They turned off all the lights and sat there for an hour before Zula fell asleep.
When she woke up, it was still dark. People were up and moving around, but not talking. Everyone was getting their stuff. Zula followed suit. Sokolov was lodged in the cockpit door again, slapping each of his men on the shoulder as they filed off.
Csongor, who had an actual wristwatch, said that six hours had passed since the plane had landed.
When Zula reached the head of the aisle, Sokolov held out a hand to stop her, then handed her a black bundle. It smelled like new clothing. She took it in both hands and let it unfold. It was a black hoodie printed with the name of a fashion designer, flagrantly bootleg.
“Not my style,” she said.
“Later we get you fur coat,” Sokolov said.
She locked eyes with him. He had perhaps the best poker face she had ever seen; she could not get the slightest hint as to whether he was engaging in deadpan humor, cruel sarcasm, or actually intending to get her a fur coat.
“That’s not my style either.”
He shrugged. “Put this on; we worry about style later.”
She put it on. He reached around behind her neck, grasped the hood, and pulled it up to cover her head, then forward so that her face was shrouded. Then he gave her a pat on her shoulder to let her know she could proceed. In a strange way that made her hate herself, she enjoyed the sensation of the pat.
Descending the stairs, she saw that two vans were idling right next to the plane. Standing next to the first one was a security consultant, watching her carefully. At the base of the stairs was another, who did not touch her but walked next to her as she proceeded to the van.
She was directed to the backseat where she sat in the middle between two security consultants who made sure that her seat belt was tightly fastened. Csongor ended up in front of her and Peter was, apparently, in the other van.
Sokolov gave a directive. The vans went into motion, driving through a gate in the security barrier and out onto an airport road. A black Mercedes pulled in ahead of them. Zula kept waiting for the moment when they’d roll up to a security checkpoint, but it didn’t happen. They never got checked at all. At some point they merged into traffic on a highway. They were in China.
CHET HAD TO drive into Elphinstone to pick up some supplies for the Mud Month shutdown, so he gave Richard a lift to the town’s one-runway airport. A twin-engine, propeller-driven airplane awaited him there, and Chet, who knew the drill, simply drove right up to it, rolled down his window, and exchanged some banter with the pilot while Richard pulled his bag out of the back of Chet’s truck and heaved it through the plane’s tiny door. Thirty seconds later they were in the air. Richard, who made this journey a couple of dozen times a year, had set up a deal with a flying service based out of the Seattle suburb of Renton, and so all this was as routine as it could be. The amount of time he would spend in the air was less than what some Corporation 9592 employees would spend in their cars this morning, stuck on floating bridges or bottled up behind random suburban fender benders.
The first and last thirds of the route were entirely over mountains. The middle third traversed the irrigated basin around Grand Coulee Dam. No matter how many times Richard flew it, he was always startled to see the ground suddenly level out and develop a rectilinear grid of section-line roads, just like in the Midwest. Early on, the pattern was imposed in fragments scattered over creviced and disjoint mesas separating mountain valleys, but presently these flowed together to form a coherent grid that held together until it lapped up against some terrain that was simply too rugged and wild to be subjected to such treatment. The only respect in which these green farm-squares differed from the ones in the Midwest was that here, many of them sported inscribed circles of green, the marks of center-pivot irrigation systems.
Richard could never look at them without thinking of Chet. For Chet was a midwestern boy too and had grown up in a small town in the eastern, neatly gridded part of South Dakota where he and his boyhood friends had formed a proto-motorcycle gang, riding around on homemade contraptions built from lawnmower engines. Later they had graduated to dirt bikes and then full-fledged motorcycles. The world’s unwillingness to supply Chet with all the resources he needed for upkeep and improvement of his fleet of bikes had led him into the business of small-town marijuana dealing, which must have seemed dark and dangerous at the time, but that now, in these days of crystal meth, seemed as wholesome as running a lemonade stand. Chet had logged a huge number of miles riding around on those section-line roads, which he preferred to the state highways and the interstates since there was less traffic and less of a police presence.