Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “What does he do for a living?” Zula asked.

  “Bartos is pursuing a postdoc in topology at UCLA.”

  “Oh.” Zula looked at Peter and told him, “That’s a kind of math.”

  “Thank you,” Peter snapped.

  Csongor continued, “But I could tell that I was not like Bartos, so I looked for other ways to make a living using my brain. The teachers in my academy only wanted me to play hockey for the school team. I ignored my classes and taught myself to program computers. Then suddenly I was making money this way. When the economy got better, programmers were needed all over the place. Especially doing localization.”

  “What is localization?” Zula asked. Peter sighed, letting her know it was a stupid question.

  “Translating foreign software into Hungarian, making things work correctly in the special environment of Hungary,” Csongor explained, and Zula thought that she could glimpse, here, in the way that he contentedly explained things, Csongor’s father the school-teacher. “As an example, because of inflation, Hungarian currency is debased.” Warming to the task, he pulled a wallet out of his pocket and produced a sheaf of bills from Magyar Nemzeti Bank, illustrated with engravings of men Zula had never heard of with crazy hats and florid mustaches. The denominations were enormous; the smallest was 1,000, and some of them bore five digits. “So if you have some trivial app that is used in retail, like for a cash register, foreign software might not be suitable because it wants format consisting of decimal point followed by some number of cents. But we don’t have a decimal point or cents, just an integer. So minor rewriting of software is needed. I did this kind of thing for merchants.”

  “Which led to credit card readers?” said Peter, who was finally showing some patience.

  “Exactly. In Warsaw Pact times, merchants did not have credit card readers, but when the economy came to life in the late 1990s, everyone suddenly had to have them, and so when people learned that I could program such machines, I had lots of work to do. My father had died from cigarettes and my mother could not make so much money, so I made money to put Bartos through school and so on. All fine. But there is a little snag. You see, the last Soviet soldier left Hungary in 1991. But there were other Russians who came in during the Cold War who took a little bit longer to leave.”

  “These guys,” Zula said, cocking her head in the direction of the neighboring plane.

  “Mafia, yes,” said Csongor. “So Step 1 of the new economy was that everything got very bad. Step 2 was that things got better and everyone obtained credit cards. And Step 3—”

  “Step 3 was credit card fraud,” said Peter.

  “Yes, and this was attempted in a number of different ways. Some better than others. The best of all ways is like this. A waiter in a restaurant has a little credit card reader in his pocket. The customer wants to pay his bill. He hands his credit card to the waiter. The waiter takes it back to a place where he is not observed and swipes it once to pay the bill. So far, totally legitimate.”

  Peter was already nodding, confident that he knew this material, so Csongor finished the story for Zula’s benefit. “However, then the waiter swipes the card through the illegitimate reader in his pocket and makes a copy of the credit card data. The reader stores the data of many such cards. These data are aggregated and then sold on the black market.”

  “So you got involved in that racket,” Peter said.

  Csongor hesitated, not completely happy with the phrasing. “I took a job to program the firmware of a device. I was perhaps naive. It became clear to me only slowly what the device was used for.”

  Peter let out a tiny snort. Csongor caught it immediately, thought about it, finally shrugged his huge shoulders and met Zula’s eye. As if she had somehow been named the judge of all such matters. “So I am just the latest in a very long line of Hungarians being talked into extremely stupid adventures by Germans, Russians, whatever. But it took me into this culture”—he shifted his gaze onto Peter, and Zula understood that he was now talking about international hacker culture—” where I was cool. Respected. Powerful drugs for a teenager.”

  Peter did not meet Csongor’s gaze, and so Csongor went on as if the point had been conceded.

  “Then later the same client came back to me with a new problem: there was too much data. Thousands of these machines had been mass-produced and distributed to waiters, not only in Hungary but all over Europe, and the data storage problem was becoming an issue, there were security problems, and so on. Could I help with this? And by the way, if the answer was no, perhaps they would report me to the police or cause other trouble for me. So I became a systems programmer. I built the systems these people needed. And after that, they needed someone to keep the system running in a secure and reliable way. So, over years, I morphed into a kind of mostly freelance systems administrator. I run servers, set up email systems, websites, wikis—”

  “I know what a systems administrator is,” Peter said.

  “My clientele are small companies or sole proprietors who are not big enough to hire someone just for this purpose. But my specialty, my niche, is situations where privacy and security are very important.”

  “You work for gangsters,” Peter said.

  “As do you, Peter.”

  “This part of it is boring for me,” Zula said.

  Csongor turned to look at her, his face a mixture of curiosity and regret. “Systems administration?”

  Zula shook her head and made a gesture of two fists banging into each other, looking between Peter and Csongor. They seemed to take her point. Zula continued, “So I’ll bet Wallace contacted you and said ‘I need secure email, no questions asked.’”

  “Exactly,” Csongor said. “I knew he worked for Ivanov. But. A Scottish accountant in Vancouver. What could possibly go wrong?” He chuckled and slapped his thigh, hoping that the others would join him in a little round of ironic laughter, but Peter was having none of it.

