Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  “I am glad I had so many free waffles,” Yuxia remarked, eyeing Richard.

  “I’m running on fumes,” he confessed.

  Yuxia didn’t seem to find this very reassuring. Richard straightened up and patted his belly. “Fortunately, I have a lot of stored energy.”

  Yuxia gazed clinically at his gas tank.

  “In another half an hour or so, we’ll be at a trail. A long climb up many switchbacks.”

  “Switchbacks?”

  “Zigzags. At that point, you should probably go on ahead. I’m just going to slow you down.”

  “Who gets the gun?” she asked.

  He thought about this question for a few moments. His brain was tired and working slow.

  Then he understood that the question wasn’t meant to be answered. It was an impossible choice. They had to stay together.

  Which meant that he needed to get off his ass.

  “Thank you,” he said, and forced one foot to pass in front of the other.

  “Is this where Zula went?” she asked him.

  “I hope so. But Jones and the others probably followed her.”

  “And now we are following them.”

  “And Jahandar is following us.”

  “If that is true,” Yuxia said, “I hope Seamus is following Jahandar.”

  She seemed enormously comforted by that idea, so Richard held his tongue rather than speculate about the mountain lion that might be serving as the death train’s caboose.

  “I am sooo glad Zula is alive,” Yuxia said, a few minutes later. Richard got the clear idea that she was trying to get his mind off how exhausted and sore he was. “I thought she was dead. I cried so hard.”

  “So did I.”

  “I asked her questions about her family,” Yuxia said, “but she did not answer very much. Now I get it; she didn’t want the others to hear such information.”

  “Smart girl. She didn’t want them to know about me.”

  “We found out about you later,” Yuxia said. “Big game man.”

  “Yes. I am a big game man.” Being stalked by a big game hunter.

  “Tell me about your family,” Richard suggested.

  “Aiyaa, my family! My family is sad. Sad, and maybe in trouble.”

  “Because of what happened to you?”

  “Because of what I did,” she corrected him. “It didn’t all happen to me.”

  “When the story comes out,” he said, “it will all be fine.”

  “If we don’t get killed,” she corrected him, and picked up her pace so dramatically that he lost her in undergrowth—her camouflage outfit was very effective—and had to break into a jog for a few paces.

  “Look, someone left clothes!” she announced a long sweaty while later and tugged on a loose sleeve that was peeking out from beneath a fallen log.

  “Zula’s,” he said, catching up with her and recognizing the garment. “She ditched all the stuff she didn’t need. Getting ready for the climb.”

  “The climb is next for us?”

  “It starts now,” he said, and stepped past Yuxia, bushwhacking through a few more yards of undergrowth until he broke in upon the switchback trail.

  During his sporadic, Furious Muse–driven efforts to lose weight, he had been forcefully reminded of a basic fact of human physiology, which was that fat-burning metabolism just plain didn’t work as well as carbo-burning metabolism. It left you tired and slow and confused and dim-witted. It was only when he was really stupid and irritable—and, therefore, incapable of doing his job or enjoying his life—that he could be certain he was actually losing weight. So it was in that state that he began to shamble up the switchback trail. But even in his flabbergasted condition, he was soon able to pick up on a basic fact of switchback geometry that was about to become important. Two hikers who might be a mile apart from each other on the trail might nonetheless find themselves separated by only a hundred yards of straight-line distance as one zigged and the other zagged. Assuming that Jahandar was chasing them—which was what they had to assume—they might have started out with an excellent head start. And he hoped that they had preserved that head start by moving as fast as they were able. And yet the moment might come, a minute or an hour from now, when they might look down, and Jahandar might look up, and they might lock eyes on each other from a range that was easily within rifle, and maybe even within shotgun, distance.

  Richard wished he could have bullshitted himself into believing that Jahandar would not be aware of this fact. But Jahandar looked like a man who had spent his whole life on switchbacks, and who well understood their properties.

