Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  Uncle Richard sometimes flew in private jets when he went to the Isle of Man to pay court to Don Donald and wouldn’t stop talking about how easy, how “zipless” it was. No check-in. No security frisk. No wait. Just go straight to the plane and get on and go.

  Zula didn’t know how the drug had affected her—had she been out cold? Merely groggy? Or in some compliant zombielike state? Anyway, the Russians could have bundled her and Peter into vehicles without anyone noticing and driven them straight onto the tarmac at Boeing Field and (if Uncle Richard was to be believed) right up to the side of the plane, where it wouldn’t have been that difficult to get them up the stairs and on board.

  So really it would have been easy. Huge penalties would have obtained if they’d been noticed or caught, but these guys weren’t the type to concern themselves with such matters. In a sick way, she kind of liked that about them.

  She went through her bag. Her passport was gone. The knife had been removed from her pocket. No car keys (not that they would have been of any use) or phone. There was a book she’d been reading, some of the odds and ends she’d collected from Peter’s place—cosmetics, tampons, hair stuff, hand sanitizer. A standard-issue Seattle fleece vest. Pens and pencils were all gone—because they were potential weapons? Because she could have used them to write a note calling for help? Someone had gone through her luggage—the larger bag she’d taken on the ski trip—and pulled out (thank God) underwear, a couple of T-shirts, a pair of shorts, and stuffed them into this bag.

  So they were going someplace warm.

  Think. When would her absence be noticed? It was common knowledge at work that she had gone skiing for the weekend. When she failed to show up for work today, people would assume she was sleeping in.

  But eventually—in a few days, maybe?—people would get worried.

  Then what?

  Eventually they might look for her at Peter’s and find her car there, unless the Russians had taken it out and driven it into the murky waters of the Duwamish. But they would find no trace that anything had gone wrong.

  She had vanished off the face of the earth.

  That was upsetting, to the point of making her nose run a little, but she didn’t cry. She had cried at Peter’s place when things had gotten bad. Then she had stupidly believed that the problem was solved. As if you could really get out of such a bad situation so cheaply. Now she was back to square one, the place she’d been when she’d stopped crying at Peter’s and had started thinking about what to do.

  She cleaned up and did a little bit of maintenance on the mascara. Didn’t want anyone to notice that she had been putting energy into makeup but didn’t want to visibly degenerate either, wanted to make the point, even if she made it subliminally, that she still had some pride, wasn’t falling apart. She performed a comb-out on her hair and then ponytailed it back. Changed into the cleanest clothes she could glean from the bag and went back to her bed, which she made back into a seat. Sat down and looked at more mountains.

  “You know the time?”

  Peter shook his head. “They took my phone.”

  She sat there for a while.

  “We’re going to Xiamen,” she announced.

  “That’s on the other side of the Pacific!” he hissed.

  “So?”

  “So we’ve been flying over mountains the whole time!”

  “A great circle route from Seattle doesn’t go across the Pacific. It goes north. Vancouver Island. Southeast Alaska. The Aleutians. Kamchatka.” She nodded out the window. “All mountains like those. Young. Steep. Subduction zone stuff.”

  Sokolov, without looking up, spoke one word: “Vladivostok.”

  “See?” Zula said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A city. Extreme eastern Siberia.”

  “Siberia. Fantastic.”

  “We’re going to Xiamen,” she insisted. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Maybe they’ll just take us into Russia and—”

  “What?” Zula asked. “Kill us? They could have done that in Seattle.”

  “I don’t know,” Peter said, “sell us into white slavery or something.”

  “I’m not white.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You saw the way Ivanov was. There’s only one thing he cares about. Find the Troll. And”—she hesitated on the threshold of the word, but there was no point in being prissy—” kill him.”

  “It would make sense,” Peter said, finally getting into the spirit. “Stop in Vladivostok. Take on supplies or whatever. Then on to Xiamen.”

