Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  Having settled all of that, he rounded up Yuxia, who was mugging in front of a mirror in a ghillie suit that made her look like the Littlest Ent. She had gotten a little giddy, which he put down to a combination of jet lag, culture shock, and emotional trauma over having been ripped from the bosom of her family and homeland. On this side of the Pacific there were, of course, many persons of Chinese ancestry whose ancestors had come over to this country in the most fucked-up circumstances imaginable, and he supposed that if this adventure were better organized, maybe with some psychologists on its advisory board, he’d be getting Yuxia in touch with the relevant support groups. But as it was they were just going to have to get in the SUV and start driving, and she was going to have to suck it up for a while, and he was going to have to keep an eye on her.

  So that was what happened. Csongor rode shotgun. Yuxia crept into the way back, burrowed into a deep warm nest of newly acquired camo gear, and crashed. Marlon sat in the center of the middle seat, blocking Seamus’s line of sight out the rearview and watched America go by with all due curiosity. Seamus felt vaguely like one of those ex-military guys who gets a job as a celebrity bodyguard and finds himself driving rock stars around.

  He was feeling some unaccountable need to get clear of the Seattle-Tacoma metro area, so he headed east over the mountains and then down into the desert. At which point it seemed as though nothing stood between him and the Atlantic Ocean, and so he went into serious road-trip, put-the-hammer-down mode, and bombed down I-90 as if there was no tomorrow. White line fever got him most of the way across the state. But then certain real-world issues—the limited size of his bladder and of his fuel tank—began to interfere with the dream. He was seeing a lot of signs for some place called Spokane. He’d heard of it. It turned out to be a decent-sized city with the usual complement of strip malls and chain hotels. None of them looked absolutely perfect, and so he kept driving anyway, and found that he had passed into Idaho without really leaving Spokane; the city had thrown a pseudopod of exurban development across the border, groping out in the direction of a place called Coeur d’Alene. It was there that Seamus finally spotted the inexpensive chain hotel of his dreams, embedded roughly in the center of an eight-hundred-mile-long development that included, within a few hundred yards of the hotel entrance, a twelve-pump gas station/convenience store complex and a restaurant that looked as if it might have microbrews on draft. Presenting his credit card—which, unbelievably, had not been canceled yet—he rented three rooms: one for Yuxia, because she was a girl. One for Marlon, because he was, ultimately, paying for everything and so it seemed that he ought to have his own room. And one that he would share with Csongor, since he and the Hungarian seemed to have developed an understanding that verged on friendship.

  They agreed to meet in the lobby an hour later and walk over to the restaurant-that-might-have-good-draft-beer.

  Seamus happened to come down to the lobby first and found himself with nothing to do except scan the rack of travel brochures by the registration desk: promotional literature for ski areas, amusement parks, gold mine tours, fishing and jet-skiing on the nearby lake. He grew bored and sat back down. But his mind was troubled in a way that it hadn’t been when he had entered the lobby. He got back up and went over to the rack and scanned it again, trying to make out what he’d seen there that had subliminally irritated him.

  He found it, finally, on the third slow pass through the rack: the word “Elphinstone.”

  It was on a cartoonish, schematic map of something called the International Selkirk Loop: a circuit of American and Canadian highways, straddling the border, that, to judge from the numerous pictures, passed by lots of pretty lakes and through some nice mountain scenery. This brochure badly wanted Seamus to understand that a person could drive this loop on a motorcycle or an RV over the course of a leisurely day or two, see a lot of natural beauty, eat tasty food, buy cool stuff. It was, in other words, a tourist brochure, and fundamentally of no interest whatever to Seamus.

  Except for that one word “Elphinstone.”

  That was the name of the town where Richard Forthrast had his cat skiing resort. The place where he had gone missing a couple of days ago.

  Correction: Seamus had no proof that he had gone missing per se. He had abruptly stopped playing T’Rain. Pretty thin evidence, that. But it had been something like twenty-four hours—difficult to tell exactly, what with the time zones and all—anyway, a hell of a long time—since Seamus had checked in on Egdod. And to judge from what the boss had said, Olivia had been dealing with troubles of her own, related to someone, something, or somewhere called Tukwila. Jones, or more likely his minions, were blowing shit up on the border, drawing every cop in the world to the epicenter. So it seemed a good bet that no one had been attending to the somewhat Mysterious Case of the possibly Missing Online Gaming Entrepreneur in a while. Seamus hadn’t been thinking about it, at least not at a conscious level, since getting these people illegally into the country had been foremost in his thoughts, and he had just been going on instinct and impulse for at least a day. When stuck in the American embassy in Manila with three illegals liable to be arrested and deported at any minute, it’s hard to focus on hypothetical events that might be taking place near the Idaho/B.C. border.

