattened herself on the upper side of this tiny collection of larger stones. She could not see the shooter; that was good. Rounds struck near her feet. She kicked wildly, bashing a few protuberant rocks out of the way, enabling her to settle her legs and her feet just a few inches lower. Important inches.

She was choking on something that was cold and sharp and hard, and hot and sticky and wet at the same time. She hocked and spat and felt the hard thing leave her mouth, sending a jolt of pain up into her skull.

Actually it was two hard things, borne on a spate of blood and saliva: a chip of rock, about the size of a chickpea, but angular and sharp. And a tooth that it had apparently sheared off at its root when the rock chip had flown into her mouth, which had been open and gasping for air. Feeling with her tongue, she found a seeping hole where her right canine ought to have been. In front of that her upper lip was numb and felt huge. It was going to hurt soon, if she lived that long.

A few more bursts of fire swept across the tiny bulwark of stones behind which she was hiding, but to no effect, other than psychological. She could hear the men talking down below. Shouting, actually, since they had deafened themselves by playing with loud toys.

What would she do in their situation? Leave the one with the submachine gun below to keep her pinned in place with occasional bursts of fire. Meanwhile the one with the pistol could scramble up the slope and find an angle from which to shoot at her.

She said good-bye to her tooth, wiped her bloody hand on her shirt, then groped down the side of her body until she found the Glock in the cargo pocket of her trousers. This she pulled out and brought up in front of her face. She had no idea how many rounds it contained. Since she seemed to have some time, she ejected its clip and rotated the back of it into the sunlight so that she could see through the little holes in its back and count the bullets. This was a seventeen-round magazine that contained nine rounds at the moment; a tenth was already chambered. She shoved the clip back into the pistol’s grip, made sure it was firmly seated, and slipped her finger carefully over the trigger, which was in its forward position: her weapon was cocked and ready to fire.

YUXIA ABOUT-FACED AND hurled herself down into the forest with Richard mounting the hottest pursuit of which he was capable. Seamus was very close to having his feelings hurt by the decisiveness with which the young lady had embraced, and acted upon, his plan. He had been assuming that there would be a lengthy and tedious transitional phase during which he would be obliged to convince her, against all of her soft womanly emotions, to leave him behind in this mortally dangerous situation: semiexposed, facing an enemy with a vastly longer-range weapon, yet unable to maneuver freely because of the requirement not to abandon Jack the chopper pilot.

In the minutes after she and Richard departed, Seamus had to keep himself busy moving about the area in a very specific manner, trying to situate himself so that the sniper above would (preferably) not be able to see him, or (barring that) not be able to get a good shot off at him. His camouflage clothing, ironically, was doing him very little good. The helicopter had come to a halt in a small and sparse collection of trees surrounded on three sides by a field of blindingly white snow. Unless he wanted to expose himself on that snow like a cockroach in a bathtub, he only had one way out, which was to move downhill into a little draw, lined with shrubs and scrubby little coniferous trees, that drained this part of the slope and eventually turned into a tributary of the river that plunged over the American Falls. This was the route that Yuxia and Richard had taken. There was little doubt in Seamus’s mind that those two were safe, at least for the time being. He was hoping that the sniper would see the disturbance that they made in the low foliage as they hustled through it, hear them crashing through dry undergrowth and snapping branches with their feet, and decide to chase after them, which would bring him directly across Seamus’s field of fire. The sniper couldn’t possibly know how many surviving people were in this party, and he couldn’t know how many had just run down the draw; with luck he would assume that they had all run off and feel no inhibitions about giving chase openly.

Seamus found a place that suited him, where he was able to settle himself into a little depression in the ground and peer uphill between tree trunks. He had pulled the hood of his jacket up over his head and cinched its drawstring tight, covering his hair and as much as possible of the oval of his face. This interfered with hearing and peripheral vision but seemed preferable to giving the sniper a nice round flesh-colored target. Sunglasses hid his eyes. He settled in to wait.

The thing with Yuxia meant nothing, he convinced himself. It wasn’t like she had been living in normal circumstances for the last couple of weeks. Even before recent events, she had been decisive and strong-minded, probably to the point where people in her village considered her a little weird. He could see that much. All this stuff with the Russians, with Jones, the Philippine excursion, the chopper crash — it had just made her more so. She just wanted to get out of this alive.

Having satisfied himself as to that, he began questioning his judgment in re the matter of Jack the pilot. If the only objective was to keep Jack’s spine stabilized until medical help could be brought in, then leaving him tightly strapped into his seat was probably a good move. But in these circumstances, leaving him there, exposed to observation and to fire from above, seemed downright ghoulish.

Jack was moving his arms. It wasn’t clear why. Trying to actually do something? Or just flailing around in agony? A lot of times, trauma did not actually hurt. The pain came later. Maybe this was happening to him now. It was difficult to see what was going on in there. The chopper’s windscreen was a casserole of cracks and shards.

“Seamus,” Jack called, “I need to get out of here.”

“Fuck!” Seamus said under his breath.

“Seamus! Help me, man! I’m in a lot of pain!”

Seamus was biting his tongue. He wanted to tell Jack to shut up, but he had no idea how close the sniper might be, whether he could hear anything that Seamus might say.

But Jack was already making it pretty obvious that someone else was down here with him and that his name was Seamus.

He heard the distinctive and never-to-be-forgotten sound of a high-velocity round passing through the vicinity, and a sharp pop/tinkle from the direction of the chopper, and, on its heels, the crack of a rifle shot from up the slope.

The temptation here, of course, was to engage in sudden movement, which was exactly what the sniper would be looking for. Seamus contented himself with swiveling his eyeballs to examine the chopper. It was such a wreck that it was difficult to see clear evidence of its having been newly shot. But as he was watching, he heard the bullet sound again and saw another round impact the fuselage, behind the cabin, below the engine. Searching its vicinity, he now saw the previous bullet hole, just a hand’s breadth away.

Another hole appeared, between the first two.

The fucker was using the chopper as a target to zero his sights.

No, wait. What was that smell?

“Gasoline!” Jack cried. “The tank is ruptured, I’m getting the hell out of here, Seamus!” And Seamus saw Jack lurch free as he undid his harness. The sudden movement caused him to scream. Seamus, like anyone else who was not a complete sociopath, felt sympathy for Jack and wanted to help him, or at least to call out some encouraging words. But those lovely altruistic instincts were completely suppressed, at the moment, by tactical calculations. Jack was actually doing the right thing, without any help, or even encouragement, from Seamus. If Seamus were to move or to call out now, he’d be giving the sniper exactly what the sniper wanted, and he wouldn’t be doing Jack any good at all.

Because — if Seamus were reading the situation correctly — the sniper suspected that there was another person down here, another person who was named Seamus and who was assumed to be able-bodied. That much he could have guessed from overhearing Jack. His plan had been to draw Seamus out of cover by creating an implicit threat to cremate the helpless pilot.

Now that Jack was moving, though, the sniper had to shoot at him directly in order to create a threat. And this was difficult since much of the helicopter was between him and the target. Jack had tumbled out the chopper’s side door and collapsed to the ground in a manner that could not have been pleasant for him. He was now dragging himself downhill, headed for the draw, albeit very slowly, his fear of the burning gasoline overriding the pain in his back.

The gasoline was ice cold and would be more difficult to ignite than usual. Merely shooting at it from a distance might not do the trick and would waste bullets. Seamus, a connoisseur of high-speed gun photography, knew that a plume of still-burning gunpowder and hot gas would erupt from the barrel of his Sig when he fired a round and probably set fire to the fuel — if he could get close enough.

Unfortunately, he was something like twenty feet away from the chopper.

Jack was moving commendably for a man with a serious spinal injury, dragging himself down the slope on his elbows.

Seamus stood up. He just stood straight up and gazed directly up the slope for perhaps two seconds and got an excellent view of the sniper, who was ensconced on a rock in the seated position, rifle at the ready, but gazing over the top of his scope, taking in a general view of the scene. The sniper reacted quickly, raising the weapon and getting his eye socketed into the scope, trying to find Seamus with it. But as Seamus knew perfectly well, these things took time. Seamus had a pretty good idea of how long they took. The transition from normal vision to the world as seen through the scope was jarring and confusing to the visual system no matter how many times you practiced it; the scope was never aimed in exactly the right direction, you had to swing the barrel around to bring the target into view, and there was a tendency to overmove it when you were hurrying to catch up with something that was moving rapidly.

And Seamus was definitely doing that. Having fixed an image of the sniper in his mind, he spun and ran toward the chopper, not in a straight line but in a series of zigzagging lunges, like Nate Robinson driving through a zone defense, and when he reached a place where he could see the side of the chopper wet with streaming gasoline, he aimed his Sig right at it, hurled himself forward, planted his feet for a quick reversal, and pulled the trigger three times as fast as his finger would move. Without pausing to observe the results, he spun away and shoved off with all the force he could muster in both legs, gaining himself an immediate distance of maybe six or eight feet. He dove to his belly and skidded across a stew of melting snow and icy mud that was suddenly growing bright, as though Venetian blinds had been opened to let the rays of the sun invade this little copse of trees. A couple of downhill somersaults got him clear of the burning wreck while (he hoped) putting out any fires that might have started on his back. Then he crawled into the draw, following the rut that Jack had made a few moments before.

He caught up with the stricken pilot in a location that was actually rather good: a water-worn cleft, forming a bottleneck in the draw, overgrown with vegetation, difficult to see or to shoot into. They were only a stone’s throw downhill from the chopper but, tactically, it was a whole different world.

Seamus motioned for Jack to stop and make himself comfortable. He did not aim his Sig at the pilot, but he certainly made no secret of the fact that it was right there in his hand, ready to fire. “If you make another fucking sound, I’ll shoot you dead,” he said. “Sorry, but those are the rules. Do you understand the rules?”

Jack nodded.

“Sniper has a predicament,” Seamus said. “He suspects we are still alive. This makes him want to stay behind and take care of us. But he knows that we sent other people on ahead of us. He needs to catch up with them and kill them. I am betting that the psychological impact of what just happened will be that he says, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to go look for the other guys.’ He will bypass this draw, which looks scary to him because it equalizes the odds — his long gun doesn’t do him any good, he has to get close, within range of this.” Seamus gave the Sig a little flick of the wrist. “He’ll go past us. I’ll follow him. You’ll stay here. If you want, you can make your way back to the chopper after it stops exploding, and throw some sticks on the fire and warm yourself up.”

Jack nodded again.

“Now, I can’t see shit from here, so I have to crawl up out of this hole and look around. We’ll get you help as soon as we can. Got that?”

Jack nodded.

“Good luck. I hope you never again have a day that sucks as hard as this one.” Seamus safetied his pistol, holstered it under his arm, and began to crawl up out of the draw on elbows and knees. When he reached a place where he could lie still, he burrowed as best he could into dry leaves and pine needles, and waited, motionless. But he didn’t have to wait long before he saw the sniper walk past, tromping and skidding awkwardly in the snow, moving parallel to the tree line, just far enough away that hitting him with a pistol would have been a miracle shot. He was looking nervously into the trees as he went. He knew, or at least suspected, that he was in view of someone who had every intention of following him. But Seamus had guessed right: the sniper simply couldn’t wait any longer. He had pressing business down-valley.

The obvious trick would be for the sniper to hike out of sight, stop, conceal himself, and wait until Seamus blundered into his sights. Seamus, accordingly, took his time and moved, when he did decide to move, in the cover of the foliage that lined the draw. Beyond the bottleneck where Jack was hiding, it broadened steadily until it developed into a valley, snow-free and heavily forested. Over the next quarter of an hour, Seamus, without exposing himself, was able to track the sniper’s footprints in the snow. But eventually the trail led down into the forest, forcing Seamus to up his game a little bit and begin tracking the sharpshooter like wild game. Before he made his plunge into the valley, he paused for a few moments to take a good look around, get his surroundings fixed in his head, make sure that he wasn’t missing anything that could be important later. Such as another contingent of jihadists bringing up the rear. It would be embarrassing to fail to notice such a thing.

He did not see another contingent of jihadists. But he was troubled by the feeling that he had seen something moving across the snow, roughly following the path that the sniper had taken. He saw nothing. He swept his gaze up and down the length of the trail that the sniper had left and convinced himself that nothing was on it. From place to place, though, it passed over a patch of khaki-colored rock that had been left exposed by the melting sun, and it had to be admitted that such places were excellent for the concealment of anything that happened to be light brown in color. After a while, with some hard looking and almost as hard thinking, he convinced himself that something might be crouching up on one of those patches, looking back at him, waiting for him to take his gaze away so that it could go back into motion.

Which might be for real, or just his imagination. But if it were for real, he could sit here all day staring at it and nothing would ever happen. So he turned his back on it and stalked into the forest.

DURING HER TIME among the jihadists, Zula had often been bemused by the slapdash and informal way that they went about certain activities. In this she recognized some of her own heritage: a mind-set and a collection of habits that had eventually been drilled out of her by Iowans. It had something to do with the way that such people assessed risk. Some might call it fatalism born of religious doctrine; others might point out that persons growing up in regions where war, disease, and famine were chronic conditions would naturally have a different set of instincts and reactions where danger was concerned.

And so when the pistol-carrying jihadist strolled out into the open and began to hike up the open slope directly toward Zula, she was not quite as dumbfounded as she might have been, had she never been around people who manifested the Third World attitude toward risk.

It could be that the man simply did not understand that Zula was armed. She had not fired the weapon recently, certainly had not showed it to them. He imagined that he would simply be able to walk up the slope, get close to her, and shoot her.

Or perhaps the plan was to take her prisoner again?

It didn’t matter. The result was the same: a moment was approaching in which Zula — lying prone, and reasonably well sheltered behind rocks — would place this man’s center of mass in her sights and pull the trigger. The closer she let him get, the easier the shot would be. As the Girl Scout in her might have predicted, she was getting cold, and her hands were beginning to shake. So she had to fight the temptation to shoot early. Better to wait for him to grow larger in the sights of the gun. But if she let him get too close, he might see the pistol in her hands.

She was lying on her side, having plastered her body into a tiny depression. It was awkward and uncomfortable. But the man below, sweeping the area with submachine-gun fire, had not been able to hit her with anything other than rock fragments, and that argued for not moving. Some little shift in position that might feel inconsequential to her could have the result of exposing some part of her body to fire.

Still — it was tempting. Her view of the man with the pistol was blocked by the pattern of the rubble. If she jackknifed, moved forward just a bit, she’d be able to see him clearly, brace her arms on a sort of flat tablet of rock a few feet away, get off the shot from a greater, and safer, distance.

Those were her thoughts while she waited and grew cold and shivery and stiff. She wondered what had caused the huge explosion she had heard earlier. Chet setting off the Claymore mine seemed like the obvious explanation. She wondered what that implied about the fate of Chet, and about Richard who had gone to look for him. She wondered what the story was on the helicopter, and whether it would be coming back.

Her meditations were interrupted by new movement, seen in the corner of her eye. She had been looking directly at the jihadist with the pistol, visible only from the shoulders up, struggling up the same scree slope she had climbed a little while ago. She now turned her head to see that the man with the submachine gun had been moving too, trying to get a new angle.

His eyes locked with hers for a moment. He looked excited and raised the weapon to his shoulder, taking aim.

She wriggled forward, moving to the new position a couple of yards ahead. The man with the pistol was startlingly close. He was flailing his arms, trying to maintain his balance. She stretched out her arms on the rock and lined up the front and rear sights, then swung them onto the dark form of the climber.

A single loud noise sounded from above her. Her ears suggested as much. The climber’s face proved it. For his immediate reaction was to freeze and look up the slope.

She pulled the trigger, felt the pistol jerk as its action cycled, saw the shell casing tinkle onto the rocks nearby.

The man was just standing there with a sort of Oh shit look on his face, and she thought for a moment that she must have missed him. But then he tried to sit down, which wasn’t going to work when facing up a steep slope. His legs flew up in the air before his ass had even touched the ground, and he began to turn back-somersaults down the mountain, gathering speed as he went.

She twitched her head around to look at the man with the submachine gun. But he was gone. Raising her head carefully, she found him at the base of the slope, lying spread-eagled.

The edge of the wood now lit up with muzzle flashes from two different weapons: freshly arrived jihadists who had witnessed all of this. But if they were firing at Zula, they were missing by a mile.

Answering fire now came from above: single shots, fired deliberately. These seemed to discourage the shooters below. Zula rolled on her back, rested her head on that flat rock, tried to figure out where it was coming from. The obvious answer was a large mass of solid stone, about the size of a city block, that jutted out from the ramp of talus. She inferred that it had a flattish top and that someone was up on top of it with a long gun.

Then her eye was drawn to movement. Along the side of that outcropping, someone was waving a piece of cloth. A T-shirt. Zula turned to look at this and, after a few moments, waved back.

A person emerged into view and began to make huge beckoning motions toward Zula. Run to me.

Zula had no idea who it was. She got up and began running anyway. She was tired of being cold and she was tired of being alone, and she was willing to try anything. Even if some risk was involved. Call it fatalism. But the piercing bangs that sounded overhead — high-powered rifle rounds lancing down into the tree line from the top of the rock — seemed to give the men below second thoughts about coming out to shoot at her.

SOKOLOV’S IMMEDIATE REACTION to the loud bang was to shed his backpack, open it up, and begin assembling the assault rifle that Igor had taken from Peter and that he had taken from Igor. The logic of this move was far from obvious to Olivia. They were only a couple of miles away from a country in which possession of this gun would be spectacularly illegal. They had not seen another living soul today, other than the Forthrasts. But Sokolov was firm in his conviction that what they had heard was not a mining blast but the detonation of a tactical military device and that they were now in a state of open war with unseen and unknown enemies.

Olivia saw, then, how it all made sense. She had known it all along, really, but had suppressed it out of a sort of bureaucratic instinct: the fear that she would never be able to sell the idea in a meeting. Of course Jones would interrogate Zula, read Richard’s Wikipedia entry, learn about the smuggling, go to his place near Elphinstone, use Zula as leverage to make Richard guide him across the border. And of course the explosion at the border crossing yesterday had just been a diversion.

He was here, now.

How long had Sokolov known it? Until the moment of the blast he had betrayed no suspicions that they might be hiking into a free-fire zone with a gang of heavily armed jihadists. But she saw now that he had been expecting this all along.

Had he been playing her?

It was more complicated than that, she suspected. He had been playing the odds. There were good reasons for Olivia and Sokolov to cross the border. They could have done it anywhere. Sokolov had favored the crossing point that was most likely to produce a meeting with Jones.

They spent a quarter of an hour — though it seemed much longer — staging a tactical retreat back up the slope, through the boulder field, to the top of the rocky spur where they had parted company with Jake.

