Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  The journey took closer to two hours than the projected three, in spite of the fact that most of it was done under sail. For as soon as they had motored clear of the shallows and of the crowd of boat surrounding Szélanya, the skipper killed the engine, and he and the boys raised some canvas. These were only a little more polished-looking than the ones that Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia had improvised, but they seemed to work a good deal better and they soon had the boat skimming efficiently down the coast.

  Csongor spent most of the journey replaying in his mind the encounter with the young man in the Celtics shirt, savoring all the different ways in which he had been stupid and cataloging the opportunities he had missed to turn the situation around and get their money back.

  Marlon seemed to read his mind. Finally he grinned, reached out, and chucked Csongor on the shoulder. “It’s cool,” he said.

  Csongor ought to have been old enough by now not to be affected by cool kids telling him that he was cool, but even so this had a powerful effect on his mood. “Really?” he said. He glanced at Yuxia, but she had slipped into sleep during the journey and was slumbering deeply, her lips slightly parted. She was, he realized, very beautiful, like a madonna in a church. When she was awake, her energy and the force of her personality shone through her face and made it difficult to know anything about what she really looked like, somewhat in the same way that you couldn’t see the glass envelope of a lightbulb when it was turned on. In some other universe he might have been attracted to her, but in this one she would forever be his kid sister.

  He glanced back up to find Marlon watching him. During the voyage of Szélanya, Csongor thought he had observed some tender moments between Marlon and Yuxia; and he had wondered whether the two of them might end up involved romantically. But the ruthless environment in which they had been living had ruled out anything actually happening. Was Marlon hoping, now, that this would change? And if so, might he feel jealous when he saw Csongor gazing for a long time at the sleeping Yuxia? Csongor didn’t see anything of the sort in Marlon’s face. He, Csongor, had never been especially good at hiding his emotions, and he hoped that Marlon would be able to read him correctly.

  “How is it cool?” Csongor asked. “You have a plan?”

  “I have to get to a wangba,” Marlon said, “and see what is happening in the Torgai. But I think I can get a lot of money.”

  “Enough to get us to Manila?”

  Marlon grinned broadly. Sort of an affectionate reaction to Csongor’s naïveté. “Much more than that,” he said.

  RICHARD FORTHRAST took her a short distance up Airport Way to a neighborhood he called Georgetown. He swung around a corner and slowed down in midblock to draw her attention to a building that, he said, was the very one from which his niece and the subject named Peter Curtis had been abducted a little more than two weeks ago. Then he proceeded to a nearby drinking establishment, in front of which was parked a long row of Harley-Davidsons. The barmaid in chief, an intense woman with many tattoos, greeted him by name and asked him “Any news yet?” and then got a brooding look when he shook his head no. They occupied the last available booth. The waitress already knew Richard’s order but brought menus for Olivia and John. Olivia had been steeling herself for a bottle of watery yellow American beer but was surprised to find a dozen and a half beers, ales, and stouts of various descriptions, all available on draft. She requested a pint of bitter and a salad. John Forthrast ordered a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a hamburger. This triggered some kind of ancient sibling grievance between the two brothers. “You’re in a city where you could eat anything,” Richard reminded him. “Would it kill you to—oh never mind.” The latter clause with a glance toward Olivia and a reckoning that this wasn’t the time to revive what showed every sign of being a worn-out argument.

  “I don’t like spicy food,” John muttered doggedly.

  “Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?” Olivia asked.

  “Both,” Richard said. “It started out as a pure simulacrum, a few years ago, before the economy crashed, when it was hip for twentysomethings to move down here and dress in Carhartts and utili-kilts. But they did such a good job of it that actual blue-collar people began to show up. And then the economy did crash, and the hip people discovered that they were, in actual point of fact, blue collar, and probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.”

  “Do a lot of people stop by here on their way to the private jet terminal?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Food and drink arrived, precipitating a lull, and then Olivia began trying to explain herself with great care to avoid saying who she worked for, though this must have been obvious, and how she knew what she knew. “Since I can’t say much,” she concluded, “I had been rather hoping that I might get some clues or some insights from you. And the fact that you already know the names of Sokolov and Ivanov suggests to me that I am not barking up the wrong tree.”

  Richard pulled out an iPad and brought up images of the note that Zula had written on the paper towels, which Olivia, of course, read with fascination.

