awareness: “They are very good. Experienced characters. Not just kids. But they have not fought together before.”
“How can you tell?”
“They don’t know how to help each other as an experienced raiding party would. And they look different.” Marlon raised his hand from the keyboard for the first time in, Csongor guessed, several hours to point out one of the attackers. “See? Definitely Bright.” Then he moved to indicate another. “Him? Earthtone. Why are they fighting together?”
Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he brought his hand sharply down to the keyboard and used the keys to spin his point of view around and up. He was looking up into the starry sky now. Hovering up there were two characters, suspended magically in midair, gazing down. Clicking on them brought up little windows showing their portraits and their names. Csongor could not read, from this distance, the microscopic type.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Doesn’t matter. Not who they say they are,” Marlon said.
“What does it mean?”
“This is not the real attack,” Marlon said. “Real attack is later.”
“How much money do you have?”
“Of gold pieces, two million.”
Marlon converted it. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Five thousand, roughly, for every member of the ambushing party.
Why would that not be the real attack? Who expected to get more than $5,000 for a few seconds’ fighting in a video game?
“You are still hoping for the amount we discussed earlier?” Csongor asked.
“We can’t stop now,” Marlon said. “We get it all or nothing tonight.”
“Actually, the sun has been up for hours.”
“Whatever.”
BY THE TIME Olivia had reached her hotel in downtown Vancouver, she had thought herself into a deep funk about Inspector Fournier and what she feared was his obstructive attitude toward the investigation. She was therefore pleasantly surprised when the desk clerk, while checking her in, noticed something interesting on the screen of her computer, and then looked up brightly to inform Olivia that she had a message waiting. A manila envelope was produced. Its heft suggested it might contain ten or twenty pages of material. Once she had checked in to her room and sorted herself out a bit, she opened it up and found that it contained faxed copies of police reports, both local and Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Her higher-ups at MI6 were insistent that she always keep them apprised of her whereabouts. She had been delinquent about that ever since leaving Seattle, so she checked in with them. It would be something like six in the morning in London now.
Then she settled in to read the reports of the missing hunters: a retired oil industry engineer from Arizona and his two sons, aged thirty-two and thirty-seven, from Louisiana and Denver, respectively, all experienced hunters, who had traveled up to B.C. to celebrate the old man’s sixty-fifth birthday by bagging a grizzly. They’d hired a guide company that prided itself on catering to serious old-school hunters. To judge from the tone of certain promotional passages on its website, this was to set it apart from competing firms that offered a posher, and presumably much more expensive, experience. Clients were offered a money-back guarantee that they would actually kill a bear at some point during the weeklong expedition.
Apparently this pitch had been convincing to the two sons, who had pooled their cash to purchase the trip as a surprise for their dad. From the police reports, and from the brutally depressing website that the missing men’s family had put up, beseeching the universe for information, it was clear that these were no dilettantes; the father had lived all over the world during his career and had lost no opportunity to hunt big game wherever it was to be gone after, frequently bringing his boys along with him. The guides were no tenderfeet either: one of them—a cofounder of the company—had been doing this for three decades, and the other was a First Nations man whose people had been living in the area for tens of thousands of years. They were in a two-year-old, four-wheel-drive Suburban well equipped with tire chains, winch, and anything else that might be needed to drive out of trouble or survive when hopelessly stuck.
Which was part of their method, and part of the problem now faced by the police. For since the guides were not anchored to a cushy lodge, they could roam wherever hunting was best, and since they were offering a money- back guarantee, they had something of an incentive to do just that. In the course of a week’s hunting, they might move among several favorite bear-hunting sites distributed over an area hundreds of kilometers on a side, almost all of which was mountainous, and only just becoming passable without snow machines. By far the most reasonable theory was that they had taken the Suburban one kilometer too far, skidded off the road, and become hopelessly lodged in a streambed or snowbank.
Or at least that had seemed the most reasonable theory during the first couple of days that they had been reported overdue. Consequently the search-and-rescue efforts had been all about crisscrossing the region in light aircraft, looking for a crashed vehicle or a distress beacon, and scanning the radio frequencies on which they might send out a distress call. Phone coverage in most of the region was out of the question, but the Suburban had a citizens’-band radio, and presumably they’d fire it up and call for help as soon as they saw an airplane. Or heard one.
“Heard” being more likely, since weather had been overcast almost the entire time. The pilots were by no means convinced that they’d achieved anything like a proper search of the area. Consequently, the investigation had been at a standstill for the last few days. The families—who had flown up to B.C. and who now seemed to be operating some sort of crisis center out of a hotel in Prince George—the nearest conurbation that even remotely resembled a major city—were insistent that something must be wrong and were coming dangerously close to saying impolite things about the RCMP’s conduct of the investigation.
Reading between the lines, it was easy enough to make out what was going on. The police—though they wouldn’t dream of saying so openly—were almost certain that the hunters and guides were all dead, probably as a result of driving over a cliff in fog. If they were merely stuck, they’d have made their situation known on the radio, or they’d have hiked out to a major road, something they were more than equipped to do. But the police couldn’t just come out and say that. So they had to manage the situation by expressing confidence that the aerial search would turn something up sooner or later. Beyond that, there was little that they could do other than make comforting and reassuring noises when cornered by reporters or distraught wives.
Olivia, needless to say, had a different theory altogether. It was difficult to imagine anything crazier- sounding than that a nest of international terrorists had stolen a business jet from Xiamen, crashed it in the mountains of British Columbia, murdered a Suburban-load of bear hunters, and headed for the border.
On the positive side, though, it should be an easy enough hypothesis to investigate. The Suburban might be four-wheel drive, but it was unlikely that Jones and company had driven it off-road for a thousand kilometers. They’d have taken the path of least resistance.
Actually, she reflected as she googlemapped British Columbia, it wasn’t merely the path of least resistance. It was
And why not? If Jones had managed to hijack the Suburban out in the middle of nowhere, he’d have understood perfectly well that he had only a few days—perhaps just a few hours—in which to do something useful with it before some kind of alert was sent out. He would have headed straight for the U.S. border along Highway 97, through Prince George (actually right in front of the hotel where the families of his victims had set up their base camp), and down into the more ramified system of highways that spread across southern B.C. If he didn’t make it across the border right away, he’d look for a way to ditch the Suburban where it wouldn’t be noticed, and he’d transfer to some other vehicle.
And then he’d think up a way to cross the border, probably out in the middle of nowhere. Something that would be difficult to prevent even if they knew it was going to happen and had a full-scale manhunt under way.
They wouldn’t need to buy food, since they could eat camp rations stolen from the hunters. Hell, for that matter they could just go hungry for a day; it wouldn’t be the first time.
