Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “What about inside the building, though?”

  “Vlad traced the wires,” Igor said.

  “I traced the wires,” Vlad confirmed, “to the server in his workshop. That’s where the video files from the camera were being stored. We used the plasma torch to completely destroy the hard drives in that server.”

  “Did you also trace the wires to the wireless router under the stairs?”

  “Of course,” Vlad said.

  “Did you know that this router had a hard drive built into it? Used to back up all files on the network?”

  Silence.

  Vlad the computer expert was turning red. Igor noticed this and held out a hand to steady him. “It has been, what, two weeks,” Igor said. “Nothing has happened. The police know nothing of these things. They will never think to collect such evidence.”

  Sokolov sat there impassively, waiting for Igor to figure it out.

  “If they had found this, why have they not come to arrest us?” Igor demanded, sounding almost like a self-righteous, upstanding citizen, scandalized by the complacency of the local cops.

  “Unless,” Vlad said, “they have put us under surveillance.”

  “Why would they bother if they already have evidence?”

  Vlad said, “It would be a major investigation. Not just of burglary but kidnapping, murder, other things. International spy shit. They don’t give a shit about people like us. A couple of burglars!” he scoffed. “They would put on the surveillance and hope that sooner or later someone more important would get in touch with us.”

  Four eyes turned toward Sokolov.

  There was a long pause. Igor raised the fingertips of both hands to his temples, making his huge fat hands into blinders, tunneling his vision at Sokolov.

  “Fucking asshole!” Igor finally said. “Why did I let you into my house?”

  “Stupid, greedy motherfucker,” Sokolov said. “The money wasn’t enough. You had to go back. Steal some more.”

  “Hey, calm down!” Vlad squeaked. “We don’t even know if the cops found the video.”

  “The uncle of Zula is a billionaire, moron,” Sokolov said. “He would bring in investigators of his own. There is nothing they would not find.”

  Something occurred to Igor and he exclaimed “Fuck!” then made a grab for his phone. Sokolov’s hand jerked toward the Makarov in his jacket pocket, but he restrained the urge to draw a weapon—as did Vlad, watching him attentively.

  Igor made a one-button call: a redial. “It’s better that you don’t come,” he announced into the phone. Then listened to a blast of verbal abuse that forced him to pull the device away from his ear. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’ll explain later. Turn the car around. Don’t come.”

  “You invited some others to the pizza party?” Sokolov asked, after Igor had shut off his phone, terminating more furious denunciations.

  Igor held his hands out. “I am sorry, Mr. Sokolov, but I must answer to certain people; and when you showed up, I had to make them aware of the fact that you were here.”

  “Are there any other ways you have fucked me that I have not been made aware of yet?”

  The fat hands became flesh pistols, index fingers aiming at Sokolov’s eyes. “I never should have worked with you. Now, the cops will come, I’ll do time. Be deported.”

  “Doing time. Getting in trouble. All very normal for a man who breaks into another man’s house and steals his computer and his rifle. If you had just followed my orders—”

  “Why should I take orders from you, motherfucker?”

  “Because I actually know what I am doing.”

  “Then how did you end up in this fucking situation?”

  It was a fair question, and it rocked Sokolov for a moment.

  In that interval, Vlad noticed something. “They’re coming,” he said.

  Sokolov looked up at him to see that Vlad was gazing out the house’s front window.

  “Who’s coming?” Igor asked.

  “How the fuck should I know?” Vlad said.

  Instinctively, Sokolov dropped to a crouch and peered over the sill of the front window, down the length of the cul-de-sac. A dark SUV, headlights on, was headed up the street, moving at little better than a walking pace.

  “Why headlights?” Vlad asked.

  “To blind us!” Igor said.

  “It’s a rental,” Sokolov suggested. “The lights come on automatically.”

  “Who rents a car for a bust like this?”

  “Not cops,” Vlad supposed. “Guys from out of town.”

  “What kind of guys?”

  “Maybe private dicks? Hired by billionaire uncle?”

