Reamde

There came a time when Jones shooed most of his comrades off into other vehicles and invited Zula forward to the RV’s dining area, which had become, quite literally, a war room. Centered on the table was one of those stuck-together maps. The image was festooned with little colored Google stickpins. Taped to windows and walls all around were photographs, also generated by that hardworking printer.

They were Zula’s photographs. Many of them featured Peter or Uncle Richard. She had taken them during the visit to the Schloss two weeks ago.

“I found your Flickr page,” Jones explained. “Evidently you downloaded the app?”

“Huh?” Zula was too disoriented by the images to muster anything more coherent than that.

“The Flickr app,” Jones said patiently. “It automatically syncs the photo library on your phone with your Flickr page.”

“Yeah,” Zula said, “I did have that app.” Past tense, since she thought her phone was somewhere in China, buried in rubble or maybe in a police lab.

“Well, anyway, your story checks out,” Jones said, as if she were to be commended for this.

“Why wouldn’t it check out?”

Jones chuckled. “No particular reason. All I mean is, I can go right to your Flickr page and see photos that went up there two weeks ago when you and Peter were visiting Dodge at Schloss Hundschüttler.” He rolled his eyes and used air quotes at the name.

“How’d you know his nickname was Dodge?”

“It’s mentioned in his Wikipedia entry.”

This was the first time they had discussed Richard—or any nonimmediate topic, for that matter—since the very brief conversation immediately after the jet crash, when Jones had been about to put a bullet in her, and she’d revealed that she had an uncle who, (a) was very rich, and (b) knew how to smuggle things across the Canada/U.S. border. She had expected further interrogation. But Jones was a thorough man, a self-starter, a strategizer. Zula had slowly come to understand that every action he had taken in the days since had been centered around Uncle Richard and the possibility of using him to sneak across the border. The war room he’d constructed in the RV had nothing to do—yet—with a Vegas casino massacre. That could all be seen to after they’d crossed the border. This here was all to do with Richard, and Schloss Hundschüttler was its epicenter.

Her brain was slowly making sense of the virtual stickpins printed on the map. Each one of them corresponded to one of the photos that Jones had printed up from her Flickr page. After several days in the cell, it was taking her a little while to get back into the Internet-based mind-set in which she had lived most of her post-Eritrean life. But she remembered she had once had a phone and that it had a GPS receiver built into it as well as a camera, and those two systems could talk to each other; if you gave permission—and she was pretty sure she had—the device would append a latitude and a longitude to each photograph, so that you could later plot them out on a map and see where each picture had been taken. During the visit to the Schloss, she and Peter and Richard had spent a couple of afternoons wandering around the vicinity on ATVs and snowshoes. The pins printed on the map were breadcrumb trails marking out the paths they had taken, a crumb dropped every time Zula had tapped the shutter button on the screen of her phone.

Her face was flushing hot, as if Jones had caught her out in something acutely embarrassing.

And yet, at the same time, it was strangely pleasurable to be reminded that she had once had a life that had included such luxuries as a boyfriend and a phone.