A few moments later she was inside the office, holding the telephone to her head, hearing nothing.
The lights didn’t work either.
All the power, all the phones, all the Internet were dead.
Jones must have cut the lines when he had come to call on Richard.
A very powerful impulse was now pushing her to burst out crying, but she turned her back on it, as it were, snubbing it like an unwelcome guest at a party, and tried to think.
Her whole plan had been predicated on the assumption that she would be able to make a phone call from here. Or at least trigger the alarm system. Flash lights on and off. That was all she needed: to get someone’s attention down the valley. Chet being her best hope; he lived in a little homestead about five miles down the road. On a quiet night it might be possible to hear an alarm from that far away.
This bank of the river—the right bank—was impassable beyond this point, because of Baron’s Rock, which turned the shore into a vertical stone wall scoured by icy water in violent motion. To get to Elphinstone she would have to cross to the left bank by running across the dam, following the road that ran over its top. From there she’d have twenty miles of bad road between her and Elphinstone. Jahandar—she was pretty sure that the fast-running jihadist was he—was only a short distance behind her at this point, and was running faster. If she merely followed the road, he could drop her with a rifle shot, or simply catch up with her and put a knife in her back.
She would have to run up into the trees and conceal herself.
Two things would then happen. One, the jihadists would control the road. In order for her to get into town, she’d have to clamber up into the forested hills that rose above the left bank and then bushwhack all the way into town. Two, she would start to get cold and to suffer from the effects of hunger and thirst. For she’d gambled everything on this sprint, leaving behind her warm clothes, not bringing water or food.
The only way she could think of to get attention was to set fire to the building and hope that someone might notice the smoke and flames.
Which might or might not work. But it would take a while. And she couldn’t wait in a burning building. Again, she’d have to run into the woods and stay alive there for a few hours, possibly more.
She had only a few minutes in which to equip herself for a wilderness survival trek of unknown duration.
She couldn’t even
This brought up a vague memory: the Schloss had emergency flashlights plugged into wall outlets, one in each room, charging all the time, except when the power went off.
Forcing herself to move in slow, careful steps—she didn’t want to trip and sprawl on broken glass—she crossed the room, felt her way down the wall, and found the flashlight. It came on, dazzlingly bright. She clapped her palm over it, not wanting to present an obvious target for someone peering through gunsights into the building, and allowed a blade of light to escape between fingers, illuminating the path out of the office.
She exited into a corridor and headed away from the main entrance. To the right was a row of offices and of storerooms that mostly contained kitchen equipment. To the left was the main food prep area for the tavern. Making a quick pass through there, she risked taking her hand off the light—the kitchen had no windows—and plucked a long sharp-pointed butcher knife and a smaller paring knife from a magnetic strip on the wall. These she dropped into a white plastic pail that was sitting on the floor beneath a sink. Using that as a kind of shopping basket she swiped a few odds and ends that might come in handy—two oven mitts, for example, that might serve to keep her hands warm if she couldn’t find anything better. There was, of course, no perishable food stored in the place, since it had been shut down for Mud Month. From a fridge she collected a bottle of canola oil that had been left there so it wouldn’t go rancid, and scored some twenty-ounce plastic bottles of water. Cabinets yielded some sacks of potato chips and other snacks, as well as rice, raisins, pasta. The bucket was approaching full, and she reckoned she had enough calories in there to keep her alive for days, provided she could find a way to cook the stuff.
Which led her to the idea of camping stoves, and other equipment. Was that too much to hope for, in a ski lodge in the mountains?
Someone was banging on the lodge’s front door in an exploratory way, trying to figure out how much force would be required to break it down.
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