  For Zula the thread of the conversation had snapped when she had said “kill.” She was now party to a murder plot. The memory of the events in Peter’s apartment was seeping back. When she had made the phone call to Corvallis, she had felt certain that it was the only thing she could do, but now she was replaying it in her mind, questioning her decision.

  The aft door opened and Ivanov burst out, wrapped in a bathrobe. Ignoring everyone else, he went to the toilet.

  Peter pulled his feet up onto his seat so that his knees were in front of his face, wrapped his arms around them, and put his head down.

  Zula had been irked by his overall attitude at first. But he had a head start; he’d awakened earlier, been thinking about their situation longer. As minutes went by and the novelty of being on a private jet wore off, Zula began to understand the same thing that Peter did, which was that they were not meant to get out of this alive.

  Ivanov emerged from the bathroom groomed and walked down the aisle, sliding his eyes over Zula’s face but making no connection. All his courtesy in Peter’s apartment had been to serve a purpose that no longer existed.

  Peter had turned his head to the side and was watching Zula watch Ivanov. After Ivanov had gone back into his compartment, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “No one could have foreseen it.”

  “Still.”

  “No. The thing with REAMDE was totally random. Bad luck is all.”

  After a couple of minutes, she said, “Maybe it’s not what you think it is.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re thinking, once they’ve got what they want—” And she made a subtle flicking motion of her thumb across her throat.

  “That’s pretty much what I’m thinking, yes.”

  “But that assumes that this thing is sort of … normal. Kind of an orderly procedure. I don’t think it’s that.”

  Peter flicked his eyes back toward Sokolov, warning her to shut up.

  The plane began to descend over more snowy mountains.

  THEY LANDED ON a long and well-paved runway in a place that was otherwise forested, with lozenges of snow splattered among the trees. It seemed to be a serious commercial airport serving passenger jets both regional and intercontinental, with some cargo traffic as well. Various hangars and utility structures were visible from the runway, but they didn’t get a good view of the terminal building per se. The plane taxied to an apron where a few other smaller planes were parked, and the pilot chose a place as far as possible from the others. Sokolov walked up and down the aisle pulling down the shades on all the windows. The pilots, who spoke Russian, emerged from the cockpit and opened the door, letting in fresh but chilly air. Ivanov and Sokolov exited the plane, leaving Zula and Peter there alone.

  “So those other guys in Seattle—” Peter began.

  “Were just local yokels,” Zula said.

  “Temps.”

  “Yeah.”

  They heard a vehicle pull up next to the plane. Some men got out, and Sokolov talked to them. The vehicle drove away. After that, they didn’t hear Ivanov’s voice, but the voices and the cigarette smoke of the new guys continued to infiltrate the cabin.

  Zula said, “Ivanov said he was a dead man. Remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “So all I’m saying is that this might not be a normal example of what he does for a living.”

  “You th
ink it’s what, then?”

  “A suicide run.”

  “Makes me feel a lot better.”

  “No, seriously, Peter. It should.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “If he expected to survive this, he’d need to get rid of us to cover his tracks. But if he’s expecting to end up dead, then he’s not thinking that far ahead.”

  “Maybe we can jump clear before the blast?”

  “Why not? We don’t matter except insofar as we can help him find the Troll.”

  “Correction. He believes we can help him find the Troll.”

  “Well,” Zula said, “that is your department.”

  “Yeah. And I’m telling you that it is pretty much hopeless unless we can somehow get inside that big ISP and look at their logs. Which would be difficult even in Seattle. For a bunch of Westerners to attempt that in China? Are you kidding me?” A trace of a smile came onto his face. “This is why I never wanted to work in a technology company.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is a classic Dilbert situation where the technical objectives are being set by management who are technically clueless and driven by these, I don’t know, inscrutable motives.”

  “Then we just need to scrutinize them harder. Do what those guys in the high-tech companies do.”

  “Which is what? Because that’s your department.”

  “Set expectations. Look busy. File progress reports.”

  “And when they lose patience?”

