few hours before. “We have an early start if we want to find the Kyrgyz camp tomorrow,” he said.
The wind had died off with the sun. A thick layer of fog had settled in, rendering the orange tent almost invisible just a few feet away. They had to wear headlamps to keep from walking off the cliff.
Quinn played his light toward the tent. “Sorry about the cramped arrangements.”
“No problem.” She got up with a groan. “I’ve watched enough Bond movies to know this is the way things always work out. I only need to know if I’m the girl spy you end up with as the credits roll or the sacrificial one who has passionate sex with you, then dies halfway through the movie.”
“Remains to be seen,” Quinn mused over his mug, blowing away a plume of steam.
“Anyway,” she added, “you look too beat to try anything tonight, Mr. Bond.”
“Sex is messy.” Quinn shrugged. “We’d probably knock the tent off the ledge-or your head would explode from all the exertion.”
Garcia pursed her lips, thinking that over. She eyed him carefully. “I’m not sure if you’re trying to talk me out of or into sleeping with you…”
“Oh.” Quinn grinned. “In Umar’s infinite wisdom, he believed a married couple should have blankets instead of warm down bags. We’re sleeping together all right. But that’s as far as it goes.”
“Because of your ex-wife?” Garcia went out on a limb.
“Maybe so.” Quinn shrugged. “But don’t necessarily expect the same resolve when I’m at altitudes below ten thousand feet.”
“I’ll make a note of that.” She grinned.
Garcia stripped down to her black wool long johns before kneeling to crawl in the vestibule door. Exhausted or not, she hoped Quinn was watching her.
She wore the floppy Nepalese hat to bed. Using her rolled fleece jacket as a pillow, she tugged her side of the blanket tight around her shoulders as he maneuvered beside her. He piled the riding jackets over their feet but kept the blanket on his side turned down to his waist. Cuban versus Alaska blood, she thought. It made sense.
“Why did your parents pick Jericho?” she asked in the darkness.
Quinn sighed. He clicked on his headlamp and rolled up on his shoulder to stare at her. “I thought you were exhausted.”
She batted her eyelashes, hoping she didn’t look too much like a silly cow.
He snapped off the light and threw an arm across his forehead, seemingly oblivious to the cold. “My dad wanted to name me Gideon, but his sister stole the name for my cousin a month before I was born. I guess they figured Jericho was the next best name from the story… Gideon’s trumpet and all.”
Ronnie couldn’t help but think he was in his element-hostile terrain in a hostile country.
“What’s he do now? This cousin of yours.”
“A big-shot banker in Anchorage,” he said. “Pretty wealthy, as a matter of fact.”
“Banker or secret government agent… let me see…”
“He’s home in a soft bed right now.” Quinn rearranged the blanket, trying to situate his body between the rocks under the tent floor.
For a long moment there was no sound but distant wind and rivers.
“You know this really sucks,” Ronnie said suddenly, not quite ready to give up Quinn’s company to sleep.
“Why’s that?” he said through a long yawn. She could just make out the outline of his chest, rising and falling in the shadows.
“Well, most couples have these sorts of sweet little conversations when they’re breathless and spent. You have to lie there and listen to me snore and pass gas all night without any of the… you know, fringe benefits.”
Quinn yawned again, longer this time, shuddering. “Could be worse. You could have night terrors and wake up trying to kill someone.”
She scrunched up next to him, stealing the warmth of his body. Smelling the musky odor of his skin.
“Is that what you do?”
“Only when I’m extremely tired…”
Through the darkness, she thought she saw him smile.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Dawn took its time in the protected valleys of the High Pamir. The mist was gone, but the morning would linger gray and clammy-cold for hours before the sun finally peeked over the knife ridges high above. A brisk wind popped at the tent fly.
Quinn stirred under the blankets, feeling the familiar aches in his shoulders and hips from too many nights on the unforgiving ground. His hands felt like claws from gripping the Enfield’s handlebars all day. The effects of the fight with Umar left him with a stiff neck and a wrenched knee that was sure to give him problems when he got older. He thought of the Chinese proverb: When two tigers fight, one is injured beyond repair-and the other one is dead.
During the night Ronnie had rolled half on top of him. Her arm flailed across his chest, the warmth of a long leg draped over his thigh. Quinn lay still for a moment, feeling the moist, fluttering puff of her exhausted breathing against his neck.
Bootystan, he thought. Jacques, Jacques, Jacques. If you could only see me now…
Trying not to wake her, he wriggled out of the tent, stifling a gasp as he stepped into his chilly riding pants and stiff Haix patrol boots. He munched a piece of naan from his day pack-courtesy of Umar’s wife-and swung his arms trying to warm up. In the muted light, he could just make out the outline of a path he hadn’t noticed the night before. Likely a game trail used by ibex or Marco Polo sheep, it ran at an angle to a small plateau about a two hundred feet above the camp.
“What do you see?”
Quinn jumped at Ronnie’s voice behind him. She’d poked her head out the tent door.
“I’m thinking I’d like to take a look at what’s up there. It might give me a glimpse of what’s ahead of us.”
“Take the bike.” She yawned, catlike. “I’m awake. Anyway, a girl could use a little privacy first thing in the morning.”
Quinn looked down at the Breitling. “Oh-seven-fifty Afghan time,” he said. “I should be back in twenty minutes.”
“Sounds good.” She pulled her head back inside the tent. “I’ll heat up some of that goat’s head soup or whatever it was.”
The trail up the mountain was strewn with baseball-sized rocks and steep enough Quinn had to keep the bike going forward or risk sliding back down. Umar had replaced the little bike’s stock Avon tires with decent enough Chinese-made Cheng Shin knobbies suitable for the washouts and gravel roads of the western frontier. It climbed without complaint.
The trouble with the Enfield was that, being old-school, some parts were prone to break. The bolts that held on the muffler had sheared off somewhere along the way since they’d left Kashgar. Quinn knew he’d have to figure out a way to jury-rig the exhaust before it fell off or risk deafness and an avalanche from blatting engine noise.
The bikes had their flaws, but the simple beauty of the Enfield was its fixability. Every village from the southern tip of India to the Mongolian Steppe had at least one shade tree mechanic who was familiar enough with the thumper to repair it with little more than a metal file and a screwdriver. Quinn felt confident he’d be able to figure something out when he got back to camp.
At the top of the goat path he was greeted by row after endless row of jagged peaks and rivers of flowing glacier ice. The world seemed nothing but muted shades of blue and slate gray.
The trail he’d hoped to scout disappeared around yet another plateau. It was easy to see how someone could hide in such a forgotten place high on the roof of the world.
Disappointed, Quinn turned the bike, rolling it to the lip before starting the short but steep ride back to camp.
