An hour later she was in the considerably smaller and less Blue Statish town of Bourne’s Ford, and half an hour after that—for it turned out to be a bit of a walk—she was in its Walmart.
She had been waiting for the point in the journey where the crazy would begin: when she’d step over some invisible threshold separating commonsensical America from the subculture where Jacob Forthrast, his family, and his neighbors lived their lives. So far, it had been more of a slow blend than a threshold. The Walmart definitely made her feel that she was getting warmer. She happened to enter through the part of it that was a huge grocery and drug store: all by itself, probably larger than any store in the United Kingdom. It was the sort of place that encouraged its customers to buy in bulk, and the shopping carts were sized accordingly. Still, they were not large enough for some of the customers: a hulking Grizzly Adams type, openly wearing a semiautomatic pistol on his hip, was pushing one overloaded cart and dragging another behind him, both piled with huge sacks of dog food, beans, bacon, macaroni. The next aisle had been all but taken over by a family of those long-dress-wearing people: Mom, two teenaged daughters, a smaller girl, a toddler boy strapped into the basket and another being chased around by a young man who was either the father or an elder brother. The men wore normal clothes: no funny hats or facial hair for them. They were running a train of three carts, and Mom was checking her way through a laser-printed list that ran to four pages. But none of the other customers was really distinguishable from what you’d see in a grocery store anywhere else in the United States, or the United Kingdom for that matter.
So she hadn’t really found the crazy yet. But with a little introspection—and she had lots of time for that, as she made her way across acre after acre of machine-buffed Walmart floor space—she saw that what she was really looking for was a way for this journey to be something other than utterly and perfectly banal. If the police had chased her and Sokolov away from the shooting scene in Tukwila; if they’d been forced to abandon the car in the Cascades and make their way north through the mountains; if she had been pursued through the dark streets of Spokane by members of a drug gang; if the mountains of northern Idaho were infested with crazy Nazis; then all of this would have been more than what it was. But none of those conditions obtained, so this was nothing more than the most tedious imaginable way to spend two days, getting across one of the easiest-to-cross borders in the world between two relatively calm and docile countries.
Or so she had just about convinced herself when she strayed into the part of the store where the flat-panel TVs were displayed, and she noticed a hundred shoppers all standing still with their backs to her, gazing at live television coverage of some event.
The TVs were not all tuned to the same channel; some were showing Fox, some CNN, some local channels from Sandpoint or Spokane. But all of them were covering the same story and broadcasting similar images: a road, seen from a helicopter, in a generally green and open landscape. The road was broadening from two to several lanes as it approached a structure that looked like a tollbooth. All the lanes were filled with stopped cars. In the middle of this traffic jam was a gray hole. A crater. Like a meteor strike. Cars around the edge of it had been crushed, shredded, punched away from the center, and were still smoking despite streams of water being played on them from nearby fire trucks. The traffic jam was surrounded by flashing aid vehicles and infested with stretcher bearers. Still forms in body bags were lined up to one side.
She worked her way in close enough to see the banners across the bottoms of the screens:
EXPLOSION IN OKANAGAN.
B.C. BLAST.
TERROR AT AMERICA’S DOORSTEP?
A ground-level camera angle showed Canadian and American flags streaming in the breeze right next to each other. This seemed to be the favored backdrop for on-the-scene reporters, who, Olivia inferred, must be all standing right next to one another talking into their microphones. With several of them going at once, she found it difficult to tell one sound bite from another. She was hearing a lot of the coded phrases uttered by “Breaking news” reporters to admit that they didn’t really know what was going on. But from time to time, one of them would launch into a recap “for viewers just joining us.” Olivia inferred from a couple of these that the explosion had taken place in Canada, just a few meters short of the U.S. border, and that the thing she’d mistaken for a tollbooth was actually the border crossing. A vehicle stopped there, waiting for inspection, had exploded with what was obviously terrific violence. The death toll was already pushing a hundred, not counting bodies that had been completely vaporized, and rescue workers were still prying open smashed cars with the Jaws of Life and searching the collapsed wreckage of both Canadian and American buildings.
The studio-bound anchorpersons, interviewing the correspondents on the scene, asked the obvious questions: Do we have a description of the vehicle carrying the bomb? Of its passenger or passengers? But it was pretty clearly hopeless. The vehicle and its occupants would have been invisible, anonymous to all except those who were stuck in traffic near it; and anyone who’d been near it would be dead.
“I’VE NEVER BEEN so sad to be right,” Olivia said to Sokolov, when she found him pushing a cart down an aisle in the camping and outdoors section. She fell in step next to him and cast an eye over the contents of his cart, wondering whether this was totally random stuff that he had thrown in there to perfect his Walmart shopper disguise or things he actually intended to buy: 5.56-millimeter cartridges, a water purification device, jerky, bug repellent, a camouflage hat, heavy mittens. Freeze-dried meals. A roll of black plastic sheeting. Parachute cord. Batteries. A folding bucksaw. Camouflage binoculars.
“You refer to explosion?” Sokolov said.