Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Water he could get from the river. Some energy bars might be useful, and he had a couple of those in his pack that he could slip into his pockets when no one was looking.

He had gone, over the course of a few hours, from utterly hopeless cynicism to toying idly with this nutball idea, to seriously working it out, to deciding that it was doable. That he was going to do it. When they got moving again, working their way down the river toward the falls, he was already thinking several miles ahead, trying to remember the way he would take tonight up out of the gorge and into the lower slopes of the mountain.

They crossed into the United States, a fact discernible only because of a moss-covered boundary monument that one of the jihadists nearly tripped over. The falls were just ahead of them and to the right. They worked their way downstream of the falls by crossing a high shelf of rock that looked down upon it from its east side. This terminated in a cliff that obliged them to descend to the riverbank in order to make any more southward progress. As Richard now explained, there was a way to scramble down from here; there had to be, or else it would never have been possible to make the return trip. But when going in this direction, the descent was considerably easier if you just used ropes. Richard had warned Jones of this well in advance, and so Jones had made sure to bring some good long ropes along. They paused up there for a short while so that some could enjoy the view down while others, who were good at such things (or claimed to be) made the rope fast to a giant cedar growing near the edge of the cliff. Half the men went down to reconnoiter. Then they sent Richard. Then the rest of them went down. He got the sense that this had been carefully thought out; they were becoming nervous that he might make a break for it and wanted to make sure that there were a few people at each end of the rope to keep an eye on him.

As soon as they reached the bottom, Jones gave an order to Abdul-Ghaffar, the white American jihadist, and nodded significantly at Richard. Richard was still absorbing this when Abdul-Wahaab (“the other Abdul” to Richard; apparently Jones’s most senior lieutenant) drew his pistol, chambered a round, and aimed it at Richard’s chest from maybe eight feet away. “I’d like you to stand with your feet about shoulder-width apart,” said Abdul-Ghaffar in his flat midwestern accent. Out of his pack he was pulling a sheaf of black heavy-duty zip ties: not the skinny ones used to restrain unruly Ethernet cables in office environments. These were a quarter of an inch wide and a couple of feet long.

None of which seemed like the beginnings of an execution. Richard, tired and taken by surprise, had been caught flat-footed anyway. He stood as Abdul-Ghaffar had asked him to, and Abdul-Ghaffar knelt behind him and zipped four of the big zip ties around the top of each of his boots, stacking them to build a heavy cuff around each ankle. He slipped more zip ties under those cuffs and linked them in a chain, joining Richard’s feet with a sort of hobble. When he was finished, Richard could move in six-inch steps, provided the ground was level. A similar treatment was then inflicted on his wrists, leaving maybe eight inches of space between them, but in front of his body, presumably so that he could open his fly to urinate, or convey food and water to his mouth.

This had all happened fast enough that his brain didn’t really catch up until it was all over. They weren’t going to kill him, at least not yet. But they seemed to have read his mind and anticipated that he might have thoughts of escaping. They searched him thoroughly now, presumably to make sure he wasn’t carrying a pocketknife or nail clipper that he could use to cut his plastic bonds during the night.

And night came soon, for they were deep in a bowl and the sky was a slot above them, traversed by the sun for a mere few hours each day. They pitched their shelters on a flat shelf of rocky ground a quarter of a mile downstream of the falls and used river water to cook up a generous repast of instant rice and freeze-dried backpacking chow.

Richard could think of nothing else to do and so he went into the tent that been assigned to him, wriggled into his sleeping bag fully clothed and booted and, without much trouble, went to sleep.

THEY PEDALED THROUGH Bourne’s Ford, slowly getting warmed up, pausing twice to adjust the bicycles and tighten up the loads. Like most American towns, this one had grown in a thin sleeve on a highway. Farmland took over behind the strip malls and fast-food outlets. Olivia had gotten the general picture that they were riding north in the valley of a river, which was off to their left, sometimes close enough to the road that they could get a good look at it, other times wandering off into the distance. It was not a fast-running mountain chute but a slow stream that meandered all over the place, but to judge from the intensity with which it was cultivated, it was excellent land. To their right, low hills developed out of the floodplain, blocking their view of what she knew to be much higher mountains in the main ranges of the Rockies beyond. To their left, the picture was altogether different, as green mountains rose abruptly from the flats just on the other side of the river. Traffic on the highway was light, and it seemed as though the majority of the license plates were from British Columbia. Except for the dark mountains brooding over it to the west, it might have been some idyllic midwestern landscape, and Olivia could see perfectly well why people who only wished to be left alone and live uncomplicated lives might come here from all over the continent and establish homesteads.

The farmlands were served by an irregular network of rural roads. One of these led to a bridge across the river. They turned onto it and crossed over the stream, heading now directly toward the mountain wall. Olivia now saw the wisdom of trying to make good time, since the sun was going to set at least an hour earlier as it fell behind the high ridgeline of the Selkirks.

The bridge connected with a north-south road set just inside the tree line, at an altitude where it would not be inundated by seasonal floods. Olivia was referring more and more frequently to a map that she had drawn by hand on a Starbucks napkin. For Jake Forthrast had given her some rough coordinates, but he did not seem to have an address per se; or if he did, he denied the authority of the U.S. government to make such assignments. They did not have to ride far before they came to an intersection with a blacktop road that plunged steeply down out of the west. It seemed to correspond to one Olivia had sketched on the napkin, so they shifted into much lower gears and began to ride up it. Tall trees closed in to either side. Half a mile later the road devolved into gravel. At the same time, it became considerably less steep, as it had taken to following the course of a tributary stream rushing down out of the mountains toward the big lazy river.

Olivia was continuing to be quite sensitive, or so she imagined, to the Crazy that she imagined must lurk up in these places. The Canadian border had become in her mind something like the end of the world, a sheer, straight cliff descending straight into the pit of Abaddon; as they crept asymptotically closer to it, the scene must become more and more apocalyptic and the people who chose to live there correspondingly strange. Which was, of course, utterly ridiculous, since what actually lay on the other side of that imaginary line was British Columbia, a prosperous and well-regulated place of socialized medicine, bilingual signage, and Mounties.

And yet the line was there, drawn on all the maps. Or rather, it was the upper edge of all the maps, with nothing shown beyond it. Since people—at least, before Google Earth came along—could not actually hover miles above the ground and see the world as birds and gods did, they had to make do with maps, which substituted for actually seeing things; and, in that way, the imaginary figments of surveyors and the conventions of cartographers could become every bit as real as rocks and rivers. Perhaps even more so, since you could look at the map any time you wanted, whereas going to look at the physical border involved a lot of effort. So perhaps it might as well be the end of the world, as far as some of the locals were concerned, and might affect the way they thought accordingly.