Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “I have a windmill. A Dulcinea.”

  “No shit, really?”

  “No shit.”

  “Who is she, big guy? Not Yuxia.”

  Csongor had shook his head. “Not Yuxia.”

  “That’s good, because I kind of like Yuxia.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Who is she?” This had partly been about making friendly conversation with Csongor but also partly a matter of professional interest; before he spent much more time wandering around in strange places with this armed Hungarian man-tank, it seemed important for Seamus to understand what made him tick—what motivated him, for example, to run about China engaging major international terrorists in gunplay.

  “Zula Forthrast.”

  “Wow.” Seamus considered it. “You picked a tough one. Let me see. She lives in a country that’s hard for you to get to. She’s the niece of a superrich guy. She’s being held hostage, in a part of the world we can only guess at, by an incredibly dangerous terrorist who totally hates you for shooting him in the head.”

  Csongor had spread out his hands, palms up, as if surrendering. “Like I said. Windmill.”

  Seamus had stepped around beside him and given him a companionable thwack on the shoulder. “I like windmill tilters,” he had said.

  “Do you have any ideas at all?” Csongor had asked.

  “As to where Jones took her?”

  “Yes.”

  Seamus had then supplied Csongor with a brief explanation of the theories that had been investigated so far: the obvious southern Philippines route, which had been exploded; the North American Gambit, which was still under investigation; and Olivia’s new SNAG concept, which (as Seamus was quite confident) she was checking out, at this very moment, in Prince George, British Columbia. None of which had seemed entirely satisfactory to Csongor. But he had obviously been comforted to know that people were working on it and discussing it in places like London and Langley.

  “How can I get there?” Csongor had asked.

  “You mean, to the northwestern U.S.?”

  “Yeah.”

  Strangely, this was the first time they had discussed what they were actually going to do. It had been obvious enough that they needed to get to Manila, so they had done so without putting any thought into what would happen next. Seamus had a vague idea of getting the three wanderers into the United States, and he had taken them to this place near the embassy. But he hadn’t actually sat down and talked to them about it yet.

  “Got your passport?” Seamus had asked.

  “Unbelievable but yes.”

  “Hungary is a visa waiver country, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you just need to fill out the web form, ditch the loaded gun, and you’re in. No problem. As for our Chinese friends … that’s going to be interesting.”

  “Does it help,” Csongor asked, “that Marlon has two million dollars?”

  “It doesn’t hurt.”

  NOW IT WAS five in the fucking morning and he was wide awake, surrounded by people who were sleeping as soundly as it was possible for humans to sleep without being etherized. And Olivia—who was supposed to be pursuing her crazy SNAG theory in Canada—had made the announcement that she was blown and going dark.

  How could your cover be blown in Canada? Why even bother going dark there? How could you tell?

  Not that Seamus, in general, had any great problem with the Great White North. But to be an MI6 agent in that country seemed about as close to a milk run as you could get in the espionage world.

  He fired up his laptop, found a wireless network, set up an encrypted connection, and got in touch with Stan, a colleague and former comrade-in-arms in the greater Washington, D.C., area. It was quitting time there, and Saturday to boot, but Stan was known to work odd hours. Seamus asked Stan whether it wouldn’t be too much of a challenge to his intellectual faculties to track down the provenance of a certain instant message, and wondered whether Stan was too much of a pussy to get it done discreetly, without setting the whole counterterrorism network alight.

  Then he took a shower. When he came back, a message was waiting for him from Stan, asking what all this had to do with Seamus’s metier, viz., eating snakes and molesting ladyboys in the southern Philippines. The message went on to claim that, as a result of Stan’s making the inquiry, the Department of Homeland Security’s Terror Alert Status had been elevated to Red, and POTUS had been evacuated to a secure facility in Nebraska. Those preliminaries out of the way, Stan divulged that the message had been sent via a cell tower near the summit of Stevens Pass, northeast of Seattle, and squarely within the borders of the United States. Judging from cell-tower records, the phone in question had been eastbound at the time. Nothing more was known, since the device had not popped up on the network since the message had been sent. Was there anything else?

