Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  “And the War of Realignment is making money?”

  “Hand over fist.”

  “Who’s making money hand over fist?” asked Peter, breaking in on them. He unslung a black nylon duffel bag and placed it on his lap as he sat down. He was gripping a rolled-up wad of paper napkins, applying direct pressure to his DVD wound.

  “You ask an interesting question,” said Richard, looking Peter in the eye.

  “Just joking,” Peter said, immediately breaking eye contact.

  “Well,” said Zula, and tapped her phone to check the time. “Could you take a picture of me and my uncle before we hit the road?”

  AS GOOGLE MAPS made dispiritingly clear, there was no good way to drive from that part of B.C. to Seattle, or anywhere for that matter; all the mountain ranges ran perpendicular to the vectors of travel.

  The Schloss’s access road took them across the dam and plugged them in to the beginning of a provincial two-laner that followed the left bank of the river to the southern end of the big lake Kootenay: a deep sliver of water trapped between the Selkirks and the Purcells. It teed into a larger highway in the middle of Elphinstone, a nicely restored town of about ten thousand residents, nine thousand of whom seemed to work in dining establishments. A gas stop there developed into a half-hour break for Thai food. Peter talked hardly at all. Zula was used to long silences from him. In principle she didn’t mind it, since between her phone, her ebook reader, and her laptop she never really felt lonely, even on long drives in the mountains. But usually when Peter was quiet for a long time it was because he was thinking about some geek thing that he was working on, which made him cheerful. His silence on the drive down from Schloss Hundschüttler had been in a different key.

  From Elphinstone they would go west over the Kootenay Pass. After that, they would have to choose the lesser of two evils where routing was concerned. They could go south and cross the border at Metaline Falls. This would inject them into the extreme north-eastern corner of Washington, from which they could work their way down to Spokane in a couple of hours and thence bomb right across the state on I-90. That was the route they’d taken when they’d come here on Friday. Or—

  “I was thinking,” said Peter, after he’d spent fifteen minutes twirling his pad thai around his fork and attempting to burn a hole through the table with his gaze, “that we should go through Canada.”

  He was talking about an alternate route that would take them across the upper Columbia, through the Okanagans, and eventually to Vancouver, whence they could cross the border and plug in to the northern end of I-5.

  “Why?” Zula asked.

  Peter gazed at her for the first time since they’d sat down. He was almost wounded by the question. It seemed for a moment as if he’d get defensive. Then he shrugged and broke eye contact.

  Later, as Peter was driving them west, Zula put away her useless electronics (for phone coverage was expensive in Canada and the ebook reader couldn’t be seen in the dark) and just stared out the windshield and replayed the encounter in her head. It pivoted around that word “should.” If he’d said, It would be fun to go a new way, or I’d like to go through Canada just for the hell of it, she would not have come back with Why? since she’d been thinking along similar lines herself. But he’d said, We should go through Canada, which was an altogether different thing. And the way he’d deflected her question afterward put her in mind of the way he’d behaved around that stranger in the tavern. Uncle Richard’s question about a drug deal had irritated her at the time. Peter’s look, his clothing, the way he acted, caused older people to make wrong assumptions about who he was. But she knew perfectly well that he was a sweet and decent guy and that he never put anything stronger than Mountain Dew into his body.

  Should. What possible difference could it make? The Metaline Falls border crossing was rinky-dink to be sure, but by the same token, it was little used, and so you rarely had to wait. The border guards were so lonely they practically ran out and hugged you. The Vancouver crossings were among the largest and busiest on the whole border.

  He was avoiding something.

  That was the one thing about Peter. If something made him uneasy, he’d dodge around it. And he was good at that. Probably didn’t even know that he was dodging. It was just how he instinctively made his way in the world. He wasn’t an Artful Dodger. More of an Artless Dodger, guileless and unaware. As a young child Zula had seen some of that behavior in Eritrea, where confronting your problems head-on wasn’t always the smartest way; the patriarch of her refugee group had devised a strategy for getting even with the Ethiopians that revolved around walking barefoot across the desert to Sudan, checking into a refugee camp long enough to make his way to America, starting a life there, getting rich (at least by Horn of Africa standards), and sending money back to Eritrea to fund the ongoing war effort.

  But the Forthrasts came out of a different tradition where, no matter what the problem, there was a logical and level-headed behavior for dealing with it. Ask your minister. Ask your scoutmaster. Ask your guidance counselor.

  Peter had been really troubled on the drive down the lake shore to Elphinstone, then hugely relieved when they had opted for the western route. By going west, he had effected some sort of dodge.

