Reamde

He considered it for a moment. The look on his face was a bit hopeless, as if he despaired of ever explaining it to a cosmopolitan outsider like Olivia. “Again,” he quoted, “‘behold the boasted world has come to nothing … let me begin anew.’ What you’re seeing isn’t politics. It’s the absence of politics. It’s us trying to live in a way where we never have to put up with politics and politicians again. That means that when the politicians come after us, try to interfere with our lives, we have to defend ourselves, with passive and nonviolent measures when we can, but, failing that…”

“With guns?”

“We take full advantage of our 2A rights.”

“2A?”

“Second Amendment.”

“Are you carrying a gun now?”

“Of course I am. And I’ll bet there’s ten other people within a hundred feet of us who are doing the same. But you’d never be able to guess who by looking around.” For Olivia had instinctively begun looking around. She did not see any obvious pistol-packers. But she did catch sight of Richard and John, who had fallen into conversation near the store’s exit and were looking at them significantly.

“Looks like we are leaving,” Olivia said, beginning to get up.

“Come and visit us,” Jake blurted out.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I know it’s out of the way. You may never come within five hundred miles of Prohibition Crick, unless you’re flying over it. But if you do, I invite you to come up into our little valley and stay with us. Sincerely. You’ll see. It won’t be weird. It won’t be uncomfortable. No one will be rude to you for being foreign, or not looking like us. You’ll enjoy it. We won’t try to convert you.”

“That is very kind of you,” she said, “and it actually sounds like something I might rather enjoy.”

“Good.”

“Now I just need an excuse to visit—what? Spokane?”

“Or Elphinstone. Or Richard’s Schloss. There’s lots of nice places within a day’s drive.”

OLIVIA WAS TOUCHED by Richard’s including her in the reunion of the three brothers, until she reflected that Richard was anything but a sentimental fool and that he must have done it for tactical reasons. After that, she only pretended to be touched. She told the Forthrasts she could see plainly enough that they had things to discuss. And Olivia had an investigation to pursue. So she parted ways with them at the bookstore and went back to the FBI offices to resume the NAG investigation.

She was still at work late that night, waiting for things to open up in London so that she could confer with some of her colleagues there and suggest some leads for them to pursue while she slept. Her mobile rang and she saw Richard’s name on its screen. “Just calling to check in,” Richard explained. An awkward pause followed as she waited for him to go on. But then she understood that he was really just trying to find out whether she had unearthed any leads, found any scrap of hope, during the hours since he’d last seen her. She could only mumble corporate-sounding buzzwords: drilling down, expanding the envelope, going into the corners of the search space. If those phrases sounded as bad to Richard as they did to her, it was a wonder he didn’t just borrow his brother’s sidearm and put himself out of his misery.

Richard informed her that he and John and Jake had spent the entire day sitting around his condo in a helpless and despondent condition, “driving each other crazy,” and that rather than waste any more time thus, they had agreed that they would leave town first thing in the morning, flying direct to Elphinstone so that they could drive one another crazy in the more beauteous environment of Schloss Hundschüttler. Olivia, who had quite enjoyed the drink in the cerulean-collar bar, expressed sincere regret that she would not get another opportunity to see him. But data were now coming in thick and fast from all those resources and scary-smart people in D.C., and since she had devoted much of the preceding day to complaining, albeit politely, about the lack of progress, she could not very well leave the office at this time to go and have another beer with the decidedly irrelevant Mr. Forthrast.

And after that, another twenty-four hours blew by as if it were nothing. It must have been because she was working now, or, like a cerulean-collar worker, putting on an ironical performance of work, and when people worked, time went by fast.

MI6 higher-ups were asking her to supply daily updates on the progress of the NAG, and before going to bed she wrote one that she did not enjoy writing at all. All day she had, in her mind, been “making progress” according to some artificial metric of what that meant: emails read and written, databases scanned, checklists ticked off, images pondered over. But since none of that work had actually led to the identification of the business jet in question, or to any evidence whatsoever that it had entered the United States, it was only progress in a negative sense. Another day of such progress and the NAG would be dead and buried, and she would be on a flight back to London.