Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  To hedge their bets against the possibility that Jones had flown all the way to North America, they got in touch with their opposite numbers in Canada and the United States and suggested that it might be prudent to keep an eye peeled for the said business jet. The most likely supposition being that it might have landed on some remote airstrip or stretch of deserted road and been abandoned. Having (to borrow a term from the Yanks) covered that base, they then focused all their energies on the Mindanao scenario.

  These proceedings extended over some forty-eight hours, during which time Olivia was at work almost whenever she was awake. The very meaning of “awake” was rendered debatable by the most extreme case of jet lag she’d ever experienced, possibly commingled with posttraumatic and/or postconcussion symptoms. At least half of the time she spent in that room pretending to take part in the meeting, she was devoting essentially all her energies and attention to the project of not simply dropping into a deep slumber right then and there. She found herself shifting position irritably every ten seconds or so, just to ward off sleep, and she heard the others discussing momentous and complicated topics as though eavesdropping through a very long speaking-tube on a dreadnought.

  When they took pity on her and sent her “home,” she went to a safe house in London: a perfectly anonymous Georgian town house that had been taken over and bent to this purpose. During the very limited amount of time that she was not working or sleeping, she found herself with nothing to do. She could not resume being Olivia Halifax-Lin just yet, could not begin facebooking or whatever it was people did now. She found a hairdresser who catered to Asians and got that business taken care of, ending up with something pageboyish, straight out of a porn film, that she never would have taken a risk on had circumstances not forced her hand. She rubbed her sore, immunized muscles. Warned to expect foreign travel, she bought clothes: enough lightweight, quick-drying synthetic garments to fill a carry-on bag and a blazer that she could throw on when she wanted to make a symbolic nod in the direction of greater formality. A new passport showed up, which made her wonder just now MI6 did these things: Did they have a passport factory of their very own? Or just a special room at the Central British Passport Factory where they could nip in and bang out a few as the occasion demanded?

  There was another session with the injectionist, perhaps a bit ahead of the normal schedule, and she was given antimalaria pills and a stern talking to about why mosquito repellent was such a good thing. Uncle Meng picked her up in what appeared to be his personal car and took her out to Heathrow, though they stopped halfway there for a cup of coffee and a scone.

  “You are bound for Manila,” he said, “by way of Dubai.”

  “I presume Manila is not my final destination?”

  “It is as far as commercial airlines are concerned,” he said. “When you are there, you’ll have one night in a hotel to pull yourself together and then you’ll find yourself in the company of one Seamus Costello, Captain, U.S. Army, retired.”

  “So he is, what, just a gentleman of leisure now?”

  Uncle Meng did not wish to dignify her witticism with a direct response.

  “Mostly,” Olivia said, “I would just like to know whether he’s working for some other branch of the government or a private security contractor.”

  “Oh no, we wouldn’t set you up with a mercenary,” said Uncle Meng, a bit pained.

  “Right then, so he was a snake eater. They decided he had talents beyond his station in life. They kicked him upstairs.”

  “The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex,” was all that Uncle Meng would say. “It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.”

  “He must have other duties.”

  “Oh yes. He spends most of his time on Mindanao, looking after the Abu Sayyaf crowd.”

  Here, as Olivia knew perfectly well, Uncle Meng was referring to Islamic insurgents in the southern Philippines who had hosted and succored Abdallah Jones for several months. U.S. special operations forces, operating hand in hand with their Filipino counterparts, had launched a raid against a jungle encampment where Jones had been positively sighted. They had found the place abandoned but extensively booby-trapped. Two Americans and four Filipinos had lost their lives. Weeks later, Jones had been traced to Manila, where he had set up a bomb factory in an apartment building and created explosive devices that had been used in a precisely timed series of car bombings. From there his trail had consisted of nothing but hints and rumors until Olivia had found him in Xiamen.

  “Costello has been after Jones for a long time,” Olivia guessed. “He takes pride in his work, or used to. Jones got the better of him more than once. Killed members of his team in sneaky and cowardly ways. Blew up civilians on his watch. Then left the country—went where Costello couldn’t get to him. Leaving Costello stuck in a backwater.”

  “He is just your type,” Uncle Meng said gently. “Please do try not to fuck him.”

  “How come it’s okay for James Bond?”

  THE FLIGHT TO Dubai was all rich Arabs and City types. The Dubai-to-Manila leg was almost entirely Filipina domestic servants headed for home. The racial and cultural crossrip was far too heavy for Olivia to get thinking about, so she watched movies and played Tetris, finally falling asleep thirty minutes before they began their descent into Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It was late afternoon. Four days had now passed since she and Sokolov had parted ways at Kinmen. A car picked her up and took her to a business hotel in Makati where she ate room service steak, cleaned up, took her malaria pills, and went to bed.

