Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!”

  “I see ’em and am pulling. Need backup though.”

  “Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back. Someone finish the bastard off. A few Kingly Strokes would take care of it, Shame.”

  Seamus said, “Okay, I’ll need to rearm, cover me for second … got it … Fuck!”

  All of the men leaned back from their screens in unison and let out roars of anguished laughter so loud that Olivia’s ears crackled. “Fuck, man!” called a compact African American. “He toasted you.”

  “We’re all fucked now,” said a Hispanic guy. “Sequester your shit while you still can.”

  Fierce clicking and typing, punctuated by roaring, anguished laughter, as (Olivia guessed) each man’s character died in the game world.

  Planted around the dining area, on windowsills and kitchen counters, were plastic dolls: troll-or elflike fantasy characters decked out in elaborate costumes and armed to the teeth with fanciful, quasi-medieval weapons. Each one stood on a faux-stone pedestal with a name chiseled into it. Olivia picked one of them up—very carefully, since it seemed that they were important—and flipped it over. Marked on the underside of the base was the logo of Corporation 9592.

  So that answered the question she’d been afraid to ask, for fear of seeming like the stupidest person in the whole world: Are you playing T’Rain? Because Olivia was not a gamer and could not tell one such game from another.

  “Olivia?”

  She looked up and locked eyes with Seamus, who was staring at her over the rim of his laptop screen. Seamus spoke with exaggerated calm: “Put … the troll … down … and slowly back away.”

  Okay, he was joking. She carefully put the doll back and then clasped her hands innocently behind her back. The other men let out loud fyoosh! noises as if an IED had just been successfully defused.

  “I’m sorry I touched your doll,” she said. “I had no idea how important Thorakks was to you.”

  Silence, as none of the men knew how to cope with her tactical use of the word “doll.”

  “I’m not a big T’Rain expert,” she continued. “Is Thorakks like a major character in the world?”

  “Thorakks is my character,” Seamus said.

  “Wow, how do you rate having a doll made of your personal character?”

  “It’s called an action figure,” he said, “and it’s nothing special. If you’ve got a character in T’Rain, all you have to do is fill out a web form and send them fifty bucks and they’ll make you one of these on a 3D printer and ship it to you. Discount for active-duty military.”

  “Are you active-duty military?”

  “No, but we have ways of finagling the discounts.”

  “Are these your own personal laptops?” Olivia asked.

  “Why do you want to know?” asked Seamus, wary that she was about to accuse him of misusing government property.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I was only wondering if there might be a spare computer around here that I might use.”

  “For, like, secure email?”

  “No. For playing T’Rain.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t play.”

  “I don’t,” she admitted, “but this needs to change.”

  “Needs!?”

  “Professional reasons,” she said.

  For she now knew that the missing person called Zula was connected to Corporation 9592—was, in fact, the cofounder’s niece—and that her abduction from Seattle to Shanghai had been somehow related to the activities of the nest of hackers who had lived in the apartment below Jones’s. While she did not feel the need to spend a huge amount of time on T’Rain, and certainly didn’t want to go to the point of having her own personal doll created on a 3D printer, she needed to know a little more about the game.

  Twelve hours later, she knew more than she needed to—and yet she still wanted to know more. What was the secret hiding place of the Black Pearls of the Q’rith? What combination of spells and herbs was needed to rouse the Princess Elicasse from her age-long slumber beneath the Golden Bower of Nar’thorion? Where could she get some Qaldaqian Gray Ore to forge new Namasq steel arrowheads to shoot with her Composite Bow of Aratar? And were those the right kind of ranged weapons, anyway, to use against the Torlok that was barring her passage across the Bridge of Enbara? She could have obtained answers to all these questions from Seamus and his band of lost boys, but she knew that any answers provided would only lead to more questions, and she had already pestered them far too many times. They seemed terribly busy, anyway, planning something.

  Something violent.

  Something in the real world. Not far away.

  She collected these impressions during brief moments of lucidity when she pulled herself out of the game to ask a question, fetch more junk food, or go to the W. C. At these times the men would all clam up and pointedly look the other way until she had once again ensconced herself in front of the game.

  It was something like three in the morning. She went back to her trailer, tossed and turned until dawn, seeing images of T’Rain whenever she closed her eyes, then finally went to sleep and was awakened in midafternoon by Seamus pounding on her door.

  He had even more things strapped to him than usual: a Camel-Bak; extra magazines for his Sig; hard-shell knee pads.

  He invited himself in and squatted down, leaning back against the wall. Stretching his quads.

  ­” People are going to die tonight because of that theory you and your colleagues spun up in London,” he said.

  “The theory that Jones flew the jet down here,” she said.

  “Yeah. That theory. So before people die for it—keeping in mind one of them might be me—I just thought I would pay a little social call, shoot the breeze, and eventually, you know, get around to asking you whether you still believe in that theory. But it turns out that when I am getting ready to go on one of these operations, I’m not much in the mood for small talk.”

