Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  Plan B, then, had been simply to steal an actual knife from the galley: a nook between the bathroom and the cockpit, which she came close to whenever she went up to pee. She had conceived this idea after her first pee trip—the one where she had looked up through the cockpit windows to see the 747 directly above them. She had planned it during her second pee trip and executed it during her third, scoring a large, heavy steak knife from a drawer. She had shoved it into the front pocket of her jeans, piercing the pocket’s internal lining so that the blade was between her thigh and her pant leg, and the wooden handle was concealed in the pocket. With a chef’s knife, this would have been crazy, but the steak knife wasn’t sharp enough to do damage as long as it stayed flat against her skin.

  Which only reminded her of a bit of lore she’d picked up in Girl Scouts, which was that jeans were the worst possible clothing for cold and wet weather. The heavy cotton fabric would soak up moisture and then lose its power to insulate.

  Anyway, trapped now in the cabin by Khalid’s free-floating rage, unable to sleep, and with absolutely nothing to do, she decided to kill some time by watching a movie. It was a ridiculous urge, but it might be the last movie she’d ever watch and she literally could not think of anything else to do. One of the DVDs on the shelf was Love Actually, a romantic comedy, something like ten years old by this point, which she had seen about twenty times; she and her college roommates watched it ritualistically whenever they found themselves in a certain mood. So she turned that on.

  The cabin was so arranged that the television monitor was in its aft bulkhead, facing forward, at the foot of the bed. Zula had made a pile of pillows at the head of the bed and arranged herself facing the screen, which meant that her back was to the entrance, off to one side.

  Perhaps an hour into the movie, she became aware that she was not alone. The door had been opened a crack. Someone had been peering through, watching the movie with her.

  Her first reaction was embarrassment more than anything else, since the film had a couple of ridiculous comic-relief subplots featuring extremely broad sexual comedy, probably meant to be self-mocking and read ironically by most of the intended audience, but which others on this plane might be inclined to take at face value.

  She then got a feeling of vulnerability and discomfort from her position: lying on a bed. So she grabbed the remote, paused the video, and swung her feet onto the floor, preparing to stand up and see who was peeking in at the door.

  As she was getting to her feet the door swung inward violently and knocked her back. The edge of the bed caught the back of her legs and made her sprawl back onto the mattress. Khalid stepped into the room, closed the door behind himself, and locked it.

  She was making to sit up and get back on her feet, but he swung wildly at her face. She recoiled enough to take most of the force out of the blow, but something hard and sharp sideswiped her across the cheek and sent her back onto her ass with tears welling out of her eyes: not out of emotion, but an involuntary response to being struck in the face. Had she just been pistol-whipped? She reached up to wipe the tears from her eyes and felt something hard and cold press into her forehead: the barrel of a gun. It kept coming, obliging her to roll back. She ended up supine with the top of her head against the aft bulkhead, the frozen TV monitor and the control panel of the DVD player above her. The gun came away. She blinked away tears and saw the muzzle of the weapon aimed at her from maybe two feet away, Khalid holding it in his right hand, using his left to undo his trousers and pull them down. A totally erect penis snapped out. Zula was not a huge penis expert, but she knew it took at least a little bit of time for one of them to get that hard, which made her realize that Khalid must have been standing outside the door for a while, getting himself ready for this. All the other men in the cabin must have fallen asleep.

  The thing with the gun was ridiculous. If he pulled the trigger, the plane would depressurize. She wondered if he understood this. But she had to assume he really was that stupid. Once the bullet had gone through her head, she would not be able to enjoy the satisfaction of watching these men lose consciousness from lack of oxygen.

  Now that Khalid’s intentions were clear, Zula wanted nothing more than to get her pelvic region as far as possible from him. But she was trapped in the back of the cabin. She planted her elbows in the mattress and levered herself up, scooted back, got her hands beneath her, pushed up to a sitting position. Khalid read this as lack of cooperation and became incensed, lunged forward, got a knee up on the bed between her knees, pawed at the waistband of her jeans. She pushed his hand away. He wound up to slap her across the face. She blocked the attack with one arm, but its force moved her sideways and made her head bounce against the front panel of the DVD player. A crisp mechanical noise sounded from behind her skull, and she heard the sound of the DVD being ejected from its slot.

