Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  Marlon and Yuxia were watching Seamus carefully now. They might, or might not, find the idea of a trip to the United States appealing on its own merits. But he’d gotten their attention by mentioning Jones and Zula, and then scared the hell out of them by elucidating their dilemma regarding paperwork.

  “Now, I believe that I might be able to arrange something.”

  Rapt silence.

  “I’m going to assume that neither one of you has a Chinese passport.”

  Marlon shook his head.

  “We only get them when we are going to travel outside of China,” Yuxia said, “and I have never done so.”

  “Actually you have,” Seamus pointed out, throwing his hands out to direct her attention to the fact that she was in Manila. She smiled. “Anyway, not having a passport will certainly throw a monkey wrench into the process of getting a visa to enter the United States.” He was trying to employ dry understatement here and wasn’t entirely certain that they were fully appreciative of his sense of humor. “But I know some people here in the embassy who can make it all right in no time.”

  “ARE YOU OUT of your fucking mind?” the CIA station chief was asking him a few minutes later.

  Marlon and Yuxia and Csongor were cooling their heels in a café in a relatively nonsecure part of the embassy. Seamus and the station chief, an American of Filipino ancestry named Ferdinand (“Call me Freddie”), were conversing in a part of the building that was very secure indeed. They had known each other for a while.

  “Freddie, you know that this room is so secret, so well shielded, that I could strangle you here and no one would ever know.”

  “No one except for the two marines with submachine guns right outside the door.”

  “Drinking buddies of mine.”

  “Seriously, Seamus, what are you asking me to do? Produce forged Chinese passports?”

  “Real American ones would be a hell of a lot easier.”

  Freddie actually considered this. “I suppose we could claim that they were American citizens, visiting Manila, whose passports were stolen by pickpockets. That farce would be uncovered the moment the State Department actually bothered to check the records.”

  “Freddie. Work with me here. The global war on terror leads us into many strange situations. We do stuff all the time that’s not technically legal. Hell, my very presence in this country is a violation of Philippine sovereignty. As is yours.”

  “So you want to play the GWOT card?”

  “Yes. Come on, Freddie. That’s the whole point of this conversation.”

  Freddie gave him an I’m waiting look. In retrospect, Seamus should have seen this as the trap that it was.

  “I know where Jones is,” Seamus said. “I can narrow it down to maybe ten square miles. Or kilometers, for our Canadian friends.”

  “Would this be related to the work you have been doing with”—and here Freddie picked up a folder marked as containing secret information—“that British girl? Olivia Halifax-Lin?”

  “That brave, brilliant British girl who single-handedly tracked Jones down in Xiamen and collected priceless surveillance data on him and his cell for months? Yes, I believe we are talking about the same Olivia.”

  “Maybe she should have taken a little more time off,” Freddie said. “Perhaps that sort of work didn’t suit her, lifestyle-wise.”

  “Why are you saying that?”

  “In the last day or so, she seems to have gone totally off the rails. She skipped out of a large and expensive FBI counterterror investigation. Just walked out of the room without explaining anything. Hightailed it up to Vancouver, leaving quite the electronic trail. Including communications with you. Crashed in a hotel room there and was bothering some poor Mountie about this same theory.”

  “By ‘this same theory’ you mean the excellent theory that she and I have been developing.”

  “Ah, so you have been working with her.”

  “Go on.”

  “Claimed she was headed to some place in B.C. called Prince George. Bought a ticket. Checked in for the flight. Never boarded it. Instead bought a ticket with cash, on short notice, and went back down to Seattle, still not bothering to explain to anyone what the hell she was doing. Did not give the FBI the courtesy of a call. Then, around the time that her plane was landing at Sea-Tac, there was a shootout in a house full of Russians, low-level criminal types, less than a mile away. An FBI surveillance operation was blown. No one knows where the hell she is. One of the guys who was under surveillance has disappeared. Russian security consultant, ex–special forces, apparently related to the whole Xiamen thing.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been talking to the FBI quite a bit.”

  Freddie made no comment, just rolled his eyes up from the secret documents and stared at Seamus over his glasses. “Yes?”

  “Anything from the intel community?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because they can get information that the FBI can’t. And sometimes they’re not very nice about sharing.”

  “This Olivia person,” said Freddie, “sent you a text message this morning, didn’t she?”

  Seamus laughed. “I knew it.” He sat up, leaning forward across the table. “So the FBI, the cops, they’re clueless. They have no idea where she might have gone. But the intel community was tracking her phone. They have a rough idea.”

  “Very rough,” said Freddie. “And getting rougher with every passing minute. But the presumption is that she wants to get across the border into Canada where she’ll have a better shot at clearing up her amazingly tattered visa status and getting home in one piece.”

  “Which is what the intel community would like to happen,” Seamus said, “and so no one is going to drop a dime on her.”

