Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  The ground was definitely falling away.

  First things first: she was on a plane. The plane was taking off. It was something like seven or eight in the morning. The bed was in a private cabin in the plane’s tail—Ivanov’s cabin. She could smell his hair oil on the pillow.

  The city dropping away from her was Xiamen. Looking out the windows on the right side, she could see, only a mile or two away, the big inlet where Csongor had confronted Jones yesterday. Yuxia’s van and a crushed taxi lay somewhere on its bottom. And a few miles beyond that in the same direction, on the other side of a strait, was the larger of the two Taiwanese islands; she was sighting straight down the length of a beach, prickly with tank traps and shingled with hexagonal blocks.

  Not long after it cleared the runway, the jet banked hard to the right, giving her an even better view of the Taiwanese island—Kinmen—as they swung around it in a broad arc, rapidly gaining altitude, and began to head south. Another turn, a few minutes later, brought them on to what she guessed was a southwesterly course. Nothing but ocean was now visible on the plane’s left, but on the right was the whole Chinese mainland, slowly getting farther away from them.

  She must have fallen asleep in her seat at about one in the morning, when they were still talking of flight plans. Jones or someone must have carried her into the aft cabin and deposited her on the bed. The four “soldiers” who’d been cooling their heels in here must have been evicted and sent up to the main cabin. These men might stone her to death sooner or later, but in the meantime they would go to great lengths to preserve her modesty.

  She remembered one figure very clearly: six hours. That was the amount of time it took to file a domestic flight plan in China. Pavel must have filed such a plan at about the time she’d gone to sleep, and they must have secured approval for takeoff only just now.

  THEY BEGAN TO consider how to arrange transportation to Kinmen’s airport. Olivia used her mobile to pull up a map, from which they learned that they were all of about three thousand meters away from it.

  Olivia was for going straight there. With a pensive and reluctant Sokolov in tow, she began to bushwhack inland. They passed quickly through what turned out to be a narrow belt of woods running parallel to the island’s north shore and emerged into a flat agricultural countryside, gridded with farm lanes. A hamlet, consisting of a ­couple of dozen closely spaced buildings, was only a couple of hundred meters off to their right; they avoided this instinctively and sidetracked away from it until a somewhat larger hamlet came into view ahead of them. Then they began cutting south across the island and soon came upon a larger road that ran east-west, across their path. Nor did that make it unusual, since it seemed as though the island’s centers of population were in its broad east and west ends, and the several roads joining them squeezed together through the island’s narrow waist, which they were transecting: a rocky spine tufted with trees and studded at its summit with the geodesic domes of Cold War radar installations.

  The place was decidedly more rural than the mainland looming over it a few miles across the water. Rural, anyway, by Chinese standards. At no point were they out of sight of a building. Bicyclists rode past in one and twos, looking at them curiously. Olivia was inclined to ignore them and trudge on, but Sokolov was obviously uncomfortable. After they had crossed over the second east-west road, he noticed a nearby watercourse, thick with trees, and led her down into it. It was a sort of drainage ditch or canalized creek that ran under the road through an arched stone culvert. Before disappearing completely into the foliage that lined its banks, Sokolov took a good look around at the flat countryside. They were completely exposed.

  “Good meeting place,” he mused.

  Olivia realized that the openness of the landscape cut both ways: anyone could see them from a distance, but by the same token, no one could sneak up on them here.

  Moving at less than half the speed they could have made in open country, they followed the watercourse south and uphill for almost a kilometer until what had been a narrow stripe of foliage broadened into a wood that merged with the dense quilt of trees spread over the island’s central ridge.

  They had used all their drinking water last night, and because of Sokolov’s precautions they had not come anywhere near a place where they could buy more. “I’m getting really dehydrated,” Olivia remarked at one point, and Sokolov turned and fixed her with a curious look. She decided not to complain about this anymore.

  The airport’s location was now obvious, since from this altitude they were able to watch a plane coming in for a landing and eventually disappearing behind the ridge. Olivia checked her watch and verified that this was the 10:45 flight from Taipei. Her good-girl instincts were telling her to get down there immediately so that she could impress her contact with her punctuality. Sokolov, however, was having none of this. “He will wait,” he pointed out.

  “But—”

  “You are not here to make him have nice day.”

  Olivia could hardly deny that.

  Sokolov took control of the phone, and Olivia watched over his shoulder for a few minutes as he consulted the map. He needed her linguistic help to locate the island’s ferry terminal, where regularly scheduled boats came in from Xiamen. She found this at the island’s southwestern tip. The most obvious route from it to the airport would be along the fattest of Kinmen’s east-west roads, which they had not crossed yet, as it traversed the southern aspect of the ridge.

  They were only about a kilometer—a thousand long strides—from the airport. And yet Sokolov insisted that they hike east—which was to say, away from the ferry terminal—through the worst terrain that he could find, darting over little mountain lanes as necessary, until they came in view of a major road intersection. Sokolov found a place where he could monitor this from cover and sent Olivia down alone, insisting that she wait for a bus so that she could enter the airport “like normal person.” “See you at meeting place,” he said.

  “When?”

  “When you are there.”

