Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  One of the men in the windbreakers—Khalid—announced, “Tonight, you will fly to Islamabad.”

  He then smiled sweetly as Pavel and Sergei broke out into nervous laughter.

  “Where is Ivanov?” Pavel wanted to know. He had asked it several times during the phone call. But Zula had never answered it directly until now.

  “Dead,” she said, and looked significantly at Khalid.

  Pavel and Sergei didn’t believe it for a moment. But only for a moment.

  “Who is this man?” Pavel asked her.

  Khalid set down his drink, reached up, grasped his zipper pull, and drew it down to his belly. The garment parted to reveal a sort of vest, sewn out of canvas, sporting a row of long, slender vertical pockets around the midriff. Each of the pockets was bulging full. From the top of each protruded a cylinder of clear plastic, like a piece of kitchen wrap that had been rolled around a flattened tube, about the size of a jumbo burrito, of amorphous yellowish-white stuff, a little bit like pie crust dough that hadn’t been rolled out yet. Electrical wires emerged from the top of each dough-tube. They were all linked together and ran up to Khalid’s shoulder and then down the sleeve of his windbreaker. He had his hand in his lap, but now coyly displayed it to Pavel and Sergei, letting them see a black plastic object topped with a red button.

  Pavel and Sergei couldn’t make sense of it for a few moments. Of course it was obviously an explosive vest. Yet to see one right there on a person’s body was so shocking that the mind couldn’t accept it at first. As if you had found Hitler in your kitchen.

  “I’ve been instructed to tell you a lot of gruesome stuff about what happens when it goes off,” Zula said. “Do I need to? I mean, the gist of it is that it’ll not only kill us but basically bring down half of the building.”

  Neither Pavel nor Sergei had anything to say.

  The windbreaker was zipped back up.

  The waitress brought them their drinks. Zula asked for the check.

  “I’ve also been instructed to tell you that there are two taxis waiting outside. Pavel goes in the first, Sergei in the second. One of these guys with the vests will ride in each taxi, to preserve, I guess, the threat. We’ll go straight to the airport and depart for Islamabad as soon as you can get through your preflight checklist. Are there any questions?”

  There were no questions.

  Leading the four men out across the lobby, Zula felt like a terrorist.

  It felt sort of cool.

  Not that she was in danger of signing up with these guys any time soon. The burqa requirement, the stoning, and so on pretty much ruled that out. But she had been so powerless for so long (and yet not that long—less than a week). Striding out of the Hyatt with enough PETN in her wake to take down the building gave her some weird vicarious feeling of power. The tired businessmen checking in at the registration desk were still giving her the same up-and-down body scan look. And yet she didn’t care what they thought of her any longer. She had gone beyond all that, was part of a reality much bigger and more intense than anything they could possibly imagine. They and their opinions of her were irrelevant. Puny.

  To be a man who had been helpless his entire life? And to have this power? To be able to access this feeling that she was just tasting now? It must be the most potent drug in the world.

  When she climbed into the backseat of the taxi, she could see from the look on Jones’s face that he was high on that drug too. “I badly want to turn this thing around and go back into town,” he remarked. He was fiddling with the screen of his phone.

  “Why?”

  “We found Sokolov.”

  Suddenly she wasn’t high on the drug anymore. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious in her face.

  “Or at least, we know where he went. Place on Gulangyu.”

  So what’s going to happen now? she wanted to ask. But she didn’t want to get in trouble for putting her nose where it didn’t belong.

  He was looking at her as if reading her mind. He wanted to tell her. Wanted her to ask.

  She refused to give him that satisfaction.

  “They’re going there now,” he said, “and they’re going to take care of him.”

