Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  As he drew closer to the place where the boat was waiting for him, he drew out both first the Makarov and then the submachine gun that he had taken last night from the jihadist and checked that both of them were in ready-to-fire condition, which was probably a good idea in any case. He reckoned that if he were trying to simulate the sounds of a battle, it would be more convincing if he could fire a few pistol shots and a burst or two from the submachine gun. He would, of course, wait until he was safely in the boat, so that the boatman would not simply run away from him in terror. To that end, he did not want to emerge from the mist with a weapon in each hand, and so he placed the Makarov in its usual push-through belt rail and slung the submachine gun over his back.

  The water had become chest-deep, adequate to float a vessel of some size. Sokolov shrank down into it so that only the top of his head was protruding from the water, a somewhat difficult thing to manage since waves kept rising up to break over him. He began his final approach by sidling from one shellfish-encrusted pillar to the next. He could hear the boat’s hull rasping against one of the pillars no more than a few meters away.

  Finally it began to come into focus: a long shadow riding on the water. As he drew closer the shadow resolved into a line of fat black Os: the tires slung over the boat’s side, the only things keeping it from being macerated by the stone pillars. He could see the boatman sitting erect at the stern, waiting, wondering when the mystery passenger would show up. A white rope ladder had been thrown over the port side near the bow; this was the closest corner to shore, and the boatman must have assumed Sokolov would approach from that direction and be glad of the assistance.

  But those tires looked as though they would provide convenient hand- and footholds for clambering aboard, and Sokolov could see no advantage in boarding from the expected direction. So he devoted a few more moments to making his way around to the stern of the boat, half wading and half swimming now, and then approached to the point where he could get a good view of the tire and the loops of rope that he would presently be using to get aboard. Then he drew breath, sank below the surface, and covered the last few meters underwater.

  When he saw the corner of the hull above him, he gathered his knees to his chest, let himself sink to the bottom, and then exploded straight up with as much force as he could produce. His hands shot out of the water first and got purchase on the tread of a tire. He brought a foot up and planted it in the tire’s rim, moved his hands up to the rope from which the tire was suspended, and then pulled with his arms and pushed with his leg, shooting up over the gunwale and sweeping his free leg around into the boat. For a moment, though his momentum was still carrying him forward, he was straddling the gunwale. The boatman was turning to look at the source of this unexpected splashing. Sokolov caught his eye for a moment, then glanced into the cargo area forward and saw three armed men lying on their bellies, all gazing in the direction of that rope ladder.

  It was too late to do anything about the momentum that was carrying him over the gunwale, and the manner in which he had swung one leg over the edge and planted it on the deck now obligated him to carry on in a pirouetting movement. He spun around the planted foot, drawing his other leg into the boat, turning his back on the prone gunmen for just a moment. The movement caused the submachine gun to fly outward on its strap. He stopped hard with both feet on the deck, and the weapon swung around him until it was in front of him. He caught it in both hands, dropping to a knee, and fired a burst into the buttocks of the closest man. Half a dozen rounds entered the target’s body through the pelvis and proceeded up through his viscera in the general direction of his brain. A second man levered himself up on his elbow and looked back to see what was happening. Sokolov obliterated his face. The third man, closest to the bow, erupted to his feet and dove over the boat’s bow in one motion, chased by a fusillade of rounds from the submachine gun. Sokolov let the weapon drop and hang from its strap and shoved his Makarov through its holster. He turned to the appalled boatman and pointed in the direction of open water. Then he threw himself down on his belly and elbow-crawled up the length of the boat, slaloming around the two stricken men who were flopping and writhing vaguely as they died, and peeked between two tires for a second before withdrawing his head. Three pops sounded from a few meters away: the third operative, probably firing at him from behind one of those stone pillars. Sokolov fired a few blind shots just as a way of making this man think twice about exposing himself. He could hear the motor revving up and feel it moving beneath his chest. The next time he popped his head up for a quick look, the standing stones had all vanished in mist that was now developing into rain. The boatman continued in reverse gear until he was well out to sea, then spun the vessel around and headed straight out.

  DIRECTLY THE GUNSHOTS were engulfed in the whoosh and clap of the incoming surf, and the drone of the motor dwindled and failed as the boat built distance between itself and the island. Olivia stifled a ridiculous impulse to call out Sokolov’s name. She gathered her feet under her and squatted on the flat top of the stone pillar for a minute or so, cupping her hands to her ears, straining to hear—what?—a call for aid? Screams of terminal agony? Walkie-talkie bursts? But there was nothing, and she was left asking herself whether she had really heard anything at all.

  A decent, albeit foolish, instinct told her to wade to the sound of the guns. Looking down, she saw that she would have to swim, rather than wade, and that the surf would bang her around like a pachinko ball among the pillars, foamed with knife-edged oyster shells and barnacles. She had only one course of action, which was to turn her back on whatever had just happened and make her way back toward shore. And she needed to act on it now, before the water got any deeper.