Inside Sokolov’s pack was a smaller bag, just a thin nylon stuff sack, made to hold a wadded-up sleeping bag. Once Sokolov had found a convenient place to lie prone on the top of the rock, he pulled this out by its drawstring and set it down on the rock. It clattered. It was full, she realized, of hard, heavy objects with corners. Once he had finished assembling the rifle, Sokolov zipped the bag’s drawstring open and dumped it out on the rock. It contained half a dozen curved plastic boxes: ammunition clips for the rifle. From their weight it was obvious that they were loaded.

Sokolov had gotten to Bourne’s Ford before her, made the rounds of local gun stores, bought all of this stuff, and loaded the clips. Just to be ready.

Okay, so he had been playing her. She found that it didn’t really bother her. Because, in a sense, she’d been playing him too. Hoping that something like this would happen.

In any case, there was little time for these metaphysical considerations. Sokolov — who had belly-crawled to the edge of the big flat rock — called her forward and got her to see what was going on below them: a young woman, brown-skinned, black-haired, in a tank top and cargo pants, scrambling up the slope in obvious fear for her life. Bursts of submachine-gun fire from a location that, at first, they were unable to see. By the time they had repositioned themselves to a place where Sokolov could get the man with the submachine gun in his sights, that man had stopped firing and was biding his time while a companion flailed and scrabbled up the slope with a pistol in one hand.

“Go down,” Sokolov commanded her, “and get Zula.”

This — more than the helicopter, the sudden appearance of the assault rifle, the shocking blasts of the submachine gun — snapped Olivia’s head around.

“That’s her!?”

Sokolov pulled his face away from the rifle’s sight and turned to give her a certain look that was very male, and very Russian.

“Okay,” she said, “but what about the guy with the pistol?”

“Zula is going to kill him,” Sokolov said.

“Seriously?”

The look again. “Seriously. But then. Only a short time — what do you call it — a window of opportunity — when she can run to safer place. I will fire suppression.”

ALL THE CHINESE people Richard had ever met had been sophisticated urbanites, so he had been half expecting that he would end up carrying the girl Yuxia on his back. But it became clear almost immediately that she was half mountain goat, or whatever the Chinese equivalent of a mountain goat was. This was made evident by the fact that he was always seeing her face. Because she was always ahead of him and frequently turned around to see what was taking him so long.

He was afraid that she was going to ask him whether he needed any help.

On one of those occasions, only a couple of minutes after they started running, she got an awed look on her face. Richard already felt as though he knew Yuxia, partly because of Zula’s description of her in the paper towel note. Her face was expressive and handsome, but not given to unguarded moments. Much of the time she had a keen and interested look about her, and frequently she flashed a knowing grin, as if enjoying a private joke. Frank astonishment was not something she would allow herself to manifest unless it was a really big deal. So Richard faltered and turned around, taking a couple of backward steps in an amazed, staggering gait. A mushroom cloud of yellow fire was turning inside out as it sprang into the air above the site of the chopper crash.

“I’m sure it’s okay,” he blurted out, turning back around and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder, encouraging her to get turned around and moving again. She recoiled, and not in a stop-harassing-me-you-dirty-old-man way. She had taken more damage in the chopper crash than she wanted to let on. When she did turn around, she did so stiffly, and Richard understood that the spryness he had been envying her for was at least partly an act, a willed refusal to show pain. Because she didn’t want men covering for her. Because chivalry sometimes came with a price.

“I didn’t get to know Seamus very well during the five minutes I spent watching the chopper crash and so forth,” Richard said, lengthening his stride and trying to draw the suddenly indecisive Yuxia along in his wake, “but he struck me as a smart guy who knows what he’s doing, and I don’t think that he would just hang around next to something that was getting ready to explode.”

She had started moving again, perhaps a little stung to see that a lumbering old man had gained several meters on her. He saw the stiffness in her neck now, the preoccupied look of someone who was working on a major headache.

“Listen,” he said, after a minute, “there’s no telling how long we are going to be running around in these mountains being chased by jihadists, and so I would like to introduce you to our new friend and traveling companion, Mr. Mossberg.”

Yuxia looked around theatrically, doing most of it with her eyes since the neck didn’t like to move. “I don’t see him,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” Richard said, and displayed the shotgun. Some part of him was aghast at the possible consequences of supplying Yuxia with a pump-action shotgun and the knowledge of how to use it, but, in general, this all felt right. “Have you seen these things in movies?”

“And video games,” she said. “You pull back on the slider.”

“Yeah. It’s called a forearm, for some reason. With this kind, sometimes you have to pull back hard — a soft pull doesn’t work.”

“It’s okay, I’m strong,” she said.

“Red, you’re dead,” he said, showing her the safety and flicking it back and forth a couple of times, alternately hiding and exposing the red dot. “Here, you try it. Just remember to keep your finger like this.” He showed her how he was keeping his index finger pointed forward along the side of the stock, not allowing it to touch the trigger.

“Oopsy daisy,” she said, nodding.

They had slowed to a brisk walk, but he deemed it a reasonable risk; it was important for her to know how to work this thing. He got the harness untangled from his clothing and handed her the gun, noting with approval that her index finger went naturally to the right place. “Pull the forearm back a little and you can see that there is a shell ready to fire,” he said.

“Shell equals bullet.”

“Shell is a word we use to mean a piece of ammunition, but here it’s not a bullet. It’s a lot of little balls.” He used his hands to pantomime them spraying outward. “Very powerful. But you have to be close, or the balls will spread out and miss the guy.”

“How close?”

“Twenty meters or less. And it helps if you aim it.”

She looked at him, not sure if he was being sarcastic. “I’m serious,” he said. “Put it to your shoulder, keep your cheek on the stock — the handle — and look down the barrel. Both eyes open.”

Yuxia came to a stop so that she could practice this, taking aim at a tree about ten yards away. “I want to shoot it,” she remarked, finding it funny and fascinating that she wanted this.

“Someday you can come to my family reunion and do all the shooting you want,” he promised her. “Not now. We only have four shells. And we don’t want Jahandar to hear us.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll give it back to you,” she said, sounding quite sullen. He looked sharply at her, and she flashed a grin. Fooled you!

“Probably a good idea,” he said. “He’ll shoot the one with the weapon first. Then you have to take it from me, and hide, and wait for him to come close.”

This remark seemed to take all the joy out of the situation, so they picked up the pace now and devoted all their attention to covering ground. He was surprised by the apparent speed with which they made it back to the spot where he had parted company with Zula earlier. This seemed like a natural place to take a break, or at least slow down, and take stock of their situation.

“I am glad I had so many free waffles,” Yuxia remarked, eyeing Richard.

“I’m running on fumes,” he confessed.

Yuxia didn’t seem to find this very reassuring. Richard straightened up and patted his belly. “Fortunately, I have a lot of stored energy.”

Yuxia gazed clinically at his gas tank.

“In another half an hour or so, we’ll be at a trail. A long climb up many switchbacks.”

“Switchbacks?”

“Zigzags. At that point, you should probably go on ahead. I’m just going to slow you down.”

“Who gets the gun?” she asked.

He thought about this question for a few moments. His brain was tired and working slow.

Then he understood that the question wasn’t meant to be answered. It was an impossible choice. They had to stay together.

Which meant that he needed to get off his ass.

“Thank you,” he said, and forced one foot to pass in front of the other.

“Is this where Zula went?” she asked him.

“I hope so. But Jones and the others probably followed her.”

“And now we are following them.”

“And Jahandar is following us.”

“If that is true,” Yuxia said, “I hope Seamus is following Jahandar.”

She seemed enormously comforted by that idea, so Richard held his tongue rather than speculate about the mountain lion that might be serving as the death train’s caboose.

“I am sooo glad Zula is alive,” Yuxia said, a few minutes later. Richard got the clear idea that she was trying to get his mind off how exhausted and sore he was. “I thought she was dead. I cried so hard.”

“So did I.”

“I asked her questions about her family,” Yuxia said, “but she did not answer very much. Now I get it; she didn’t want the others to hear such information.”

“Smart girl. She didn’t want them to know about me.”

“We found out about you later,” Yuxia said. “Big game man.”

“Yes. I am a big game man.” Being stalked by a big game hunter.

“Tell me about your family,” Richard suggested.

“Aiyaa, my family! My family is sad. Sad, and maybe in trouble.”

“Because of what happened to you?”

“Because of what I did,” she corrected him. “It didn’t all happen to me.”

“When the story comes out,” he said, “it will all be fine.”

“If we don’t get killed,” she corrected him, and picked up her pace so dramatically that he lost her in undergrowth — her camouflage outfit was very effective — and had to break into a jog for a few paces.

“Look, someone left clothes!” she announced a long sweaty while later and tugged on a loose sleeve that was peeking out from beneath a fallen log.

“Zula’s,” he said, catching up with her and recognizing the garment. “She ditched all the stuff she didn’t need. Getting ready for the climb.”

“The climb is next for us?”

“It starts now,” he said, and stepped past Yuxia, bushwhacking through a few more yards of undergrowth until he broke in upon the switchback trail.

During his sporadic, Furious Muse — driven efforts to lose weight, he had been forcefully reminded of a basic fact of human physiology, which was that fat-burning metabolism just plain didn’t work as well as carbo-burning metabolism. It left you tired and slow and confused and dim-witted. It was only when he was really stupid and irritable — and, therefore, incapable of doing his job or enjoying his life — that he could be certain he was actually losing weight. So it was in that state that he began to shamble up the switchback trail. But even in his flabbergasted condition, he was soon able to pick up on a basic fact of switchback geometry that was about to become important. Two hikers who might be a mile apart from each other on the trail might nonetheless find themselves separated by only a hundred yards of straight-line distance as one zigged and the other zagged. Assuming that Jahandar was chasing them — which was what they had to assume — they might have started out with an excellent head start. And he hoped that they had preserved that head start by moving as fast as they were able. And yet the moment might come, a minute or an hour from now, when they might look down, and Jahandar might look up, and they might lock eyes on each other from a range that was easily within rifle, and maybe even within shotgun, distance.

Richard wished he could have bullshitted himself into believing that Jahandar would not be aware of this fact. But Jahandar looked like a man who had spent his whole life on switchbacks, and who well understood their properties.

He saw, then, how it was all going to work out. And he understood that his confusion, his laggardliness, his irritability, were not all due to the fact that he was hungry. This was his brain trying to tell him something.

And if there was one thing he had learned in his ramshackle career, it was to pay close attention to his brain at such times.

His brain was telling him that their plan was fucked.

Their plan was fucked because Jahandar was going to catch up with them — had probably been doing so the entire time — and was going to reach the place where he could shoot up the slope from another switchback. Hell, he could just set up a sniper’s perch, get his gun propped up on something nice and solid, make himself comfortable, and wait for Richard and Yuxia to pass back and forth above him, zigging and zagging up the mountain like a pair of lame ducks in a shooting gallery.

I love you, but I’m tired of being the girlfriend of the sacred monster. This had been the last thing that Alice, one of his ex-girlfriends, had said to him before ascending into the pantheon of the Furious Muses. It had taken him a while to decode it — Alice hadn’t been in a mood to wax discursive — but he’d eventually figured out that this, in the end, was the reason that Corporation 9592 had no choice but to keep him around. Every other thing that he had done for the company — networking with money launderers, stringing Ethernet cable, recruiting fantasy authors, managing Pluto — could be done better and more cheaply by someone who could be recruited by a state-of-the-art head-hunting firm. His role, in the end, had been reduced to this one thing: sitting in the corner of meeting rooms or lurking on corporate email lists, seeming not to pay attention, growing ever more restless and surly until he blurted something out that offended a lot of people and caused the company to change course. Only later did they see the shoals on which they would have run aground if not for Richard’s startling and grumpy intervention.

This was one of those times.

The only thing that made any sense at all was to stop, look for cover, wait for Jahandar to catch up with them, hold fire until he came within twenty yards, and try to take him down with the shotgun before he could shoot back.

“Stop,” he said quietly.

“You okay, big guy?” Yuxia asked.

“Fantastic,” he assured her. “But here is where we have to stand and fight.”

“I am so in favor of that,” she said. “Do I get to shoot one of these motherfuckers?”

“Only if I die first.”

CSONGOR ABRUPTLY SHIFTED the SUV into gear, punched the gas, and rumbled out of the parking lot. He had been running the motor to feed juice into Marlon’s laptop.

“What the — ?” Marlon asked, as he watched his Wi-Fi connection disappear. Csongor couldn’t tell whether Marlon had cribbed this phrase from comic book word bubbles or was making an arch reference to Chinese nerds who naively picked up snatches of English dialog in this way. It was hard to tell, sometimes, with Marlon.

“Something is wrong,” Csongor said.

“I thought you said you couldn’t drive this thing.”

“I can’t drive it legally,” Csongor said.

“Oh.”

“But I can make it go, as you see.”

“I was transferring money,” Marlon said. Not in a whiny, complaining way. Just making sure Csongor knew that his important work had been interrupted.

“You’ve been transferring money for three hours,” Csongor pointed out, “while I have been looking at the clock and the map.” He rattled an Idaho road map that Seamus had bought at a gas station yesterday. “There is no way that those guys should still be gone. The da G shou can wait for their money; they’ve waited this long.”

Because he had been studying the map, Csongor knew how to get them out of Coeur d’Alene and on the road north to Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. He followed the route, scrupulously observing all the traffic laws to minimize his chances of being pulled over. He did not think that a Hungarian driver’s license would pass muster in these parts.

“Maybe they just found something interesting to look at.”

“That’s not the point,” Csongor said. “A helicopter can only carry so much gas — it can only stay in the air for a certain amount of time.”

He sensed Marlon looking at him incredulously.

“I googled it,” Csongor explained, “when you went out to urinate.”

“Okay…”

“I know what you are going to say next: maybe they had mechanical trouble and had to land. But in that case they should have called us and told us that they would be late.”

“How late are they?”

“Very late.”

Marlon was still looking at him expectantly.

“Mathematically,” Csongor said, “the helicopter is out of gas.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

“Maybe we should call — ”

“Call who?” Csongor asked, with a kind of cruel satisfaction. For he had gone down the same road in his mind and found only dead ends. He waited for Marlon to work his way to the same nonconclusion.

They blew through what seemed to be an important road junction at the extreme limit of the greater Coeur d’Alene metropolitan area and went bombing north on a nice straight open highway. It was turning into a beautiful day.

“So what are you going to do?”

“We are going to go to Bourne’s Ford, which is only a few miles from where they were flying, and go to the Boundary County Airport, and ask the people there if they know anything about a missing helicopter.”

About half an hour later they found themselves crossing a long causeway over a lake. Before them was the town of Sandpoint. Csongor noticed Marlon craning his neck to get a sidelong view of the speedometer. Glancing down, he saw that he was going ninety.

“It is not kilometers per hour,” Marlon informed him. “In the metric system, you are going at something like five thousand.”

“Not quite that fast,” Csongor said, but he did relent and drop down to eighty.

A minute later, he explained, “I believe Seamus went up there to find Jones. This was his real plan. But he could not say this out loud. Then Yuxia asked why she could not go along, if it was only a sightseeing trip. Seamus was trapped.”

“Yuxia is good at such things.”

“What do you think of her?” Csongor asked. “Is she your girlfriend?”

“For a while I was thinking maybe,” Marlon admitted, “but then I decided she was my sister.”

“Huh.”

“China is funny. One child per family, you know. We are all looking for siblings.”

Csongor nodded. “It is a much better system,” he said, “than the one we use in Hungary.”

“Why?”

Csongor looked across at Marlon. “Because you get to choose.”

Marlon smiled. “Ah.”

Csongor turned his attention back to the road.

“Your brother in California,” Marlon said.

“What about him?”

“Are you going to go and visit him?”

“Do you want to see California?”

He could hear Marlon beaming. “Yes.”

“It is probably a better place for you,” Csongor said, “than for me. If I go, I will take you. You can be the star. I will be your — ”

“Bodyguard?”

“Fuck that. I was thinking entourage.”

“California, here we come!” Marlon exclaimed.

Csongor thrust a stubby finger out the window at a road sign that said CANADA 50 MI/80 KM. “We are going wrong way,” he pointed out. “Before California, we have to get into trouble. Then out of it.”

Marlon shrugged. “But that is what we do.”

Csongor nodded. “That is what we do.”

BY THE TIME Csongor had finished slowing down from highway speed, they were halfway through Bourne’s Ford and in danger of blowing past it altogether. As a way of giving them some time to get their bearings, Csongor pulled into a gas station. Using some American cash from his wallet — for Seamus had passed out a bit of spending money — he fronted the cashier $40, then strolled back to the SUV and began to pump fuel into it. The way that the gas pump worked was slightly unfamiliar and made him feel inept and conspicuous. But eventually he figured out how to latch the nozzle in the on position, and then he leaned back against the side of the vehicle and crossed his arms to wait for its enormous tank to fill. Marlon had made a quick toilet run and was already ensconced back in the passenger seat, scanning the airwaves for open Wi-Fi connections.

A blue Subaru station wagon turned in off the highway and pulled up on the opposite side of the pump island. Its front was thickly speckled with the dried corpses of insects. Bundles of stuff had been lashed and bungeed down to its roof rack. Since it was so clearly not from around here, Csongor glanced at its license plate. It was from Pennsylvania.

It sat there for a while with its engine running, and Csongor could just barely hear the muffled sounds of a discussion going on inside of it. The tail end, he suspected, of a long-running argument among tourists who had been cooped up together in this small vehicle for far too long.

Then the driver’s door swung open and a man climbed out: a Middle Eastern fellow with a close-cropped beard and dark wraparound sunglasses. He went to the cashier and gave him some paper money, then returned to the Subaru and began to pump gas into it.

Another man, an African with a slender angular look that reminded him of Zula, got out of the backseat, went inside, and used the toilet. When he emerged, he was carrying a large-format paperback with a red cover, which he had apparently just purchased: Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer.

Noting movement in the corner of his eye, Csongor looked up the SUV’s flank to the passenger-side rearview mirror, which Marlon had adjusted so that he could use it to stare Csongor in the eye. The look on his face said: Can this really be happening!?

Csongor looked off in some other direction and responded with a nod.

He had decided that he wanted to be the last vehicle out of this gas station, so when he was finished pumping the gas, he went back inside as if he intended to use the W. C. Instead of which he lurked in the back of its little convenience store area, pretending to be unable to make up his mind as to which selection he ought to make from its dizzying variety of jerky and keeping an eye on the blue Subaru.

“Selkirk Loop,” said the clerk wonderingly, gazing out at the same thing. “Brings in all kinda people.”

The driver removed the nozzle from the side of his car. Csongor advanced to the cash register, spilled out some bags of jerky and two water bottles, and yanked an Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer out of the rack for good measure.

“Those are hot sellers today,” the clerk remarked.

Csongor said nothing. The clerk had pegged him as an American, and he saw no reason to call that into question by opening his big mouth.

