Reamde

Mission accomplished. Jones, or any idiot for that matter, could see right across the border now, would understand that Richard could simply be shot in the head and left here and they’d find some way of getting down past the falls and into the United States without his assistance.

It was time, in other words, to call out the sales force, take Jones to lunch, begin gardening personal contacts, shape his perception of the competitive landscape. Forge a partnership. Exactly the kind of work from which Richard had always found some way to excuse himself, even when large amounts of money were at stake.

Yet now his life was at stake, and no one was around to help him, and he still wasn’t doing it. He simply couldn’t get past his conviction that Jones could go fuck himself and that he wasn’t going to angle and scheme and maneuver for Jones’s sake.

Maybe because all that behavior ultimately seemed like groveling to him. That was really his problem: deep down, he believed that all such people were grovelers.

They took a little break at the mine’s exit to enjoy the view, to set the last booby trap, to brew tea, to pray, and to try to get phone reception. Reasonable enough; it seemed as though the whole Idaho panhandle were directly visible from here, and there had to be a cell tower somewhere in that. The experiment would have been over very quickly if there’d been no reception at all, but it seemed that some of the jihadists were able to get one bar if they stood in a particular attitude in a particular place and held the phone a certain way and invoked various higher powers. Richard was tempted to make a sour analogy to pointing oneself in the direction of Mecca, but he didn’t think it would do much for his life expectancy. Their rituals became ludicrous after a certain point. Because none of these guys had an ironic modern attitude, none saw the humor.

No, strike that. Almost all of them had been living under cover in the Western world and were as capable of seeing the humor as any fourteen-year-old American sitting on his couch watching South Park reruns and sending snarky tweets to his friends. But they’d made a conscious decision to turn their backs on all that. Like smokers or drinkers who’d gone straight, they were more dogmatic about this than anyone who’d come to that place naturally. Only Jones had the self-confidence to let himself be amused, and that was how he and Richard ended up making eye contact.

“So,” Richard said, after he and Jones had enjoyed the moment, “you going to put a bullet in me now, or should I show you the easiest way to get past American Falls?”

“I’m happy with the arrangement in its current form,” Jones said. “If that changes, you’ll be the first to know. Assuming you see it coming.”

“Well, you raise an interesting question there, Abdallah. Would I see it coming? Is it going to be one of those slow beheadings? Or just an unannounced shot to the head?”

Richard now watched in some degree of fascination as Jones actually mulled it over. “Other things being equal,” he said, “I’d prefer to give you some opportunity to pray first, perhaps write out a statement. But if we find ourselves trapped in some awkward situation, there may not be time for that.”

“Is that a little incentive program you just laid out for me? A built-in penalty for awkward situations?”

“The incentive program, as I’m sure you understand, is all about Zula. Because of the regrettable lack of phone reception, we have not been able to check in with our comrades. You may assume that she is still alive and that you may keep her in that condition by keeping us out of awkward situations and doing other things for us.”

“Does that mean that if you’d been able to get bars, you’d have given the order to kill her?”

“There is no fixed plan. We assess our situation from hour to hour.”

“Then assess this: we’re sitting in an exposed place up here. Anyone down there in those valleys could see us. What are we waiting for?”

Jones acted as if he hadn’t heard this. “Is that Abandon Mountain?” he asked, nodding south.

“Yes.”

“Roads connect to its opposite side.”

“The lower slopes, yes. That’s the way out.”

“Let’s go then,” Jones said, rising to his feet and dusting off his bum.

Richard had just tasked him: told him that they had to move away from this exposed position. Jones, not wanting to bow to Richard, had pretended not to hear it. But a few moments later he had done what Richard had suggested, as if it had been his own idea. Now that was the kind of psychological program that Richard could get involved in, if he could only find, or create, more opportunities to develop it.