Reamde

“Stop it,” he said gently. “It’s a waste of time.”

“Then what do you want to do?”

“Send you on your way. Save Dodge. I’ll follow.”

“You’ll … follow?”

“I can’t go near as fast as you. But there’s no reason for me to just stay here. I want to die on the forty-ninth parallel.”

She was squatting on her haunches with her arms crossed over her knees. She looked south, into the sunlight, toward the border. Then she dropped her head onto her forearms and sobbed for a while.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“No, it’s not. People are dead.” She raised her face, let herself tumble back onto her bottom, stretched her legs out next to Chet. “I didn’t kill them. But they’re dead because of things that I did. Does that make sense? Peter. The pilots. The people in the RV. They’d all be alive if I’d decided differently.”

“But you’re not helping the killers,” Chet said. Something about lying on the ground, combined with her outburst, had revived him a little, made him feel almost normal.

“Of course I’m not helping them.”

“You fired that shotgun, didn’t you? To warn me.”

“Jahandar—the sniper—was drawing a bead on you. Yes. I warned you by firing the shotgun.”

“So you’re fighting against them.”

“Of course I am. But what’s the point, if it just leads to a different set of people getting killed?”

“Too heavy a question for me,” he said. “You just do what you can, pretty lady.”

She tried to fight it, but the corners of her mouth drew back into a smile. “You call all women that.”

“It’s true.”

“It’s been a while since I heard that kind of talk.”

Chet shrugged demurely.

“Well,” Zula continued, “all those people died for nothing unless I help Richard escape. And then we can go for help. But I have to get to the border first. And I need your help for that.”

“American Falls,” Chet said. “That’s where we’re going.”

“How do I—do we—get there?”

He turned his head, raised his good arm, gestured at the ridge that rose above them to the south: a blade of cream-colored granite, patched with snow, skirted by a ramp of boulders that had been flaking away from it and thundering down into the valley for millions of years. The trail had taken them up onto the ridge’s middle slopes, flying on creosoted stilts over the rubble fields, and terminated at a place where a wall of sound rock jumped out of the talus. The tunnel had been blasted straight into it, aimed horizontally through the heart of the ridge.

“We use the mine tunnels to get past this bad boy. See, we don’t have to hike over the top. That would take days. It’d kill me. Hell, it’d kill you. No. We use the tunnels. That’s what Richard discovered. That’s his secret. We go out the other side. Then down the river to the falls. Latitude forty-nine north. That’s where I stop, and you keep going.”

“Then let’s go,” she said, “if that’s what you want.”

“Yes. It’s what I want.”

THE TUNNEL WAS large enough to accommodate a narrow-gauge train, which was to say that a car could have driven into it with room to spare. To prevent just that sort of behavior, the owners had fabricated a massive steel gridiron, bolted into the rock, that blocked the passage. The barrier was situated about ten meters inside the entrance of the tunnel. That ten meters was a tornado of lurid graffiti and an ankle-deep trash heap of discarded beer bottles, chip bags, knotted condoms, and drained batteries. Just at the entrance was a fire ring; Zula, acting in Sherlock Holmes mode, verified that its ashes were still blazing hot. They were only a couple of hours behind Jones and company.

In the middle of the gridiron was a man-sized door. This had clearly been locked and vandalized, chained and vandalized, welded shut and vandalized, so many times as to threaten the integrity of the entire structure. Now it stood slightly ajar and Zula’s flashlight, shining through the grid, revealed that the graffiti and trash on its opposite side were only a little less prevalent. Her nose caught a pungent and familiar odor: fresh spray paint. Playing her flashlight over the steel plate on the door, she saw a few characters in Arabic. She couldn’t read them. She touched one of the glyphs and fresh green paint came away on her fingertip.

“Careful!” called Chet, strolling along slowly in her wake.

“Why?”

“They used to booby-trap it.”

“Who did!?”

“Back in the day,” Chet said, “the business got a little competitive. A little nasty. Crazy people got into it. People who’d kill you. That’s when Dodge and I decided to go straight.”

Zula painted the light beam up and down the length of the door crack, and noticed, way up at the top, a steely glint. Piano wire. It had been made fast around the vertical bar that served as the edge of the door, and routed horizontally across the gap between door and frame, across the grid and all the way to the tunnel wall. There it disappeared into a mound of trash that had been piled up in the corner formed by the wall and the steel grid.