Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  They made a cursory tour of the cabins, mostly just checking for dangerous and/or useful articles, and then ventured belowdecks. Things looked different here from when Yuxia had been put through her ordeal. Then, the place had seemed larger, since its contents had been neatly stowed in boxes. But in the hours since, some kind of frenzied unpacking had taken place, and junk was strewn all over, interspersed with slashed-open cardboard boxes. Yuxia remarked on this, which led to a conversation with Marlon in which she explained, as curtly as she could, what had happened in this place during the afternoon. Yuxia held up her wrists to show the damage inflicted by the ropes as she had struggled. This seemed to affect Marlon deeply, and she was astonished to see tears beginning to come into his eyes.

  They decided to get out of there and sort through the junk later.

  Batu conducted them to the galley and, as a sort of automatic reflex, got busy making tea. Watching Batu fill a kettle from a spigot, Marlon asked him about the ship’s supply of potable water, and Batu assured him that there was plenty—hundreds of liters—in its storage tanks; he prided himself on keeping these topped up at all times. “Water is cheap—not like fuel!”

  This prompted the obvious question—which, as soon as it was asked, made Marlon feel foolish for not having asked it before—of how much fuel the vessel might have on board.

  Batu didn’t know the answer, but the look on his face made it obvious that this could be a serious problem.

  “I’m going to go up to the bridge and look at the fuel gauge,” Marlon said, getting to his feet, but Batu waved him off, saying that there was no such thing on a boat like this; fuel level was estimated by dipping a stick into the tank and seeing how much of it came out wet. So Marlon sat down again, and he and Yuxia waited while the tea was prepared.

  “That guy on the bridge,” Marlon said. “Mohammed. Was he one of the ones who—”

  “Who what?”

  “Did that thing to you?”

  “Yes,” Yuxia said curtly.

  That seemed to dampen the conversation, and so they began to sip at their tea, sitting back in their chairs a little. Yuxia’s eyes fell closed, then slowly opened. “I am going down,” she said in English. Switching back into Mandarin, she asked Batu to pour a larger cup of tea—not just a thimble—so that she could take it to Csongor, who might be having a hard time staying awake up there. Batu rummaged through his bungee-corded cabinets until he found a mug. Meanwhile Marlon asked him, “When was the last time they bought fuel?”

  Batu had a difficult time remembering. “They brought out a ­couple of drums last week,” he said. He set the mug on the table, holding it down with one hand, since the boat had begun to roll as they got away from the coast and into higher seas offshore. He poured the mug full, pausing once to refill the little teapot.

  “A couple of drums,” Marlon repeated. “That can’t be very much for a vessel this size.”

  Batu made no comment.

  “There’s really no reason to fill the tanks unless you’re going out on a long sea voyage,” Marlon said, working through the logic of it. “And this thing didn’t go out on long voyages, did it?”

  “Not recently,” Batu said, meaning not since it became the floating headquarters of a terrorist cell.

  Yuxia tossed back the last of her tea-thimble, then picked up Csongor’s mug and got carefully to her feet, stepping across the galley in a wide-based gait to compensate for the vessel’s movement beneath her. She passed out through the hatch and began ascending the stairs that led up to the bridge.

  “What do you think the range of this boat is? Enough to make Taiwan?” Marlon asked.

  Batu shrugged, as if to say, You’re asking a Mongolian about boats?

  From above, they heard Yuxia asking a question, then flashing into anger and speaking in a raised voice. There was a massive thud, as of a body hitting the deck, and the crash of a shattering mug. Csongor cried out in a blurry voice. There was more crashing and banging, and then a series of very loud pops.

  CSONGOR HAD KNOWN it was a mistake to sit down. The only way he could remain awake was by staying on his feet. But when the boat worked its way out into the big swells, and the deck began to heave and bank underneath him, he finally had the excuse he needed. Until then he’d been standing in the middle of the bridge, looking out the front windows over Mohammed’s shoulders. But along the aft bulkhead was a short bench that had been calling to Csongor for a while. Like everything else of consequence, it was welded to the deck; these ­people used welders as carpenters used nail guns. Csongor backed away from Mohammed, moving slowly as he compensated for the pitching of the deck, and let himself down to the bench.

  Yuxia’s voice was in his ears, nearby. Odd, since Yuxia was not on the bridge.

  Another oddity: Csongor’s eyes were closed. He didn’t remember allowing that to happen. He got them open and discovered Yuxia just inside the hatchway with a mug in her hand. She was looking across the bridge at Mohammed, whose posture seemed to indicate that he had just spun around to gaze at Yuxia in astonishment.

  Astonishment, and fear.

  Mohammed was holding something in one hand: a gray plastic microphone, connected by a coiling black cord to a small electronic box mounted on brackets above the control panel. This had been dark when Csongor’s eyes had closed, but glowing LEDs shone out of it now.

  The pilot was talking on the two-way radio, or getting ready to.

  Csongor reached for the pistol in his back waistband while using his other hand to push himself up off the bench. He noticed that his feet were slow to move. At about the same time, Yuxia was throwing the contents of the mug at Mohammed.

