Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  Zula fell. But as she did she launched herself as best she could in the general direction of that gun arm. Her right shoulder happened to come down on Jones’s breastbone, forcing the air out of his lungs, and as she was bouncing off it she flung her right hand out and planted it on Jones’s forearm, pinning the gun hand to the surface of the pier.

  Only after she had reinforced that with a knee against his elbow did she dare to look at the side of Jones’s head. She saw red there, but it was the red of burns and abrasions, not of pumping blood. The pistol had gone off right next to the side of his head, but the bullet had not penetrated his skull.

  Csongor didn’t know this; he was still standing there watching Jones and Zula come to rest, unwilling to fire the pistol again lest he accidentally strike Zula, and probably under the impression that it wasn’t necessary. He’d already shot Jones in the head once, and, she sensed, he was a little stunned by his own behavior.

  Loud banging noises began to sound from nearby, and Csongor looked up in alarm. Zula followed his gaze back over her shoulder and saw one of Jones’s comrades, perhaps ten meters away, firing a pistol wildly, holding it in one hand so that it bucked with each recoil, and not bothering to sight over the barrel.

  The taxi driver chose this moment to make a break for it, and the shooter, following some kind of dumb reflex to attack whatever was moving, turned and fired a couple of rounds that knocked the man flat on his stomach.

  Csongor’s eyes went to Zula; she had taken the highly imprudent step of removing her free hand from Jones’s gun arm and was using it to wave him away and down. He backed up a couple of steps, raising the pistol.

  Noting violent movement in the corner of her eye, Zula turned her attention to the other surviving jihadist, who was making a dive for a loose gun that had fallen from the pocket of the man who had earlier run afoul of the taxi.

  “Get out, the cops are coming anyway!” Zula shouted.

  Csongor backed up two steps toward the edge of the pier, then, just as the other jihadist was opening fire, turned around and jumped off. Unlike the taxi, he did make a splash.

  Zula heard a step behind her and then felt something hard pressing into the back of her neck. She removed her knee from Jones’s elbow.

  “Thank you,” Jones said, a bit groggy, but coming around fast. He bent his arm, raising the gun, and then used it to gesture at the prone taxi driver, and then in the direction of where Csongor had jumped. He shouted a command in Arabic. This was acknowledged respectfully by the first gunman to have opened fire, who walked over to the taxi driver and shot him casually in the back of the head. Then he walked over to the edge of the pier and looked down into the water.

  A series of booms sounded from below, and the man quietly toppled over the edge and disappeared.

  “Polar bears and seals,” Jones remarked. He reached up with his cuffed hand, collapsing Zula’s arm, and grabbed her hair, which was frizzed out and eminently grabbable. He wrenched her head around with a violent sweeping movement of the arm and slammed her face into the pier, then rolled over on top of her, pinning her full-length to the deck with his body on top of hers. “I’m not shielding you, by the way,” he explained, “you’re shielding me. You know how polar bears hunt?”

  “From below?”

  “Very good. It’s so nice having an educated person around. Your man Csongor can see up, just barely, through the cracks between the planks. He knew exactly where my man was.”

  The other gunman seemed to have arrived at the same realization and was now moving around nervously, edging toward the end of the pier where the boat was waiting and the water was deeper.

  The sirens were getting very close. Jones propped himself up on his elbows, taking some of his considerable weight off Zula, and gazed curiously down the pier, then, for some reason, checked his watch. Blood dribbled from the wound on the side of his head and spattered the side of her face. She turned away from it and let it drain down the side of her neck. Her pinky was starting to throb. She glanced at it and saw the nail ripped out at the base, hanging on by a few shreds of cuticle, and blood coursing out.

  The pier jerked beneath them. A few moments later, a massive thud sounded from somewhere. It wasn’t especially loud, but one had the impression it had traveled from an event, far away, that had been very loud indeed.

  Zula couldn’t see what the cop cars were doing, but she knew that they were close, no more than a couple of hundred feet away. There were two of them. One, then the other, turned off its siren.

  Then nothing happened for half a minute. Jones just watched, fascinated, and checked his watch again.