  Olivia made a final effort to get semipresentable, waited until the coast was clear, and then emerged from the trees, towing a four-meter-long strand of flowering vine behind one ankle until she kicked free of it. The bus arrived forty-five minutes later and took her on a journey that she could have done on foot in ten.

  During the wait, she had the presence of mind to check the screen of the phone she’d been using and saw the message OUT RUNNING ERRANDS—BUYING A WEDDING GIFT FOR NIECE—I THINK SHE WOULD LIKE NEW KITCHEN KNIFE.

  “Kitchen knife” and “wedding gift” were not established code phrases. “Out running errands” seemed like a tipoff that her contact had decided to leave the airport and go elsewhere on the island. But Olivia had no way of guessing where. And the next bus that came along was headed to the airport whether she liked it or not. She climbed aboard. There were three seats available. She chose one on the aisle, not wanting to present her face in a window.

  She was still puzzling over the message as the bus pulled up in front of the main terminal and disgorged twenty or so locals, mostly airport workers. As Olivia gazed into the terminal building, all her alarm bells went off at once. All the bad things that she’d been trained to look for were there on display, as if this were a spy training film, carefully designed to depict the worst imaginable scenario. Every bench, every snack bar, every security checkpoint had one or two loitering, watchful men, pretending to pay attention to their mobile phones. Some of them even had the temerity to wear sunglasses indoors.

  She was seeing precisely what Sokolov had anticipated: the mainland PSB had packed this morning’s ferry with plainclothes goons who had flooded the airport and any other place where Olivia and Sokolov might be likely to show up. They were keeping an eye out for any white male—but especially one traveling in the company of a Chinese female.

  What those men might actually do, if they sighted the two together, was not clear to her. They had no power to arrest anyone on Taiwanes
e soil. Gunplay in a public space seemed unlikely. But they could take pictures and make a hell of a stink.

  Olivia’s contact, getting off the plane, must have seen the same thing and decided to get out of there.

  She remained aboard the bus, sinking low in her seat and peering through the lower edge of a dirty window. A stocky, middle-aged man, wearing a bulky suit and mirrored shades, was leaning against an advertising case, smoking a cigarette and barking into a phone. As the bus began to pull away, she noted that the case was filled with kitchen cutlery—the traditional Chinese cleaver-shaped knives. Which jogged her memory, finally. The island was within artillery range of Xiamen, and during the late 1950s, half a million high-explosive shells had been lobbed into the place. Over the next two decades, these had been followed by five million shells packed with propaganda leaflets. Local artisans dug them out of the ground and used the steel to make cleavers.

  THE KNIFE FACTORY was an ideal place for a meeting, if one was concerned about being bugged or overheard. It was just a large open industrial structure, filled in the middle with many thousands of old rusted shells, bullet shaped, melon sized. Workers cut them into cigarette-pack-sized chunks using abrasive-wheel saws that shrieked like condemned souls while hurling out showers of sparkling white hellfire. A mechanical hammer beat these out flat, and they were pushed into a roaring furnace for heat treating. Finally, the tempered slabs were ground into knives on stone wheels and finished on belt sanders that looked and sounded as though they could jerk a finger off without noticing. This business of making shells into cutlery was sufficiently unusual that the factory offered tours. Olivia joined a group of five others who had flown in from Taiwan to see the sights and buy knives.

  Getting here had taken long enough that the implications of all those goons in the airport had begun to work themselves out in Olivia’s mind. It was strongly in MI6’s interest to get her safely back to London, and so she had few worries on that score. But Sokolov was a different matter. MI6 did not know, yet, how she had made her way to Kinmen. They didn’t know about her travel buddy. Now that she had made it to Taiwanese soil, he was—to use dry British understatement—inconvenient. But if she were to ditch him here—which would be easy—she would have to spend the rest of her life avoiding mirrors.

  If this had been the good old Cold War days, and Sokolov had been a possible defector, stuck behind the Iron Curtain, then they might have organized some sort of caper to smuggle him out to the West and set him up with a new life. In exchange, he would supply them with priceless military intelligence. But from what little she’d been able to learn, Sokolov divided his time between Toronto, London, and Paris. And there was very little in his head that MI6 didn’t already know.

  “Meng Anlan?”

  The speaker was Chinese, or at least Chinese-looking: a hefty man in his fifties wearing shaded glasses and dressed in the loud shirt of a tourist who didn’t care if everyone knew that he was a tourist. He had been checking her out through those shades.

  She just looked at him. If he had to ask …

  “May I walk with you?” he asked. Or rather shouted, since they were standing two meters away from one of those abrasive-wheel saws.

  It looked like the conversation was going to be in Fujianese-inflected Mandarin. Fine with her.

  She fell in step beside him, and they began a slow procedure of falling farther and farther behind the main tour group. He was shouldering a bag. She hoped it might be full of food. But now was the wrong time to ask.

  What the hell. “Do you have anything—a candy bar, a bag of peanuts.” She had managed to buy water along the way but had not eaten in something close to twenty-four hours.

  “Forgive me,” he said in English, and rummaged in his bag. The best he could come up with was a bag of almonds.