  “How should I know?” Zula said. “I’m not claiming I know the answer.”

  ANOTHER PLANE TAXIED alongside them and cut its engines. A few people came out of it, and there was more talking and smoking. Their plane began to flinch as heavy objects were loaded into its cargo space.

  The whole aircraft shifted on its suspension as someone put his weight on the front stairway, and they could feel it bobbing slightly as he mounted each step.

  He entered the plane. Zula’s instantaneous judgment was that the guy was another of Ivanov’s goons, like the ones who had showed up at Peter’s place in Seattle. This was based entirely on appearance: his size, build, and extremely close-cropped copper-blond hair, his coat—dark green canvas, hanging to midthigh, with a vaguely military cut about it, looking like it could conceal just about anything short of a bazooka—and his scuffed black steel-toed boots. As he reached the top of the steps he swung a large shoulder bag down to the deck. It was a somewhat hip bike messenger bag with a broad padded strap meant to go diagonally across the body.

  The first thing he wanted to look at was the cockpit, and so all they could see for a few moments was the back of his head, supported by an unusually thick neck.

  After he’d gotten his fill of looking at the plane’s control panel, which took a while, he turned to inspect the door of the lavatory. He pushed at it curiously, causing it to accordion open, and then gave it a curious up-and-down look. He had been standing in a somewhat hunched posture, as if afraid he would bang his head on something, and now tilted his head back, opening his mouth to reveal a set of stained, gapped, but structurally rock-solid teeth, and felt above him with one hand, checking the height of the ceiling, verifying that if he straightened his posture the top of his bristly, bullet-shaped head would slam into it. Then he noticed Zula and Peter and turned toward them. His eyes were pale blue and broad set in a wide, bony skull. But his complexion was florid and just a bit toasty. He was surprised, interested, but not at all troubled, to see Zula and Peter looking back at him.

  “Hello,” he tried, and Zula understood that English was not his native tongue; but he was trying to find out whether Peter and Zula could communicate that way.

  “Hello,” they responded.

  “I am Csongor.”

  “Csongor the hacker?” Peter inquired.

  “Yes,” Csongor answered, amused, or at least bemused, that Peter had been able to identify him in this way. He stepped into the passenger cabin. He and his luggage were too wide to move abreast down the seat-row, so he held the messenger bag out at arm’s length and allowed it to precede him.

  “I’m Peter. You’ve apparently heard of me,” said Peter in a tone that was sour, verging on openly hostile.

  Csongor, seeming to take the matter very seriously, stepped forward and extended his hand. Peter, incredulous, shook it. Csongor then turned toward Zula and waited for his cue.

  “This is Zula,” Peter announced, in a tone of voice suggesting that Csongor really ought to drop dead.

  Zula extended her hand. Csongor bent forward and kissed it, not in an arch way, but as if hand kissing were a wholly routine procedure for him. He set his bag down on one of the leather-upholstered seats, carefully, suggesting that it contained something valuable and delicate, such as a laptop. Then he sat down next to it, facing Peter and Zula.

  Peter shifted in his seat in a manner just short of writhing that spoke of discomfort with the new seating arrangement. He ended up squarely facing Csongor. Zula could almost smell his tension. He did not like facing people, he was an introvert, it wasn’t his way.

  There was a long, awkward moment.

  “Who wants to begin?” Zula asked.

  Csongor looked at Peter, who apparently didn’t want to begin. So, with a small by your leave sort of gesture, he began to speak in distinctly accented but essentially perfect English. “Yesterday … this thing happened with Wallace’s email. A couple of hours later, I was asked to go to Moscow for a meeting. I went. There was no meeting. Instead I was recommended to get on this plane.” He nodded in the direction of the plane that had parked next to them. “I followed the recommendation. It was full of certain types of people. Now I am here. I know nothing.”

  Neither Peter nor Zula said anything in response.

  Csongor found this somewhere between funny and irksome. “You said who wants to begin,” he reminded Zula, “not end.”

  Still nothing.

