Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  The back of Corvallis’s neck turned red. They drove past Peter’s loft. Everyone observed silence for a while. According to Zula’s note, a man—Wallace—had died in there.

  Only a couple of minutes later, they turned off Airport Way into the frontage road that led to the FBO.

  Considering the net worth of its clientele, one might have expected a glitzier place. But it was just a boxy two-story office building that faced the frontage road—a public thoroughfare—on one end and the restricted zone of the airport tarmac on the other. The airfield’s tall cyclone fence ran right up to one wall and then continued on the other side. As they pulled off the road, they entered a parking lot with only a few cars scattered about; at its opposite end this was terminated by the fence, or rather by a large rolling gate set into it. Corvallis pulled up to it and stopped. Richard clambered out of the car. As soon as the personnel inside recognized his face, they hit the button that caused the gate to trundle open. Richard waved Corvallis forward, and he drove onto the tarmac and directly to a bizjet that was parked no more than fifty feet away. Richard followed on foot and greeted the pilot by name as he emerged from the cockpit and descended the stairway. Corvallis parked at a respectful distance from the plane’s landing gear and then popped the Prius’s hatchback, and the men formed a bucket brigade to move the luggage up into the plane’s cargo hold. Richard was more than normally aware of these details since he knew that two weeks earlier Zula had passed through the same gate with the Russians.

  The pilot, as usual, was ready to go, but they were still waiting for the assistant with the visas. He invited them to come aboard and make themselves comfortable; the flight attendant had brought in some sushi. John, for whom this sort of travel was still novel, took him up on the invitation. Richard strolled back toward the FBO, thinking he might get a cup of decaf and grab a newspaper. The airport-facing end of the building was a lounge, clean and reasonably well appointed but not flagrantly luxurious. At any time of the day or night, one might see a few people, individuals or small groups, sitting there checking their email and waiting for planes. At this particular moment there was only one other person there, an Asian woman in her twenties, short hair, dressed in jeans and sort of a nice jackety getup that made the jeans look slightly more serious. She had been reading a novel and drinking tea. Richard went over to the self-serve latte machine and began pressing buttons. He was keeping one eye out the window, watching for the taxi carrying the assistant fresh in from San Francisco with the visas.

  “Mr. Forthrast?”

  The words had been spoken with an English accent. Richard turned around, surprised, to see that it was the Asian woman. She was standing about ten feet away in a somewhat prim attitude, wrists crossed in front of her to hold the novel as a shield in front of her pelvis: Sorry, I know this is a bit awkward.

  “The same.” Richard could read the signs well enough: this was either a hard-core T’Rain player who wanted to rap with him about the game, or someone who wanted a job at Corporation 9592. He dealt with both types all the time, pleasantly.

  “Don’t go to China.”

  He had been watching the foam dribble from the latte machine, but now his head spun around to fix on her. She looked apologetic. But quite firm.

  “How the hell do you know where I’m going?”

  “Zula isn’t there,” the woman said. “It’s a dead end.”

  “How would you know any of this?”

  “I was there,” the woman said.

  IN RETROSPECT OLIVIA had never done more or traveled farther to achieve so little as in the past ten days.

  After bidding adieu to “George Chow” in the Taipei airport, she flew to Singapore. Obsessed by the idea that everyone was looking at her funny, she monopolized a sink in the airport for a while, scrubbing away the ridiculous makeup job that Chow’s cosmetician had put on her face in the hotel room in Jincheng. She was itching to attack the haircut too, but you couldn’t have scissors in airports and she didn’t want to make that much of a spectacle of herself. The laceration on the top of her head had never been properly stitched. It tended to open up and start bleeding at odd moments and so it didn’t seem advisable to be getting hands-on up there. Maybe MI6 would have people in London who were good at this sort of thing—combat beauticians, trauma stylists. It seemed likely that her MI6 superiors were making hysterical efforts to get in touch with her and pump her for information during this layover, but she didn’t have any way of communicating with them that she was willing to trust. And even if someone walked up to her in person, right here in the ladies’, someone she recognized as working for the agency, she wasn’t sure how much she’d be willing to divulge. Someone had set an ambush for Sokolov out there in the mist off Kinmen, and she didn’t know who. Best case was that it had just been Chinese intelligence or local gangsters. Worst case was that MI6 actually wanted him dead. Between those two extremes, perhaps MI6 had been penetrated and Chinese intelligence had access to its secrets. In any case, she didn’t feel like spilling any more information about Sokolov until she got back to London and learned more.

