Reamde - страница 195
OLIVIA HAD BEEN warned, of course, that working for MI6 would not be romantic. Not, in other words, the way it was in the movies. It was a bit embarrassing that this needed to be mentioned at all. No one who was worldly and intelligent enough to work for MI6 would really think it would be like a James Bond movie, would they?
So she had expected grinding tedium and deeply unromantic situations from the very beginning. For the most part, her time in Xiamen had amply fulfilled those expectations. The flashy bit at the very end had been anomalous to say the least.
And yet none of this careful hope deadening and expectation crushing on her trainers’ parts had fully prepared her for the job of traveling from Wenatchee to Bourne’s Ford on public transportation. She’d been lucky to reach the bus station in Wenatchee just a few minutes before the coach to Spokane was scheduled to depart. It was running half an hour late. No big deal. She bought a ticket with cash and climbed aboard a tired intercity bus reeking of mildew and air freshener and sat on it for several hours, watching the high desert of central and eastern Washington State go by, trying not to make too much of an impression on the down-at-heels senior citizens and migrant laborers sitting around her. A few hours later she disembarked at the bus and train station in downtown Spokane: a city she was certain had fine characteristics but that looked bleak and anonymous from street level at nightfall. It was ten degrees colder here than it had been on the coast. The next bus for Bourne’s Ford didn’t leave until tomorrow morning. She couldn’t check into a hotel without presenting ID and thereby sending up a flare, so she walked to a reasonably nice Italian restaurant and had a long slow dinner that she paid for with cash. Then she walked to a cinema and caught the last showing of a comedy that, she guessed, was aimed at teenagers. This disgorged her into a parking lot at one in the morning. Everything was closed. Not even bars were open. Caught in the open, she just kept walking, trying to look purposeful. If she had to walk for five hours, it wasn’t the end of the world. She was wearing comfortable flats and the energy expended by walking would keep her warm enough, despite the fact that she was underdressed for the weather. But after about two hours, as she was trudging up a seemingly endless commercial strip, she noticed a Perkins Family Restaurant that was open twenty-fours. She went into it and ate the most colossal breakfast she had ever had in her life, spent about an hour reading a single used copy of USA Today, then paid for the meal, went out, and hit the streets again.
By six in the morning the sky was getting light, joggers were out, and Starbucks cafés were beginning to open their doors. She killed another hour in one of those and then hiked back to the bus station, where she caught an 8:06 bus headed for Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. This was much like the first one, except with a certain hard-to-pin-down air of Wild West mountain-man craziness about it. The Wenatchee-Spokane run had been a simple matter of getting across a sparse desert, irrigated in some places, therefore with a generally farmlike vibe. She had noticed, as they’d drawn closer to Spokane, that trees were beginning to survive, just isolated specimens at first, then clumps, then small forests. But northward from Spokane the forest cover became continuous, the highway began to bound up and down considerable slopes, and the businesses and dwellings along it stopped feeling like farms and began feeling like outposts. Decidedly eccentric signage began to show up: billboards inveighing against the United Nations, and hand-lettered jeremiads about the existential threat posed by the federal budget deficit. But of course she just noticed those things because she was looking for them; it was mostly fast-food joints and convenience stores like anywhere else in America, interspersed with clusters of vacation homes (wherever there was a lake or a nice stretch of river), ranches (where the land was open and flat), or outbreaks of Appalachian-style rural poverty. Sometimes they’d jump over a ridge and pass through what she thought was out-and-out wilderness, until she saw the zigzagging tracks of the logging roads.
Then suddenly they were passing through a rather nice town, which she learned was Sandpoint, and which had all the indicia — brewpub, art gallery, Pilates, Thai restaurant — of a place where Blue State people would go to enjoy a high standard of living while maintaining nonstop connectivity and assuaging their guilty consciences in re global warming, fair trade, and the regrettable side effects of Manifest Destiny. The bus stopped there for a bit; many passengers got off, and only a few got on. For, as was obvious from looking out the windows, northern Idaho was not a place where anyone could sustainably live unless they had access to a vehicle of some description, so the market for public transit was correspondingly tiny and mostly limited to juveniles, very old people, shaggy men who appeared to be one step above vagrants, and women in ankle-length Little House on the Prairie — style dresses — apparently members of some very traditional religious sect.
