Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
The turnoff, when they reached it late in the afternoon, had a car waiting at it.
It was the gray SUV from the airport, or else its identical twin, parked squarely across the mouth of the side road with its hazards off and its engine running, a thread of exhaust smoking up into the wet air.
A woman stood beside it under a black umbrella, dry from the knees up, watching the van come down the last of the highway toward her.
She didn't wave them down. She'd simply chosen the place where the side road narrowed, so that Beto had to slow to take the turn, and having slowed, with the SUV filling the gap, had to stop.
Beto said a word that didn't translate into anything Elena knew and put the van in park without anyone telling him to.
The woman was perhaps fifty, entirely unhurried, dressed in field clothes that had plainly never been within a hundred miles of a field.
She held the umbrella at a precise angle, as though the rain were a small administrative matter that would shortly be resolved in her favor and there was no need to make a fuss about it in the meantime.
She walked to Elena's window. She didn't knock on the glass. She simply stood there, close, with a patience that had clearly never once been tested, until Elena reached over and rolled the window down.
"Dr. Vargas." The accent was faint and Elena couldn't place it, somewhere the woman had left a long time ago.
The voice had no edges anywhere in it. "I'm Nadine Volkov.
I believe a colleague of mine, Mr. Hartmann, paid you the courtesy of a visit at your hotel.
I'm sorry we have to do this on a roadside in the rain.
It genuinely wasn't my preference. It rarely is, if I'm honest. Roadsides are nobody's preference, which is exactly why so many things end up being decided on them.
People will agree to a thing standing in the wet that they'd have argued about for a week in a warm room. "
"Ms. Volkov." Elena kept her hands folded in her lap where the woman couldn't see them, and where they couldn't give anything away. "We have somewhere we need to be."
"You have a field station in the Chiapas highlands.
Dr. Okonkwo's. A generator, an old Chubb safe set in concrete, and a very great deal of optimism.
" Volkov recited it back without any weight on the words, the way a person reads out a file they closed some hours ago and no longer find interesting.
"You won't reach it. I don't say that as a threat, Dr. Vargas, and I want to be precise, because I think you're a precise person and I think you'll respect precision more than you'll respect drama.
I say it as a forecast. And you, of all the people I could be standing in the rain with, have just spent a night learning to respect a forecast."
The rain ran off the taut black silk of the umbrella in a single clean sheet and drummed on the roof of the van.
"Every checkpoint between this turnoff and the highlands has your details now.
Your name, your number, your photograph, your sister's face.
The road past the next town washes out in weather like this most years, and this is a wet year.
And the man who's driving you has already decided, somewhere behind his eyes where he hasn't quite admitted it to himself yet, that none of this is worth what we're paying you for it, which is nothing at all.
" Her gaze moved, unhurried, past Elena and into the back of the van, and found Rosa, and rested on her a moment, mild and exact, before it moved on.
The moving-on was worse than if it had stayed.
"I'm not here to take anything away from you.
I'm here to offer you the only version of the next two weeks in which every single person in this van gets to go home afterward.
That's a generous offer, Dr. Vargas. In my experience they don't come around twice. "
Logan leaned forward from the seat behind Elena's. "So you're describing a kidnapping," he said, "with a benefits package."
Volkov didn't look at him. She kept her eyes on Elena, unbothered, the way you'd wait out a passenger's cough before continuing a sentence.
"Mr. Shepard reaches for the dramatic word.
It's a likeable quality, it really is, and it's served him.
It will get someone hurt eventually, though I'd put money it won't be him.
Men who reach for the dramatic word tend to be standing slightly off to one side when the consequences of it actually arrive.
" She let the rain fill the space where a lesser person would have hurried on.
"I'm offering you the boring version, Dr. Vargas.
The version where nothing happens to anyone.
You of all people ought to think very hard before you turn down the version where nothing happens. "
"And the slab?" Elena said.
"Becomes the responsibility of people who are equipped to protect it, which none of you are, whatever you tell yourselves in hotel rooms. You get your name on the study.
The real study, the one that runs in a real journal and makes you again, the way you were before.
Your sister gets her exclusive, first and clean.
Mr. Shepard gets to go on doing whatever it is that Mr. Shepard does.
" The umbrella didn't so much as tremble.
"Or you drive on up that road, and you let the road decide instead of me.
And the road, Dr. Vargas, is so very much less reasonable than I'm being. "
Elena looked at her for a long moment. The dry knees.
The level voice with nothing behind it that could be reached or moved.
The eyes that had touched Rosa once, gently, and let her go, which was somehow the most frightening thing in it.
Here was a person who had, Elena felt sure, never once been told no by anyone she couldn't afford to reach.
And she understood, with a small cold clarity that surprised her by how steady it was, that she was about to be the exception.
"Thank you for the forecast, Ms. Volkov," she said, and rolled the window up between them. "Drive, Beto."
He didn't move. Volkov hadn't stepped back out of the road, and the SUV still filled the turn, and Beto sat with both hands on the wheel and his foot on the brake, looking at the woman standing in the narrow place with her umbrella and her patience.
For three full seconds nobody in the van breathed, the wipers slapping across the glass, the rain coming down, the woman not moving.
Then she stepped aside. Unhurried, gracious, a good host walking difficult guests to a door she was glad to see them leave by.
Beto let out his breath and put his foot down, and the van lurched off the highway onto the side road and past her, and in the wing mirror Elena watched the gray car and the black umbrella shrink behind them and not pull out and not follow.
The not-following, by now, was the worst thing they could have done.
"That," Rosa said, after a mile, and her voice was not as level as she wanted it to be, "was her looking at me. At the end there. She looked at me."
"I know," Elena said. "I saw it." She turned in her seat to see her sister's face properly, past the crate, in the gray light.
"We don't split up. Not for anything, and not for any reason anybody hands us, no matter how good it sounds when they say it.
From here on we stay where we can see each other, all of us. Promise me that."
"You don't get to be the one who?—"
"Promise me, Rosa."
Rosa held her eyes across the length of the van. The road had begun to climb, and the rain on the roof changed its pitch as the land tilted up under them toward the highlands.
"I promise," she said.
They drove the rest of the afternoon up into the rising country, the thick lowland heat thinning out behind them, the green going darker and steeper and closer on both sides of the narrowing road.
Elena watched the bars on her phone fall from three to two to one as the towns spread farther and farther apart.
Somewhere ahead of them was Okonkwo's field station, and a safe, and a generator. Volkov had named all three of them out loud, standing in the rain on a roadside, which meant they were no longer a destination so much as a place Orpheus already knew to be waiting for them to arrive.
Elena turned the gray field notebook over in her hands, the unread cluster of folded figures waiting inside it under its one-word name, and she made herself stop looking at it and think instead about the road, and the rain, and keeping every person in this van where she could see them.