Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “You’d be Jones?” Richard said.

  “That I would. May we come inside? I’ve been tracking your website—the one that keeps asking whether anyone has seen Zula—and I’ve come to give you news and claim the reward.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “Not only is she alive, Richard, but you have the power to keep her that way.”

  “WELL, THAT HAPPENED,” Seamus announced. He crossed his arms over his chest and used his legs to shove his chair back from the computer.

  Csongor had already logged out. Never again, he suspected, would Lottery Discountz walk the streets of Carthinias. Marlon was still engaged, typing chat messages—apparently aimed at the character called Clover, who seemed to be Egdod’s bagman. On his screen it was possible to see Clover and Reamde standing so close that their heads were almost touching. Thorakks loitered a few meters away and Egdod—suddenly poignant in his smallness and aloneness—just stood there.

  Yuxia was perched on a counter near Seamus. “What’s next for you guys?” the latter asked. Grammatically, the question was aimed at all of them, but he was looking at Yuxia when he asked it.

  Which was just as well since Csongor hadn’t the faintest idea how to answer it. Apparently they were going to get some money now. At least enough to buy an airplane ticket. But to where? And could Csongor even get out of this country legally? The last stamp in his passport was from Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow. Since then he’d entered and left China illegally and sneaked into the Philippines. He might be wanted for God only knew what sorts of crimes in China. Did the Philippines have an extradition treaty with China? Did Hungary?

  He could only brood and worry and listen to Yuxia giving Seamus the third degree. “Who the heck are you?”

  “I already told you,” he said innocently.

  “A cop? A spy?”

  “I’m a sex tourist.”

  Yuxia laughed in his face. “You would have to travel much farther,” she said, “to find someone willing to do it with you.”

  This seemed to Csongor shockingly rude, and his head swiveled around just to be sure that such words had actually come from Qian Yuxia’s mouth. They had.

  And Seamus was eating it with a spoon. “Okay. Not a sex tourist.”

  “Why do you ask what is next for us?”

  “Oh, I just feel that we have established the beginnings of a friendship here, and I want to make sure you are all taken care of, that’s all.”

  “You can take care of me,” she said, “by getting me back home.”

  Seamus made a face. “Now, that’s going to be tricky,” he said. “I didn’t know much about you until just now.”

  By “just now” he meant the conversation that had occupied much of the preceding hour, in which Csongor, assisted somewhat by his comrades, had narrated the remainder of their story.

  “So? Now you know all about us,” Yuxia said, trying to sound insouciant. But Csongor knew her well enough, by now, to tell when she was troubled. Her eyes wandered and her face fell.

  “I know enough to charge you with a list of crimes as long as my arm, if I were a Chinese prosecutor,” Seamus said. Reacting, apparently, to a look on her face, he became dismayed and held out his hands as if trying to tamp something down. “Not that they would. What do I know? All I’m saying is, think hard before you go running back to China.”

  “I’m not going back,” Marlon scoffed. “It is my country and I love it, but I can’t go back.” And he returned to his money-shuffling activities.

  “Mystery man,” Csongor said, “what can you do to help us?”

  “In the next half hour or so, not so very much,” Seamus returned. “I need to make at least one phone call about our goon with the rifle. And I want to keep an eye on Egdod. He is worrying me a little. But after that, I will try to put something together. Maybe you guys can help us.”

  “Who is ‘us’ and what do you think we can help you with?”

  “The good guys and killing Jones.”

  “I am all about killing Jones,” Yuxia volunteered, holding up her hand like a little girl in school.

  Csongor, raised from birth to be a little more cautious in his utterances, only took this under advisement. But he did ask, “Why are you worried about Egdod?”

  “He has reverted to his bothavior.”

  “Which is?”

  “Trying to walk home,” Seamus said. “And home, for him, is, like, five thousand miles away.”

  “What does this mean?” Yuxia asked.

  “It means that Richard Forthrast’s computer crashed, or he lost his Internet connection.”

  “Maybe he just went to sleep,” Yuxia said.

  “Yes, or maybe he’s having coffee with whoever was ringing his doorbell, and his computer went to sleep,” said Seamus. “But in the meantime, the most powerful character in all of T’Rain is wandering around the world on autopilot.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Yuxia asked.

  “Maybe tag along. Like escorting a drunk president home after a long night in the bar.”

  “Didn’t you say you had to make a phone call?”

  “I have been trained by the United States government,” Seamus said, “to do more than one thing at a time.”

  “TURNABOUT IS FAIR play,” said a disgustingly cheerful voice, with a South Boston accent, on the other end of the line.

  Olivia groaned. “What time is it?”

  “Something like five, where you are. Not that bad. Up and at ‘em.”

  “What is happening?”

  “Just a little update for you. I can’t say everything I’d like to, because of where I am. But I found them, and I’ve been hanging out with them, and oh so much has happened in the magical world of T’Rain while you have been getting your beauty sleep.”

  “You physically found them,” she said, sitting up in bed. Outside, it was still dark, and she could see the lights of downtown Vancouver out the windows of her room. “You’re where they are.”

