Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  After the terrible thing with the bucket, they dragged her back up to the galley. One of the crew members—the one who seemed responsible for most of the cooking—put a cup of tea in front of her. She was sick and quivering, coughing and raw chested, but basically undamaged, and so she picked up the cup, pressing it hard between both of her hands, which were shaking uncontrollably, and sipped. It was actually pretty good tea. Not as good as gaoshan cha but sharing some of the same medicinal properties, which were just what the doctor ordered for someone who had recently been upside down breathing seawater.

  Until now, the main thing driving her actions had been concern for Zula. And she was still very concerned about Zula. But that emotion had now been forced out by something much more intense and immediate, which was a desire to see every man aboard this vessel dead. Not even a desire, so much as an absolute nonnegotiable requirement.

  Her hands were not shaking with fear. This was rage.

  After a few minutes, they moved her to a cabin: the same one, she guessed, where Zula had been held earlier. Which raised the question, What had they done with Zula?

  They must be taking her into Xiamen for some reason. The whole purpose of the affair with the bucket had been to force Zula to run some errand for them.

  She became so preoccupied by this that she failed to notice for a long time that the phone was buzzing against her ankle. Not just once, to announce a text, but over and over again in a steady rhythm.

  She snatched it out in a panic, worried that it would go to voice mail before she could answer it. The number on the screen was hers; this was Marlon, calling her with her own phone.

  “Wei?” she whispered.

  In the background, she could hear a rhythmic squeaking noise.

  “What is that sound?” she asked.

  “Csongor rowing,” Marlon said.

  DURING THE LONG run to Heartless Island, Marlon and Csongor had learned from direct observation what every waterman knew from experience, and what engineers knew from wave theory: that longer vessels inherently go faster than shorter ones. They had given the larger vessel something of a head start, since they didn’t want to follow it obviously. Not long after the beginning of the voyage, they had noticed that their quarry was pulling away from them, in spite of the fact that they were running the outboard at full throttle and felt as though its frail-seeming wooden hull would be smashed to pieces by the waves at any moment. The boat they were following did not appear to be running at high speed and yet it was gradually outdistancing them.

  As they had slalomed around a few small islands along the way, they had been able to regain some lost ground by cutting straight across tidal shallows where the big boat had been obliged to swing wide. But by the time they’d hove in view of the crowded island that seemed to be their destination, the terrorists’ boat had become a nearly invisible dot, and it had required all of Csongor’s powers of concentration to maintain his focus on it and to prevent its getting lost against the background of countless other vessels.

  But of course it had slowed down as it had neared its destination, and so Marlon and Csongor had finally been able to gain on it. The problem of tracking it had become slightly easier, and easier yet when it had elected to swing clear of most of the harbor’s clutter and tie up alongside a fishing vessel that stood aloof from the myriad others.

  Csongor couldn’t be certain that he hadn’t become confused and lost it during those anxious minutes, so it had been with a slowly building sense of relief that he made out the damaged deck planks, the crushed pallets, and certain other identifying marks that he had memorized during the first few minutes of the chase.

  Whereupon they had run out of gas and been forced to break out the oars.

  Much of the remainder of the day had then been consumed with hugely important, yet infuriatingly trivial matters such as obtaining water and food. Without Csongor, Marlon would have found this easier, but still not easy. Easier because he would not have had to explain the presence of a large white man in the boat with him. But still not easy because it would have been obvious to the waterfront society of this little island that Marlon was by no stretch of the imagination a boat person. Had he shown up in a gleaming new white fiberglass runabout, they might have pegged him as a nouveau riche with a freshly acquired toy and taken little note of his obvious lack of nautical acumen. But instead he was in an old and, to put it charitably, well-broken-in working boat that had had no business making the run across open water from Xiamen in the first place. The easiest possible explanation for this combination of clues was that Marlon had stolen the boat from an honest Xiamen waterman and was now a fugitive from justice.

  That had all been obvious, and so it had not seemed like a smart move to simply row the boat into the most crowded part of the harbor. Instead, although they had already been suffering from thirst and from a general feeling of being at the end of their ropes, they had taken turns rowing the boat in a wide arc around the island, looking for a less obvious place to put in. Along the way, they had swung past the fishing vessel to which the terrorists’ boat had been tied up, never coming closer than several hundred meters and trying not to stare directly at it. There had been nothing to see anyway. A couple of men had been visible through the windows on the bridge, and two more had been loafing on the main deck just aft of the superstructure, but beyond that there had been nothing to suggest that the vessel was occupied by anyone other than run-of-the-mill fishermen.

  During their endless, creeping approach to this island, it had become obvious that it must have a sort of dog-bone shape, since there was a hill, covered with dark green vegetation, at each end, and the town spread across the saddle between. It was oriented roughly north-south and the terrorists’ boats were anchored toward the southern end of the harbor, where the rafts of conjoined fishing vessels petered out into grids of floating fish farms. As they crept southward, the town abruptly ceased to exist and was replaced by inhospitable terrain consisting of ancient, weathered brown sedimentary rock sloping up out of the water to be colonized by olive-drab succulents on the lower slopes and a scruffy mat of green-black tropical vegetation higher up. Csongor remarked on the fact, which to him seemed odd, that in China some places were unbelievably crowded and others were totally uninhabited but there was no in between. Marlon thought it curious that anyone should find this remarkable. If a place was going to be inhabited, then it should be used as intensively as possible, and if it was a wild place, all sane persons would avoid it.

