Apparently this pitch had been convincing to the two sons, who had pooled their cash to purchase the trip as a surprise for their dad. From the police reports, and from the brutally depressing website that the missing men’s family had put up, beseeching the universe for information, it was clear that these were no dilettantes; the father had lived all over the world during his career and had lost no opportunity to hunt big game wherever it was to be gone after, frequently bringing his boys along with him. The guides were no tenderfeet either: one of them—a cofounder of the company—had been doing this for three decades, and the other was a First Nations man whose people had been living in the area for tens of thousands of years. They were in a two-year-old, four-wheel-drive Suburban well equipped with tire chains, winch, and anything else that might be needed to drive out of trouble or survive when hopelessly stuck.
Which was part of their method, and part of the problem now faced by the police. For since the guides were not anchored to a cushy lodge, they could roam wherever hunting was best, and since they were offering a money-back guarantee, they had something of an incentive to do just that. In the course of a week’s hunting, they might move among several favorite bear-hunting sites distributed over an area hundreds of kilometers on a side, almost all of which was mountainous, and only just becoming passable without snow machines. By far the most reasonable theory was that they had taken the Suburban one kilometer too far, skidded off the road, and become hopelessly lodged in a streambed or snowbank.
Or at least that had seemed the most reasonable theory during the first couple of days that they had been reported overdue. Consequently the search-and-rescue efforts had been all about crisscrossing the region in light aircraft, looking for a crashed vehicle or a distress beacon, and scanning the radio frequencies on which they might send out a distress call. Phone coverage in most of the region was out of the question, but the Suburban had a citizens’-band radio, and presumably they’d fire it up and call for help as soon as they saw an airplane. Or heard one.
“Heard” being more likely, since weather had been overcast almost the entire time. The pilots were by no means convinced that they’d achieved anything like a proper search of the area. Consequently, the investigation had been at a standstill for the last few days. The families—who had flown up to B.C. and who now seemed to be operating some sort of crisis center out of a hotel in Prince George—the nearest conurbation that even remotely resembled a major city—were insistent that something must be wrong and were coming dangerously close to saying impolite things about the RCMP’s conduct of the investigation.
Reading between the lines, it was easy enough to make out what was going on. The police—though they wouldn’t dream of saying so openly—were almost certain that the hunters and guides were all dead, probably as a result of driving over a cliff in fog. If they were merely stuck, they’d have made their situation known on the radio, or they’d have hiked out to a major road, something they were more than equipped to do. But the police couldn’t just come out and say that. So they had to manage the situation by expressing confidence that the aerial search would turn something up sooner or later. Beyond that, there was little that they could do other than make comforting and reassuring noises when cornered by reporters or distraught wives.
Olivia, needless to say, had a different theory altogether. It was difficult to imagine anything crazier-sounding than that a nest of international terrorists had stolen a business jet from Xiamen, crashed it in the mountains of British Columbia, murdered a Suburban-load of bear hunters, and headed for the border.
On the positive side, though, it should be an easy enough hypothesis to investigate. The Suburban might be four-wheel drive, but it was unlikely that Jones and company had driven it off-road for a thousand kilometers. They’d have taken the path of least resistance.
Actually, she reflected as she googlemapped British Columbia, it wasn’t merely the path of least resistance. It was the path. This region did not have a road grid. It just had a road. Unless they had taken an extremely circuitous route along logging tracks in the mountains—unlikely, this early in the year—or looped around far to the east, into northern Alberta, they’d have had to proceed south on Highway 97.
And why not? If Jones had managed to hijack the Suburban out in the middle of nowhere, he’d have understood perfectly well that he had only a few days—perhaps just a few hours—in which to do something useful with it before some kind of alert was sent out. He would have headed straight for the U.S. border along Highway 97, through Prince George (actually right in front of the hotel where the families of his victims had set up their base camp), and down into the more ramified system of highways that spread across southern B.C. If he didn’t make it across the border right away, he’d look for a way to ditch the Suburban where it wouldn’t be noticed, and he’d transfer to some other vehicle.
And then he’d think up a way to cross the border, probably out in the middle of nowhere. Something that would be difficult to prevent even if they knew it was going to happen and had a full-scale manhunt under way.
They wouldn’t need to buy food, since they could eat camp rations stolen from the hunters. Hell, for that matter they could just go hungry for a day; it wouldn’t be the first time.
The only thing they would need would be petrol. Gas.
Another look at the map.
If they had acquired the Suburban up in the region where the search was going on, and if its tank had been reasonably full, they’d have been able to make it all the way to Prince George before having to refuel. Of course, there were other refueling stations scattered along the road north of there—people had to buy gas somewhere—but Jones would have avoided those instinctively, not wanting to make a memorable impression on the proprietors, who might have recognized the Suburban as belonging to a local guide service. No, he’d have taken it all the way to the relative anonymity of Prince George and then he’d have bought his petrol in the largest, most impersonal gas station he could find.
Tomorrow she would be driving north to Prince George. Somewhere in that town there must be a surveillance camera that had caught the image she needed. And if she could only sweet-talk its owners into giving her a copy of that image, then she could use it as a sort of sluice gate to divert a great deal of misdirected Jones-hunting energy into a more profitable channel