Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  But the van belonged to the family enterprise in Yongding. If she abandoned it here, it would be traced to her immediately.

  She could go into that building and try to figure out what was going on. That was what a plucky heroine would do in a movie, but it didn’t seem like a very wise idea in real life.

  Or she could summon the PSB herself. But funny things sometimes happened when the PSB got involved. It wasn’t always about punishing the wrongdoers and helping the victims. Everyone knew that there were all sorts of connections between criminal groups and the government. Yuxia knew very little about these Russians. Less than an hour had passed since they’d put the cuff on her wrist and she hadn’t had time yet to sift through her memories of them and piece together a theory as to what they were really up to. But they had to be either spies or gangsters. If they were the latter, they might have connections with local gangsters, and if that were the case, there was no telling what bad things might happen to Yuxia if she ratted them out to the PSB and some mole within the PSB ratted her out in turn.

  She had to get the van out of here.

  The manacle came off her wrist.

  “Thank you, sir. Now can you start the engine?” she asked. “I don’t have the keys.”

  The locksmith’s eyes jumped down to the ignition switch on the steering column, then back up to hers. He said nothing, but she could see in his face that he could do it. Just as plain, though, was that he really didn’t want to. He knew that something was profoundly wrong about this situation and he wanted out of here.

  “No,” he said, and he began putting his tools back in his bag.

  She glanced out the windshield to see the PSB cop looking her way, ignoring an angry woman who was haranguing him while gesturing irritably at the van.

  Yuxia waved at him in the windshield and beckoned him over.

  The locksmith was closing up his bag now. “I am doing this one for free,” he said. “I am getting out of here now and I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want to hear from you again.”

  The van’s power windows did not function with the engine off, so Yuxia half opened the door, forcing the cop to step around it. “Good morning, Officer!” she said brightly, which had the effect of freezing the locksmith. She pushed the door a little farther open, turning toward the cop, and blocking his view of the handcuff dangling from the steering wheel while giving him a nice big smile to look at. But he was not much taken with the smile. He looked her up and down, paying special attention to the blue boots.

  “Move this van!” he said.

  “I lost my keys,” she said.

  “How could you lose your keys!?”

  Everything about this cop was reminding Yuxia of another reason why she didn’t want any dealings with the PSB. She was a Big-Footed Woman from the mountains and they were Han lowlanders and that did not make for easy dealings.

  “The keys fell out of my hand and went down there,” she answered, pointing at a sewer grate a few meters up the street. “The locksmith is starting the engine for me. As soon as he’s finished, I’ll be on my way.”

  The cop stepped toward her, wanting to look inside the van. Yuxia scooted back on the seat and leaned against the steering wheel, concealing the handcuff but giving the cop a clear view of the locksmith’s face and his bag of tools. The cop nodded. This was his beat; he recognized the face of every merchant in the neighborhood, including this one.

  “What are you waiting for!?” the cop demanded. “This vehicle is blocking traffic! Stop sitting around flirting with this girl! Get the engine started and get it out of here or we’ll have it towed!”

  The locksmith made some calculation of his own as to whether he should cry for help and turn this into a full-fledged PSB investigation. Yuxia had no way of knowing what elements went into that calculation.

  “Yes, Officer!” the locksmith replied. “It should only be a couple of minutes!”

  “Very well.” The cop stepped back from the van and sauntered out in front of the vehicle to direct traffic and keep an eye on things. Yuxia closed the door.

  THE DOOR GAVE after two blows, and Kautsky blew through it. The rest of the squad, poised like sprinters at the starting line, rushed through after him, diverting around him like water flowing around a derelict tank in an Afghan river.