  “Fuck!” Igor said, and stomped over to the corner of the living room. He hauled the rifle case down from the shelf.

  “What were you thinking of doing with that?” Sokolov asked him. The two options he could think of were to hide it, so that it couldn’t be used as evidence, or to take it out and start using it.

  “I am not going back to Russia,” Igor said. As if this answered the question. Which it didn’t. “I’ve got an escape route out the back.”

  “Asshole, they’ll be covering the back exit!” Vlad pointed out. No doubt correctly. “You won’t get more than a couple of steps!”

  The SUV came to a stop, directly in front of the house, headlights glaring brightly enough, on this dull overcast day, to make it impossible to count the number of people inside.

  Its driver’s-side door opened and a pair of blue-jeaned legs dropped to the ground. The driver stepped out from behind the door and slammed it shut. Short hair did nothing to hide the fact that this was a woman. An Asian woman. She stepped out farther from the SUV’s headlight glare.

  It was Olivia. And she had apparently come here alone.

  “What the fuck!?” Vlad shouted, holding up his hands. He would have been ready for a whole carload of heavily armed federal agents. But not this.

  Sokolov spun around to face Vlad and raised an index finger to his lips, shushing him. Glancing up toward the ceiling in a gesture that any Russian would recognize: Remember, someone is listening to us. Vlad, wide-eyed, seemed to take this in. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. Okay, I’ll shut up.

  They were distracted by a crisp mechanical clunking noise from the other side of the room. Sokolov looked over to see that Igor had pulled the rifle out of the case. It was some sort of AR-15 variant. The sound had been made by him drawing the bolt carrier back, locking the action into an open state. As Sokolov watched, Igor plucked out one of several loose cartridges that had been rattling around loose inside the case, manually fed it into the breech, and slapped the side of the weapon, releasing the bolt and letting it slam the cartridge into firing position.

  Sokolov noticed that his Makarov was in his hands, aimed at Igor.

  Olivia rang the doorbell.

  “Get down!” Sokolov shouted in English. Unsure whether she’d heard him, he pivoted and fired a round through the door, far above Olivia’s head. That should give her the general idea.

  “Kill him!” Igor shouted, apparently to Vlad. Then he raised the rifle and aimed it at the front door.

  Vlad was fumbling in his pocket. But he was poorly trained and was having trouble getting the weapon out. “Run out the back door,” Sokolov suggested. “There’s no one there.”

  “How would you know?” Vlad asked.

  “Do it or I’ll fucking kill you,” Sokolov said, aiming his Makarov at Vlad.

  “I told you, he’s setting us up! Motherfucker!” Igor shouted, letting the barrel of the rifle drop and using his free hand to pull a revolver out of the waistband of his trousers.

  Sokolov pivoted and fired two rounds into Igor’s midsection, waited for him to hit the floor, then fired one more.

  Vlad was crouching on the floor next to the PC with his hands on top of his head, completely unmanned. An utterly ruthless, animal instinct within Sokolov told him to simply execute this miserable person, who could o
nly cause trouble for him. But he could not bring himself to do it.

  “I suggest you run. Fast,” Sokolov said.

  “Why bother? Didn’t you say we were under surveillance?”

  “By someone,” Sokolov said. He had crossed the room and picked up the rifle. Setting his pistol down for a moment, he hauled back on the rifle’s bolt carrier, ejecting the round that Igor had chambered, then set the rifle into its case, which he slammed shut. He carried it to the front door, which he opened. Olivia was no longer there. The SUV was in motion, making a three-point turn in the middle of the cul-de-sac, getting turned around into position for a getaway.

  Then it stopped.

  Nothing happened for a few moments.

  Then she kicked open the passenger door.

  EXCEPT FOR THE part about his niece being held hostage and he himself being the captive of murderous jihadists, this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one’s normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one’s mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true—the way small children experienced things—precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life.