  There was a sense in which all things to do with Zula and the Russians were a red herring. MI6 couldn’t care less about them. They just wanted Jones, and any intelligence that they might be able to glean as a by-product of hunting for him. They’d had a quite satisfactory arrangement going in Xiamen, which had been destroyed by the Russians’ intervention. Everything to do with T’Rain and REAMDE was a distraction; for Olivia to hang out in a biker bar with the founder and chairman of Corporation 9592 was acceptable as an off-hours diversion but should under no circumstances be confused with actual productive work. Thus the official line. But having just finished a very long and expensive wild-goose chase to Zamboanga, an officially sanctioned mission that had put Seamus’s men to a lot of effort and danger and apparently led to several deaths, Olivia was now inclined to view the party line with a great deal of skepticism. She had a vague sense that drinking with Richard Forthrast might in the long run be more productive than flying to Manila had been. But she couldn’t explain how, yet, and so she didn’t think she’d be filing an expense report. Which turned out to be a nonissue in any case, since Richard picked up the check before giving her a lift back to her hotel.

  It was not until eleven o’clock the following morning that she was really able to get down to work on the NAG, the North American Gambit, which was her name for the theory that Jones had found some way to fly his stolen business jet directly from Xiamen to this continent. Here in the Seattle office of the FBI, signs were obvious that her local contacts were being controlled by persons in Washington, D.C., who were quite serious about working this theory in a systematic way. This was both good and bad. Obviously it was helpful that they liked her theory well enough to take it seriously and devote resources to its investigation. But whoever was running this project in D.C. was an Organization Man or Woman, someone with a studious engineer-like mind-set, who spent a lot of time worrying about accountability. No Seamus Costello, in other words. It seemed that a lot of duplication of effort was going on in which that hypothetical flight was being wargamed and flight-simulated in precisely the way that had already been done at MI6 more than a week ago. Ever newer and better “resources” were being “brought online” and ever more “scary-smart” analysts being “looped in” and “brought up to speed.” These developments were relayed second- and thirdhand to Olivia, and it was obvious from the tones of the emails and the expressions on people’s faces that she was expected to be gratified by each of these improvements. And yet from this remove, thousands of miles from whatever Beltway conference room where all the action was taking place, all these enhancements yielded zero results other than additional delays. It was not until about twenty-four hours after her meeting with Richard Forthrast
that she finally began to get access to some of the data she needed to evaluate the NAG in a serious way: lists of the tail numbers of private airplanes that had landed at U.S. airports around the time in question (a week and a half ago now, long enough to give her the sense that she was pursuing a hopelessly cold trail) and high-resolution satellite images of out-of-the-way bits of the northwestern United States where computer-image-processing algorithms had detected white shapes that looked like they might conceivably be jet airplanes.

  Early in the afternoon she received a text message from Richard Forthrast informing her that he was just a few blocks away, killing time at the Greyhound station, and would she like to grab a cup of coffee? The honest answer was that she was right in the middle of something and she didn’t have time, but the message was tantalizingly mysterious, and coffee sounded good, and Richard was generally fun to hang out with. So she took the elevator to the ground floor and walked to the Greyhound station and found Richard and John sitting on a bench, reading the New York Times and Reader’s Digest, respectively, waiting for a bus from Spokane that had been delayed by weather on Snoqualmie Pass. Jacob Forthrast had decided to come out from his compound in Idaho and spend a little time with his two older brothers. “He feels useless” was Richard’s explanation—just the sort of bleak and pitiless analysis that could only happen between siblings—“and when he found out we weren’t going to China after all, he hopped on a bus.” He was looking up at Olivia over his reading glasses and his New York Times and must have seen in her face certain questions she was too polite to ask: Does he not have a car? Is he too poor to pay for an airline ticket? Richard folded up his newspaper and treated Olivia to a brisk little explanation of Jake’s belief system, delivered in a way that made it seem like he’d done it lots of times before and wanted it done properly. His tone was studiedly noncommittal, making it clear that he didn’t agree with Jake about anything, but there was nothing he could do about it, and so there was no point getting hung up on the essential ridiculousness of it all.

  Not long after this little orientation session came to an end, the bus pulled in, and Jake climbed off in the middle of a long stream of senior citizens, ethnic minorities, people too young to drive, and hard-luck cases. Feeling very much the odd woman out despite the Forthrast brothers’ efforts to make her feel welcome, Olivia strolled down the street with them to a bookstore that Jake wanted to visit. Given the fact that Jake believed a lot of crazy stuff, Olivia found it intriguing that the top item on his list was to visit a bookstore. If nothing else, it served as an icebreaker. She had no idea how such a man might react to her as a nonwhite female, but he was quite cordial, even easy to talk to, and went out of his way to describe himself as a “wingnut” and a “wack job,” apparently thinking that this would help put Olivia—or “Laura,” as she was still calling herself—at ease. It was clear that he had been brought thoroughly up to speed on the latest news regarding Zula, and how “Laura” fit into the picture. He had been thinking about it during the bus ride and come up with any number of questions and theories, most of which seemed like the products of an acute and active mind. He was, Olivia realized, at least as intelligent as Richard, and possibly more so.

  “Why do you live out there, the way you do?” she finally asked him.