  Then the nonstop to London. She spent the first bit of it getting drunk and the rest of it sleeping.

  The plane landed at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 at something like six in the morning. Since her immigration status had become impossible to make sense of, she was met, at the top of the jetway, by a man in a uniform and a man in a suit. She had always read of people being “whisked through” certain formalities, but this was the first time she had ever been personally whisked and she had to admit that it had its charms. Particularly when you were hungover and bleeding. In order to get from Terminal 5’s gates to Immigration and Customs, it was necessary to descend a prodigious stack of escalators, beginning well above ground level and terminating deep below. There was a place, about halfway along, where an escalator deposited the newly arrived passengers on a landing that happened to coincide with street level; as you executed a U-turn to get on the next, you could look out through glass doors and walls at a road with cars and trucks streaming along it. Uniformed personnel were forever stationed before those glass doors to make sure that everyone coming down those escalators kept going down into the levels where they were to be processed.

  Everyone, that is, except for those lucky few who were being whisked. Olivia was ready to make the U-turn and descend along with everyone else, but her escorts got off that escalator and just kept walking in a straight line. And since Olivia was sandwiched between them, she did the same, expecting that, at any moment, one of the security guards stationed before the doors would wrestle her to the ground and begin blowing on a whistle. Instead of which, a door was opened for her, an alarm was stifled by a series of digits punched into a keypad, and suddenly she was out of doors climbing into a black Land Rover. They were out on the M4 before the stale air of the jumbo jet had even dissipated from her clothes and hair.

  Into a London doctor’s office, some sort of exceedingly private and specialized practice, a basic tenet of which was never to evince surprise or skepticism. Where had she come from? South China. Health generally good? Until quite recently. What had happened recently? Hurled against a wall by a blast wave, showered with broken glass, half buried in debris, ran through a damaged building barefoot, makeshift bandages, fled from gunmen, swam in the polluted waters of the Nine Dragons estuary, crawled through minefield, slept on a pile of vines. The doctor just nodded absentmindedly, as if she were complaining of vaginal itching, and then ran her through a scanner the size of a nuclear submarine. That accomplished, he prodded her all over, put his fingers every place he could think of, squeezed bones and organs she didn’t know were externally accessible, peered into orifices with Dr. Seuss–like equipment, asked her probing questions intended to judge her cognitive status. Or other kinds of status. Had sex recently? Oh yes. Any chance of being pregnant? No. He lidocained the thing on the top of her head and put in a couple of stitches and did things that produced a scent of burning hair.
Then he turned her over to an “injectionist,” who plied her trade on Olivia’s deltoids, forearms, buttocks, and thighs with unseemly diligence, pulling many wee tubes of blood out of her and replacing the lost fluids with vast, neon-colored inoculations. It was made clear to her that the large muscles in question would hurt later and that she would have to come back for more. All this attention paid to her health made her happy at first, until on further reflection she understood that they were getting ready to work her to death and they didn’t want her gumming things up by complaining of vague pains or chills. What, you say your ribs are hurting? That’s funny, we didn’t see anything on the scan.

  Notes were jotted and verbal representations made to the effect that she should see certain specialized doctors and therapists at some vague time in the future. A follow-up was scheduled.

  Then, off to MI6 for a surprisingly civil brunch and preliminary round of drinking with persons of gratifyingly high rank. Then the windowless conference room she had been anticipating and dreading. Her primary debriefer was none other than “Meng Binrong,” the Englishman who had been telephonically playing the role of her uncle during her time in Xiamen. He was blond-going-white, blue-eyed, with the classic florid English drinker’s complexion, energetic, mistakable for a man in his fifties or even late forties. But certain giveaways—the fact that he found it necessary to mow his eyebrows, the sheer number of burst capillaries—suggested he was older than that. Not eager to volunteer details about himself, but it was obvious from the sorts of things he knew—and didn’t know—and from the way he spoke Cantonese and Mandarin (the former with perfect fluency, the latter a bit choppily), that he had spent his young life in Hong Kong. To Olivia he had always been a gruff voice on the phone, her uncle and boss, her one connection to what was for her the real world. But never more than a play-actor. From certain things he now said and certain assumptions he made, it now became clear to Olivia that this man—who never quite got around to stating his name—had been responsible for running the operation.

