CSONGOR WOKE UP nagged by the vague sense that there was
“Your org chart?” Csongor asked.
“Orc chart,” Marlon said.
INSPECTOR FOURNIER GOT back to Olivia at about three thirty in the afternoon, letting her know that they had conducted a simple search of police records and found nothing about weird private jet landings or roving bands of Middle Eastern terrorists. The only thing that had been flagged as even moderately peculiar was that a group of hunters had gone missing in north-central B.C., about ten days ago.
Forty-five minutes later—having made a quick raid on her hotel room to grab her stuff and check out—Olivia was northbound on Interstate 5, stopped almost totally dead in the inevitable Friday afternoon rush hour jam-up. But she was moving. She was moving, she was convinced, in the general direction of Abdallah Jones.
IN SOME RESPECTS, Abdallah Jones’s jihadists were so hapless that they almost—
She had flattered herself that, as they drew closer to the Schloss, they’d move her up to the front of the RV and consult her for directions. But it seemed that they had scored a GPS from one of the many Walmarts they had raided during their wanderings and were now simply using it to zero in on the coordinates of the place where she had taken photographs of the collapsed mining structure a few weeks ago. They closed and locked the door of her cell so she’d not be a distraction; and so she spent the last few hours of the journey alone in the dark, running through the exercise program she had invented for herself and trying to guess their location from what few sensory cues penetrated the insulated walls of the room. They passed through a town; she guessed Elphinstone. They bought groceries; she guessed at the Safeway. Then they left town and began to ascend (her ears were popping) on a winding road. Almost certainly the one that ran up the valley toward the Schloss. Someone honked furiously at them for a while, then sped past; as a little joke to herself, she imagined it might be Uncle Richard. Then she suddenly knew with certainty that it
They reached a place where the road became gravel and then shut off the RV’s engine. Nothing happened, from her point of view, for an hour; she could feel the suspension rocking as men climbed off, presumably going to reconnoiter. Muffled discussions were going on up ahead of her, and stuff was being unloaded. Almost
Then she heard the sound she’d been waiting for ever since they’d constructed this prison cell and put her in it: the heavy clinking of the chain as someone dug it out of whatever storage bin it had been heaped in.
Scrabbling at the door. Then it was kicked open. Zakir—the big soft-bodied Vancouverite—was standing there, eyeglasses slightly askew, the chain all piled up in his arms. Shaving and bathing had not been such a priority with him these last several days.
“I’ll be needing your neck,” he announced, with elaborate, sarcastic fake-politeness.