Now the Subaru’s driver came in to use the toilet, and Csongor had no choice but to go outside, get into the SUV, and start it up. He pulled out onto the road, went about half a block down a commercial strip, and entered the parking lot of a fast-food place. This turned out to have a drive-through, and so, on an impulse, he drove into it and placed an order for a couple of hamburgers. He drove around the back in a big U and paid at the window. The SUV was now pointed back out toward the street.

While the man at the window was stuffing their order into a bag, Marlon said, “There!” and Csongor glanced out to see the blue Subaru cruising past them at a safe and legal velocity.

He was a bit anxious that they might have lost their quarry as a result of the fast-food gambit, but a few moments later, when he gunned the SUV back out onto the street, sucking deeply from a bucket-sized serving of Mountain Dew, he was able to see it clearly a few hundred meters ahead, making its way peaceably through a series of stoplights.

The next bit felt touch-and-go, since, depending on the lights, they sometimes seemed to fall far behind and other times drew uncomfortably close. But it had become obvious that these men were heading north out of town. Marlon used these minutes to flip through the Atlas and Gazetteer and find the relevant map.

“North of here, a few kilometers, is an intersection,” Marlon announced. “If they go straight, then they are headed for Canada, and it means nothing. But if they go left, across the river, then they are trying to reach the place where Seamus and Yuxia were flying to this morning.”

“Is there some other way we can cross that river?” Csongor asked. “So we won’t be following them so obviously?”

“Yes. Turn around here.”

And thus they turned back, dropping away from direct pursuit of the Subaru, and went back into the middle of the town and crossed over a different bridge. A few minutes later they were headed west, seemingly direct into the mountains; but just before the terrain became really steep, Marlon directed Csongor to make a right turn onto a gravel road that ran due north, heading generally parallel to the river. During his three hours of intense boredom at the flight center, Csongor had flipped through the vehicle’s manual enough to learn how it could be shifted into four-wheel drive, so he took a moment to do this, and then went blasting up the road at an insane pace for some miles. He did not think that there were any cops around here to pull him over; and if they did, he would simply claim that there were terrorists in the area, driving a blue Subaru.

Come to think of it, they should have done that before leaving Bourne’s Ford. But their own illegal status had put them in an awkward frame of mind, never knowing when to hide from the authorities and when to call out for their help. They didn’t know that those men were terrorists. They might have been innocent tourists. When Marlon had said, a few minutes earlier, that they might go straight at the intersection and head north into Canada, presumably to enjoy the Selkirk Loop, it had sounded perfectly reasonable to Csongor and he had wondered at his foolishness for harboring this racist stereotype that the men were terrorists.

And now he was here in the middle of nowhere cursing himself for his failure to recognize the obvious.

They crested a minor rise in the highway in time for Marlon to pick out the blue Subaru crossing the bridge. It had made the left turn and was headed into the mountains.

Marlon opened his mouth to say something, but Csongor had caught it too. “Fuck!” he said.

“This is the part where we get into trouble?”

“Evidently. Make sure you don’t lose sight of it,” Csongor said, and then devoted all his attention and energy to keeping the SUV from drifting off the road. For its suspension was being thrashed so hard at the moment that it was a rare moment when all four of its wheels were actually touching the ground.

“Here,” Marlon said, a minute later. They were approaching a fork, a smaller gravel road headed up a valley to the left.

“This is where you saw them turn?”

“I didn’t see them,” Marlon said.

“Then how can you be sure?”

“Because they left a trail in the air,” Marlon said, “like a jet.”

And indeed, Csongor now saw that the air above the little side road was milky with dust that had been churned up by the Subaru’s tires a minute earlier. Whereas, when he looked north along the riverside road, the air was clear.

A sign, rusted and snowplow-bashed and riddled with shotgun pellets, stood at the junction. PROHIBITION CREEK ROAD, it said.

“Here goes,” said Csongor. He swung the steering wheel and gunned the motor.

ZULA’S RISING TO a crouch and sudden scramble toward the base of the rock elicited several bursts of gunfire from down below, each of which was answered by a crisp rifle shot from the top of the rock above. The shooters below, who she imagined were firing from a standing position after sprinting up the last few switchbacks, did not really have time to situate themselves and draw a proper bead on her; she thought she might have heard a few of the insane-bumblebee noises that apparently signaled the near approach of high-velocity rounds. But the going here was much easier than below, partly because of the gentler slope and partly because the footing was better — more hard rock and less random boulder pile. She forced herself to cover at least a hundred feet before risking a look back. The tree line was no longer visible. She experimented with rising out of her crouch and saw it slowly peek back over the horizon, then dropped her head before anyone could draw a bead and pull a trigger. She ran now in a hunched-over posture, headed for that frantically waving T-shirt, and covered another couple of hundred yards before looking back again. She was now able to stand all the way upright without exposing herself. Winded and banged up, the cold dry air sending an ice pick into the root of her shattered tooth with each breath, she permitted herself to quick-walk the last bit, and finally came within conversational distance of the T-shirt waver.

She had hoped, in a completely irrational way, that this might be Qian Yuxia, but she had known this was not the case from a hundred yards out. The voice that greeted her now spoke in an English accent: “Is that Zula?”

Zula, not trusting herself to speak, just nodded her head and grimaced. The English woman came out to greet her and met her with a handshake at the base of the huge rock. “My name’s Olivia. I’m so sorry about your lip; is that as painful as it looks?”

Zula rolled her eyes and nodded.

“I wish I could tell you we had an ambulance — a helicopter — something — but there’s none of that, I’m afraid. We’ve got a bit of a walk ahead of us. Do you feel up to it?”

“Who’s we?”

“The man up there,” Olivia said, momentarily shifting her gaze to the top of the rock, “is known to you, I believe. Name of Sokolov.”

“Someone needs to get that guy a first name,” Zula lisped.

“I know, it seems a bit gruff to go round calling him that.”

“What the hell is Sokolov doing here? Other than the obvious, I guess.”

“I believe he feels he owes you something.”

“You could say that.” Zula was following Olivia’s lead now, as they climbed up along the side of the big outcropping. The slope here had become steep again, and Zula could see the skid marks in the gravel where this Olivia person had sledded down.

“There’s a bit coming up,” Olivia said, pointing up the slope, “where we’ll need to keep our heads down. Coming back in view of the fellas down below.”

Zula looked back and nodded.

“He never intended for things to get quite so fouled up,” Olivia said, returning to the topic of Sokolov. “Was keeping an eye on you. Didn’t want you hurt.”

“I had sort of gotten that vibe, but it was hard to tell.”

“Then, when Jones entered the picture, I’m afraid our man Sokolov took it quite personally. In other words, I don’t think it’s about you anymore.”

“I’m perfectly happy for it not to be about me.”

“All right then, are you ready?”

“I guess so,” Zula said, though in truth she could hardly have been more exhausted.

“One good push over the top.” And Olivia began churning her feet in the scree, setting off little avalanches that Zula had to hop over. Their progress through this last exposed bit was probably not as nimble or as quick as Olivia had pictured, and Zula, becoming stuck at one point, risked a look back and verified that they were now in view of the tree line again. But the distance was so great that the shot would have been impossible without a scoped rifle, and the shooters down there seemed to have become thoroughly demoralized by Sokolov’s policy of firing high-velocity rounds down into their muzzle flashes. The next time Zula glanced back, all she could see was rocks, and then she and Olivia enjoyed a fairly easy scramble up a little chute and out onto the broad and generally flat top of this giant outcropping.

Until now Zula had had only a vague idea of where she was on the larger map, which had been fine since she’d had very little leisure to think about grand strategy. But from here the whole thing became plain. Abandon Mountain was at her back. Looking outward and down over the territory from which she had just ascended, she was facing generally west. Off to the right, a few miles away, was the ridge through which she and Chet had passed yesterday via the old mining tunnels. To her left, a long, gently curving talus slope spanned a distance of a couple of miles to a long ridge thrown out southward from the mountain. She knew from Richard’s description that if she traversed that slope and popped up over that ridge she would descend into the valley of Prohibition Crick and find Jake’s place.

She collected all these impressions while following Olivia, at an exhausted, shambling pace, across the top of the rock toward the precipitous edge from which Sokolov had been shooting at the jihadists. The farther Olivia went, the more she tended to hunch over, then crouch, then crawl. Deeply tired of such inefficient forms of locomotion, Zula balked at going farther. She advanced slowly to the point where she would have to begin crawling on hands and knees, then stopped and squatted on her haunches, stretching out her wrecked thigh muscles and her calves. About thirty feet away she could see the soles of Sokolov’s boots, heels up and toes down, as he lay prone at the cliff edge, peering through the scope of a tricked-out AR-15 rifle that looked oddly similar to the one Peter had kept in his safe. Olivia was lying on her side next to him, talking into his ear, and he was nodding and making little remarks back to her. Something in Olivia’s body language — the almost total relaxation with which she lay next to him — told Zula that she was watching a sort of intimate moment, which made her feel awkward. But after a few moments, Olivia began to inchworm back from the precipice, and Sokolov turned his head and gazed back at Zula with his blue eyes. An American would have made some sentimental gesture here, made it mawkish, but Sokolov contented himself with the tiniest nod and a suggestion of a wink. Zula responded by raising her hand and twitching her fingers in a suggestion of a wave. This was plenty for Sokolov, who snapped his head back around and returned to his occupation.

Olivia led her to a place where she and Sokolov had stashed a couple of mountain bikes. These were loaded with gear, much of which was now irrelevant — or perhaps of greater use to Sokolov than to them. All of this Olivia stripped off and left lying on the ground. They had come well supplied with water and food, a good deal of which went into Zula’s mouth while Olivia was sorting through the rest. A first aid kit contained some over-the-counter painkillers, which Zula consumed at greater than the recommended dosage. Olivia helped Zula adjust the height of her seat post — she was apparently going to use what had been Sokolov’s bicycle — and led her on a short ride up this outflung spur of rock toward the summit of the mountain. In a minute or so they came to a place where they could ramp down onto the faintest trace of a trail that tracked horizontally across the talus slope in the direction they wanted to go.

Their traversal of this seemed endless. It was enlivened at the beginning by some shots fired, apparently at them, from far below. It seemed that the jihadists were probing southward, trying to avoid or to outflank Sokolov’s position by moving through the woods. An abandoned mining camp down at the bottom of the slope looked like it would provide lots of cover for the jihadists, if they could only reach it. But Olivia and Zula were far out of range, and Sokolov was continuing his policy of trying to pick off anyone who took shots at them, and so within a few minutes Zula had stopped worrying about gunmen and turned all her attentions to the project of just making it through the next hour or two. Part of the time they were able to ride the bicycles in their lowest gear, which was very low indeed, but for the most part it was more efficient to push or even carry the machines. Olivia insisted it was worth it, that the bicycles would come in very handy once they got through this part of the journey. Zula did not respond and hardly cared; she had descended into some numb and semicomatose state where all that was going on around her seemed to have been shone dimly onto a screen by a failing projector with a bad sound system.

But in time they made it to a place from which they could look down a clear and reasonably well-defined trail into a valley lined with dark green forest, and Zula remembered Uncle Richard’s story about how he had long ago happened upon Prohibition Crick after a miserable, hot slog across an exposed and sun-blasted slope. She felt she knew the way down out of some family instinct, and she ignored Olivia’s solicitous questions and polite suggestions that they stop for water and food. She threw a leg over the saddle of her bicycle and let gravity begin pulling her down into that valley, squeezing the brakes every second or two, making sure she didn’t run out of control. She could hear Olivia following her in like style. This trail had lots of switchbacks too, but downhill switchbacks on a bicycle were, of course, pure ecstasy compared to uphill on foot, and so she did nothing but enjoy the ride and feel her spirits rise and her energy return for the first few minutes. Then Olivia’s voice intruded on her awareness, warning her of something. She skidded to a halt and listened. Below them, an engine was snarling: not a chainsaw, but some sort of vehicle, a dirt bike or four-wheeler.

“That might be your uncles,” Olivia said. Probably the wrong advice for Zula, who responded by releasing the brakes and letting the bike run downhill at a speed that was on the edge of being out of control. She managed to slow it down just enough to avoid spinning out at the next switchback, got it fishtailed around, built up speed again, and then had to slam the brakes hard to avoid a head-on collision with a camo-painted four-wheel ATV coming up the other way.

Uncle Jake was driving and Uncle John was riding on the jump seat in back, and both of them were carrying rifles and wearing preoccupied expressions. The transformation that came over their faces when they discovered Zula blocking their path was, she hoped, something she would remember for the rest of her life and tell people about at the re-u.

RICHARD HAD, OF course, packed for the trip hastily, Jones following him around the Schloss aiming a pistol at him and telling him to go faster. There’d been no shortage of warm clothes to choose from. All of it had been skiwear; the Schloss was not about hunting. He was now wearing a yellow parka and red snow pants, with white gloves and a blue hat. Underneath were a green flannel shirt and blue jeans. So he could make himself slightly less conspicuous by shedding the outerwear, at the cost of freezing to death.

Qian Yuxia was wearing just what the doctor ordered for this sort of affair: head-to-toe camouflage. When Richard pointed out the disparity, more out of black humor than anything else, she immediately offered to swap with him. But this would have taken a lot of time; her clothes wouldn’t have covered much of his body; and it would have left her either freezing to death in her underwear or else a blaze of primary colors in Jahandar’s telescopic sight.

She then offered to take the gun, find a good place to hide, and blow Jahandar away when he happened by. Which Richard would not have taken seriously had it been proposed by certain other women of Yuxia’s age and stature. In her case, he found it entirely believable. But it would have been the first time she had ever fired a gun. She would only have one chance. She would have to wait until he came very close; if she misjudged the distance and fired too soon, she’d miss him, or just wound him lightly, and then he would tear her apart with high-velocity rounds while Richard watched helplessly from a hiding place. Not really the way Richard wanted to spend his last few minutes on earth.

They were running out of time, talking too much. Yuxia was becoming sort of a problem in that she simply would not be satisfied with anything less than an active role in the death of Jahandar. Faint rustling noises were sounding from down the slope, which could be explained in many different ways, but it was most prudent to assume that this was the approaching sniper.

They settled it like this: Richard moved downhill off their current switchback and crouched behind the root-ball of a huge tree that had toppled straight down the slope. The root-ball was at least twelve feet in diameter, a scraggly sunburst of enormous but shallow roots, interstices caulked with brown mud and with moss. It rose above him as an almost vertical wall. He could not have been more totally shielded from view; Jahandar could peer up the slope all he wanted, he could ascend the switchback that ran about ten yards below where Richard was crouching and never get any suggestion that Richard was there. By the same token, however, Richard couldn’t see Jahandar.

Yuxia meanwhile maneuvered to a place directly uphill of Richard where she could squat in some undergrowth and peer out, almost impossible to see from below. She had a panoramic view of the slope beneath her and could look Richard in the eye from a distance of perhaps fifty feet. She would wait and watch for Jahandar to pass just below Richard, and raise both hands in the air at the moment when the sniper was immediately below the root-ball, moving laterally along the switchback below it.

Richard waited, watching Yuxia’s face and listening to the sounds of the forest.

Ten minutes passed of what was very close to bliss, as far as Richard was concerned.

Zula was alive. He had seen her. But that didn’t explain the bliss. After all, Chet was dead. Moreover, there was a seriously injured chopper pilot awaiting rescue up on the ridge. Any happiness he felt for Zula ought to have been outweighed by sadness for them.

So that wasn’t it.

He was in beautiful wilderness that he had known for almost forty years, just sitting and waiting, alert and alive, banged up, half in shock, but probably soaked in endorphins and adrenaline for just that reason. And no one could reach him via phone or email, Twitter or Facebook, and bother him. His whole mind, his whole attention was focused on one thing for the first time that he could remember.

Occasional bangs sounded from higher up: people shooting at each other, he reckoned. Most of it sounded tentative, exploratory. What did John call it? Reconnaissance by fire. But then came a prolonged exchange, scores of rounds being fired, some from semiautomatic and others from fully automatic weapons, and he had the sense that it had come to a head somehow.

He knew that one side of this small war had to be Jones and his jihadists, but who was on the other side? Had the cops finally arrived? If so, why didn’t they have helicopters?

These ruminations caused his attention to waver for some time, while also making it difficult to hear more subtle noises emanating from the trail below.

He became aware that Yuxia was gesticulating furiously. Which gave him a pang of guilt, since he got the idea that she had been signaling to him in a more discreet way for some time and that he had failed to notice it and forced her to make herself obvious.

She got a stricken look on her face and dropped from view.

A mighty crack sounded from what seemed like just over Richard’s shoulder, and mud and moss exploded from the slope just behind where Yuxia’s head had been a moment earlier.

Jahandar must have come up the trail behind Richard and passed all the way behind him, then looked uphill and seen Yuxia waving her arms.

He heard the bolt of the rifle being worked, ejecting the spent casing, chambering a new round. Then the rustle of clothing. Then the sound, amazingly crisp and distinct in the clear, quiet air, of a revolver’s hammer being pulled back and cocked.

Why was Jahandar switching to a handgun?

Because he’d seen Yuxia gesturing, trying to get someone’s attention down below. From that, he knew someone had to be down here, hiding. Waiting for him. And the obvious place to hide was the root-ball only a few yards away from where Jahandar was standing. The sniper rifle was not going to do him any good in that sort of a fight.

Slow, subtle rustling now as Jahandar stepped off the path, into the foliage, looking for a way to come around Richard’s flank.

Richard had checked the shotgun a hundred times to verify that a shell was chambered, and forced himself not to do so again, since doing so would make a noise. He looked down and inspected the safety lever to make sure that the red dot was showing. It was ready to fire.

He had nestled himself back into a hollow among the dead tree’s roots, which might not be the best situation since it was constraining his field of view, limiting his arm swing. He was considering how to improve this state of affairs without getting killed when his glance fell on a round stone, about the size of a baseball, that hundreds of years ago had gotten caught up in the root system of this tree and was now sticking out of the clotted mud down by his knee. Remembering a trick he had played as a boy, stalking and being stalked by John in the ravine of the farm crick, he acted now without thinking. Until this point he had been mired in a kind of psychological cold molasses. But now he just reached down with his left hand, found the rock, pulled it free from its mud matrix, and underhanded it into some shrubs about five yards off to his right. It flew soundlessly and probably invisibly, then rustled through the bushes and struck the ground with shocking and sudden noise. Jahandar responded immediately, firing a round at it, recocking. This gave away his position: too far off to the right for Richard to get a clear shot without moving farther away from the root-ball. Reckoning that it was now or never, Richard shoved off against the roots with his butt, pivoting around his planted right foot as his left swung around like the leg of a compass tracing a ninety-degree arc. At the same time he was bringing the shotgun up, getting the barrel and the bead aligned with the pupil of his eye, wondering when the hell Jahandar was going to swim into his sight picture. Finally he saw Jahandar in his peripheral vision and realized he had not pivoted far enough; he gave his hips an extra twitch. His left foot was coming down, a bit sooner than he’d have liked; he tried to raise the knee, delay the footfall, give himself some extra rotation, but the result was that the toe hooked on a root and torqued badly. He was falling to his left now, balance lost, still lacking a solid plant for the left foot, which came down hard and uncontrolled on whatever happened to be there. Whatever it was, it was slippery and uneven and made his foot twist around in a way that it wasn’t supposed to. He felt no pain, yet. He had glanced away from Jahandar for just a fraction of a second. He now returned his attention to the sights. Jahandar was gone. He had executed some sort of dive-and-roll back onto the trail. Richard was tempted to fire blindly but held his finger away from the trigger, mindful of the limited number of shells in the magazine. Reconnaissance by fire wasn’t going to work for him.

