Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  “This is not a video game,” Csongor said. “It is real.”

  “Then get real, asshole!” Marlon suggested.

  It was neither polite nor well phrased, but Csongor took the meaning.

  “You want to take that boat,” Csongor said. Just to make sure that he and Marlon understood each other.

  “You know of any other way to get out of China?”

  “Where are we going to go?”

  “Wherever!”

  “How are we going to—”

  “Listen!” Marlon said. “She’s doing it.”

  Csongor turned back toward the fishing vessel, which was now startlingly close to them, and heard banging and screaming and the voices of angry men. A steel latch clanked, a door was hauled open, and the cacophony, which had been muffled, radiated out over the water: a woman’s voice, hardly recognizable as Yuxia’s, shouting and, he guessed, cursing, and the sound of glass smashing. Men telling her to knock it off.

  “Remember this?” Marlon asked.

  Csongor looked at Marlon, becoming a little more visible to him now because of the light diffusing from the fishing boat’s windows, and saw him holding one of the objects that they had earlier marked as stun grenades.

  “Take two,” Csongor said. He reached into his pocket, took out the second stun grenade, and handed it to Marlon. He looped the strap of the purse over his shoulder, just so he wouldn’t lose track of it in whatever was to follow, and pulled out the pistol. Jones had identified it, earlier, as a Makarov. He drew back the slide just to verify that there was a round in the chamber.

  Then he slipped it into his waistband, grabbed the oars, and began to pull like hell. He had glimpsed an opportunity, however unlikely, to get himself out of China.

  SOKOLOV AWOKE TO a perfectly silent office. And yet lodged in his short-term memory was the sound of an elevator door opening.

  He willed himself not to go back to sleep and soon heard faint voices.

  Feeling in the dark, he verified that his pistol and flashlight were where he had left them, next to his head. He drew one knee, then the other up to his chest so that he could tie his shoes. Whoever they were, the visitors were moving cautiously, reconnoitering, discussing. It was not a break-the-door-down-and-barge-in type of visit.

  They would have been stopped by the glass doors. Sokolov had sealed them with the cable lock. They would be trying to find a way around those doors, debating whether to just break the glass. The noise would be stupendous, but it was the middle of the night, and the building was mostly vacant.

  Not knowing how many there were or what their intentions might be, Sokolov decided to retreat and lurk. He stood up and got one foot into the loop of Ethernet cable he had tied earlier, then put his weight on it and straightened the leg, thrusting his head and shoulders up through the vacancy in the ceiling.

  He let the gun, the clip, and the flashlight rest for the time being on top of an adjoining tile. Then he reached up and got a grip on the heavy steel. Once that was done, it was easy to raise his knees up and go completely upside down, hanging by his hands while endeavoring to thrust his lower legs through the triangular openings in the truss. That accomplished, he was able to hang by his knees, head down, hands free.

  He pulled up the cable loop after him and let it rest off to one side atop the ceiling grid.

  From the direction of the entrance came a couple of exploratory thumps, followed by a tremendous crash and a long decrescendo of high-pitched clattering as glass fragments sprayed all over the floor of the lobby. He listened for a few moments, just to get some sense of how many there were and how they were moving. Then he picked up the loose ceiling tile from where he had laid it and set it into its position.

  As he was doing so, something caught his eye on the table below: his phone, and a scrap of paper. They’d been in the back pocket of his suit trousers. Normally he wore pants with zip pockets and kept them zipped. That way, he never had to worry about things falling out of them when he was something other than upright and vertical, and this in turn left him free to make use of all of his hard-earned diving and rolling skills.

  But Jeremy Jeong’s business suit had turned that training into bad habits.

  There was nothing to be done about it; he could hear the intruders making their way into the office. He carefully fitted the missing tile back into its place. Then he picked up his flashlight and put it into his mouth, leaving it turned off for the time being. He picked up the Makarov and chambered a round with a slow careful movement of the slide, muffling the sound as best he could with his hand. The spare clip was a bit of a problem, since he was still hanging upside down and none of his pockets could be relied upon. He left it where it was for now, but practiced laying his hand on it in the dark until he could touch it on the first try.

  And then he could do nothing, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, except listen. And even the listening was not especially good, since he was separated from what he was listening to by a deck of ceiling tiles that had been designed specifically to muffle sound. And the intruders, at least for the first little while, were trying to move stealthily; they had no idea whether anyone was in this office or what sort of reception they should expect, and so they had to clear the place. Clear it, in the sense of a military or police unit going through every room of a house to make sure that no attackers were hiding anywhere. From what little Sokolov could infer based on sounds, they seemed to know what they were doing; they were not just walking around like idiots, clumped together, poking their heads into offices, but rather leapfrogging each other from doorway to doorway and communicating in single-word utterances, or perhaps through sign language. They had, in other words, been through some sort of training. And they had to be armed; it would not make sense for them to do what they were doing unless they had guns and had them out and ready to fire.

  But finally there came a point when they began to converse in normal voices. Sokolov heard the faint metallic clicks of guns being put back in safe conditions.