  Which Richard was totally incapable of, normally. Looking back, he could see that the majority of his breakups with the women who lived on in his superego as the Furious Muses had occurred in conjunction with attempts to go on vacation. He had never gone on vacation in any place that did not have high-speed Internet. Even the private jet in which he flew to those vacation sites had its own always-on Net connection. This probably qualified him as a serious head case, but he liked nothing more than to sit on a beach underneath a palm frond cabana in Bali, stripped to the waist, sipping an exotic drink from a coconut shell, watching waves roll in from a blue ocean, while wandering around T’Rain via the computer on his lap, firing off memos and bug reports to his technical staff. He could think of nothing more relaxing.

  Except for what he was doing now. If only the bad parts of it could be done away with. He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.

  JONES AND COMPANY had done a creditable job of it, maintaining the injured-hiker pretense until the moment Richard had opened the door, then instantly cutting the power and the Internet. Apparently they had scoped out the property and found the utility shed up by the dam, broken into it, and stationed a man there with bolt cutters. Probably Ershut. Richard had been observing Jones’s men, learning their names and qualities, and had identified Ershut as a Barney. This being a term from the original Mission: Impossible television series that only made sense to people of Richard’s vintage, or hipsters who liked to watch primeval TV shows on YouTube. Anyway, if ever there was a man who would be stationed in a utility shed with bolt cutters, it would be Ershut. The other one, Jahandar, had probably been perched in a tree watching the action unfold through a telescopic sight. But once the door was open and the cables severed, Jahandar moved to another perch closer to the building, with a view across the dam and down the road to Elphinstone, while Jones and Ershut and Mitch Mitchell made themselves at home in the Schloss.

  Mitch Mitchell was Richard’s secret and unspoken name for the gringo who wanted, in the worst way, to be addressed as Abdul-Ghaffar. Having no idea what the man’s actual birth certificate name might have been, Richard—who simply could not bring himself to take the Abdul-Ghaffar thing seriously—had to make one up that went with his face and personality.

  “How long you got?” had been Richard’s first question to Mitch Mitchell, when he’d taken in the melanoma scar.

  “Inshallah, long enough to strike a blow for the faith,” he had responded. Richard had just barely managed to not roll his eyes, but Mitch seemed to have detected some faint trace of mockery. “But it depends,” he had added, “on whether it has gone to the brain.”

  “No comment on that,” Richard had said.

  “I hate to break in,” Jones said, “just when the two of you are getting off on the right foot. But I need to show you an MPEG, if that’s all right.”

  “Is this MPEG going to answer any of my questions about Zula?” Richard asked.

  “Many of them, undoubtedly,” Jones said.

  Until that point Richard had been engaging in a staredown with Mitch Mitchell, who apparently wanted Richard to believe that the melanoma had very much gone to his brain, and perhaps wiped out some of his behavioral inhibitions; but this seemed important enough for Richard to shift his gaze to Jones. He had seen various pictures of the man on the Internet and in the pages of the Economist and was still experiencing some of that disorientation that sets in when you find yourself in the actual presence of a famous person.

  “Well, let’s withdraw to the tavern then, if you don’t mind being in a place that serves alcohol.”

  “As long as you’re not serving it now,” Jones said.

  “Are you kidding? It’s five in the morning.”

  The jest fell flat. Richard led them into the tavern, where T’Rain was still displayed on the big screen. A sizable crowd of people had gathered around Egdod. They were all exhibiting minor bothaviors such as breathing, scratching, and shifting their weight from foot to foot. But nothing was happening. This because (as a large dialog box superimposed on the screen was proclaiming) Richard had lost his Internet connection, and so nothing he saw here reflected what was “actually” (whatever that meant) going on in the T’Rain world. He fired off the command-key combo that shut down the game and was greeted by the usual Windows desktop. Jones meanwhile had shoved a thumb drive into a USB slot on the front of the computer. This showed up as a removable drive. Richard opened it to find one file: Zula.mpeg.

  “This isn’t going to infect my computer with a virus, is it?” he asked. Again, it was difficult to get a laugh out of these guys.

  He double-clicked the icon. Windows Media Player opened up and showed him crappy webcam footage of his niece, sitting on a rumpled bed in a black room, reading yesterday’s issue of the Vancouver Sun.

