It was not until eleven o’clock the following morning that she was really able to get down to work on the NAG, the North American Gambit, which was her name for the theory that Jones had found some way to fly his stolen business jet directly from Xiamen to this continent. Here in the Seattle office of the FBI, signs were obvious that her local contacts were being controlled by persons in Washington, D.C., who were quite serious about working this theory in a systematic way. This was both good and bad. Obviously it was helpful that they liked her theory well enough to take it seriously and devote resources to its investigation. But whoever was running this project in D.C. was an Organization Man or Woman, someone with a studious engineer-like mind-set, who spent a lot of time worrying about accountability. No Seamus Costello, in other words. It seemed that a lot of duplication of effort was going on in which that hypothetical flight was being wargamed and flight-simulated in precisely the way that had already been done at MI6 more than a week ago. Ever newer and better “resources” were being “brought online” and ever more “scary-smart” analysts being “looped in” and “brought up to speed.” These developments were relayed second-and thirdhand to Olivia, and it was obvious from the tones of the emails and the expressions on people’s faces that she was expected to be gratified by each of these improvements. And yet from this remove, thousands of miles from whatever Beltway conference room where all the action was taking place, all these enhancements yielded zero results other than additional delays. It was not until about twenty-four hours after her meeting with Richard Forthrast that she finally began to get access to some of the data she needed to evaluate the NAG in a serious way: lists of the tail numbers of private airplanes that had landed at U.S. airports around the time in question (a week and a half ago now, long enough to give her the sense that she was pursuing a hopelessly cold trail) and high-resolution satellite images of out-of-the-way bits of the northwestern United States where computer-image-processing algorithms had detected white shapes that looked like they might conceivably be jet airplanes.
Early in the afternoon she received a text message from Richard Forthrast informing her that he was just a few blocks away, killing time at the Greyhound station, and would she like to grab a cup of coffee? The honest answer was that she was right in the middle of something and she didn’t have time, but the message was tantalizingly mysterious, and coffee sounded good, and Richard was generally fun to hang out with. So she took the elevator to the ground floor and walked to the Greyhound station and found Richard and John sitting on a bench, reading the New York Times and Reader’s Digest, respectively, waiting for a bus from Spokane that had been delayed by weather on Snoqualmie Pass. Jacob Forthrast had decided to come out from his compound in Idaho and spend a little time with his two older brothers. “He feels useless” was Richard’s explanation—just the sort of bleak and pitiless analysis that could only happen between siblings—“and when he found out we weren’t going to China after all, he hopped on a bus.” He was looking up at Olivia over his reading glasses and his New York Times and must have seen in her face certain questions she was too polite to ask: Does he not have a car? Is he too poor to pay for an airline ticket? Richard folded up his newspaper and treated Olivia to a brisk little explanation of Jake’s belief system, delivered in a way that made it seem like he’d done it lots of times before and wanted it done properly. His tone was studiedly noncommittal, making it clear that he didn’t agree with Jake about anything, but there was nothing he could do about it, and so there was no point getting hung up on the essential ridiculousness of it all.
Not long after this little orientation session came to an end, the bus pulled in, and Jake climbed off in the middle of a long stream of senior citizens, ethnic minorities, people too young to drive, and hard-luck cases. Feeling very much the odd woman out despite the Forthrast brothers’ efforts to make her feel welcome, Olivia strolled down the street with them to a bookstore that Jake wanted to visit. Given the fact that Jake believed a lot of crazy stuff, Olivia found it intriguing that the top item on his list was to visit a bookstore. If nothing else, it served as an icebreaker. She had no idea how such a man might react to her as a nonwhite female, but he was quite cordial, even easy to talk to, and went out of his way to describe himself as a “wingnut” and a “wack job,” apparently thinking that this would help put Olivia—or “Laura,” as she was still calling herself—at ease. It was clear that he had been brought thoroughly up to speed on the latest news regarding Zula, and how “Laura” fit into the picture. He had been thinking about it during the bus ride and come up with any number of questions and theories, most of which seemed like the products of an acute and active mind. He was, Olivia realized, at least as intelligent as Richard, and possibly more so.
“Why do you live out there, the way you do?” she finally asked him.
By this point she was sitting across the table from him in the bookstore’s coffee shop. Jake had immediately found the book he wanted: a manual on organic farming. Richard and John had wandered off into other parts of the bookstore, aimlessly browsing, and there was no telling when they’d be back. She had bought Jake a cup of coffee, and he had returned to making self-deprecating jests about his lifestyle, which Olivia was now starting to find a little boring—dancing around the unmentionable. Better to just ask him flat out. As a stranger in a strange land, she reckoned she could get away with it.
“I guess I started with Emerson’s essay ‘On Self-Reliance’ and just followed the trail from there,” he said. “‘Behold the boasted world has come to nothing … Let me begin anew. Let me teach the finite to know its master. ‘I’d already been having thoughts along those lines when Patricia died …Dodge might have told you about that?”
She shook her head. “But I did see something about it…”
“In his Wikipedia entry, sure. Anyway, at the time I had nothing else going for me, and so I decided to spend a summer trying to build a life around that.”
“Emersonian self-reliance, you mean.”
“Yeah. The summer turned into a year, and during that year I met Elizabeth, and after that, well, the die was pretty much cast. Dodge had this property in northern Idaho, which he had acquired years before, during a phase of his life that I believe is also covered pretty well in the Wikipedia article.”
Olivia smiled at the polite evasion, and Jake seemed to draw confidence from her reaction. Olivia said, “As I understand it, this was the southern terminus of his … route. Or whatever you want to call it. Just a few miles south of the Canadian border. But within reach of the U.S. highway network.”
“Exactly. But it also just happens to be one of the most beautiful places you can imagine: the head of a little valley, just where the land gets flat enough to build on and cultivate, but only a few minutes’ walk from mountains full of wildlife and waterfalls, huckleberries and wildflowers.”
“You make it sound marvelous.”
“When I got off the bus in Bourne’s Ford—which is the closest town—an old man told me ‘Welcome to God’s country.’ I thought it was kind of hokey, but once I had found my way up the valley to Dodge’s property, well, then I understood. At first Elizabeth and I were just living in a backpacking tent. I wrote to Dodge and asked him if he wouldn’t mind my trying to improve the place a little, and so we began to build, and things just happened.”