  He saw, then, how it was all going to work out. And he understood that his confusion, his laggardliness, his irritability, were not all due to the fact that he was hungry. This was his brain trying to tell him something.

  And if there was one thing he had learned in his ramshackle career, it was to pay close attention to his brain at such times.

  His brain was telling him that their plan was fucked.

  Their plan was fucked because Jahandar was going to catch up with them—had probably been doing so the entire time—and was going to reach the place where he could shoot up the slope from another switchback. Hell, he could just set up a sniper’s perch, get his gun propped up on something nice and solid, make himself comfortable, and wait for Richard and Yuxia to pass back and forth above him, zigging and zagging up the mountain like a pair of lame ducks in a shooting gallery.

  I love you, but I’m tired of being the girlfriend of the sacred monster. This had been the last thing that Alice, one of his ex-girlfriends, had said to him before ascending into the pantheon of the Furious Muses. It had taken him a while to decode it—Alice hadn’t been in a mood to wax discursive—but he’d eventually figured out that this, in the end, was the reason that Corporation 9592 had no choice but to keep him around. Every other thing that he had done for the company—networking with money launderers, stringing Ethernet cable, recruiting fantasy authors, managing Pluto—could be done better and more cheaply by someone who could be recruited by a state-of-the-art head-hunting firm. His role, in the end, had been reduced to this one thing: sitting in the corner of meeting rooms or lurking on corporate email lists, seeming not to pay attention, growing ever more restless and surly until he blurted something out that offended a lot of people and caused the company to change course. Only later did they see the shoals on which they would have run aground if not for Richard’s startling and grumpy intervention.

  This was one of those times.

  The only thing that made any sense at all was to stop, look for cover, wait for Jahandar to catch up with them, hold fire until he came within twenty yards, and try to take him down with the shotgun before he could shoot back.

  “Stop,” he said quietly.

  “You okay, big guy?” Yuxia asked.

  “Fantastic,” he assured her. “But here is where we have to stand and fight.”

  “I am so in favor of that,” she said. “Do I get to shoot one of these motherfuckers?”

  “Only if I die first.”

  CSONGOR ABRUPTLY SHIFTED the SUV into gear, punched the gas, and rumbled out of the parking lot. He had been running the motor to feed juice into Marlon’s laptop.

  “What the—?” Marlon asked, as he watched his Wi-Fi connection disappear. Csongor couldn’t tell whether Marlon had cribbed this phrase from comic book word bubbles or was making an arch reference to Chinese nerds who naively picked up snatches of English dialog in this way. It was hard to tell, sometimes, with Marlon.

  “Something is wrong,” Csongor said.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t drive this thing.”

  “I can’t drive it legally,” Csongor said.

  “Oh.”

  “But I can make it go, as you see.”

  “I was transferring money,” Marlon said. Not in a whiny, complaining way. Just making sure Csongor knew that his important work had been interrupted.

  “You’ve
been transferring money for three hours,” Csongor pointed out, “while I have been looking at the clock and the map.” He rattled an Idaho road map that Seamus had bought at a gas station yesterday. “There is no way that those guys should still be gone. The da G shou can wait for their money; they’ve waited this long.”

  Because he had been studying the map, Csongor knew how to get them out of Coeur d’Alene and on the road north to Sandpoint and Bourne’s Ford. He followed the route, scrupulously observing all the traffic laws to minimize his chances of being pulled over. He did not think that a Hungarian driver’s license would pass muster in these parts.

  “Maybe they just found something interesting to look at.”

  “That’s not the point,” Csongor said. “A helicopter can only carry so much gas—it can only stay in the air for a certain amount of time.”

  He sensed Marlon looking at him incredulously.

  “I googled it,” Csongor explained, “when you went out to urinate.”

  “Okay…”

  “I know what you are going to say next: maybe they had mechanical trouble and had to land. But in that case they should have called us and told us that they would be late.”

  “How late are they?”

  “Very late.”

  Marlon was still looking at him expectantly.

