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.
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