Reamde

“Another story. Not in the Wikipedia entry. I’ll tell you some other time. The point is that he needed to walk into the U.S. but didn’t know how. He followed the old narrow-gauge railway line up out of Elphinstone, walking on the railroad ties.”

“A nice gentle climb.”

“Yes, for the reason mentioned. He got to the end. And then he found some way around, or through, the wall of rock that was blocking his path, and covered the last miles south across the border, and picked his way south —”

She sketched a faint, wavy, speculative line down through the circle she’d drawn earlier for Abandon Mountain, and thence down into Bourne’s Ford.

“He didn’t exactly pioneer it.” She glanced up to see Jones staring at her intently. “He was following traces left forty, fifty years earlier by whiskey smugglers during Prohibition.”

Prohibition Crick. She wondered if that would show up on Google Maps.

“And later by marijuana smugglers.”

“That’s the rumor, certainly.”

Jones was impatient with that. “Rumor or not, he made a lot of trips along this route.” He leaned forward and traced it with his finger. “He passed by the ruin of the baron’s house many times, and that was how he conceived the idea to buy the property and fix it up into a legitimate business.”

“That much of the Wikipedia entry is correct as far as I know,” she allowed.

“YOU MEAN, YOU were there in China?” Richard asked the woman.

“I mean, I was there when the apartment building blew up.”

Richard just stared at her.

“The one with your niece in the cellar.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t imagine you were talking about some other blown-up apartment in China.”

“Sorry.”

He looked at her for a while. “You’re not going to tell me who you are, are you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. But you can call me… oh, Laura, if it helps to have a name.”

“What is your interest in all this, Laura? What do you have to gain from talking me out of going to Xiamen?”

“Laura” got a wry look on her face. Trying to work out what she could say and what she couldn’t.

“Is this to do with the Russians?” he asked. “Are you somehow connected with that investigation?”

“Not in the way you mean,” she said. “But just a few days ago I was with one of them. The leader.”

“Ivanov, or Sokolov?” Richard asked. And was immediately gratified to see frank shock spread across Laura’s face.

“Very good,” she said. “I had the feeling that unexpected things might happen if I talked to you.”

Richard knew the two Russian names because Zula had mentioned them in her note. But he could see that the woman Laura didn’t know about that note. “So which of them were you with?” he asked.

“Sokolov,” Laura said. And she must have seen some look of hope on Richard’s face, because caution then fell down over her own visage like a shutter. “But I’m very sorry to tell you that this doesn’t actually help, where finding Zula is concerned. Not directly, anyway.”

“How can it not help? My understanding is that Ivanov abducted her and that Sokolov is his henchman.”

“Ivanov’s dead. Sokolov, if anything, was prepared to help Zula once Ivanov was out of the way. But because of the way it all went down… nothing happened right. Zula is no longer with the Russians.”

“Who’s she with?”

Laura clearly knew the answer but was uncomfortable blurting it out. “Is there another place we can chat?” she asked.

“Not until you talk me out of getting on that plane and flying to China.”

“Zula hasn’t been in China for something like ten days,” Laura said.

“Where is she then?”

“It is my considered opinion,” Laura said, “that she’s quite nearby.”

Day 17

Even after land finally hove into view on her port side, Szelanya glided along parallel to a dark coast for the better part of a day before the winds finally shifted round and enabled them to steer her in to shore. The coastline was fractally scalloped, consisting of shallow bays, miles wide, themselves indented with smaller indentations. The big bays were frequently demarcated by headlands or little isles that were connected to the mainland at low tide. Having cleared one of these, the crew of Szelanya—unused to navigating in the presence of land, or, for that matter, any solid object—trimmed her sails and adjusted her rudder to make her cut into the next bay. This one eventually hooked around, perhaps ten kilometers ahead of them, into a little island that was linked to the mainland by mudflats, and once they got themselves pointed into it, there was no doubt that they would make landfall somewhere, and soon. They could not now escape from the bay even if they tried. For Szelanya had not been designed as a sailing vessel. It had become one almost two weeks ago, but only in the sense that any floating object, devoid of other propulsion, was wind driven. Actually making it into something that would sail had involved a lot of trial and error; mostly the latter.

She had been well supplied with plastic tarps, but they learned soon enough that these could not stand up to the stresses imposed on them by the wind. Fishnets were much stronger but would not hold air. And so they had improvised sails by combining the two: laying fishnets out over tarps and then sewing them together with zip ties, piano wire, needle and thread, tape. The resulting composites were strong enough to stand up to the wind, but their edges and corners—where the wind’s power had to be transmitted into lines attached to the ship—ripped out whenever the breeze was appreciable. So there had been a lot more learning and improvising connected with those edges. The results were very far from being pretty, but nothing had torn out in a long time. It was only after they had solved that problem and hoisted their first little sail up on the yards and the rigging intended for manipulating fishnets that their Engineer had fetched a bottle of beer from the ship’s stores and, to the consternation of his fellow officers, smashed it against the boat’s prow while christening her Szelanya, the “Mother of the Wind.” “If such a being exists,” he explained, “she might be flattered, and decide not to completely fuck us.”

The Straits of Taiwan ran northeast-southwest. As they had learned during the first few hours of their journey, a steady current flowed down it, bending all courses southward. And as they learned over the first few days, that current was strongly assisted by the prevailing winds, which blew vigorously and consistently out of the northeast, pushing them down out of the strait into the South China Sea.

The Skipper had never been on a boat, other than passenger ferries, until the day the adventure had begun. Nonetheless he had, during the first, critical forty-eight hours, acquired a command of basic sailing principles with a speed and fluency that had struck the Engineer as being almost supernatural. Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn’t work and moving aggressively to exploit small successes. A profusion of ideas spewed forth from his mind. There was no such thing as a bad idea, apparently. But, perhaps more important, there was no such thing as a good idea either, until it had been tried and coolly evaluated. It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake. Once he and his fellow officers had built sails that would not immediately fall apart, and once he had learned to make the ship sail after a fashion, the Skipper had begun perusing some of the charts that had been left beyond on the bridge by the vessel’s previous owners. Making some rough calculations from the GPS, he had reckoned that the