  Then the sirens came back on again, and the cars went into motion. Their frequency Dopplered down, and their volume began to diminish.

  The cops were driving away from them at high speed.

  “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” said Jones, switching into a posh accent. He looked down at her, as if suddenly surprised to find her underneath him. “That bang was the sound of a very brave man martyring himself. Somewhere near the conference center. It seems to have drawn the cops’ attention. Which was the whole idea, of course. We have had to do rather a lot of improvising today. Speaking of which, you and I are now going to execute a very nonimprovised long walk off a short pier. If you work with me and come along nicely, I shall permit you to keep your teeth.”

  JEREMY JEONG DOUBLE-BOLTED his door, which Sokolov approved of. One could not be too careful. Then he stripped off his gym togs and entered the bathroom and turned on the shower.

  Sokolov rolled out from under the bed, stripped naked, and stuffed what was left of his clothes into a hotel laundry bag that he found clipped to a hanger. He dropped the CamelBak into the same and then rolled it up into a neat bundle. Having already marked the locations of the clothes he wanted, he was able to find and put on underwear, socks, shirt, and a business suit in less time than it would take Jeremy to shampoo his hair. He stuffed a necktie into his pocket and shoved his feet into a pair of shoes—a bit tight, but tolerable—and then slipped out the door, letting it close softly behind him. He took the elevator down to a mezzanine level, went into a men’s room, entered a stall, sat on a toilet, and put on the necktie, then tied his shoes. From the CamelBak he retrieved the little notebook where he had written the address of the spy woman. He exited the stall and checked his appearance in the mirror. The tie was a little askew, so he fixed it. Then he took the elevator to the lobby and approached the concierge, smiling helplessly.

  “Sorry, English not so good.”

  The concierge, a dazzling woman of about thirty, tried a few other Western languages on him, and they decided to stick with English.

  “There is nice Chinese lady here. Extremely helpful to my company. I wish to say thanks. When I get back to Ukraine, I send her nice present, you understand?”

  The concierge understood.

  “Is to be surprise. Nice surprise.”

  The concierge nodded.

  “Here is address of woman. I try to write down correctly. Not good at writing Chinese as you can see. I think this is it.”

  The woman’s eyes scanned the rudely fashioned characters, passing easily over some of them, snagging on others. Once or twice she allowed her flawless brow to wrinkle just a little. But in the end she nodded and beamed. “This is an address on Gulangyu Island,” she said.

  “Yes. The little island just over there.” Sokolov waved toward the waterfront. “Problem is, when I get back to Ukraine, I cannot write woman’s address in Chinese on FedEx document. Need to have it in English. So my question for you is, can you please translate this address into English words for FedEx?”

  “Of course!” said the concierge, delighted to be part of sending a lovely surprise gift to a nice Chinese lady. “It will be just a moment.”

  And now a minute or two of moderate anxiety as Sokolov watched her write out the words on a hotel notepad, while handling two interruptions. He thought it very likely that Jeremy Jeong
would not even notice that one of his suits was missing (he had three of them) for hours; and even then it would seem so bizarre that he would hesitate to mention it. But there was always the possibility that he was hypervigilant and prone to summoning the law at the slightest pretext, in which case Sokolov really needed to be out of here.

  The concierge gave him another smile and slid the paper across the counter to him. Sokolov accepted it with profuse thanks, walked out the door, climbed into a taxi, and took it to another Western business hotel half a mile up the road. There, he availed himself of a free computer in the lobby, where he typed the spy’s English address into Google Maps.

  This yielded a close-up view of an irregular street pattern, which told him nothing, so he zoomed out until he could see the whole island. He checked the scale and verified his general impression that Gulangyu was no more than a couple of kilometers in breadth. He tried to get a sense of its layout, its cardinal directions: basically, how to get to and from the ferry terminal even if he were lost. Then he turned on the satellite imagery. From this a few things were obvious. First of all, its transportation system was much more finely meshed than was hinted by the street plan, which only depicted perhaps 10 percent of the roads and rights-of-way. Or perhaps those were not roads, but alleys and walkways, private footpaths among the buildings. Second, the buildings were all roofed in tasteful earthtones, contrasting with the garish tile and sheet metal that tended to protect Xiamen’s buildings from the rain. Third, there was a lot of greenery. Fourth, the place names tended to be schools, academies, colleges, and the like; and the presence of large oval running tracks and so on suggested that they were rather nice schools.

