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.