  She hitched the skirt of her dress up above her waist—not that it was really going to help—and stripped off her panties and, wanting to keep her hands free, shoved one arm through a leg hole and pulled the garment up to her shoulder where it would stay put. She jumped off the pillar into the water, which came up to her navel, and began wading back in the direction of the shore. This involved some guesswork since the atmosphere had become a dense white fog salted with tiny hurtling raindrops, and it was impossible to see any landmarks, let alone the sun. The surf created swirling and unpredictable currents as it found its way among the pillars and tried to knock her legs out from under her. She moved from one pillar to the next, keeping a hand out for balance, yet trying to avoid any forceful contact between her skin and those serrated, shell-slathered columns. In the early going, she feared she might be headed the wrong way, but soon enough she noticed that the water was now lapping at her buttocks, then her upper thighs, and the going was becoming easier. She was headed back toward George Chow, at least approximately.

  She then began to ask herself whether she really wanted to find George Chow.

  The most paranoid explanation she could think of for the last half-hour’s events was that Chow was not an MI6 agent at all, but a Chinese agent (or what would amount to the same thing, a double agent) who had bamboozled Olivia into believing that he’d help get her and Sokolov to safety. Instead of which he had sent Sokolov directly into a trap.

  The more she thought about it, though, the less she favored this theory. She guessed that Chow was a legit MI6 man but that one of two things must be the case:

  1. He had been followed or ratted out during his earlier movements around Jincheng, and some of the Chinese agents who had come over on the ferry this morning had been waiting for Sokolov on the boat.

  2. MI6 actually wanted Sokolov dead and had hired some local talent to make it happen.

  The latter also seemed a bit paranoid. But there was no doubt that Sokolov was, for MI6, a highly inconvenient and dangerous loose end. Moreover, Olivia could envision a situation in which the Chinese government would get in touch with the British government through some deep, dark channels and say, “We are hysterically pissed off about what went down in Xiamen yesterday and we want to see heads start rolling now
; otherwise, we will make things quite difficult for you.” In other words, MI6 might have made a deal to get rid of Sokolov in exchange for maintaining the status quo ante with their Chinese counterparts.

  Raising the question, Was Olivia too a loose end who needed to be disposed of as part of the same deal?

  She guessed not, for the simple reason that, immediately before Sokolov had kissed her good-bye, he had supplied her with information that MI6 wanted as to how Abdallah Jones might be tracked down.

  “DID YOU GET it?” was the first thing George Chow said to her as she approached the car. The directness of this question, so much at odds with Chow’s usual Cambridge/Oxford diffidence, did nothing to ease her suspicions.

  She had paused at the water’s edge, out of his sight, to get her underwear on and her dress down where it was supposed to be. So the absolute best that could be said of her appearance was that her fanny wasn’t showing. But Chow, who had been standing there the entire time keeping an eye on her purse and her shoes, tactfully avoided looking directly at her.

  “I have all the information he has,” she said. “Or perhaps the correct form of the word is had.”

  Chow gawped at her, nonplussed.

  She turned her head back out toward the sea, trying to judge whether he was just playing stupid. Was it possible that he could have failed to hear the gunfire? Sound traveled in funny ways on days, and in places, like this. For all she knew, he might have sat down inside the taxi and closed the doors and rolled up the windows just to stay out of the rain, in which case it was completely plausible that he might have failed to hear what she had heard.

  In any case, she was not going to give him anything useful until she was in a safe place—preferably London. “Can we please get under way?” she asked, lunging for the door handle of the taxi before Chow could open it for her. “Loitering here seems not a good idea.”

  He climbed in next to her and gazed at her curiously as the taxi pulled a U-turn onto the road and headed for the airport. She stared resolutely out the windscreen for a few minutes, then, finally, turned to look him directly in the face. “Do you have anything to tell me?” she demanded.

  “You’re going to have to help me out,” he said.

  “If you’re working for the PRC, put a bullet in me now,” she said. “Otherwise please try to get a fucking clue because or else you’re worse than fucking useless.”

  “Olivia!” he exclaimed, in an offended-professor tone. “To the best of my knowledge, all has gone exactly according to plan. If you have better information, I should be obliged—”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” she said. “What I don’t know is what the bloody fuck was the plan!?”

  This silenced him until they reached the airport—which, given the size of the island, wasn’t long. Then it was all ticket counters and security checkpoints and boarding lounges for a while. He tried to beguile her into a remote corner where they could talk, but she could see no advantage in telling him anything until they were farther from China.

  They took the next flight to Taipei.

  There, George Chow pursued her to the departure lounge for her next flight, which was bound for Singapore. From there she was scheduled to fly nonstop to London.

  It seemed that he had received an update on his phone. She hoped to God that they were using some kind of bulletproof encryption.

  “Mr. Y,” he announced, “never turned up.”

  “Never turned up where?”

  “On the containership to Long Beach.”

  “How fucking stupid would he have to be to actually board that ship considering…”

  “Which is a good thing,” Chow added, “since it was overhauled and boarded by the Chinese navy on its way out of port.”

