Reamde

Waiting in line at Immigration, she checked her messages and received word that contact had indeed been made with American counterintelligence and that they were receptive to the idea of her paying a call on them and that she should go ahead and book a ticket to Seattle. The message was time-stamped only an hour ago, meaning that if she had waited in Manila for official go-ahead she would only now be calling the airlines there. So she had saved herself a full day by taking action. Of course, getting reimbursed for the ticket might not be so easy.

Once she had passed through formalities, she rented a car and began driving south. She’d been reluctant to share with her new American counterparts her idea of talking to Richard Forthrast; like anyone else who works in an organization and who has just come up with a pet idea, she considered it her property and didn’t want to share it out. And she was afraid that it would get slapped down or, worse yet, co-opted. But crossing the border a day ahead of schedule and making solo contact with an American citizen probably was not how to get the relationship off on the right foot, and in any case, she had to keep in mind that talking to Forthrast was just a sideshow to the main project, which was looking for Jones in North America. So she pulled over to the side of the road and made some calls.

At about five in the afternoon, she found herself in a secure office suite in a federal office building in downtown Seattle, making friends with her officially approved contact, an FBI agent named Marcella Houston, who was all about tracking down Jones but who said nothing about Richard Forthrast. Olivia spent a couple of hours with her before Marcella went home for the evening with the promise that they would get cracking on the Jones hunt first thing in the morning.

After checking in to a downtown hotel, Olivia found a secure email waiting for her from London, passing on the information that Richard Forthrast and his brother John had, just a few hours ago, obtained single-entry visas to China, and moreover that a flight plan had been filed that would take them from Boeing Field to Xiamen, departing rather soon.

It was, she realized, all a matter of bureaucratic lag time. By jumping on the plane to Vancouver and then bombing down to Seattle, she had appeared in the FBI’s offices a full day ahead of when they had been expecting her and, moreover, just at the close of normal business hours. Marcella had stayed late to give her a polite welcome and to promise that something would happen tomorrow. All of Marcella’s attention had been focused on the Jones hunt. Olivia’s proposal to contact Richard Forthrast—supposing it had been noticed at all—had been forwarded to some other person’s inbox and probably hadn’t even been read yet. Because if anyone of consequence had read it, they would have forbidden her to talk to Richard Forthrast, or they would have insisted on sending one of their own with her.

But as it happened, Richard Forthrast’s jet was idling on the tarmac at Boeing Field; and there was nothing preventing her from going down there to talk to him.

WHEN ZULA’S MOBILE prison cell was complete and the door slammed shut on her, time stopped moving for several days. This gave her plenty of time to hate herself for having failed to escape when she’d had a chance.

Sort of a chance, anyway. During the time they’d been parked in the Walmart, before the plywood had been bought and the cell constructed, she could theoretically have gone into the shower stall and unlocked the end of the chain that was looped around the grab bar. She could then have made a dash for the side door and perhaps got it open long enough to scream for help and attract someone’s attention. Or she might have gone back into the bedroom, kicked a window out, and jumped. Once she had been locked into the cell, she found it quite easy to convince herself that she ought to have done one of those two things, and that having failed to do so made her into some kind of idiot or coward.

But—as she had to keep reminding herself, just to stay sane—she’d had no idea that they were planning to turn the back of the vehicle into a prison cell. She’d assumed that the chain would be in place for much longer and that she could bide her time, waiting for a moment when everyone was asleep or distracted. Making an impulsive run for it might have blown her one and only chance.

On the day following the Walmart stopover, she dimly heard additional sawing and banging noises on the other side of her cell door.