  Meanwhile Khalid was taking advantage of her disarray to undo the front of Zula’s jeans. He was jerking down on the waistband, trying to peel them off her, but this wasn’t working. Partly because he was only using one hand. But also, as Zula understood, partly because the steak knife in her pocket was trapped against her thigh and making it impossible to turn the garment inside out. He was yanking wildly, furiously, shaking her all over. She reached up to brace her hands against the bulkhead behind her, just to prevent her head being slammed into it. Her left hand came into contact with the ejected DVD.

  Peter in the tavern at the Schloss. Snapping the DVD and cutting his hand.

  Khalid seemed to have lost patience with doing everything one-handed and so he did something to his pistol—placing it on safety?—and then tossed it behind him so that it thumped onto the carpeted floor just in front of the door. He then made much more rapid progress on getting Zula’s jeans peeled back from her waist and buttocks. The knife swiveled around and made a long scrape on her thigh.

  While he was thus distracted Zula had pulled the DVD from its slot and bent it between the thumb and fingers of her left hand, compressing it almost into a U. She was afraid to just snap it in half—it would make a loud noise, he would notice.

  The jeans now bridged the space between her thighs and formed a barrier to Khalid’s progress. He had only made matters worse for himself. Looking down at her vulva, exposed but temporarily unreachable, he saw the blade of the steak knife jutting out from the pocket.

  He let out a cry of rage. Getting back to his feet he gave the garment several terrific jerks, pulling both legs completely inside-out. Her butt was bouncing up and down anyway and so she swung her hand underneath it, let her weight slam down on the bowed DVD, felt it crack in half, the noise muffled by the mattress and by the flesh of her butt.

  The jeans were now dangling from her ankles, the knife far out of her reach. Khalid shoved his hand in, groped for the pocket, and drew the weapon out triumphantly. Then he stepped in, ramming a knee down between hers, and then bent forward to plant the heel of one hand against her chin. He shoved her head back and then placed the blade of the knife against her throat.

  Zula chose that moment to swing one arm down and around in a broad, blind scything motion, slashing at Khalid’s penis with the sharp corner of a DVD half.

  She definitely made contact with something. He reflexively moved both hands down to his groin, leaving the steak knife resting on her belly.

  Nothing was there to support the weight of his upper body and so his head leaned forward. His eyes bulged in astonishment—conveniently for Zula who rammed up with both hands, aiming for each eye with a DVD shard.

  Some instinct told her to close her eyes as she did this and so she didn’t see the results. But she heard a howl from Khalid and felt him toppling backward.

  Letting go of the DVD halves, she pawed at the knife on her belly but only succeeded in knocking it away; it bounced across the bed and fell into the crack between the mattress and the wall.

  Just as well. The important thing was the gun. She rolled up and fell from the bed and crawled on hands
and knees toward the door, where she reckoned the gun had come to rest. Khalid was right next to her, pawing at his face and screaming.

  She saw the pistol and slapped one hand down on top of it just as the door was being kicked open from the other side. It burst open, trapping her gun hand against the wall.

  She was now lying almost full-length on the floor, hobbled by her inside-out blue jeans, one hand free, the other holding a semiautomatic pistol of unfamiliar design, but pinned between the door and the wall, therefore hidden from view, but also immobilized.

  The door had been kicked open by one of the soldiers, who was now leaning against it, pinning her arm. Abdallah Jones was right behind him, looking over his shoulder. Everyone was shouting.

  Zula began exploring the pistol’s controls with her fingertips, trying to figure out which little protuberance might be the safety. She didn’t want to hit the clip ejection lever by mistake. Usually, the safety would be within easy reach of the right thumb. She found something that seemed to fit the bill and flicked it.