  Why yes, Seamus responded, if it wouldn’t interrupt Stan’s busy schedule of watching gay bondage pornography videos on the taxpayer-provided high-speed Internet connection, he would very much like to know whether a certain young lady had bought any airplane tickets or rented any cars in Washington or British Columbia of late.

  A few minutes later came an email assuring Seamus that the lap dancer in question had indeed left an electronic trail a mile wide and that Seamus might be able to make use of the following data in tracking her down and getting his stolen kidney back: she had flown from Vancouver to Seattle this morning and rented a navy blue Chevy Trailblazer.

  Seamus sent a polite note back reminding Stan to zip his fly when finished and promising to buy him a drink during Stan’s next visit to Zamboanga, supposing that Stan had the testicular fortitude to come within a thousand miles of such a challenging locale.

  Then he pulled up a Google map of Stevens Pass. It was on a minor highway, a two-laner that Google didn’t even bother to draw on the map once he had clicked the Zoom Out button a couple of times. Seattle, then Vancouver came into view on successive clicks, and then Spokane, farther to the east, near the Idaho border.

  Why had she rented a large SUV? Was it the only thing left in the lot? Or was she expecting to do some off-road work?

  Something Csongor had said earlier was eating at him. Had been tunneling into his brain during the scant four hours he had managed to sleep: Does it help that Marlon has two million dollars?

  The flip answer—always the first thing that would come into Seamus’s head—was, Why yes, with that kind of money he could lease a bizjet and fly there directly.

  Which got him thinking about flight paths and border formalities.

  This was an asinine idea, worth thinking about only as a thought experiment, but: Supposing they did exactly that? Leased a bizjet and flew it to the Pacific Northwest?

  Then they would still have the minor problem that Marlon and Yuxia lacked visas. Which would be a showstopper if they landed at Sea-Tac or Boeing Field or any other international airport with immigration barriers.

  Why not just land out in the middle of nowhere? Avoid those barriers altogether?

  Answer: they’d be noticed on radar. In theory. But what if they did something tricky to avoid that? What was to stop them, really? Other than the fact that their pilot would refuse to do it because he wouldn’t want to get caught and thrown into prison.

  So it was just a crazy thought experiment. But it was a thought experiment with a side effect, which was that it forced him to think exactly the same thoughts that Abdallah Jones had been thinking two weeks ago. Jones must have looked at the same Google map, traced the mountain ranges, zoomed in and out on promising border-crossing sites.

  He was now, for some reason, fully and utterly convinced of Olivia’s theory. Jones must have flown to North America. It was so doable.

  And he must have stopped short for some reason, landed in Canada. It didn’t really matter why, exactly. But if he’d landed in the States, he’d have done something by now. The fact that he’d been silent for so long suggested that he had been m
aneuvering toward the Canadian border, looking for a discreet way to cross it.

  How would he do it, exactly?

  “What are you looking at?” asked a voice from behind him. Csongor, lying there awake, gazing dully at Seamus’s laptop.

  “I’ve got a windmill of my own,” Seamus said.

  “Jones?”

  “Yeah. And I think he’s somewhere on this map.” He was looking at the bottom hundred miles of British Columbia, most of Washington State, and the Idaho panhandle. “And I’ll bet he’s got your Dulcinea with him. Sweet sovereign of your captive heart.”

  “What are we waiting for?” Csongor asked.

  “The embassy to open. And…”

  “And what?”

  Seamus grabbed his hair with both hands and pulled. “A fucking clue as to where exactly he wants to cross the border. Shit man, once you get past the suburbs of Vancouver it’s wilderness all the way to fucking Sault Ste. Marie.”

  And that was when it came to him. Maybe because he was really smart. Maybe because he was lucky. Maybe because, down in the little toolbar at the bottom of his screen, a little tab labeled “T’Rain” was flashing on and off, trying to get his attention.