  “Tried to get the Globe and Mail,” Jones said apologetically, “but they were all out.”

  So that was it. Jones wanted to be the guy making the smart-ass quips.

  Richard broke down weeping, and they had to leave him alone for a couple of minutes.

  “FOR NOW, YOUR assistance in getting across the border would do nicely” had been Jones’s answer, when Richard had got his composure back and had asked them what they wanted.

  This surprised him a bit. He was so accustomed to people wanting his money. Being asked for his services as a smuggler filled him with a kind of pride, and almost made him grateful to Jones—as if Jones had done him a favor by showing respect for certain of Richard’s hidden qualities that no one else gave a shit about anymore.

  “You’re almost there,” Richard said. “Go south. You can’t miss it.”

  “I have been led to believe,” said Jones through a thin smile, “that it’s a bit more difficult than you make it sound, and that you are especially good at getting across without drawing unwanted attention.”

  The helpful, earnest Iowa Boy Scout in Richard made him want to sketch Jones a map and provide detailed instructions, right on the spot. But that wasn’t what Jones wanted. The terms of the transaction didn’t really need to be spelled out, and Jones probably didn’t want to say them out loud: he had retained at least that amount of British understatement. But he must have left Zula under the control of some people who were supposed to kill her if Jones and his party failed to make it across the border safe and sound.

  Which meant that Richard w
as going on a little hike. Throwing in his lot with these guys, sharing their fate.

  “I guess I’d better pack then,” he said.

  “We have a good deal of what you’ll be needing,” Jones said. “But if there is any particular equipment you require, clothing, pharmaceuticals—”

  “Weapons?”

  The thin smile came back. “I believe we have that adequately covered.”

  WHEN THEY HAD displayed her, up at the top of the hill with a chain around her neck, he had gone into another weeping fit. They were tears of joy. A bit odd, that. But knowing was so much better than wondering; and knowing that she was still alive was sweeter yet.

  The first day’s hike was straight south along the rail line. It got steeper as it went, until it began to push the limits of what nineteenth-century locomotive technology was really capable of. For the watershed of the Blue Fork was terminated, to the south and east, by a vaguely Cape Cod–shaped range of mountains: a beefy bicep projecting eastward from the Selkirks, and a bony forearm running generally north-south, eventually merging into a branch of the Purcells. They were traversing along the flank of the latter, gradually putting more and more vertical distance between themselves and the Blue Fork. The trail began going on little excursions, elbowing its way into mountain valleys to spring over tributaries, then feeling its way around projecting ridges that separated such valleys. As these became more precipitous, the builders had resorted to constructing trestles across the valleys and dynamiting short tunnels through the ridges, which must have been maddeningly difficult and insanely expensive at the time, but now provided the bikers and skiers who used the trail with amusing distractions.

  Eventually they got trapped in the crook of the elbow, where progress was barred by the bulging bicep that ran roughly east-west, several miles north of the border, high enough that its upper slopes were devoid of vegetation: just towering, sand-colored ramparts with snow on the tops. They might have been mistaken for craggy dunes. Richard, who had been all over them, knew them as exposed buttresses of granite whose outer surfaces had spent the last few million years being slowly shivered and whittled away by the ridiculously unpleasant climate. Every small victory of element over mountain was celebrated by a small avalanche as a boulder, the size of a house, a car, a pumpkin, or a teakettle, exploded loose and headed downhill until stopped by older ones. The result was a large terrain of slopes, all at roughly the same angle, ramping up to the high, nearly vertical cliffs from which the rocks were being shed. Nothing much would grow in rubble, so there was no shade from the sun or shelter from the elements, and (perhaps just as important, for the psychological well-being of hikers) no variety to relieve the tedium. Walking across it was a nightmare, not just because it was steep but because its irregularity made it impossible to get into any sort of rhythm; indeed, the term “walking” could not even really be applied to the style of locomotion that the place forced on anyone stupid or unlucky enough to find himself in the middle of it.