  But now he was here. Literally, he was on the map. For when he pulled the Selkirk Loop brochure out of the rack, Coeur d’Alene became visible on the map, down toward the bottom. His eyes began jumping back and forth, top to bottom: Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene. Elphinstone, Coeur d’Alene.

  The only problem being that horizontal line drawn through the middle of the Loop: the Canada/U.S. border. No way was he getting Marlon and Yuxia across that.

  But maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe what he was looking for was coming to him.

  “Seamus?”

  He looked up. Csongor was there, and Marlon, and Yuxia, all freshly showered and looking like the Xiamen branch of the Lynyrd Skynyrd Fan Club. He had the sense that they’d been looking at him for a while, wondering when he was going to snap out of it.

  “Are you hungry?” Csongor continued. Not that he gave a shit; Csongor was hungry.

  Now, some part of Seamus was wondering why these kids didn’t just walk over to the restaurant and order food, if that was what they wanted. But he had dragged them to this place and created a situation in which they were totally dependent on him—appointed himself the Dr. Reed Richards of this little band of superheroes—and he had to step up to his responsibilities.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Just thinking about tomorrow’s program of activities.”

  “Yay,” Yuxia said. “Activities!” She translated this abstraction into Mandarin, and Marlon nodded, a little uncertainly.

  Csongor was unsure to what degree Seamus was being sarcastic, and he was now watching with heightened vigilance. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

  “Well,” Seamus pointed out, “we’re dressed for hunting.”

  “We don’t have guns.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  Csongor was now watching very carefully. Seamus broke eye contact and returned his attention to the rack for a minute. “Just kidding,” he said. He scanned an index finger across a row, looking for something he’d noticed earlier.

  There it was. He snapped the brochure out, then turned toward the exit. “Let’s eat,” he said.

  But the others were having none of it. They bunched behind him, peering over his shoulder or around his elbow to read the cover of the brochure he’d just pulled from the rack: SELKIRK HELICOPTER TOURS.

  AFTER HE’D LED the terrorists through the mine and out the other side, Richard was aware, at some level, that he really needed to start in on the sell job of his life: he needed to get Abdallah Jones to believe that making it past American Falls would be no picnic and that his skills as guide were still—in the parlance of old what’s-his-name, the CEO of Corporation 9592—mission critical. That Richard still had world-class value-added here.

>   But Richard could not bring himself to do this, for exactly the same reason that, when Corporation 9592 had grown to a certain size, he had become listless during meetings and allowed himself to drift to the periphery of relevance. Richard was, at bottom, a guy who did stuff. A farmer. A plumber. A Barney.

  What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.

  Hence his recent surge of reinvolvement in the company, sorting out various troubles attributable to the Wor. The Wor had given him something to do and he had just gone out and done it. Likewise looking for Zula. As long as there had been doors to hit with sledgehammers, he’d been all over it. Later in that project, when it had become a matter of maintaining the “Where’s Zula?” Facebook page and politicking with cops, he had become listless and of no use.

  And now this: Jones had wanted help finding his way through the mine tunnels or else he would kill Zula. Richard had packed a sleeping bag and some spare clothes and applied himself to getting that done. They had punched through it while the sun was rising and emerged on the south slope to enjoy a view that in other circumstances he’d have found immensely pleasing: the low sun setting fire to torn diaphanous curtains of mist rising from stands of ancient cedars, the distant roar of the falls, swollen by snowmelt, the Selkirks and the Purcells and other ranges of mountains rambling off into the distance, affording peeks at deep blue lakes and cavernous valleys. The granitic mass of Abandon Mountain rising out of its rampart of talus, just a few miles south of the border, its sheer eastern face glowing in the rich golden light of the early sun.

  Mission accomplished. Jones, or any idiot for that matter, could see right across the border now, would understand that Richard could simply be shot in the head and left here and they’d find some way of getting down past the falls and into the United States without his assistance.

  It was time, in other words, to call out the sales force, take Jones to lunch, begin gardening personal contacts, shape his perception of the competitive landscape. Forge a partnership. Exactly the kind of work from which Richard had always found some way to excuse himself, even when large amounts of money were at stake.

  Yet now his life was at stake, and no one was around to help him, and he still wasn’t doing it. He simply couldn’t get past his conviction that Jones could go fuck himself and that he wasn’t going to angle and scheme and maneuver for Jones’s sake.

  Maybe because all that behavior ultimately seemed like groveling to him. That was really his problem: deep down, he believed that all such people were grovelers.