  He clicked on that tab. The window expanded to reveal that Thorakks was under attack. He was out in the middle of a desert somewhere, walking along in a large crowd of characters who had all been following Egdod. That crowd was being assaulted by a horde of horse archers.

  “Are you actually going to play video games now?” Csongor asked incredulously.

  “Give me a minute to kick the shit out of these guys and then I’ll answer your question,” Seamus said, going into action, breaking Thorakks out of his robotic stupor, shouldering a shield, throwing up a protective spell. Cutting down one horse archer with a thunderbolt and another with a stroke of his sword.

  But Thorakks wasn’t the target. Egdod was.

  They were riding in to count coup on Egdod. They couldn’t hope to actually hurt a character of such power, of course. But they could earn the fantastic distinction of having struck a blow against the oldest and most powerful character in all T’Rain.

  Egdod was doing nothing. Making no move to defend himself. He was still following his bothavior: trying to walk all the way to his HZ, thousands of miles away.

  “Where are you?” Marlon asked. He had been awakened by the sounds of T’Rainian combat.

  “How the fuck should I know?” Seamus responded. “When we left that place I stayed logged in and told Thorakks to follow Egdod. So we are wherever Egdod wandered to. How long since we left?”

  “Something like twelve hours,” Csongor said.

  “So. Richard Forthrast gets up twelve hours ago to answer the doorbell and never comes back. Never logs out properly. Egdod goes into his bothavior. What does that tell you?”

  Csongor shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “He’s sleeping,” Marlon suggested. “He was awake for a whole day.”

  “Goddamn it,” Seamus said. “I was afraid one of you would come up with a reasonable explanation such as that.”

  “You have an unreasonable explanation?” asked Yuxia, who had emerged from her private bedchamber looking sweet and sleepy and heard the last part of the exchange.

  “Yeah,” said Seamus, after a brief pause to admire Yuxia. He minimized the T’Rain window, brought up his Google map again, and zoomed in on a stretch of border between the Idaho panhandle and a town called Elphinstone. “Abdallah Jones is crossing the border here, now. And Richard Forthrast is helping him do it.”

  AS THEY DROVE down out of the pass and into more settled areas in the river valleys on the dry side of the Cascades, Olivia began to feel oppressed by the sense that they were absurdly conspicuous, driving along together in this rental car.

  She did not have the faintest idea what the police and the FBI might be thinking. But it seemed best to assume the worst and to start behaving as though she and Sokolov were in a hostile country, cover blown, being hunted by the police. In which case, doing what they were doing was the dumbest possible way to proceed, and it was a miracle they hadn’t been pulled over and handcuffed yet.

  They could ditch this car easily enough and find some other way to proceed eastward. But the mere fact of “short-haired Asian woman traveling with lean, close-cropped blond man” was enough to make them conspicuous, should an APB go out to all the local cops and highway patrol cruisers.

  “We have to split up,” she said.

  “Agreed.”

  “At least for now,” she added, because some ridiculous instinct was telling her that her first sentence had sounded a little too harsh and she didn’t want to hurt Sokolov’s feelings. She glanced over at him. He did not appear to be hurt.

  “The place we’re going is in the general vicinity of Bourne’s Ford, Idaho,” she said.

  “Bourne’s Ford, Idaho,” he repeated.

  “I can’t give you a specific landmark. I’ve never been there.”

  They had become stuck in traffic behind a semitrailer truck that said WALMART.

  “Just find the nearest Walmart,” she suggested. “There’s got to be one within thirty miles. I’ll meet you in the sporting goods department between noon and half past. I’ll just keep going there every day until you turn up.”

  Sokolov pulled the long gun case out of the backseat and laid it across his lap. He opened it up to reveal the weapon. By popping out two pins he was able to break it down into two pieces, neither of which was more than about a foot and a half long, and by collapsing the stock he was able to make it shorter yet. He placed both pieces of it into his knapsack—a new purchase from the Eddie Bauer store in downtown Seattle—and then transferred a lot of other odds and ends that were rattling around loose in there: a few cartridges, two empty clips, some cleaning supplies.