An hour later she was in the considerably smaller and less Blue Statish town of Bourne’s Ford, and half an hour after that — for it turned out to be a bit of a walk — she was in its Walmart.
She had been waiting for the point in the journey where the crazy would begin: when she’d step over some invisible threshold separating commonsensical America from the subculture where Jacob Forthrast, his family, and his neighbors lived their lives. So far, it had been more of a slow blend than a threshold. The Walmart definitely made her feel that she was getting warmer. She happened to enter through the part of it that was a huge grocery and drug store: all by itself, probably larger than any store in the United Kingdom. It was the sort of place that encouraged its customers to buy in bulk, and the shopping carts were sized accordingly. Still, they were not large enough for some of the customers: a hulking Grizzly Adams type, openly wearing a semiautomatic pistol on his hip, was pushing one overloaded cart and dragging another behind him, both piled with huge sacks of dog food, beans, bacon, macaroni. The next aisle had been all but taken over by a family of those long-dress-wearing people: Mom, two teenaged daughters, a smaller girl, a toddler boy strapped into the basket and another being chased around by a young man who was either the father or an elder brother. The men wore normal clothes: no funny hats or facial hair for them. They were running a train of three carts, and Mom was checking her way through a laser-printed list that ran to four pages. But none of the other customers was really distinguishable from what you’d see in a grocery store anywhere else in the United States, or the United Kingdom for that matter.
So she hadn’t really found the crazy yet. But with a little introspection — and she had lots of time for that, as she made her way across acre after acre of machine-buffed Walmart floor space — she saw that what she was really looking for was a way for this journey to be something other than utterly and perfectly banal. If the police had chased her and Sokolov away from the shooting scene in Tukwila; if they’d been forced to abandon the car in the Cascades and make their way north through the mountains; if she had been pursued through the dark streets of Spokane by members of a drug gang; if the mountains of northern Idaho were infested with crazy Nazis; then all of this would have been more than what it was. But none of those conditions obtained, so this was nothing more than the most tedious imaginable way to spend two days, getting across one of the easiest-to-cross borders in the world between two relatively calm and docile countries.
Or so she had just about convinced herself when she strayed into the part of the store where the flat-panel TVs were displayed, and she noticed a hundred shoppers all standing still with their backs to her, gazing at live television coverage of some event.
The TVs were not all tuned to the same channel; some were showing Fox, some CNN, some local channels from Sandpoint or Spokane. But all of them were covering the same story and broadcasting similar images: a road, seen from a helicopter, in a generally green and open landscape. The road was broadening from two to several lanes as it approached a structure that looked like a tollbooth. All the lanes were filled with stopped cars. In the middle of this traffic jam was a gray hole. A crater. Like a meteor strike. Cars around the edge of it had been crushed, shredded, punched away from the center, and were still smoking despite streams of water being played on them from nearby fire trucks. The traffic jam was surrounded by flashing aid vehicles and infested with stretcher bearers. Still forms in body bags were lined up to one side.
She worked her way in close enough to see the banners across the bottoms of the screens:
...EXPLOSION IN OKANAGAN.
B.C. BLAST.
TERROR AT AMERICA’S DOORSTEP?
A ground-level camera angle showed Canadian and American flags streaming in the breeze right next to each other. This seemed to be the favored backdrop for on-the-scene reporters, who, Olivia inferred, must be all standing right next to one another talking into their microphones. With several of them going at once, she found it difficult to tell one sound bite from another. She was hearing a lot of the coded phrases uttered by “Breaking news” reporters to admit that they didn’t really know what was going on. But from time to time, one of them would launch into a recap “for viewers just joining us.” Olivia inferred from a couple of these that the explosion had taken place in Canada, just a few meters short of the U.S. border, and that the thing she’d mistaken for a tollbooth was actually the border crossing. A vehicle stopped there, waiting for inspection, had exploded with what was obviously terrific violence. The death toll was already pushing a hundred, not counting bodies that had been completely vaporized, and rescue workers were still prying open smashed cars with the Jaws of Life and searching the collapsed wreckage of both Canadian and American buildings.
