Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  The big man was shouting at him in English. Marlon couldn’t make out a word he was saying. This was partly because of the window and the ambient noise (though the gun battle seemed to be over) but also, as he came to realize, because the big man had a heavy accent of some type.

  And also because the big man was completely out of his mind with rage. A rage that only seemed to grow the more he bellowed and gesticulated.

  The big man was talking himself into something.

  He was talking himself into doing something dreadful to the younger man.

  Marlon noticed, now, that a pistol had appeared in the big man’s hand.

  When he was ready, the big man aimed his gun directly at the young man, who tried to hide behind the white palms of his hands. There were three enormous booms. The big man made some contemptuous remark and then walked past the younger man, who was still collapsing to the floor, and proceeded down the next flight of stairs.

  After a few moments the black man stalked after him.

  IT HAD BEEN with mixed feelings that Olivia Halifax-Lin had learned that Abdallah Jones had absconded from Mindanao and turned up in Xiamen. For Olivia had just devoted the better part of a year, and MI6 had spent half a million quid, on setting her up with a false Chinese identity so that she could work under deep cover within the borders of the Middle Kingdom. And she really hated Abdallah Jones a lot. But hunting Islamic bombers was not supposed to be her job.

  As any Halifax-Lin family photograph would demonstrate, one could never predict the outcome of what used to be called miscegenation. Olivia had two siblings. Her older brother looked Welsh to Welsh ­people, but on a trip to Portugal he’d been mistaken for Portuguese, and when he went to Germany, Turks came up to him on the street and greeted him in Turkish. Their younger sister had classic mixed-race looks. Olivia, on the other hand, could walk down any street in China without drawing undue notice. In a small town, she would likely be pegged as waidiren, but in a big city she would never be identified as waiguoren.

  Their father was an economist, born and raised in Beijing but relocated to Hong Kong in his late teens and eventually to an academic post in London, where he had married Olivia’s mother, a speech therapist. They had grown up speaking English and Mandarin interchangeably. Olivia had read East Asian history at Oxford. It was considered good form to pick up at least one language you didn’t already know, and so she had taken a couple of years of Russian.

  Preferring to hang with a more international crowd, she had spent a lot of time in the student bar at St. Antony’s College, and it was there that she had first been approached by a member of the faculty who suggested in a deniable and genteel—almost subliminal—way that (ahem) MI6 knew of her existence. While flattered, she had deflected the overture—supposing that’s what it was—by mentioning that she had plans to pursue a master’s degree in international relations at the University of British Columbia, with an eye toward coming back to St. Antony’s to pursue a Ph.D.

  The professor, by this point, had bought her a drink. After allowing a few minutes to pass, he had made a whimsical suggestion. The Chinese community in Vancouver was huge: a city within a city, populous enough that the appearance of an unfamiliar Chinese-looking and-acting person in a store or an apartment building would not arouse any particular notice. Olivia’s memory of the conversation was a bit hazy—she was a lousy drinker—but she was pretty sure he had used the term “spy Disneyland.” And when she had asked for an explanation, he had pointed out that a girl like Olivia could go to a place like Vancouver’s Chinatown and try to pass as Chinese and see if anyone detected the subterfuge. It would give her a feeling for what would be entailed in working as a deep cover agent in China, but it would be as safe, and as fake, as Disneyland.

  The idea of Olivia as an MI6 agent had seemed comical at first, and yet she had to admit that it appealed to the same part of her personality that enjoyed acting in amateur theatrical productions—which, aside from sporadic and desultory participation in field hockey and kung fu, was her main extracurricular activity.

  She had performed sixteen speaking roles in a dozen different productions. The numbers looked funny because she tended to get cast in roles so small that, with a change of costume, she could easily do more than one in the same play. With time and experience she had graduated to sidekick and girlfriend roles in small productions around Oxford. Beyond that, she had no ambitions in the theatrical world. But she had come to understand that the decisions of casting directors reflected the way that people in general, and men in particular, looked at her. New men who swam into her environment ignored her at first. Some then began to gaze curiously at her. Then they either went back to ignoring her or else found some way of letting her know that they thought she was beautiful; that this was by no means obvious; and that they deserved some reward or appreciation for having been so ingenious as to notice it. Different directors had awarded her greater or lesser roles depending on where they fell in the continuum of Olivia-face-appreciation, but starring roles had eluded her for the reason mentioned.

