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.