Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  Not that Sokolov had any certainty of being forgiven. There were no guarantees. But this way he had a decent chance. Whereas if he sneaked around and tried to avoid them, they would surely take note of his lack of courtesy and approach him in a more suspicious frame of mind.

  That much he had decided during the first half of his voyage across the Pacific. The question, then, was how to go about making contact with the people in question. Simply calling them from a pay telephone on the beach would be indiscreet and would suggest a kind of desperation.

  On the other hand, if he climbed on a bus and went straight to Igor’s house, it would seem reasonable enough. For this was not the act of a desperate person. Certainly not that of one with something to hide, since it was to be expected that Igor would spread the news of Sokolov’s arrival via the grapevine. No, this was a good low-key way to say to those whom Ivanov had betrayed: I survived, I got out of China, I am not on the run, I have nothing to hide, you’ll be hearing from me once I have got my feet on the ground.

  So in a sense this was a make-work visit. Sokolov still had enough dollars in his pocket to pay for a motel room and a bus ticket. He really needed nothing at all from Igor.

  It was a social call.

  And yet Igor sensed at some level that this made no sense. Which was why he was so worried. So suspicious.

  Anyway, he consented, finally, to let Sokolov in his front door. A decidedly awkward exchange of greetings followed. He and Vlad and Sokolov ended up sitting around the kitchen table, which was strewn with Russian-language newspapers, mugs half full of cold coffee, and dirty cereal bowls. The chilly silver light, so characteristic of this part of the world, washed in through a mesh-covered window and made it possible to see everything without actually illuminating it.

  “I just got off a containership from China,” Sokolov said. For if Igor conveyed nothing else to the grapevine, Sokolov wanted it known that this, and no other reason, was why he had been incognito for two solid weeks. “No Internet, no phone. I’ve been totally out of touch.”

  “Made any phone calls?”

  “I don’t have a phone. I’m telling you, I literally jumped off the fucking ship two hours ago and came straight here.”

  “So you have heard nothing in two weeks.”

  “Closer to three. It’s not as if we were doing a lot of communicating when we were in Xiamen.”

  “Well, you need to check in. There are a lot of people confused. Pissed off.”

  Sokolov grinned. “Heard from them, did you?”

  “I thought I was a dead man,” said Igor, completely unamused. Sokolov glanced at Vlad, hoping to draw him into the conversation, but Vlad, a somewhat younger man than Igor—skinny, with long unkempt hair—had scooted his chair into the corner of the kitchen and was sitting there with his hands in the pockets of a bulky leather jacket, implicitly threatening to drill Sokolov with whatever was in his pocket. Vlad had been a minor player in the takeover of Peter’s apartment, but he was as deeply implicated as anyone else. Sokolov suspected him of being a meth user.

  A plane took off from Sea-Tac, flying directly over the house, and made conversation impossible for a little while.

  “Well, you look alive to me,” Sokolov said finally.

  Igor nodded. “There was a sort of investigation, I guess you could call it. Certain people wanted to know where Ivanov had gone, what he had done. They were very suspicious. I tried to explain to them about Wallace. About the virus.” Igor shrugged his huge shoulders, a great rolling movement like a barrel falling off a truck. “What do I know about such things? I just told them what I had overheard. The hacker in China. T’Rain. Zula. Tried to make sense of it. After a while they calmed down.”

  “There you have it,” Sokolov said. “I expected as much. Once they had it all explained. You did well.” This not so much for Igor’s ears as for those he might spread the story to later.

  Igor now got an expectant look on his face. Rather than wait for him to say it, Sokolov said: “I’ll take care of it from here.”

  “Good.”

  “I just need to make my way back to them, you know, without getting in trouble with Immigration, with the law.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Which is why I came here,” Sokolov said. “I won’t be much trouble. Just need to take a shower. Get a bite to eat. Pull myself together. Then I’ll be on my way.”

  “You need money?” Igor asked suspiciously.

  “Not really.”

  Igor softened. “Because I can lend you some if you need it.”