  Csongor’s body weight was now well forward, but his feet still hadn’t budged. They were somehow trapped. He realized he was going to fall flat on his face. His hands came forward instinctively to stop his fall. One of these had achieved a partial grip on the pistol. His ankles were getting torqued in a bad way and he was going down in an extremely awkward fashion, and at some risk of taking Yuxia down with him. He came to rest painfully and in discrete sections, like a big tree breaking into chunks as it fell over in a windstorm. The pistol went sliding across the deck. He could not reach it. Mohammed was crying out in rage and wiping hot tea out of his face. Yuxia hurled the empty mug at him, then dropped to her knees and clawed the pistol up off the deck. She aimed it in his approximate direction and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened because the safety was on.

  “Yuxia, give it to me!” Csongor cried, with a beckoning motion, and Yuxia turned and slid the pistol across the deck to him.

  Mohammed had recovered enough to reel in the microphone, which had been dangling at the end of its cord. He lifted it to his mouth.

  Csongor flicked off the pistol’s safety and cocked the hammer. He aimed it at Mohammed, but his view along the sights was blocked abruptly by Yuxia, who threw herself across the bridge and made a grab at the microphone. There was a few moments’ wrestling match. Mohammed shoved her away, but she dragged him back with her. This happened to give Csongor a clear shot at the radio. One bullet through that box would put an end to the pilot’s broadcasting ambitions. Csongor drew a bead on it.

  Mohammed reached up and grabbed a flashlight bracketed above the bridge windows and clocked Yuxia in the head with it and she fell backward to the deck, clutching her face and crying out, more in anger than pain. He raised the mike to his mouth again. Csongor squeezed the trigger and went deaf. The pistol snapped his hands back. A hole appeared in the window above the radio, and cracks networked across the glass. Csongor fired a second time and made another hole in the glass, a few centimeters from the first. He lowered his aim just a hair and pulled the trigger three times in succession.

  Mohammed had frozen for a moment after the first bullet had been fired. Then, looking across the bridge to see Csongor aiming in roughly his direction, he assumed that Csongor was aiming at him and decided to get out of there. His way out happened to take him directly in front
of the radio and so at least one of Csongor’s three-round fusillade struck him in the thorax. He went down immediately.

  MARLON RAN HALFWAY up the steps and then paused, wondering if he was about to get his head blown off. But then he heard Csongor’s voice, and then Yuxia’s, and so he climbed up the rest of the way and entered the bridge.

  Csongor was lying on the deck, twisted around in an awkward position. Yuxia was sitting in one corner, holding one hand over a bloody laceration on the side of her head and weeping. Mohammed was lying on the deck surrounded by a lot of blood, still gripping a radio microphone. Its cable, now stretched nearly straight, ran almost vertically up from the microphone to a small box mounted to the top of the ship’s control panel. The box had been perforated by a bullet, and the window above it sported two more bullet holes and a fan of cracks.

  The mike slipped out of Mohammed’s relaxing hand and jumped up and bobbed on the end of its cord like a yo-yo.

  Csongor did something with the pistol to make it safe, then drew himself back toward a crude bench at the back of the bridge. Something was amiss with his ankles. Stepping over to get a better look, Marlon saw that both had been lashed to the bench’s supporting angle irons by several turns of electrical wire. A reel and a pair of wire cutters rested on the deck nearby.

  Marlon fetched the wire cutters and tossed them to Csongor, who went to work snipping himself loose. “I went to sleep,” Csongor said. “He wanted to use the radio—to call his friends, I suppose. But he must have been afraid that I would wake up from the sound of his voice. He couldn’t attack me because he didn’t have any weapons. So he did this. He knew that he would have time to send out a distress call before I could get loose and come stop him. But Yuxia showed up.”

  “Did she show up in time?” Marlon asked.

  “I don’t know,” Csongor said, “but I think she did.”

  Marlon, stepping over a broad ribbon of blood that had found a path across the deck, went to Yuxia. A flashlight was rolling around on the floor with blood on it. Controlling a strong feeling of disgust, Marlon picked this up and turned it on. Yuxia was fully conscious but very upset. “Let me see it,” Marlon said. “Let me see it.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  “Let me have a look.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I want to see.”

  He finally understood that she did not care about the wound on her head and just wanted some comfort. He did not feel it was appropriate, just yet, to put his arms around her, or anything like that, and so he reached down with his free hand and rested it on top of her shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll get some ice from Batu,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said in a tiny voice, like a child. Not like her.

  Marlon got up and passed out through the hatch to the gangway just in time to hear a loud scraping and bumping noise from above. Batu was not down in the galley, where Marlon had left him; he was up on the roof of the bridge. Thumping footsteps suggested he had now gone into rapid motion.

  A large white fiberglass capsule rolled and banged down from above, nearly catching Marlon in the head. It splashed down into the sea alongside the ship.

  Batu was above him, perched like a cat on the railing. A faded orange life preserver was slung over one shoulder. “There’s more water down in the hold,” he said, “in plastic drums. Use it sparingly. You don’t know how long you’ll be drifting.” And then he sprang from the railing and plummeted about five meters into the water.