  Olivia nodded. “He took off southbound. If he had turned it into a martyrdom operation—crashed it into something—we’d know. If it had landed somewhere and been noticed, we’d know. So he didn’t do either of those things. He flew it somewhere he could land it and hide it without being noticed. This place is easily reachable from Xiamen, he knows it well, has friends and connections here…”

  “You mentioned all those things before,” Seamus said.

  Olivia was silent.

  “All I’m saying: here I am. Seamus. Alive and well. Not your best friend, but someone you know a little. As far as I can tell, you don’t hate me. You tolerate my presence. Maybe even like me a tiny little bit. I’m about to leave. Let’s say I come back in a body bag tomorrow morning. Let’s say that happens. You get on a plane and fly back to London. As you are sitting on that long, long airplane flight, at some point when you’re over India or Arabia or fucking Crete or something, are you going to go, like”—he smacked himself in the face and adopted a look of chagrin, shook his head, rolled his eyes—” ‘Shit, you know, that theory actually sucked. ‘Is that going to happen?”

  “No,” Olivia said. “It’s the best theory we have.”

  “We being the guys sitting around the table in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “How about you, Olivia? Is it the best theory you have?”

  “Does it matter?” That answer had sprung to her lips surprisingly quickly.

  His face froze for a few seconds, and then he smiled without showing his teeth. “No,” he said, “of course not.”

  Then he pushed himself away from the wall, rose to his feet, spun on the balls of his black-on-black running shoes, and walked out.

  She sat there without moving for twenty minutes, until she heard the helicopters taking off.

  Then she went to the empty dining area and opened up Seamus’s laptop—he had given her a guest account—and played T’Rain for the rest of the afternoon, through into the evening, and then all nig
ht. Every so often she would stop and try to adjudge whether she was tired enough to go to sleep. But she knew perfectly well that no such thing would happen until Seamus and his men had come back.

  They were back at about nine in the morning. Olivia had passed out on the sofa, gotten perhaps three hours’ sleep in spite of herself. All six of them came in together, filthy and sweaty and in some cases bloody; but none of them was seriously injured. She got the sense that they had been speaking very loudly and uninhibitedly, but the volume dropped to almost zero as soon as her sleepy head popped up from behind the back of the sofa. She caught Seamus’s eye. He was staring at her fixedly, peeling things off himself, dropping them on the floor.

  The other men drifted out and tromped off to their barracks. She couldn’t avoid the impression that they had wanted to throw down their stuff and relax here and that her presence in the room had ruined it.

  Seamus sidestepped around. He was carrying a gray plastic laptop under one arm. Not his usual machine. He set it on the coffee table, then sat down in a chair arranged at ninety degrees to the couch. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and carefully placed the tips of his fingers together and flexed his hands against each other, as if checking to see whether all the little joints in the fingers still worked. Some of his knuckles had been bleeding.

  He looked Olivia straight in the eye and said, in a mild but direct tone of voice, “Do you want to fuck?”

  She must have looked a little surprised.

  “Sorry to be so blunt,” he went on, “but surviving one of these things always makes me incredibly horny. This, and going to funerals. Those are the triggers for me. So I just thought I would ask. I feel like I could rip off a great one just now. Tip-top. So I’m just checking. Just on the off chance you might be in the mood for something, you know, totally hot and meaningless.”

  Olivia could well imagine it: the mischievous grin spreading across her lips, scampering back to the guest cabin, crowding into the shower, and getting banged senseless by this hormonally enraged man-child.

  “Um, I sort of am actually,” Olivia said earnestly, “but I think it’s a temptation I can resist for now.” Feeling that this required more explanation, she added, “I was specifically told not to, actually.”

  He looked impressed. “Really!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone actually bothered to issue you an order forbidding coitus with me.”

  “Yeah. More I think directed at me and my reputation than yours.”

  He looked crestfallen.

  “But I’m sure yours is amazing! Your reputation, that is.”

  He nodded.

  “Did it go all right then?” she asked.

  “Yeah! Why do you ask?”

  “Just coz you’ve got blood all over you.”

  “Do you know what I do for a living?”

  She no longer felt like bantering back.

  Seamus leaned back, reached into a cargo pocket, pulled out a little black case, unsnapped it to reveal a set of tiny screwdrivers. He flipped the laptop upside down, selected a tool, began to undo little screws. “The objective was to enter one of their encampments and grab at least one subject for interrogation. And to get any other evidence that might be useful along the way. Like this.” He patted the laptop. “Not really a good helicopter-gunship-assault kind of mission. We had to land some distance away and go in on foot and surprise them.”

  “ ‘Surprise’ being, I guess, quite a mild term for how you approached these blokes.”

  “It’s an incomplete term. They were definitely surprised.” Seamus had removed all the little screws he could find. He paused, looking at the laptop, still all together in one piece. “Jones has been known to booby-trap these things and then leave them lying around,” he said. “But this one was not left lying around. It was being used when we entered the hut.” He popped the back off. Olivia couldn’t help flinching. But there were no lumps of plastique inside. Seamus chose another screwdriver and began to remove the screws that held its little hard drive into place. “I’ll upload this to Langley while I’m taking my shower.”