  Sokolov had spoken to them of the need to sever the loop: the loop of observing, thinking, deciding, and acting. In normal circumstances the loop was a good thing but not now; they had to act without thinking for a few moments, and only then could they observe and think and decide. Sokolov, never one to ask his men to do something he wouldn’t do himself, followed the rule pretty faithfully even though some part of his brain was already telling him that something was wrong, something didn’t make sense. The apartment was indeed a warren of smaller rooms, which was bad for them, but not unexpected, nothing they couldn’t cope with. But he wasn’t seeing computers and he wasn’t seeing young Chinese men. He was seeing sleeping bags and mattresses on the floor, rather closely spaced, with men sleeping on them. Lots of men. Some looked Chinese but some didn’t. A migrant laborer squat? They were hairy and somewhat older than he’d been expecting. Stuff was piled all over the place: burners, thermometers, pots and pans, jars of ingredients he couldn’t identify just now, big rectangular cans of the type used to hold industrial solvents. God, there were a lot of people living here! Sokolov’s squad was certainly outnumbered, perhaps by as much as two to one. Not that it mattered since the Russians were all strapped with multiple semiautomatic weapons and, in Kautsky’s case, an autoloading shotgun. Whereas China was not one of those places where ordinary people had weapons.

  Which only made him more surprised and disoriented when, after that first five seconds had passed, and the loop had started running again, Sokolov noticed that the apartment was full of Kalashnikov assault rifles. These, and their banana-shaped ammunition magazines, were simply all over the place.

  You couldn’t look at everything at once, and so Sokolov ended up looking at one noteworthy thing in particular. He was in a relatively large room, cut almost in half by a long table consisting of planks set up on oil drums. His mind had first pegged the table as a kitchen counter, since it looked as though things were being mixed up there in bowls, but on second thought, the stuff they were mixing up was not food. It was a concoction he had seen and smelled before. Hell, he’d even made it before. It was fuel oil and ammonium nitrate. Everyone’s favorite cheap simple high explosive. Standing on the opposite side of the table was a rather tall man, a Negro with a beard, wearing the T-shirt and jeans he had apparently just been sleeping in. But now he was up on his feet and looking around brightly. Behind him, an inconveniently placed window had been sealed off by covering it with a cheaply printed poster of Osama bin Laden.

  There was a silence throughout the apartment as all the Russians’ loops started running again and as the occupants, who had mostly been sleeping, came awake to discover the Russians among them.

  Sokolov must have had an astonished look on his face because the tall Negro was looking at him with a certain degree of amusement. The Negro’s hands and arms were largely concealed by the clutter of explosives-making stuff on the table, but they went into motion now, and Sokolov heard the very familiar snick-chunk of a Kalashnikov being charged; this being the last thing that one generally did preparatory to pulling the trigger.

  Two very loud booms sounded from another room: Kautsky opening up with his semiautomatic shotgun.

  Swinging the rifle upward, the Negro spoke in a calm, quiet, and matter-of-fact tone: “Allahu akbar.”

  “I JUST CAN’T fucking believe it,” Peter muttered, as he worked the bobby pin in the manacle. “I can’t believe what you did.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “Well, I can’t believe what everyone else is doing,” Zula said. “As far as I’m concerned I’m the only one here being reasonable.”

  “You think it’s reasonable
to fuck with a guy like Ivanov?”

  “What kind of a guy is Ivanov anyway?” Zula asked. “What do we really know about him?”

  “He’s a pretty tough guy,” Csongor put in. Zula glared at him, and he looked somewhat apologetic for having taken Peter’s side.

  “Do you know that of your own knowledge, or just by reputation?” Zula asked.

  Csongor didn’t answer.

  “Did you not see what happened to Wallace in my building?” Peter demanded.

  “That’s a good way of putting it. I did not see what happened to Wallace. I saw Wallace go into a room. I saw a long bundle being carried out. Obviously we were meant to think it was Wallace’s dead body. I’ll bet it was fake.”

  “Fake!?”

  “Yeah. They took him in there and said, ‘Listen, Wallace, we need to scare the crap out of these two Americans, so play along. Shut up and go limp for a minute and we’ll roll you up in a piece of plastic and carry you out and make it look like we just killed you.’ He’s probably sitting in his flat in Vancouver right now playing T’Rain.”

  “I doubt it,” Csongor said.