  “Who is Ivanov? What did Wallace do for him?” Peter asked.

  Csongor leaned back in his seat, suddenly feeling tired, and rubbed his eyes. “I had been working for these people for six years before I ever met Ivanov. Then he showed up in Budapest one day and took me to a hockey game and dinner, and then it was obvious who was really the boss.”

  “But it was too late then.”

  “Yes, I already knew too much and so on. In Russia there are a few such groups as the one that Ivanov is part of. Some are ethnic Russians. Ivanov belongs to one of those. Others are Chechens or Uzbeks or what have you. The Russian ones are very old, dating back to perhaps Ivan the Terrible. If you are a member of such a group, you live your whole life in it.”

  Peter snorted. “That’s not saying much.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If you’re a mobster, your life expectancy is what, thirty years?”

  “On the contrary,” Csongor said. “Precisely because so many of their activities are routine and boring, many of the members die of old age. Which is the problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “It’s a problem for Ivanov, that is.”

  “How so?”

  “It has always been the practice for groups like this to have a fund, called the obshchak, which is a common pool of money that they use for all kinds of purposes, including benefits.”

  “Benefits!? Are you telling me that Russian mobsters get dental!?”

  Csongor shrugged. “I don’t see why you are so surprised. A man who gets a toothache must have it seen to, no matter what he does for a living. In the system of these groups, the money for the dentist is paid out of the obshchak. When a member reaches the age of retirement, the obshchak takes care of him. And, of course, the obshchak is also used to fund…”—and Csongor looked around at the plane—” operations.”

  “So we are guests of the obshchak right now,” Peter said.

  “Yes, but I do not think that we are authorized guests,” Csongor returned.

  “What do you mean
?”

  “I think that Ivanov is basically stealing the funds that are being used to rent this plane,” Csongor said. “Because this is not how these guys operate. They are extremely conservative investors for the most part. They don’t do crazy shit like this.”

  Peter snorted.

  Zula said, “A pension fund is a pension fund.”

  “Precisely,” said Csongor, turning to her. “Most of the obshchak is invested in proper financial instruments. Wallace is a, here my vocabulary fails me—”

  “Money manager?” Zula guessed.

  “He is one who manages the money managers,” Csongor said. “He distributes his clients’ funds among several different professional managers, evaluates their performance, moves money from one account to another as necessary.”

  “That’s not all he does,” Peter said. “When I met him, he was buying stolen credit card numbers from me.”

  “This is unusual for Wallace.”

  “I sort of got that impression.”

  “Wallace’s boss is—was—Ivanov. I believe that Ivanov made some mistakes. Of the money he controlled, some was supposed to be invested legitimately. This he entrusted to Wallace. Other money was put into schemes that we would call organized crime. I can only guess, but I think that Ivanov got into trouble.”

  “Some of his schemes failed,” Zula said.

  “Or perhaps he simply embezzled from the obshchak,” Csongor said. “Maybe he was not the right man to be managing this money.”

  Peter laughed.

  Csongor allowed himself the barest trace of a wry smile and continued: “The quarterly numbers were looking not so good. He knew he was in trouble, needed to take some risks in order to bring those numbers up. Guys like him are maybe addicted to taking risks anyway. He and Wallace set up some complicated transactions and at the same time invested some of the money Wallace controlled in schemes such as your stolen credit card numbers. When Wallace lost all his files—”

  “The house of cards collapsed,” Zula said.

  “Yes.”

  “So why haven’t they come down on Ivanov yet?”

  “They don’t know,” Csongor said. “Ivanov has a long leash and has moved with too great speed. By the time his bosses know that something strange is going on, we’ll be in Xiamen.”

  “So we are going to Xiamen,” Zula said.

  “This is what I was told,” Csongor said. “To find the Troll.”

  “Are they going to kill us?”

  Csongor thought about it rather too long for Zula’s taste. “I think this depends on Sokolov.”

  “What is the deal with him?”

  “Another private contractor, like Wallace. Except that he does security.”

  “I’m afraid to even ask about his background.”

  “Twice a hero,” Csongor said. “Once in Afghanistan and once in Chechnya.”

  “Military,” Peter translated. “Not a gangster.”

  “There is a bit of a, what do you call it, revolving door. It’s complicated.”

  “But if it’s true that Ivanov has gone off the reservation,” Zula said, “then a military man isn’t going to approve of that, is he? He doesn’t have to keep following orders if it’s clear that his boss has gone bananas.”

  “I don’t know Sokolov” was all that Csongor said to that.

  SOKOLOV STEPPED ABOARD and then backed halfway into the cockpit to let others go by him. One by one, short-haired Russian security consultants came aboard and distributed themselves around the cabin according to suggestions from Sokolov. These were younger than Sokolov, but not precisely young; their ages seemed to range from late twenties to late thirties. They all had interesting faces, but Zula was disinclined to gaze directly at them since she did not want to be caught looking. Peter, Zula, and Csongor were allowed to keep their own space in the aft part of the cabin. Sokolov’s crew filled up the other available spaces and, when all seats were taken, resorted to sitting on the floor in the aisle. There were seven of them including Sokolov.