  “As I said, I just need to collect myself for a few minutes. I’ll count my money and perhaps take you up on that offer.”

  “The shower is that way,” said Igor, pointing with his eyes.

  THE HOUSE’S FLOOR was spongy and uneven—being consumed from beneath, Sokolov guessed, by some combination of insects and rot. The frame of the bathroom door had sagged into a parallelogram, the flimsy hollow-core door was still a rectangle; he bashed it shut with his shoulder and then used the hook-and-eye lock that had been added onto it when the lockset had stopped working. This seemed to be ground zero for the mildewy scent that pervaded the entire bungalow. Sokolov turned on the shower, then jerked the curtain across its front so water wouldn’t splash out onto the floor. He took a seat, fully clothed, on the toilet, which was located behind the door, and got out his Makarov and chambered a round. That Igor would kick the door down and Vlad fire blindly into the shower stall was unlikely. But neither was it out of the question; and if it happened, Sokolov would be quite disappointed in himself if he had failed to be ready for it.

  He checked his watch and made himself comfortable for fifteen minutes, during which time he thought about Olivia and Zula, Csongor and Yuxia and Peter.

  Since Zula was the only one he’d seen escaping the building, he had been assuming that Csongor and Peter were dead and that Yuxia was in the custody of the Public Security Bureau. These facts were unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do about them.

  Of Zula’s situation, he could only speculate. He had scanned some newspapers in the bookstore downtown where he had purchased the map. He’d seen no reference to Abdallah Jones. Then he had moved on to some weekly newsmagazines, where he hoped he might see some stories summarizing events of the last week or two. Nothing.

  In several places he had noted posters bearing Zula’s face, sometimes alone, sometimes paired with Peter’s. They were stapled to telephone poles and bus stop bulletin boards, looking a bit yellow and starting to be encroached upon by advertisements for lost dogs and maid services.

  A Google search would have told him much more. But he had seen—more to the point, not seen—enough in the newspapers to suspect that Jones was still lying low somewhere and that Zula, if alive, was still with him.

  As for Olivia, he hoped and trusted that she had found her way safely home and was well on her way to forgetting about him. He had been reassured, back on Kinmen, to see a kind of intelligent guardedness on her face. I can’t believe I’m fucking this guy. He’d have been worried, on the other hand, if she had thrown hopeful or adoring looks at him. Now that they had been apart for a while, her rational mind would have seized the controls from whatever part of her brain found a man like Sokolov attractive and wrenched her back onto a safe and reasonable course.

  He was not entirely happy about this. Under other circumstances, perhaps, it would have been worth pursuing. Sad that it was impossible. Not as sad as many other things in this world.

  The bungalow’s walls were thin, and beneath the hiss of the shower he could hear Igor’s voice as a kind of indistinct throbbing, difficult to make out except when he pronounced distinct words like “Da, da!” During the intervals when Igor was silent, Sokolov heard nothing from Vlad. Apparently Igor was talking to someone on the phone. This was not surprising, and, as a matter of fact, Sokolov was pretending to take this shower precisely to give Igor an opportunity to make a next move: try to kill him, or el
se call people in his network and begin spreading the news.

  He turned off the shower, turned on the faucet, pulled a disposable razor out of his bag, and shaved using a sliver of soap that had been left on the edge of the sink. He kept the Makarov handy. But if they’d been going to do it, they’d have done it while they thought he was in the shower.

  While he was shaving, he heard Igor place another phone call, this one in English. Igor seemed to be ordering a pizza from Domino’s.

  This did not seem to be the act of a man who was about to murder his guest, so on one level Sokolov relaxed a little bit. It did raise new questions, though. Why was Igor now showing hospitality? Any man in his right mind would want Sokolov out of the house pronto. Had he been ordered, by someone on the telephone, to stall Sokolov? Keep him in the house until someone else could be sent out to deal with him?

