Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  So he was going to have to look for a place where he could get away from them suddenly, out of rifle shot range, in some manner that would make it difficult to track him.

  A movie hero would have jumped off the cliff into American Falls yesterday. After a few tense moments, his head would have broken the surface of the river some distance downstream. Richard knew that this was not really a practical strategy. But there might be stretches of the river that he could conceivably use in a similar way, body-surfing through rapids.

  The problem was that their route didn’t really follow this river. The river ran south and west. Their destination was more easterly, and so their plan today was to hike down the east bank for about a mile and then clamber up an endless slope until they broke out above the tree line and found themselves on a rocky spur thrown out from the mountain. From there they’d traverse a talus field that constituted the peak’s western slope and finally drop into the valley of Prohibition Crick. The only way Richard could make a quick getaway in that sort of country was to let gravity take him and skid or roll down a slope. Which might have been fun, or at least survivable, on a sand dune or a snowfield, but in this territory would just lead to slow death from broken bones and ruptured organs.

  Still, he kept pondering it through the long hours of the night, since it was the only way to keep the F.M.s off his back. He readily agreed to their basic premise, which was that, since he was about to lead a band of heavily armed terrorists straight to the homestead where several of his close relatives were minding their own business, his own life was forfeit to begin with.

  The obvious dodge was to lead them somewhere else instead. But there were limits to how far he could mislead them. Jones had quite obviously done his homework, interrogating Zula in considerable detail, poring over Richard’s Wikipedia article, printing out hard copies from Google Maps. He had a very clear idea of where they were going. As a matter of fact, Jones could easily find his way all the way to Pocatello from here with no help at all from Richard, which made Richard suspect that he was now being kept alive, not as a guide, but as a hostage and possible subject of a gruesome webcam execution. He could already picture the YouTube page, Dodge kneeling on a rug with a sack on his head, Jones behind him with the knife, and, underneath the little video pane, the first of many thousands of all-capital-letter comments sent in by all the world’s useless fuckwits.

  No, at this point the only card he really had to play—the only way to help Jake and John and the others save themselves—was to warn them. Because until now Jones had shown no awareness whatsoever that the valley of Prohibition Crick was inhabited. He must have seen a few roofs peeking out of trees in the Google satellite photos, but he might have made the reasonable guess that these were just summer cabins for Spokane orthodontists, boarded up and quiet at this time of year. Even if he had known that people were living in them year-round, he couldn’t have guessed—could he?—that these were the most heavily armed civilians in the history of the world—gun nuts on a scale that made Pathans look like Quakers.

  Even gun nuts could be taken in a surprise attack, but if Richard could somehow make them aware that they were in danger, then they would be able to give a very good account of themselves.

  The plan he finally arrived at, then, just as the roof of his tent was beginning to shed a few stray photons into his wide-open eyes, was that he would proceed docilely until he was within audible gunshot range of Jake’s place, and then make a break for it. The jihadists would shoot at him, and probably hit him. But everyone in the valley would hear it.

  And then all hell would break loose.

  He actually dozed for a little while, maybe an hour or so, and woke up to see more light filtering through the tentcloth and to hear the hiss of a backpacking stove being lit up.

  Something told him to get moving. He wriggled out of the sleeping bag, spun around on his butt, got his booted and hobbled feet out the door, and then inchwormed out onto the ground.

  Only two of the nine jihadists were out here: the tall Somalian-Minnesotan named Erasto, and another guy whose name Richard could not seem to keep in his mind. An Egyptian with a dark, callused spot in the middle of his forehead, caused by contact with the ground during prayer. They were heating a pot of water, presumably to cook up some porridge. Richard waddled closer to the stove and held his zip-tied hands out near the pot to catch some of the warmth. Erasto was eating an energy bar, the Egyptian just staring off aimlessly into the distance.

  Richard realized that he had to take a crap, and he had to take it now.

  He stood up. Erasto watched him carefully. He looked over toward the crap-taking place, which was a hundred or so feet away at the base of the cliff they had yesterday descended with rope.

  “You guys have any toilet paper?”

  No response.