  Jones brought a hand down on the shoulder of the man who was blocking the doorway and pulled him out of the way, then entered the cabin and dropped to his knees, straddling Khalid and making the cabin now a very crowded place indeed. Zula was being ignored for the moment. She pulled herself up to a sitting position, leaning against the door and slamming it shut. This triggered a fresh round of hollering and door beating on the other side. Zula looked at the gun in her hand to verify that it was cocked; she guessed it was, though she wasn’t familiar with this style. Khalid was sitting up about four feet way from her, in profile, knees to his chest, hands over his face. Jones was facing him, speaking to him ardently, trying to get him to take his hands away so that he could look at the damage.

  Zula pointed the weapon at the center of Khalid’s torso and fired three rounds through what she guessed were his heart and lungs.

  A loud, high-pitched noise dominated everything: either ringing in her ears or the sound of air escaping through bullet holes in the fuselage. Maybe both. Something huge flew at her: Jones had reacted by snatching the duvet off the bed and hurling it at her face. At the same time, the pressure on her back became immense. Air was escaping from the cabin, and the higher pressure in the front of the plane was forcing the door open. She fired another round in the direction where she guessed Jones might be coming from, but then his whole weight was on her gun arm, pinning it to the floor, and she was being crushed between his body and the door. His knee came down in the middle of her chest. She used her free hand to hurl the blanket out of the way. Jones was unharmed and on top of her, reaching above his head to grab for a yellow object dangling from the ceiling. She had some difficulty making it out, because it was blurry, but then she recognized it as an oxygen mask. Jones pulled it to him, placed it over his mouth and nose, and got the elastic band over the back of his head.

  Then he looked down at her.

  The instructions in the safety briefing said that you should put the mask on your own face first, then tend to anyone around you who needed help. Jones had done the first bit perfectly, but now he was just gazing at her interestedly as she went to sleep.

  AS SOKOLOV WAS wading out toward the sound of the boat, he began to consider all of the ways in which this might go wrong—or might already have gone wrong. This kind of thinking had been his habit for as long as he could remember. It had been amplified a thousandfold during his service in the military and transferred quite comfortably to the security consultant business. If security consultants ran the world, militaries would no longer be needed, because all possible contingencies that might lead to the application of violence would have been anticipated and dealt with long before they had developed into actual wars. Or so he had always told himself as a way to justify his choice of a second career.

  The fact that visibility had dropped to much less than a hundred meters was both a good and a bad thing. It was good that Sokolov would be able to board the boat and transfer to the containership unobserved by any spies ashore. It was bad that he could not see his ride coming. In the taxi, he had asked several questions of “George Chow” about how he had made these arrangements, how he had chosen this particular boatman, and whether he might have been observed or followed by any mainland Chinese operatives. George Chow had seemed confident—a bit too breezily confident for Sokolov’s tastes—that it had all been pulled off perfectly. This sort of self-assurance, in and of itself, was frequently a warning sign. Sokolov knew nothing of George Chow and his history in this sort of business, nor of the extent to which the mainland authorities had penetrated the police and security forces of this island, and so it seemed safest for him to assume that Chow had been followed from the hotel, or (easier and cheaper) observed on security cameras as he had made his way through Jincheng and down to the waterfront to hire a boatman. If that were the case, then it would have been quite easy for a mainland operative to go and talk to the same boatman as soon as Chow departed and, through some combination of bribery and threats, get him to tell what he knew.

  (“What does the boatman know?” Sokolov had asked, in the taxi.

  “Only that he is to pick someone up at a certain place and time” had been the answer from the front seat. “You must tell him where you are going.”)

  Anyway, the boat waiting at the rendezvous point marked on the GPS device Chow had given him might turn out to be full of men who had come over from the mainland this morning specifically to find Sokolov and either kill him or take him back to the ­People’s Republic of China for interrogation and God only knew what other sort of treatment.