  Where did that put him, she had to wonder? Was the operation considered a success or a failure? Or was it naive to think that MI6 would even bother assigning such facile designations to undertakings of such complexity? Supposedly they had garnered loads of intelligence from tapping Jones’s communications. No one could complain about that. The fact that he’d gotten away was unfortunate. But how could they possibly have anticipated—

  “What the fuck happened?” asked Uncle Meng, careful to say it in measured and melodious tones.

  “Everything I know, I know from talking to Mr. Y,” Olivia said, using the code name that she and George Chow had employed for Sokolov.

  “Do you know his real name?”

  “Does it matter right now?”

  Uncle Meng just stared at her with his amazingly pale eyes.

  “It’s just that I thought we were after Jones.”

  “You know perfectly well that we are.”

  “The whole situation with Mr. Y is extremely confusing to me,” Olivia said. “Because of what happened at the end.”

  “Mr. Chow said that you claimed to have heard gunfire from out on the water.”

  “The claim stands.”

  “Mr. Y seems like quite the trouble magnet.”

  “Does that put me in the category of trouble?”

  “Why? Was he drawn to you?”

  “I’d say it was mutual.”

  Uncle Meng considered it. “So. You have feelings for Mr. Y. You think you heard him exchanging gunfire with un-known persons, somewhere out in the mists of the Orient. You are worried about what has become of him. And so here we are circling round each other and talking to no purpose because the conversation has become all about him.”

  “Yes.”

  “So let’s talk about Jones.”

  “All right.”

  “The entire point of trying to put Mr. Y on that ship to Long Beach was to secure his cooperation—to get some information he supposedly had as to where Jones was going. Did you get that information from him?”

  “Jones was able to get control of a business jet parked at the FBO at Xiamen Airport,” Olivia said. She stood up, turned to the whiteboard, and wrote down its tail number. “Mr. Y observed it taking off at zero seven one three hours local time.” She wrote that down too. “It headed south.”

  The conference room was well supplied with younger aides, one of whom, at a nod from Uncle Meng, commenced typing furiously.

  Olivia said, “You’ll find that it’s leased to, or maybe even owned by, a Russian national based out of Toronto, and that it had flown into Xiamen a few days earlier.”

  “Is this Russian national the same person as Mr. Y?”

  “No, Mr. Y worked for him as a security consultant.”

  “That being a euphemism for the sort of chap who leaves a pile of corpses in the hall outside of your flat.”

  “They deserved it,” Olivia said.

  Uncle Meng raised his shorn eyebrows at this, but not in a disapproving way.

  “Do we know who else is aboard that plane?”

  “I don’t know the ins and outs of flying,” Olivia said, “but I’ve been turning it over in my mind and I can’t but think that its usual pilots must be at the controls. Jones must have coerced them somehow.”

  “I don’t disagree, but I was really asking about the bloody terrorists.”

  “Not many of Jones’s crew could have survived what happened in that building,” Olivia said. “I’m amazed that Jones did. But he can’t have been acting alone. So he must have had some other safe house or support network that he drew on later.”

  “The yacht club,” said Uncle Meng, using a bit of jargon that he and Olivia had devised during the course of the operation. They’d been unable to get many details, but they were fairly certain that Jones had traveled by sea from the Philippines to Taiwan and from there to Xiamen, and that he was getting supplies and personnel through some such connection, probably small fishing vessels passing stuff back and forth, literally and figuratively under the radar.

  They ended up drawing a time line on the whiteboard. There was a gap of many hours between the explosion of the apartment building and Mr. Y’s startling and timely arrival—which seen from this remove had a touching Romeo-esque quality—on “Meng Anlan’s” balcony. This was at least tangentially relevant to Jones’s movements, since it was assumed that the men who’d been sent to her apartment had been acting at Jones’s behest. Olivia made her best guess as to the time of the phone conversation between Mr. Y and Jones, of which she had overheard Sokolov’s half while they’d been out on the stolen water taxi. Sokolov had known somehow that Jones was at the airport. He had guessed that some female named Zula was with him. He had threatened to find and dispatch Jones in some exceptionally cruel style if he did anything to Zula.