  Csongor guessed that the slope of the ground here was exactly wrong. It was gentle enough that dangerous rocky shallows extended a considerable distance from the tide line, making it a death trap for ships, and yet steep enough that, above the waterline, it was difficult to build on. And so even though they were moving at what seemed an agonizingly slow pace, they went, over the course of perhaps five minutes, from being in a place where ten thousand eyes could see them to a place where they were perfectly invisible. The strata of the bedrock, eroding at different rates, reached into the water with long bony fingers separated by deep shadowed clefts, and the hill rose above them, no man-made objects on the thing except for a radio tower at the summit.

  After another half an hour, it became evident that they had worked their way around the southern end of the island and were now looking up its eastern face. Stretched between the hills at either end, like a taut sail between two spars, was a long beach that was absolutely deserted. Driblets of heavily eroded stone were strewn across it from place to place, but for the most part it was an almost perfectly flat expanse of sand that had been dropped by some longshore current as it tripped over the headland they had just circumnavigated. Above it rose a dune held together by some low green vegetation sparkling with yellow flowers and studded with random pieces of garbage that had apparently been hurled off the edge of the bluff above. For backing up against the top of the slope was a jumbled skyline of low houses that, as they now realized, was simply the other side of the island�
��s one and only town. They had gone halfway around the island and were now looking at the town’s back, huddling against the incoming weather from the South China Sea.

  They pulled the boat up onto the beach, which was littered with garbage of a more seaborne nature, and left it among some half-dissolved boulders where it might be slightly less conspicuous. Csongor sat down nearby in the shade of a rock, shading himself under the parasol, and waited, hoping that Marlon would get back soon and that no one would come to ask him what business he had here. Marlon hiked up into the town, carrying a small amount of cash from Ivanov’s man-purse, and returned half an hour later with two shrink-wrapped bricks of water bottles and some noodles in Styrofoam bowls, already lukewarm but exquisitely satisfying to Csongor. Marlon had already eaten, and so he took a turn at the oars now and rowed the boat back south again while Csongor filled his belly. On their first swing around the southern end of the island, they had noticed a few deep clefts in the rocks: corridors of water no more than a couple of meters wide, where soft layers of rock had been eaten away by the waves. It was late afternoon and these were already deep in shadow. They rowed the boat into one of them and let an incoming wave carry them forward until its keel skidded against the bed of gravel and jetsam that was trying to fill this crevice up. It was cool in here, and they felt invisible and safe. So much so that both men were almost overcome now by a powerful need to sleep. But they took turns keeping each other awake until their stomachs had digested the food and the feeling had passed. Then Marlon clambered up out of the slot and disappeared again for a while.

  Csongor was awakened by someone shaking his shoulder. It was Marlon. The sky overhead was deep twilight.

  “The boat is moving,” Marlon announced.

  Csongor was still coming to terms with the fact that he was where he was; it had not all been just a bad dream.

  “Back to Xiamen?”

  “No. Toward us!”

  The tide had receded, and so both men had to get out of the boat and shove it down the rock chute for a few meters to refloat it. The space was too narrow to deploy the oars, and so they had to push it out against wave action by pawing at the rock walls. But eventually they got out to a place where they could row again, and then Csongor saw the boat in question immediately. The smaller vessel—the one with the taxi crater in its cargo deck—was not in evidence. The fishing boat was motoring along directly in front of them, only a few hundred meters off their bow, headed for the dark, uninhabited side of the island.

  Without gas for their motor, it was, of course, out of the question for them to follow this vessel. Csongor assumed that it was about to turn into the open sea and disappear. But instead it cut its engines to a low growling idle and kept station in front of the beach for a while—long enough for them to row halfway to it. Then they were scared out of their minds by a smaller vessel, similar in its general lines to the one that had earlier absorbed the hits from the taxi and the van, which came motoring around the north end of the island and made straight for the fishing boat, eventually tying up alongside it. Marlon and Csongor meanwhile backed water and pulled toward the shelter of the rocks. It was dark enough by this point that there was little chance of their being seen, as long as they maintained a prudent separation.

  An hour passed. Muffled thuds and voices told them that people and goods were being moved from the fishing vessel to the launch. Then the launch revved its engine and made off to the south, rapidly disappearing around the end of the island, which suggested that it might be headed back toward Xiamen.

  After a little while, the fishing vessel too began to head south, moving at an extremely slow pace, perhaps just as a way to save fuel. But by this time Marlon and Csongor had rowed back out into the open water and placed themselves directly in its path.

