“Most of this is self-explanatory, if one is willing to put a bit of thought into it,” Jones remarked. “As an example, in this snapshot of Peter donning his snowshoes, there’s a mountain peak in the background, wooded on its lower slopes, but with a barren face—I’m guessing scree beneath the snow. According to the time-stamp, it was taken right around noon—indeed, I can see the remains of your lunch on the seat of the ATV. The shadows should therefore be pointing north. And strangely enough, when we look at the Google satellite image—which was taken during the summer, evidently—we see a peak here, with a scree-covered face turned toward the pin on the map, which is more or less to its south. So it all fits together. Schloss Hundschüttler’s website could hardly be more descriptive; I have already taken the virtual tour of the property and had a virtual pint in the virtual tavern. Virtual pints being the only kind that I, as a devout Muslim, am allowed to have…” Jones had become somewhat rambling, perhaps because Zula was being a little slow to snap out of this combination of cell-induced ennui and the shock of seeing familiar places and faces so displayed. He slid a page across the table at her, then bracketed it between two more. Each contained an image from her phone. “But there are still certain mysteries that require explanation. What the bloody hell is this?” he asked. “I know where it is.” He tapped a location on the map, a few miles south of the Schloss, sprouting a cluster of stickpins. “But what the hell? It’s not mentioned on the Schloss’s site, and even WikiTravel is silent on the matter.”
“It was an abandoned mine.” Zula paused, a little taken aback by the unfamiliar sound of her own voice. Then she corrected herself: “It is an abandoned mine.” She had grown accustomed to thinking of her life and everything she’d ever experienced as dwelling solely in the past.
“What were they mining? Trees?”
She shook her head. “Lead or something; I don’t know.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “What sort of mine requires a million board feet of timber?” For the overwhelming impression given by the photographs was of planks and beams, thousands of them, silver with age, splayed and flattened in some sort of slow-motion disaster that ran all the way down the side of a small mountain. As if the world’s biggest timber flume, a waterfall of rough-sawn planks coursing down the slope, had suddenly been deprived of water and had frozen and shriveled in place.
“Mines are supposed to be below ground, I’d thought,” Jones continued.
“Aren’t you a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines?” Zula asked.
Jones, for once, looked a bit sheepish. “They should probably change the name. It’s not just about that. I only went there to learn how to blow things up. I don’t know squat about mines really.”
“All of this wood was some kind of structure that they built aboveground, obviously. For what purpose I don’t know. But it runs up and down the slope for quite a distance. It’s got to be some kind of mineral separation technique that uses gravity. Maybe they sluiced water down through it, or something. In some places, it’s just these big chutes.” Zula pointed to the wreckage of one such in the background of a photograph of Uncle Richard. Then she shuffled papers around until she found a photo of something that looked like a very old house pushed askew by a shock wave. “Other places you’ll see a platform with a shack, or even something the size of this, built on it. But they are mostly just flattened, as you can see.”
“Well, whatever this thing is, it’s eight point four kilometers from the Schloss, and almost exactly the same elevation,” Jones said.
“Because of the railway,” Zula said.
He looked interested. “What railway?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t exist anymore. But there used to be a narrow-gauge railway that ran from Elphinstone south into this valley. Closest to town was the Schloss, which was the baron’s residence and the headquarters of the whole empire. Farther back up the valley were the mines he made his money from…”
“And this is one of those,” Jones said, flicking his eyes down at the photos they’d been looking at. “But why did you say because of the railway?”
“The elevation,” Zula said. “You noticed that there’s very little difference in altitude. That’s because—”
“Trains aren’t very good at going up and down hills,” Jones completed the sentence for her, nodding.
“Yeah. Neither are bicyclists and cross-country skiers. So—”
“Ah, yes, now I understand. The trail up the valley, so proudly described on the Schloss’s website.”
Zula nodded. “That trail is just the right-of-way of the old narrow-gauge mining railway, paved over.”
“Yes.” Jones considered it for a bit, paying more attention to the convolutions of the terrain shown on the map. “How does one connect with that trail, I wonder?”
Zula propped herself up on her elbows, leaned over the table, tried to focus on the map for a while. Then she shook her head. “This is too much information,” she said. “It’s not that hard.” She flipped one of the photographs over to expose its blank back. Then she swiped the fat carpenter’s pencil that Jones had picked up at Walmart. She slashed a horizontal line across the page. “The border,” she said. Then a vertical line crossing the border at right angles. “The Selkirks.” Another, parallel to it, farther east. “The Purcells. Between them, Kootenay Lake.” She drew a long north-south oval, north of the border. “Highway 3 tries to run parallel to the border, but it has to zig and zag because of obstructions.” She drew a wandering line across the Selkirks and the Purcells. In some places it nearly grazed the border, in others it veered considerably to the north. At one such location, south of the big lake, she penciled in a fat X, bestriding the highway. “Elphinstone,” she said. “Snowboarders and sushi bars.” Because of the highway’s northward bulge, a considerable bight of land was here trapped between it and the U.S. border. Into the middle of it she slashed a line that first headed southwest out of town but then curved around until it was directed southeast: a big C with its northern end anchored at Elphinstone and its southern end trailing off as it approached the United States. Then she sketched in a series of cross-hatches across this arc, cartographic shorthand marking it as a railway line.