  A car pulled up alongside. The two Russian pilots came aboard and began doing paperwork. More stuff was loaded from the vehicle to the plane’s cargo hold, and when that got full, additional items were handed up from below and passed down into the passenger cabin and stuffed wherever they would fit. Ivanov came aboard, smelling of alcohol, and went into his compartment in the back. Sokolov handed Zula a shopping bag that turned out to contain a pair of Crocs, a few T-shirts, and underwear.

  The pilots closed the door. Sokolov issued a directive to raise the window shades. The plane taxied to the runway, took off north, and banked south. Several minutes later, as they were climbing toward cruising altitude, Zula got a good long view of what she took to be Vladivostok: a sizable port city built around a long inlet, shaped like a crooked finger, at the end of a beefy peninsula.

  They flew for a while in silence. The security consultants smoked: a behavior that Zula had never seen aboard an airplane.

  “So if we are to find the Troll, perhaps we should conceive of a plan?” Csongor offered.

  The security consultants looked at him curiously, but then their attention began to drift away, and they began to make wry comments and crack jokes in Russian. Every so often Sokolov would tell them to shut up and they would be quiet for a while. Or perhaps Sokolov was ruling out certain topics of conversation. Zula preferred not to speculate on what those topics might be.

  “Well, for starters, do you know anything at all about Xiamen?” Zula asked.

  “I had the opportunity to do a little googling,” Csongor said.

  “We didn’t,” Peter said.

  “It is a curious place,” Csongor said. “Maybe a little like Hungary.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Too many neighbors.”

  “I had never heard of it until yesterday,” Zula said.

  “It’s the place with the terra-cotta warriors, right?” Peter said.

  “You are thinking of Xi’an,” Csongor said, with a rueful smile indicating that he had made the same error. “That is inland. Xiamen is on the coast. A little bit up from Hong Kong. Directly across a, what do you call it, a narrow bit of water—”

  “Strait,” Zula said.

  “Yes, from Taiwan. So. Xiamen is the place where the Spanish silver used to come into China. Spanish brought it on galleons from Mexico to Manila, and from there, Chinese merchants brought it up to Xiamen, and then up the Nine Dragons River to the interior. But the Dutch found out about this, and so the place became infested with Dutch pirates who would hide behind all the little islands and come out and steal the silver. When they weren’t doing that, they would rob the Chinese people. Then Zheng Chenggong came and chased them away. This was an amazing man. His mother was Japanese. His father was a Chinese pirate. He was born in Japan. But he was raised by Muslim ex-slaves, freed by his father; so some people think he was secretly a Muslim. Anyway, he chased the Dutch out of Taiwan and made it part of China again. He’s a hero to both the mainland Chinese and to the Taiwanese. There is a huge statue of him in Xiamen.”

  “And this relates to our problem how?” Peter asked, making an elaborate show of patience.

  Csongor gave Peter an appraising look. “Like I said, I only had Internet access for a few minutes. Long enough to download some old books. Then they cut me off. So I have been reading the books on the plane.”

  “So all your information is from old books,” Peter said.

  “Yes. But there is a point, which is that the links between Xiamen and Taiwan are very old and complicated. Right in the harbor of Xiamen are two islands that actually belong to Taiwan! They are less than ten kilometers from Xiamen, but they are part of a different country and during the Cold War the Red Army used to shell them all the time with artillery.”

  “So I’m getting the picture that Xiamen has got all kinds of links to Manila, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, it is a major port, et cetera,” Zula said. “Is this all just touristy background stuff or does it
tell us anything regarding the Troll?”

  Csongor shrugged. “Maybe not about the Troll but maybe about us. About our situation. I was trying to figure out how these guys were going to get us into the country. You need a visa to enter China. Did you know this?”

  “No,” Zula said, and Peter shook his head.

  “It’s not hard but it takes a little while, you have to do some paperwork, send in your passport. Obviously we do not have visas. So I was wondering, how are these guys even going to get us into the country?”

  Zula and Peter were watching Csongor interestedly, waiting for the punch line.

  “You ask why this is relevant to us. The answer, I think, is that if they were trying to get us into some place in the interior of the country they would have a more difficult time. But Xiamen is famous for smuggling and corruption. Something like ten percent of all foreign goods sold in China are smuggled in to the country. Traditionally a lot of that smuggling has happened through Xiamen. There was a huge smackdown there ten years ago—”

  “Crackdown,” Peter and Zula said in unison.

  “Yes. Many officials executed or sent to prison. But it is still the kind of place where a man like him”—Csongor, not wanting to utter the name, flicked his eyes toward the door of Ivanov’s compartment—“would be able to make connections with local officials who control the ports, the customs, et cetera, and get away with smuggling, shall we say, human cargo into the country.”