  “Dude,” Richard said, “I really gotta go. No fooling.”

  Erasto seemed incredulous-verging-on-disgusted that he was having to deal with such matters. “Jabari!” he said. This seemed to get the attention of the Egyptian. Richard seized on it as an opportunity to finally learn the guy’s name. Jabari. As in jabber. As in jabbing someone with a knife.

  Erasto was asking some kind of question. Jabari bestirred himself and began to sort through a nearby pack, apparently looking for the bumwad supply.

  Richard was hopping from foot to foot, as best he could when hobbled. It was very much open to question whether he was going to make it to a suitable place in time.

  “I’m going to start hopping toward a suitable place to take a crap,” he announced. He was speaking as calmly as possible, since he didn’t want to shout and give non-English speakers such as Jabari the wrong idea. “You can follow me, you can shoot me in the back, whatever. But something’s got to give.” The sentence was punctuated with an impressive fart, which proved a much more effective communication than anything that had been escaping from Richard’s other end. Richard toddled around until his back was turned to Erasto and then began mincing across the campsite, moving away from the river and into the undergrowth that grew profusely between the bank and the base of the cliff. In about half a minute’s hopping, cursing, farting struggle through the shrubs—which grew densely here, watered by the mist drifting from the falls—he came to a clear place, dotted with turds and flecked with used bumwad, at the base of the cliff.

  “Cliff” was too simple a word to denote the geological phenomenon rising above him. It was not a sudden vertical wall so much as a rapid increase in the slope of the ground that became fully vertical, and even developed into a bit of an overhang, twelve or fifteen feet above. And it was not a simple monolith, but a junk pile of boulders, tenacious vegetation, and packed soil that just happened to be really steep. Its top was out of view, but he knew it to be about fifty feet above. Anyway, it was now sheltered enough that he felt he could take a decent crap and so he hopped up and down several times, reversing his direction by degrees, and began to fumble with his belt.

  A roll of toilet paper in a Ziploc bag struck him in the chest, underhanded by Jabari from perhaps twenty feet away, and bounced to the ground at his feet. “Thank you,” Richard said, stripping his trousers down. Jabari turned his back and retreated somewhat. Richard, looking at him through the tops of the shrubs as he squatted to obey nature’s call, saw the Egyptian raising both hands and waving cheerfully to someone back in the camp; apparently someone, probably Abdul-Wahaab, wanted to know what the hell was going on and needed to be reassured that all was well.

  Richard was just in the middle of letting it all go when a dark object dropped out of the sky and thudded to the ground right in front of him. He assumed at first that it was a short bit of a stick that had tumbled out of a tree on the top of the cliff. But on a closer look he observed that it was neatly rectangular.

  It was, he now saw, a pocket multitool—a Leatherman or similar—in its black nylon belt holster.

  “THIS IS ALL about making a case,” Seamus said.

  T
he automatic waffle machine emitted a piercing electronic beep, signaling it wanted to be turned over. Seamus reached out and flipped it. The Four were standing at the complimentary breakfast bar of their hotel in Coeur d’Alene. None of the others had ever seen an automatic self-serve waffle machine before, and so Seamus was giving them an impromptu demo of the best that America had to offer.

  “I’m not sure how that phrase translates into Chinese or Hungarian,” he went on. “What I’m trying to say is this. We are going to see my boss, who happens to live on the other end of the country. We have to drive because I can’t get you guys on a plane without IDs. We happen to be in striking distance of a place where I think Jones might be crossing the border. Last time I logged into T’Rain—which was about half an hour ago—Egdod was still wandering across the desert, followed by a couple of hundred coup counters and curiosity seekers. Which supports my theory.”

  “It does?” Yuxia asked.

  “Okay, never mind the part about Egdod. You either believe it or you don’t. I happen to believe it. Anyway, I called this dude who has a chopper.” Seamus patted the brochure for the dude in question, which was sticking out of his back pocket. “He is willing to take me up there to fly over the area. I’ll only be gone for a couple of hours. We’ll be on the road by midafternoon. Chances are we can still make Missoula tonight. You guys can hang out here, see a movie, whatever. Just don’t get arrested or do anything that would call attention to your complex immigration status.”