  By this point she was sitting across the table from him in the bookstore’s coffee shop. Jake had immediately found the book he wanted: a manual on organic farming. Richard and John had wandered off into other parts of the bookstore, aimlessly browsing, and there was no telling when they’d be back. She had bought Jake a cup of coffee, and he had returned to making self-deprecating jests about his lifestyle, which Olivia was now starting to find a little boring—dancing around the unmentionable. Better to just ask him flat out. As a stranger in a strange land, she reckoned she could get away with it.

  “I guess I started with Emerson’s essay ‘On Self-Reliance’ and just followed the trail from there,” he said. “‘Behold the boasted world has come to nothing … Let me begin anew. Let me teach the finite to know its master. ‘I’d already been having thoughts along those lines when Patricia died …Dodge might have told you about that?”

  She shook her head. “But I did see something about it…”

  “In his Wikipedia entry, sure. Anyway, at the time I had nothing else going for me, and so I decided to spend a summer trying to build a life around that.”

  “Emersonian self-reliance, you mean.”

  “Yeah. The summer turned into a year, and during that year I met Elizabeth, and after that, well, the die was pretty much cast. Dodge had this property in northern Idaho, which he had acquired years before, during a phase of his life that I believe is also covered pretty well in the Wikipedia article.”

  Olivia smiled at the polite evasion, and Jake seemed to draw confidence from her reaction. Olivia said, “As I understand it, this was the southern terminus of his … route. Or whatever you want to call it. Just a few miles south of the Canadian border. But within reach of the U.S. highway network.”

  “Exactly. But it also just happens to be one of the most beautiful places you can imagine: the head of a little valley, just where the land gets flat enough to build on and cultivate, but only a few minutes’ walk from mountains full of wildlife and waterfalls, huckleberries and wildflowers.”

  “You make it sound marvelous.”

  “When I got off the bus in Bourne’s Ford—which is the closest town—an old man told me ‘Welcome to God’s country.’ I thought it was kind of hokey, but once I had found my way up the valley to Dodge’s property, well, then I understood. At first Elizabeth and I were just living in a backpacking tent. I wrote to Dodge and asked him if he wouldn’t mind my trying to improve the place a little, and so we began to build, and things just happened.”

  “But where does the whole Chris­tian right-wing thing enter into it? What’s that about?”

  Jake’s blissful expression became somewhat guarded. “When we had children, religion came back into our lives, as it does for many people, and Elizabeth has been my pathfinder as far as that is concerned. For me it’s about being part of a community that is not based just on geographical proximity or money, but on spiritual values. There are no cathedrals in the mountains. You create your own church just as you hunt or grow your own food, split your own firewood. And just like those things, it might seem simple and rude to people who live in places with cathedrals and schools of theology.”

  “What about the politics?”

  He considered it for a moment. The look on his face was a bit hopeless, as if he despaired of ever explaining it to a cosmopolitan outsider like Olivia. “Again,” he quoted, “‘behold the boasted world has come to nothing … let me begin anew.’ What you’re seeing isn’t politics. It’s the absence of politics. It’s us trying to live in a way where we never have to put up with politics and politicians again. That means that when the politicians come after us, try to interfere with our lives, we have to defend ourselves, with passive and nonviolent measures when we can, but, failing that…”

  “With guns?”

  “We take full advantage of our 2A rights.”

  “2A?”

  “Second Amendment.”

  “Are you carrying a gun now?”

  “Of course I am. And I’ll bet there’s ten other people within a hundred feet of us who are doing the same. But you’d never be able to guess who by looking around.” For Olivia had instinctively begun looking around. She did not see any obvious pistol-packers. But she did catch sight of Richard and John, who had fallen into conversation near the store’s exit and were looking at them significantly.

  “Looks like we are leaving,” Olivia said, beginning to get up.

  “Come and visit us,” Jake blurted out.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I know it’s out of the way. You may never come within five hundred miles of Prohibition Crick, unless you’re flying over it. But if you do, I invite you to come up into our little va
lley and stay with us. Sincerely. You’ll see. It won’t be weird. It won’t be uncomfortable. No one will be rude to you for being foreign, or not looking like us. You’ll enjoy it. We won’t try to convert you.”

  “That is very kind of you,” she said, “and it actually sounds like something I might rather enjoy.”

  “Good.”

  “Now I just need an excuse to visit—what? Spokane?”

  “Or Elphinstone. Or Richard’s Schloss. There’s lots of nice places within a day’s drive.”

  OLIVIA WAS TOUCHED by Richard’s including her in the reunion of the three brothers, until she reflected that Richard was anything but a sentimental fool and that he must have done it for tactical reasons. After that, she only pretended to be touched. She told the Forthrasts she could see plainly enough that they had things to discuss. And Olivia had an investigation to pursue. So she parted ways with them at the bookstore and went back to the FBI offices to resume the NAG investigation.