  IF HIS EXPERIENCE as the creator of REAMDE had taught Marlon anything at all, it was that something always got massively screwed up with any plan, and you never knew what that something was until it happened. In this case, it was that Csongor rowed too hard. Marlon had first encountered the Hungarian in extremely chaotic circumstances, and for most of their acquaintance he had been too distracted to really pay close attention to the man’s physical presence. At 190 centimeters, Marlon considered himself unusually tall. But in looking at Csongor, he’d had the unaccustomed experience of seeing one who was taller. And he was tempted to guess that Csongor was twice his weight, but he knew that couldn’t be possible. He carried some weight around his midsection, but none of it was what you’d call flab; his head was big and wide, but it did not support any redundant chins. The power with which he pulled on the oars gave Marlon the nervous feeling that the boat was being jerked out from under him, and that was just in normal rowing. During the last minute or so before their collision with the fishing boat, Csongor had finally gotten it into his head that he was rowing for his life, and possibly for Zula’s, and had hauled on the oars with so much power that Marlon had instinctively crouched lower in the boat and put a steadying hand on each gunwale.

  Csongor, of course, could not see where he was going and so in the final moments Marlon, not trusting his ability to communicate in English, began pointing this way and that, telling him which way to steer. He had neglected to allow for the fishing boat’s bow wave, which caused their prow to pitch up sharply at the very end; then one of the tires slung along its sides bashed into them and flipped the boat over in an instant. Marlon, who saw it coming, jumped straight up off his bench even as the little boat was spinning out from under him and managed to snag the rim of a tire with one hand. The other hand followed it an instant later, which was a good thing because otherwise he’d have lost his grip. The larger vessel was moving faster than he’d estimated, and it positively yanked him forward. This drew all of his attention for a moment, but then he looked back along the side and saw the capsized rowboat rapidly falling away to aft, and no sign of Csongor.

  Then a hand broke the water and groped up and pawed uselessly at the upturned hull. Another hand joined it. The boat jerked straight down, as if grabbed from beneath by a shark. Csongor was trying to find a way to get his weight on top of it, but it was rapidly falling away to aft. Finally Csongor’s torso rose partway out of the water and a hand shot up and grabbed the rim of the last tire. Instantly Csongor was buried in a bow wave of his own making, the same thing that had hit Marlon a few moments earlier: he was being pulled through the sea by the tow rope of his arm, and his head was breaking the waves. But with some more struggling and wrestling, he was able to get the second arm out of the water and grip one of the ropes by which the tire was suspended, and then do a pull-up that got his head out of the water so that he could breathe.

  Marlon looked away and tended to his own problems for a moment. His upper body was out of the water, but his legs were being dragged along, creating powerful suction that threatened to rip him off the tire. Inching, like a rock climber, to a slightly better grip, he was able to lift a leg out and drape it over the adjoining tire, and this both reduced the suction and gave him leverage to clamber up and get better handholds. He worked his way to a place where he was standing with one foot on the tire’s rim and reaching up over his head with both hands to grip the boat’s gunwale.

  He risked a look back and saw that Csongor had achieved similar results. The little rowboat was nowhere to be seen. Csongor was holding on with one hand, using the other to pat himself down, verifying that the gun was still where he had put it, the shoulder bag still slung across his body.

  Then he began climbing, and Marlon followed suit. In a few moments, he was able to vault over the
gunwale and land in a crouch on the main deck. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. From the sounds of it, Yuxia was still doing an excellent job of raising hell on the other side.

  Csongor, squatting back at the stern, looked across to the opposite side, then turned to Marlon and shrugged, indicating that he saw nothing. He rose to his feet, took the pistol out of his pocket, checked it, and then began to walk around the back of the superstructure.

  Marlon took one of the stun grenades out of his pocket and got his finger into its ring. Then he walked across the front of the superstructure, sticking close to its front bulkhead in case anyone might be looking down from the bridge, and peeked around the corner. Perhaps three meters aft, light was shining from an open hatch. Two men, a large one and a smaller one, were standing on the catwalk outside, looking in. The larger of the two got a snarling look on his face and strode over the high threshold into the cabin. As soon as he was out of the way, Marlon was able to look all the way aft to the stern of the boat and see Csongor’s bulky form there.