  “I want to come with you,” Yuxia said.

  “There’s not enough room in the helicopter.”

  “The brochure says it can carry up to four passengers,” Yuxia said, and pulled another copy of the same brochure out of her jacket pocket.

  During the awkward silence that followed, Seamus happened to look up and see Csongor and Marlon gazing at him expectantly. The waffle seemed to have been forgotten.

  “The big one can take four,” Seamus admitted. “I had my eye on the little one.”

  “What is it exactly you think you’re going to be doing?” Csongor asked.

  “Flying over the area I’m interested in. Taking pictures. Getting a feel for it.”

  “How would our being in the helicopter prevent you from doing that?” Marlon wanted to know.

  Seamus shrugged. “Maybe it wouldn’t.”

  Yuxia asked, “Are you just lying to us?”

  “Why would I lie to you?”

  The waffle maker squealed again.

  “You’re acting weird,” Yuxia said. “Are you expecting to, like, land the chopper and have combat with Jones?”

  “No, I am not going to have combat with Jones. That is not what this is about.”

  “Good,” Yuxia said, “because if that is your plan, you should warn the pilot.”

  “YOUR WAFFLE IS DONE!” shouted a peevish breakfaster from across the room.

  Yuxia elbowed Seamus out of the way, figured out how to open the waffle iron, and deposited its steaming load onto a plate. The squeal stopped.

  Csongor wanted to try it now. He picked up a minicarafe of waffle batter and poured it into the appliance and watched broodingly as it infiltrated the valleys between the bumps.

  “Of course,” Seamus said, “if I believed that there was any chance whatsoever of getting into a firefight with jihadists, it would behoove me to say so to the pilot.”

  “Behoove it would!” Yuxia agreed.

  “So it is totally safe,” Csongor said.

  “As safe as flying around in a chopper can ever be,” Seamus agreed. He did not actually believe a word of this, but he had been cornered.

  “Whereas if we stay here, there’s a chance that we’ll get into trouble,” Csongor pointed out. “You are responsible for us.”

  “Alas, yes.”

  “If the chopper has a breakdown, you get stuck up north, then we are here with no car keys, no hotel room, no ID…”

  “Okay, okay,” Seamus said. “You can come with me and stare at trees from a great height all morning.”

  RICHARD HAD SEEN that tool and its holster before. He was pretty sure it was the one Chet always wore on his belt.

  It was about five feet in front of him. When he was finished emptying his bowels, he rolled forward onto his knees, then to all fours, stretched out, and coaxed it up off the ground with the tips of his fingers. Then he pushed himself back to a squat. He set the multitool down on the ground next to his foot, then picked up the Ziploc bag containing the roll of bumwad and pulled that open.

  He could hear some of the other jihadists emerging from their tents in the campsite, a couple of hundred feet away. If they behaved true to form, they would begin the day by estimating the direction of Mecca, then kneeling on their camping pads and praying.

  When he was finished using the toilet paper, he stuffed the roll back into the Ziploc bag. With one hand he wadded and rattled the bag, making noise that he hoped would cover the crackling sound of the Velcro on the Leatherman’s holster—for he was using his other hand to jerk that open. He pulled out the tool and turned it inside out, making it into a pair of pliers with built-in wire cutters. These would make short work of the zip ties while producing a characteristic sound—a crisp pop that Jabari would certainly recognize, if he heard it. The roar of the American Falls and the rapids downstream of it might cover some of that sound, but still Richard was careful to cut the zip ties with the bare minimum of force required, sort of worrying the cutters through the plastic instead of severing them explosively. He removed only the ties joining his ankles and the ones joining his wrists, leaving in place the ones serving as cuffs.

  He then closed up the multitool and was about to pocket it when he realized that a knife might come in handy. The device had several external blades, files, rasps, and so forth. Richard found the one with the sharpest and most traditionally knifelike blade and opened that up until it snapped into the locked position.