  To paraphrase Tolstoy, all rich places were alike, but each poor place was poor in its own way. The slums of Lagos, Belfast, Port-au-Prince, and Los Angeles each would have presented a completely different and bewildering panoply of risks. But just from looking at this map, Sokolov knew that he could go to Gulangyu and walk its streets and make his way in the place just as well as he could in a parky suburb of Toronto or London.

  He did not want to arouse undue attention by printing it out, so he sketched a rudimentary map onto the back of the note he had received from the concierge and spent a while examining the satellite view of the building in question, getting a rough idea as to its layout and the general shape of its grounds. He noted that there was a hotel nearby, standing on considerably higher ground. Its website informed him that it had a terrace where drinks were served in the afternoons.

  He bought a man-purse from a store in the hotel lobby and dropped his CamelBak and other few possessions into it, then carried it down to the waterfront where he took the next ferry to Gulangyu.

  BY NO MEANS had the planning of the taxi-ramming operation developed to an advanced state during the fifteen seconds between its conception in Yuxia’s mind and its execution. She had not, as an example, had time to communicate any part of it to Csongor. Consequently he’d been forced to figure it out by himself and to brace for impact by putting his head against the seat in front of him. Like a lot of good plans, though, this one was extremely simple. The bad men were up to something involving a boat. Yuxia could put the sole tool at her disposal (the van) to use in wrecking same, and thereby prevent them from doing whatever.

  High mountain girl that she was, she didn’t know much about boats. She was now learning that all her intuitions about them were considerably off base. There had been no question in her mind that having a taxi—to say nothing of a taxi followed by a minivan—crash into the top of one of these things would completely destroy it. Now she was dumbfounded to see that the boat was not destroyed. It still floated; it was still a boat.

  Not to trivialize what had happened. Undoubtedly it had been a very bad day for the boat. It might be damaged beyond repair. But it still floated. Gazing out the destroyed windshield while hanging facedown in the safety belt, she could kind of see how it worked: the deck might be wood, but the hull was steel. And because it was floating, when things crashed into it, the water acted like a shock absorber of basically infinite capacity. The comparative frailty of the wooden deck planks actually worked to its advantage, since in snapping and bending they soaked up a lot of damage. And the stacks of empty wooden cargo pallets on top of the deck had collapsed as the taxi had fallen through them, further cushioning the impact.

  Another amazing fact: Qian Yuxia had ended up on the boat! This had not been the plan at all. The idea had been to stop on the pier. But she had not reckoned on the air bag. There must have been a few moments of inattention, following the crash, when she had let her foot press down on the gas.

  “Csongor?” she called. But he was no longer in the vehicle.

  A phone started ringing. Not hers. It was down somewhere near her foot …

  It was in her boot! It had gone flying, bounced around the interior of the vehicle, and ended up dropping into the open top of her blue boot. It was now wedged against her right ankle bone. She tucked her foot closer, reached in, and pulled it out.

  “Wei?”

  “Wei? Yuxia?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Marlon.”

  “Why are you calling your own phone?” For she had recognized this one as his.

  “Never mind. Are you okay?”

  “I’m talking on the phone, aren’t I?”

  “Are you still in the van?”

  “Yes, but the van is—”

  “I know. I’m looking at it. You’d better get out of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because bad shit is going down on that pier—ohmygod.”

  Marlon didn’t have to explain why he was saying this, because Yuxia could now hear gunfire behind her. Gunfire and sirens.