  But in the deep cover agent game, bit players, girlfriends, and sidekicks were precisely what was wanted. No James Bond types need apply.

  There were about half a dozen photographs in the world—mostly candid shots taken on phones—that made Olivia look really beautiful. And she had learned that she could make people look for, and eventually see, that beauty by looking as if she expected it. But she could just as well make them fail to see it by looking otherwise. She thought it might be a good skill for a spy.

  AFTER SIX MONTHS in Vancouver, she had suddenly been overcome by a craving for winter melon soup that resulted in a spontaneous trip to Chinatown. Not the old one downtown, but the new one out in the suburbs. A haggling session with a greengrocer had led to Olivia’s taking possession of a winter melon as long as her arm. As they had finished the transaction, the grocer had made a bit of small talk with Olivia, asking her how long she had been in Canada. “Six months,” Olivia had told him, and he had then politely inquired which part of China she had come over from. And rather than try to explain everything about her parents, she had just said, “Beijing.” He had accepted that with no trace of skepticism, and nearby onlookers had joined in the conversation, accepting her as a pure Chinese woman from China.

  During her second year, then, she had moved to an apartment building in a mostly Chinese neighborhood and had passed, with very little difficulty, as a graduate student from Beijing. The closest she ever came to being outed was when someone made a comment—a flattering one, she hoped—about her unusual looks. But then, Yao Ming probably got a lot of comments about his unusual height. No one doubted Yao Ming was Chinese.

  After a while she had been invited to tea (the English kind) by a woman based at the British consulate in Vancouver, who again in a very genteel and deniable way wanted to know how it was all going and whether a Ph.D. from St. Antony’s were still in her future, or might she consider taking a bit of time off first and gaining some experience in the world of work? Olivia had not ruled it out, and after that, the teas had become a regular thing and had led to luncheon interviews in nice London restaurants when she went home for the holidays.

  She had begun not doing certain things that, had she done them, would have made it impossible for her to work for MI6 in the future. She had not put up a Facebook page. She had not posted photos of herself on Flickr. She had not visited China, meaning that the government of that country had no photos of her, no record of her existence. She had not done these things for the simple reason that the MI6 plants who kept popping up in her path kept asking her whether she had ever done them. And when she said no, the news was always greeted with impressed eyebrow raising.

  And so to London and MI6, where she had toiled as an analyst for two years, developing her cover identity and writing reports on miscellaneous topics. One of which had been the Welsh terrorist Abdallah Jones, who was of particular interest to Olivia because he had once blown up Olivia
’s great-aunt’s bridge partner on a bus in Cardiff.

  He was (as she learned) of West Indian ancestry, that is, the descendant of slaves brought to the Caribbean to work on sugar cane plantations. He had grown up in a Cardiff slum where he had acquired an addiction to heroin. He had kicked that addiction with the assistance of a local mullah who had converted him to Islam. Chemically unshackled, he had taken an undergraduate degree in earth sciences at Aberystwyth and followed that up with graduate instruction at the Colorado School of Mines, where he seemed to have learned a hell of a lot about explosives. Returning to Wales, he had fallen in with a radical cell of Islamists and cut his teeth blowing up buses in Wales and the Midlands before migrating to London and graduating to tube stations. When those activities had rendered him the object of intense police curiosity, he had moved to Northern Africa, then Somalia, then Pakistan (the site of his largest single exploit, killing 111 people in a hotel blast), then Indonesia, the southern Philippines, Manila, Taiwan, and now—strange to relate—Xiamen. All those steps had made perfect sense except for the last two.