  Anyway, he rinsed his face, splashed water into his stubbled scalp to make it look as if he’d actually showered, pulled his stuff together, wrenched the door open, and stepped back out into the bungalow’s living room. Vlad was playing a video game on a tricked-out PC that was connected to a large flat-screen monitor. Igor was watching and supplying commentary, but tore his attention away to greet Sokolov. “Please, make yourself comfortable,” he said, rolling forward as if he intended to rise to his feet. He had a beer in his hand. “Would you like a beer? I’ll get one for you.”

  “No thanks, not now.”

  “I ordered pizza. It should be here in forty minutes. I thought you might be hungry.”

  “Thanks, that sounds delicious. It’s been forever since I had pizza.” These words came out of his mouth somewhat mechanically; his mind was going too fast to make genuine conversation.

  “Noodles and rice for two weeks, eh?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “On the freighter—Chink food only, I’ll bet.”

  Sokolov shook his head. “The crew was Filipino; they eat different stuff. It was fine. Just no pizza, that’s all.”

  “How the hell did you talk your way on board that thing? From what I’ve heard, the Chinese cops must have been going crazy.”

  Sokolov shrugged. “It’s a big port. Famous for smuggling. It’s always possible to find a way out of such places.”

  “But you were alone—and you don’t speak Chinese?”

  So, one thing at least was obvious, which was that whomever Igor had been talking to on the phone had asked him to wheedle more information from Sokolov on how he had made his way from a gunfight in a collapsing apartment building in Xiamen to Igor’s house in Tukwila, and to probe for inconsistencies in the story—to the extent that Igor even had the intellectual equipment for such an undertaking. Perhaps the pizza stalling maneuver was solely to keep Sokolov in the house long enough for Igor to ask a series of such questions. Or perhaps a carload of men was on its way to the house right now to fetch Sokolov and subject him to a more rigorous examination. In either case, it wouldn’t look good for Sokolov to bolt out of the house, spurning the pizza, as much as announcing that he had something to hide.

  He had, of course, been surveying the place for exits and had noticed that, for such a small structure, it was actually rather difficult to get out of. There seemed to be a lot of property crime in the neighborhood, and it was obvious enough that Igor and Vlad were not above dealing in stolen goods, and possibly in drugs as well, so they had been assiduous about putting bars or steel mesh over their windows. The only exits were the doors.

  “What the hell,” Sokolov said. “I think I will have a beer. It’s okay, I can get it myself.” For Igor had already sunk back into the depths of his black leather sofa and was not the sort to get up again quickly. Sokolov went back into the kitchen and confirmed his memory that it led to a sort of back porch with an exit to the yard behind the house. He stepped into the porch and examined the door, a flimsy thing that had been beefed up with more steel mesh and a number of extra bolts. He opened all of these and confirmed that he could now yank the door open with a single quick gesture.

  Then back to the living room with his beer. He had been a little worried that Igor would be suspicious at the amount of time he had taken to fetch a beverage, but his host was deeply absorbed with the progress of the video game. Sokolov dragged a chair into a position where he could look out the front window of the house and straight down the length of the cul-de-sac.

  There followed about forty-five minutes of desultory conversation. Occasionally Igor would ask him a question about what had happened in Xiamen and Sokolov would relate a bit of the story, but sooner or later they always drifted back into video-game watching.

  A small car came up the street, but it was just the pizza delivery. “I’ll get more beer,” Sokolov said, and went into the kitchen. He found a large pot in the cabinet next to the stove, put it in the sink, and began running hot water into it. Then he went to the fridge and got more beers and ferried them out to the living room. Igor was on his feet, undoing the front door locks, greeting the pizza delivery boy. Sokolov set the beers down on the coffee table. Then he went back into the kitchen and took the pot, now containing several liters of warm water, and placed it on the range and turned the burner on high. When the water was boiling, it might serve as a sort of weapon or at least a distraction.