  “Yeah. Courtesy of the Philippine Air Force and a lot of favors that had to be called in.”

  “That is splendid work,” she said. “I knew you were smarter than you looked and acted.”

  “Just as dumb as everyone thinks, actually. Just a matter of following a big fat easy lead.”

  “Have you had a chance to talk to them?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I’ve heard their story. Quite a yarn. That’s not important now, though.”

  “What is important now, Seamus?”

  “There may be some action at your end today. Thought I’d let you know.”

  “In Vancouver?”

  A pause. “Shit, I’m sorry, I forgot you went to Vancouver.”

  “So … the action is going to be in Seattle?”

  “Maybe. As a by-product of what just happened, we got a photograph of one of Sokolov’s henchmen there. A few days after the main thing went down, he went back and broke into Peter’s place and stole a rifle out of a gun safe.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “It’s a total red herring, as far as finding Jones is concerned.”

  “So why are you waking me up to tell me about it?”

  “Because I thought you were still in Seattle, working with those FBI agents,” Seamus said, “and I just wanted to let you know…”

  “… that they were going to be dealing with this.”

  “Yes.”

  “That the investigation down there is going to get derailed and distracted by this red herring.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “As it happens, I’ll be doing something else today, though.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “Driving up to Prince George to look for strategically located security cameras. Begging their owners to let me see footage.”

  “Have fun with that.”

  “What’s on your age
nda, Seamus?”

  “Figure out what to do with this traveling circus.”

  RELUCTANT AS SHE was to give the jihadists credit for anything, Zula had to admit that they showed commendable restraint when it came to talking on the radio. Perhaps it was a Darwinian selection thing. All the jihadists who failed to observe radio silence had been vaporized by drone strikes.

  There was no walkie-talkie or phone chatter from the time Jones left the camp with his three comrades until two and a half hours later, when Ershut and Jahandar trudged up the hill, looking winded but satisfied. In the meantime, the other members of the expedition—everyone except for Zakir and Sayed—breakfasted, prayed, and packed. The latter activity seemed to consume a great deal of emotional energy. It looked like every family-leaving-on-vacation meshuggas Zula had ever witnessed in the developed world, blended with a healthy dollop of desperate-refugees-striking-out-for-Sudan. The only thing missing was yelping dogs and crying kids. These men were not being helped any by the fact that each of them was obliged to carry lots of weapons. Washing the dishes and tidying the kitchen area at the base of her tree, Zula had a central viewpoint on the resulting arguments and the ruthless prioritization that flowed from them. It all seemed to come down to: pound for pound, what would kill the largest number of people? Bricks of plastic explosive ended up being given high priority. Guns too were highly thought of. Ammunition, somewhat less so; it seemed that they were expecting to purchase a lot of it in the States. Which Zula had to grant was a very reasonable plan. Unless their weapons used really weird bullets, they’d be able to pick up everything they needed in sporting goods emporia. Bullets, being made of lead, were heavy; and it seemed that heaviness was very much on their minds as they hoisted their packs off the ground, staring off into the distance, thinking about what it would be like to carry this up and down mountains for several days.

  In another sample of the weird and profoundly distasteful emotional involvement that had been coming over her of late, Zula actually became anxious that they wouldn’t be ready in time. She didn’t think she had Stockholm syndrome yet, but she was beginning to understand how people got that way.

  In any case, Ershut and Jahandar trudged back into the camp to find their comrades perhaps 75 percent finished with packing; and the intensity of their outrage was sufficient to make the remaining 25 percent come together rapidly. Even so, a quarter of an hour must have expired before the others were ready. During that interval, Zula was, for lack of a better word, exhibited. Ershut was the custodian of the keys. He opened the padlock that secured the end of the chain around the tree, then used it as a very long and heavy dog-leash to prevent Zula from straying as he led her down the hill for a short distance. Below their campsite, but above the uppermost reaches of the plank-avalanche, a lump of granite, about the size of a two-story house, protruded from the slope. It saw, and could be seen from, much of the valley below. Much of the Blue Fork’s course could be seen from it, beginning in talus-and snow-covered mountains some miles to the south, or left, and running beneath the cliffs of Bayonet Ridge, directly below, to its junction with the White Fork at the Schloss, off to the right. The slope was heavily forested, but when the angles were right, it was possible to get a clear view of the road and of the turnaround at its end.

  Standing in the middle of the turnaround were three men. She could not really see faces at this distance, but she knew them from their shapes as Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, and Uncle Richard. And she knew that they could see her.

  A childish thrill shot down her arm, telling her to raise it and wave at her uncle. She controlled that impulse and lost sight of the men below through a screen of tears. Turning her back on her uncle in shame, she began to trudge back to the campsite, heedless of the tug of the chain. Ershut let her go and locked her back up and left her to sit at the base of the tree, curled up and sobbing. A pathetic state of affairs. But better than she deserved. She had just betrayed her own uncle. He was now in the power of men who would certainly kill him as soon as he was no longer useful.

