The lodge kitchen had been open since five-thirty.
He had been the second person in the breakfast room. The first had been a Croatian engineer in a Belgrade-cut sport coat who had come down at five-forty for coffee and a phone call and had taken his coffee and his phone and disappeared back up the stairs by five-fifty. Paul had taken the corner table by the window. He had ordered the Continental — a basket of bread, a hard-boiled egg, a tray of cured meat and cheese — and a black coffee, and he had eaten the breakfast in the fast sequence that had been the speed of his eating since his rat year at VMI, because the body required calories and the calories required loading and the loading required time and the time was the time the situation gave him, and he had finished the breakfast in approximately seven minutes and was on his second coffee at six o’clock when she came down the stairs.
She was in dark cargo pants and a moisture-wicking long-sleeve shirt in a soft slate gray that did not, at any meeting distance, read as anything other than a shirt. Her hair was up, the way her hair was up on every project trip he had ever been on with her, in the careful executive bun that took her four minutes in the morning and held all day. She had her field bag on her right shoulder. She walked across the breakfast room with the stride of a woman who had slept and was operating at her standard daily output, which was higher than the standard daily output of anyone else in the room, and she found him at the corner table and walked over.
“Doc.”
“Paul.”
She set her bag on the empty chair across from his. She did not, in setting the bag down, ask him to take the bag from her. He did not offer to take it. She sat. The waiter came. She ordered the Continental and a black coffee. The waiter went.
“You’ve been up.”
“Couple hours.”
“How long is the drive.”
“Forty minutes to the trailhead. Maybe forty-five with the construction on the access road.”
“All right.”
“You eat.”
“I will eat.”
The breakfast came. She ate at her standard pace, which was approximately half his pace, and which he had learned to plan around in twelve project trips over five years, and she had her last bite of bread at six-thirty-five, which was the time he had told the waiter the night before they would want the check, and the waiter brought the check, and Paul reached for it.
She said, “Paul.”
He looked at her.
“Vertex is paying for this trip. Put it on the room.”
He put the leather folio back on the table without opening it. He let the bill go the way he had let most of the bills go for five years, as a piece of arithmetic that did not require his hand, and he wrote his name and his room number on the slip the waiter had provided and signed it and left it on the table.
“Got the keys.”
She held them up. The Land Cruiser was a Vertex-rented HZJ79 that had been waiting at the lodge when they arrived, because the company travel desk had matched the rental to the country’s road conditions and had selected the diesel-cab Land Cruiser the way the company travel desk selected things, and she had taken the keys from the clerk last night because she had been the senior executive on the trip and the keys had been brought to her with a careful European deference.
“All right, Doc.”
He stood up. She stood up. Her bag was on the empty chair across from where he was standing. He registered his own impulse to lift it for her, and did not act on it.
She picked up the bag.
She walked toward the door of the breakfast room, and he walked behind her at the two-paces-back distance that had been his walking distance behind her in twelve countries across five years, and they walked through the lobby and out the heavy front doors of the lodge into the mountain morning at six-fifty.
The morning was sixteen degrees Celsius and the canyon was full of fog at the bottom and the pine country south of the lodge was a clean dark green under a sky that had not yet decided whether it was going to be blue or gray and the air smelled of pine and the faint mineral edge of the karst he had caught last night from the balcony.
The Land Cruiser was at the gravel turnaround at the end of the entry drive, where the staff had moved it last night after he had checked the fluids and the tire pressure and had repacked the cargo area for the morning.
She walked to the driver’s side.
She stopped.
She turned to him.
“You drive.”