Reamde

Olivia’s plan to bolt out of the hotel and get a hot start on the day turned out to be embarrassingly, stupidly optimistic in more than one way. The night before she had fallen asleep in her clothes and left several things undone, such as taking a shower, checking her email, and touching base with Inspector Fournier, who’d been so kind as to send her those police reports. After Seamus woke her up, she set about doing those things. The shower went quickly and according to plan; nothing else did. What she’d envisioned as a quick check of her work email turned into a slough of despond. The next time she looked at the clock, an hour and a half had disappeared, and she was only getting in deeper; emails she had sent at the beginning of this session had spawned entire threads of responses in which she was now profoundly entangled, and people were threatening to set up conference calls. Her hasty departure from the FBI offices in Seattle had left her colleagues there variously confused and irritated, and these had to be brought up to speed or calmed down. At the same time, these same people were being made aware of the decrypted video images from the security cameras in Peter’s apartment, and so she got to watch as awareness propagated across their networks of email lists and they began to discuss what they should do next. It was Saturday morning and FBI agents were thumbing emails from the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. “Out of office” responses were bouncing around the system like pachinko balls. The channel through which these images had reached them was extremely confusing (decryption key pulled out of a dead man’s wallet by a Hungarian in the Philippines communicating with an American in Canada, the conversation taking place on an imaginary planet), and Olivia had to intervene and explain matters.

And that was just the Seattle FBI part of it. She had made the mistake of mentioning the idea of the Prince George security cam gambit to some of her colleagues in London, and this had spawned volumes of useless debate and counterproductive efforts to help her.

The only thing that kept her from being stuck in email all day long was a telephone call from Fournier, who had suddenly become hospitable and now wished to have coffee with her. She agreed to meet him in the lobby of her hotel in half an hour, then packed her bags—not much of a chore, since she hadn’t unpacked, and half of her crap was still down in the rental car anyway—and, almost as an afterthought, used Google Maps to check out the route to Prince George.

The results caused her to do a double-take. It was 750 kilometers and it was going to take her eleven hours, not counting eating and peeing breaks. The numbers were so enormous that she suffered a spell of disorientation, thinking that Google must have mistakenly routed her on some ridiculously convoluted route. But no, the map showed a reasonably straight course. It really was that far: the equivalent of driving from London to John o’ Groats. She was going to spend the entire day driving, and she was not going to get there until after dark. Tomorrow was Sunday.

She checked the flight schedules, hoping that there would be hourly shuttles. The result: there were a few flights during the day, including one that she might be able to make if she canceled her breakfast with Inspector Fournier and then made a dash to the airport. Politically, this was not the best move, and so she booked a seat on a late-morning flight instead.

Then down to the lobby to have coffee and a scone with Fournier. For some reason she had been expecting a middle-aged, rumpled Quebecois version of Columbo, but Fournier was trim, probably in his early thirties, and wore a stylish set of eyeglasses that made him seem younger still. What she’d mistaken for hostility had, she suspected, been a Continental formality that contrasted with the American frat boy ambience she had been immersed in during the previous days. She immediately suspected, and Fournier soon confirmed, that he’d spent a few years living in France, which was where he had picked up his professional manners and his taste in eyewear. Olivia’s status as MI6 agent, operating on foreign soil, had probably done nothing to loosen him up. But in person he could not have been more charming and attentive.