  “Mathematically,” Csongor said, “the helicopter is out of gas.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Maybe we should call—”

  “Call who?” Csongor asked, with a kind of cruel satisfaction. For he had gone down the same road in his mind and found only dead ends. He waited for Marlon to work his way to the same nonconclusion.

  They blew through what seemed to be an important road junction at the extreme limit of the greater Coeur d’Alene metropolitan area and went bombing north on a nice straight open highway. It was turning into a beautiful day.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “We are going to go to Bourne’s Ford, which is only a few miles from where they were flying, and go to the Boundary County Airport, and ask the people there if they know anything about a missing helicopter.”

  About half an hour later they found themselves crossing a long causeway over a lake. Before them was the town of Sandpoint. Csongor noticed Marlon craning his neck to get a sidelong view of the speedometer. Glancing down, he saw that he was going ninety.

  “It is not kilometers per hour,” Marlon informed him. “In the metric system, you are going at something like five thousand.”

  “Not quite that fast,” Csongor said, but he did relent and drop down to eighty.

  A minute later, he explained, “I believe Seamus went up there to find Jones. This was his real plan. But he could not say this out loud. Then Yuxia asked why she could not go along, if it was only a sightseeing trip. Seamus was trapped.”

  “Yuxia is good at such things.”

  “What do you think of her?” Csongor asked. “Is she your girlfriend?”

  “For a while I was thinking maybe,” Marlon admitted, “but then I decided she was my sister.”

  “Huh.”

  “China is funny. One child per family, you know. We are all looking for siblings.”

  Csongor nodded. “It is a much better system,” he said, “than the one we use in Hungary.”

  “Why?”

  Csongor looked across at Marlon. “Because you get to choose.”

  Marlon smiled. “Ah.”

  Csongor turned his attention back to the road.

  “Your brother in California,” Marlon said.

  “What about him?”

  “Are you going to go and visit him?”

  “Do you want to see California?”

  He could hear Marlon beaming. “Yes.”

  “It is probably a better place for you,” Csongor said, “than for me. If I go, I will take you. You can be the star. I will be your—”

  “Bodyguard?”

  “Fuck that. I was thinking entourage.”

  “California, here we come!” Marlon exclaimed.

  Csongor thrust a stubby finger out the window at a road sign that said CANADA 50 MI/80 KM. “We are going wrong way,” he pointed out. “Before California, we have to get into trouble. Then out of it.”

  Marlon shrugged. “But that is what we do.”

  Csongor nodded. “That is what we do.”

  BY THE TIME Csongor had finished slowing down from highway speed, they were halfway through Bourne’s Ford and in danger of blowing past it altogether. As a way of giving them some time to get their bearings, Csongor pulled into a gas station. Using some American cash from his wallet—for Seamus had passed out a bit of spending money—he fronted the cashier $40, then strolled back to the SUV and began to pump fuel into it. The way that the gas pump worked was slightly unfamiliar and made him feel inept and conspicuous. But eventually he figured out how to latch the nozzle in the on position, and then he leaned back against the side of the vehicle and crossed his arms to wait for its enormous tank to fill. Marlon had made a quick toilet run and was already ensconced back in the passenger seat, scanning the airwaves for open Wi-Fi connections.

  A blue Subaru station wagon turned in off the highway and pulled up on the opposite side of the pump island. Its front was thickly speckled with the dried corpses of insects. Bundles of stuff had been lashed and bungeed down to its roof rack. Since it was so clearly not from around here, Csongor glanced at its license plate. It was from Pennsylvania.

  It sat there for a while with its engine running, and Csongor could just barely hear the muffled sounds of a discussion going on inside of it. The tail end, he suspected, of a long-running argument among tourists who had been cooped up together in this small vehicle for far too long.

  Then the driver’s door swung open and a man climbed out: a Middle Eastern fellow with a close-cropped beard and dark wraparound sunglasses. He went to the cashier and gave him some paper money, then returned to the Subaru and began to pump gas into it.