Getting low seemed to be a good idea and so he let himself drop, which was already happening anyway: his ankle was badly messed up, and the first spike of pain had just made it up his leg to his brain. He took his left hand off the shotgun’s forearm and let its barrel go vertical for a few moments as he tumbled back onto his ass, using his left hand to break the fall just a bit.

Then he looked up to see Jahandar staring at him through a gap between dangling roots, no more than ten feet away. Jahandar was just in the act of bringing his revolver up to bear on Richard.

Richard, who had been so much at gravity’s mercy an instant ago, now found it too weak and slow to bring the shotgun’s barrel down as fast as he would like. Rather than wait here to get shot, he twitched his body sideways, flinging himself down onto his back and then his side, rolling away. A younger man on better terrain might have rolled all the way over and come back up firing, but Richard bogged down in rocks and tree roots about halfway through this maneuver and found himself in the worst possible situation of having to get up on hands and knees with his ass pointed squarely in Jahandar’s direction and the shotgun down in the mud. How could anything go so badly wrong? It was just like John’s Vietnam stories, the ones he told when he was drunk and weeping. A pistol was banging, banging, banging. Richard wasn’t dead yet. His mind had registered something odd about that banging, but he hadn’t had time to think about it yet. An eternity later he fell heavily onto his ass, finally facing toward the enemy, finally with the shotgun up where he wanted it. He expected to see Jahandar still aiming the revolver his way, fire spurting from the barrel and all but scorching Richard’s nylon parka, but the jihadist had turned to look downhill and had crouched down so that only the curve of his back was showing.

The banging hadn’t come from Jahandar’s pistol. It must be Seamus, firing from farther way.

Richard, taking advantage of the slope, rolled up onto his feet, got a clear view of Jahandar’s center of mass, aimed the shotgun, and fired. He then collapsed facefirst into the root-ball as his ankle gave way beneath his weight. A broken-off root jabbed him in the eye. His hand came up involuntarily, and the shotgun tumbled into his lap. He heard himself letting out a brief scream.

In the silence that followed, a gentle footfall, very nearby. He looked up with his one operant eye and saw nothing but the forest moving alongside him. The shotgun slid out of his lap as if moving under its own power.

Qian Yuxia jerked the forearm back. Sharply. A spent shell flew out and bounced off Richard’s head. She rammed it home, then raised it to her shoulder. Someone said, in a gurgling voice, “Allahu akbar,” but the final syllable was buried in the shotgun’s muzzle blast.

“Nice,” pronounced a voice. The voice of Seamus. “But don’t stand so fucking close to him next time. I almost nailed you.”

“Dream on,” said Qian Yuxia.

SOKOLOV WATCHED THE departure of Olivia and Zula with a vast sense of relief: an emotion that he would, of course, never be able to share, or even hint at, with those two estimable females. By this point he had seen enough of them to know that they were cooler under pressure, and better to be with in a tight spot, than 999 out of 1,000 women. But their presence obliged him to divert a significant fraction of his attention into being considerate of their needs, responding to their inquiries, and keeping them alive. In most other circumstances it would have been no trouble at all, and more than repaid by the pleasure of their company. But this business now was going to be formidable trouble, and he needed to think of it to the exclusion of all else.

The environment was, on the whole, markedly Afghanistan-like. The jihadists would feel at home here, would instinctively know how to move, where to seek cover, how to react. Sokolov, of course, had done his time in Afghanistan. But that was long ago, and most of his work since then had been of a decidedly urban character. Advantage Jones.

There were more of them. Sokolov was alone, at least until such time as Zula and Olivia could get back to the compound where the fanatics — those American Taliban — lived with all their guns and their stockpiles of ammunition and materiel. Even then, it was not clear to what extent those people could form themselves up into an effective force on short notice. It was clear that Zula’s relatives were well armed and that they had the marksmanship part of the curriculum well covered. But military recruits spent only a small portion of their time actually shooting at targets; other forms of training were ultimately more important. Even supposing that they did come out from their bunkers with their assault rifles and their expensive knives, they might be more hazard than help to Sokolov. He had no way of communicating with them. They were as likely to identify him as foe than as friend. Soon he might have not just one but two groups of well-armed mountain men trying to kill him. Advantage Jones.

Sokolov was operating completely alone, which, while it technically placed him at a numerical disadvantage, conferred another sort of benefit in that he did not have to coordinate his actions with anyone else. No communication meant no foul-ups. The tiniest bit of cover could be used to advantage. Advantage Sokolov, provided he kept his distance and avoided getting surrounded.

So that — not getting surrounded — was what the Americans called the Name of the Game. Zula’s startling emergence from the wilderness had obliged him to give away his position. Had it not been for that, he’d have waited for all the jihadists to expose themselves on the slope below and then spent the morning picking them off.

According to Olivia — who had obtained the information from Zula — the size of Jones’s contingent had been nine this morning. One of them had somehow been killed hours ago. During the action just concluded, Sokolov and Zula had each accounted for one. That left six unaccounted for. It was possible that Sokolov’s suppressing fire had hit someone down in the trees, but he doubted it.

Another detail: Zula reported that a rear guard of unknown size — quite likely no more than two men — was an hour or two behind Jones’s main group. But one of them was a sniper.

Which raised the question of whether any of the men down below Sokolov might be so equipped. He had engaged in several exchanges of fire with them so far, but with so many opponents, all concealed in the forest, spraying rounds at him from different directions, it had been difficult for him to take a census of their weapons. From sound alone it was obvious that most of them had submachine guns or assault rifles. But the infrequent firing of a bolt-action sniper rifle could easily have gotten lost in all that noise. Some of them might have been packing scopes in their bags, and for all he knew they were down there right now mounting better optics on the weapons that he knew about. Sokolov’s gun was pretty and expensive, with a nice scope on it, but its barrel and its ammunition imposed certain inherent limitations on its effective range. In a sniping duel against a man armed with a proper long-range weapon, he would lose.

Earlier, Olivia had assisted him by bringing a sleeping bag, food, and water right up to the edge of the rock where he had made his little nest. It had become comfortable to a degree that was actively endangering his life; he was reluctant to move from this location that had already been made known to the enemy. As a first step toward abandoning it, he wriggled back to a spot from which he could not be seen from below, then devoted a few minutes to teasing a sleeping bag out of its nylon sack and loosely restuffing it into his parka. He pulled the hood up and made sure that it was packed tight enough to keep it round, then poked his sunglasses into it and wrapped a scarf around the lower part of its “face.” The whole time he was doing this he was feeling a moderate sense of embarrassment at playing such a cheap trick. But he had read all the old propaganda stories about the snipers of Stalingrad and knew that they had achieved much with a repertoire of simple gambits such as this one. When it was complete, he crawled forward, pushing the effigy before him so that its head would pop into view over the edge of the rock long before Sokolov himself became exposed.

A mirror would have been nice to have at this point, but he lacked one. He had to use his ears. The result of the experiment was a fusillade of reports from perhaps four different weapons, most of them firing multiple rounds in semiautomatic mode, which was to say that they were shooting one bullet per trigger pull rather than simply opening up with bursts. They were, in other words, aiming. Perhaps Jones had finally made it to the top of the trail and imposed some discipline. Rounds cracked into the rock near the effigy, others whined overhead. Sokolov closed his eyes and listened for the slow, heavy cadence of a bolt-action rifle firing high-powered rounds. A jerk ran down his arm as the effigy took a bullet in the head, and he heard a plasticky clatter as the sunglasses fell out and bounced down the cliff face below.

So at least one person down there was a good shot with a properly zeroed assault rifle. But if they had a sniper’s weapon per se, they had decided not to use it; and that was, in these circumstances, an odd decision. Zula had told Olivia that there was a sniper in the rear guard. Perhaps he had all the good stuff with him.

Or perhaps a fantastically good long-range weapon was aimed at his location at this very moment and its operator, having detected Sokolov’s pathetic masquerade through his excellent telescopic scope, had elected not to show his hand.

Taking only what he thought he’d need to survive the next few hours, Sokolov pulled back from the edge of the rock. Jones’s vanguard might have been idiots, but Darwinian selection had now removed them from the battle, and the only people left down there were the smart and cautious remainder, probably being led personally by Jones. They’d not expose themselves to his fire again. If they were feeling extraordinarily feisty, they might look for a way to outflank his position and get him in a cross fire, but this would take half the day, and they must know they didn’t have that long. The tree line stretched south all the way to — well, to wherever the hell these men needed to go. Moving through the forest was slow and awkward, but preferable to being shot at from above. That, Sokolov was quite sure, was what they would do. They would only post some sort of rear guard to keep an eye out for him and make sure he didn’t fall on them from behind.

His understanding of the local geography was not perfect, but he had the general sense that, on their way out to the open highways of the United States, they would pass near to the compounds of the American Taliban. Had it not been for the fact that Olivia and Zula were headed for one of those compounds right now, Sokolov might have been tempted to set up a blind and wait for the stragglers Zula had warned him of. The American survivalists, after all, could take care of themselves, and Sokolov was not above feeling a certain “plague on both your houses” attitude toward these groups.

But as it was, he felt obliged to pursue these men. They would already have a considerable head start. He ought to be able to erase this, however, by moving through open territory and proceeding generally downslope.

He ran over the top of the big rock, following roughly in the tracks that Zula and Olivia had made a bit earlier, and then began working his way judiciously down the talus slope. Below he could see the abandoned mining facility. He had not examined this carefully when he and Olivia had passed above it a few hours ago. Now he confirmed his vague memory that the place was overgrown with scrub trees and high weeds. For it was situated right at the edge of the zone where it was possible for vegetation to survive. Beyond it was the mature forest through which the jihadists were moving, or would be soon.

He was exposed on this slope, but it offered enough scraps of cover that — being that he was a lone operative, not a platoon — he could move from one to the next, throwing himself down when he reached them and making little stops to listen and observe. For about the first half of his progress down the talus field, he neither saw nor heard a thing. The jihadists — assuming they were coming this way — had been forced to work their way around a lobe of the mountain, traveling two kilometers to cover one kilometer of straight-line distance. Sokolov was just hurtling somewhat recklessly down the southern face of that landform, so it was to be expected that he would not see them at first. The seventeen-year-old buck private in him just wanted to sprint all the way to the bottom and take cover in the old mine buildings strewn invitingly around the base of the slope. The veteran wanted to creep on his belly from one cover to the next, never rising to his feet, never exposing himself. In the early going, the buck private won the argument, but as he lost more and more altitude, the verge of the forest began to seem more and more fraught with hazards and the veteran’s approach began to take over. He was lower down now, more on a level with any possible attackers, and this made it easier to find cover.

He came to a point where he could definitely hear the jihadists making their way through the trees, and then it became a matter of calibration: he didn’t have as far to travel now, but he had to do it more carefully. They did not appear to think that he was nearby. Perhaps they believed that, in shooting the effigy atop the rock, they had killed Sokolov. Perhaps they had become confused as to geography. In any case, they did not know that he had come around from another direction to engage them, and as long as they remained in that state of ignorance he had a huge advantage that could be lost in an instant if he behaved indiscreetly. And so the last part of Sokolov’s journey was a reenactment of the very worst moments of his special forces training: he spent the whole time crawling on his belly, at first over sharp rocks and then over sopping ice-cold mud overgrown with thorny and poky vegetation.

But this got him, at last, into the precincts of the mining camp, which was a generally flat bottomland at forest’s edge, really a kind of sump that had accepted more snowmelt in the last few weeks than it could absorb. It extended perhaps fifty meters from the base of the slope to the edge of the true forest and several hundred meters in the direction parallel to the slope, and it was scattered with abandoned trucks, trailers, shacks, and one structure that seemed to be an actual log cabin. Sokolov gravitated to the latter. Its cedar-shake roof had long since fallen in to cover its floor, and windblown pine needles and other such debris had collected in the lee of its walls, almost a meter deep. Sokolov burrowed into the needle pile, then reached around him and arranged the stuff to form a mound of camouflage, nothing showing except for the snout of his Makarov.

Then he relaxed and sipped from his CamelBak tube. Ten minutes later, he was listening as Jones, probably standing no more than twenty meters away, gave orders to his men. Sokolov’s Arabic was rusty. Even without the half-remembered vocabulary he had managed to retain, he could guess what Jones was saying, simply based upon the tactical realities of the situation. He was telling some of his men — probably no more than two of them — to find suitable cover in this mining camp and keep an eye on the slope above. Anyone trying to make his way down that slope should be tracked until he was close enough to make for easy shooting, then shot. Anyone taking the high road should be harassed with long-range fire, which might not hit the target but would at least give him something to think about while warning Jones and the others that they were being shadowed from the commanding heights.

Jones then moved on with the main group.

The ones he’d left behind talked to each other in low tones for a minute and then began to explore the camp, looking for places where they could take cover and wait. Sokolov was now convinced that there were exactly two of them.

One of them walked straight into the cabin. He was a tall slender East African man, quite young. Sokolov shot him twice in the chest and then, while the boy was standing there wondering if this was really happening, once in the head.

Having had plenty of time to inventory the escape routes from this structure, he exploded from under the pile of pine needles, got a leg up on an old table, and vaulted through a vacant window opening. He was fairly certain that this placed most of the log cabin between him and the other jihadist, who was out familiarizing himself with an abandoned truck. Moving around to a location from which he could see said truck, he unslung the rifle, brought it up, and fired four rounds through its sheet metal, distributed through the part of the cab where a terrified man would be likely to throw himself down.

Answering fire came out of weeds ten meters from the truck and forced him to drop into a lower crouch. Looking back up a moment later, he saw a man in full sprint toward an outhouse. Getting a moving target centered in his sights, at this distance, that fast, was impossible. Instead he drew a solid bead on the outhouse and fired four more rounds through it. The bullets would pass all the way through the structure and out the other side, probably not hitting anything but keeping the runner honest.

He then embarked on a retreat toward the edge of the woods. The fight had begun too soon: less than a minute since Jones and the main group had departed. They would come back, they would figure out where he was, and they would surround him. Given more time, Sokolov would have won the duel with the man hiding behind the outhouse. As it was, he had no choice but to make himself scarce in the most excellent hiding place he could find, and wait for them to move on.

On cue the other four jihadists came running back out of the woods firing undisciplined bursts. The man behind the outhouse called for a cease-fire and then stood up, exposing himself in a manner that verged on insolent. This man was both good and brave: he was daring Sokolov to take a shot at him and give away his position. Sokolov, inching out of the mining camp on his back, was tempted. But he was making an obvious track in the mud that they would soon find and follow. His only purpose for the next quarter of an hour was to get into the woods and run and hide. If he survived that, the jihadists would begin moving again, and his pursuit of them could resume.

THE SUV BOTTOMED out in a dip, angled sharply upward, and vaulted a sharp rise, nearly jumping into the air. In the same instant, they came in view of a wide spot, just ahead, where a smaller road forked off to the left and strayed up into the mountains. Two vehicles had taken advantage of this to pull over to the side of the road. One was the Subaru wagon they’d been tailing. The other was a dust-caked Camry. Both vehicles’ doors were hanging open, in perfect position for them to be sheared off by the bumper of the onrushing SUV. Men had emerged from both cars and were holding an impromptu conference around the back of the Camry. Some were looking at maps spread out on its rear window. One had a laptop open on the Subaru’s hood and was pointing something out to another. A man was pacing up and down the shoulder of the road, talking into a very large phone. No, on second thought that thing was a walkie-talkie. Most of them were smoking. There were at least eight of them — more than could be counted at a glance. All their heads turned to look in alarm at the SUV, which fishtailed wildly at the top of the rise as Csongor twitched the steering wheel. For a moment, nearly airborne, the big vehicle had practically no grip on the road. Then it slammed back down onto its suspension.

“Left!” Marlon shouted. “Go left!”

Csongor gunned it up the little road that forked off to the left. As they blew past the parked vehicles, Marlon gave them a cheerful grin and a friendly wave. These pleasantries were not returned. Csongor felt the tires losing traction for a moment as he shifted course, and all the muscles in his neck and back went hard as he imagined bullets coming in through the tailgate. But then they were on their way up the little side road, going considerably slower now as this one was even steeper, windier, and rougher than the one they’d just turned off of. “Just keep going,” Marlon said.

“I get it.”

“They have guns.”

Csongor turned to look at him. “You saw guns?”

“No. But when we came over the hill, their hands moved.” He pantomimed a jerk of the elbow, a reach of grasping fingers toward a concealed weapon.

“Crap. So now there’s, what, eight of them?”

“At least.”

“Where was that Toyota from?”

“Some place with a lot of dirt.”

Csongor had been gradually tapering the SUV’s speed down to little more than a walking pace. They had rapidly gained altitude and now found themselves creeping along the edge of a slope so steep that some might accuse it of being a cliff. In any case, it was too steep for trees to grow on, so Marlon now had an excellent view down toward the river and the main road that snaked along its bank. “Okay, they are moving again,” he announced, from this Olympian perspective.

“We must have spooked them.”

“We should turn around and go back,” Marlon said, “because this road goes friggin’ nowhere.”

But Csongor, lacking Marlon’s view to the side, had been scanning the territory ahead and begged to differ. “These roads are for the men who cut down the trees,” he said. He was unsure of the English term for that occupation, and even if he had known it, Marlon might not have recognized it. “They go all over the place.” And indeed, in another few hundred meters — once they had gotten clear of an out-thrust lobe of mountain that accounted for the steep slope — the road forked again, the left fork winding up a valley into the mountains, the right plunging downhill. Csongor took the latter. A few seconds later they passed through another such intersection and found themselves on a short spur that dropped straight down to rejoin the road along the river. Once again they were following a dust trail. But it was so dense now that they could not see more than a hundred or so meters into it; the Subaru and the Camry might be just ahead of them, easily close enough that they could shoot back out their windows and hit the SUV. Csongor had to steady his nerves by reminding himself that the dust was even thicker in the wake of those vehicles; they could peer back out their rear windows all they wanted, but they wouldn’t be able to see anything, not even a vehicle as big as this one.

Along a curve of the river they caught sight of the lead vehicle — the Camry — just a short distance ahead of them, and Marlon exhorted him to drop back a little bit, lest they be spotted.

“What the hell are we going to do when we get to the end of the road?” Csongor asked.