  The intruders—Sokolov guessed four or five of them—were not speaking Chinese. Having heard a lot of Central Asian languages, he guessed it was one of those, but he couldn’t understand a word of it. One time he heard a man speak roughly in Chinese and heard a meek Chinese voice answering back. They must have a hostage.

  A lot of attention was paid, for a few minutes, to the computer. Sokolov had left this switched off, since it gave him the creeps to be sharing space with an intelligent machine that was connected to the Internet all the time. They booted it up and spent a little while clicking around. This rapidly grew boring for whoever was not actually doing it, and so at least one of the men began roaming around the office—Sokolov could see occasional reflected glints from his flashlight.

  This man ended up directly below Sokolov. He was quiet for a few seconds, then he called out to his comrades.

  A few of them now congregated below, and Sokolov knew that they were looking at the phone he had dropped.

  A curious kind of conversation now took place, in which several voices would call out a few words in approximate unison, followed by a pause, followed by a repetition of the same. Sokolov was unsure what to make of it until he heard “Westin.” Then he understood that they were going through the photographs on the phone, looking at each one and trying to identify it.

  Once they got to the end of the photos, there was general discussion for a while, which did not seem to lead anywhere. Nor would it. There was nothing interesting on the phone. Only the numbers of some dead men.

  Then one of them began speaking in Chinese. Haltingly. As if reading.

  Sokolov clearly heard the word “Gulangyu.”

  It was the piece of paper: the one that had fallen to the table alongside the phone. It was the scrap on which he had copied out Meng Anlan’s address.

  This got them excited in a way that the phone hadn’t and actually led to one of them taking out his own phone and making a call to someone. There was discussion in a langu
age that Sokolov recognized as Arabic. Of this he knew a few words, but again the only thing he could distinguish through the ceiling tiles was “Gulangyu.”

  That, and “Okay,” repeated several times.

  Some calculation here. He could just slide the ceiling tile out of the way and begin shooting. No doubt he’d be able to get a few of them before they got their weapons off safety and began to shoot back. But when they did shoot back, it would be very difficult for him to move from this incredibly exposed position; and all they’d have to do would be to empty clips toward his general direction and he’d be dead soon.

  Moreover, he was certain now that Jones was not among the men down there. These men were speaking a Central Asian language that Jones wouldn’t know. But when they made the phone call, they switched to Arabic. They must have been talking to Jones at that point. So even if, by some miracle, Sokolov could kill every man down there, he wouldn’t get Jones.

  Now, maybe they were now planning an expedition to Olivia’s apartment. If so, he wanted to stop them before they got there.

  Maybe he could wait until they were out of the room, then let himself down, track them to some place from which he could launch an attack, and get them all.

  But they had just given Olivia’s address over the phone to Jones. So that cat was out of the bag. Even if he could stop all of these guys, that might not protect Olivia, if Jones was now on his way to her place independently.

  Now there was a thought. If Sokolov went to Gulangyu now, was there a chance he might be able to intercept Jones there, and finish this thing tonight?

  His mind was made up as soon as this thought entered it.

  The men below were moving purposefully now, in a hurry to be quit of this place and to embark on their next mission. Sokolov waited until he was fairly certain that they were gone, then moved the tile a little and looked around. Nothing.

  But they might have suspected he was up there, left someone behind to kill him when he emerged.

  So he grabbed the steel girder, pulled himself up, got his legs free, swung them down and simply dropped straight through the ceiling tile, landing on the conference table and then executing a dive and roll from there toward the doorway. Somersaulting through that, he came up in a low crouch, weapon up, and turned and looked both ways. Nothing. But—

  Scared the hell out of him. A man was lying on the floor no more than ten feet away.

  But he was motionless, hands zip-tied behind his back. And he was naked.

  On second thought, not exactly motionless. Still twitching. A huge stain was spreading out from the vicinity of his head, which was tilted back at a funny angle. His throat had been cut.

  Sokolov retrieved his spare clip and other goods from the wreckage now strewn around the conference table, but paused on his way out of the suite to shine his flashlight over the dead man’s face. He was ethnic Chinese.

  Why had they taken his clothes?

  Because something about them made them useful.

  A uniform. The guy was a cop, or a security guard.

  “NI YAO GAO de tamen ji quan bu ning.” Easy for Marlon to say. Hard for Yuxia to accomplish, locked as she was in a steel-walled cabin where everything of consequence seemed to be welded down. There was little in here that a person could smash or break. She tried smacking the glass of the porthole and nearly broke her hand. But there was a wooden chair that wasn’t nailed down, and she found that she could pick it up by its back and smash it into things. Her first few attempts went wild and crashed into the steel door, hard enough that the chair itself began to disintegrate and to send fragments of dry, broken wood bouncing back into her face. She brushed kindling out of her hair, then shifted to a double-handed grip on the largest part of the chair that was still in one piece and went back to work, finally beginning to strike home on the glass of the porthole itself. The glass wasn’t impressed. She hit it harder. Still nothing. Somehow this made her more enraged than Ivanov’s deception, being handcuffed to the steering wheel, Jones abducting Zula, being shoved facefirst into salt water.

