Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “Actually, there is nothing at all—not even hourly log files—between midnight and ten A.M. on Tuesday,” Corvallis pointed out. He drew Richard’s attention to the table and traced his finger down the column listing the time/date stamps. “See, the cron job was functioning properly all through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Monday night, it did its thing at eleven P.M.…”

  “But then there’s a gap,” Richard said. “No more little cron job files until ten in the morning on Tuesday.”

  “After which,” Corvallis concluded, “it resumes its usual habits until Thursday at two A.M.”

  “Coinciding with a big video file,” Richard pointed out. “The reason there’s nothing after that is because the server that was running the whole system got trashed. Someone came back to Peter’s place on Thursday, two days after Peter and Zula had vanished. Bastard probably knew it was empty; he must have been an accomplice, or a friend of one of the bad guys. Broke in through an upstairs window. Went downstairs, triggering the security camera and causing that last big file to be created. Opened the front door from the inside. Carried in a plasma cutter. Opened Peter’s gun safe. Stole something from in there. Noticed the computer that was logging the security videos and used the plasma cutter to destroy its hard drives.”

  Corvallis nodded. “That fits,” he said. “As soon as that computer was destroyed, the hourly log files stopped coming in.”

  “The only part that doesn’t make sense is the gap on Tuesday morning,” Richard said. “As if the power went out for a while. But that can’t be it. The machine had a UPS.”

  Corvallis was shaking his head. “A power outage would have showed up in these logs. I’m seeing nothing.”

  “So how do you explain it?”

  “There’s an obvious and simple answer, which is that the files were manually erased,” Corvallis said. “Someone who knew how the system worked went in between nine and ten A.M. on Tuesday and wiped out all files generated since midnight.”

  “But this is the backup drive we’re looking at,” Richard reminded him.

  Corvallis looked up at him. “That’s why I’m saying it had to be someone who was familiar with the system. He knew about the backup drive, and he was careful to erase both the original and the backup files.”

  “Peter, in other words, is the one who did this,” Richard said.

  “That’s the simplest explanation.”

  “Either he was working with the bad guys—”

  “Or he had a gun to his head,” Corvallis said, then winced at the look that came over Richard’s face.

  “So where does that leave us?” Richard asked, somewhat rhetorically.

  “The data from here,” said Corvallis, indicating the PC, “is all stuff that the cops should be able to analyze, the same way we have been doing. But unless they can get the NSA to decrypt the video files, it won’t go any further than we’ve already gone. The other stuff—the T’Rain logs that we used to make the connection to Wallace—they can’t get unless they come in our front door with a court order.”

  “But they can establish a connection to Wallace just from the fact that his car is parked in the loft,” Richard said.

  “I think that all you can really do is wait for them to gather more information about Wallace,” Corvallis said. “Let the investigation run its course.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” Richard said. “Could you do me one other favor, though?”

  “Sure.”

  “Keep checking the T’Rain logs. Let me know if there is any more activity on any of these accounts.”

  “Zula’s and Wallace’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll set up a cron job to do it right now,” Corvallis said.

  “Once an hour?”

  “I was thinking once a minute.”

  “Now, that’s the spirit.” Richard considered it.

  “Anything else?” C-plus asked, flexing his fingers, kind of like a boxer jumping up and down in the corner of the ring.

  “There must also be, I would guess, a whole complex of many accounts connected with these kids in Xiamen, right?”

  “In theory, yeah,” C-plus said. “But they seem to have been pretty savvy about protecting themselves. Like, instead of carrying the gold around on their persons, they have it stashed all over the Torgai Foothills.”

  “Which would prevent anyone other than us from knowing where it was,” Richard said. “But because we have admin privileges, we can just search the database and find every pile of gold pieces in that region, correct?”

  “Of course.”

  “And then we can go back through the log files and identify the characters who moved the gold pieces to those stashes.”

  “Sure.”

  “So those characters should get placed on some kind of watch list. Whenever they log in, we track them. Watch what they’re doing. Check their IP addresses. Are they still in Xiamen? Or moving around? Do they have coconspirators in other places?”

  Corvallis said nothing.

  “What am I missing here?” Richard asked, starting to get a bit exercised.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why didn’t we do this a long time ago!?”

  “Because,” C-plus said, “it’s exactly the kind of thing that the cops would ask us to do as part of an investigation, and official corporate policy is to tell the cops to go fuck themselves.”

  “Hmm, so we’ve been hands-off with the REAMDE guys until now,” said Richard, talking loudly over a surge of hot shame. Furious Muses were beginning to pop up on his emotional radar like Soviet bombers coming over the Pole.

  “Yeahhhh…”

  “Well, until we can prove that there’s no connection between them and Zula’s disappearance, corporate policy has to change,” Richard said.