The question elicited a slack-jawed, distracted expression from Marlon. It occurred to Csongor that Marlon, born and raised in a colossal, densely packed city, had no instincts that were useful for being out in the middle of fucking nowhere.

“Hide,” Marlon said, “and wait for them to come back out. Then we follow them out. When we get to that town, we stop and call the cops.”

“We could just do that here.”

“There’s no place to hide here.” Marlon spoke an evident truth; the road was a narrow graveled ledge trapped between a mountain and a river.

But Marlon’s rejoinders had been coming more and more slowly, and after this one he went silent for a while.

“We should start looking for a place to hide,” Csongor offered, just trying to be agreeable. “Maybe there will be something up here.” For the valley was now broadening, as if the river were about to divide into tributaries. The distance between the road and the riverbank grew rapidly, and soon their view of the stream was blocked by dense coniferous forest, brightened here and there by the fresh shoots and buds of deciduous trees. The general trend was uphill, but the terrain was flatter than what they had passed through minutes before; they seemed to have found their way into some high, broad valley among the mountains. Until seeing this, Csongor had supposed that they had ventured beyond the limit of civilization and entered into wilderness, but now he understood that they had merely been driving through a natural bottleneck. Cleared land, livestock, mailboxes, and houses began to complicate their view.

“We should keep going,” Csongor said. “Maybe there is a town or something.”

“There is no town on the map,” Marlon said, fixated upon the Atlas and Gazetteer. “Just a mountain, name of Abandon. Then Canada.”

“Then maybe we should just pull into one of these places and ask for help,” Csongor said. He slowed down and took the next right, turning into a driveway that ran into the woods for a few meters — just enough to accommodate a stopped vehicle — before terminating in a gate.

“TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT,” Marlon said, reading words spray-painted in foot-high letters on a sheet of plywood that covered most of the gate. “What is a trespasser? Some kind of animal?”

“It’s us,” Csongor said, throwing the SUV into reverse and gunning it backward onto the road.

They proceeded without further discussion for a kilometer or so, then slowed down as they approached a whorl of dust filling the whole road cut, from tree line to tree line. Csongor took his foot off the accelerator and let the SUV idle forward. The windshield was a dusty mess, so he motored his window down and leaned out to get a clear view.

This made it possible for him to see that a big vehicle — a pickup truck, red — was stopped in the oncoming lane, pointed toward them. No silhouette was visible behind its steering wheel. This struck Csongor as deeply wrong.

A figure emerged from the dust, walking up along the driver’s side of the truck. Behind him was a second man, moving in the same way. The first of them reached the driver’s door and pulled at the handle but found it to be locked. He then reached in through the window, which was apparently open, and got it unlocked. This was accompanied by some strange pawing gestures that caused little cascades of sparkly bits to tumble out of the window frame and scatter on the ground.

“Broken glass,” Marlon said.

The man hauled the door open and then backed away, as if aghast at what he was seeing there. He paused for a moment, pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt, and said something into it. Then he reholstered the radio and nodded to his companion. The two of them bent forward as one and reached into the truck’s cab, then hauled back.

What they dragged out of the cab was clearly recognizable as a limp human form even though its head had been blown apart into a soggy mushroomlike thing trailing gray stuff that had to be brains. The feet came out last; clad in a pair of high-topped work boots, they bounced off the truck’s running board and then hit the ground heels first.

“Shit, Csongor. Csongor! CSONGOR!” Marlon was calling.

Csongor was so transfixed by the sight of the body that he had stopped paying attention to the two living men who were dragging it by the arms. He now noticed, dully, that those men were staring directly up into his face from no more than about ten meters away.

Then he felt something come down hard on his knee and sensed the steering wheel moving free of his hands. The SUV surged forward, veered left, then right, then left again. The corpse-dragging men were filling the windshield; then they disappeared beneath the edge of its hood and the vehicle thumped and bucked as it smashed them back into the pavement and rolled over them.

Csongor looked down to see Marlon’s left hand on his knee, shoving his foot down into the gas, and his right hand on the steering wheel. Marlon had flung himself sideways across the SUV’s cab and was practically in Csongor’s lap.

“I got this,” Csongor said. “I got it! Fine!” Marlon relented and wriggled back into the passenger seat.

“Maybe we should go back and get their guns,” Marlon suggested.

“That’s how it would work in a video game,” Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing. He allowed the gas pedal to come up off the floor for a moment.

Then Marlon hollered as the rear end of the Subaru became visible just ahead of them. Men were standing around it, looking up in alarm. Csongor twisted the wheel to avoid them. Then remembered that these were the guys they wanted to run over. Tried to correct the error. Felt the vehicle tilt beneath them as it went up on two wheels.

In his peripheral vision, something was coming at him. He looked out Marlon’s window to see that it was the road, hinging straight up into the glass. Marlon was spinning away from it, bringing his hands up to protect his face.

That they had rolled over was obvious enough. What didn’t become obvious for several moments was that they had rolled over all the way and ended up sitting upright on all four wheels, sideways on the road, rocking gently from side to side on the suspension.

Csongor looked out his open window and saw jihadists (it was time to start calling them that) reaching into their garments, just as Marlon had pantomimed a few minutes ago.

He swung the wheel. “Get down!” he said.

Glass was breaking all around him. His door had been sprung off its hinges during the rollover. He pushed it open to provide some space for him to lean sideways. Looking straight down at the road, using its edge as a guide, he got the SUV pointed in what he hoped was the correct direction and punched the accelerator.

A few moments later he sat up straight, just in time to see that he was making for a head-on collision with a fat man riding down the middle of the road on an all-terrain vehicle, a rifle in his lap. Some mutual swerving occurred, and they just avoided hitting each other.

He looked over to see that Marlon was, at least, moving. He had banged his head on something during the rollover and was bleeding from a laceration, stanching it with a wad of Gazetteer.

The road went into a gentle leftward curve. Rustic houses went by them, mostly on the right.

Some of them began to look familiar, and he understood that he was driving in circles. The road had terminated in a big loop. There was nowhere he could go from here.

Except, possibly, up a driveway? He had to do something because the jihadists would be coming soon — might be running laps on the same loop already — and they had him bottled up here, at the head of the valley. He paused at the entrance to one driveway, saw a white man coming down it holding an assault rifle. An assault rifle! He gunned it forward to the next driveway, but this one was blocked, just off the road, by a gate. No place to hide from vengeful jihadists.

The driveway after that seemed to wind off into the woods for some distance. Csongor, reacting without thinking, turned down it, praying that the move wasn’t being observed by any of the people who were pursuing them. Because this not was a decision he could take back; he couldn’t assume that there was a handy infinite loop at the end of this road.

It went around a single bend and terminated in a massive timber gate. Csongor crunched it to a stop, then took advantage of a little wide spot that had been cleared, just in front of this barrier, to make it possible for wayward vehicles to turn around. Even so, getting the SUV reversed in such a tight spot required many back-and-forths. During a few of these, he found himself gazing curiously out his window at a panoply of documents that had been laminated in weatherproof plastic and stapled to the wood. None of them seemed to be direct threats to kill him. They were more in the way of legal filings and political/religious manifestos.

A word passed in front of his eyes that took a moment to sink in. When it did, he stomped the brake. Reversed the vehicle’s direction. Then crept back the way he’d come, as slowly as he could make the vehicle move. Scanning the documents on the gate, unwilling to believe he’d actually seen it.

“What is up, bro?” Marlon demanded. Then he called out “Aiyaa!” as Csongor stomped the brake again, jerking the vehicle, and him, and his aching head.

“I think I get it now,” Csongor said.

“Get what?”

“What’s happening.”

He was staring at a document — a sort of open letter — signed at the bottom. The signature was so neat that you could actually read it. It said, JACOB FORTHRAST.

UNCLE JOHN DROVE the all-terrain vehicle back toward Jake’s cabin with Zula sitting on the luggage rack behind him. Jake rode her bicycle. Olivia and Jake chivalrously suggested that those two ride on ahead as fast as possible, the bicyclists catching up as soon as they could. John, though, was averse to any plan that involved splitting up; and the intensity of his reaction as much as proved that he was recollecting something that had not worked out very well in Vietnam. The journey back was therefore carried out in a tortoise-and-hare mode, the ATV running forward for a few hundred yards and then idling along while Jake and Olivia caught up with them.

During these pauses, John would try to communicate with persons not present. The people who lived around Prohibition Crick had gone there specifically to get off the grid, and so excellent phone reception was not among their priorities. They were not the sort to look benignly on phone company technicians crawling around the neighborhood hiding cables under the ground and setting up mysterious antennas to bathe every cubic inch of their living space with encoded emanations. In spite of which, you could sometimes get one bar if you stood in a high, exposed place in just the right posture. But they were in some combination of too far from the down-valley cell towers and too deeply trapped in the folds of Abandon Mountain’s lower slopes for this to work.

John also had a walkie-talkie, which Jake and members of his family tended to take along with them as a safety measure when they ventured into the wilderness on hunting and huckleberry-picking expeditions. This was of a common brand, pocket-sized, and notoriously fickle when used in the convoluted landscape of the Selkirks; sometimes they could reach people from twenty miles away, sometimes they were no better than shouting at each other. John’s first few efforts to reach Elizabeth back at the cabin were unavailing.

After that, Zula took the device from him and hit on the idea of trying some of the other channels. The device was capable of using twenty-two of them. John had left it set on channel 11, which was the one that the Forthrast family was in the habit of using. Zula hit the Down button and indexed this all the way to 1, pausing on each channel for a few moments to listen for traffic. Then she worked her way back up to 11 and attempted to hail Elizabeth a few more times, with no results. Then up to 12. Nothing. Then she moved up to 13. A barrage of noise came out of the thing’s tiny speaker, and she had to turn the volume down. Several people were trying to transmit on the same channel all at once, and all of them were shouting.

“Why is channel 13 special?” she called back to Jake, who was jogging along about fifty feet behind the ATV.

“Community emergency channel,” he said. “Why?”

“I think there’s an emergency.”

“That’s why Elizabeth hasn’t answered,” John suggested. “She must have switched over to 13.” He gunned the ATV ahead and gave Zula a few hundred yards’ rough ride to a spot where the trail swung around a root of the mountain and gave them a view — albeit distant, dusty, and cluttered by trees — down into the valley. Sporadic gunfire and sounds of roaring engines were spiraling up from below.

The voices on channel 13 were a bit clearer now, but still fragmentary as different transmissions stepped on each other. A man kept breaking in to insist on the need for radio discipline. “Cut the chatter!” “Copy.” “Pennsylvania plates…” “Come again?” “Multiple vehicles…” “Black SUV, two subjects…” “Frank is dead, repeat, they ambushed him in his truck…” “Camry…” “Full auto…”

It required a minute or two for Zula to absorb this. She assumed at first that word of Jones’s approach had preceded him into the valley and that she was listening to the sounds of the community preparing to be invaded from out of the north. But this could not be reconciled with all that she was hearing about vehicles — vehicles that had to be coming up out of the south.

“He must have friends,” she concluded, “come up here to meet him.”

John knew who he was, and approximately what he was doing, because Zula had been giving him an update during the ride. He considered it and shrugged. “It’s not like he was going to hitchhike around the U.S. He’d have to have confederates. I guess they’re here.” He thought about it some more, gazing back at Olivia and Jake who were huffing and puffing along in their wake. “I wonder what they were expecting. Probably just empty logging roads. Jake’s community doesn’t have a name, doesn’t show up on maps. Still, it’s odd that they would come in shooting.”

Jake had not heard the radio traffic, but the gunfire coming up out of the valley was clear enough, and he had a look in his eye that Zula hoped she’d never again see on a loved one’s face. He was up here, and his wife and children were down there, where the fighting was.

John saw it too. “They know what to do,” he reminded his kid brother. “You can be sure that they’re bunkered down and they’re fine.”

“I have to get down there,” Jake said.

Without a word John hopped off the ATV, turning it over to Jake. Zula rolled off the back and came up on her feet, a little unsteady but feeling much better.

Jake turned off the trail and began plunging down the slope, cutting across switchbacks wherever he could.

“It’s about one click from here,” John said. “Descending steep slopes is not my strong suit. I suggest you healthy young ladies proceed together and I’ll bring up the rear.” Slung over his back had been a hunting rifle of the old school, with a brown wooden stock and a telescopic sight. Zula knew he had carried it along only in case he needed it to deal with an enraged bear. He now stripped this weapon off his shoulder and held it out to Zula. “Pump action,” he said. “Thirty ought six, four rounds in the magazine.”

Some part of Zula — the small-town upbringing — wanted to say, Oh no I couldn’t possibly, but she stifled it; the look on the face of her uncle — who, for all practical purposes, had been her father for the last fifteen years — said that he would not brook any argument. She remembered, just for an instant, the day that the meth heads had come to the farm to steal their anhydrous ammonia.

So she only uttered a single word, which was “Thanks.”

OLIVIA TURNED OUT to be pretty spry — more than a match, anyway, for Zula in her current condition. They hewed mostly to the trail and occasionally crossed tracks that had been carved across it by Jake in his impetuous plunge. Zula’s expectation that Jake would soon get far ahead of them turned out to be wrong. When the ATV moved, it moved faster than they could run, but he seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time hung up on obstacles or working his way around slopes too steep for it to negotiate. Its sound was always there, just a bit ahead of them, occasionally drowned out by gunfire. Some sort of weird, inappropriate family-competitive instinct made Zula want to catch and surpass it. But before this happened, they came in view of the cabin itself, its green sheet-metal roof nestled among the peaks of the surrounding trees, and then it became all about getting there as fast and as directly as possible.

Jake and his family had gone through the forest within a hundred-meter radius of the cabin and removed all small scrubby undergrowth and pruned away the dead, ladderlike branches that tended to project from the trunks of mature conifers. This was supposedly an anti-forest-fire measure; it would prevent blazes from storming through the dry understory and consuming the house. It had the side effect of vastly increasing visibility. In the natural woods of these parts, you couldn’t see farther than a few dozen yards because of all that clutter, but from the windows of Jake’s cabin you could see all the way to the edge of the zone they had cleared. Which made Zula suspect that it was also a tactical measure, making it more difficult for people to sneak up on them through the woods. Whatever its purpose, the upshot was that when Olivia and Zula burst into that zone, they suddenly had a clear view all the way to the back of the cabin, where Jake had just finished jumping off the ATV. He made straight for the cellar door, a pair of heavy-gauge steel hatches mounted on an angled frame of reinforced concrete. Zula watched as those doors opened and Elizabeth, strapped with a shotgun in addition to her usual Glock semiautomatic, came out to throw her arms around her husband and give him a kiss.

But it was not a long, fond sort of reunion, for her next act was to grab Jake’s face between her hands and tell him something that looked very important. As she spoke, she turned her head significantly toward the front side of the cabin.

Jake nodded, gave Elizabeth a peck, and stepped back. Elizabeth backed down the steps and hauled the doors closed on top of herself. Zula, now sprinting through the trees no more than fifty paces away, had an impulse to call, No, wait for us! But she was too out of breath to make any sounds other than gasping, and — on second thought — being trapped in a bomb shelter with Elizabeth and the boys did not actually sound that appealing.

Jake meanwhile had unslung his rifle and chambered a round and gone into a style of movement that he must have learned by attending a tactical rifle combat seminar or else by watching DVDs of action films. The gist of it was that he kept the rifle aimed in the same direction as he was looking, and he tended to go very cautiously around corners.

Zula managed to call out, “Coming at you from behind, Uncle Jake!” since there was something in his body language that suggested he might not take kindly to being surprised.

He turned back and made a shushing gesture, then ventured around the corner of the building and disappeared from their view.

Zula was trying to make sense of it. Lots and lots of armed bad men in front of the cabin would call for Jake to go down below with his family and to gather Zula and Olivia with him. So whatever was in front couldn’t be that bad.

“I want to see what is there,” Zula said, breaking stride, and making a lateral move, swinging wide around the same side of the cabin up which Jake was creeping. “I might be able to help.” She swept the rifle down off her shoulder.

“May I join you?” Olivia said between gasps for air.

“Of course.” Olivia seemed to be joining her in any case.

The ground was uneven, the sight lines interrupted not only by tree trunks but by piles of firewood and outbuildings. They were moving in a wide swing around the property while Jake advanced in a straight line up the side of the cabin. So an anxious and confused minute passed as they tried to get Jake back in view without exposing themselves to whomever might be coming up the driveway. They ran afoul of chicken-wire enclosures that the Forthrasts had erected to keep rabbits away from their vegetables, coyotes and lynx away from their chickens, wolves and cougars away from their goats. But finally Zula swung into position where she was able to see Jake from the waist up, standing in his driveway, leveling his rifle at a target nearby, and shouting.

Zula stood up cautiously. Two heads came into view, down at the level of Jake’s waist. Were they kneeling? Both of them had their hands on tops of their heads, fingers laced together.

One of them looked awfully familiar. But what she was thinking could not be real. Checking to make sure that the safety was engaged, she raised the rifle and used its telescopic sight to peer at the one on the right. A big man, not much shorter than Jake even on his knees. Burly. Close-cropped copper hair and a sunburned neck.

“OMFG,” she said.

“Two men are coming in through the gate,” Olivia said, “and I don’t much like their looks.”

Zula panned the rifle down the length of the driveway until the crosshairs found the big timber gate. This was ajar. A half-wrecked SUV was partly visible through it, blocking the road. And just as Olivia had said, two men had just circumvented the vehicle and were now coming around the edge of the gate. They perfectly matched the profile of the jihadists Zula had been hanging around with for the last three weeks. One of them had a pistol drawn, the other had a carbine, which he now raised to his shoulder, apparently drawing a bead on Jake: the most obvious target. And the most vulnerable.

Zula got the crosshairs on the latter and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

“Look out!” Olivia screamed.

Zula flicked the safety off and tried it again. The shot apparently missed; she was breathing hard and she hadn’t really braced herself properly. But it had a remarkable effect on the two jihadists, who jumped back around behind what they perceived as the shelter of the gate and threw themselves down on the ground.

Shouting now from the driveway. She clearly recognized Csongor’s voice, and she understood his tone: Are you crazy? We’re the good guys!

“The Asian gentleman,” said Olivia, “I recognize from his hoops career in Xiamen. Marlon, it must be. And may I assume that the big lad is the famous Csongor?”

Lady, who the fuck are you? was what Zula wanted to say. Instead, what came out was: “Uncle Jake!” Zula came into the open, calling, “Let them in! It’s okay!”

Two heads — Marlon’s and Csongor’s — turned around to look in her direction. They seemed astonished. Especially Csongor.

“Go! Go!” Jake said, pivoting to face the gate. Moving somewhat uncertainly, Csongor and Marlon took their hands off their heads and clambered to their feet. They began moving toward the cabin. Jake went the other way, getting well clear of them and raising his AR-15 to his shoulder. He was aiming it straight down the driveway toward the gate. He fired a spread of several rounds, then began backing up, keeping his sights centered on the gate while closing the distance between himself and his house. Zula meanwhile had braced herself against a tree and obtained a clear view of the same target, ready to fire again if either of the two jihadists should show themselves. But nothing happened. Nothing moved.