  Marlon began to walk aft. Csongor began to walk forward. The smaller man who was still out on the gangway noticed Marlon first, and his whole body went into a kind of spasm. There was no helping it; he couldn’t prevent himself from being astonished at the sight of a stranger on his boat. Marlon caught his eye and pointed suggestively aft. The man turned to look in the direction indicated and saw Csongor raising a pistol and aiming at his face. While this poor fellow was thus distracted, Marlon pulled the pin out of the stun grenade—this was surprisingly difficult—and then reached around and chucked it into the cabin. He noticed, then, that the door opened outward, and so he gave it a shove and clanged it shut and leaned against it just in time to feel a mighty boom through his butt and feel a blast of hot air and shattered glass smack him in the back of the head.

  SOKOLOV HAD A key card that would enable him to summon an elevator, but he reckoned that the jihadists might be down in the lobby, in view of the indicator panel. They might notice one of the lifts going into motion and stopping at 43. If so, they could simply kill him when the door opened. So he took the stairs instead, just as Zula had done the other day. He took them fast, bounding over banisters and caroming off walls. But he was still moving a hell of a lot slower than those guys in the elevator.

  Fearing that the fire exit to the outside might set off an alarm, he took a chance on the door to the lobby, pushing it open slightly first to check for an ambush. No one was there.

  They might be waiting to ambush him from the plantings outside, but if they really knew he was here and wanted to ambush him, they’d have gone about it differently. So he walked stolidly out of the building, down the drive, and out to the street. Then he broke into a jog, headed toward the ferry terminals, less than a kilometer away. He was keeping an eye out for the jihadists the entire way but saw nothing.

  A ferry was loading at the terminal for Gulangyu. Sokolov swung wide around it, avoiding streetlamps, and made his way down to a smaller and lower dock nearby, where several speedboats were tied up, and their drivers sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking. These were the high-speed water taxis for moneyed passengers, and Sokolov had been eyeing them with interest the whole time he’d been in Xiamen.

  On the way over he had made a large withdrawal from the Bank of CamelBak. He let them see the wad of magenta bills in his hand. This got their attention. Not in a favorable way. It made them nervous and suspicious. He could not concern himself with their emotional state just now. He nodded across the water and said, “Gulangyu.”

  One of the boatmen was just a little quicker than the others; Sokolov ended up in his boat. This was a kind of small pleasure craft seen by the millions on lakes and rivers all over the world: an open white fiberglass skiff with a big outboard motor on its back, capable of seating maybe six people comfortably. Orange life vests were stored in an open bin, probably in obedience to some regulation, and disposable plastic rain ponchos were available for lightly dressed passengers caught in sudden downpours.

  The ferry had already pulled away from its dock. At this time of night there were not too many people headed for Gulangyu. Most of the passengers remained in the ferry’s roofed, illuminated, Plexiglas-walled interior, perhaps to avoid a faint suggestion of a chill in the air; though around here, “chill” meant that a woman in a spaghetti-strap dress might experience goose bumps when exposed to the full force of the wind.

  Not the least bit chilly were four male passengers grouped on an open deck up at the ferry’s bow, gazing toward Gulangyu, pointing and talking.

  As the boat came abreast of the ferry—for it was going twice as fast as the larger vessel—Sokolov picked up a plastic poncho, swept it over his shoulders, and poked his head through the hole in the middle, then pulled the hood up over his head. He left it on, and did not look back, until a couple of minutes later, when the boatman cut his engine and let the little vessel glide the last few meters toward the Gulangyu terminal.

  As he was disembarking, Sokolov glanced back and saw that the ferry was not as far behind them as he had hoped it would be. The little boat had accelerated more quickly at the beginning of the journey and jumped out to a lead, but the ferry, once it got going, moved faster than it appeared to.

  Still, there was a reason why people paid more for the speedboats, and Sokolov reckoned it had to do with the congestion in the terminals. Gulangyu Island sported a number of parks, tourist attractions, and bars that attracted a younger crowd, many of whom were trying to make their way back to Xiamen at the moment, and so the terminal on this end was much more crowded.

