“Well, anyway, your story checks out,” Jones said, as if she were to be commended for this.
“Why wouldn’t it check out?”
Jones chuckled. “No particular reason. All I mean is, I can go right to your Flickr page and see photos that went up there two weeks ago when you and Peter were visiting Dodge at Schloss Hundschüttler.” He rolled his eyes and used air quotes at the name.
“How’d you know his nickname was Dodge?”
“It’s mentioned in his Wikipedia entry.”
This was the first time they had discussed Richard—or any nonimmediate topic, for that matter—since the very brief conversation immediately after the jet crash, when Jones had been about to put a bullet in her, and she’d revealed that she had an uncle who, (a) was very rich, and (b) knew how to smuggle things across the Canada/U.S. border. She had expected further interrogation. But Jones was a thorough man, a self-starter, a strategizer. Zula had slowly come to understand that every action he had taken in the days since had been centered around Uncle Richard and the possibility of using him to sneak across the border. The war room he’d constructed in the RV had nothing to do—yet—with a Vegas casino massacre. That could all be seen to after they’d crossed the border. This here was all to do with Richard, and Schloss Hundschüttler was its epicenter.
Her brain was slowly making sense of the virtual stickpins printed on the map. Each one of them corresponded to one of the photos that Jones had printed up from her Flickr page. After several days in the cell, it was taking her a little while to get back into the Internet-based mind-set in which she had lived most of her post-Eritrean life. But she remembered she had once had a phone and that it had a GPS receiver built into it as well as a camera, and those two systems could talk to each other; if you gave permission—and she was pretty sure she had—the device would append a latitude and a longitude to each photograph, so that you could later plot them out on a map and see where each picture had been taken. During the visit to the Schloss, she and Peter and Richard had spent a couple of afternoons wandering around the vicinity on ATVs and snowshoes. The pins printed on the map were breadcrumb trails marking out the paths they had taken, a crumb dropped every time Zula had tapped the shutter button on the screen of her phone.
Her face was flushing hot, as if Jones had caught her out in something acutely embarrassing.
And yet, at the same time, it was strangely pleasurable to be reminded that she had once had a life that had included such luxuries as a boyfriend and a phone.
“Most of this is self-explanatory, if one is willing to put a bit of thought into it,” Jones remarked. “As an example, in this snapshot of Peter donning his snowshoes, there’s a mountain peak in the background, wooded on its lower slopes, but with a barren face—I’m guessing scree beneath the snow. According to the time-stamp, it was taken right around noon—indeed, I can see the remains of your lunch on the seat of the ATV. The shadows should therefore be pointing north. And strangely enough, when we look at the Google satellite image—which was taken during the summer, evidently—we see a peak here, with a scree-covered face turned toward the pin on the map, which is more or less to its south. So it all fits together. Schloss Hundschüttler’s website could hardly be more descriptive; I have already taken the virtual tour of the property and had a virtual pint in the virtual tavern. Virtual pints being the only kind that I, as a devout Muslim, am allowed to have…” Jones had become somewhat rambling, perhaps because Zula was being a little slow to snap out of this combination of cell-induced ennui and the shock of seeing familiar places and faces so displayed. He slid a page across the table at her, then bracketed it between two more. Each contained an image from her phone. “But there are still certain mysteries that require explanation. What the bloody hell is this?” he asked. “I know where it is.” He tapped a location on the map, a few miles south of the Schloss, sprouting a cluster of stickpins. “But what the hell? It’s not mentioned on the Schloss’s site, and even WikiTravel is silent on the matter.”
“It was an abandoned mine.” Zula paused, a little taken aback by the unfamiliar sound of her own voice. Then she corrected herself: “It is an abandoned mine.” She had grown accustomed to thinking of her life and everything she’d ever experienced as dwelling solely in the past.
“What were they mining? Trees?”
She shook her head. “Lead or something; I don’t know.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “What sort of mine requires a million board feet of timber?” For the overwhelming impression given by the photographs was of planks and beams, thousands of them, silver with age, splayed and flattened in some sort of slow-motion disaster that ran all the way down the side of a small mountain. As if the world’s biggest timber flume, a waterfall of rough-sawn planks coursing down the slope, had suddenly been deprived of water and had frozen and shriveled in place.
“Mines are supposed to be below ground, I’d thought,” Jones continued.
“Aren’t you a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines?” Zula asked.