Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “Seattle.”

  “Thank you.” Then, as Sokolov went past him, he asked: “You just jump off a train or something?” For, as Sokolov had noticed, this beach was separated from the city by a railway siding.

  “Or something,” Sokolov affirmed. Then he pointed with his chin down the beach. “Is bus?”

  “Yeah. Just keep going to the marina.”

  “Thanks. Have nice day.”

  “You too. Take it easy, man.”

  “Is not my objective. Nice thing to say though. Enjoy piss.”

  Day 19

  Olivia’s plan to bolt out of the hotel and get a hot start on the day turned out to be embarrassingly, stupidly optimistic in more than one way. The night before she had fallen asleep in her clothes and left several things undone, such as taking a shower, checking her email, and touching base with Inspector Fournier, who’d been so kind as to send her those police reports. After Seamus woke her up, she set about doing those things. The shower went quickly and according to plan; nothing else did. What she’d envisioned as a quick check of her work email turned into a slough of despond. The next time she looked at the clock, an hour and a half had disappeared, and she was only getting in deeper; emails she had sent at the beginning of this session had spawned entire threads of responses in which she was now profoundly entangled, and people were threatening to set up conference calls. Her hasty departure from the FBI offices in Seattle had left her colleagues there variously confused and irritated, and these had to be brought up to speed or calmed down. At the same time, these same people were being made aware of the decrypted video images from the security cameras in Peter’s apartment, and so she got to watch as awareness propagated across their networks of email lists and they began to discuss what they should do next. It was Saturday morning and FBI agents were thumbing emails from the sidelines of their kids’ soccer games. “Out of office” responses were bouncing around the system like pachinko balls. The channel through which these images had reached them was extremely confusing (decryption key pulled out of a dead man’s wallet by a Hungarian in the Philippines communicating with an American in Canada, the conversation taking place on an imaginary planet), and Olivia had to intervene and explain matters.

  And that was just the Seattle FBI part of it. She had made the mistake of mentioning the idea of the Prince George security cam gambit to some of her colleagues in London, and this had spawned volumes of useless debate and counterproductive efforts to help her.

  The only thing that kept her from being stuck in email all day long was a telephone call from Fournier, who had suddenly become hospitable and now wished to have coffee with her. She agreed to meet him in the lobby of her hotel in half an hour, then packed her bags—not much of a chore, since she hadn’t unpacked, and half of her crap was still down in the rental car anyway—and, almost as an afterthought, used Google Maps to check out the route to Prince George.

  The results caused her to do a double-take. It was 750 kilometers and it was going to take her eleven hours, not counting eating and peeing breaks. The numbers were so enormous that she suffered a spell of disorientation, thinking that Google must have mistakenly routed her on some ridiculously convoluted route. But no, the map showed a reasonably straight course. It really was that far: the equivalent of driving from London to John o’ Groats. She was going to spend the entire day driving, and she was not going to get there until after dark. Tomorrow was Sunday.

  She checked the flight schedules, hoping that there would be hourly shuttles. The result: there were a few flights during the day, including one that she might be able to make if she canceled her breakfast with Inspector Fournier and then made a dash to the airport. Politically, this was not the best move, and so she booked a seat on a late-morning flight instead.

  Then down to the lobby to have coffee and a scone with Fournier. For some reason she had been expecting a middle-aged, rumpled Quebecois version of Columbo, but Fournier was trim, probably in his early thirties, and wore a stylish set of eyeglasses that made him seem younger still. What she’d mistaken for hostility had, she suspected, been a Continental formality that contrasted with the American frat boy ambience she had been immersed in during the previous days. She immediately suspected, and Fournier soon confirmed, that he’d spent a few years living in France, which was where he had picked up his professional manners and his taste in eyewear. Olivia’s status as MI6 agent, operating on foreign soil, had probably done nothing to loosen him up. But in person he could not have been more charming and attentive.