  “I suppose that is theoretically possible,” Peter said, “but I think it is insane and irresponsible of you to bet our lives on it.”

  “None of this is real,” Zula said. “It is all gangster theater.”

  A couple of loud booms echoed down the stairway.

  After a brief silence, they heard several different fully automatic weapons firing at the same time.

  Peter swiveled his head around and fixed Zula with a look.

  “Either that, or I’m wrong,” Zula said.

  “THAT’S ENOUGH!” THE locksmith exclaimed, barely audible above the sound of gunfire and of stray pieces of broken glass and debris rattling down onto the roof of the van. “I’ve had it!” He was half lying, half sitting on the floor of the van, legs folded up in front of the passenger seat, body wedged in under the radio, reaching up to work on the ignition lock. His brain was telling him to hurl himself out of the vehicle and run as fast as he could, but it was going to take a little while to extricate his body.

  Yuxia looked out the windshield. The PSB cop was backing away from the building, looking up just like everyone else on the street.

  Something really bad was happening, and Qian Yuxia was an accomplice to it.

  She reached down and slipped her hand into the locksmith’s as if she were going to help pull him up. Instead of which she pinned it against the steering wheel. She used her other hand to grab the dangling manacle and snap it over his wrist.

  “You can try to pick that handcuff while I’ve got my fingernails in your eyes,” she said, “or you can start the engine while I sit here quietly. Your choice.”

  IN THE WHOLE world, there might have been as many as ten thousand people who were better than Sokolov at falling and rolling around on hard surfaces. Circus acrobats and aikido masters, mostly. Also included in that group would have been many of the younger Spetsnaz men. The remaining six billion or so living humans did not even enter the picture.

  Sokolov had come to it a bit late, since he had not been recruited into Spetsnaz until after serving a couple of tours in Afghanistan. But for exactly that reason his trainers had been ruthless with him, making him dive and fall and roll on concrete floors over and over again until blood had seeped through the fabric of his uniform wherever there’d been bone anywhere near the skin. The point being that if you did it right, there shouldn’t be blood, or even bruises.

  Different special forces units around the world had different philosophies as to what was the best way to conduct close-quarters fighting. In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons. Knees, hips, shoulders, and elbows should be used as fluidly as the soles of one’s boots. Hands, though, should be reserved for holding things, such as guns. Sokolov had been trained accordingly and had maintained that standard of training for as long as he had stayed in Spetsnaz. After he had moved into the private sector, he had continued to practice SAMBO: a Soviet martial art, similar in many respects to jujitsu, that involved a huge amount of falling and rolling. He had done this because, when you were working as a security consultant, trying to keep things safe for private clients—clients who might be, say, movie stars at ski resorts or CEOs’ wives at shopping malls—there were times when you just wanted to get someone on the ground or place them in a submission hold as opposed to riddling their corpse with bullets and shotgun pellets.

  Usually, of course, he warmed up a bit first and swept the floor to make sure it was clean and free of little bits of hard stuff that could cause minor injuries. Those niceties were lacking here, but the fact that a tall black man—evidently an Islamic militant of some type—was swinging a loaded and cocked AK-47 over the table at him gave him all the motivation he needed to skip the preliminaries and go into motion.

  First, though, he put four bullets into the wall just next to the door toward which he was diving. He did this because he had seen, in his peripheral vision, someone furtively poking his head around the corner and then drawing it back: behavior that triggered whole networks of neural circuitry built up in his brain during his work in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