  She slept through three alarms and wake-up calls and made it down to the lobby fifteen minutes late. Seamus Costello was in the restaurant eating bacon and eggs, over easy. The reddish-yellow color of the runny yolks perfectly matched that of his beard, but even so he self-consciously wiped his chin before standing up to shake Olivia’s hand. He looked like a slightly over-the-hill backpacker, the kind of guy you’d strike up a conversation with on a rattletrap bus in Bhutan or Tierra del Fuego, borrow a joint from, ask for advice on where and where not to stay the night. He was lean, like a strip of bacon that had spent too long in the pan, and a bit north of six feet tall. He had green eyes that seemed just a little too wide open—though, she had to admit, any nonblack eyes looked that way after you’d been living in China for a while—and he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover. But he’d been to school—anyone in his job would probably have a master’s degree or better—and he could dress up his speech when he remembered to make the effort.

  Which he didn’t, now. “Ya came this close,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger an eighth of an inch apart.

  Delivered in the wrong tone, it would have been a rebuke or even mockery. But he had a trace of a smile on his face when he said it. The tone was philosophical.

  He was congratulating her.

  She shrugged. “Not close enough, I’m afraid.”

  “Still. What was that like? Sittin’ there, day after day, listenin’ to yer man and his crew…”

  “I don’t speak Arabic, unfortunately.”

  “I’d not have been able to contain myself,” he said ruefully, staring out the window and getting a sort of mischievous-boy look on his face as he imagined (she guessed) going across that Xiamen street and walking up to Apartment 505 and gutting Abdallah Jones with a knife. “Ah, that fucking bastard.” He turned his eyes back to her. “So. You think he’s on Mindanao.”

  “There is a cove not far from Zamboanga, sheltered enough that it would be a good place to ditch, deep enough tha
t a plane would sink rapidly and become invisible to—”

  “I’ve swum in it,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  Olivia was looking a little startled. “I read the report,” he explained. “I know what your working theory is. They ditched, just where you said, and went ashore. That whole area is lousy with Abu Sayyaf, it would have been easy for them to hook up with their brothers.” He chose to turn the Boston accent all the way up to eleven when pronouncing the word “brothers.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think I’m going to take you down there and we are going to check it out.”

  “But what do you really think?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Tell you what, let’s go down there, I’ll show you around, and in another couple of days, once we’ve gotten to know each other, established a trust relationship, then we can each tell the other what we really think.” Then he pitched forward a bit. “What!? What!?” for a look of amusement had crept onto her face.

  “I thought you were here,” she said, “because you were no good at politics.”

  He put his palms together, fingertips nestled in his beard, like a Southie boy going to his First Communion. “I like to think I am here,” he said, “because I’m good at acquiring new skills. Which comes in handy in Zamboanga. Want some breakfast?”

  “Are we going to miss our plane?”

  “They’ll wait for us.”

  THE REASON FOR his lack of urgency became plain when they got out the door and into Manila traffic, for which simple words like “bad” or “horrendous” were completely inadequate as descriptors. Two hours into the journey, they had traveled less than a mile from the hotel.

  “Up for a stroll?” Seamus asked her.

  “I would be up for just about anything that wasn’t this,” Olivia said. So he paid the taxi driver and they set out on foot, Olivia feeling inordinately proud of herself for having packed light and, moreover, done so in a bag that could be converted into a backpack. Seamus chivalrously offered to carry it for her but she shrugged him off, and they began walking between lanes of stationary traffic for a while until he steered them off to the edge of the road. The heat was fantastic, whooshing out from beneath the stopped vehicles and baking her bare legs. It abated somewhat as they worked their way out of the traffic jam and onto smaller streets. Seamus purchased two flimsy umbrellas from a street vendor, handed one to Olivia, and snapped the other open to keep the sun off his head. She followed his lead in that. Navigating by the sun, he maneuvered them into a residential neighborhood that started out seeming reasonably affluent and became somewhat less so as they got farther from Makati. But she never felt in any danger, out of a possibly fatuous belief that no harm could come to her when she was walking next to someone like him. They were noticed, and watched carefully, by hundreds of people, and followed by dozens. “Miss? Miss?” some of them called.

  “It’s freaking them out that you’re carrying your own bag,” Seamus said, and so she finally surrendered it to him, leaving herself with nothing but a belt pack that was now serving in lieu of purse and the parasol. She’d assumed they were trying to get to the airport, which was definitely off to their left, or south; but Seamus kept taking them west, cutting across the occasional cemetery or basketball court, until they struck water: a very unappealing stagnant creek, half choked with plastic debris and smelling of sewage. Olivia couldn’t tell which way it was flowing, but Seamus made an educated guess and led her along its bank, occasionally holding out an arm to prevent her from toppling into it, until they got to a place where it widened into a little basin where actual boats were to be seen: long, slender double-outrigger canoes equipped with outboard motors. Seamus had no difficulty hailing one of these and inducing its owner to take them in the direction of Sangley Point. The hull was so narrow that Olivia could bridge it with her forearm. They sat amidships under an awning of sun-blasted canvas, Olivia in front, leaning back against her pack, and Seamus behind.