  Under the circumstances, Olivia couldn’t not tell Fournier about her plan to go to Prince George and look for strategically located security cameras. He sat back, stroked his fashionably stubbled chin, and gave it serious consideration. “In a perfect world,” he said, “you would not have to go there in person and look for such things.” Then he gave a hugely expressive shrug and cocked his head to one side. “Matters being what they are, I fear you are correct. Having such a thing done through the usual channels, when we have no evidence that Jones ever came within thousands of miles of Canada, and no particular reason to suspect foul play in the case of the missing hunters, would be … how shall I say this politely? … time-consuming.”

  It seemed clear that Fournier had come here expecting to find a sort of madwoman, but that meeting Olivia in the flesh and hearing her side of the story had begun to tell on him. His confidence that the hunters were merely lost, or innocently frozen to death, had been shaken a bit. He was now finding a few minutes’ diversion in entertaining Olivia’s theory. If nothing else, he seemed to think, it would enliven an otherwise dull investigation.

  Olivia, for her part, was finding it exasperatingly difficult to maintain her focus. She should never have checked her email. All she could think about was the torrent of messages even now coming into her inbox. Her adversaries were framing counterarguments that were going unanswered, her collaborators were requesting help and clarification that she was failing to supply. She ought to have been grateful, and gracious, to Fournier, and so have savored every minute of their discussion. Instead of which she was relieved when he glanced into his empty cup and began the end of the conversation with “Well…”

  She promised to check in from Prince George, shook his hand, and headed for the airport. She made a willful effort not to take out her phone until she had checked in her rental car and was on the shuttle bus to the terminal.

  Then she was confronted by a queue of unread messages whose length exceeded even her worst expectations. Subject headers had become completely deranged by this point, making it difficult to guess what these people were even talking about. But one of them, at the top of the stack—only received a few minutes ago—had the succinct heading “Got him.” It had come from one of the FBI agents in Seattle.

  She called him directly on the phone. Agent Vandenberg. A redhead from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  “I’m declaring email bankruptcy,” she said.

  “Happens to all of us, Liv,” said Agent Vandenberg, who was decidedly not of the Continental, Inspector Fournier style.

  “Just tell me how it all comes out.”

  “Don’t know yet,” he said puckishly.

  “But I’m seeing ‘Got him’ in the subject line. Whom did you get?”

  “I guess that should have been ‘recognized him,’” said Agent Vandenberg after a slight, embarrassed pause. “One of our guys immediately recognized the subject who stole the rifle. We know all about this guy. Igor.” He snickered at the name. “Igor has been the subject of many investigations. He’s a legal immigrant. But that’s the only thing about him that’s legal. This is the first time we have got him so dead to rights, though.”

  “So are you going to pick him up?”

  “We don’t see him as a flight risk. We don’t think he’s about to go do something bad. It’s been a week and a half since he stole that gun, and he’s been pretty inactive that whole time. So we blasted a judge out of bed, got ourselves a cou
rt order, and instituted surveillance on his domicile. It’s a crappy little house in Tukwila.”

  “Where’s Tukwila?”

  “Exactly. He shares it with another Russian, who has been his roommate there for, like, four years.”

  “Gotten anything good yet?”

  “It’s taking us a little while to rustle up an interpreter, so we don’t know what the three of them are saying.”

  “Three?”

  “Yeah. There’s three Russians in the house.”

  “I thought you said two. Igor and his roommate.”

  “They have a visitor. Just arrived. Surprised the hell out of them, apparently. We don’t exactly know what’s going on. Igor and his roommate were lounging around in couch potato mode, watching a hockey game on the satellite, and suddenly there was a knock on the door. Then they’re all like, ‘Who the hell could that be?’ I’m just guessing from their tone of voice. Then one of them goes and looks out the window and says something like, ‘Holy shit, it’s Sokolov!’ and then they sound kind of scared for a while. But eventually they let him in.”