WHAT HAD HAPPENED to Richard Forthrast’s ankle was clearly a sprain, not a break. He could hop and hobble, but not walk. This created an interesting situation for Seamus. Not that the situation hitherto had been devoid of fascinating qualities. According to Richard, they were only a few minutes’ walk (for an able-bodied person, anyway) from breaking out into an open space where they would be able to move south, traversing the western face of the mountain, and drop down into a valley where Richard’s brother lived in a cabin. Richard wanted Seamus to leave him behind and move in that direction as fast as possible, because he was worried that Jones’s main group was about to attack the place.

Which Seamus was more than willing to do. He was suffering a bit of survivor’s guilt, having left Jack the chopper pilot behind earlier in the day, and getting ready, now, to abandon the lamed Richard. This was made a lot easier by Richard’s insistence that he should just get on with it, and that he, Richard, could take care of himself in the meantime.

Yuxia was a different matter. Seamus had sort of imagined that she would be a good girl and hang around to look after Richard and keep him company. That being in a chopper crash and being chased through the American wilderness by a fanatical sniper might have sated her taste for adventure, at least for one morning. Barring that, that the heavy psychological aftermath of having just killed a man with a shotgun blast from point-blank range might have left her with a need to sit in a quiet place for a while and think about what it all meant.

But no, everything in her face and body language said that she was going with Seamus. That she was kind of irked by the stupid deliberation that Seamus had been displaying, in the sixty seconds since Jahandar had gone to meet his seventy-two black-eyed virgins, and that if Seamus spent any more time thinking it through, she might just grab a weapon and take off without him.

The inevitability of Yuxia’s participation in the operation’s next phase caused Seamus to think about its details a bit harder. It sounded as though they would be traversing a slope in the open, where they could be shot at from a distance by men with good rifles.

“Is there any way of getting to the same place without going across an exposed slope?” he asked Richard.

“It can be done through the woods,” Richard allowed, nodding off the trail into some formidable-looking forest. “Much more slowly.” He thought about it. “I heard some shooting from that direction a minute ago.”

“So did I. Either Jones met with opposition, or he decided to ambush a meth lab.”

“Up here, a marijuana grow would be more likely. Too far from the road for a meth lab.”

“Anyway, they seem to be going through the woods,” Seamus said, “which would slow them down.”

“If you take the high road,” Richard said, “you’ll be way up above them. You’ll be able to reach cover if you have to. And you’ll have the advantage if you are packing the A.I.” For he had recognized Jahandar’s rifle and assumed Seamus had done the same.

“The high road it is,” Seamus said, trying to put a lot of decisiveness into his voice, as a way of appeasing Yuxia, who was bouncing around in her camo like the little sidekick bruin in the old Yogi Bear cartoon. “Which gun, or guns, would you like me to leave you with?”

“You can take them all, if your intention is to shoot lots of bad guys with them.”

“I should have mentioned that it was a trick question,” Seamus continued. “We are being tailed by a mountain lion that is most definitely not as afraid of us as we are of it.”

“I know.” Richard looked around. “As much as I covet the A.I., in these woods, I can’t see far enough for its excellent qualities to be of any use beyond assuaging certain masturbatory gun-nut impulses.”

“What about the shotgun?” Seamus asked.

“Yuxia should take that. She knows how to use it, and it looks cute on her.” This, at least, elicited a dimpled grin from Yuxia as she basked for a few moments in the scrutiny of the two men.

“No argument.”

Seamus approached the pellet-riddled corpse and rolled it over. “Here’s a wheel gun, if you can believe it.”

“I thought it sounded like a six-shooter,” Richard said.

“Five-shooter, more like. Large caliber.” Seamus dropped to his knees and studied the revolver, which had been concealed under Jahandar’s body and was now lying in the middle of the trail. He carefully uncocked it, then held it up. “Trophy piece. Must have taken it off a dead American contractor.”

“Seems like just what the doctor ordered for last-ditch cougar defense. I’ll take it. You get the A.I.”

“Done,” Seamus said. Less than a minute later, he and Yuxia, regeared and rearmed, were jogging up the switchbacks.

DURING THE QUARTER of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet place beneath a fallen log, he thought about age. These ruminations were triggered by all that he had done in the last half hour or so. He had created an effigy, seen it shot to pieces, run across a big rock, and then made a helter-skelter descent of a large open slope. Twenty times he had dived and rolled into cover on a surface consisting largely of big sharp rocks, each of which had left some kind of mark on him, some of which had inflicted bone bruises that would take weeks to get better. Another twenty times he had dived and rolled in ice-cold mud. He had sprinted into an unfamiliar abandoned mining camp with no idea of what he was going to do, then found an ideal place to take cover and taken advantage of it. He had rested there for all of about three minutes before blowing it by shooting the tall African jihadist, whereupon he had been obliged to abandon the position and go into another intense fugue of running, diving, vaulting, rolling, and hiding in uncomfortable places.

All this effort, all these risks taken and damages sustained, had achieved one thing for him, which was that he had killed exactly one of his numerous foes.

Now, had he been a seventeen-year-old, he’d have harbored foolish and unrealistic expectations of what could really be achieved in a situation such as this one, and he’d have believed that the payoff for all that work and risk and pain ought to have been greater than bagging one enemy. Driven by that misconception, he would have been slower to abandon the log cabin, slower to give up on the hope of shooting the man who had hidden behind the outhouse. He would have adopted a combative stance toward the main group of jihadists who had come running back to the camp. As a result, they would have surrounded him and killed him. All because he was young and imbued with an unrealistic sense of what the world owed him.

On the other hand, had he been a few years older than he really was, or not in such good physical condition, then all the running and diving and exposure to the elements would have felt much more expensive to him. Unsustainable. Disheartening. And those emotions would have led to his making decisions every bit as fatal, in the end, as those of the hypothetical seventeen-year-old.

So, as loath as he was to be self-congratulatory, he saw evidence to support the conclusion that he was at precisely the right age and level of physical conditioning to be undertaking this mission.

Which, viewed superficially, seemed like a favorable judgment. But with a bit more consideration — and, as he hid beneath the tree and listened to the jihadists beating the bushes, he did have a few minutes to think about it — it was really somewhat troubling, since it implied that all the operations he had participated in during his career before today had been undertaken by a foolish boy, in over his head and surviving by dumb luck. Whereas any operations he might carry out in the future would be ill-advised excursions by a man who was over the hill, past his prime.

He really needed to get out of this line of work.

But he’d been saying that ever since Afghanistan, and look where it had gotten him.

After a while, he heard Jones calling out to the others, telling them to give up the search. The need to press on outweighed the desire to take vengeance on the man who was stalking them. Sokolov waited until he could no longer hear the jihadists moving around, then emerged from his cover very carefully, beginning with a quick bob of the head followed by an immediate retreat. When several such ventures failed to draw fire, he began to feel some confidence that they had not left anyone behind to kill him when he emerged from cover, and he moved more freely. But he had the uncomfortable sense that they were now way ahead of him, and he began to consider how he could make up for lost time. Jones and his crew had made the decision to move through the forest, which was slower than going across the high country above the tree line, and so an obvious way that Sokolov might make up for lost time would be to go back into the mining camp and then continue to move through the scrubland just outside the limit of the trees.

This involved some slogging, since the ground here at the base of the slope was saturated with runoff. After several minutes of slow progress, he was reminded of his foolishness by a sound from high above: scraping and banging rocks. He went into the best cover he could find, which was a clump of bushes that seemed to thrive in the boggy soil, and then looked up in time to see a minor avalanche petering out on the talus slope, perhaps a thousand meters above him: just a few rocks that had been dislodged by someone or something and tumbled for a short distance before coming to rest. This gave him an idea of where he should look, so he swung his rifle up and peered through its scope, starting at the place where the rocks had stopped moving and then tilting up until he could see the faint horizontal scar of the trail. With a bit of panning sideways, he was confronted with the arresting sight of a man, sitting on the ground, and aiming a rifle right back at him! His first reaction was to flinch and get deeper into cover, which caused him to lose the sight picture. Even as he was doing so, however, his mind was processing what he had glimpsed and noting a few peculiarities.

Chief of these was that the rifle’s bolt handle had been jutting perpendicularly out from the side of the weapon, which meant that it was not in condition to fire.

And — unless his memory was playing tricks — the man had been holding the weapon oddly. His right hand was not where it ought to have been — not in a position to pull the trigger.

Slightly emboldened by these recollections, he reacquired the sight picture and verified it all. This time, as soon as he had the other man in his sights, the guy pulled his head away from his scope, revealing a European-looking face. Not that this proved anything. But there was something in the set of that face that did not say “paleface jihadist.”

This guy, whoever he was, was on Sokolov’s side. He had seen Sokolov from above, probably tracked him through his telescopic sight, and identified him as a friendly. He had triggered the little avalanche as a way of getting Sokolov’s attention. And he now wanted to communicate.

He grinned and looked off to the side. A moment later his face was joined by that of a young Asian female.

Very familiar-looking.

Sokolov had been trained for more than two decades to remain absolutely silent in battlefield situations, but he could not prevent an expression of surprise from escaping from his lips when he recognized this person as Qian Yuxia.

The man with Yuxia now began gesturing with his hands. It was impossible to communicate well in this manner. Russians and Americans — he guessed that this fellow was American — used different systems of hand signs. But the gestures were eloquent enough. The man was envisioning a sort of pincer movement. He and Yuxia would proceed along the high road, Sokolov would likewise continue doing what he was doing, and they would converge on the jihadists at the target, which Sokolov assumed to be Jake Forthrast’s cabin.

All of which was obvious enough. And even had it not been obvious, it was more or less mandatory; neither of them had much choice as to where they would go and what they would do next. That wasn’t the point.

The point was that they should try to avoid killing each other by accident during the fight that was going to begin in a few minutes. And Sokolov thought it was an excellent point.

“THIS WAY!” ZULA called, for Csongor and Marlon were preceding Jake up the driveway, headed for the cabin. Zula could see through the scope of the rifle that the jihadists had parked a couple of vehicles athwart the driveway’s entrance, up where it joined the road. They had posted a few men behind those vehicles and in the surrounding woods, apparently to fire at any neighbors or inquisitive police who might try to come after them. The main group, numbering perhaps five, were running toward the gate, using the half-wrecked SUV as cover. When they got there, they’d be able to shoot down the driveway and pick off anyone standing out in the open.

Olivia had seen the same thing. “Get behind cover!” she was calling. “Come toward me!”

The men were all slow to hear and respond. They had a lot on their minds. Olivia switched into Mandarin and called something out in a high sharp tone that made Marlon’s head swivel around and look right at her. He seemed to come to his senses then and grabbed Csongor’s sleeve and hauled him toward the sound of Olivia’s voice. Csongor was too big and had too much momentum to be diverted by this alone, but he could be steered, and within a few moments he and Marlon were both storming through the belt of woods and undergrowth that ran along the edge of the driveway. They burst out into the semicleared space where Zula and Olivia were. A few seconds later, Jake followed in their wake. Zula collected most of these impressions through her ears, since her gaze was still fixed through the scope at the gate. She had pumped a new round into the rifle. The magazine had only held four to begin with. Muzzle flashes lit up the view through her scope, and several rounds zipped through the foliage over her head.

“I’m covering the gate,” Jake announced. “You should pull back, Zula.”

Zula turned to see Jake kneeling behind the bole of a large tree, aiming his rifle through what she could only assume was a gap in the brush. He fired a round, studied the result, fired two more. Then he glanced up at her and used his eyes and his chin to indicate the direction he thought she should go.

“Over here, Zula!” Olivia called. Zula bent low and scurried into a gap between a goat pen and a net-enclosed structure where Jake and Elizabeth cultivated raspberries. A few seconds later, she had emerged into an open space behind the shed where the goats took shelter from the mountain weather. Olivia, Marlon, and Csongor were there.

It was awkward to say the least. Csongor took a quick step toward her, then faltered.

Why did he falter?

Because she was carrying a rifle?

Because her face was a horror show?

Because he wasn’t sure whether she fancied him?

She searched his face for clues and got no answers, other than a powerful, unfamiliar, and situationally inappropriate feeling of pleasure that he was alive and here.

Two bangs sounded from up the hill. Then a third. Then a whole lot of other bangs in return.

“Uncle John,” Zula explained, in the silence that followed. “I left him with the Glock.”

Olivia said, “So, at the risk of stating the obvious, they’re coming to shake hands with that lot.” She tossed her head in the direction of the driveway, which was all of a sudden sounding like a free-fire zone. Zula peered around the edge of the shed and saw Jake retreating toward them.

“What is going on?” asked the voice of Elizabeth, coming out of the walkie-talkie. “Someone fill me in.”

Zula raised the device toward her face and was about to say something when Jake came in range of her, lashed out with his left hand, and ripped it out of her grasp. “Lock it down, baby,” he said. “Don’t wait for us.”

“Where are you?”

“Tell me you are in lockdown, and I’ll answer your question,” Jake responded testily.

A few moments’ radio silence followed. Jake turned to look at the others. “We’re cut off,” he said. “There’s no way we can get to the cabin before these guys do.”

“Done,” Elizabeth confirmed.

“The safe room is sealed,” Jake announced, then pressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie again. “Okay. We’re behind the goat shed. I’ll try to update you from time to time. Can the boys hear me?”

“Yes, they’re right here gathered around me.”

“Be brave and pray,” Jake said. “I love you all, and I hope I’ll see you soon. But until you see my face in the security camera, don’t unlock those doors no matter what happens.”

ONCE HE WAS certain that no one could see him, John sat down and began to descend the slope on his ass. His artificial legs were very nice — Richard bought him a new pair every few Christmases and spared no expense — but they were worse than useless when going downhill. Even when he was moving in ass-walking mode, all they did was get hung up on undergrowth anyway, so he paused for a minute to take them off and rub his sore-as-hell stumps. He reached around behind his back and stuffed them into the open top of his knapsack, then resumed inchworming down the mountain. Progress was slow, but — considering the switchbacks — actually not a hell of a lot slower than walking upright. In normal circumstances, he’d have been chagrined by the loss of personal dignity, but he was alone, and since his head was no more than a couple of feet off the ground, no one could see him in any case.

It was probably this detail that saved his life, since the advance scout moving ahead of Jones’s main group was doing a commendable job of passing through the forest quietly, and John — whose hearing was not the best — didn’t become aware of him until he was only twenty feet away.

John, of course, had been using his hands for locomotion. The Glock that Zula had given him was in his jacket pocket.

The scout would have blown by too quickly for John to take any action, if not for the fact that some shots sounded from below, and caused the scout’s stride to falter, and drew his attention. Standing with his back to John, he looked down toward Jake’s cabin and raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth. He was a close-cropped blond man with a scar on the back of his head. John had the Glock out by this point. The shot was so ideal that he got a little ahead of himself, raising the weapon in both hands and thereby disturbing his perch on the slope. He felt his ass starting to break free and managed to squeeze off one round before he became discombobulated and slid down a yard or so to a new and more stable resting place.

The scout had turned around to see him and probably would have killed him had his hand not been occupied by the walkie-talkie. As it was, all he could do was shout some sort of warning into it before John fired two more rounds into his midsection and brought him down. His body spiraled around the trunk of a tree and skidded down the slope for a few yards. Abandoning all pretense of quiet movement, John skidded down after him, using his ass as a sled, and probably breaking his tailbone on a rock about halfway down. This sent such a jolt through his body that it spun him into an ungainly, sprawling roll down the hill as things spewed out of his pockets and backpack in a sort of avalanche-cum-yard-sale. But he got to the jihadist and stripped him of his weapon before any of the others could get there to investigate. This was a very nice piece, a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, fully automatic. John was not familiar with it. Without his reading glasses he couldn’t make sense of the little words stamped into its metal around the controls. But with a bit of groping around and experimentation he was able to figure out how to charge it and how to take off the safety.

An anxious voice blurted from the jihadist’s walkie-talkie. But at the same time John heard the same voice saying the same thing from a few yards away.

The approaching man heard it all too, and now began to use the walkie-talkie as a way to home in on his friend’s location, keying the mike every couple of seconds and listening for the answering crackle of static. John, somewhat desperately, grabbed the device and flung it away from him as if it were a live grenade. But the oncoming jihadist did not seemed to be fooled; apparently he head heard John’s clothes rustling with the sudden movement. He did not stop. John aimed toward the sound and pulled the trigger. A short burst of rounds chortled from the weapon. Poorly aimed and unlikely to hit anything; but John, unfamiliar as he was with this gun, had not been a hundred percent certain that it was in a condition to fire when the trigger was pulled, and he needed to get past that.

The jihadist, perhaps ten yards away but completely obscured by ferns and scrubby little trees, reacted instantly by diving down the slope: a desperately dangerous move, but a logical one, if he’d had reasons to doubt the security of his position. For John now had no idea where the man was, and given the density of the undergrowth, that would continue being true until he gave away his position by moving.

Speaking of which, John’s position was nothing to write home about either, and anyway he had given it up by firing the weapon. Making a reasonable guess as to where his opponent had rolled and tumbled, he edged down the slope a little more, trying to move as quietly as possible, which meant slowly. He became aware as he was doing this that more than one person was moving through the woods around him.

He was sitting very still, trying to listen for their movements, when a boot slammed into the side of his Heckler & Koch and pinned it to the ground. Since John was holding on to it firmly, this shoved him down on his side. He turned his stiff neck and looked up to see a man’s face staring down at him from six feet above.

Or maybe a bit more than six feet. The man was tall. Black fellow. Not that John had any problem with blacks. He had always been happy to judge other men on their own unique qualities as individuals.

He looked kind of familiar. John had seen his picture recently.

Abdallah Jones was gripping a pistol in one hand and, in the other, one of John’s artificial legs, which had skidded down the slope in advance of him.

“Too pathetic for words,” Jones said.

“Fuck you and the goat you rode in on,” John returned.

Jones bent down, raised the leg above his head, and brought it down toward John’s face like a truncheon.

WHEN THE GUNFIRE started in earnest, Sokolov abandoned stealth and broke into a run. There was no point in sneaking around in the woods anymore. Jones had not left anyone behind to snipe at him. The jihadists were in full flight toward Jake’s compound now, shooting at anything that moved, just trying to make their way out to a road so that they could get clear of this area before the police locked it down. Or at least that was the vision that Sokolov constructed in his head. It occurred to him to wonder how Jones expected to escape. Was he planning to commandeer vehicles? Or did he have confederates scheduled to rendezvous with him? The latter seemed a much better plan, and thus far Jones had planned rather well. It was also the most pessimistic scenario from Sokolov’s point of view, since it meant that Jones would have reinforcements, presumably armed with all that the gun shops of the United States of America had to offer. They would probably make directly for the Forthrast compound, since that was the most-difficult-to-fuck-up instruction that Jones could possibly give them. Men in situations like this one were largely instinct-driven, and their instinct would be to gravitate toward something that looked like a shelter and that would serve as an obvious rallying point.