  To avoid some scary-looking, switchbacky stuff in the Okanagans—perhaps not the best choice, in the middle of the night, and at this time of year—they shot up north and connected with a bigger, straighter highway at Kelowna. There they stopped at a gas station/convenience store, and Peter took the exceptional step of buying coffee. Zula made the hopeless suggestion that she be allowed to drive and Peter offered her an alternative role: “Talk to me and keep me awake.” Which she could only laugh at since he hadn’t said a word. But from Kelowna onward she did try to talk to him. They ended up talking mostly about nerd stuff, since that was the only area where, once he got going, the words would really tumble out of him for hours. He was perpetually interested in the underlying security apparatus of T’Rain and how it might be vulnerable and how, therefore, he might be able to improve it, while charging them money for the service and making him look very good to his new employer. Zula was perpetually unable to talk about it much because she had signed an NDA of awesome length and intimidating detail, something on which no minister, scoutmaster, or guidance counselor could ever have given sage advice. She could talk about what had been made public, which was that her boss, Pluto, was the Keeper of the Key, the sole person on earth who knew a certain encryption key that was changed every month and that was used to digitally sign all the fantasy-geological output of his world-generating algorithm. It was sort of like the signature of the Treasurer of the United States that was printed on every dollar bill to certify that it was genuine. Because the output of Pluto’s code dictated, among other things, how much gold was in each wheelbarrow of ore dug out by Dwinn miners. Zula had not been hired to work so much on the precious-metals part of the system—her job was computational fluid dynamics simulations of magma flow—but she had to touch those security measures every day, and Peter was forever posing hypothetical questions about them and how they might be breached—not by him but by hypothetical black-hat hackers that he could be paid to outwit.

  That got them awake and alive to Abbotsford, still something like an hour outside of Vancouver, but grazing the U.S. border, and in some ways a more logical place to cross. They stopped, not for gas, but because Peter’s bladder was full, and the stop turned into a long one as Peter used his PDA to check the waiting times at various border crossings. Meanwhile Zula went in and bought junk food. When she came out, he had the back of the vehicle open and was fussing with something back there. She heard zippers, the rustle of plastic. “You want to drive?” he asked her.

  “I’ve been telling you for six hours that I’d be happy to drive,” she pointed out mildly.

  “Just thought you might have changed your mind or something, but I would really like to rest my eyes and might even go to sleep,” he said,
which Zula did not intuitively believe since to her he seemed to have a pretty serious buzz on. But something clicked in her head to the effect that he was dodging again. The act of driving across the border was triggering his dodging instinct. It had happened as they had neared the fork in the road at Elphinstone and was now happening again. She agreed to drive.

  “It’s the Peace Arch,” he said. “We want the Peace Arch crossing.”

  “There’s one, like, two miles from where we are now.”

  “Peace Arch has less traffic.”

  “Whatever then.”

  So she began driving them the last few dozen kilometers west, to the Peace Arch crossing, which was actually right on salt water: the farthest they could go, the longest they could delay the crossing. Peter, after a few minutes, leaned his seat back and closed his eyes and stopped moving. Though Zula had slept with him more than a few times and knew that this was not his pattern when it came to sleeping.

  The electronic signs on the highway said that the so-called Truck Crossing—just a few miles to the east of the Peace Arch crossing—was actually less crowded and so she went that way. Only two cars were ahead of them in the inspection lane, which probably meant a wait of less than a minute.

  “Peter?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Got your passport?”

  “Yeah, it’s in my pocket. Hey. Where are we?”

  “The border.”

  “This is the Truck Crossing.”

  “Yes. Less wait time here.”

  “I was kind of thinking Peace Arch.”

  “Why does it matter?” Only one car to go. “Why don’t you get out your passport?”

  “Here. You can give it to the guard.” Peter handed his passport to Zula, then settled back into a position of repose. “Tell him I’m asleep, okay?”

  “You’re not asleep.”

  “I just think that we’re less likely to get a hassle if they think I’m asleep.”

  “What hassle? When is there ever a hassle at this border? It’s like driving between North and South Dakota.”

  “Work with me.”

  “Then close your eyes and stop moving,” she said, “and he can see for himself that you’re asleep, or pretending to be. But if I state the obvious—‘he’s sleeping’—it’s just going to seem weird. Why does it matter?”

  Peter pretended to sleep and did not respond.

  The car ahead of them moved on into the United States, and the green light came on to signal them forward. Zula pulled up.

  “How many in the car?” asked the guard. “Citizenship?” He shone the flashlight on Peter. “Your friend’s going to have to wake up.”

  “Two of us. U.S.”

  “How long have you been in Canada?”

  “Three days.”

  “Bringing anything back?”

  “No,” Zula said.

  “Just a bag of coffee. Some junk food,” said Peter.

  “Welcome home,” said the guard, and turned on the green light.

  Zula accelerated south. Peter motored his seat back upright and rubbed his face.

  “Want your passport back?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  “It’s like two hours to Seattle,” Zula said. “Maybe that’s long enough for you to explain why you have been fucking with me all day.”

  Peter actually seemed startled that she had figured out that he was fucking with her, but he made no attempt to protest his innocence.

  A few minutes later, after she had merged into traffic on I-5, he said, “I did something hyperstupid. Maybe even relationship-endingly stupid, for all that I know.”

  “Who was that guy in the tavern? He had something to do with it, right?”

  “Wallace. Lives in Vancouver. As far as I can tell from his trail on the Internet, he’s an accountant. Trained in Scotland. Immigrated to Canada in the 1980s.”

  “Did you do some kind of job for him? Some kind of security gig?”

  Peter was silent for a little while.

  “Look,” Zula said, “I just want to know what is in this car that you were so nervous about taking across the border.”