  How could he put four bullets through a wall when his hand was empty? The answer was that he had a pistol in his hand, with a round chambered and ready to go, before he was consciously aware of it. Though his employer would have bought him any sort of fancy gun and holster he had asked for, Sokolov had elected to stay with a Makarov: the standard-issue Russian sidearm, which was a smallish and rather simple semiautomatic pistol that lived in an odd and ingenious type of holster. Unlike most holsters, which were dead ends—you could only get the weapon out by pulling on it, butt first—the Spetsnaz holster was a sort of rail that the pistol moved through. When bad things were not happening, you inserted the weapon into the top of the rail, where it stayed, safe and secure. When bad things started to happen, you brought your hand down onto the butt of the pistol and pushed it down and through the end of the device. As you did so, lugs built into the rail engaged the slide of the pistol and pushed it back, chambering a round, so that by the time the weapon was free of the holster it was ready to fire. About a tenth of a second after the black man said “Allahu akbar,” Sokolov discovered his pistol in his hand in exactly that condition. He aimed it just to one side of the door frame and fired four rounds as quickly as that was possible while initiating a dive and roll. A burst from the AK-47 might have passed through the general area where he had been standing, but it was hard to tell; the apartment had become rather noisy, and all he could hear was ringing in his ears. He tumbled fluidly into the next space, which turned out to be a sort of back storage room, perhaps a pantry, with a sleeping bag, now empty, on the floor. The former occupant of the bag had gotten stealthily to his feet, picked up an AK-47 of his own, and made that furtive glance into the room where the black man had been mixing up the ANFO. Now he was slumped on the floor, not doing much. Sokolov could not see where bullets had gone through him, but he could tell from the sheepish, glazed look on the man’s face that he was hit. While making these admittedly hasty observations Sokolov began firing back into the room from which he had just escaped, but the black man had had the presence of mind to change his position and so nothing was there. Sokolov, now lying flat on his back in a spreading puddle of the other man’s blood, holstered his pistol and took the AK-47. It was a bit large and cumbersome for these environs, but its bullets would penetrate brick walls and it had a larger magazine.

  Some idiot was spraying AK rounds through the wall above him, causing shattered plaster to rain down into his face. Sokolov verified that his rifle was ready to fire, then rolled into the doorway and discharged three rounds at a man—not the black man, but a Ce
ntral Asian type with a beard—who was doing the spraying. The man went stiff and just as quickly went floppy, and Sokolov hit him with one additional shot, more carefully aimed at his center of mass. The Central Asian went down. There was no doubt in Sokolov’s mind that he had been stationed at that position by the black man with orders to cover Sokolov. This implied that the Negro was, (a) in charge, and (b) trying to make his way out of the apartment. A very deeply buried instinct, the lust for the hunt, made Sokolov want to go after him. Then some higher part of his brain weighed in. Thirty seconds ago he had been in the hallway getting ready to scare the hell out of a Chinese hacker and now he wanted to pursue a black Islamic militant through the middle of a pitched AK-47 duel in a bomb factory?

  Looking past the supine body of the Central Asian, Sokolov could see one end of a larger room that looked almost like a disco because of the muzzle flashes. Whatever was going on there—and he could see very little of it—could not possibly last for very long. He could already see the feet of one of his men lying motionless on the ground, sticking out into the doorway.

  The light was brightening and flickering.

  From where Sokolov lay he could have belly-crawled like an infantryman across the ANFO-mixing room, but this would have made him easy prey for anyone who happened to step into the doorway. So he pushed himself up and crossed the room with a dive and a roll and came up just short of the doorway with his rifle at the ready.

  He was greeted by a tongue of yellow flame reaching across the floor. He flinched back, not before some of it had lapped around his boot and set it on fire. He stomped his boot on the floor and managed to get the fire out, and a powerful smell of acetone came into his nostrils. A can of the stuff had been punctured.

  Four completely motionless bodies—two of them Russians—were sprawled on the floor. Three wounded men—one of them Russian—had given up all thought of continuing the fight and were trying to roll or crawl clear of the rapidly spreading lake of burning solvent. The exit lay on the opposite side of the flames; Sokolov was trapped in this end of the apartment. All the gunfire was happening at the other end. Through the rippling air above the fire, Sokolov saw men on their feet and knew them as enemy, since his Spetsnaz boys would never expose themselves so stupidly. Aiming and firing over the flames, he brought down five with as many shots. But the mere fact that they were standing there in that attitude all but proved that Sokolov’s men were either dead or had withdrawn into the corridor.