Which was obliterated by a wash of glare from Chet’s flashlight. He had finished his potty break, or whatever, and was bringing up the rear. Moving heavily again, lurching frequently to the side, as if he needed the wall of the adit to hold him up. He had zipped up his leather jacket as if to ward off a sudden chill.
“This is the way out,” Zula said, announcing as much as asking it.
“You can find the way out from here,” Chet confirmed. “Just go slow and look for booby traps.”
He allowed her, now, to lead the way. She moved forward about fifty feet, then waited for him to catch up, then did it again. She came to another intersection, but it was obvious which way to go, for light and air were unmistakably coming up the tunnel now. She began to proceed at an extremely deliberate pace, just barely staying ahead of Chet. There was no point in getting too far out in front of him, since she just had to wait for him to catch up, and going slowly gave her more time to look for booby traps. They came to what must be the main adit leading southward out of the mine and found a flatbed car that was still capable of rolling down the rails bolted into its floor. Zula, after inspecting it for piano wires and Claymore mines, insisted that Chet sit down on it. She got her hands on his shoulders and pushed him along down the rails for a surprisingly long time, the brightness ahead of them increasing every time they came to a bend in the tunnel, and finally came around a curve and were blinded by the almost direct light of the sun shining into the mine’s southern entrance. It seemed an obvious place to put a third booby trap, and they were too dazzled to see, so they waited there for a few minutes, eating snacks and letting Chet guzzle another bottle of water. Then Chet got to his feet, and they took the tunnel’s last hundred yards one cautious step at a time.
The last booby trap was a simple tripwire stretched from wall to wall at ankle level, just a few yards short of the exit, where hikers impatient to get out of this place would be tempted to break out into a long stride. Chet insisted that Zula step over it and then get all the way out of danger before he snipped it with his Leatherman. He was afraid that it was some sort of particularly fiendish IED that would detonate when the wire was cut. But nothing happened, and Chet staggered out of the tunnel a few moments later looking like the ghost of a miner who had died in the heart of the mountain a hundred years ago.
They had traveled less than a mile as the crow flew, but entered into a different world. Zula inferred that the prevailing winds must bring wet air from the Pacific up from the south to deposit loads of rain in the valley that now stretched out before them. For the air was palpably moister than what they’d been breathing on the Schloss side of the ridge, and the vegetation was of an altogether different biome. They had entered the mine in an arid wasteland of talus and emerged in the middle of something that was close to being a rain forest.
And a wilderness. There was no graffiti, no party trash at this end. A fire ring stood nearby, and around it were some flat spots where it looked as though backpackers might pitch tents when they ventured up here. But compared to the other side, only a short drive from the town of Elphinstone and a short hike from the comforts of the Schloss, this place was out in the middle of nowhere, a shred of territory caught between the U.S. border and the nearly uncrossable barrier of the ridge that now rose up behind them. Had the views been more spectacular, it might have attracted backpackers and mountain bikers anyway. But better vistas were to be had for less work in places like Glacier and Banff, not so many hours’ drive away, and so this place had been left alone, save by cross- border smugglers and international terrorists. Patches of snow, rounded by the spring melt, spread in the trees all around them and lapped up the slopes of the mountain, contributing to a general runoff that seeped through mud and trilled down small watercourses into cold gurgling brooks that came together, perhaps a mile below, into a river that hurtled south down the valley; and though they couldn’t see it from here, they could hear the roar of the cataract that almost coincided with the border, not marked on maps, but known to the few people who lived in these parts as American Falls.
OLIVIA HAD BEEN warned, of course, that working for MI6 would not be romantic. Not, in other words, the way it was in the movies. It was a bit embarrassing that this needed to be mentioned at all. No one who was worldly and intelligent enough to work for MI6 would really think it would be like a James Bond movie, would they?
So she had expected grinding tedium and deeply unromantic situations from the very beginning. For the most part, her time in Xiamen had amply fulfilled those expectations. The flashy bit at the very end had been anomalous to say the least.