  She just wasn’t screaming enough. She began to let go with a deep grunt from her belly with every blow. Like that American tennis player, the big black woman, who screamed whenever she hit the ball. Anyway, to scream was part of raising hell, right? She wound up like a baseball player and lashed out with what was rapidly being reduced to a single short club of wood and screamed as loud as she could and just missed the porthole with a vicious blow. This made her even more angry, so she sucked in a breath and let go another scream and struck another wild blow that missed; and she began now to mix her screaming with curses that she had learned from the women of her village when they were very angry at the men in their lives, and finally she landed a strike on the porthole glass so hard that it cracked. The men of the boat had covered the porthole with paper and someone on the other side now snatched it down and looked through the broken glass just in time to see another chair-leg attack headed right for his face. He ducked out of the way as chips of glass flew out from the spreading fracture, and when he bobbed back up, he was screaming right back at her.

  A few more strikes and a pie-wedge-shaped chunk of porthole glass was knocked out, and the one man had been joined by three others. Four of them! There were only six men on the whole boat. She gripped the chair leg like a mortar and began to use what was left of the glass as a pestle, jabbing at it with short sharp blows. This was, as much as anything, a way of catching her breath. She had forgotten to breathe. She saw the door handle move and knew they were coming; she stepped back from the door, sucked in as much air as she could, and greeted the first man into the room with a blast of invective that, had he understood the dialect she was using, would have shriveled his genitals into something like raisins. Other men followed the first one in through the narrow hatch and then spread out to either sides, backed up against the walls, out of range of the flailing chair leg. The look on their faces was genuine fear. Yuxia had turned into a crazy woman, a witch. Because only a crazy woman or a witch would behave this badly when she was totally in the power of a group of men who could rape her and kill her any time they felt like it.

  A man entered the cabin with such force that he practically knocked the other men down. It was the boat’s captain. He hated her. He came right at her. She instinctively swung the chair leg at him, but he must have known some martial arts because he caught it on the fly and twisted it right out of her hand and hurled it contemptuously out the door and into the sea.

  Yuxia reached into her boot and pulled out the phone and held it up for all of them to see. “I have already called the police!” she announced. “You are all dead men.”

  This was perhaps the only thing that could have stopped the captain in his tracks. He stood perfectly still for a count of three.

  A small, cylindrical object bounced in over the cabin’s threshold and landed in the middle of the floor. This was not the first time Yuxia had ever seen one. Earlier today, Marlon and Csongor had discovered a couple of them among Ivanov’s personal effects, and they had discussed them briefly, using some English terminology that she vaguely recognized. Not commonly used English words but ones she had heard before. “Stun” and “grenade.” From movies, she understood the grenade concept well enough. The thing on the floor didn’t look like the grenades from movies and so she would not have recognized it had it not been for the lucky coincidence of the chat in the van a few hours ago.

  Or maybe not such a coincidence.

  It occurred to her that the grenade was missing its ring.

  Yuxia turned away from it, closing her eyes, and clapped her hands to the sides of her head.

  ZULA COULD NO longer remember a time when she hadn’t felt extremely conspicuous. Sitting alone in the bar of the Hyatt in damp clothes that were very much the worse for wear, she felt no more or less out of place than usual. She had gotten used to it. She was being eyed by several businessmen who, she could only suppose, were wondering how a crack whore had ma
naged to find her way to Xiamen.

  The only men in the place who weren’t looking at her were the pair at the next table: a couple of Middle Eastern/South Asian–looking guys in bulky windbreakers. Even they, however, were keeping Zula in the corners of their eyes, in case she had any thoughts of making a break for it.

  Anyway, she didn’t have to wait for long before the two pilots came down. Uniformed and everything. Carrying their special pilot briefcases and dragging their rollaway bags behind them like cubical pets. They had been ready. She had talked to them on Jones’s phone. Called the hotel’s operator, asked to be patched through to the two Russians who had checked in at the same time three days ago. It had taken them a while to find the right rooms, but the first of the pilots she’d called, Pavel, had picked up the phone on the first ring. Contrary to what Jones thought, he hadn’t been lounging around watching pornography and drinking. He had been waiting.

  Of course, what he’d been waiting for was the voice of Ivanov, speaking Russian. Zula speaking English had come as a distinct surprise. But she’d been able to convince Pavel that, yes, she was that girl who had been on the flights earlier in the week. That something had gone awry with the plan. And that it really would be in his best interest to come down and meet with her in the hotel bar.

  Pavel and the other pilot, Sergei, approached her somewhat warily, looking her up and down. As just about any sane person would.

  “Please,” she said, with a gesture. “Sit down.”

  Even that took some persuading.

  But that was okay. She didn’t have to persuade Pavel and Sergei of anything else. Just to sit down at this table.

  As soon as Pavel and Sergei had taken their seats, the two men in the windbreakers got up and brought their club sodas over and joined them. Five now at the table. Pavel and Sergei were now even more taken aback than they had been to begin with. But proceedings were interrupted by a waitress who came over to take their orders. Zula noted with approval that both pilots asked for nonalcoholic drinks.