  It was fortunate that Agent Vandenberg was such a loquacious soul, since he then went on talking long enough to give Olivia a chance to get her composure back.

  “I think I get the general picture,” she said, when Vandenberg paused to draw breath, and she felt she could keep her voice steady. “Did you say that the name of the surprise visitor was Sokolov?”

  “Yes, we’re pretty sure of that. Why? Mean anything to you?”

  “It is a very common Russian name,” she observed. “But you said that they were surprised to see him?”

  “Surprised, and pretty seriously freaked out. Sokolov had to ring the doorbell three times. They left him cooling his heels on their front porch for, like, five minutes while they discussed how to handle the situation. I don’t know who this guy is—but he ain’t no Avon lady.”

  “Thanks,” Olivia said. “That is interesting.”

  ZULA ENDED UP retreating into her tiny tent and pulling her sleeping bag over her head. A natural reaction to shame. All she wanted was to have a bit of privacy while she finished her blubbering. This had the unintended, but useful, consequence that the others forgot she was there.

  Not literally, of course. The friggin’ chain trailed across the ground and went right into her tent. Everyone knew exactly where she was. But some kind of irrational psychological effect caused them to act as if she weren’t right there, just a few yards away from them.

  She wasn’t sure whether that was a bad or a good thing. It might cause them to blurt out useful information they’d never divulge if her eyes were on their faces. On the other hand, maybe it was easier to command the execution of someone you couldn’t see.

  Abdul-Wahaab, Jones’s right-hand man, was the last of the hikers to depart the camp. Before hoisting his pack onto his shoulders, he gathered the stay-behind group around him: Ershut, Jahandar, Zakir, and Sayed. They were all of about twenty feet from Zula, standing around the stove and drinking tea.

  “I’ll speak Arabic,” said Abdul-Wahaab. Somewhat redundantly, since he was, in fact, speaking Arabic.

  Trying not to make obvious nylon-swishing noises, Zula pulled the sleeping bag off her face and rolled toward them, straining to hear as much as she could. She had been in the company of men speaking Arabic for two solid weeks and was continually frustrated that she hadn’t learned more of it. And yet she had come a long way; her time in the refugee camp had planted some seeds that had been slow to sprout but that were now growing noticeably from day to day.

  “I have spoken with our leader,” said Abdul-Wahaab. “He has learned some things about the way south from the guide.”

  Zula’s mental translation just barely kept up. Fortunately Abdul-Wahaab was not a torrential speaker. He uttered short, pithy sentences and paused between them to sip tea. Zula’s understanding was largely based on picking out nouns: leader. The way to the south. And this word “dalil,” which she had heard frequently in the last few days and finally remembered meant “guide.”

  “The path is difficult, but he knows of shortcuts and secret ways,” Abdul-Wahaab continued, actually using the English word “shortcuts.”

  “He thinks two days for us to cross the border. After that, one more day before we could reach a place with Internet. Maybe two days.”

  The others listened and waited for Abdul-Wahaab to give orders. After sipping more tea, he went on: “After four days, if you hear nothing, kill her and go where you will. But we will try to get a message to our brothers waiting in Elphinstone. They will then come here and find you. We will send GPS coordinates showing the way south. God willing, you can then join us for the martyrdom operation.”

  “In that case, should we kill her?” Zakir asked.

  “We will give instructions. She might be useful to us.” He sipped his tea. “The guide states that there will be no phone coverage, unless we climb to the top of a mountain and have good luck. If this happens, perhaps you will get a text with other instructions.”

  Beyond that, the talk turned to what they would all do once they had crossed the border: the challenges they would face there and their eagerness to pursue various opportunities for mayhem. Abdul-Wahaab discouraged all such talk, though, insisting that they maintain their focus on getting through the next few days. He seemed to become aware that he was holding up the rest of the group, and drained his tea, and accepted Ershut’s help in hoisting his heavy pack onto his back. Then, after exchanging embraces with the four stay-behinds, he turned away and began tromping down toward the trail.