  They ate pizza and drank beer. Vlad had paused his video game. This was not running on a console, such as an Xbox; it ran on a personal computer. Not a boring beige box such as you would see in an office. A PC made specifically for young male game players with a tech fetish, all tricked out with multicolored LEDs and complex molded shapes recalling the hull of an alien spacecraft. When Sokolov had first seen this thing, just after walking into Igor’s house a couple of hours ago, his mind had snagged on it for a moment, then moved on. Ever since, something about it had been nagging at him. But he’d had other things to think about.

  Now, finally, it came to him. He remembered where he had seen this thing before.

  This was Peter’s computer.

  They must have come back to Peter’s place at some point while Sokolov had been embroiled in China and stolen whatever looked good to them.

  It must have been very soon after they had gone to Xiamen, because once Peter and Zula had been reported missing, the cops would have gone there, turned it into a crime scene, made it a very hazardous place to carry out a burglary.

  Which meant that the cops must have gone there after Vlad and Igor had ransacked it.

  Which meant that, instead of finding the carefully cleaned-up, evidence-free scene that Sokolov had arranged, they would have found evidence of said ransacking.

  “You are making me nervous, with this look on your face!” Igor complained.

  Sokolov glanced up to see that Igor was, in fact, looking a little edgy.

  Sokolov cleared his throat. “You went back to that place,” he said, “and took some things.”

  Here, Sokolov would not have been surprised to see Igor dart a guilty look at the fancy PC, which was sitting on the floor so close that he could have set his beer on top of it. But instead Igor threw a nervous look into the corner of the room behind Sokolov. By dint of a supreme effort of will, Sokolov resisted the temptation to turn around and look at whatever it was. Some loot from the apartment, obviously, that Igor considered more valuable or that in some sense loomed larger in his imagination than the PC.

  What would a man like Peter have in his place that could be that interesting to Igor? It was easy to understand the attraction of the PC. All young men liked to play video games. What else? Peter didn’t do drugs.

  Then Sokolov remembered Igor standing at the top of Peter’s stairs, examining a gun safe. Assuring Sokolov that it was locked.

  “I won’t deny it,” Igor said, with a shrug to say it was really nothing, and a nervous laugh that argued to the contrary.

  “Ivanov didn’t pay you well enough?”

  “Nothing’s enough for a job like that one. Shit, I just thought it was going to be security
. Bodyguard shit at the worst. Then it turned into—”

  Sokolov nodded. “Of course, I can sympathize. I was as surprised as you were. I am just asking. It is important for me to know the facts. That’s all. When did you go back to the place?”

  “Two days later, maybe,” said Igor, and glanced over to Vlad for confirmation. “We staked it out the night before. Made sure there were no cops, no surveillance. Found a way in. Nice and quiet.” Another glance into the corner.

  “How did you get the safe open?” Sokolov asked, just guessing. “Quietly?”

  “Plasma torch,” Vlad blurted out. Igor threw him a killing look, but Vlad didn’t even understand that he had stepped into a trap that Sokolov had put out for him.

  “Weren’t you worried that it would damage the gun?”

  “He kept it in a metal case,” Vlad said, and nodded into the same corner. This gave Sokolov an excuse, finally, to turn around and look. Resting on the top of a bookshelf at about head level was a long case of burnished aluminum, just the sort of thing a gun fancier would use to carry around an especially prized rifle. One end of it was marred with flecks and streaks of darker stuff: molten metal that had sprayed onto it and congealed.

  Sokolov turned back around. “This torch didn’t set off the smoke alarms?”

  Igor said, “We went around, found them all, pulled their batteries.”

  “When you were going all over the place looking for those smoke alarms,” Sokolov went on, “you might have seen some security cameras.”

  “Two of them,” Igor said. “We cut the wires, of course.”

  Sokolov, who knew that there were actually three cameras, bit down hard until the urge to scream had passed. “Of course. But up until the moment you cut those wires, you were visible to the cameras.”

  “Vlad’s good at computers,” Igor volunteered.

  Vlad nodded, as if to confirm the validity of Igor’s assessment. “Obviously we had cut the Internet the first time we went there,” he said, “so we knew that the cameras couldn’t send data outside of the building.”