Finally, somewhere down south of the border, below the hook-shaped railway, she made another X and told him that it was Bourne’s Ford, Idaho. “My uncle is quite the expert on the history of this railway,” she said. “He could explain it better.”
“I’ll ask him when I see him,” Jones said.
This hit her like a baseball bat to the bridge of the nose. It took her a few moments to get going again. “Bourne’s Ford is in a river valley,” she said.
“Most fords are,” Jones pointed out dryly.
“Right. Anyway, it’s well served by rail and river transport. So it was thought for a while that the way to make the baron’s mine profitable was to run the line over the border and connect with other mining railways that had been run up into the mountains on the U.S. side.” She sketched in a few lines radiating up toward Canada from Bourne’s Ford. “Abandon,” she muttered.
“Abandoned mines?”
“Abandon Mountain,” she said. “It’s up here somewhere.” She made a vague circle between Bourne’s Ford and the border.
“Nice name.”
“They had a talent for these things. Anyway, so there was this competition as to whether all the ore was going to end up going south to Bourne’s Ford and Sandpoint, which would have turned this whole region into a dependency of the United States, or whether they were going to tie it into the Canadian transport network instead. It led to sort of a railway-building contest. The baron was smart enough to play both sides against each other. Americans were trying to punch a line up from the south, and he was at least pretending to run his narrow-gauge line down to the border to connect up with it.” She tapped the lower arc of the C. Then she moved the pencil up and scratched at its northern end. “At the same time the Canadians were desperately trying to build the la
st set of tunnels needed to connect Elphinstone with the rest of the country. The Canadians won. So the baron connected his line at the northern end, and Elphinstone developed into a prosperous town. The southern extension of the line—which was probably just a feint anyway, to make the Canadians dig those tunnels faster—was abandoned.”
“But it’s still there,” Jones said.
“It was surveyed all the way to the border,” Zula said. “They only graded it to within a few miles. At that point you run into the need for trestles and tunnels, and it starts getting really expensive to actually build it. So the bike-slash-ski trail goes up basically to the face of a cliff, five miles short of the border, and stops.”
“But there’s a way through.”
“Evidently,” Zula said. “When my uncle was carrying the bearskin south—”
“Bearskin?”
“Another story. Not in the Wikipedia entry. I’ll tell you some other time. The point is that he needed to walk into the U.S. but didn’t know how. He followed the old narrow-gauge railway line up out of Elphinstone, walking on the railroad ties.”
“A nice gentle climb.”
“Yes, for the reason mentioned. He got to the end. And then he found some way around, or through, the wall of rock that was blocking his path, and covered the last miles south across the border, and picked his way south—”
She sketched a faint, wavy, speculative line down through the circle she’d drawn earlier for Abandon Mountain, and thence down into Bourne’s Ford.
“He didn’t exactly pioneer it.” She glanced up to see Jones staring at her intently. “He was following traces left forty, fifty years earlier by whiskey smugglers during Prohibition.”
Prohibition Crick. She wondered if that would show up on Google Maps.
“And later by marijuana smugglers.”
“That’s the rumor, certainly.”
Jones was impatient with that. “Rumor or not, he made a lot of trips along this route.” He leaned forward and traced it with his finger. “He passed by the ruin of the baron’s house many times, and that was how he conceived the idea to buy the property and fix it up into a legitimate business.”
“That much of the Wikipedia entry is correct as far as I know,” she allowed.
“YOU MEAN, YOU were there in China?” Richard asked the woman.
“I mean, I was there when the apartment building blew up.”
Richard just stared at her.
“The one with your niece in the cellar.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t imagine you were talking about some other blown-up apartment in China.”
“Sorry.”
He looked at her for a while. “You’re not going to tell me who you are, are you?”
“No, I’m afraid not. But you can call me … oh, Laura, if it helps to have a name.”
“What is your interest in all this, Laura? What do you have to gain from talking me out of going to Xiamen?”
“Laura” got a wry look on her face. Trying to work out what she could say and what she couldn’t.
“Is this to do with the Russians?” he asked. “Are you somehow connected with that investigation?”
“Not in the way you mean,” she said. “But just a few days ago I was with one of them. The leader.”
“Ivanov, or Sokolov?” Richard asked. And was immediately gratified to see frank shock spread across Laura’s face.
“Very good,” she said. “I had the feeling that unexpected things might happen if I talked to you.”
Richard knew the two Russian names because Zula had mentioned them in her note. But he could see that the woman Laura didn’t know about that note. “So which of them were you with?” he asked.
“Sokolov,” Laura said. And she must have seen some look of hope on Richard’s face, because caution then fell down over her own visage like a shutter. “But I’m very sorry to tell you that this doesn’t actually help, where finding Zula is concerned. Not directly, anyway.”