  To say, as people frequently did, that Abdallah Jones was to MI6 what Osama bin Laden had been to the CIA was to miss a few important points, as far as Olivia was concerned. It was true that Jones was MI6’s highest-priority target. So to that point, the comparison served. Beyond that, as Olivia took every opportunity to point out, comparing Jones to bin Laden was dangerous in that it minimized the danger posed by Jones. Bin Laden’s best days had been over on September 12. One of the most famous men in history, he’d spent the rest of his life huddled in various hiding places, watching himself on TV. Jones, on the other hand, was little known outside of the United Kingdom, and even though he had blown up 163 people in eight separate incidents before his thirtieth birthday, there was little doubt that he would kill many more than that in the future.

  Since he was out of the United Kingdom, and unlikely to return, he’d have to be caught in some other country.

  Awkward, that.

  Fortunately there was this thing MI6, an entity whose purpose was to operate in places that did not happen to belong to the United Kingdom. And so when Olivia’s bosses there asked her to write reports about Abdallah Jones, it was not simply because they wanted to fatten his already huge dossier. It was because they wanted to work out some way of catching him or killing him.

  Olivia had assumed it was all academic, at least to her. Her languages were English, Mandarin, (less so) Russian, and (even less so) Welsh. This made it unlikely for her to get an undercover posting in the places where Abdallah Jones tended to hang out. So all her flawlessly gardened memos and PowerPoint presentations about what a bad actor Jones was and how important it was to go after him had seemed free of any taint of self-interest; MI6 could throw its entire annual budget after Jones and it wouldn’t bring Olivia Halifax-Lin any more budget authority or any chance at operational glory.

  After a shoot-out in Mindanao that had left several American and Filipino special forces troops dead, Jones had moved to Manila for a couple of months and then breezed out of town hours before a police raid, leaving behind a fully operational bomb factory that he had thoughtfully booby-trapped. Circumstantial evidence suggested that he must have gotten passage to Taiwan on a fishing vessel. The Chinese-speaking world was not a normal locus of Islamic terror, and so why he had gone to Taiwan, and what he had done there, could only be guessed at.

  After six months of lying very low, he had made the jump across the straits to Xiamen, of all places.

  Vague as it might have sounded, this was incredibly precise and specific intelligence that hinted at the existence of extraordinary sources and methods. Though Olivia had not been told this explicitly, it was easy enough to guess that MI6 must have an informant in Pakistan who was privy to messages being passed between Jones and his al-Qaeda contacts.

  She did know this much for certain: through that channel, MI6 had obtained the name of a city (Xiamen) and a couple of mobile numbers. Radio frequency devices had been used to scan for the digital signature of those mobile phones and slowly zero in on the place where they were being used. Much of this had been done in collaboration with American three-letter agencies, through pure signals intelligence technology: satellites, listening posts on the nearby Taiwanese island of Kinmen, and remote-control devices dropped in Xiamen by contract operatives who, of course, had no idea what they were doing or who they were working for.

  That whole phase of the operation had been based on the premise, first put forth by Olivia, that Jones had to be sitting in one place most of the time. A tall black man simply couldn’t move around in a Chinese city without attracting a huge amount of attention. He must have a safe house somewhere and he must spend virtually all his time in it, communicating via phone. All of which was perfectly obvious to anyone who’d ever been in China, or even in Chinatown, but it had apparently come as a useful insight to some people in MI6 who had assumed that, because Xiamen was a big international port city, Abdallah Jones could wander about in the same way he might have done in Paris or Berlin.

  Through these technical means, anyway, the signals intelligence geeks had narrowed Jones’s location down to roughly one square kilometer before Jones had had the good sense to throw away his phones and swap them out for new ones.

  The day after those phones had gone dark, Olivia had been put on a plane to Singapore.

  No particular orders awaited her there, and so she just wandered around Chinatown for a few days, reassuring herself that she really could pass for Chinese.