  As she was stuffing these into her mouth, he said: “Bit of a stink.” His accent said that he had grown up in England.

  “I’m sure lots of ­people are bloody furious,” she said. “Can we sort that out later?”

  “Hunger makes you irritable.”

  “It’s not the hunger. It’s the not-knowing-what’s-going-to-happen.”

  “You’re fine,” he said. “You’re safe. You’re going home. But it has to be done with a decent respect for the feelings of that lot.” He nodded toward the mainland, which they could not see from here, but which loomed psychologically over everything. “They watch the ferries. The terminals. If you were to just waltz on board a plane and fly off to Taipei, it would be construed as—”

  “Rubbing their face in it.”

  “Apparently there were a lot of bodies.”

  “Four, to be exact.”

  “In your flat, yes. But there’s the matter of the apartment building—or had you forgotten?”

  “I remember it well.”

  “What in God’s name happened there?”

  “Long story. Not the place for it.”

  “We agree,” the man said.

  “Sorry if I’m focusing too much on narrowly practical matters,” she said, “but how do I get aboard a plane without seeming to ‘waltz on board’?”

  “Use a fake name. Change your appearance. And travel with me.”

  “You think that will fool them?”

  “Actually, I do,” he said, “but even if it doesn’t, the purpose is—”

  “To show a decent respect for their feelings.”

  “Yes.” The man—somehow they had skipped over any sort of formal introduction—drew closer to her and transferred his bag to her shoulder. “Clothes,” he said. “Money. British passport. Not in your name, of course. A veritable cornucopia of feminine hygiene. A few odds and ends.”

  “A book or two?” she asked. “Or is that too much to hope for?”

  He chortled. “You’re already worried about what you’re going to do on the flight to London?”

  “Never mind. I’m sure I’ll be drinking myself senseless.”

  He turned his attention to the knife tour for a few moments, admiring a trip-hammer that was using hydraulic power to beat the hell out of a piece of hot steel being moved around in it by a tong-brandishing worker, stripped from the waist up.

  But then he turned back.

  “There are, of course, many questions.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ll answer them all in due course.”

  “So I supposed.”

  “But there is one in particular that I have been directed to ask you, just in case something goes awry.”

  “In case I get sucked out of the airplane.”

  “Rogue wave. Meteor strike.”

  “All right. What is the one question?”

  “Who killed all those men in your apartment?”

  She made no answer.

  “Was it you?”

  She snorted.

  “Because we didn’t think you were that sort of spy.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Well, who was it then?”

  “You squandered your one question,” she said, “on something that would take me a day and a half to answer properly.”

  “Do we need to worry about him—I’m going to make a wild supposition that a Y chromosome is involved and use the masculine pronoun—do we need to worry about him killing a great many more Chinese ­people on Chinese soil at any time in the near future?”

  “Those probably weren’t even Chinese ­people,” she said, “but the answer is no. And by the way, he’s not British.”

  “Good. Ah yes. One more thing.”

  “I thought you said there’d only be one more question.”

  “It’s difficult to stop once I’ve got started.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “Where is Abdallah Jones?”

  “He could be anywhere in the world,” she said. “He was at an airport last night.”

  “Bloody shame.”

  “Isn’t it.”

  “An airport? Odd phrasing.”<
br />
  Olivia shrugged.

  “How do you know he was at an airport?”

  This, then, was the moment. But she didn’t know who this guy was. How much power he wielded, what he might, or might not, be able to do for her. Her sense was that he was just acting here as a conduit between her and someone else, someone back in London. “Mr. Y,” she said.

  “He of the chromosome?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Mr. Y talked to Jones on the phone.”

  “That must have been an interesting conversation.”

  “Mr. Y’s half of it certainly was. In any case, he knew, somehow, that Jones was at an airport. I would guess he heard jet engines in the background, or instructions on how to fasten a lap belt.”

  “But Mr. Y knows nothing further.”

  “Funny you should ask,” Olivia said. “Mr. Y says he has more information now. Information that could be used to figure out where Jones went.”

  “And where is Mr. Y? Stuck in China?”

  “Probably looking at you from behind a shrub. Don’t look around, though.”

  “I shan’t. Can’t say how pleased I am that he understands the need to keep his head down.”

  “He has all sorts of talents.”

  This elicited a searching look from the man. Olivia, remembering this morning’s activities in the bunker, felt her face getting warm and hoped that he would mistake it for the red heat of the case-hardening furnace glowing on her face. Hurrying on, she continued: “If you would like to make an arrangement with him to get him out of the country safely—which is what I recommend and advocate—then I can make a rendezvous with him and let him know where matters stand.”

  “Obviously, I don’t have a ready-made passport for a gentleman of his description,” the man said, “since I don’t even know what his description is. Even if I did, for him to go to the airport today and get on a plane—”

  “I understand. I get it.”

  “Speaking of passports—”

  Olivia was nonplussed for a few moments, then took his meaning. She reached into her pocket and took out her Chinese passport. Her million-pound Meng Anlan passport. The man took it from her and, with a flip of the wrist, tossed it through the open maw of the forge. It exploded into flame before it had even touched the coals, and was fully consumed in a few moments.