Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
"Stop," Elena said. "Beto, stop, don't take us onto it?—"
There was a second truck behind them.
She heard it before she saw anything of it, a diesel note climbing the grade they had just come down, and she turned in her seat and watched headlights swing up into the rain at their backs.
Close. A heavy crew-cab, riding high, filling the narrow road from the cut bank on one side to the gorge lip on the other.
Front and back, then. The gorge fell away on one side of them and the raw cut bank rose on the other, and the only open ground left in the whole world was the bridge itself, a hundred feet of pale, slick concrete strung over a river that would not give anyone back.
They left the bridge open because they want us on it.
"They want us on the bridge," she said aloud, and the moment she said it she understood that she was right. "Beto — put us on the bridge. Halfway across. Do it now."
"Elena—" Logan started.
"They can't bring a truck across to us if we're already sitting on it.
It's one lane. If we stop dead in the middle, then the only way anyone reaches the slab is on foot, in the open, one end of the bridge at a time.
" She had the whole shape of it now, clear and cold, the way a reading came together when the last glyph finally fell into place.
A single lane forced armed men into single file.
It made them come at her one at a time, from one direction, on a surface that gave no one any footing.
"It's the worst place in the world to be attacked, and it's the best place I've got to be cornered. I'll take cornered."
Beto's eyes found her in the mirror and held there for half a second, no more. Then he did the brave thing, the strange thing that a frightened woman in the back seat had told him to do, and he put the Hilux out onto the bridge and stopped it dead in the center of the span.
For a moment nothing happened at all but the rain.
Then doors opened at both ends of the bridge together. Men climbed out of the trucks in dark rain gear and did not hurry. She counted four of them and knew there were more behind the ones she could count. They did not run, because there was no reason for them to run, and they knew it.
Behind the truck at the far end, under a black umbrella that ought to have looked absurd in all of this and somehow did not, Nadine Volkov stepped out into the rain.
She looked down the length of the bridge at the stopped Hilux and she waited, unhurried.
She had arranged all of this some hours ago, and she had come only to collect it.
A voice reached them through a loudhailer, tinny and flattened by the distortion and calm all the way through it.
"Dr. Vargas. There's nowhere for the truck to go.
I'd ask you to look at your situation honestly, because you're good at that.
Send the slab out to me, and walk to me, all of you, and this remains the boring version of the afternoon.
Drive at my people, and it stops being boring, and I can't help you after that.
You have a minute. I'd spend it thinking, rather than doing anything at all with your hands. "
"Rosa." Elena did not turn around. "How high is the river?"
"Very. Ellie, why?—"
"Logan. The crate's on the pallet jack in the bed. Can two people roll it?"
"To where? There's nowhere on this bridge to?—"
"Just answer me."
"Yes. Two people can roll it. Why?"
She was already moving, twisting up out of the seat and climbing back over into the bed.
At the eastern end of the bridge the men had started forward onto the span, single file, exactly as the width of the lane forced them to, exactly as she had known they would have to.
The geometry was holding. The geometry was the only ally she had, and it was holding.
"We are not giving them the slab," she said. "We are not driving a truck at armed men on a bridge. We are not walking down there and handing ourselves to that woman. There's a third thing, and none of them have a plan for the third thing, because who would."
"Which is?" Logan had come over the seat after her, and the rain sheeted off both of them as they worked the tarp back off the crate, the knots swollen and stubborn under their fingers.
"The river takes things and it doesn't give them back.
" She got her shoulder in under the edge of the crate and felt the whole dead weight of the obsidian shift inside it.
"She came all this way to take the slab off us cleanly.
So we make clean impossible for her. We put it somewhere the only way anyone gets it back is to want it more than they're being paid to want it. "
Logan understood it in half a second, because they had dug enough sites together over the years that he could read her hands before she finished with her mouth. "You're going to drop it in the gorge."