  He set it on the ground, rose to a half squat, pulled up his trousers, and fastened his belt. Remaining in a crouch, he picked up the knife and began to walk along the relatively clear space that ran along the base of the cliff. Until now he had not bothered to look up because he knew that all he would see was an overhang several feet above him. But as he moved along the cliff’s base he came into a zone only a short distance away where the overhang receded, and at that point he looked up, expecting to see Chet’s face gazing down at him.

  Instead he saw a frizz of black hair exploding out from beneath a stocking cap.

  It took him several moments to understand that the person he was staring at was Zula.

  She extended one arm and pointed, drawing his attention to something on the ground behind him: Jabari, who was coming to investigate.

  Richard looked back up and saw her waving frantically, telling him to move farther away along the base of the cliff. She herself had risen from a squat and was beginning to move that way, exhorting him with gestures to follow.

  Until now he had moved slowly, to hide the fact that he had removed his hobbles. But Jabari was closing in on the place where Richard had been taking his dump and would see the cut zip ties soon enough. Richard broke into a run.

  Within a few moments he understood that Jabari was coming after him.

  It was difficult to run, to keep an eye on Jabari, and at the same time to keep casting glances upward toward Zula. But at some point he realized that she was holding both hands out, gesturing at him to stop.

  Which didn’t make sense. Why would he want to stop?

  He looked back and saw that Jabari was much closer than he’d expected. The Egyptian had drawn a semiautomatic pistol but not aimed it yet; he was still using both hands to flail away at undergrowth that was impeding his progress.

  Richard looked up again and saw Zula at the very lip of the cliff with a bundle of sticks in her arms. She heaved it out into space.

  Jabari stepped out of the undergrowth. He was perhaps ten feet from Richard, looking him up and down, amaz
ed that he had gotten out of the zip ties.

  Richard looked up again and saw a rickety construct unfolding in the space above them: two thin lines of parachute cord with sticks lashed between them at regular intervals.

  A rope ladder.

  Jabari had seen it too. He seemed only slightly more dumbfounded than Richard.

  It had been all rolled up and was now falling and unrolling in a tangledy mess. The rung in the middle of the bundle was the longest and heaviest of them all, and its weight was helping to pull the whole roll downward and keep it straight. Richard understood that it was coming right at his head, and so he stepped back against the wall of the cliff, allowing it to fall down in front of him.

  The ladder bounced to a stop, yawing and sashaying. Jabari was looking up toward the top, trying to see who had thrown it. He aimed his pistol nearly straight up in the air.

  Richard couldn’t see what Jabari was aiming at. But he did now notice a curious fact, which was that the bottom rung of the ladder—the heavy thing that had made it all unroll—was a black pump-action shotgun.

  While Jabari was preoccupied with trying to identify threats at the top of the cliff, Richard stepped forward, got the weapon in his hands, flipped off the safety, and pulled the forepiece back slightly so that he could see into its breech. A shell was already chambered.

  Maneuvering the weapon was not made any easier by the rattletrap skein of parachute cord and tree branches from which it dangled, but, at a range of three yards, this wasn’t going to be a precision operation anyhow. He brought the stock up to his shoulder and drew a bead on Jabari.

  The movement finally drew the Egyptian’s notice. He looked down at Richard. At the same time he was beginning to lower the pistol. Not fast enough to make a difference.

  “Sorry,” Richard said, as they were making eye contact. Then he pulled the trigger and blew Jabari’s head off.

  SEAMUS HAD DEVELOPED a set of instincts around timing and schedule that owed a lot to his upbringing in Boston and his postings in teeming Third World megacities such as Manila, which was to say that he always expected it would take hours to get anywhere. Those habits led him comically astray in Coeur d’Alene at six thirty in the morning. They reached the municipal airport in less time than it took the SUV’s windows to defog. The chopper place was just inside the entrance. Two helicopters, a big one and a small one, were parked on the apron outside a portable office. A pickup truck was parked in front of it, aimed at the big chopper, headlights on, providing supplementary illumination for a man in a navy blue nylon pilot’s jacket who was sprawled on his back under the instrument panel, legs dangling out onto the skid, messing with wires. “Never a good sign,” Seamus remarked, and parked in front of the portable office.