Neal Stephenson - Reamde

That got them awake and alive to Abbotsford, still something like an hour outside of Vancouver, but grazing the U.S. border, and in some ways a more logical place to cross. They stopped, not for gas, but because Peter’s bladder was full, and the stop turned into a long one as Peter used his PDA to check the waiting times at various border crossings. Meanwhile Zula went in and bought junk food. When she came out, he had the back of the vehicle open and was fussing with something back there. She heard zippers, the rustle of plastic. “You want to drive?” he asked her.

“I’ve been telling you for six hours that I’d be happy to drive,” she pointed out mildly.

“Just thought you might have changed your mind or something, but I would really like to rest my eyes and might even go to sleep,” he said, which Zula did not intuitively believe since to her he seemed to have a pretty serious buzz on. But something clicked in her head to the effect that he was dodging again. The act of driving across the border was triggering his dodging instinct. It had happened as they had neared the fork in the road at Elphinstone and was now happening again. She agreed to drive.

“It’s the Peace Arch,” he said. “We want the Peace Arch crossing.”

“There’s one, like, two miles from where we are now.”

“Peace Arch has less traffic.”

“Whatever then.”

So she began driving them the last few dozen kilometers west, to the Peace Arch crossing, which was actually right on salt water: the farthest they could go, the longest they could delay the crossing. Peter, after a few minutes, leaned his seat back and closed his eyes and stopped moving. Though Zula had slept with him more than a few times and knew that this was not his pattern when it came to sleeping.

The electronic signs on the highway said that the so-called Truck Crossing—just a few miles to the east of the Peace Arch crossing—was actually less crowded and so she went that way. Only two cars were ahead of them in the inspection lane, which probably meant a wait of less than a minute.

“Peter?”

“Yeah?”

“Got your passport?”

“Yeah, it’s in my pocket. Hey. Where are we?”

“The border.”

“This is the Truck Crossing.”

“Yes. Less wait time here.”

“I was kind of thinking Peace Arch.”

“Why does it matter?” Only one car to go. “Why don’t you get out your passport?”

“Here. You can give it to the guard.” Peter handed his passport to Zula, then settled back into a position of repose. “Tell him I’m asleep, okay?”

“You’re not asleep.”

“I just think that we’re less likely to get a hassle if they think I’m asleep.”

“What hassle? When is there ever a hassle at this border? It’s like driving between North and South Dakota.”

“Work with me.”

“Then close your eyes and stop moving,” she said, “and he can see for himself that you’re asleep, or pretending to be. But if I state the obvious—‘he’s sleeping’—it’s just going to seem weird. Why does it matter?”

Peter pretended to sleep and did not respond.

The car ahead of them moved on into the United States, and the green light came on to signal them forward. Zula pulled up.

“How many in the car?” asked the guard. “Citizenship?” He shone the flashlight on Peter. “Your friend’s going to have to wake up.”

“Two of us. U.S.”

“How long have you been in Canada?”

“Three days.”

“Bringing anything back?”

“No,” Zula said.

“Just a bag of coffee. Some junk food,” said Peter.

“Welcome home,” said the guard, and turned on the green light.

Zula accelerated south. Peter motored his seat back upright and rubbed his face.

“Want your passport back?”

“Sure, thanks.”

“It’s like two hours to Seattle,” Zula said. “Maybe that’s long enough for you to explain why you have been fucking with me all day.”

Peter actually seemed startled that she had figured out that he was fucking with her, but he made no attempt to protest his innocence.

A few minutes later, after she had merged into traffic on I-5, he said, “I did something hyperstupid. Maybe even relationship-endingly stupid, for all that I know.”

“Who was that guy in the tavern? He had something to do with it, right?”

“Wallace. Lives in Vancouver. As far as I can tell from his trail on the Internet, he’s an accountant. Trained in Scotland. Immigrated to Canada in the 1980s.”

“Did you do some kind of job for him? Some kind of security gig?”

Peter was silent for a little while.

“Look,” Zula said, “I just want to know what is in this car that you were so nervous about taking across the border.”

“Money,” he said. “Cash in excess of ten thousand dollars. I was supposed to declare it. I didn’t.” He leaned back, heaved a sigh. “But now we’re safe. We’re across the border. We—”

“Who is ‘we’ in this case? Am I some sort of accomplice?”

“Not legally, since you didn’t know. But—”

“So was I ever in danger? Where does this come from, this ‘we’re safe’ thing?” Zula did not often get angry, but when she did, it was a slow inexorable building.

“Wallace is just a little weird,” he said. “Some things he said—I don’t know. Look. I realized I was making a mistake even while I was doing this. Hated every minute of it. But then it was done and I had the money and we were on the road, headed for the border, and I started to think about the implications.”

“So you wanted to find a border crossing that was busy,” she said.

“Yeah. So they’d be more pressed for time, less likely to search the car.”

“When you checked the crossing times at Abbotsford—”

“I was looking for the crossings that were busiest.”

“Unbelievable.”

She drove for a while, thinking through the day. “Why did you do it at the Schloss?”

“It was Wallace’s idea. We were trying to match up our travel schedules. I mentioned I’d be there. He jumped at it. Didn’t seem to mind driving all the way out from Vancouver in the winter. Now I realize that he didn’t want to cross the border with the cash. He wanted to saddle me with that little problem.”

“What kind of an accountant pays for security consulting services in cash?”

Peter said nothing.

Zula was working through it. Hundred-dollar bills. One hundred of them would make ten thousand bucks. That would be a bundle roughly how thick? Not that thick. Not that difficult to hide in a car.

He was carrying more than that. A lot more. She’d seen odd behavior connected with his luggage. Rearranging something at Abbotsford.

“Hold on a sec,” Zula said. “You charge two hundred bucks an hour. It would take fifty hours of work to add up to ten thousand dollars. My sense, though, is that you are carrying a lot more than ten thousand. Which means a lot more than fifty hours of work. But you just haven’t been that busy lately. You’ve been fixing up your building. You just spent a whole week hanging drywall . When could you have logged that many hours?”

And so then the story did come out.

ZULA’S PREDICTION WAS right. It did give them something to talk about all the way back to Seattle.

Peter was right too; it was a relationship termination event. Not so much what he’d done in the past—though that was pretty stupid—but what he’d done today: the ridiculous drama about crossing the border.

The real kiss of death, though, was that he invoked Uncle Richard.

It happened when they were somewhere around Everett, about to enter into the northern suburbs of Seattle. He sensed that he had ten, maybe fifteen miles in which to plead his case. Which he attempted to do by bringing up all the weird stuff that Richard Forthrast had done, or was rumored to have done, in his past. Zula seemed to get along just fine with Uncle Richard, so—the argument went—what was her problem with Peter now?