When Faraday pulled up beside it, June had trouble understanding what she was seeing on the ground. When she got out and walked over, she realized the wet heap on the blacktop was a pile of clothes. Peter’s clothes. All of them.
Her stomach curdled with fear. She cursed, long and loud.
Those motherfuckers had stripped him naked.
They were going to kill him.
55
June had the Tahoe’s extra key. Peter’s luggage was still in the back, but there was nothing else. She and Lewis climbed in and led the way down surface streets toward the freeway and the old Boy Scout camp. Each of them had already downloaded a map of that section of the national forest, knowing cell signal could be spotty in the wilderness. On the way to the mall, Faraday had talked them through the layout of the compound. The main entrance and parking area, the cabins, the lodge and armory and greenhouses.
SR 167 was a parking lot. On 18, the rain was brutal and traffic was creeping along at ten miles per hour. They were losing time. Didn’t these idiots know how to drive? June’s stomach was sour with worry. She wanted to roll down the window and scream at everyone to get the fuck out of their way. She didn’t. Raging at the indifferent world wouldn’t help.
She checked Google Maps and saw a couple of accidents perfectly placed to bring everything to a halt. She found an overland route anddirected Lewis off the freeway. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea, and the surface street maze was almost as bad.
In Covington, Lewis pulled into a mini-mall lot, ran into an auto parts store, and came back with two sets of tire chains, leaving one with the Lexus. “All this rain down here, gonna be plenty of snow up in the mountains.”
They cut across 272nd Street toward Maple Valley. It was nine-thirty. To calm her mind, she opened the paper map of Washington state on her lap and tried to focus. It wasn’t easy. At the moment, June didn’t give a fat fuck about the Messenger’s plan or the end of American civilization as she knew it. She cared about Peter, Ellie, and Carlotta. Once she got them free, then she’d give a shit about whatever those assholes were planning.
Still, whatever the Messenger was up to, June couldn’t count on Peter having figured it out. When they got him back, she wanted to be able to tell him their next step. So she stared down at the clustered hieroglyphics and the lines connecting them, then at the long column of numbers running down one side. Finally, she picked a large circle of symbols outside of Kennewick, pulled out her notebook, and started copying down the pictograms.
One looked like a fat little rolling pin, kind of. Another was a jagged arrow curving up. Another was a jagged arrow that curved down. There was a tiny picket fence, and a tiny stick figure, and a dozen other little images that didn’t look like anything, really. A box with anXin it. A box with a dot in it. Some boxes rendered in red, others in green or blue or black. Then circles with vertical lines, circles with horizontal lines, also in multiple colors. All linked to other groups of symbols by the ruler-straight lines.
Again, the whole thing reminded her of a corporate org chart for an extremely complex interconnected organization, or maybe a group of organizations. She stared at it hard, willing the answer to come, butit didn’t. There was something to that idea, she could feel it. But she couldn’t quite latch on to it.
So she opened her laptop and pulled up a map and zoomed in on that area, comparing the pictograms on paper to the online version. Because the scale was so large on the hard copies, she had to assume the locations were approximations. She scrolled and scanned, both in regular map view and in satellite view, looking for any object that might correspond to a symbol.
Nothing clicked. Fuck. She felt the Tahoe accelerate. She looked up and saw the traffic clearing ahead of them. They were heading into the mountains. On the windshield, the coastal rain had changed to sleet.
She turned to Lewis. “You got a look at these maps, right? Did anything make sense to you?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “Not a lick. And no pressure, but you got about twenty minutes before we ditch the truck.”
“Understood.” She picked another spot on the map and repeated the process, scrolling and scanning at the new location. Nothing. Lewis mostly kept his eyes on the road, but every few minutes he’d glance over.
“Our turn coming up,” he said. “You figure out those numbers on the side yet?”
“Shit, I haven’t even tried.” She’d looked at them back at Stella’s house, thinking maybe they were email addresses or account numbers or numerical passwords. Then Robert had called to say he’d cracked the burner phone, and she hadn’t gotten back to it.
“They all the same number of digits?” Lewis asked.
She counted. “Yeah. Fourteen.” Then the light bulb went on and she gave herself a dope slap. “Fuck a duck. They’re GPS coordinates, but in digital format. How could I miss that?”
Latitude and longitude were usually depicted in degrees, minutes, and seconds. But they could also be depicted as a single number, whichJune knew from her reporting was a format often used in programming. The first seven digits were latitude, the second seven were longitude. Seven digits meant four decimal places, which would give an accuracy to about eleven meters.
She opened a new browser window and typed the first number into the search bar, leaving a space between the seventh and eighth digit. A map came up. She frowned. “China? Fucking Inner Mongolia?”
Lewis glanced over. “Right idea, wrong hemisphere. Second set of numbers, make it negative.”
She went back to the search bar, added a minus symbol after the space, and hit return. A new map came up. The pin was in the middle of what appeared to be empty land, east of the mountains, just off Highway 17. She zoomed in and gained no new details. She zoomed out and that’s when she saw it.
“Holy fuck. It’s two miles from the Chief Joseph Dam.”
She switched to satellite view and went back to the pin. It was the dead center of an enormous electrical substation. Zoomed in all the way, she could even see the power lines running from the dam to the substation, then out to the southwest, toward Seattle.
“The Messenger’s going to hit the power grid,” she said. But how? By blowing up the dam? It would be a catastrophe, but not exactly a civilization-ender. They’d have to destroy hundreds of power plants to make a dent.
Lewis slowed and took a right onto a low, narrow bridge and crossed the river. Below, the churning water was black in the headlight wash. After the bridge, the road turned to gravel. He accelerated again, the Tahoe bucking wildly over the ruts. Her fingers kept bouncing off the keys. “Pull over for a sec,” she said. “Let me plug in the next number.”
