Reamde

“How long have you been awake?” Peter asked.

“A minute,” Zula said. “You?”

“Maybe half an hour. Hey, Zula!”

“What?”

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?”

Zula tossed off the blankets, got to her feet, and walked, a little unsteadily, up past Sokolov to the head of the plane. The cockpit door was closed, but beside it was another door leading to the lavatory.

Something scraped and thumped to the floor at her feet. She looked down to discover her shoulder bag. Sokolov had tossed it her way.

She looked up and locked eyes with him. “Thanks,” she said.

He gazed at her for a three-count and went back to his documents.

She went in, sat down, put her face in her hands, and peed.

Think.

How had Ivanov and company gotten them out of the country?

Uncle Richard sometimes flew in private jets when he went to the Isle of Man to pay court to Don Donald and wouldn’t stop talking about how easy, how “zipless” it was. No check-in. No security frisk. No wait. Just go straight to the plane and get on and go.

Zula didn’t know how the drug had affected her—had she been out cold? Merely groggy? Or in some compliant zombielike state? Anyway, the Russians could have bundled her and Peter into vehicles without anyone noticing and driven them straight onto the tarmac at Boeing Field and (if Uncle Richard was to be believed) right up to the side of the plane, where it wouldn’t have been that difficult to get them up the stairs and on board.

So really it would have been easy. Huge penalties would have obtained if they’d been noticed or caught, but these guys weren’t the type to concern themselves with such matters. In a sick way, she kind of liked that about them.

She went through her bag. Her passport was gone. The knife had been removed from her pocket. No car keys (not that they would have been of any use) or phone. There was a book she’d been reading, some of the odds and ends she’d collected from Peter’s place—cosmetics, tampons, hair stuff, hand sanitizer. A standard-issue Seattle fleece vest. Pens and pencils were all gone—because they were potential weapons? Because she could have used them to write a note calling for help? Someone had gone through her luggage—the larger bag she’d taken on the ski trip—and pulled out (thank God) underwear, a couple of T-shirts, a pair of shorts, and stuffed them into this bag.

So they were going someplace warm.

Think. When would her absence be noticed? It was common knowledge at work that she had gone skiing for the weekend. When she failed to show up for work today, people would assume she was sleeping in.

But eventually—in a few days, maybe?—people would get worried.

Then what?

Eventually they might look for her at Peter’s and find her car there, unless the Russians had taken it out and driven it into the murky waters of the Duwamish. But they would find no trace that anything had gone wrong.

She had vanished off the face of the earth.

That was upsetting, to the point of making her nose run a little, but she didn’t cry. She had cried at Peter’s place when things had gotten bad. Then she had stupidly believed that the problem was solved. As if you could really get out of such a bad situation so cheaply. Now she was back to square one, the place she’d been when she’d stopped crying at Peter’s and had started thinking about what to do.

She cleaned up and did a little bit of maintenance on the mascara. Didn’t want anyone to notice that she had been putting energy into makeup but didn’t want to visibly degenerate either, wanted to make the point, even if she made it subliminally, that she still had some pride, wasn’t falling apart. She performed a comb-out on her hair and then ponytailed it back. Changed into the cleanest clothes she could glean from the bag and went back to her bed, which she made back into a seat. Sat down and looked at more mountains.

“You know the time?”

Peter shook his head. “They took my phone.”

She sat there for a while.

“We’re going to Xiamen,” she announced.

“That’s on the other side of the Pacific!” he hissed.

“So?”

“So we’ve been flying over mountains the whole time!”

“A great circle route from Seattle doesn’t go across the Pacific. It goes north. Vancouver Island. Southeast Alaska. The Aleutians. Kamchatka.” She nodded out the window. “All mountains like those. Young. Steep. Subduction zone stuff.”

Sokolov, without looking up, spoke one word: “Vladivostok.”

“See?” Zula said.

“What’s that?”

“A city. Extreme eastern Siberia.”

“Siberia. Fantastic.”

“We’re going to Xiamen,” she insisted. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Maybe they’ll just take us into Russia and—”

“What?” Zula asked. “Kill us? They could have done that in Seattle.”

“I don’t know,” Peter said, “sell us into white slavery or something.”

“I’m not white.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You saw the way Ivanov was. There’s only one thing he cares about. Find the Troll. And”—she hesitated on the threshold of the word, but there was no point in being prissy—” kill him.”