  “What about the other part of the mission?”

  “Grabbing a subject?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Done.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In the hands of our Filipino colleagues.”

  SEAMUS DOCKED THE little hard drive into a gadget that inhaled all its contents without altering them and squirted them down a high-bandwidth connection to the United States for, she guessed, decryption and analysis. Then he went back to his quarters and took a shower. Olivia took one of her own, not because she was dirty but because she had that cottony, icky feeling that came from lying on a sofa for a whole day playing a stupid game. She wanted to get some exercise but didn’t see how it was possible. In the courtyard of their little compound, Seamus’s team had set up some kind of body-weight exercise system involving ropes, and she’d seen them out there going at it yesterday. But that was exercise with a purpose—This might give me a tiny edge on the next mission—whereas she wanted to do something wholesome like go for a walk.

  There was a couple of hours’ hiatus. Food was eaten, email checked. Then Seamus spun his laptop around. It was playing a video window: a reasonably high-definition feed from a small, windowless, brightly lit room. A man, stripped to the waist, was sitting in a wooden chair, hands behind him as if cuffed. His features were Malay/Filipino, but he had been growing a scruffy beard. One eye was closed off by a huge shiner, and at the places where bony ridges had once sat close beneath the skin, butterfly bandages were straining to hold lacerations closed. The swelling extended down toward his chin, and she wondered whether his jaw might have been broken. He was mumbling in some language that Olivia didn’t recognize.

  One of Seamus’s men, whom she had previously pegged as Hispanic, scooted closer, plugged in a pair of large, expensive-looking headphones, and leaned forward to listen. After a few moments, he began to rattle off sentence fragments in English: “It’s like I said before … honest to God … I’ll tell you anything you want to hear, you know this now … but you want the truth, don’t you? The truth is we didn’t see him. Didn’t hear anything until a few days ago. Then we got word … send out emails, you know. They could be anything, just random.”

  Seamus explained, “According to the analysts at Langley, that laptop was used to send out a bunch of junk emails starting a few days ago.”

  “Like spam?” someone asked.

  “They were just cutting and pasting random scraps of text from instruction manuals, encrypting it, sending it out. Trying to create the illusion of traffic. False chatter.” Seamus swiveled his eyes to look at Olivia. Then he made a little jerk of his head toward the door. She got up, headed for the exit, and he followed in her wake, all the way to her quarters.

  “This is not about fucking, I assume?” she asked.

  He rolled his eyes. “No, I’m in a completely different state of mind now; I regret what I said earlier.”

  “Very well,” she said levelly.

  “Though that is a cute haircut.”

  This was certainly an attempt to bait her, and so she remained silent and, she hoped, inscrutable.

  “What I really wanted to tell you was that … you’ve got what you came here for,” Seamus said.

  “What did I come here for, do you imagine?”

  “Evidence to support the theory you really believe.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “I thought I would get your opinion,” Olivia said, “before showing my hand.”

  He stuck his tongue in his cheek and thought about it.

  “It’s not poker,” she said. “There’s no disadvantage in your telling me what you think. We’re both trying to get the same rat bastard.”

  “If Jones had something as awesome as a bizjet,” Seamus said, “would he use it to scurry like a mouse back into the nearest hole? I think not.”r />
  “He’d do something really cool, like fly it into a building,” Olivia said, nodding.

  Seamus held up one admonishing finger. “Oh, no,” he said, “because that would involve dying, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose very likely, yes.”

  “And he doesn’t want to die.”

  “For a man who doesn’t want to die, he puts himself in some quite dodgy situations,” she pointed out.

  “Oh, I think he’s conflicted,” Seamus said. “Someday he’s going to be a martyr. Someday. This is what he keeps telling himself. Then he looks around himself, at the wack jobs and goat fuckers he has to work with, and he sees how much more he has to offer the movement by staying alive. Putting his expertise to work, his languages, his ability to blend in. And so the day of martyrdom keeps getting postponed.”

  “Convenient for him, that.”

  Seamus grinned and shrugged. “I actually don’t know whether the man is a coward, or really trying to use his skills in the most productive way by staying alive. I’d love to ask him that someday. Before sticking a knife into his belly.”

  “So. He didn’t come here. He didn’t crash it into a building. He didn’t get caught. Where’d he go?”

  “All of his instincts,” Seamus said, “would move him in the direction of the United States.”

  THEY SPENT THE rest of the day writing reports to their respective higher-ups. The next morning, Seamus and Olivia flew back to Manila. Seamus had business there at the U.S. embassy, and Olivia needed to make arrangements to fly home. The route back to Olivia’s hotel was almost a perfect reversal of the trip out, complete with the sweaty hike across the city to get around traffic. They reached the hotel at 10:12 A.M. and the hotel bar at 10:13, and after dutifully gulping down glasses of water for technical rehydration purposes, they moved on to alcohol.