  THE JIHADISTS’ KIT included several Chinese entrenching tools: bare wooden handles about the length of a man’s arm tipped with shovel-shaped blades that could be rotated into a few different positions, making them usable as picks or as shovels. Through a combination of stomping the snow down with their feet and using these tools to scrape and shovel a path, they created a lane from the plane’s door to the prefab building with the functioning woodstove. They then used it to transfer their baggage from the plane into the building. The jet had been on the ground for a few hours now and the temperature inside of it had been declining the whole time, to the point where Zula had been pulling blankets off the bed one at a time and wrapping them around herself, transforming herself into a semblance of a burqa-clad woman of the conservative Islamic world. She was startled, after a while, to hear loud hacking and ripping noises from inside the plane, then understood that they were wielding their tools to strip its interior of anything they could conceivably use. But this was only a guess since they had kept the cabin door closed, and reacted splenetically when she pulled it open to peek out.

  Eventually, though, the time came when Jones shoved the door open, letting in a wash of cold but blessedly clean-smelling air, and beckoned to her, letting her know that her days of private jet travel were finally at an end. And none too soon for Zula’s taste.

  She emerged to find the cabin darker than she’d expected, since the interior had been wrecked, and shards of plastic wall-stuff and bats of insulation were dangling in front of the windows. Moreover, the cockpit door was closed, blocking any light from that direction. As Zula proceeded up the aisle, staggering and sliding over debris, she perceived that the door had taken heavy damage, perhaps from the same tree limb that had killed Pavel, and that a lake of blood had seeped out from under it to freeze or coagulate in front of the jet’s main entrance. She had no choice but to walk through it and track it out onto the snow beyond, which was already stained with red for a distance of several meters from the side of the plane. But when she looked up and away from the terrorists’ gore-track, she saw a clean white overcast sky and smelled pine trees and rain. This was not the bitter dry Arctic cold of midwestern winter, with temperatu
res far below freezing. This was the heavy drenching chill of the northwestern mountains, which somehow felt colder to Zula, even though the temperature was tens of degrees warmer. She drew the blankets tighter around her body and followed the track toward the heated building. No one escorted her. It did not seem that they were even watching her. They knew, as did she, that if she tried to make a run for it, she would bog down in deep snow with her first step and freeze to death before getting beyond rifle range.

  The building was dark and it was stifling; they had overdone it with the wood-burning stove. The sharp tang of hot iron reminded her of the smell of Khalid’s blood, and it did not hide the musty and mildewy funk of the long-shut-up building. The front room occupied the full width of the structure, which she pegged at eighteen or twenty feet, since this was a double-wide. The back right corner of the room was an L-shaped kitchen. Cabinet doors hung open. At whatever time that this facility had been mothballed, abandoned, or shut down for the winter, it had evidently been stripped of all items worth picking up and carrying away. Remaining was a sparse, motley array of cooking and serving ware, mostly consisting of the cheapest stuff that could be purchased at a Walmart. The woodstove was in the room’s left front quadrant. A banged-up aluminum saucepan, packed with snow, was rocking and sizzling on its top. Behind it was a rectangular table seating six: evidently as much for working as for dining, since behind it, against the wall, were a desk and a filing cabinet. To the right, as she walked in, were a sofa, a chair, a coffee table, and an old television set sitting on top of a VCR—a detail that dated the place more effectively than any other clue. In the back wall was a door leading to a corridor that ran back for some distance. She assumed that a lavatory and smaller offices or bunkrooms might branch off from it.

  The jihadists had brought food with them, in the form of military rations, as well as rice and lentils, which could of course be cooked with melted snow. One of the soldiers seemed to have been put in charge of that project. Two others were exploring a neighboring building that seemed to have been a maintenance shop. They were looking for tools, and they were finding a situation analogous to what obtained in the kitchen: all the good stuff had been taken, leaving only junk that wasn’t worth moving: rusty shovels and worn-out push brooms. But shovels were just what they needed, since the task at hand, apparently, was to turn the jet into a coffin for Pavel and Sergei and Khalid. Zula inferred that they were worried about being spotted from the air. In that case the pilots had done them a large favor by crashing the plane in trees. A long skid mark led to the wreck, but snow had begun to fall during the time they had been here and would soon erase this. It only remained to cover the plane itself with some combination of snow and hacked-off foliage. This project went much faster once they had liberated some tools from the shed, but even so it occupied Jones and the other surviving jihadists for the remainder of the day. They kept themselves warm by working hard, and when they came in for breaks they wanted to eat. Supplying them with food somehow became Zula’s responsibility. This was ridiculous, but no more so than anything else that had happened to her in the last week, so she pretended to go about it cheerfully, deciding that it might improve her life expectancy and enlarge her freedom of action if she made herself useful rather than staying in a fetal position under a pile of blankets, which was what she felt like doing. The front room had windows and therefore views out three sides, and so this also enabled her to move about and look around and try to get some conception of where they were.