And yet none of this careful hope deadening and expectation crushing on her trainers’ parts had fully prepared her for the job of traveling from Wenatchee to Bourne’s Ford on public transportation. She’d been lucky to reach the bus station in Wenatchee just a few minutes before the coach to Spokane was scheduled to depart. It was running half an hour late. No big deal. She bought a ticket with cash and climbed aboard a tired intercity bus reeking of mildew and air freshener and sat on it for several hours, watching the high desert of central and eastern Washington State go by, trying not to make too much of an impression on the down-at-heels senior citizens and migrant laborers sitting around her. A few hours later she disembarked at the bus and train station in downtown Spokane: a city she was certain had fine characteristics but that looked bleak and anonymous from street level at nightfall. It was ten degrees colder here than it had been on the coast. The next bus for Bourne’s Ford didn’t leave until tomorrow morning. She couldn’t check into a hotel without presenting ID and thereby sending up a flare, so she walked to a reasonably nice Italian restaurant and had a long slow dinner that she paid for with cash. Then she walked to a cinema and caught the last showing of a comedy that, she guessed, was aimed at teenagers. This disgorged her into a parking lot at one in the morning. Everything was closed. Not even bars were open. Caught in the open, she just kept walking, trying to look purposeful. If she had to walk for five hours, it wasn’t the end of the world. She was wearing comfortable flats and the energy expended by walking would keep her warm enough, despite the fact that she was underdressed for the weather. But after about two hours, as she was trudging up a seemingly endless commercial strip, she noticed a Perkins Family Restaurant that was open twenty-fours. She went into it and ate the most colossal breakfast she had ever had in her life, spent about an hour reading a single used copy of
By six in the morning the sky was getting light, joggers were out, and Starbucks cafes were beginning to open their doors. She killed another hour in one of those and then hiked back to the bus station, where she caught an 8:06 bus headed for Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. This was much like the first one, except with a certain hard- to-pin-down air of Wild West mountain-man craziness about it. The Wenatchee-Spokane run had been a simple matter of getting across a sparse desert, irrigated in some places, therefore with a generally farmlike vibe. She had noticed, as they’d drawn closer to Spokane, that trees were beginning to survive, just isolated specimens at first, then clumps, then small forests. But northward from Spokane the forest cover became continuous, the highway began to bound up and down considerable slopes, and the businesses and dwellings along it stopped feeling like farms and began feeling like outposts. Decidedly eccentric signage began to show up: billboards inveighing against the United Nations, and hand-lettered jeremiads about the existential threat posed by the federal budget deficit. But of course she just noticed those things because she was looking for them; it was mostly fast-food joints and convenience stores like anywhere else in America, interspersed with clusters of vacation homes (wherever there was a lake or a nice stretch of river), ranches (where the land was open and flat), or outbreaks of Appalachian-style rural poverty. Sometimes they’d jump over a ridge and pass through what she thought was out-and-out wilderness, until she saw the zigzagging tracks of the logging roads.
Then suddenly they were passing through a rather nice town, which she learned was Sandpoint, and which had all the indicia—brewpub, art gallery, Pilates, Thai restaurant—of a place where Blue State people would go to enjoy a high standard of living while maintaining nonstop connectivity and assuaging their guilty consciences in re global warming, fair trade, and the regrettable side effects of Manifest Destiny. The bus stopped there for a bit; many passengers got off, and only a few got on. For, as was obvious from looking out the windows, northern Idaho was not a place where anyone could sustainably live unless they had access to a vehicle of some description, so the market for public transit was correspondingly tiny and mostly limited to juveniles, very old people, shaggy men who appeared to be one step above vagrants, and women in ankle-length
An hour later she was in the considerably smaller and less Blue Statish town of Bourne’s Ford, and half an hour after that—for it turned out to be a bit of a walk—she was in its Walmart.
She had been waiting for the point in the journey where the crazy would begin: when she’d step over some invisible threshold separating commonsensical America from the subculture where Jacob Forthrast, his family, and his neighbors lived their lives. So far, it had been more of a slow blend than a threshold. The Walmart definitely made her feel that she was getting warmer. She happened to enter through the part of it that was a huge grocery
