Reamde

The same thing had happened at the abandoned mine two weeks ago. Then, however, it had felt different to her. They had just survived a plane crash and their future had seemed uncertain; they had been holed up together in a cozy refuge; and, as ridiculous as it might sound, there had been a sense of shared hardship that had made Zula feel like pitching in. Now, of course, matters were rather different. There was a chain around her neck, for one thing. But the quality of the personnel had declined precipitously from those days. There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to seine up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas. Zula almost felt as if she’d seen the whole ABC devolution happen in microcosmic form during the two scant weeks she had been rattling around western Canada with Jones and his crew. Jones was indisputably an A, and, in retrospect, those he had chosen to accompany him on the business jet had been As too in their own ways. Sharjeel was the very prototype of a B and he had brought with him Zakir, precisely the kind of C that people who quoted the “As hire As, Bs hire Cs” maxim dreaded bringing into their organization.

But Jones, being an A, seemed to understand this well enough and had sorted matters out accordingly. Their first few hours at the camp had been so quiet that Zula had actually dozed off on her camp pad for a little while; swathed in four layers of cheap fleece, she could sleep practically anywhere without the need for blankets or sleeping bag. She had awakened to find Zakir eyeing her in a manner that, at any time in her life prior to the advent of Wallace and Ivanov, she’d have found creepy. As it was, she found herself wondering whether Zakir could maintain that state of arousal once she had gotten her chain wrapped around his throat and her knee on his spine. During her confinement in the back of the RV, she had done many push-ups and many squats.

Anyway, the thing that had awakened her had been the advent in camp of a sizable contingent of jihadists, something like ten in addition to the three who had been left here to hold the fort. It seemed that several of the cars had arrived at the turnaround point at about the same time, disgorged this cast of characters, and then been driven away by persons who had been deemed redundant by Jones: Cs, or perhaps even Ds. So all of them were now literally at the end of the road, bereft of wheeled transportation (for the RV had been taken away) and supplied with much more in the way of camping equipment, weaponry, and ammunition than they could plausibly carry. The light was growing dim. Zula pulled the hood of her fleece over her head to hide the movements of her eyes and tried to carry on an inventory without being obvious. She did not see any weapons beyond what they had brought on the bizjet and acquired from the bear hunters. That, she reckoned, made sense; much easier to get weapons where they were going, and less weight to carry across the border.

Probably it was more useful to inventory the men than the gear.

All of the original five were now present: Jones, Abdul-Wahaab, Ershut, and the lovers. The A-team, as it were. Of the Vancouver contingent there were still weaselly Sharjeel and podgy Zakir. The third member of that group, whose name she had forgotten, seemed to have been sloughed off; perhaps he was one of the bit players whose job had been to drive a vehicle away from this place and make himself scarce. So that was seven. But the total number of jihadists now present was thirteen—a figure she was not able to pin down, exactly, until she was made to serve them all dinner.

The additional half dozen were mostly men she had glimpsed or heard at least once during the interminable wanderings of the RV as they had all zeroed in from, she guessed, diverse parts of North America. Two of them were completely new to her. She gathered from the way these were greeted that they had only just managed to join up with the caravan. Most of those present either hadn’t seen them in years or had no idea who they were. She pegged them as As. Partly this was because Jones treated them with special respect. But only partly. She could just tell. Erasto was from the Horn of Africa, probably Somalia. He spoke perfect midwestern-accented English and enjoyed looking at her slyly as he was doing so, glorying in her reaction: he must be an adoptee like her, someone who had been raised in some place like Minneapolis but who unlike her had decided to go back to his homeland and dedicate his life to the cause of global jihad. He was six foot four, built like a greyhound, baby-faced, didn’t need to shave. A Benetton model.