  “As long as she keeps her wits about her, I would guess she’ll be back in London in a couple of weeks, looking forward to, oh, about four decades of working behind a desk.”

  “Okay,” Seamus said. “That’s all quite amusing. But what I really want to talk about is Jones.”

  “Yes. You know where Jones is. You figured it out, apparently, while spending all night playing a video game in a provincial Internet café patronized by Australian sex tourists.”

  “That is pretty much the size of it.”

  “And the break that enabled you to put all this together came in the form of a telephone call from Olivia Halifax-Lin, made during her previous sudden disappearance from the FBI’s radar screens.”

  “There’s no PowerPoint presentation, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Seamus said.

  “If there were, would it have Olivia’s name on it?”

  “Only if that would be advantageous.”

  “It was a rhetorical question. Everyone knows that the idea came from her.”

  Seamus said, “I’m guessing that is viewed as a bad thing?”

  “Unless you have some hard evidence as to Jones’s whereabouts, it’s going to be treated as a highly speculative theory that was talked about, but never exactly written down, by an agent whose reputation could hardly sink any lower.”

  “So it is about the PowerPoint.”

  Freddie ignored this. “Seamus, you are a living example of the Peter Principle.”

  Seamus looked down, mock shocked, toward his own genitalia.

  “Not that one,” Freddie said. “Never mind. The point is that you have risen as high as you can get in the hierarchy without having to behave like a responsible manager.”

  Seamus was half out of his chair, but Freddie calmed him by holding up one hand. “I will be the first to attest that you are as responsible as any man who ever lived when it comes to those in your command. If I had to go back to being a snake eater, I would want to be your subordinate. But above the level where you are now, you have to be able to justify your actions and your expenditures by supplying documentation, and you have to engage in all sorts of political maneuvers to make sure that the right people see your PowerPoint presentations at the right time
s. And you are a million miles away from being able to do this in the case of whatever theory you and Olivia have been cooking up. And consequently no one above you in the hierarchy is going to stick his or her neck out by supporting your theory.”

  “Even if I were that kind of guy, Freddie, there isn’t time. We need to act now.”

  “Give me something,” Freddie said.

  “I got nothing to give, Freddie!”

  “What you’re asking for right now is a nightmare from my point of view. Handing out fake passports to two random Chinese kids. What are you trying to achieve, Seamus? You want to make these two into American citizens? Put them in the Witness Protection Program?”

  “Look,” Seamus said, “I just have to fucking get there. So I can check this out.”

  “I’m not stopping you.”

  “But these kids are with me, and I can’t just abandon them here.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I could get in a taxi and go to the airport now. If they had an ounce of common sense, they would apply for asylum. Now, that would be a nightmare.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m just saying, they’re here, Freddie, and I ain’t sending them back to China. Either they go with me, now, or they camp out on your front yard and request asylum. They are very Internet-savvy.”

  Freddie was frozen solid. Beginning to perspire a bit.

  “If I wanted to threaten you,” Seamus continued, “I’d hit you where you live.”

  “Where do I live?”

  “Abdallah Jones killed a bunch of your guys.”

  “They were your guys, Seamus.”

  “I’m your subordinate. You gave the orders. Let’s call them our guys. Now I know where Jones is. I can get him. But I have this waif problem.”

  “Wraith?”

  “Waif. Waif. I’m being followed around by Chinese waifs. And one not-so-waiflike Hungarian. Prevents me from getting to Jones. Your personal fault.”

  “You’re making this too hard,” Freddie said, after thinking about it for a while. “You just need some way to get them on a plane in Manila, and off the plane Stateside, without them being snatched by Immigration.”

  “That would do, for now,” Seamus admitted. “We could work on the details later.”

  “It’s too bad we can’t get them on a military flight,” Freddie said.

  “How would that help us?”

  “It would depart from an airbase here and land at a base in the States. Not that they don’t check papers. But we could finesse it much more easily.”

  “Finesse it?”

  “For me to get Immigration at a place like Sea-Tac to look the other way while you smuggled a couple of undocumented Chinese into the country, I would have to get a hundred fucking people involved, from several agencies,” Freddie said. “People would drag their feet, raise objections, screw it up.”

  “I thought this was what you were good at. PowerPoint presentations. Consensus building.”

  “Only when you give me something to work with. And lots of time. But if we could turn it into a military thing, that would be much easier.”

  “What does it cost to charter a business jet?”

  “How should I know? Do I look like the kind of person who charters business jets?”

  “No, but Marlon does.”

  “Who’s Marlon?”

  Day 20

  Once the main party had gone south, the camp was much reduced in number of tents (only two left, not counting Zula’s little one-person shelter) but hugely expanded in its solid waste footprint. Much of what they had brought up here had been carried straight from grocery stores or Walmarts, and during the morning’s last-minute packing frenzy, they had pulled everything out of its sacks and packaging material, which they had simply dropped on the ground. Now the wind was blowing it around, much of it tumbling away until it snagged in shrubs or tree branches. Zula wondered if it was stupid for her to be offended by this desecration of the natural environment, given the larger goal of the jihadists’ mission and the number of people they’d already killed.