“How can it not help? My understanding is that Ivanov abducted her and that Sokolov is his henchman.”
“Ivanov’s dead. Sokolov, if anything, was prepared to help Zula once Ivanov was out of the way. But because of the way it all went down … nothing happened right. Zula is no longer with the Russians.”
“Who’s she with?”
Laura clearly knew the answer but was uncomfortable blurting it out. “Is there another place we can chat?” she asked.
“Not until you talk me out of getting on that plane and flying to China.”
“Zula hasn’t been in China for something like ten days,” Laura said.
“Where is she then?”
“It is my considered opinion,” Laura said, “that she’s quite nearby.”
Day 17
Even after land finally hove into view on her port side, Szélanya glided along parallel to a dark coast for the better part of a day before the winds finally shifted round and enabled them to steer her in to shore. The coastline was fractally scalloped, consisting of shallow bays, miles wide, themselves indented with smaller indentations. The big bays were frequently demarcated by headlands or little isles that were connected to the mainland at low tide. Having cleared one of these, the crew of Szélanya—unused to navigating in the presence of land, or, for that matter, any solid object—trimmed her sails and adjusted her rudder to make her cut into the next bay. This one eventually hooked around, perhaps ten kilometers ahead of them, into a little island that was linked to the mainland by mudflats, and once they got themselves pointed into it, there was no doubt that they would make landfall somewhere, and soon. They could not now escape from the bay even if they tried. For Szélanya had not been designed as a sailing vessel. It had become one almost two weeks ago, but only in the sense that any floating object, devoid of other propulsion, was wind driven. Actually making it into something that would sail had involved a lot of trial and error; mostly the latter.
She had been well supplied with plastic tarps, but they learned soon enough that these could not stand up to the stresses imposed on them by the wind. Fishnets were much stronger but would not hold air. And so they had improvised sails by combining the two: laying fishnets out over tarps and then sewing them together with zip ties, piano wire, needle and thread, tape. The resulting composites were strong enough to stand up to the wind, but their edges and corners—where the wind’s power had to be transmitted into lines attached to the ship—ripped out whenever the breeze was appreciable. So there had been a lot more learning and improvising connected with those edges. The results were very far from being pretty, but nothing had torn out in a long time. It was only after they had solved that problem and hoisted their first little sail up on the yards and the rigging intended for manipulating fishnets that their Engineer had fetched a bottle of beer from the ship’s stores and, to the consternation of his fellow officers, smashed it against the boat’s prow while christening her Szélanya, the “Mother of the Wind.” “If such a being exists,” he explained, “she might be flattered, and decide not to completely fuck us.”
The Straits of Taiwan ran northeast-southwest. As they had learned during the first few hours of their journey, a steady current flowed down it, bending all courses southward. And as they learned over the first few days, that current was strongly assisted by the prevailing winds, which blew vigorously and consistently out of the northeast, pushing them down out of the strait into the South China Sea.
The Skipper had never been on a boat, other than passenger ferries, until the day the adventure had begun. Nonetheless he had, during the first, critical forty-eight hours, acquired a command of basic sailing principles with a speed and fluency that had struck the Engineer as being almost supernatural. Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn’t work and moving aggressively to exploit small successes. A profusion of ideas spewed forth from his mind. There was no such thing a
s a bad idea, apparently. But, perhaps more important, there was no such thing as a good idea either, until it had been tried and coolly evaluated. It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake. Once he and his fellow officers had built sails that would not immediately fall apart, and once he had learned to make the ship sail after a fashion, the Skipper had begun perusing some of the charts that had been left beyond on the bridge by the vessel’s previous owners. Making some rough calculations from the GPS, he had reckoned that the consequences of just letting the wind and current push them around would be landfall in Malaysia or Indonesia in a few weeks’ time. Tacking upwind, or even sailing at right angles to the wind, would be out of the question with what primitive rigging they could improvise from found objects on the boat. But the Engineer, who had done a bit of sailing on Lake Balaton, believed that by setting a sail at the correct angle and angling the rudder just so, they could use the northeasterly winds to drive them south and east toward the island of Luzon, and thereby shorten their voyage by one or two weeks. So they bent their course for the Philippines, and though the first day’s results were discouraging, they taught themselves over time to make Szélanya track south-southeast more often than not.
Then it was just waiting, and watching the sky, and wondering how it was all going to go down when the inevitable storm hit. It occurred to them—far too late, obviously—that they shouldn’t have run the fuel tanks completely dry, since it would be nice to be able to operate the generator that supplied power to the bilge pump. A battery system seemed to be keeping the GPS unit and other small electronic devices alive, but none of the energy-hungry stuff was available to them; when they had to haul on a line, they would use a hand-cranked winch, or, if none was in the right location, jury-rig strange aboriginal-looking snarls of cables and levers to get the job done. The entire vessel began to look as if it were lashed together with metal tourniquets.