“Yes. Turn around here.”
And thus they turned back, dropping away from direct pursuit of the Subaru, and went back into the middle of the town and crossed over a different bridge. A few minutes later they were headed west, seemingly direct into the mountains; but just before the terrain became really steep, Marlon directed Csongor to make a right turn onto a gravel road that ran due north, heading generally parallel to the river. During his three hours of intense boredom at the flight center, Csongor had flipped through the vehicle’s manual enough to learn how it could be shifted into four-wheel drive, so he took a moment to do this, and then went blasting up the road at an insane pace for some miles. He did not think that there were any cops around here to pull him over; and if they did, he would simply claim that there were terrorists in the area, driving a blue Subaru.
Come to think of it, they should have done that before leaving Bourne’s Ford. But their own illegal status had put them in an awkward frame of mind, never knowing when to hide from the authorities and when to call out for their help. They didn’t know that those men were terrorists. They might have been innocent tourists. When Marlon had said, a few minutes earlier, that they might go straight at the intersection and head north into Canada, presumably to enjoy the Selkirk Loop, it had sounded perfectly reasonable to Csongor and he had wondered at his foolishness for harboring this racist stereotype that the men were terrorists.
And now he was here in the middle of nowhere cursing himself for his failure to recognize the obvious.
They crested a minor rise in the highway in time for Marlon to pick out the blue Subaru crossing the bridge. It had made the left turn and was headed into the mountains.
Marlon opened his mouth to say something, but Csongor had caught it too. “Fuck!” he said.
“This is the part where we get into trouble?”
“Evidently. Make sure you don’t lose sight of it,” Csongor said, and then devoted all his attention and energy to keeping the SUV from drifting off the road. For its suspension was being thrashed so hard at the moment that it was a rare moment when all four of its wheels were actually touching the ground.
“Here,” Marlon said, a minute later. They were approaching a fork, a smaller gravel road headed up a valley to the left.
“This is where you saw them turn?”
“I didn’t see them,” Marlon said.
“Then how can you be sure?”
“Because they left a trail in the air,” Marlon said, “like a jet.”
And indeed, Csongor now saw that the air above the little side road was milky with dust that had been churned up by the Subaru’s tires a minute earlier. Whereas, when he looked north along the riverside road, the air was clear.
A sign, rusted and snowplow-bashed and riddled with shotgun pellets, stood at the junction. PROHIBITION CREEK ROAD, it said.
“Here goes,” said Csongor. He swung the steering wheel and gunned the motor.
ZULA’S RISING TO a crouch and sudden scramble toward the base of the rock elicited several bursts of gunfire from down below, each of which was answered by a crisp rifle shot from the top of the rock above. The shooters below, who she imagined were firing from a standing position after sprinting up the last few switchbacks, did not really have time to situate themselves and draw a proper bead on her; she thought she might have heard a few of the insane-bumblebee noises that apparently signaled the near approach of high-velocity rounds. But the going here was much easier than below, partly because of the gentler slope and partly because the footing was better—more hard rock and less random boulder pile. She forced herself to cover at least a hundred feet before risking a look back. The tree line was no longer visible. She experimented with rising out of her crouch and saw it slowly peek back over the horizon, then dropped her head before anyone could draw a bead and pull a trigger. She ran now in a hunched-over posture, headed for that frantically waving T-shirt, and covered another couple of hundred yards before looking back again. She was now able to stand all the way upright without exposing herself. Winded and banged up, the cold dry air sending an ice pick into the root of her shattered tooth with each breath, she permitted herself to quick-walk the last bit, and finally came within conversational distance of the T-shirt waver.
She had hoped, in a completely irrational way, that this might be Qian Yuxia, but she had known this was not the case from a hundred yards out. The voice that greeted her now spoke in an English accent: “Is that Zula?”
Zula, not trusting herself to speak, just nodded her head and grimaced. The English woman came out to greet her and met her with a handshake at the base of the huge rock. “My name’s Olivia. I’m so sorry about your lip; is that as painful as it looks?”
Zula rolled her eyes and nodded.
“I wish I could tell you we had an ambulance—a helicopter—something—but there’s none of that, I’m afraid. We’ve got a bit of a walk ahead of us. Do you feel up to it?”
“Who’s we?”
“The man up there,” Olivia said, momentarily shifting her gaze to the top of the rock, “is known to you, I believe. Name of Sokolov.”
“Someone needs to get that guy a first name,” Zula lisped.
“I know, it seems a bit gruff to go round calling him that.”
“What the hell is Sokolov doing here? Other than the obvious, I guess.”
“I believe he feels he owes you something.”
“You could say that.” Zula was following Olivia’s lead now, as they climbed up along the side of the big outcropping. The slope here had become steep again, and Zula could see the skid marks in the gravel where this Olivia person had sledded down.
“There’s a bit coming up,” Olivia said, pointing up the slope, “where we’ll need to keep our heads down. Coming back in view of the fellas down below.”