  Zula decided that she would make her move after dark tonight.

  WHEN SOKOLOV HAD been a little boy growing up in the Soviet Union, he had been exposed to more than a few magazine articles and television programs depicting the misery of life under capitalism. A reporter would travel to some squalid place in Appalachia or the South Bronx and take a few depressing photographs, then jot down, or make up, some equally depressing anecdotes and package it into a story intended to make it clear that people back in the USSR didn’t have it so bad. While no one was stupid enough to take such propaganda at face value, all but the most cynical persons assumed that there was some truth to them. Yes, the standard of living could be higher in the West. Everyone knew this. But it could be lower too.

  Both ends of that spectrum were on display during Sokolov’s hour-long journey from Golden Gardens to the home of Igor. He waited for a bus near a marina crowded with yachts. The bus took him to a sleek modern downtown, where he did a bit of shopping and then boarded a light rail train headed in the direction of the airport. During that journey, the view out its windows became steadily more like a photo spread from a Soviet propaganda article. The railway line had been threaded through the poorest neighborhoods. The urban part was a complex and densely packed mixture of black people and pan-global immigration; it wasn’t pretty, but at least it was striving. Then there was a light-industrial buffer zone that separated it from a sort of white ghetto in the suburbs. The train ran high above this on towering reinforced-concrete pylons, and he looked almost straight down into the backyards of tiny, rotting bungalows strewn with detritus.

  He climbed out at the last station before the airport and then walked for a mile and a half, wending his way into a neighborhood full of houses like that. He had not acquired a phone yet, but he had been able to purchase a street map at a bookstore downtown, and he had Igor’s address written down in a little book that had been with him through all his adventures.

  Igor’s house stood at the end of a cul-de-sac, backed up against a freeway embankment held together by a felt of blackberries and ivy. This mat of vegetation had covered and killed several trees and was making a bid to take over a shed in the back. But the house that Igor shared with his friend Vlad was actually tidier than many on this street: the two vehicles parked in its driveway both appeared to be in working order, and neither of them had turned green with moss. They did not store ju
nk on their front porch, and they had taken sensible precautions, covering the front windows with expanded steel mesh and beefing up the locks on the front door.

  Igor’s fear caused Sokolov nothing more than mild irritation at first, since its sole effect was to slow everything down. But he could hardly blame the man for being cautious. Sokolov took his hands out of his pockets and held them out wide, palms up. “A couple of hours,” he insisted, “and then I will be gone. Forever.”

  HIS CHOICE TO come to this place was debatable, to say the least. He had been thinking about it all through the sea voyage.

  He had to go somewhere and do something. His only real means of making a living was doing what he did: security consultant. The fact that he was fluent only in Russian and that he carried a Russian passport placed certain limits on where he could ply that trade. He could make his way back to Russia and retreat into the woods and spend the rest of his life chopping wood and hunting deer, but he had grown rather accustomed to living in big cities and being paid a decent amount of money and, for lack of a better word, being respected for who he was and what he did. Most of his clients had been nothing like Ivanov, and, after this, he would never work for such a person again. But the regrettable incidents of the last few weeks would need to be explained to the owners of the obshchak from which Ivanov had stolen the money, and to the families of the men who had been slain by Abdallah Jones. And Sokolov was actually confident that it all could be explained. For the owners of the obshchak were, at bottom, reasonable people. Courtesy went a long way with them. In what had happened to Wallace and Ivanov, they would perceive a kind of poetry and a kind of justice. Ivanov had, in effect, obtained just the fate he had wanted, in that he had died while trying to get the money back. The story worked perfectly well as a cautionary tale: look what happens to those who steal money with which they have been entrusted. It would all work out just fine if Sokolov could merely relate the story to the people Ivanov had betrayed.