(It was, Zula realized, just another business meeting. The only thing missing was the PowerPoint presentation. Some of the group—presumably the Cs—were being given the shit work, and Jones had to soften them up first with the meal and the fake camaraderie.)
Staying behind to enjoy Zula’s excellent campfire cuisine would be Zakir, Ershut, and two others. One of these, Sayed, Zula had mentally classified as a graduate student: a quiet man, closer to forty than thirty, who seemed markedly uncomfortable in the camping and hiking milieu. It was obvious to Zula why he and Zakir were being left behind—she’d have made exactly the same choice—and both of them looked some combination of disappointed and relieved.
Ershut, though, was dumbfounded. The same went for Jahandar, an Afghan whom Zula had last seen perched on the top of the RV with a sniper rifle and a pair of binoculars. Zula herself had to make a modest effort to hide her own astonishment, for if ever there was a man cut out for a long trek down the length of a mountain range in hostile territory, it was Jahandar. To the point where Zula had some difficulty in imagining how they had smuggled him this deep into a Western democracy. They must have drugged him, packed him into a crate, shipped him over by air freight direct from Tora Bora, and kept him pent up on a mountaintop until now. Everything about his appearance—the hat, the beard, the glare, the battle scars—should have got him arrested on sight in any municipality west of the Caspian Sea. Anyway, never mind how they’d managed it, Jahandar was here, and he was pissed. And this encouraged the normally taciturn Ershut to voice objections of his own to Jones’s plan.
They kept glancing over at her. As if to say, How many people does it take to keep tabs on a girl chained to a tree?
Jones gave her a glance too: a knowing look, as if to say, I can tell you understand more than you let on. He pushed his dirty plate in her direction, then rose to his feet and made gestures indicating that Ershut and Jahandar should come with him. They strolled away from the campfire until they had reached a place from which they could not be easily heard, where they continued the conversation in lower tones. Jones was filling them in on some aspect of the plan that did not need to be shared with the entire group just now.
Or perhaps it was only Zula with whom they did not wish to share it. For at some point, a few minutes into their discussion, the three of them all turned their heads to look her way, paused in their deliberations for a few heartbeats, and then looked back together, turning their backs on her to continue the discussion in a more reasonable timbre. All the tension was gone from their body language.
They had decided to kill her.
It would not happen right away. But at some point after the main group had been launched toward the border, Ershut or Jahandar would cut her throat—not, she guessed, before she’d cooked them a meal and done the dishes—and then they would set out in pursuit of the main body. And knowing the two of them, they’d have little difficulty in catching up. Zakir and Sayed, she guessed, would be left behind to throw dirt on her corpse.
The meal broke up, and the men scattered into the darkness beyond the reach of the firelight, leaving her with a pile of dirty paper plates and some pots that needed scrubbing. Most of them went to bed. Jahandar made himself tea with the water she had been heating for dishes, then retreated to a position a short distance up the hill, whence he could survey the whole camp and all below it. He took his rifle with him.
Zula did the dishes. Imagining Jahandar’s crosshairs on her forehead.
SEVERAL HOURS OF despair had given way to the vague notion, more in Csongor’s heart than his head, that he was beginning to make sense of the Carthinias Exchange and its diverse actors. There was a trading pit in the middle of the place, a full 360-degree amphitheater of polished stone steps, perhaps thirty meters—the limit of shouting distance—at its top, funneling in and down to a tiny, flat floor no more than three meters across. The thing was split neatly in half through the middle, though there were no screens or fences or visual cues to make this obvious; it could be inferred by noticing that different sorts of people tended to congregate on each side: on the one, merchants who were trying to get money out of the world, and on the other, priests from the temples, trying to make full use of their money-annihilating capacity by undercutting the competing priests.