  After that, the time line sported another white space until 0713 in the morning yesterday, China time, when the jet had taken off. Then a very long blank space encompassing the thirty-six hours between that moment and “NOW.” A few tentative marks were later drawn into that space, denoting when Olivia had made contact with George Chow, when Sokolov had disappeared into the mist, and the spans of time occupied by Olivia’s flights from Kinmen to Taipei, Taipei to Singapore, Singapore to London.

  Then a difficult pause.

  “It might have been convenient for us to have known,” said Uncle Meng, “just a bit earlier than now, that Abdallah Jones was in the air, in a jet with such-and-such tail number.”

  Olivia was ready for this. Had been thinking about it. “By the time I got that information out of Mr. Y, Jones had already been in the air for eight hours. Because of what happened—the gunfire—I considered the operation blown and no longer trusted George Chow, so I didn’t give him the tail number. We had to get out of Kinmen anyway. By the time we reached Taipei, Jones had been in the air for at least ten hours. I had no secure line of communications from there by which to reach you. By the time I r
eached Singapore, it had been long enough that Jones’s plane was almost certainly no longer airborne.”

  Uncle Meng seemed unconvinced. But before this awkward topic could be developed further, one of the younger, laptop-smacking analysts piped up with the following news: “Yesterday a missing persons report was filed on someone named Zula. A Yank. Adopted from Eritrea, hence the unusual name. Female, early twenties, lives in Seattle, which is where the report was filed.”

  “Get us more on her,” said Uncle Meng. “I’d love to know how she ended up on a hijacked business jet in Xiamen with Abdallah Jones. Not to mention how it is that Mr. Y, so bloodthirsty in other respects, cares how this random person is treated.”

  “You’re reading Mr. Y all wrong,” Olivia said.

  They all just gazed at her, hoping she’d say more.

  “He’s a gentleman,” she explained, for want of any better way to put it.

  “Oh. Why didn’t you just say so?” said Uncle Meng.

  MUCH OF WHAT happened after that was out of her purview: they got loads of data about Zula. Loads more about the Russian. They guessed, but Olivia refused to confirm, that Mr. Y was Sokolov. They brought in RAF types who knew a great deal about airplanes and radar and put aeronautical charts up on the whiteboards and hooked up a flight simulator programmed to simulate that exact type of business jet and tried flying it out of Xiamen. Olivia looked out of the simulator’s virtual cockpit windows and saw the beach at Kinmen where she had been standing with Sokolov, and almost fancied that if she strained her eyes enough she might see two columns of pixels down there, blurred representations of herself and of “Mr. Y” staring up at this simulated plane. Extremely childish/romantic. The true and serious purpose of this was to investigate possible flight plans that Jones might have followed after taking off that morning. Several of these were “wargamed,” which sounded like fun until it became evident that 90 percent of the wargaming had to do with the internal doings of air traffic control centers and protocols for filing flight plans in various Southeast Asian countries. A faction badly wanted to demonstrate that Jones could have flown the jet all the way to Pakistan, but gaping holes were blasted in this scenario as expert persons pointed out all the restricted military airspace around the disputed border regions of India/China, Pakistan/India, et cetera. Another faction was all for the idea that he had taken the jet all the way to North America. But to justify this they had to piece together a somewhat tangled tale that could explain how he had evaded radar detection while flying up a crowded and well-monitored air traffic corridor, and they had to provide some justification for why the plane had initially taken off southbound—an injudicious use of fuel. They were able to do that by composing an argument having to do with domestic Chinese flight plans. No one could prove that they were wrong, but all were uneasy with the story’s complexity. By far the simplest and most plausible scenario was that Jones had simply dropped the plane down to wavetop level and flown it straight to Mindanao and ditched it. Olivia favored that theory if for no other reason than that, if true, it meant that Jones had already been on the ground and the plane sunk beneath the waves by the time Sokolov had given her the tail number, and so she couldn’t be blamed for having delayed passing it on.