  He made as if to shrug off the plastic poncho, then thought better of it. The boatman was giving him an odd look. Sokolov held out his hand, palm up, and looked to the sky, trying to pantomime: Does it look like rain to you? He could not tell whether he was getting through to the boatman at all. Finally he plucked at it and dangled a couple of the magenta bills. These were accepted and the boatman turned away. Transaction finished.

  Sokolov flipped the hood up over his shaved head. He’d removed his hair to make himself harder to identify, in the event that the PSB had found a witness to this morning’s events or caught something on a surveillance camera. But now it was making him stand out in a way that wasn’t to his advantage.

  He strode through the waterfront park for a distance, startling a few pairs of young lovers, then cut uphill on a steep street channeled between old stone walls. This was one of the few roads that actually showed up on the map. It wound from side to side, following the island’s steep contours, dodging huge outcroppings of gray stone that were plastered with vines, clutched in the monstrous root systems of outlandish trees, and occasionally incised with staircases. From time to time, just after rounding a corner, Sokolov would stop and peer behind to see if anyone was coming up the same way. He saw nothing obvious. But the island’s road network was a maze, and Olivia’s building could be approached from more than one direction.

  As a matter of fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he knew where he was; he felt that he should have been there by now, but in the dark he couldn’t see any of the landmarks he had picked out earlier.

  His view was blocked for a while by a rank of tall trees growing on the inside of a wall, marking the edge of a compound: some school or government institution. Then he came into a crossroads and saw the landmark he’d been searching for: a hotel built atop a high stony rise, with terraces and gardens that afforded a fine view over Gulangyu, the strait, and the city beyond. He had sat there for a while earlier today, gazing down into the courtyard of Olivia’s building, watching people come and go, and trying to come up with a Plan C for getting into her apartment after Plans A and B had exposed him to unacceptable risks of detection.

  So now he understood where he was and where he needed to go: up a street that forked to the left. But coming down that street toward him, filling its width from wall to wall, was a group of half a dozen young men who he could tell had been enjoying a few dr
inks and were now ambling toward the ferry terminal. They were in the cheerful and gregarious stage of drunkenness, accosting everyone they saw and trying to strike up conversations in a way that pretended to be friendly but was in truth quite aggressive. One of them had already seen Sokolov, absurdly conspicuous in his shaved head and plastic poncho, and was pointing him out to a fellow. Sokolov cruised into the other fork and, as soon as he was out of view, sprinted flat out for a hundred meters or so, just to get out of hailing range.

  An alley presented itself on his left, and he ducked into it. Following it back toward the looming hotel, he began to see landmarks he recognized. Running up a stone stairway overarched with big old trees, he emerged into the somewhat larger street that ran past Olivia’s building. Standing right there were a couple of old ladies out for a walk who looked at Sokolov as if he were a marmoset in a zoo. He nodded to them politely and turned in the direction of Olivia’s building. Two young women emerged from a gate and pursued him up the street for a short distance, giggling and pantomiming picture-taking gestures. They wanted to get a snapshot of him to show their friends. He quickened his pace and declined the offer.

  He had to get out of this fucking country now.

  Then, there it was. The gateway to the compound that housed Olivia’s building, absolutely distinctive because of a tree that had taken root on top of the adjoining wall and spread its weird molten limbs all over the stonework, trying to find some actual dirt to grow in, possibly seeking refuge from the relentless attentions of three different kinds of flowering vines that were using it as a trellis. Sokolov checked in all directions and saw nothing untoward on the street. He walked through the gate into the walled garden that surrounded the building.

  The place was constructed in a generally European style as reinterpreted by whatever local artisans the owner had been able to hire a hundred years ago. It was vaguely Classical, with a row of four spindly pillars supporting a veranda and, above it, a balcony. Ahead of him, on the veranda, silhouetted against the lights of the entryway, were four men, checking the place out, talking on phones. Darting their heads this way and that. Sokolov, feeling like a little kid playing some kind of ridiculous game, stepped behind a tree so that they wouldn’t see him if they looked back. It had been a hell of a long time since he had been reduced to hiding behind a tree, and he did not view it as much of a professional achievement.