Their plan was fucked because Jahandar was going to catch up with them—had probably been doing so the entire time—and was going to reach the place where he could shoot up the slope from another switchback. Hell, he could just set up a sniper’s perch, get his gun propped up on something nice and solid, make himself comfortable, and wait for Richard and Yuxia to pass back and forth above him, zigging and zagging up the mountain like a pair of lame ducks in a shooting gallery.
I love you, but I’m tired of being the girlfriend of the sacred monster. This had been the last thing that Alice, one of his ex-girlfriends, had said to him before ascending into the pantheon of the Furious Muses. It had taken him a while to decode it—Alice hadn’t been in a mood to wax discursive—but he’d eventually figured out that this, in the end, was the reason that Corporation 9592 had no choice but to keep him around. Every other thing that he had done for the company—networking with money launderers, stringing Ethernet cable, recruiting fantasy authors, managing Pluto—could be done better and more cheaply by someone who could be recruited by a state-of-the-art head-hunting firm. His role, in the end, had been reduced to this one thing: sitting in the corner of meeting rooms or lurking on corporate email lists, seeming not to pay attention, growing ever more restless and surly until he blurted something out that offended a lot of people and caused the company to change course. Only later did they see the shoals on which they would have run aground if not for Richard’s startling and grumpy intervention.
This was one of those times.
The only thing that made any sense at all was to stop, look for cover, wait for Jahandar to catch up with them, hold fire until he came within twenty yards, and try to take him down with the shotgun before he could shoot back.
“Stop,” he said quietly.
“You okay, big guy?” Yuxia asked.
“Fantastic,” he assured her. “But here is where we have to stand and fight.”
“I am so in favor of that,” she said. “Do I get to shoot one of these motherfuckers?”
“Only if I die first.”
CSONGOR ABRUPTLY SHIFTED the SUV into gear, punched the gas, and rumbled out of the parking lot. He had been running the motor to feed juice into Marlon’s laptop.
“What the—?” Marlon asked, as he watched his Wi-Fi connection disappear. Csongor couldn’t tell whether Marlon had cribbed this phrase from comic book word bubbles or was making an arch reference to Chinese nerds who naively picked up snatches of English dialog in this way. It was hard to tell, sometimes, with Marlon.
“Something is wrong,” Csongor said.
“I thought you said you couldn’t drive this thing.”
“I can’t drive it legally,” Csongor said.
“Oh.”
“But I can make it go, as you see.”
“I was transferring money,” Marlon said. Not in a whiny, complaining way. Just making sure Csongor knew that his important work had been interrupted.
“You’ve been transferring money for three hours,” Csongor pointed out, “while I have been looking at the clock and the map.” He rattled an Idaho road map that Seamus had bought at a gas station yesterday. “There is no way that those guys should still be gone. The da G shou can wait for their money; they’ve waited this long.”
Because he had been studying the map, Csongor knew how to get them out of Coeur d’Alene and on the road north to Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. He followed the route, scrupulously observing all the traffic laws to minimize his chances of being pulled over. He did not think that a Hungarian driver’s license would pass muster in these parts.
“Maybe they just found something interesting to look at.”
“That’s not the point,” Csongor said. “A helicopter can only carry so much gas—it can only stay in the air for a certain amount of time.”
He sensed Marlon looking at him incredulously.
“I googled it,” Csongor explained, “when you went out to urinate.”
“Okay…”
“I know what you are going to say next: maybe they had mechanical trouble and had to land. But in that case they should have called us and told us that they would be late.”
“How late are they?”
“Very late.”
Marlon was still looking at him expectantly.
“Mathematically,” Csongor said, “the helicopter is out of gas.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Fifteen minutes ago.”
“Maybe we should call—”
“Call who?” Csongor asked, with a kind of cruel satisfaction. For he had gone down the same road in his mind and found only dead ends. He waited for Marlon to work his way to the same nonconclusion.
They blew through what seemed to be an important road junction at the extreme limit of the greater Coeur d’Alene metropolitan area and went bombing north on a nice straight open highway. It was turning into a beautiful day.
“So what are you going to do?”
“We are going to go to Bourne’s Ford, which is only a few miles from where they were flying, and go to the Boundary County Airport, and ask the people there if they know anything about a missing helicopter.”
About half an hour later they found themselves crossing a long causeway over a lake. Before them was the town of Sandpoint. Csongor noticed Marlon craning his neck to get a sidelong view of the speedometer. Glancing down, he saw that he was going ninety.
“It is not kilometers per hour,” Marlon informed him. “In the metric system, you are going at something like five thousand.”
“Not quite that fast,” Csongor said, but he did relent and drop down to eighty.
A minute later, he explained, “I believe Seamus went up there to find Jones. This was his real plan. But he could not say this out loud. Then Yuxia asked why she could not go along, if it was only a sightseeing trip. Seamus was trapped.”
“Yuxia is good at such things.”
“What do you think of her?” Csongor asked. “Is she your girlfriend?”
“For a while I was thinking maybe,” Marlon admitted, “but then I decided she was my sister.”
“Huh.”
“China is funny. One child per family, you know. We are all looking for siblings.”
Csongor nodded. “It is a much better system,” he said, “than the one we use in Hungary.”
“Why?”
Csongor looked across at Marlon. “Because you get to choose.”
Marlon smiled. “Ah.”
Csongor turned his attention back to the road.