As he drew closer to the compound, he began to hear more small-arms fire. He rounded a hillside and found himself only a couple of hundred meters from the cabin. Had it not been for the trees he’d have been able to see it clearly. As it was, he could glimpse a corner of roof, a chimney top with a lightning rod projecting from it, the whirling anemometer of the little home weather station that Jake and his sons had mounted up there. Gunfire and shouting were coming from out in the driveway. And other sounds of battle from nearer — the hillside leading down from the high trail. But there did not seem to be anything emanating from the cabin itself, which made him think that he had arrived before either Jones’s hikers or the U.S.-based drivers had managed to occupy the place.

And so he decided that he would occupy it first. Its walls were solid logs, almost half a meter thick, sufficient to stop most of the rounds that the jihadists’ weapons were firing.

He plunged down the hill and across a short stretch of level ground until he reached the edge of the area that Jake had cleared. This was going to become a very dangerous place in a few seconds. It might already be. He dropped to his belly and crawled several meters to a spot where he could take shelter behind a recently felled tree, not yet cut up for firewood. Its trunk was too skinny to hide him or to stop bullets, but its innumerable small dead branches, spraying out in all directions, created a visual screen. He crawled down the length of it, getting a bit closer to the cabin, then raised his head cautiously and, when this failed to draw fire, spent a few moments looking into the cabin’s windows. He saw no smashed-out panes, no faces peeking round the edges of window frames — no signs, in other words, that it had yet been occupied. He could still make out two identifiable groups of gunmen moving around the property, converging generally on the cabin — but not there yet.

He got to his feet and sprinted for the cabin’s back door.

TO PARAPHRASE a familiar proverb, Seamus had been provided with a hammer — a rather good sniper rifle — and now he was looking for nails. He and Yuxia had spent the last few minutes descending the trail that, judging from evidence (lots of recent footprints and ATV tracks) led down into wherever it was that everyone was converging — a cabin, according to some hasty directions supplied by Richard, owned by Richard’s brother Jake and occupied by family members, including women and children, who ought to have no part in this quarrel.

In his haste to get to the bottom of the slope, Seamus nearly caught up with Jones’s main group. Alerted, almost too late, by a few gunshots from just below — gunshots that were evidently not intended for him — he threw himself down, got situated in a prone firing posture with reasonable cover, flipped the lens caps off the ends of the rifle’s scope, and got it ready to fire.

He had also run some distance ahead of Yuxia, who now caught up with him and didn’t have to be told that she should throw herself down next to him so as not to present a target.

Now if one of those assholes down below would only make a target of himself. This was the rub of the hammer/nail problem. If Seamus hadn’t come into possession of the rifle, he’d have brought a completely different skill set into play, moving down the slope as stealthily as possible in search of shorter-range combat opportunities. Instead, here he was, frozen in a fixed position that was too far out of the action to be of any use.

A movement caught his eye through a gap in the foliage. Yuxia saw it too and pointed. By the time he had flicked his eyes in that direction, whatever he’d glimpsed was gone. He lost interest, reckoning that none of these jihadists would ever show himself twice in the same place. But then a little gasp from Yuxia told him he’d guessed wrong. He swung the rifle in that direction, peered through the scope, waited for a few seconds, and then, finally, saw it clearly.

But it wasn’t what he’d expected. Not a head. Not a gun. Not a hand. But a foot. A disembodied boot on the end of a rod.

Holding the rod about halfway along, a gloved hand. It descended sharply, then came back up again.

Seamus risked climbing up to his knees, so that he could get a better view. It took a moment to get the scene recentered in his scope. This time he was able to see the arm attached to that hand. Following it down, he identified the face of none other than Abdallah Jones.

He was just about to pull the trigger when his sight picture was obscured by the head and shoulders of another man who had entered the scene, gesticulating like crazy, trying to get Jones’s attention. Seamus lifted his eye from the scope, trying to see what this other jihadist was looking at, but his view of the world was limited to a single narrow aperture between tree branches, and whatever had got this man so excited was far out of his view.

So he exhaled, dropped his eye back to the scope, made sure the crosshairs were still on the man’s back, and pulled the trigger. The rifle went off like a motherfucker and the jihadist sprang forward as if he had been kicked in the back. He dropped out of view, revealing Jones, who Seamus fondly hoped might have been struck by the same bullet. But the bullet had either fragmented in the first man’s body or else caromed off a vertebra and gone off in another direction.

There might be some alternate, parallel universe, designed to the exact specifications of snipers, where Jones would now freeze with terror long enough for Seamus to work the bolt, chamber another round, and fire. But not here. Jones dove and rolled and was long gone before Seamus was in a position to shoot again.

“They know we’re here,” Seamus said.

“Ya think?”

“We just have to proceed with caution, is all I’m saying.”

“Why was that man waving his arms?”

“Could have been anything,” Seamus said, “but I’ll bet he saw Sokolov.”

“DON’T SHOOT!” Olivia cried, for Jake Forthrast, attracted by movement in his peripheral vision, had swung his AR-15 around to bear on a man sprinting in a zigzag pattern across his backyard, headed for his cabin. Olivia had just recognized the man as Sokolov.

“Thank you,” Jake said, and turned instead to aim in the general direction of some gunshots sounding from the base of the hill. Some of the jihadists were up there, trying to bring down Sokolov. A single very sharp crack sounded from higher up the slope.

“They’ve got a sniper,” Jake said. But at almost the same moment they could hear excited voices from where Jones and his men had gone to ground, apparently saying much the same thing.

“Maybe we’ve got a sniper,” Csongor suggested.

“Maybe,” Jake said, “but who the hell?”

Olivia heard all of this as if from a great distance, focused as she was on Sokolov. About halfway through his run he had disappeared from her view, hidden behind the corner of the cabin, and she had no way of knowing whether he had found shelter there or been brought down by that clatter of fire from the woods. But then a curtain moved in an upper-story window. He was too smart to expose himself where she, or anyone, would be able see his face, so she saw nothing more than this subtle movement; but that alone gave her confidence that the one behind that curtain was him. “I believe he made it,” she said. “He’s in the cabin.”

Glass shattered in the front of the house and a series of bangs sounded. A scream of dismay erupted from the driveway.

“So it would appear,” Zula said.

“What do we do now?” Marlon wanted to know.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Jake said, “if you all can just hole up somewhere and not get killed, well, that’s the best you can reasonably hope for.”

“I’m all in favor of not getting killed,” Olivia said, “but what are you going to do, Jake?”

“My neighbors are probably headed this way right now, loaded for bear,” Jake said. “If they just blunder into the middle of this, they’ll be mowed down — they have no idea what they are getting themselves into. I’m going to work my way back out to the gate and do what I can to prevent that from happening.”

A jihadist sprinted out of cover, making a run for the rear of the house — apparently thinking that he could get in through the back door while Sokolov was shooting out the front. He thudded up the porch steps, grabbed the doorknob, and found it locked. Zula was getting into position to aim her rifle at the man. Before she could do anything, however, his head snapped forward as if he were trying to head-butt his way through the door. He slid and crumpled to the deck and lay there twitching. The echo of another sharp bang resounded from above.

“Definitely our sniper,” Marlon concluded.

Jake had already departed, taking advantage of these distractions to run for the cover of a woodpile some yards away. From there he was quickly able to make his way off the property, or at least out of their field of view. More bangs sounded from the upper-story windows of the cabin, as Sokolov was apparently moving from window to window taking aim at any targets that presented themselves: sometimes shooting out the back at Jones’s group, other times out the front at the ones trying to come up the driveway. The latter seemed more numerous and better armed. Jones’s contingent had lost a few members and also had to contend with the sniper firing down on them from the hillside behind.

“They are coming closer to us,” Marlon said. His face was turned toward the back side of the property, his ears tracking the purr of a submachine gun, firing in occasional bursts that got a little nearer each time. Each of those bursts caused damage to a window or a window frame on the cabin’s upper story, and those targets were migrating slowly along the back and around the corner of the building. The dark weathered surface of the logs was splintering to reveal blond wood underneath, as if the place were being swarmed by invisible chainsaws.

Sokolov popped up in the window where he had twitched the curtain earlier, and fired two rounds before ducking back down to avoid a long burst of fire. So it would seem the owner of the submachine gun was working his way through the property, dodging around the side of the cabin in a wide arc, probably trying to connect with his brothers in the driveway without exposing himself to fire from either Sokolov or the sniper. The farther he got without being cut down, the more likely it was that others would follow in his wake and that the four behind the shed — who were armed only with Zula’s rifle and the pistol that Jake Forthrast had handed to Csongor — would find themselves confronting all that remained of Jones’s group, who were few in number but armed to the teeth. And no doubt pissed. All four of them assembled this picture in their minds over the course of a few moments and instinctively drew away from the approaching shooter, seeking cover around the corner of the shed or behind tree trunks. But the news was not particularly good from the driveway side either. The jihadists in front were communicating with those in back using walkie-talkies. While Sokolov had been focusing all of his attention on Jones’s group, trying to prevent them from coming around the side and tangling with Zula, Olivia, Marlon, and Csongor, the attackers in the driveway had begun to move up toward the cabin.

Zula, prone behind a cedar tree and gazing over the sight of the rifle, trying to catch sight of the agile shooter with the submachine gun, was growingly conscious of a rhythmic thud-thud-thud that was growing to fill the air and shake the ground. Focused as she was on other matters, she had not given it much thought at first. She now recognized it as the sound of a helicopter. It had come in at higher altitude but was now making a low and slow pass over the compound. She rolled over on her back and looked almost vertically upward at the belly of a chopper passing maybe a hundred feet overhead. Men were peering out the windows, trying to make sense of what was going on down here. As it passed by and banked around, she was able to see markings of the Idaho State Patrol.

It made a lazy swing over the back forty and then came around to the front and hovered above the driveway.

A streak of fire lanced up out of the trees near the gate and struck it near the tail rotor. The back half of the chopper disappeared for a moment in a spike of white fire. What was left of it began to pinwheel, descending rapidly. It dropped out of Zula’s view, and a moment later she heard it crash into the driveway, and fusillades of gunfire as the jihadists on that side poured rounds into its wreckage.

SOKOLOV UNDERSTOOD THAT the rocket-propelled grenade had been intended for him. Pinned down by his fire from the upper story of the cabin, the jihadists had sent a man back to get the device out of the trunk of a car. He had been stealing through the woods, trying to get into position to fire a grenade through a window, when the chopper had appeared overhead and presented him with an even more tempting target. And so he had played his hand and ruined the surprise.

The next RPG would be headed his way as soon as the jihadist could reload.

The back of the cabin sported screened-in decks on both the ground level and the upper story; Elizabeth, last night, had referred to the latter as a “sleeping porch.” Sokolov vaulted through a shattered window and landed flat on the deck of the sleeping porch. If any of the jihadists out back had noticed this — and they probably had — then they knew that they now had a shot at him. Not a good shot, for if they were close, they’d be firing upward through the two-by-four decking of the porch; and if they were farther away, their view would cluttered by furniture. But their surplus of ammunition would make up for many of these deficiencies. Sokolov’s life expectancy up on this deck was well under sixty seconds.

Or at least that was the state of affairs before the upper story of the cabin exploded. The man with the RPG knew what he was doing: with two shots he had brought down a helicopter and essentially decapitated the building that Sokolov had been using as a sniper’s perch.

Sokolov now became part of a large mass of rubble — mostly logs — finding its way to the ground. The sleeping porch peeled away from the side of the house and toppled, and he of course fell with it and struck the ground with less violence than might have been expected. But logs, and a considerable part of the roof structure, came after, and Sokolov’s world grew dark and confined, and when he tried to move his right leg, it budged not at all, but responded only with weird tingling sensations that he knew as harbingers of serious pain.

SEAMUS’S QUEST FOR nails to hit with his hammer had been petering out as the would-be nails either died or fled, making their way around the side of the cabin and taking cover behind the numerous trees, small structures, and woodpiles that complicated that swath of the property. It became obvious that he needed to relocate to a position farther down the slope. And yet he hesitated. He knew that Yuxia would insist on coming with him, and he did not want to bring her into what would clearly turn into a vicious, short-range, tree-to-tree kind of affair, your basic hatchet fight in a dark cellar. He was trying to think of some way to broach this topic with her when he noticed the chopper making its pass over the back of the compound, just above treetop level — which meant it was nearly on a level with Seamus. Had he been one of the bad guys he could have taken out both the pilot and the copilot with a single round through both of their helmets. As it was, he levered himself up on his elbows and simply watched it fly by with the cynical and helpless attitude of the experienced combat veteran. For it was obvious that the two troopers in the chopper had no idea how much danger they were in. They had probably flown up here in response to a vague, excited telephone report of shots fired in the woods: something that must happen all the time in these parts. Assuming that it was nothing more than poachers, or kids screwing around with their dads’ guns, they were making a low and slow pass over the area, just to put the fear of God into the hearts of the miscreants. After which they would fly home and spend the afternoon drinking coffee and writing up a very dull report.

They were going to die.

The copilot was swiveling his head from side to side, scanning the ground below, occasionally turning to an angle from which Seamus might — just might — show up in his peripheral vision. If only Seamus were not clad from head to toe in camouflage.

Seamus jumped to his feet and did a few jumping jacks. He unzipped his parka, turned it inside out, began waving it over his head.

The chopper turned its tail rotor toward him, like a dog presenting its ass to be sniffed, and began to cruise away.

Seamus noticed something red on his arm, just above the elbow, and looked down curiously to see that a chunk of flesh was missing from it.

Yuxia jumped to her feet and fired the shotgun. Pumped it, ejecting the spent shell, and chambering the last one.

ZULA HAD BEEN having miserable bad luck with the rifle. The jihadists seemed to be quite good at staying behind cover. She had fired another round but apparently not hit anything. She had just two left.

Olivia had sprung to her feet when the top half of Jake’s cabin had disintegrated, and she had taken a few paces toward its still-settling ruins before Marlon had jumped up and tackled her to the ground. He was lying next to her now, a consoling hand on her shoulder, talking to her.

Zula flinched, sensing movement nearby, and looked back to see that it was Csongor, approaching on hands and knees. He flopped down, pressing against her. Her body responded to the contact as if it were just him being companionable. But her mind understood that he was making himself a human shield to protect her from any shots that might come from the direction they were most concerned about.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Ssh,” he said. “It is very logical.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes. You have to use your rifle to get the guy with the big weapon — I guess it must be rocket-propelled grenade? But you can’t do that if this asshole over here” — he waved the pistol vaguely in the direction from which they’d been hearing the bursts of the submachine gun — “is shooting at you. So I’ll take care of him.”

She was about to take issue with this when a racket sounded from above their heads. They looked up, blinking their eyes against a descending haze of wood dust, to see a ragged line of fresh bullet holes in the wall of the shed.

Zula met Olivia’s eye for a moment.

“Scatter!” Zula cried, and rolled up and ran around to the other side of the shed. She heard Olivia relay the command to Marlon and then felt and heard their footfalls and their ragged breathing as they sought other cover.

She was looking around trying to figure out where Csongor had ended up when a fusillade, the longest and the loudest yet, sounded from the driveway, up near the gate. Cringing against the shed wall, she understood that this had to be Jake and the neighbors, mounting some kind of organized assault. They’d be moving up the driveway, which meant that the remaining jihadists on this side would have to retreat toward the house.

Had Jake and his group seen the RPGs? Did they understand what they were up against?

Zula, summoning energy she had no right to have, risked getting to her feet and running several yards to the cover of the woodpile that Jake had used earlier. Throwing herself down, she raised her head cautiously and tried to scope out the scene in front of her.

In this environment, so filled with irregular natural forms, anything straight and smooth captured the eye. She saw one such thing now, projecting outward near the base of a tree. Definitely a man-made shape. But not a rifle. She suspected that it might be the stock of the RPG launcher. It was wiggling around, as if its operator were getting ready to use it.

Getting ready to fire a grenade into the middle of the group that Jake was leading up the driveway.

She was too low. She sat up, leaned against the side of the woodpile to steady her aim, and drew a bead on what she’d just been looking at.

From this higher vantage point she was clearly able to see the head and shoulders of a man, crouching against a tree with his back to her, holding a loaded RPG on his shoulder.

She got the crosshairs between his shoulder blades and took up the slack in the trigger. Then she heard a loud crack and felt something crash down on top of her head.

THE MAN WITH the submachine gun had been maddeningly elusive. When the four had scattered at Zula’s suggestion, he ought to have fired wildly in all directions, trying to hit at least one of them. This, at any rate, would have made things easier for Csongor. Instead, the jihadist had prudently held his fire, probably realizing that in such a melee he was only going to waste ammunition.

Csongor was confident that he had found reasonably secure cover. Since he was a large target with a small gun, he didn’t fancy his chances in a running-and-shooting duel with a small, elusive person carrying anything fully automatic. So, as difficult as this was, he lay very still and very quiet, and simply waited for the other guy to make a move.

Nothing happened for a minute or so, other than the sound of shots coming from the driveway.

But then the man just stood up, perhaps ten meters away, and fired a burst from his hip. He examined the results, then raised the weapon to his shoulder to fire at something with better aim.

The man was shooting at Zula.

Csongor pressed himself up to one knee, raised the pistol, and fired half a dozen rounds. By the time he was finished, the man was gone: dead or fled to cover, it was difficult to say.

ZULA HAD BEEN struck by a hunk of firewood that had been dislodged from the top of the pile by what she guessed was a poorly aimed burst of fire. It would leave a nasty bump but nothing serious.

Trying not to think about what this meant, she lined up her shot again and saw the man with the RPG, still about where he had been before, squatting on his haunches, bouncing up and down a little, pivoting and moving from time to time as he evaluated different targets.

Then a change came over him. He had been restless, nervous, but now had settled down into the attitude of a cat getting ready to pounce. Through the scope she could see his eye making itself comfortable in the weapon’s sight, his finger finding the trigger.

She pounced herself by pulling her trigger first.

Nothing happened. She understood now that her finger must have contracted against the trigger and fired a shot when the piece of wood had struck her on the head. The chamber was empty.

She pumped the weapon, chambering her last round, quickly lined up her shot again, and fired. Lifting her head from the sight she saw the man sprawling forward, and a jet of fire leaping from his shoulder as the RPG was launched. It caromed off the ground a few yards in front of him, spiraled into the air, and went screaming away.

“OKAY,” SEAMUS SAID, “I guess you can come with me. Just save the last shell for something really important, okay?” And with that he plunged forward down the slope at a run, cradling the rifle in his good arm and letting the damaged one dangle. Blood streamed down it freely and dribbled from his fingertips. He nearly tripped over the body of the man who had shot him, and who had been destroyed by Yuxia’s shotgun blast. Jones must have sent this guy back to track down the annoying sniper and kill him, which Seamus had almost made too easy by jumping up and presenting himself as a target.