  SOKOLOV HAD A moment’s irrational fear that he was never going to strike the water, but he mastered the urge to look down, since this would have led to getting punched in the face by the ocean. He wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway. He kept his toes pointed and his ankles together, not wanting any water hammer effects on his testicles either, and then suddenly there was a shock in his legs and a searing whoosh immediately snuffed out by a deep mechanical throb: the screws of the freighter, churning away just behind him. An old habit told him that he should begin swimming now. But he was zipped up from ankles to neckline in an orange survival suit that knew how to find the surface. He waited. The frigid water, churned into a foaming sluice by the screws, streamed over him.

  His head broke the surface and he was breathing again. To get his bearings, he spun in place, treading water as best he could in the unwieldy suit, until he could see the transom of the freighter receding. It was already impressively far away.

  He turned his head to the right and saw what he’d seen a few seconds earlier from the ship’s fantail: brassy light reflecting against the underside of low clouds. The lights of a city, and perhaps of an impending sunrise. Brighter, sharper lights gleamed along a slope perhaps a kilometer distant, a bluff rising out of the sea, carpeted with trees but densely settled with houses, and a few big avenues aglow with the logos of strip malls and fast-food places.

  He drew a bead on a KFC sign and began swimming.

  THE APLOMB WITH which the boatman had helped Sokolov throw the dead men off the deck of his vessel, in those misty waters off Kinmen two weeks ago, had convinced Sokolov that here was a fellow with whom he could really do business. He had wondered where “George Chow” had found this man and had begun to develop a hypothesis that this was not just any random boatman who had been, as it were, hailed off the street, but was actually some kind of a local fixer who ran various errands for the local espionage community. Either that, or he was a clinical psychopath, of whom Sokolov was more afraid than anyone else he had dealt with on that day.

  It happened sometimes that in the early part of one of these projects, it felt as if you were going up hill into a headwind. Everything was against you; luck was always bad; nothing fell together, nothing worked out right. But beyond a certain point it changed and it was all easy, everything went your way. Thus here. He had rid himself of Olivia, who was an alluring and yet highly inconvenient person to have in his life. He was no longer in the PRC, no longer in the crowded city center of Xiamen, and, to boot, shrouded in dense fog and being assisted by a peppy boatman who, if he had been impressed or scared by the three gun-toting agents who’d commandeered his boat, must have been even more so by the way Sokolov had vaulted aboard and machine-gunned them. Since he seemed to have passed over that watershed, it had not really surprised him when he had found himself, only a little while later, ascending a rope ladder toward an open hatch near the stern of a big containership bound for the open Pacific. He had easily come to terms with its Filipino crew and bought passage, and even a bunk of his own, using the remaining cash in his pockets. The next two weeks had been a sort of vacation on a steel beach, and a welcome opportunity to rest up and heal from various minor injuries suffered during the events in Xiamen. Only during the last couple of days had he really stirred himself from his bunk and begun to exercise again, practicing his falls and rolls on the ship’s deckplates to the great amusement of the crew.

  A TIDAL CURRENT seemed to drag him alongshore. A beach came into view, and he made for it as best he could in the suit. He did not need it for its flotation properties, but dared not shed it lest he die of hypothermia within sight of land. The sun was far from being up yet and would be hidden by dense clouds when it got around to rising above the horizon; but the sky was definitely growing lighter, enabling him to pick out a few details on the beach: strewn logs, and fire rings, and a public toilet.

  Wrestling and kicking his way through a forest of brown kelp
, he got to a place where he could feel a rocky bottom under his feet and trudged carefully toward a beached log, taking his time, not wanting to turn an ankle in a moment of thoughtless haste. When the water became knee-deep, he crouched in the lee of the log, in case he was being watched from one of the dwellings on the slope above, and stripped off the suit. Stuffed inside of it he had been carrying a set of clothes wrapped up in a garbage bag. He changed into these, all except for socks and shoes, which he carried a-dangle around his neck for the time being. The survival suit might garner attention if he left it here, so he stuffed it into the black garbage bag and slung that over his shoulder. Then he climbed a little higher on the strand and began to make his way south. He had no idea where he was, but the freighter had been headed south and so it seemed reasonable to assume that port facilities and a larger city were to be found in that general direction.

  Half a dozen teenagers, boys and girls, were huddled together around the remains of a campfire. The empty beer bottles and fast-food wrappers all around them gave a fair account of how they had spent the preceding evening. They’d had enough foresight to bring blankets and sleeping bags and make a night of it. As Sokolov approached, one of them rose and staggered down the beach until he felt he had gone far enough to fish out his penis and urinate without giving offense to any female members of his party who might be awake. In this he seemed to be erring on the side of caution, glancing back frequently over his shoulder. Sokolov approved of this.

  He was still pissing, with the enviable vigor of the young, as Sokolov approached within hailing distance. His eyes traveled up and down Sokolov’s body. His face bespoke alert curiosity but not fear; he had not identified Sokolov as a derelict or criminal.

  “What is this place?” Sokolov asked him.

  “This is Golden Gardens Park,” the young man answered, in the touchingly naive belief that this would mean something to Sokolov.

  “What is name of city, please?”