  During the last couple of hours of the flight, Zula had not followed the plane’s course on the electronic map, and so she did not know in what part of B.C. they had actually landed. In a vague way, she thought of B.C. as being a vastly scaled-up Washington State, which was to say that the western part was rain forest ramping up to snow-covered but not especially high mountains, and the interior was, generally speaking, a big basin, tending to dryness, with hills and mountains generously scattered about, and the eastern fringe was even larger mountains: the Rockies and their tributary ranges. The place where she and the terrorists now found themselves looked dry and rocky to her, which made her think that they must be well into the interior. But Zula’s time in the Pacific Northwest had gotten her used to the concept of microclimates (a considerable adjustment for one who had grown up in a place where the climate was as macro as it could possibly be), so she knew that it was best not to go making assumptions; it was quite possible that they were only a few miles from salt water and that this valley was dry merely because it lay in the rain shadow of coast-facing mountains. From here it might be rain forest in all directions; or it might be desert. They might be hard up against the border of the Yukon or they might be only a three-hour drive from downtown Vancouver. She simply had no idea. And neither, she suspected, did Abdallah Jones.

  There was no doubt, however, that this facility was a mine. It would be wrong to call it “abandoned,” since the doors had been locked and some low-value infrastructure had been left in place: just the sort of gear that would be needed to reboot the operation if the owners ever had a mind to do so. Her first guess was that it had been shut down for the winter, but various clues suggested that it had gone unused for a number of years. She knew enough of geology to understand that mineral prices fluctuated, and that, depending on the tenor of the underlying ore, a mine that was profitable in some years might not be worth operating in others. This could be one of those.

  Busying her hands with stoking the fire, and occupying her brain with such immediate and practical thoughts, she was almost completely unmindful of what had happened at the end of last night’s airplane journey. When this did come into her thoughts, she was shocked by how little effect it had had on her, at least in the short term. She developed three hypotheses:

  1. The lack of oxygen that had caused her to pass out almost immediately after she’d killed Khalid had interfered with the formation of short-term memories or whatever it was that caused people to develop posttraumatic stress disorder.

  2. This was just a temporary reprieve. Later, if she survived, the trauma of last night would come back to mess her up.

  3. Possibly because of devastating experiences earlier in her life, she was some kind of a psychopath, a born killer; the comfortable circumstances under which she’d been living until a week ago had made it possible for this to go unnoticed, but now stress was bringing it out.

  She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn’t feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method.

  One thing had certainly changed, though: she had fought back and she had eliminated one of these guys. What was to say she couldn’t do it again?

  The answer came to her immediately: after they had landed, Jones had been about to kill her. She had saved her life only by offering herself as a hostage: a resource by which something might be extorted from Uncle Richard. She guessed it was a one-time reprieve and that any future homicides would be dealt with a little more sternly.

  RICHARD’S PHONE BEGAN to warble an eldritch, theremin-inspired tune. He picked it up and saw a graphic of a crystal ball with a colored miasma swirling through it, partly obscuring a picture of Exalted Master Yang. YOU ARE BEING ORBED, it said.

  He was in his office at Corporation 9592, where he had been preoccupied drafting a status report for his brother John. Since he knew it would end up on Facebook, he had been trying to make it as informative as possible without divulging any of Corporation 9592’s proprietary information. This was not going very well, and so he was glad of the distraction. He activated the Orb app, which put up a screen that made it look as though he were sitting at a plank table in a medieval castle, holding a grapefruit-sized sphere of magically imbued crystal in one hand and stroking it with the other. The hands in question belonged to Egdod. The face in the orb was that of Exalted Master Yang, Nolan’s primary character, the most powerful martial artist in the world of T’Rain, capable of killing a man with his ey
ebrow. “You called?” he said.

  “Isn’t it still way early there?”

  “I am in Sydney,” Nolan said, “two hours later.” The cadences of his voice were familiar, but they had been electronically reprocessed by the Orb app to make him sound like Exalted Master Yang, whose age was well into the quadruple digits, and who rarely spoke above a whisper, lest he inadvertently decapitate his interlocutor with his twenty-seventh-level Lion Roar power.

  “Why?”

  “I felt it was time to be in a place with a legal system.”

  “Things too hot for you in Beijing?”

  “Not hot. Just … weird. Harri wanted to get out.” Harri, short for Harriet, was Nolan’s wife: a black Canadian lingerie model and power forward. Certain things about China she found a bit odd.

  “Related to the REAMDE investigation?” Richard would not have spoken so bluntly had Nolan been in Beijing. The Orb app encrypted all voice traffic, so point-to-point communications were secure; but if anyone were listening in on Nolan’s apartment, they’d have been able to hear what both he and Richard were saying.

  “Until yesterday.”

  “What happened yesterday?”

  “They started asking me questions about terrorists.”

  Richard had no answer for that.

  “And Russians,” Nolan added helpfully.

  “Wait a sec,” Richard said. “You’re saying that the same cops who had been pestering you about REAMDE suddenly changed the topic to terrorists and Russians?”

  “No,” Nolan said, “a different set of cops. Like the investigation was handed off to new guys.”

  “Did you tell them anything?” Richard blurted out. Then he wished he could haul it back.

  “What could I tell them!?” Nolan demanded. “The whole thing was totally bizarre!”

  Good, Richard thought, please let it stay that way. He was dumbfounded to hear about the terrorists and the Russians—this made no sense whatsoever—but he supposed that the Chinese authorities must take a rather dim view of both groups; and if they had somehow dreamed up a connection between them and REAMDE, it would in no way simplify the project of getting to the bottom of Zula’s disappearance.