  Another man, an African with a slender angular look that reminded him of Zula, got out of the backseat, went inside, and used the toilet. When he emerged, he was carrying a large-format paperback with a red cover, which he had apparently just purchased: Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer.

  Noting movement in the corner of his eye, Csongor looked up the SUV’s flank to the passenger-side rearview mirror, which Marlon had adjusted so that he could use it to stare Csongor in the eye. The look on his face said: Can this really be happening!?

  Csongor looked off in some other direction and responded with a nod.

  He had decided that he wanted to be the last vehicle out of this gas station, so when he was finished pumping the gas, he went back inside as if he intended to use the W. C. Instead of which he lurked in the back of its little convenience store area, pretending to be unable to make up his mind as to which selection he ought to make from its dizzying variety of jerky and keeping an eye on the blue Subaru.

  “Selkirk Loop,” said the clerk wonderingly, gazing out at the same thing. “Brings in all kinda people.”

  The driver removed the nozzle from the side of his car. Csongor advanced to the cash register, spilled out some bags of jerky and two water bottles, and yanked an Idaho Atlas and Gazetteer out of the rack for good measure.

  “Those are hot sellers today,” the clerk remarked.

  Csongor said nothing. The clerk had pegged him as an American, and he saw no reason to call that into question by opening his big mouth.

  Now the Subaru’s driver came in to use the toilet, and Csongor had no choice but to go outside, get into the SUV, and start it up. He pulled out onto the road, went about half a block down a commercial strip, and entered the parking lot of a fast-food place. This turned out to have a drive-through, and so, on an impulse, he drove into it and placed an order for a couple of hamburgers. He drove around the back in a big U and paid at the window. The SUV was now pointed back out toward the street.

  While
the man at the window was stuffing their order into a bag, Marlon said, “There!” and Csongor glanced out to see the blue Subaru cruising past them at a safe and legal velocity.

  He was a bit anxious that they might have lost their quarry as a result of the fast-food gambit, but a few moments later, when he gunned the SUV back out onto the street, sucking deeply from a bucket-sized serving of Mountain Dew, he was able to see it clearly a few hundred meters ahead, making its way peaceably through a series of stoplights.

  The next bit felt touch-and-go, since, depending on the lights, they sometimes seemed to fall far behind and other times drew uncomfortably close. But it had become obvious that these men were heading north out of town. Marlon used these minutes to flip through the Atlas and Gazetteer and find the relevant map.

  “North of here, a few kilometers, is an intersection,” Marlon announced. “If they go straight, then they are headed for Canada, and it means nothing. But if they go left, across the river, then they are trying to reach the place where Seamus and Yuxia were flying to this morning.”

  “Is there some other way we can cross that river?” Csongor asked. “So we won’t be following them so obviously?”

  “Yes. Turn around here.”

  And thus they turned back, dropping away from direct pursuit of the Subaru, and went back into the middle of the town and crossed over a different bridge. A few minutes later they were headed west, seemingly direct into the mountains; but just before the terrain became really steep, Marlon directed Csongor to make a right turn onto a gravel road that ran due north, heading generally parallel to the river. During his three hours of intense boredom at the flight center, Csongor had flipped through the vehicle’s manual enough to learn how it could be shifted into four-wheel drive, so he took a moment to do this, and then went blasting up the road at an insane pace for some miles. He did not think that there were any cops around here to pull him over; and if they did, he would simply claim that there were terrorists in the area, driving a blue Subaru.

  Come to think of it, they should have done that before leaving Bourne’s Ford. But their own illegal status had put them in an awkward frame of mind, never knowing when to hide from the authorities and when to call out for their help. They didn’t know that those men were terrorists. They might have been innocent tourists. When Marlon had said, a few minutes earlier, that they might go straight at the intersection and head north into Canada, presumably to enjoy the Selkirk Loop, it had sounded perfectly reasonable to Csongor and he had wondered at his foolishness for harboring this racist stereotype that the men were terrorists.