Come to think of it, they should have done that before leaving Bourne’s Ford. But their own illegal status had put them in an awkward frame of mind, never knowing when to hide from the authorities and when to call out for their help. They didn’t know that those men were terrorists. They might have been innocent tourists. When Marlon had said, a few minutes earlier, that they might go straight at the intersection and head north into Canada, presumably to enjoy the Selkirk Loop, it had sounded perfectly reasonable to Csongor and he had wondered at his foolishness for harboring this racist stereotype that the men were terrorists.
And now he was here in the middle of nowhere cursing himself for his failure to recognize the obvious.
They crested a minor rise in the highway in time for Marlon to pick out the blue Subaru crossing the bridge. It had made the left turn and was headed into the mountains.
Marlon opened his mouth to say something, but Csongor had caught it too. “Fuck!” he said.
“This is the part where we get into trouble?”
“Evidently. Make sure you don’t lose sight of it,” Csongor said, and then devoted all his attention and energy to keeping the SUV from drifting off the road. For its suspension was being thrashed so hard at the moment that it was a rare moment when all four of its wheels were actually touching the ground.
“Here,” Marlon said, a minute later. They were approaching a fork, a smaller gravel road headed up a valley to the left.
“This is where you saw them turn?”
“I didn’t see them,” Marlon said.
“Then how can you be sure?”
“Because they left a trail in the air,” Marlon said, “like a jet.”
And indeed, Csongor now saw that the air above the little side road was milky with dust that had been churned up by the Subaru’s tires a minute earlier. Whereas, when he looked north along the riverside road, the air was clear.
A sign, rusted and snowplow-bashed and riddled with shotgun pellets, stood at the junction. PROHIBITION CREEK ROAD, it said.
“Here goes,” said Csongor. He swung the steering wheel and gunned the motor.
ZULA’S RISING TO a crouch and sudden scramble toward the base of the rock elicited several bursts of gunfire from down below, each of which was answered by a crisp rifle shot from the top of the rock above. The shooters below, who she imagined were firing from a standing position after sprinting up the last few switchbacks, did not really have time to situate themselves and draw a proper bead on her; she thought she might have heard a few of the insane-bumblebee noises that apparently signaled the near approach of high-velocity rounds. But the going here was much easier than below, partly because of the gentler slope and partly because the footing was better — more hard rock and less random boulder pile. She forced herself to cover at least a hundred feet before risking a look back. The tree line was no longer visible. She experimented with rising out of her crouch and saw it slowly peek back over the horizon, then dropped her head before anyone could draw a bead and pull a trigger. She ran now in a hunched-over posture, headed for that frantically waving T-shirt, and covered another couple of hundred yards before looking back again. She was now able to stand all the way upright without exposing herself. Winded and banged up, the cold dry air sending an ice pick into the root of her shattered tooth with each breath, she permitted herself to quick-walk the last bit, and finally came within conversational distance of the T-shirt waver.
She had hoped, in a completely irrational way, that this might be Qian Yuxia, but she had known this was not the case from a hundred yards out. The voice that greeted her now spoke in an English accent: “Is that Zula?”
Zula, not trusting herself to speak, just nodded her head and grimaced. The English woman came out to greet her and met her with a handshake at the base of the huge rock. “My name’s Olivia. I’m so sorry about your lip; is that as painful as it looks?”
Zula rolled her eyes and nodded.
“I wish I could tell you we had an ambulance — a helicopter — something — but there’s none of that, I’m afraid. We’ve got a bit of a walk ahead of us. Do you feel up to it?”
“Who’s we?”
“The man up there,” Olivia said, momentarily shifting her gaze to the top of the rock, “is known to you, I believe. Name of Sokolov.”
“Someone needs to get that guy a first name,” Zula lisped.
“I know, it seems a bit gruff to go round calling him that.”
“What the hell is Sokolov doing here? Other than the obvious, I guess.”
“I believe he feels he owes you something.”
“You could say that.” Zula was following Olivia’s lead now, as they climbed up along the side of the big outcropping. The slope here had become steep again, and Zula could see the skid marks in the gravel where this Olivia person had sledded down.
“There’s a bit coming up,” Olivia said, pointing up the slope, “where we’ll need to keep our heads down. Coming back in view of the fellas down below.”
Zula looked back and nodded.
“He never intended for things to get quite so fouled up,” Olivia said, returning to the topic of Sokolov. “Was keeping an eye on you. Didn’t want you hurt.”
“I had sort of gotten that vibe, but it was hard to tell.”
“Then, when Jones entered the picture, I’m afraid our man Sokolov took it quite personally. In other words, I don’t think it’s about you anymore.”
“I’m perfectly happy for it not to be about me.”
“All right then, are you ready?”
“I guess so,” Zula said, though in truth she could hardly have been more exhausted.
“One good push over the top.” And Olivia began churning her feet in the scree, setting off little avalanches that Zula had to hop over. Their progress through this last exposed bit was probably not as nimble or as quick as Olivia had pictured, and Zula, becoming stuck at one point, risked a look back and verified that they were now in view of the tree line again. But the distance was so great that the shot would have been impossible without a scoped rifle, and the shooters down there seemed to have become thoroughly demoralized by Sokolov’s policy of firing high-velocity rounds down into their muzzle flashes. The next time Zula glanced back, all she could see was rocks, and then she and Olivia enjoyed a fairly easy scramble up a little chute and out onto the broad and generally flat top of this giant outcropping.
Until now Zula had had only a vague idea of where she was on the larger map, which had been fine since she’d had very little leisure to think about grand strategy. But from here the whole thing became plain. Abandon Mountain was at her back. Looking outward and down over the territory from which she had just ascended, she was facing generally west. Off to the right, a few miles away, was the ridge through which she and Chet had passed yesterday via the old mining tunnels. To her left, a long, gently curving talus slope spanned a distance of a couple of miles to a long ridge thrown out southward from the mountain. She knew from Richard’s description that if she traversed that slope and popped up over that ridge she would descend into the valley of Prohibition Crick and find Jake’s place.
She collected all these impressions while following Olivia, at an exhausted, shambling pace, across the top of the rock toward the precipitous edge from which Sokolov had been shooting at the jihadists. The farther Olivia went, the more she tended to hunch over, then crouch, then crawl. Deeply tired of such inefficient forms of locomotion, Zula balked at going farther. She advanced slowly to the point where she would have to begin crawling on hands and knees, then stopped and squatted on her haunches, stretching out her wrecked thigh muscles and her calves. About thirty feet away she could see the soles of Sokolov’s boots, heels up and toes down, as he lay prone at the cliff edge, peering through the scope of a tricked-out AR-15 rifle that looked oddly similar to the one Peter had kept in his safe. Olivia was lying on her side next to him, talking into his ear, and he was nodding and making little remarks back to her. Something in Olivia’s body language — the almost total relaxation with which she lay next to him — told Zula that she was watching a sort of intimate moment, which made her feel awkward. But after a few moments, Olivia began to inchworm back from the precipice, and Sokolov turned his head and gazed back at Zula with his blue eyes. An American would have made some sentimental gesture here, made it mawkish, but Sokolov contented himself with the tiniest nod and a suggestion of a wink. Zula responded by raising her hand and twitching her fingers in a suggestion of a wave. This was plenty for Sokolov, who snapped his head back around and returned to his occupation.