  They took a little break at the mine’s exit to enjoy the view, to set the last booby trap, to brew tea, to pray, and to try to get phone reception. Reasonable enough; it seemed as though the whole Idaho panhandle were directly visible from here, and there had to be a cell tower somewhere in that. The experiment would have been over very quickly if there’d been no reception at all, but it seemed that some of the jihadists were able to get one bar if they stood in a particular attitude in a particular place and held the phone a certain way and invoked various higher powers. Richard was tempted to make a sour analogy to pointing oneself in the direction of Mecca, but he didn’t think it would do much for his life expectancy. Their rituals became ludicrous after a certain point. Because none of these guys had an ironic modern attitude, none saw the humor.

  No, strike that. Almost all of them had been living under cover in the Western world and were as capable of seeing the humor as any fourteen-year-old American sitting on his couch watching South Park reruns and sending snarky tweets to his friends. But they’d made a conscious decision to turn their backs on all that. Like smokers or drinkers who’d gone straight, they were more dogmatic about this than anyone who’d come to that place naturally. Only Jones had the self-confidence to let himself be amused, and that was how he and Richard ended up making eye contact.

  “So,” Richard said, after he and Jones had enjoyed the moment, “you going to put a bullet in me now, or should I show you the easiest way to get past American Falls?”

  “I’m happy with the arrangement in its current form,” Jones said. “If that changes, you’ll be the first to know. Assuming you see it coming.”

  “Well, you raise an interesting question there, Abdallah. Would I see it coming? Is it going to be one of those slow beheadings? Or just an unannounced shot to the head?”

  Richard now watched in some degree of fascination as Jones actually mulled it over. “Other things being equal,” he said, “I’d prefer to give you some opportunity to pray first, perhaps write out a statement. But if we find ourselves trapped in some awkward situation, there may not be time for that.”

  “Is that a little incentive program you just laid out for me? A built-in penalty for awkward situations?”

  “The incentive program, as I’m sure you understand, is all about Zula. Because of the regrettable lack of phone reception, we have not been able to check in with our comrades. You may assume that she is still alive and that you may keep her in that condition by keeping us out of awkward situations and doing other things for us.”

  “Does that mean that if you’d been able to get bars, you’d have given the order to kill her?”

  “There is no fixed plan. We assess our situation from hour to hour.”

  “Then assess this: we’re sitting in an exposed place up here. Anyone down there in those valleys could see us. What are we waiting for?”

  Jones acted as if he hadn’t heard this. “Is that Abandon Mountain?” he asked, nodding south.

  “Yes.”

  “Roads connect to its opposite side.”

  “The lower slopes, yes. That’s the way out.”

  “Let’s go then,” Jones said, rising to his feet and dusting off his bum.

  Richard had just tasked him: told him that they had to move away from this exposed position. Jones, not wanting to bow to Richard, had pretended not to hear it. But a few moments later he had done what Richard had suggested, as if it had been his own idea. Now that was the kind of psychological program that Richard could get involved in, if he could only find, or create, more opportunities to develop it.

  Such an opportunity came along rather soon, as they came to a place where they could see an obvious way to traipse off in the general direction of Abandon Mountain. Every greenhorn pot smuggler who came this way tried it, only to find himself in difficulties two hours later when he learned that this easy-looking trail led to a cul-de-sac. In order to prove that it was a cul-de-sac, it was necessary to expend another few hours probing for a way out of it, thereby wasting most of a day. And so here Richard actually did have to perform a little sell job, convincing Jones that it would really be much better for them if they turned aside from the obvious and easy path and instead spent the next couple of hours picking their way down a slope that, had it supported a proper trail, would have been an endless succession of densely packed switchbacks. But no one could have built a proper trail on this thing without using tactical nuclear weapons. It was a junk pile of fallen logs strewn over primeval talus and covered with a loose slippery froth of moss and decaying vegetation. After leaving a green spray-paint annot
ation at the top, they devoted four hours to clambering down it, covering all of about half a mile on the map.

  Richard, back in his dope-carrying days, had made this trip three or four times before he had lost all patience with it. He had come here with nothing on his back except for food and a bedroll and devoted several days to finding a quicker and easier way down: the proverbial Secret Shortcut: an abrupt and chancy descent into a dry wash followed by a relatively quick and easy hike down a gully leading to a spot near the top of the falls. Had it not been for that discovery, his nascent smuggling career probably would have been snuffed out by the sheer unattractiveness of this part of the journey. But he felt no particular need to share the shortcut with Jones and his men. For now, they were stuck in a place that had no phone reception: a state of affairs that seemed to limit the amount of damage that Jones could do. The longer this lasted, the greater the chance that someone would notice the signs of his hasty departure from the Schloss and launch a proper investigation.

  And there was also the fact that, like it or not, Richard was leading these people directly toward the place where Jake lived. He was doing all of this to save the life of his niece. It had all seemed easy until he had looked out from the mine’s exit and seen Abandon Mountain. Now he was thinking pretty hard about the fact that, to save his niece, he was leading a band of terrorists straight toward a remote cabin containing two brothers, a sister-in-law, and three nephews.