Reamde

NOW IT WAS five in the fucking morning and he was wide awake, surrounded by people who were sleeping as soundly as it was possible for humans to sleep without being etherized. And Olivia—who was supposed to be pursuing her crazy SNAG theory in Canada—had made the announcement that she was blown and going dark.

How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?

Not that Seamus, in general, had any great problem with the Great White North. But to be an MI6 agent in that country seemed about as close to a milk run as you could get in the espionage world.

He fired up his laptop, found a wireless network, set up an encrypted connection, and got in touch with Stan, a colleague and former comrade-in-arms in the greater Washington, D.C., area. It was quitting time there, and Saturday to boot, but Stan was known to work odd hours. Seamus asked Stan whether it wouldn’t be too much of a challenge to his intellectual faculties to track down the provenance of a certain instant message, and wondered whether Stan was too much of a pussy to get it done discreetly, without setting the whole counterterrorism network alight.

Then he took a shower. When he came back, a message was waiting for him from Stan, asking what all this had to do with Seamus’s metier, viz., eating snakes and molesting ladyboys in the southern Philippines. The message went on to claim that, as a result of Stan’s making the inquiry, the Department of Homeland Security’s Terror Alert Status had been elevated to Red, and POTUS had been evacuated to a secure facility in Nebraska. Those preliminaries out of the way, Stan divulged that the message had been sent via a cell tower near the summit of Stevens Pass, northeast of Seattle, and squarely within the borders of the United States. Judging from cell-tower records, the phone in question had been eastbound at the time. Nothing more was known, since the device had not popped up on the network since the message had been sent. Was there anything else?

Why yes, Seamus responded, if it wouldn’t interrupt Stan’s busy schedule of watching gay bondage pornography videos on the taxpayer-provided high-speed Internet connection, he would very much like to know whether a certain young lady had bought any airplane tickets or rented any cars in Washington or British Columbia of late.

A few minutes later came an email assuring Seamus that the lap dancer in question had indeed left an electronic trail a mile wide and that Seamus might be able to make use of the following data in tracking her down and getting his stolen kidney back: she had flown from Vancouver to Seattle this morning and rented a navy blue Chevy Trailblazer.

Seamus sent a polite note back reminding Stan to zip his fly when finished and promising to buy him a drink during Stan’s next visit to Zamboanga, supposing that Stan had the testicular fortitude to come within a thousand miles of such a challenging locale.

Then he pulled up a Google map of Stevens Pass. It was on a minor highway, a two-laner that Google didn’t even bother to draw on the map once he had clicked the Zoom Out button a couple of times. Seattle, then Vancouver came into view on successive clicks, and then Spokane, farther to the east, near the Idaho border.

Why had she rented a large SUV? Was it the only thing left in the lot? Or was she expecting to do some off-road work?

Something Csongor had said earlier was eating at him. Had been tunneling into his brain during the scant four hours he had managed to sleep: Does it help that Marlon has two million dollars?

The flip answer—always the first thing that would come into Seamus’s head—was, Why yes, with that kind of money he could lease a bizjet and fly there directly.

Which got him thinking about flight paths and border formalities.

This was an asinine idea, worth thinking about only as a thought experiment, but: Supposing they did exactly that? Leased a bizjet and flew it to the Pacific Northwest?

Then they would still have the minor problem that Marlon and Yuxia lacked visas. Which would be a showstopper if they landed at Sea-Tac or Boeing Field or any other international airport with immigration barriers.

Why not just land out in the middle of nowhere? Avoid those barriers altogether?

Answer: they’d be noticed on radar. In theory. But what if they did something tricky to avoid that? What was to stop them, really? Other than the fact that their pilot would refuse to do it because he wouldn’t want to get caught and thrown into prison.

So it was just a crazy thought experiment. But it was a thought experiment with a side effect, which was that it forced him to think exactly the same thoughts that Abdallah Jones had been thinking two weeks ago. Jones must have looked at the same Google map, traced the mountain ranges, zoomed in and out on promising border-crossing sites.