  Csongor tried, “You guys have a similar story, I guess?”

  “Not really that similar,” Zula said. “It started with Wallace being murdered in Peter’s apartment.”

  Csongor’s blue eyes snapped over to appraise Peter. “You murdered Wallace?”

  Zula was astonished to hear herself laughing. But it seemed that whatever neurological circuits were responsible for laughing took no account of what the higher brain might consider inappropriate. “No, no,” she said. “Some Russians murdered him. Then they brought us here.”

  “Well, that’s not very good,” Csongor said.

  “I know,” Zula said. “Whatever it was that Wallace did, he didn’t deserve—”

  “No, I mean it’s not very good for us.”

  Peter snorted. “We weren’t under any illusions that this was anything other than unbelievably bad for us.”

  “Yes, but perhaps I was,” Csongor said. And now that he said this, Zula saw that he was quite sincerely taken aback.

  As he might well be. He had just been made aware that he was complicit in a murder.

  “That is too bad,” Peter said, “because I was kind of hoping that maybe you could tell us what the fuck is going on. Who are these people? We know nothing.”

  Csongor’s face reconfigured itself in a way that suggested his wheels were turning now, he was thinking instead of merely reacting. “Nothing? Really?”

  Peter drew breath as if to answer, then checked himself.

  “You know nothing about playing certain types of games with other people’s credit card numbers?” Csongor asked. “Or is that rather the specialty of Zula?”

  Peter sighed. “Zula has nothing to do with it. I did sell Wallace a database of credit card numbers.”

  “The one that Ivanov is so angry about.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then,” Csongor said. “Now we have basis for conversation. These kinds of guys—how much do you know about them?”

  “You mean, Russian, er…” Having spit out the adjective, Peter couldn’t bring himself
to utter the noun.

  “Mafia or organized criminals or whatever you want to call them,” Csongor said, turning hands momentarily palms up to say it didn’t matter. “They are not like how you see them on TV and movies…”

  “Really? Because showing up in the private jet, killing Wallace in my apartment, it all seems pretty much straight from the script.”

  “Ah, but this is extremely unusual,” Csongor said. “I am amazed, frankly.”

  “Comforting.”

  “Almost all of what they do is very boring. They are trying to make a living in the context of this unbelievably fucked-up system. This is their only motive. Not excitement, not violence. How they got most of their revenue in Russia was not crazy shit like drug deals or arms trafficking. It was overcharging for cotton from Uzbekistan. And when they moved into the States and Canada, it was health insurance fraud, avoiding gasoline taxes, and credit cards. Lots of credit cards.”

  “What’s your involvement with all this?” Zula asked. “If you don’t mind my asking?”

  “No, I don’t mind your asking,” Csongor said. “But I do mind answering, since it is somewhat embarrassing. Not a thing to be proud of.”

  “Okay, don’t answer, then.”

  Csongor considered it. Zula had pegged his age in the early thirties at first, but now that she was getting a better look at him—the elasticity of his face, the openness of his feelings—she understood that he was more like a big-boned twenty-five. “I will answer a little bit now, maybe more later. How much do you know of the history of Hungary?”

  “Nada.”

  “Zip.”

  Apparently Csongor was unfamiliar with these slang terms, so Zula just shrugged hugely. He nodded and looked a little dismayed, unsure where he should begin. “But you at least know it was a Warsaw Pact country. Until about 1999 or so. Controlled by Russians in a very severe way.” Peter and Zula had begun nodding as if they did know all these things, which encouraged him. “Today, it is fine. It is totally modern, with a high standard of living. But in the nineties, when I was a teenager, the economy was terrible—the Communist system had been dynamited, like an old statue of Stalin, but it took some years for a new system to be created. Bad unemployment during those years, inflation, poverty, and so on. My father was a schoolteacher. Overqualified for it. But that is another story. Anyway, in our family, we had very little money, and the only way we knew to make a living was using our brains. As it happens, I was not the smart one. My older brother is the smart one.”