  “So the whole operation was blown,” she said.

  “Yes,” Chow said, “a fact you appear to have been aware of from the very beginning.”

  Shit. He was trying to put this on her now.

  “You’re seriously trying to tell me you didn’t hear that fucking Wild West shootout down there at the beach.”

  “I heard nothing,” he said. “But if you heard something, you should have informed me so that we could…”

  “Make sure you finished the job properly?”

  “What!?”

  “Or give the poor bastard even more of your professional assistance?”

  Silence.

  “He’s better off making shift for himself,” she said, “assuming he’s still alive. Which, come to think of it, seems like a rather bad assumption.”

  George Chow had gotten a bit hot under the collar.

  Not that Olivia could throw stones.

  “I hadn’t realized until now,” he said, “to what degree this had become a personal matter for you.”

  She thought about it for half a minute or so, and then said, calmly: “I just wish we had done a better job.”

  “It is a common thing to wish,” Chow said, “in our line of work. Welcome to the profession.”

  “My flight is boarding.”

  “Bon voyage,” he said. “Hoist a pint for me, will you?”

  “I’ll probably hoist a few.”

  ZULA AWAKENED TO find herself hog-tied with what she guessed were torn strips of bedsheets. A pillowcase had been placed over her head and secured in place with a snug but not tight ligature. Cold pink brightness shone through it. By squirming around and pressing her face against things she confirmed that this was shining in through the jet’s windows.

  The light began to fluctuate, shuttering on and off. The engines were straining up and down. Something thudded into the bottom of the plane, or vice versa, and they bounced, then sank and thudded again, and proceeded to make the roughest landing that Zula had ever experienced. As they thumped and rumbled to a stop, its noise, and the declining scream of the engines, was drowned out by cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and then a lot of thumping, as if some sort of scuffle were taking place forward.

  Someone came in. Jones. She had learned his smell and the way of his movement. He cut through the bindings that joined her ankles to her wrists. Then he grabbed her by the feet and dragged her to the edge of the bed, then pulled her to a sitting position. He untied the thing around her throat and whipped off the pillowcase. She blinked and shook her head, puffed air out of the side of her mouth to blow a loose lock of hair away from her eye. He could have helped her but chose instead to watch in amusement.

  A snow-covered pine branch was pressed against the airplane window.

  Khalid was still lying on his side on the floor. The amount of blood was beyond her wildest expectations. Jones was standing in it, staring into her face.

  “Pavel and Sergei are dead,” he announced.

  “From the crash or—?”

  “Pavel, I should say, was done in by a largish tree branch that came in through the windscreen and clobbered him in the throat. Sergei fared rather better until one of my colleagues entered the cockpit with a large knife and put him down.”

  He watched her carefully as this little scene played out in her mind’s eye.

  “You knew it would happen,” he said. “And you understand why. Both of them had been in the Russian Air Force, you know. Dropping napalm on ­people like me. Touching that they made you part of the deal. I must hand it to the Russians. As much as I hate them and would like to see the entire country sterilized, it is true that they know how to treat a lady.”

  Zula looked him in the eye. Making the obvious comparison.

  “Which brings me to the subject of you,” he admitted with a sigh. He turned slightly, revealing a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand. She flinched, and he immediately raised the weapon to cover her. Zula had been so carefully inculcated in gun range etiquette that to have any weapon pointed her way was far more shocking than it would have been to any person unused to firearms. “It has been a great pleasure knowing you,” Jones said, as if he were seeing her off at the train station. “Really it has. In a perfect world—no
—in a better world—I would now say to you something like ‘Zula, will you please accept Islam and become a mujahid and fight alongside us?’ and you would answer ‘Of course, I have seen the light of Islam’ and it would be so. The problem with that scenario being that, not so many hours ago, you made a reasonably sincere-looking commitment to be submissive and cooperative, and then you killed my best man with a DVD.”

  She averted her gaze. Did it make any sense to feel guilty?

  “Love Actually, of all things—a film for which I have always secretly harbored a soft spot, but that I will never again be able to enjoy in quite the same way. And that is why, as much as I hate to do it, I must now, for the good of the cause—”

  “My uncle has six hundred million dollars,” Zula said.

  That rocked him back.

  “Really,” he said after a while.

  “Really. If you don’t believe me, check it out. And if I’m wrong, you can give me the Khalid treatment.”

  “Meaning what you did to him, or what he did to the schoolteacher?”

  Zula had no answer.

  “Because I’m perfectly capable of doing either, or both, with or without your say-so,” Jones pointed out.

  “It’s true,” she insisted.

  He considered it for a while. Then he caught her looking. “Oh, I believe you,” he assured her. “I’m just trying to work out whether it matters. You’re suggesting some sort of ransom deal? Of course you are. But it’s not clear to me how we would set up such a transaction, or what good the money would do us, even if we could take delivery of it without every police and special forces unit in the world descending upon us. It would be difficult enough in Waziristan. In Canada?” He scoffed.