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.”