  She knew that word “sangley,” at least; it was Chinese, from the dialect that was spoken around Xiamen, and it quite literally meant “business.”

  They maneuvered down progressively wider channels for a quarter of an hour or so, the densely packed neighborhoods giving way to giant industrial zones and expanses of flat empty territory, then abruptly turned into a blunt channel that disgorged them directly into Manila Bay. For the first time Olivia was able to look about and get a clue as to where they were. They were headed for a claw of land reaching out into the bay a couple of miles ahead of them. A running conversation between Seamus and the pilot, in a mixture of Tagalog and English, led to a series of increases in the throttle, to the point where they were bounding and bouncing over chop, sending occasional gouts of spray into Olivia’s face. “He’s worried you don’t like it. Wants to go slow for you,” Seamus explained, and Olivia twisted around until she could make eye contact with the boatman, grinned, and gave him the thumbs-up.

  The spray and the cool sea air were a fine antidote for the killing heat of the traffic jam, and so they arrived at a dock on Sangley Point salty and in need of showers but somewhat refreshed. It was a military installation: an airbase, Seamus had explained, formerly of the United States, now of the Philippine Air Force. A pilot in uniform met them at the dock—Seamus had called or texted ahead, apparently—and walked them to a waiting Humvee that took them directly onto the tarmac of the base’s single, very long runway. They pulled up next to a simple two-engine passenger plane with military markings and were airborne a few minutes later. They took off to the west, headed straight for the narrow exit of the gigantic bay, and soon banked left and began the long flight south to Zamboanga: something like five hundred miles, which they expected to cover in a couple of hours. Seamus spent most of it sleeping. Olivia looked out the windows and tried to see the archipelago’s countless islands, inlets, and channels through the eyes of an Abdallah Jones.

  “What do you think?” Seamus asked her, just as she was finally about to nod off. She jolted awake, looked across at him—they were seated on opposite sides of a small table that occupied most of the plane’s cabin—and tried to snap out of the jet-lag torpor that had crept up on her. She wondered how long he’d been watching her. His decision to leap out of the taxi in Manila and set off on foot had been made to look like the spontaneous act of a free spirit, but she had little doubt that it had been calculated as a way of putting her to the test. Not by any stretch of the imagination a difficult or strenuous test, but an unscripted moment in which she might let her guard down and reveal aspects of her personality otherwise difficult to see. By sleeping for most of the flight, Seamus seemed to be telling her that she had passed the test, whatever it was. Now they were starting to get down to work.

  “A million places to hide, once you get down on the surface,” Olivia said. “But flying in on a business jet in the middle of the day, you’d be absurdly conspicuous.”

  With the tiniest suggestion of a nod, Seamus broke eye contact and looked out the window. “There it is,” he said. “Welcome to the GWOJ.”

  “GWOJ?”

  “Global War on Jones.”

  THE ZAMBOANGA OUTPOST of the GWOJ turned out to be one corner of an air force base that had been constructed on flat coastal land, otherwise occupied by rice paddies, outside of a middling regional city. The base as a whole was moderately well fenced and defended. The corner occupied by Seamus and his team was a fortress unto itself, surrounded by high chain-link and razor wire bolstered by stacked steel shipping containers. Approaching vehicles had to run a slalom course through containers that Seamus assured her had been filled with dirt so that they could not simply be bashed out of the way by an onrushing truck bomb. Once inside that perimeter, though, they found themselves in a tiny simulacrum of America: a compound of modular dwellings surmounted by howling air conditioners fed by cables from a huge diesel generator situated downwind. Several of the modules were barracks for Seamus and members of his cre
w, one was guest quarters for people like Olivia, and there was a double-wide with kitchen and dining facilities at one end and a conference room at the other.

  Here as everywhere else in the world, everyone hung out in the kitchen. So after Olivia had dropped her stuff in the guest quarters and taken a shower, she went into the double-wide to find Seamus and two other members of his crew hanging out there, lounging on sofas or sitting with erect postures at the dining table, focused on their laptops, sipping American soft drinks. The whole scene in fact looked quintessentially American to her, which, as she would’ve been the first person to admit, meant nothing, since she had spent practically no time in the United States. Seamus’s crew was multiracial to a fault and looked somewhat uneasy in their cargo shorts and T-shirts, as though they’d all much rather be in uniform. They all had lots of stuff strapped to them: holsters with semiautomatic pistols, knives, radios. Even their eyeglasses were strapped to their heads. Earlier, they’d all been perfunctorily introduced to Olivia; none of them now gave her more than a glance and a nod. They were intensely focused on what they were doing: some sort of pitched battle.

  “Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!”

  “I see ’em and am pulling. Need backup though.”

  “Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back. Someone finish the bastard off. A few Kingly Strokes would take care of it, Shame.”

  Seamus said, “Okay, I’ll need to rearm, cover me for second … got it … Fuck!”

  All of the men leaned back from their screens in unison and let out roars of anguished laughter so loud that Olivia’s ears crackled. “Fuck, man!” called a compact African American. “He toasted you.”