  “Money,” he said. “Cash in excess of ten thousand dollars. I was supposed to declare it. I didn’t.” He leaned back, heaved a sigh. “But now we’re safe. We’re across the border. We—”

  “Who is ‘we’ in this case? Am I some sort of accomplice?”

  “Not legally, since you didn’t know. But—”

  “So was I ever in danger? Where does this come from, this ‘we’re safe’ thing?” Zula did not often get angry, but when she did, it was a slow inexorable building.

  “Wallace is just a little weird,” he said. “Some things he said—I don’t know. Look. I realized I was making a mistake even while I was doing this. Hated every minute of it. But then it was done and I had the money and we were on the road, headed for the border, and I started to think about the implications.”

  “So you wanted to find a border crossing that was busy,” she said.

  “Yeah. So they’d be more pressed for time, less likely to search the car.”

  “When you checked the crossing times at Abbotsford—”

  “I was looking for the crossings that were busiest.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  She drove for a while, thinking through the day. “Why did you do it at the Schloss?”

  “It was Wallace’s idea. We were trying to match up our travel schedules. I mentioned I’d be there. He jumped at it. Didn’t seem to mind driving all the way out from Vancouver in the winter. Now I realize that he didn’t want to cross the border with the cash. He wanted to saddle me with that little problem.”

  “What kind of an accountant pays for security consulting services in cash?”

  Peter said nothing.

  Zula was working through it. Hundred-dollar bills. One hundred of them would make ten thousand bucks. That would be a bundle roughly how thick? Not that thick. Not that difficult to hide in a car.

  He was carrying more than that. A lot more. She’d seen odd behavior connected with his luggage. Rearranging something at Abbotsford.

  “Hold on a sec,” Zula said. “You charge two hundred bucks an hour. It would take fifty hours of work to add up to ten thousand dollars. My sense, though, is that you are carrying a lot more than ten thousand. Which means a lot more than fifty hours of work. But you just haven’t been that busy lately. You’ve been fixing up your building. You just spent a whole week hanging drywall. When could you have logged that many hours?”

  And so then the story did come out.

  ZULA’S PREDICTION WAS right. It did give them something to talk about all the way back to Seattle.

  Peter was right too; it was a relationship termination event. Not so much what he’d done in the past—though that was pretty stupid—but what he’d done today: the ridiculous drama about crossing the border.

  The real kiss of death, though, was that he invoked Uncle Richard.

  It happened when they were somewhere around Everett, about to enter into the northern suburbs of Seattle. He sensed that he had ten, maybe fifteen miles in which to plead his case. Which he attempted to do by bringing up all the weird stuff that Richard Forthrast had done, or was rumored to have done, in his past. Zula seemed to get along just fine with Uncle Richard, so—the argument went—what was her problem with Peter now?

  It was then that she cut him off in midsentence and said that it was over. She said it with a certainty and a conviction in her voice and her face that left him fascinated and awed. Because guys, at least of his age, didn’t have the confidence to make major decisions from their gut like that. They had to build a superstructure of rational thought on top of it. But not Zula. She didn’t have to decide. She just had to pass on the news.

  Day 1

  On Friday Zula had skipped out of work early and driven straight to Peter’s space (he always called it his “space”). She had parked her car inside the more warehousey part of the building,
which was accessible through a huge, grade-level, roll-up door off the back alley, and left a few of her work things there. So despite the relationship termination event, she had to go back to his place to get her car and collect her things. From I-5 she exited onto Michigan Avenue, which ran diagonally along the northern boundary of Boeing Field, and after following it toward the water for a couple of blocks, doubled back north into Georgetown.

  A hundred years earlier Georgetown had been an independent city specializing in the manufacture and consumption of alcoholic beverages. It was bounded by major rail lines and industrial waterways. Early in the twentieth century it had been annexed by Seattle, which couldn’t stand to see, so close to its city limits, an independent town so ripe for taxation.

  When airplanes became common, the regional airport had been built immediately to the south. This was nationalized around the time of Pearl Harbor and then used by Boeing to punch out B-17s and B-29s all through the war. Georgetown’s quieter and narrower streets had become crowded with riveters’ bungalows. Still the neighborhood had preserved its identity until late in the century, when it had come under attack from the north, as dot-coms looking for cheap office space had invaded the industrial flatlands south of downtown, preying on machine shops and foundries that had lost most of their business to China. The mills and lathes had been torn out and junked or auctioned off, the high ceilings cleaned up and rigged with cable ladders creaking under the weight of miles of blue Ethernet wire. Truck drivers had had to get used to sharing the district’s potholed streets with bicycle commuters in dorky helmets and spandex. It was during that era that Peter, sensing an opportunity, had acquired his building. He had talked himself into it largely on the strength of a belief that he and some friends would launch a high-tech company there. This had failed to materialize because of changes in the financial climate, so he had ended up using part of it as live/work space and renting the rest of it to artists and artisans, who, as it turned out, didn’t pay the same kind of rent as high-tech companies. But what was bad for Peter had been good for Georgetown—at least, the aspect of Georgetown that was about actually making things as opposed to playing tricks with bits.