  If that came to pass and if it developed into a gunfight (which, if Sokolov had anything to say about it, it most certainly would), then how would it look—or sound, since they couldn’t see it—to Olivia and George Chow? A series of gunshots, largely muffled by the sound of surf finding its way through the thousands of stone fingers jutting out of the sand. Even if Olivia were foolish enough to attempt to wade out and investigate, she would find nothing; the boat would have departed by then. At the most there might be a corpse or two floating in the water, but it was highly improbable that she would happen upon such direct evidence. Much more likely was that the outcome would remain mysterious to both her and George Chow and that, spooked, they would get to the airport as quickly as possible and get out of this place.

  In the taxi, Sokolov had asked George Chow what was going to happen when he reached the end of the voyage in Long Beach. Chow had assured him that friendly agents of the U.S. government would board the containership at that point and whisk him away to a safe place where he could be debriefed of all the information he had to offer about Abdallah Jones and given assistance in making his way through immigration formalities.

  But Sokolov was in no way interested in being thus greeted and debriefed and assisted. He already had a B-1 visa, which entitled him to enter the United States any time he wanted. If he were to sneak into the United States from a containership, which, compared to what he’d been doing in the past twenty-four hours, ought to be as easy as pissing off a dock, then the worst thing that anyone could say about him was that he had not had his passport stamped when he’d entered the country: theoretically a problem, but so trivial and so distant that it hardly seemed worthy of his notice at this time. He had already given Olivia all the useful information that he had regarding the whereabouts of Abdallah Jones, and so any further debriefings in L.A. would inevitably center on topics whose elaboration could only make life more difficult for him, such as Ivanov and Wallace and what had happened yesterday morning in the apartment building. If the American authorities believed that he had been killed in an ambush in the fog and mist off the shore of Kinmen, then he would be spared such embarrassments.

  There was also the matter of Olivia.

  Sokolov quite liked Olivia and wanted her to be happy. He could tell from watching her face that she was unwilling to be honest with herself about the nature of the relationship that she had
enjoyed with Sokolov, which had quite obviously (to Sokolov anyway) been based on simple, animal attraction. Sometimes you met someone and you just instinctively wanted to fuck their brains out. It had to do with pheromones or something. Most of the time, the feeling was not reciprocated, but sometimes it was, and then these things happened with a suddenness and intensity that could not help but be disquieting to anyone who believed that his or her life made sense. There was nothing more to it than that, though. They’d had their fun in the bunker, and probably could have had quite a bit more if circumstances had put them in a safe place together. But such relationships were unlikely to last. Olivia, a highly cultivated and rational woman, was unwilling to admit that she was the kind of person who could engage in such a liaison, and so she was even now putting her powerful brain to work coming up with a story according to which it was really much, much more than that. If it were somehow the case that they lived next door to each other or worked in the same office, then she’d have had to work through a long and dramatic and ultimately painful process of coming to terms with the fact that it was all strictly animal attraction and that there was no actual basis for a relationship there.

  Fortunately, the situation at hand was quite a bit simpler than that. Even if the rendezvous with the boat and with the containership went perfectly, the two of them would likely never see each other again. But if Sokolov were killed in an ambush in the fog and mist off the shore of Kinmen, then she could close the door on this highly satisfying but ultimately meaningless affair, and go on to live the happy and contented life that Sokolov very much wanted her to live.

  And so, as he drew closer to the sound of the boat’s motor, Sokolov conceived of a plan, which seemed straightforward enough at the time, to greatly simplify both his future life and Olivia’s by firing a few shots from his weapon. This would scare the hell out of the boatman, but Sokolov thought he could bring that problem under control without too much difficulty. Once they had effected the rendezvous with the containership, Sokolov would then find some way to induce its captain to claim that the rendezvous had not occurred—that the boat carrying Sokolov had failed to show up and that Sokolov had never boarded the vessel. Two weeks from now, Sokolov would slip off the ship in Long Beach and make use of his connections in that town to lie low for a bit. Then he would make his way back to Toronto, which was where he had started. A thorough inspection of his passport stamps might turn up some inconsistencies, but he had never seen anyone actually look at those things.