  Bracing her right elbow against the steering wheel to support the weight of her upper body, Yuxia reached out with her left, found the door handle, and jerked back on it. Something went snick inside the door, but it didn’t open. It must have been jammed by one of today’s many violent impacts. Bashing her shoulder into it made no difference. She transferred the phone into her other hand so that she could reach down with her right and undo the seat belt. This caused her to fall forward into the steering wheel and sound the horn. “I’ll call you back,” she shouted, and snapped the phone shut and, for lack of a better place to put it just now, dropped it into her boot again. Then, using various hand- and footholds in the van’s interior, she clambered up into the backseat and across to the open side door.

  Beyond this point, her way forward would take her across an exceedingly dangerous-looking terrain of crumpled taxi and splintered wood. Some combination of being struck in the face by the air bag and the boat’s gentle bobbing made her queasy and unsure of her movements. She crouched in the door frame while trying to recover her balance. She saw, and was seen by, an older man who had come forward from the boat’s pilothouse to inspect the damage. She considered saying something but got the idea, based on the man’s appearance, that he might not speak Mandarin. Drawing slowly on a cigarette, he gave her a most unpleasant look. She felt aggrieved by this, until she remembered that she had just done everything in her power to destroy his boat, which was probably the source of his livelihood.

  It might have developed into an exchange of curses or even of blows had they not been distracted by the appearance of two figures above them on the edge of the pier: the tall black man and Zula. Yuxia controlled a sudden, ridiculous impulse to wave and call hello.

  The black man said, “I am going to count to three and then jump. You may jump, or not.” Yuxia understood that, since the speaker was handcuffed to Zula and was much bigger than her, this was both a mean sort of joke and a threat.

  In the end they jumped together and landed awkwardly on an open and uncratered stretch of deck. Zula cried out in pain and held a bloody fist protectively against her stomach. This finally got Yuxia moving; she clambered down out of the van’s door frame, thinking to go and see what was wrong. The black man looked at her cu
riously, but then turned his attention to the pissed-off skipper and gave him an order in a language Yuxia did not recognize. The skipper trotted back in the direction of the pilothouse.

  Whatever pain had caused Zula to cry out was now subsiding. She looked up and spied Yuxia. A happy and grateful look came onto her face, but only for the briefest moment; then she looked anguished, horrified. “Yuxia! Get off! Jump into the water now!”

  Yuxia hesitated, then realized that her girlfriend was probably giving her some good advice. But during that interval, another man had jumped down onto the deck from the pier. He was carrying a gun. At a word from the tall black man, he leveled the weapon at Yuxia, holding it in both hands and staring at her down the length of its barrel. Once his eye had connected with hers through its iron sights, he gave it a little twitch indicating that she should approach. She still had thoughts of taking Zula’s advice, but then the boat’s engine roared and it surged forward, causing the van to settle. Yuxia had no choice but to scamper away as the van toppled sideways off the crushed taxi. This only brought her closer to the gunman, who showed admirable focus in mostly ignoring the slow-motion vehicular avalanche taking place only a few meters away from him.

  She was only a couple of meters away from Zula at this point, so she just walked over to her. Zula threw her bloody right fist around Yuxia’s shoulder, and Yuxia put both of her arms around Zula’s waist. “Thank you,” Zula said, starting to cry. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work,” Yuxia said.

  The tall black man stuck his handgun into his waistband, then reached into his pocket. “Since the two of you are on such affectionate terms,” he said, pulling out a silver key, “let’s make it official.” He unlocked the manacle from his right wrist, then peeled Yuxia’s left arm away from Zula’s waist and snapped it onto her. The two women were now joined at their left wrists, which, as they immediately discovered, meant that they couldn’t face in the same direction. If one of them walked forward, the other had to walk backward, or else they had to do something awkward with their arms, and move shoulder to shoulder. Their captor understood this very well. Seizing the manacle’s chain with one hand, he towed them aft, around the side of the pilothouse, to an open space on the stern that was shaded under a canvas awning. Rummaging around in a toolbox, he produced a hammer and a large nail. He drove the nail about halfway into a deck plank, then dragged them over, forced them down, pressed the chain to the deck right next to the nail, and pounded on the nail until it had been bent over the chain and its bowed head driven deeply into the wood.