The only problem being that horizontal line drawn through the middle of the Loop: the Canada/U.S. border. No way was he getting Marlon and Yuxia across that.
But maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe what he was looking for was coming to him.
“Seamus?”
He looked up. Csongor was there, and Marlon, and Yuxia, all freshly showered and looking like the Xiamen branch of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Fan Club. He had the sense that they’d been looking at him for a while, wondering when he was going to snap out of it.
“Are you hungry?” Csongor continued. Not that he gave a shit; Csongor was hungry.
Now, some part of Seamus was wondering why these kids didn’t just walk over to the restaurant and order food, if that was what they wanted. But he had dragged them to this place and created a situation in which they were totally dependent on him — appointed himself the Dr. Reed Richards of this little band of superheroes — and he had to step up to his responsibilities.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just thinking about tomorrow’s program of activities.”
“Yay,” Yuxia said. “Activities!” She translated this abstraction into Mandarin, and Marlon nodded, a little uncertainly.
Csongor was unsure to what degree Seamus was being sarcastic, and he was now watching with heightened vigilance. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.
“Well,” Seamus pointed out, “we’re dressed for hunting.”
“We don’t have guns.”
“Speak for yourself.”
Csongor was now watching very carefully. Seamus broke eye contact and returned his attention to the rack for a minute. “Just kidding,” he said. He scanned an index finger across a row, looking for something he’d noticed earlier.
There it was. He snapped the brochure out, then turned toward the exit. “Let’s eat,” he said.
But the others were having none of it. They bunched behind him, peering over his shoulder or around his elbow to read the cover of the brochure he’d just pulled from the rack: SELKIRK HELICOPTER TOURS.
AFTER HE’D LED the terrorists through the mine and out the other side, Richard was aware, at some level, that he really needed to start in on the sell job of his life: he needed to get Abdallah Jones to believe that making it past American Falls would be no picnic and that his skills as guide were still — in the parlance of old what’s-his-name, the CEO of Corporation 9592 — mission critical. That Richard still had world-class value-added here.
But Richard could not bring himself to do this, for exactly the same reason that, when Corporation 9592 had grown to a certain size, he had become listless during meetings and allowed himself to drift to the periphery of relevance. Richard was, at bottom, a guy who did stuff. A farmer. A plumber. A Barney.
What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.
Hence his recent surge of reinvolvement in the company, sorting out various troubles attributable to the Wor. The Wor had given him something to do and he had just gone out and done it. Likewise looking for Zula. As long as there had been doors to hit with sledgehammers, he’d been all over it. Later in that project, when it had become a matter of maintaining the “Where’s Zula?” Facebook page and politicking with cops, he had become listless and of no use.
And now this: Jones had wanted help finding his way through the mine tunnels or else he would kill Zula. Richard had packed a sleeping bag and some spare clothes and applied himself to getting that done. They had punched through it while the sun was rising and emerged on the south slope to enjoy a view that in other circumstances he’d have found immensely pleasing: the low sun setting fire to torn diaphanous curtains of mist rising from stands of ancient cedars, the distant roar of the falls, swollen by snowmelt, the Selkirks and the Purcells and other ranges of mountains rambling off into the distance, affording peeks at deep blue lakes and cavernous valleys. The granitic mass of Abandon Mountain rising out of its rampart of talus, just a few miles south of the border, its sheer eastern face glowing in the rich golden light of the early sun.
Mission accomplished. Jones, or any idiot for that matter, could see right across the border now, would understand that Richard could simply be shot in the head and left here and they’d find some way of getting down past the falls and into the United States without his assistance.
It was time, in other words, to call out the sales force, take Jones to lunch, begin gardening personal contacts, shape his perception of the competitive landscape. Forge a partnership. Exactly the kind of work from which Richard had always found some way to excuse himself, even when large amounts of money were at stake.
Yet now his life was at stake, and no one was around to help him, and he still wasn’t doing it. He simply couldn’t get past his conviction that Jones could go fuck himself and that he wasn’t going to angle and scheme and maneuver for Jones’s sake.
Maybe because all that behavior ultimately seemed like groveling to him. That was really his problem: deep down, he believed that all such people were grovelers.
They took a little break at the mine’s exit to enjoy the view, to set the last booby trap, to brew tea, to pray, and to try to get phone reception. Reasonable enough; it seemed as though the whole Idaho panhandle were directly visible from here, and there had to be a cell tower somewhere in that. The experiment would have been over very quickly if there’d been no reception at all, but it seemed that some of the jihadists were able to get one bar if they stood in a particular attitude in a particular place and held the phone a certain way and invoked various higher powers. Richard was tempted to make a sour analogy to pointing oneself in the direction of Mecca, but he didn’t think it would do much for his life expectancy. Their rituals became ludicrous after a certain point. Because none of these guys had an ironic modern attitude, none saw the humor.
No, strike that. Almost all of them had been living under cover in the Western world and were as capable of seeing the humor as any fourteen-year-old American sitting on his couch watching South Park reruns and sending snarky tweets to his friends. But they’d made a conscious decision to turn their backs on all that. Like smokers or drinkers who’d gone straight, they were more dogmatic about this than anyone who’d come to that place naturally. Only Jones had the self-confidence to let himself be amused, and that was how he and Richard ended up making eye contact.
“So,” Richard said, after he and Jones had enjoyed the moment, “you going to put a bullet in me now, or should I show you the easiest way to get past American Falls?”
“I’m happy with the arrangement in its current form,” Jones said. “If that changes, you’ll be the first to know. Assuming you see it coming.”