  The white capsule was bobbing in the ship’s wake now. It had fallen open, and something big and orange was blooming on the water: the life raft, inflating automatically. Batu, belly down on his life preserver, was dog-paddling toward it.

  Marlon went back into the bridge and stepped gingerly across a remarkably wide pool of blood to the control panel, where he pulled back on the lever that controlled engine speed. Then he swung the wheel around so that the vessel was pointed due east, toward Taiwan.

  “Why did you slow us down?” Yuxia asked.

  “To conserve fuel,” Marlon said.

  “You think we’re going to run out?” Csongor asked.

  “Batu does.”

  FINE, SEE YOU AT ELEVEN.

  This was the text message that Olivia found on the phone when she turned it on while peeing in a thicket at 6:49 the next morning. It was a response to last night’s HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER.

  Actually the whole island was a thicket; she had found an especially dense part of it for this purpose and checked for snakes and bugs before dropping into a squat.

  She and whoever was at the other end of this connection—presumably a handler in London, routed through an untraceable connection to the instant messaging network—were using a completely open and public channel to pass messages in the clear. They had to be coy. HAVE GONE TO HAICANG TO CHECK IN ON GRANDMOTHER was written in a prearranged code, using characters calculated not to arouse the interest of the PSB. She spent a minute or two squatting there and puzzling over SEE YOU AT ELEVEN before realizing that it probably meant exactly what it said. Kinmen was connected to Taiwan by a long-range ferry, used mostly by mainland Chinese tourists, and by regular air service. The ferry wasn’t much use in these circumstances, but it would be easy for the British embassy in Taipei to send someone out on a commercial flight to meet with her at the airport.

  This was a virgin phone with no traceable connections to Olivia or anyone else, and she was on Taiwanese soil anyway, and so she felt no hesitation about using its Internet connection to surf for airline schedules. It seemed that a flight from Taipei was coming in to the local terminal at 10:45.

  She returned to the bunker to find it empty. But after a bit of looking around, she found Sokolov standing near the edge of the minefield, gazing up the length of the beach. Back toward Xiamen. He checked his watch, then turned to look at her.

  She reached out with one hand and found his. He did not snatch it out of her grasp, and so she pulled on it and began walking.

  She led him back to the bunker. Still not looking at him, she got up on tiptoe and steadied herself with an elbow crooked around the back of his neck and carefully touched her lips to his. Her heart beating hard, more from fear than from passion, since she was afraid that he would turn away, reject her. That his not taking advantage of her last night was simple lack of interest. But his hand came around against the small of her back, and it became clear that he had only been waiting for her permission.

  She had wondered how it would feel having sex on the bed of matted vines, which had become flattened during the night, but it ended up not being an issue since they did it standing up, with her back against the wall. After months of hard work in Xiamen, characterized by nothing but loneliness and anxiety, it felt so good that it brought her almost to a kind of weeping and grateful hysteria. For his part, Sokolov, after he had let her gently down, tumbled back onto the floor, slapping it with both hands, and collapsed as if crucified under the beam of sunlight coming in through the door.

  “I am no longer poor fucked Russian,” he stated, after ten minutes or so.

  “I’ve got news for you, honey—”

  “No. Alluding to yesterday’s conversation. In flat.”

  “Well, you’re out of China at least,” she said, “but—”

  “No. I have useful information,” he said.

  “Really.”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of useful information?” Your spy Olivia Halifax-Lin is a helpless slut.

  “Information that can help your employer find Abdallah Jones,” he said.

  “Aha.”

  Sokolov got his legs under him, rolled up to a low squatting position. He reached for his trousers, which like many other items of clothing had gone ballistic a few minutes ago and remained sprawled in their positions of impact. He stood up and pulled them on. “Because,” he said, “you have message, no?”

  “How’d you guess?”<
br />
  “Heard phone vibrate.”

  He politely looked the other way as she stood up and mounted a search-and-rescue operation for her clothes. Crisscrossing the floor of the bunker on filthy, bare feet, she thought about the amount of effort and money she devoted, every day, to personal grooming, and how completely beside the point all of it had been during her last two sexual liaisons.

  “Why did you wait until now to tell me?” she asked.

  “Because until now we were fucking,” he pointed out.

  “No, I mean why didn’t you tell me last night?”

  “Because last night I did not have information.”

  “How could you possibly have obtained any information this morning?”

  “This must remain a mystery,” he said, “for now.” But he glanced upward as he said it, as if the answer were written in the sky above the Xunjianggang.

  ZULA FELT THE jet thumping and bucking underneath her and startled awake, fearful/hopeful that they had come under some sort of police assault. But in the first moments after she opened her eyes, she was astonished to see buildings and parked planes streaking past them, and bright sunlight glancing in low over the sea.

  She was on a plane, or something else that moved pretty damned fast. She didn’t even know whether it was landing or taking off.

  How could the sun be up? Hours must have passed while she was slumbering.

  The fact that she was lying in a king-sized bed did nothing to help her get her bearings.