Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“It is not kilometers per hour,” Marlon informed him. “In the metric system, you are going at something like five thousand.”

“Not quite that fast,” Csongor said, but he did relent and drop down to eighty.

A minute later, he explained, “I believe Seamus went up there to find Jones. This was his real plan. But he could not say this out loud. Then Yuxia asked why she could not go along, if it was only a sightseeing trip. Seamus was trapped.”

“Yuxia is good at such things.”

“What do you think of her?” Csongor asked. “Is she your girlfriend?”

“For a while I was thinking maybe,” Marlon admitted, “but then I decided she was my sister.”

“Huh.”

“China is funny. One child per family, you know. We are all looking for siblings.”

Csongor nodded. “It is a much better system,” he said, “than the one we use in Hungary.”

“Why?”

Csongor looked across at Marlon. “Because you get to choose.”

Marlon smiled. “Ah.”

Csongor turned his attention back to the road.

“Your brother in California,” Marlon said.

“What about him?”

“Are you going to go and visit him?”

“Do you want to see California?”

He could hear Marlon beaming. “Yes.”

“It is probably a better place for you,” Csongor said, “than for me. If I go, I will take you. You can be the star. I will be your—”

“Bodyguard?”

“Fuck that. I was thinking entourage.”

“California, here we come!” Marlon exclaimed.

Csongor thrust a stubby finger out the window at a road sign that said CANADA 50 MI/80 KM. “We are going wrong way,” he pointed out. “Before California, we have to get into trouble. Then out of it.”

Marlon shrugged. “But that is what we do.”

Csongor nodded. “That is what we do.”

BY THE TIME Csongor had finished slowing down from highway speed, they were halfway through Bourne’s Ford and in danger of blowing past it altogether. As a way of giving them some time to get their bearings, Csongor pulled into a gas station. Using some American cash from his wallet—for Seamus had passed out a bit of spending money—he fronted the cashier $40, then strolled back to the SUV and began to pump fuel into it. The way that the gas pump worked was slightly unfamiliar and made him feel inept and conspicuous. But eventually he figured out how to latch the nozzle in the on position, and then he leaned back against the side of the vehicle and crossed his arms to wait for its enormous tank to fill. Marlon had made a quick toilet run and was already ensconced back in the passenger seat, scanning the airwaves for open Wi-Fi connections.

A blue Subaru station wagon turned in off the highway and pulled up on the opposite side of the pump island. Its front was thickly speckled with the dried corpses of insects. Bundles of stuff had been lashed and bungeed down to its roof rack. Since it was so clearly not from around here, Csongor glanced at its license plate. It was from Pennsylvania.

It sat there for a while with its engine running, and Csongor could just barely hear the muffled sounds of a discussion going on inside of it. The tail end, he suspected, of a long-running argument among tourists who had been cooped up together in this small vehicle for far too long.

Then the driver’s door swung open and a man climbed out: a Middle Eastern fellow with a close-cropped beard and dark wraparound sunglasses. He went to the cashier and gave him some paper money, then returned to the Subaru and began to pump gas into it.

Another man, an African with a slender angular look that reminded him of Zula, got out of the backseat, went inside, and used the toilet. When he emerged, he was carrying a large-format paperback with a red cover, which he had apparently just purchased: Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer .

Noting movement in the corner of his eye, Csongor looked up the SUV’s flank to the passenger-side rearview mirror, which Marlon had adjusted so that he could use it to stare Csongor in the eye. The look on his face said: Can this really be happening!?

Csongor looked off in some other direction and responded with a nod.

He had decided that he wanted to be the last vehicle out of this gas station, so when he was finished pumping the gas, he went back inside as if he intended to use the W. C. Instead of which he lurked in the back of its little convenience store area, pretending to be unable to make up his mind as to which selection he ought to make from its dizzying variety of jerky and keeping an eye on the blue Subaru.

“Selkirk Loop,” said the clerk wonderingly, gazing out at the same thing. “Brings in all kinda people.”

The driver removed the nozzle from the side of his car. Csongor advanced to the cash register, spilled out some bags of jerky and two water bottles, and yanked an Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer out of the rack for good measure.

“Those are hot sellers today,” the clerk remarked.

Csongor said nothing. The clerk had pegged him as an American, and he saw no reason to call that into question by opening his big mouth.

Now the Subaru’s driver came in to use the toilet, and Csongor had no choice but to go outside, get into the SUV, and start it up. He pulled out onto the road, went about half a block down a commercial strip, and entered the parking lot of a fast-food place. This turned out to have a drive-through, and so, on an impulse, he drove into it and placed an order for a couple of hamburgers. He drove around the back in a big U and paid at the window. The SUV was now pointed back out toward the street.

While the man at the window was stuffing their order into a bag, Marlon said, “There!” and Csongor glanced out to see the blue Subaru cruising past them at a safe and legal velocity.

He was a bit anxious that they might have lost their quarry as a result of the fast-food gambit, but a few moments later, when he gunned the SUV back out onto the street, sucking deeply from a bucket-sized serving of Mountain Dew, he was able to see it clearly a few hundred meters ahead, making its way peaceably through a series of stoplights.

The next bit felt touch-and-go, since, depending on the lights, they sometimes seemed to fall far behind and other times drew uncomfortably close. But it had become obvious that these men were heading north out of town. Marlon used these minutes to flip through the Atlas and Gazetteer and find the relevant map.

“North of here, a few kilometers, is an intersection,” Marlon announced. “If they go straight, then they are headed for Canada, and it means nothing. But if they go left, across the river, then they are trying to reach the place where Seamus and Yuxia were flying to this morning.”

“Is there some other way we can cross that river?” Csongor asked. “So we won’t be following them so obviously?”

“Yes. Turn around here.”

And thus they turned back, dropping away from direct pursuit of the Subaru, and went back into the middle of the town and crossed over a different bridge. A few minutes later they were headed west, seemingly direct into the mountains; but just before the terrain became really steep, Marlon directed Csongor to make a right turn onto a gravel road that ran due north, heading generally parallel to the river. During his three hours of intense boredom at the flight center, Csongor had flipped through the vehicle’s manual enough to learn how it could be shifted into four-wheel drive, so he took a moment to do this, and then went blasting up the road at an insane pace for some miles. He did not think that there were any cops around here to pull him over; and if they did, he would simply claim that there were terrorists in the area, driving a blue Subaru.

Come to think of it, they should have done that before leaving Bourne’s Ford. But their own illegal status had put them in an awkward frame of mind, never knowing when to hide from the authorities and when to call out for their help. They didn’t know that those men were terrorists. They might have been innocent tourists. When Marlon had said, a few minutes earlier, that they might go straight at the intersection and head north into Canada, presumably to enjoy the Selkirk Loop, it had sounded perfectly reasonable to Csongor and he had wondered at his foolishness for harboring this racist stereotype that the men were terrorists.