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.