  Then, in the abrupt and enigmatic style she was beginning to get used to, she was flown to Sydney, and from there to an airport on some place called Hamilton Island, where she was met by John, a sunburned Brit, formerly of the Royal Marines’ Special Boat service, now working, or pretending to work, as a recreational scuba diving instructor. From the airport, John and Olivia walked (the first time in her life she had ever departed from an airport as a pedestrian) to an anchorage only a few hundred meters away, where a diving boat awaited. Olivia made herself at home in a cabin while John motored to a smaller island a few kilometers away.

  Then John spent three days teaching Olivia all that he could about scuba diving.

  Then he took her back to the airport, gave her a great big salty/sandy hug, and put her on another plane. She was sad to see the last of him but also a little bit relieved. Less than twelve hours after she’d first come aboard his boat, Olivia and John had started having sex, and hadn’t stopped until ten minutes before the stroll to the airport. This was by far the fastest time Olivia had ever gone zero to sixty with any man; she was thrilled, shocked, and embarrassed by it and understood that if she had stayed on that boat for even one more day, the whole situation would have started to go sour and maybe even blown up her career.

  Flying back into Singapore with John’s handprints almost palpable on her, she followed instructions to go and dine at a particular restaurant. There she met a man named Stan, whose attempts to dress like a tourist did very little to hide the fact that he was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Stan and Olivia ate noodles together and then proceeded by taxi to Sembawang Wharves, where Olivia boarded an American destroyer in a long raincoat with the hood up while carrying a large umbrella. It wasn’t raining.

  The destroyer seemed impatient for her to arrive, and cast off its lines and headed out to sea even while she was being shown to her accommodations. Somewhat to her relief, Olivia did not find herself having impulsive sex with Stan or any other members of the destroyer’s crew.

  A day and a half later, under heavy clouds just before daybreak, she was transferred to a Royal Navy submarine that had been waiting for them out in the middle of nowhere. Here the accommodations were the tiniest imaginable, and she saw all sorts of circumstantial evidence that men and stuff had been hastily and grudgingly moved aside for her benefit. A waterproof pouch awaited her. It contained a cheap but reasonably presentable business suit from a Shanghai tailor who ha
d evidently been supplied with her measurements. There was also a purse, prepacked with her Chinese identity card; her Chinese passport; a somewhat used wallet containing credit cards, money, photos, and other plausible wallet contents; half-used-up containers of the same cosmetics she used normally, mostly Shiseido stuff that could be obtained in any city in the world; and other purse junk, such as used train tickets, receipts, candy, cough drops, breath mints, tampons, dental floss, hotel give-away sewing kit, Krazy Glue, and, inevitably, a condom, expiration date three years ago, artfully timeworn so it would look like she had thrown it into her purse after a mandatory safe sex workshop and forgotten about it.

  The captain of the sub handed her a sealed envelope, half an inch thick, covered with warnings as to its secrecy. She opened it up to find three items:

  • A letter from her boss telling her to establish the precise whereabouts of Abdallah Jones. This document did not bother to point out, or even hint at, the terrible things that would happen to Jones soon afterward. This only made it feel heavier in her hands, as if it had been typed out onto a sheet of uranium.

  • The dossier of her Chinese alter ego. Most of this she had written herself and had memorized, but they’d apparently included it in case she wanted to do some last-minute cribbing.

  • An addendum explaining how the hell her alter ego had suddenly found herself in Xiamen. This she read closely, since it all came as a surprise to her.

  Aboard the sub was a squad of Special Boat service men. One of them showed her a place where an extra pod had been welded onto the hull of the submarine, like a wen on a camel. This could be accessed through a system of hatches. Olivia was quite certain that it was the most expensive single object she had ever seen in her life. The pod was a tiny submarine, capable of holding up to half a dozen men. “Or five men and one woman, if it comes to that,” the SBS man said. In some ways it was a simple vessel. It was not made to be filled with air or to withstand the pressure of the ocean. The seawater filled it, and the occupants wore scuba gear. But in other respects it was loaded with what she took to be fantastically complex navigation and stealth technology.