So that was what happened. Csongor rode shotgun. Yuxia crept into the way back, burrowed into a deep warm nest of newly acquired camo gear, and crashed. Marlon sat in the center of the middle seat, blocking Seamus’s line of sight out the rearview and watched America go by with all due curiosity. Seamus felt vaguely like one of those ex-military guys who gets a job as a celebrity bodyguard and finds himself driving rock stars around.
He was feeling some unaccountable need to get clear of the Seattle-Tacoma metro area, so he headed east over the mountains and then down into the desert. At which point it seemed as though nothing stood between him and the Atlantic Ocean, and so he went into serious road-trip, put-the-hammer-down mode, and bombed down I-90 as if there was no tomorrow. White line fever got him most of the way across the state. But then certain real-world issues—the limited size of his bladder and of his fuel tank—began to interfere with the dream. He was seeing a lot of signs for some place called Spokane. He’d heard of it. It turned out to be a decent-sized city with the usual complement of strip malls and chain hotels. None of them looked absolutely perfect, and so he kept driving anyway, and found that he had passed into Idaho without really leaving Spokane; the city had thrown a pseudopod of exurban development across the border, groping out in the direction of a place called Coeur d’Alene. It was there that Seamus finally spotted the inexpensive chain hotel of his dreams, embedded roughly in the center of an eight-hundred-mile-long development that included, within a few hundred yards of the hotel entrance, a twelve-pump gas station/convenience store complex and a restaurant that looked as if it might have microbrews on draft. Presenting his credit card—which, unbelievably, had not been canceled yet—he rented three rooms: one for Yuxia, because she was a girl. One for Marlon, because he was, ultimately, paying for everything and so it seemed that he ought to have his own room. And one that he would share with Csongor, since he and the Hungarian seemed to have developed an understanding that verged on friendship.
They agreed to meet in the lobby an hour later and walk over to the restaurant-that-might-have-good-draft-beer.
Seamus happened to come down to the lobby first and found himself with nothing to do except scan the rack of travel brochures by the registration desk: promotional literature for ski areas, amusement parks, gold mine tours, fishing and jet-skiing on the nearby lake. He grew bored and sat back down. But his mind was troubled in a way that it hadn’t been when he had entered the lobby. He got back up and went over to the rack and scanned it again, trying to make out what he’d seen there that had subliminally irritated him.
He found it, finally, on the third slow pass through the rack: the word “Elphinstone.”
It was on a cartoonish, schematic map of something called the International Selkirk Loop: a circuit of American and Canadian highways, straddling the border, that, to judge from the numerous pictures, passed by lots of pretty lakes and through some nice mountain scenery. This brochure badly wanted Seamus to understand that a person could drive this loop on a motorcycle or an RV over the course of a leisurely day or two, see a lot of natural beauty, eat tasty food, buy cool stuff. It was, in other words, a tourist brochure, and fundamentally of no interest whatever to Seamus.
Except for that one word “Elphinstone.”
That was the name of the town where Richard Forthrast had his cat skiing resort. The place where he had gone missing a couple of days ago.
Correction: Seamus had no proof that he had gone missing per se. He had abruptly stopped playing T’Rain. Pretty thin evidence, that. But it had been something like twenty-four hours—difficult to tell exactly, what with the time zones and all—anyway, a hell of a long time—since Seamus had checked in on Egdod. And to judge from what the boss had said, Olivia had been dealing with troubles of her own, related to someone, something, or somewhere called Tukwila. Jones, or more likely his minions, were blowing shit up on the border, drawing every cop in the world to the epicenter. So it seemed a good bet that no one had been attending to the somewhat Mysterious Case of the possibly Missing Online Gaming Entrepreneur in a while. Seamus hadn’t been thinking about it, at least not at a conscious level, since getting these people illegally into the country had been foremost in his thoughts, and he had just been going on instinct and impulse for at least a day. When stuck in the American embassy in Manila with three illegals liable to be arrested and deported at any minute, it’s hard to focus on hypothetical events that might be taking place near the Idaho/B.C. border.
But now he was here. Literally, he was on the map. For when he pulled the Selkirk Loop brochure out of the rack, Coeur d’Alene became visible on the map, down toward the bottom. His eyes began jumping back and forth, top to bottom: Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene. Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene.
The only problem being that horizontal line drawn through the middle of the Loop: the Canada/U.S. border. No way was he getting Marlon and Yuxia across that.
But maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe what he was looking for was coming to him.
“Seamus?”
He looked up. Csongor was there, and Marlon, and Yuxia, all freshly showered and looking like the Xiamen branch of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Fan Club. He had the sense that they’d been looking at him for a while, wondering when he was going to snap out of it.
“Are you hungry?” Csongor continued. Not that he gave a shit; Csongor was hungry.
Now, some part of Seamus was wondering why these kids didn’t just walk over to the restaurant and order food, if that was what they wanted. But he had dragged them to this place and created a situation in which they were totally dependent on him—appointed himself the Dr. Reed Richards of this little band of superheroes—and he had to step up to his responsibilities.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just thinking about tomorrow’s program of activities.”
“Yay,” Yuxia said. “Activities!” She translated this abstraction into Mandarin, and Marlon nodded, a little uncertainly.