  Ershut and Jahandar spent much of the afternoon napping. Zula couldn’t tell whether this was in consequence of having awakened early or in the expectation of staying on watch tonight.

  While they slumbered, Zula went to work cutting up some mutton to make kebabs. Sayed spent his time reading and praying, and Zakir, supine on a camping mat in a patch of sunlight, either stared at Zula from under the brim of his hat or snored. When he was snoring, Zula took trimmings of fat, bones, and even whole pieces of red meat, and put them in paper grocery bags and tossed them down the slope in the direction of the tents. In any proper grad-student-run campsite this would have led to an inquisition on the scale of the Salem witch trials, but here, given the jihadists’ insensitivity to litter, it would go unnoticed save by wild animals. Last night had been bear-free, but, given that this wasn’t a frequently used campsite, the animals would have no reason to visit the place until they came to associate it with the availability of food.

  All the while she was doing this, she was maintaining, in her head, a debate as to whether it was a good idea. If they didn’t execute her before sundown, she stood a good chance of getting away from these men, even without the assistance of the local Ursus arctos horribilis community. It wasn’t as if she were going to sit up all night long, padlock key in her hot little hand, waiting for the arrival of bears before making her move. If they did show up, they’d be as likely to wake up her captors as to help cover her escape; and if they were of a mind to kill and eat humans, they’d be at least as interested in her as in them. But she did it anyway, because it seemed a fine way to show her contempt for these men.

  Afternoon seemed to stretch out forever. The nappers awoke when the sun was only about a hand’s breadth above the ridge of the Selkirks and began hanging around her little kitchen area in the timeless manner of hungry persons who expected others to prepare their food. Zula displayed the spitted, ready-to-cook kebabs and let it be understood that they would taste better cooked over coals than on the blue flames of a camp stove. Soon Ershut and Sayed were tromping around in the nearby woods gathering firewood.

  Zula grew accustomed to hearing their heavy, crashing movements in the trees and so didn’t make much of it at first when her ears picked up the faint crunch of dried pine needles being trod upon, the rustle of shrubbery being pushed out of the way by something making its way through the forest. When it did finally break the surface of her awareness, she had the immediate feeling that she had actually been hearing it for quite some time. In the back of her head she’d been thinking, Why is Ershut creeping along so slowly? He’ll never gather much firewood that way. But then she saw Ershut stomping into the campsite from the opposite direction, carrying a double armload of dead branches. So it must be Sayed? But Sayed emerged from the trees only a few paces behind Ershut.

  Zakir, then, the creepy one, was sneaking up on her through the woods. But why bother? She was chained to a tree. She’d already been caught.

  Was it Jahandar, getting into position in a new sniper’s perch? No, she’d seen him going off into the woods toward the Blue Fork, carrying an empty water bag.

  It must be Zakir then.

  Two minutes later, as Zula was putting new fuel onto the nearly burned-out remains of the campfire, she heard a loud zipping noise, and looked up to see Zakir dragging himself out of his tent, where he had apparently gone to change into some warmer clothes. Getting ready for temperatures to drop. For the sun was just a red bubble on the Selkirks now.

  So who, or what, had been creeping around in the woods up there?

  She became very excited for a moment, imagining that it was a rescuer. A sniper from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, sent to infiltrate the camp in advance of a major, helicopter-borne rescue operation. On that illusion, she made a point of not staring into the woods, not showing any curiosity about what might be back there.

  But after a lit
tle while, as the fire blazed high and then began to die down, forming beds of coals in the interstices among the tangled logs, she shook her head in a kind of self-embarrassment that she’d ever been so naive as to imagine such a thing. No one was coming to rescue her. She had to do it herself. And it was probably better that way. Running through woods in the dark, she had a chance. Chained to a tree in the middle of a pitched automatic weapons duel, she wouldn’t last long. Worse, she wouldn’t have the power to change her situation.

  None of which answered the question.

  She permitted herself to look out into the woods now. None of the men noticed; none of them cared.

  But she’d waited too long. The sun was behind the mountains. The fire almost cast more light, now, than the sky. But she was patient, keeping her back to the sunset and the fire and waiting for her eyes to adjust as she stared into the almost perfect blackness of the woods.

  She saw nothing. There was nothing to see.

  And yet something was bothering her. After all she’d been through at the hands of humans, it seemed inconceivable that anything of the natural world could hold any terrors for Zula. But there was something out there, and it did terrify her. Not in the intellectual way of I hope Jones didn’t order them to kill me but at a much deeper level.

  She could feel a tingle at the back of her scalp. This was something that had happened only a few times in her life. Her hair was attempting to stand up on end, like that of a dog who senses it’s staring into something big enough to kill it and wants to look bigger.