Though, on the other hand, that might have saved his life. Had he stayed down, the stalker would have drawn closer before opening fire. By doing jumping jacks in plain view, Seamus had made himself irresistible, and the stalker had given way to the temptation to open fire at longer range than his pistol could really hit anything at.

“Should I take his gun?” Yuxia asked, thrashing along a few yards behind him.

“Good idea, honey,” Seamus called back. “Know that if you pull the trigger, it will fire.”

“Okay.”

“On top of it is a moving slide thingy that will jump back and bite a hunk of flesh from your hand if you keep holding it that way.”

“Mmmkay,” she said, a bit absently.

“I’m serious. Move your hand down.”

She did so, finally.

“You all right?” Seamus asked.

“We are running in the open.”

“You’re welcome to stop at any time,” Seamus pointed out, a little testily. “We are doing this because the end game of this thing is happening right now, and we are no longer near the place where it’s happening. I need an angle, and a shot.”

“You are bleeding on the ground.”

“Excellent place for it.”

They ran for a couple of hundred yards through the open space along the perimeter of the cleared compound, seeing no jihadists who were alive. Something spectacularly bad had happened to the cabin, but Seamus saw and understood it only dimly. He was, he realized, probably going into shock. And he was a little ashamed of that, since the wound on his arm ought not to have been such a big deal. His act of running down the hill and into the compound had, in a way, been a semiconscious tactic to put it out of his mind and get him focused on something else.

“I see the fucker,” he announced. The head of a tall man had popped up into view perhaps a hundred yards away. Advancing to the next tree, he leaned against it, to steady the upcoming shot, and then dropped to his left knee.

He hadn’t planned to drop to a knee; it just happened. His right leg had buckled.

Something heavy had been slapping against his thigh with each stride. Something in his right pants pocket. When he dropped, his right knee came up, and that pocket got squeezed as the front of his trousers creased, and a large amount of warm fluid gushed out of it and washed over his right buttock and ran down his thigh.

He glanced down for the first time in a while and observed that he had also been shot on the right side of his abdomen and that blood had been running out of the wound this whole time and accumulating, for some reason, in his pocket.

He was lying on his back, and Yuxia was standing above him with her hands clapped over her mouth. She might have let out a bit of a scream.

He thrust the rifle up into the air with his good arm. “Shoot him,” he said. “Shoot Abdallah Jones.”

CSONGOR MOVED FORWARD cautiously to see whether he had managed to hit the man with the submachine gun. He heard a slight rustle and looked over to see Abdallah Jones, just standing there looking at him. Csongor moved his pistol around to bear on Jones. Jones brought a Kalashnikov around and aimed it at Csongor, at the same moment.

The range was greater than Csongor was comfortable with. His hands were shaking.

“You,” Jones said. “If it were anyone else, I’d have already pulled the trigger. As it is, I’m just standing here dumbfounded. How the hell, Csongor? It is Csongor, right?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“The story is complicated.”

“Shame, that. Because I really would love to hear it. But there is, of course, no time.” He raised the Kalashnikov to his shoulder.

A crack sounded from off to the side. The sniper again. Jones looked in that direction, but showed no ill effects; the sniper had somehow missed.

Csongor dropped to the ground and began firing blindly through foliage.

Several rounds came back in his general direction, but this was nothing more than Jones firing to keep Csongor’s head down. It worked. The next time Csongor felt brave enough to lift his head, Jones was nowhere to be seen.

From over near the cabin, he heard the drone of a small engine starting up.

He stood to see Jones astride an all-terrain vehicle. Jones spent a few moments figuring out the controls, then got the thing turned around and headed around the side of the house, trying to make it out to the road.

SOKOLOV WAS IN worse pain than he’d ever experienced, and he reckoned that he might lose the leg before this was all over. Had even considered pulling out his knife and self-amputating. Other than that, however, he was not doing that badly. No bullets had struck him. He had not suffered serious trauma during the collapse of the sleeping porch. The actual deck of the porch, which had thudded into the ground right next to him — a blunt guillotine blade that would have pinched him in half, had he landed wrong — had formed a pocket; all the logs and other debris that had rained down on top had been held up above the ground by its planking, which had been crumpled and compressed but not altogether driven into the ground.

So he was fine. He just couldn’t move. The heap of logs provided several large apertures through which he could look out and view his surroundings, and he had experimented with aiming the rifle through these. But no targets had presented themselves.

Until, that is, he heard the ATV starting up.

He could not actually see the ATV — his view in that direction was blocked by a sizable chunk of the cabin’s roof — and so he assumed that this was Jake, come back to reclaim his vehicle.

It idled for a few moments. The driver revved its motor and put it into gear, then began to ride it around the side of the cabin, circumventing the debris pile in which Sokolov was trapped.

Through a gap between logs Sokolov caught a brief glimpse of the driver’s head. Jones.

He thrashed around, sending a shocking wave of pain up his leg, and twisted into a position from which he could fire the rifle through another gap. He expected that Jones would be passing by very soon.

Which Jones obligingly did, and Sokolov pulled the trigger a few times as the vehicle came into view.

The engine stopped with a mechanical crunch, and Jones cursed. Unfortunately the vehicle’s momentum had carried it out of Sokolov’s sight. He heard Jones climbing off and unlimbering his Kalashnikov. The end of the weapon’s barrel appeared for a moment, silhouetted on the edge of Sokolov’s aperture.

But the gunshots that he heard next were not Kalashnikov rounds fired from nearby, but pistol shots from a greater distance. Not just one, but two pistols firing round after round.

TOTALLY EXPOSED AT the base of the rubble pile, harassed by poorly aimed rounds from faraway pistols, unable to seek cover in the log heap because he knew that an armed man was lurking back in there, Jones rolled to his feet and broke into a run, heading away from the cabin, back the way he had come. When it became obvious what he was doing, Yuxia broke from cover and went charging after him, screaming curses and firing the pistol wildly until it was out of ammunition. But by that time, Jones had disappeared into the forest at the base of the hill.

A FEW MINUTES after Seamus and Yuxia left him behind, Richard forced himself to get on his feet and begin hobbling up the trail. He had swallowed as much ibuprofen as his system could handle and he had swaddled the sprained ankle in strips of fabric cut from Jahandar’s garments. A long tree branch, trimmed and whittled, served as a walking staff. The high road — the climb up to the top of the big flat rock, followed by the long traversal of the talus slope — would be many hours of misery for a man in his condition. But there was another way of getting to Jake’s, a low road leading along the edge of the forest, through the old abandoned mining camp and then around a spur of the mountain into the valley of Prohibition Crick. It seemed much the better choice. So he split off from the trail shortly before it pierced the tree line, and hobbled south through the woods. He had feared that this would turn into an endless, toiling death march, but once he found his stride, he began to make reasonably good time — not a hell of a lot slower than if he hadn’t sprained his ankle.

The first leg of the journey, from the trail to the old mining camp, presented some difficult going in places. At one point, he was forced to range up and down a slope looking for the easiest place to traverse it. In the end, he found the spot by noticing a trail that had been pounded into the ground by several people who had gone before him. It was obvious from the freshness of the traces and the litter left behind that he was now following literally in the bootprints of Jones’s contingent of jihadists. Once he worked his way through the difficult bit, which involved a certain amount of scooting along on his butt, keeping his staff planted to prevent him from avalanching down the hill, he came out into a stretch of more level ground that, if memory served, would lead eventually to the mining camp. Here the jihadists’ trail spread out, as they had formed a broad front while reconnoitering the level ground. Richard chugged along freely in their wake, planting his staff with each stride.

His mind wandered. He now dared to believe that everything was going to work out okay, that Zula would have made it safely to Jake’s by this point, and that he would get there soon. That Jones would slip away into the Idaho/Montana wilderness, or else be captured, and that life for the Forthrasts would return to normal. Which got him to thinking about all the email, all the tweets that would be waiting for him, all the things left undone. And as part of all that, it occurred to him to wonder what Egdod was up to. Because, come to think of it, Richard had been logged on as Egdod when Jones had severed his Internet link. Egdod would have reverted to his bothavior, which in his case would mean trudging for thousands of miles across T’Rain, trying to get back to his mountaintop palace. This would, to put it mildly, draw lots of notice in that world. He wondered how many high-level characters had showed up to attack Egdod, and whether any of them had succeeded in bringing the old man down. He tried to recollect what the landscapes looked like between Carthinias and Egdod’s home zone. He envisioned the aged wizard wading through swamps, trudging doggedly across deserts, scaling mountain ranges, and walking through forests.

Kind of like Richard was doing. Egdod, of course, carried a wizard’s staff, just a simple stick, no fancy carvings or jewels. Just like what Richard was carrying now. Egdod’s beard was long and white, where Richard’s was just a couple of days’ gray stubble. And Egdod, of course, had no need to carry a huge, looted revolver in his waistband. Hell, Egdod didn’t even have a waistband. But despite all of those differences, Richard still found something hugely enjoyable about the fact that, at the same moment, both he and Egdod were wandering alone across their respective worlds, seeing everything close up in a way that they rarely had a chance to. Getting back in touch with the terrains from which they had sprung, autochthonously, early in their lives.

And possibly beset by unknown enemies. Richard, in his reverie, had quite forgotten to keep an eye out for the mountain lion. He executed a slow pirouette around his staff, just to see if anything was hunting him. But of course the whole point of being hunted was that you didn’t know it was happening. He stood still for a minute or two, just listening, just being aware of the place. Enjoying the moment. Because very soon this part of his life would be over, and he’d be descending into the valley of Prohibition Crick the way he had done on that autumn afternoon in 1974 with a bearskin on his back. Except that instead of finding a hidden smuggler’s cabin, he would find a nice modern cabin with Internet, full of people who would all want to talk to him.

When he was good and ready, he turned back around and followed the jihadists’ muddy footprints out of the trees and into the open plateau of the old mining camp.

A solitary man was walking toward him, a couple of hundred meters away, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He was moving with the weary, hitching gait of a man who knew he ought to be running but simply could not summon the energy. Occasionally he spun around and walked backward for a couple of steps, much as Richard had done just a few minutes before when he had been worried about the cougar. Unlike Richard, he was also scanning the sky. And indeed, now that Richard was out in the open, he noticed the sound of at least one helicopter.

The man turned forward again and froze, staring directly at Richard. It was Abdallah Jones.

Richard considered reaching around behind his back and drawing the revolver, but even with its long barrel and large caliber, it was useless at this range. No point, then, in letting Jones know that he was armed. Using the staff to ease his descent, he dropped to one knee. He and Jones were now looking at each other through a haze of scrub brush. Jones was bringing up his rifle: a Kalashnikov. Richard dropped to both knees, then to all fours, then scurried to a different position just as a few exploratory rounds hummed through the air above him and pelted into the mucky ground behind.

It was difficult to move in this way without making the brush wiggle, which would give Jones a way to track where he was. And in any case he was leaving a mashed-down trail that Jones could simply follow until he had a clear shot. Richard, looking behind him, saw that trail and noted its embarrassing width and, even here, heard the voice of a Furious Muse reminding him that he needed to lose weight. Zigzagging would break the trail up into short segments and make it more difficult for Jones to just drill him in his fat ass while strolling along in his wake. But it would also slow him down. So he very much needed to find proper cover and to take shelter there and force Jones to expose himself.

Calling to mind the last prospect he had enjoyed before he’d noticed Jones, he recalled a tumbledown log cabin that ought to be about fifty yards away from him now. It was not terribly far from the edge of the woods; and he could get into the trees with a short, very painful sprint from where he was now. He crawled, therefore, toward the woods, pausing occasionally to listen, hoping to get a fix on Jones’s location.

Which Jones obligingly provided by calling out: “Who’s your sneaky little friend, Dodge?”

Richard got to his feet and sprinted toward the woods, then dove as soon as he began to hear gunfire. Actually “sprint” was an awfully optimistic way to describe his movement; for Richard, it meant simply that he was moving as fast as he possibly could. Several rounds passed nearby, or so he judged from the weird sounds that seemed to be tearing up air molecules in his vicinity. From the place where he landed, it was a short belly crawl through mud into the trees. There he felt safe in getting up to a crouch and moving along through the forest until the old log cabin was visible just a stone’s throw away.

He could see Jones, tracking him at a leisurely pace through the part of the camp where he’d been running, diving, and crawling just a few moments earlier. Jones’s attention, quite reasonably, was directed mostly forward into the woods. But he kept turning to look back in the direction from which Richard had emerged into the camp a minute before. Richard took advantage of one such moment to hop out from cover and “sprint” perhaps half of the way from the tree line to the cabin, keeping an eye on Jones as he was doing so. Eventually Jones noticed him and brought the Kalashnikov around. Richard then dove again and belly-crawled the rest of the way to the cabin with rounds from Jones’s rifle humming through the air. If Jones had been carrying unlimited ammo, he could have laid down a lot more fire, and almost certainly hit Richard. But he seemed to be conserving his rounds. Which was a good thing. But it did cause him to wonder what had gone wrong, for Jones, in the last few hours. Why was he backtracking, alone, with depleted ammunition? What had been happening at Prohibition Crick this morning?

Once he had reached the safe side of the cabin, Richard got to his feet and shambled wearily into its front door and, in the sudden darkness, tripped over something soft that turned out to be the dead body of Erasto. Flies were already getting to it. Where did flies come from in situations like this?

Controlling a powerful urge to throw up, Richard patted the corpse down looking for weapons. But someone had already done this and relieved his departed comrade of everything except one ammunition clip for a pistol that was no longer here.

Richard knee-walked over the rotting remains of the building’s collapsed roof to a vacant window, popped his head up for a moment, and withdrew it. Jones had altered his course and was walking directly toward the cabin now, holding the rifle up at his shoulder, ready to fire.

“Another Forthrast holed up in the ruins of another log cabin, waiting to die,” Jones said. “You people are consistent, I’ll give you that. Unfortunately I don’t have an RPG, like the one we used on your brother’s place, but the results are going to be the same: a pile of dead meat in a ruined shack.”

Richard, as a younger man, might have been powerfully moved by this sort of talk. As it was, he was largely ignoring the meaning of the words themselves and using them mostly as a way to keep track of Jones’s position. He had pulled out the revolver, checked its cylinder, verified that it was loaded with the full five rounds. He got his thumb on its massive hammer and drew it back until it cocked.

“You see,” Jones said, “when you make the mistake of letting me get this close, the grenade doesn’t need to be rocket propelled.”

Richard was sitting on the floor beneath the window, gazing up into the shaft of light coming in through it, and saw an object fly in, bounce across the opposite wall, and tumble to the floor — which was actually the former roof. It bounced and came to rest almost within arm’s reach. Richard rolled toward it. His hand closed around it at the same moment as his conscious mind was understanding what it was: a grenade. It would have been clever, he later supposed, to toss it back through the same window at Jones, but the easy and obvious — and quick — throw from here was out the cabin’s vacant doorway. So that was where he threw it, and he was relieved to see it disappear from direct shrapnel line of fire beyond the poured concrete front stoop. It went off, and for a few seconds afterward, Richard’s life was all about that.

But only for a few seconds. He had waited too long, been too conservative; he had escaped the effects of that grenade only through dumb luck. He got to his feet, a little unsteadily, not just because of the ankle but the brain-stirring effect of the blast, and stood with his back to the wall next to the window. Through the opening he could see a narrow swath of what was out there, but Jones wasn’t in that swath. Getting the revolver out in front of him, he pivoted around his good foot and presented himself in the window opening long enough to get a wide-open view outside the cabin.

Jones was at about ten o’clock, and lower down than Richard had been expecting, since he had apparently thrown himself down to await the results of the grenade. He was just clambering to his feet, and when Richard caught his eye, he made a sudden sideways dive toward the cabin. Richard swung the revolver laterally, trying to track the movement, but his elbow struck the frame of the window at the same moment as he was deciding to pull the trigger. The revolver made a sound that would have seemed loud, had a grenade not just gone off, and a bullet drew a trace through weedy foliage about a foot away from Jones’s head. Jones was bringing his rifle up to return fire, but Richard was already withdrawing from the window. He pulled back so quickly, in fact, that he lost his balance and tumbled onto his ass.

He and Jones were now no more than four feet apart, separated only by the log wall of the cabin.

Richard could squat there and wait and hope that Jones would move into just the right position so that Richard could fire through a gap between logs. Or he could go out the way he had come in, move around the side of the cabin, and try to shoot around the corner. Or he could present himself in the window again and just fire from point-blank range.

He was cocking the revolver again when Jones opened fire with his Kalashnikov. Richard’s whole body flinched, and he very nearly let the hammer slip. But no rounds seemed to be passing through the cabin. Nor could they, really, given Jones’s location. So what the hell was Jones shooting at?

It came to him then that he was overthinking this.

This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler. But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles, figure out some clever way to dodge around the essential nature of what was happening, to get through to the other side without getting hurt. His opponent, of course, simply didn’t give a shit what happened to him and was probably a dead man anyway — which gave Jones an advantage that Richard could match only by adopting the same attitude. It was an attitude that had come naturally to him as a young man, taking down the grizzly bear with the slug gun and doing any number of other things that later seemed ill-advised. Wealth and success had changed him; he now looked back on all such adventures with fastidious horror. But he had to revert to that mind-set now or else Jones would simply kill him.

All of this came simply and immediately into his head, as though the Furious Muses had chosen this moment to give up on being furious for once — perhaps forever — and were now singing in his ears like angels.

Richard stood up in the window, holding the revolver in one hand now, and swung it out and down.

Jones was right there, sitting on the ground, leaning back against the wall of the cabin, aiming his rifle, not up at Richard, but out into the open space beyond. He had been shooting in that direction for some reason.

He glanced up into Richard’s eyes.

“It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!” Jones exclaimed.

Richard pulled the trigger and shot him in the head.

He cocked the revolver again and stood poised there for several seconds, looking at the aftermath to make sure he was not misinterpreting the evidence of his eyes, out of wishful thinking. But Jones was unquestionably dead.

Finally he raised his gaze from what remained of Jones and looked up and out over the field of weeds and overgrown scrub beyond. It was by no means clear what Jones had been marveling at in the last moment of his life. For fresh green leaves had not yet begun to bud out, and the hue of the place was the tawny umber of last year’s dead growth. Finally, though, Richard’s eyes locked on something out there that was unquestionably a face. Not a human face. Humans did not have golden eyes.

The eyes stared into Richard’s long enough for Richard to experience a warm rush of blood to his cheeks. He was blushing. Some kind of atavistic response, apparently, to being so watched. But then the eyes blinked, and the cougar’s tiny head turned to one side, ears twitching in reaction to something unseen. Then it spun around, and the last Richard saw of it was its furry tail snapping like a whip, and the white pads of its feet as it ran away.