  “You really think you’re going to need that?”

  “Is matter of responsibility,” Sokolov said. “Can’t leave in abandoned car. Anyway, is evidence too—fingerprints of Igor.” He zipped the pack shut and looked at her. “You get out at bus stop, I will liquidate car.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “In the forest, back up there, are, what do you call them, places where hikers pull off road, go to beginning of path.”

  “Trailheads.”

  “Yes. I think it is normal to park a car in such place for several days. It is legal. Will not draw attention. But it is off the road. Not obvious. I will go back, park at such place, hike down.”

  “Then what?”

  “Hitchhike.” Sokolov paused for a moment. “Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers. With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous.”

  They had been passing signs on the road that appeared to designate bus stops. After a few more miles they found one that was conveniently situated next to a parking lot where they could pull out of traffic. Olivia walked over to the bus stop and checked the schedule and verified that a bus would be along in another twenty minutes to take her into the nearby town of Wenatchee. She went round back of the SUV and rapped on the rear window. Sokolov had already moved laterally into the driver’s seat. He popped the tailgate. She hauled it open and pulled her bag out of the back. For a moment, their eyes locked in the rearview mirror.

  “See you,” she said.

  “See you.”

  She slammed the tailgate, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder, and walked to the bus stop. Sokolov put the car in gear, got the SUV turned around, and headed back up the way they had come, keeping an eye peeled for trailheads.

  GIVEN THE REMARKABLE length and diversity of Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia’s enemies list, the five-block stroll from the hotel to the U.S. embassy was one of the more stimulating experiences of Seamus’s recent life. Not because anything actually happened—he’d have known how to behave, in that case—but because he had no way of telling whether any of the people who passed them on the sidewalk or cruised past them in cars, jeepneys, and motor scooters were gu
n-toting assassins bent on retribution. He reckoned he could have covered the distance in about half the time if he had simply slung Yuxia over his back in a fireman’s carry and hoofed it with the long-legged Csongor and Marlon keeping pace. Not a one of them was under six feet two, and they all seemed to get the idea that hanging around in the open was not the preferred strategy. Yuxia was a different matter, not because she was tiny (she could move as fast as any of them when she had a mind to) but because she insisted on viewing this as a fascinating exploratory junket into a new and unfamiliar world, and an opportunity to establish cross-cultural relations with as many as possible of the hundreds of people she encountered on the street. Most of these conversations were gratifyingly brief, possibly because Yuxia’s interlocutors kept stealing uneasy glances at Csongor and Seamus, who tended to bracket the girl and stand with their backs to each other and their hands in their pockets scanning the vicinity with disconcerting alertness. Meanwhile Marlon did his bit by chivvying her along, muttering to her in Mandarin, as though playing the role of a nervous, irritable boyfriend.

  The embassy was huge, a city within the city, and given the number of active Islamic terrorist cells in the Philippines, it was not the sort of place you could just stroll into. Seamus came here frequently enough that most of the marine guards recognized him. But his three companions would have to ID themselves and pass through metal detectors like anyone else. Seamus managed to squeeze the whole party into a gatehouse where they could stand and wait in air-conditioned comfort until the duty officer arrived, which took all of about thirty seconds. Seamus was then able to explain the unusual nature of his visitors and his errand. Csongor was briskly but politely disarmed, and everyone was metal detected and frisked. Seamus was then allowed to lead his guests out into the embassy grounds, which sprawled for many acres across reclaimed land along the shore of Manila Bay. Both Americans and Japanese had, at various times, controlled the Philippines, and run major wars, out of this compound. There was an older chancery in the middle, hemmed in from both sides by more recent buildings that housed the embassy’s thousands of American and Filipino employees. A great deal of space was given over to all things having to do with visas. Seamus hoped that he could get Marlon and Yuxia in to see some of those people today.