  THE BOAT CARRYING Zula, Jones, and Jones’s crew retraced the course taken earlier up the strait between Xiamen and Gulangyu. But just as they were clearing the northern end of the battery of passenger ferry terminals, the skipper cut the throttle and began to steer a course toward shore, aiming for a dark patch along the waterfront. As they drew in closer, ambient light from the buildings of downtown made it possible to see a few mean little piers hosting a motley assortment of smaller craft. Nevertheless, they were sturdy enough to support vehicles. A taxi was waiting on one of them. Leaning against it, a dark human form suspended between the bluish pane of a phone screen and the bobbing red star of a cigarette.

  In addition to the skipper, Jones, and Zula, there were six men on the boat. Two of them scrambled up from its prow onto the pier and made the boat fast, then padded over to the taxi and greeted the man who had been waiting for them.

  Following, as instructed, one pace behind Jones, Zula disembarked. He led her to the taxi. The two of them climbed into the backseat where tinted windows would make them invisible. It was the same taxi they’d been in earlier in the day.

  One man climbed, quite cheerfully, into the vehicle’s trunk. An additional two crammed themselves into the backseat along with Zula and Jones, and another got into the front passenger seat. The others stayed with the boat.

  They drove to the skyscraper that contained the safe house. The men asked questions, which Jones translated into English for Zula; he then translated her answers back into Arabic. They were all mundane but very practical questions about fire exits, guard stations, the underground parking garage, and so on. The interrogation went on for longer than the drive, and so the driver circled the block a few times as Jones’s men satisfied their curiosity.

  Finally the taxi pulled into the same covered entrance where, a very long time ago, Zula and Peter and Csongor and all of the Russians had climbed into the rented van and bantered with Qian Yuxia.

  The man in the passenger seat climbed out and entered the lobby, where he engaged in conversation with a security guard seated behind a sweeping marble-clad desk.

  After a few minutes, he turned half around, while keeping his eye fixed on the guard, and made a little wave back toward the taxi.

  The entrance to the underground garage was just ahead of them, down a ramp that was sealed off by a steel door. This now groaned into movement and lifted out of their way. The taxi pulled into it and navigated to an elevator bank, where the two men in the backseat hopped out and liberated the one in the trunk. As they were doing this, the doors of one of the elevators slid open to reveal the first man standing next to the security guard. The guard had his hands behind his back, and he had a pistol to his head. All of them crowded into the elevator, and the doors closed.

  The taxi then pulled back out of the skyscraper’s basement and onto the waterfront boulevard. A few minutes later they were back at the pier. Khalid and one of the other jihadists now joined them in the taxi, and Jones told the driver to head for the Hyatt by the airport. Once the taxi had pulled out onto the main road, he pulled out his phone, looked at Zula, and said, “Here is where you are going to be magnificently cooperative.”

  “WHAT ARE YOU asking her?” Csongor demanded.

  “Which side of the boat she is on,” Marlon said, taking the phone away from his head for a moment. Then he put it back and listened. “She is on that side.” He waved his hand out toward the open sea.

  Csongor looked at the fishing vessel. It was perhaps a hundred meters away from them. If he stopped rowing, and it kept going on a straight course, it would pass just in front of them, leaving them on its starboard side—which was to say, the side facing toward the island. Marlon was telling him that Yuxia was in a cabin on the port side.

  To say that they were trying to intercept the larger vessel would have been to imply, somehow, that they had a plan. Which, in turn, would have been to imply that Marlon and Csongor had been communicating with each other as to what they ought to do. Neither of these was true. Earlier, they had made use of the cover afforded by darkness, and the fact that their out-of-gas boat was incapable of making noise, to move around and keep an eye on the terrorists’ activities. This had nearly
brought them to grief when the faster launch that had met the fishing boat had suddenly come roaring toward them. Since then Csongor had been rowing with all his might. And when he had rehydrated with a few bottles of water and filled his belly with noodles, his might was considerable, and he was able to jerk the little boat across the flat water like a water skater. But why was he doing it? What was the plan? No idea.

  “What are we—” Csongor began, but Marlon cut him off. He was hanging up the phone. “I told her gao de tamen ji quan bu ning,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  Marlon grinned, stalling Csongor while he worked through the translation. “Make it so that not even their dogs and chickens are at peace.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Raise hell, more or less.”

  “Okay. Then what?” Csongor stopped rowing and looked at Marlon.

  Marlon nodded significantly toward the oncoming vessel. “The wheels,” he said.

  Csongor turned and looked. Marlon had used the wrong English word, but it was obvious what he was referring to. Every discarded tire in the entire industrialized world seemed to have ended up here on the Chinese coast, where they were used by the locals in the same way that their landlubber cousins used bamboo: as the Universal Substance out of which all other solid objects could be made. Sometimes they had to be hugely reprocessed in order to serve their intended function. In other cases, they still looked like tires. Every boat—nay, every floating object—in this universe was protected on all sides by tires slung from its gunwales on ropes, lined up in rows like shields on a Viking ship. This one was no exception. They dangled just above the waterline. It would be easy to reach up from the rowboat, grab one, and use it to climb aboard the larger vessel. The wheels.