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.