Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“THERE’S VODKA IN the bar.” The spy Olivia said that in Russian. Sokolov guessed now, from her accent and from her freewheeling approach to dispensation of alcoholic beverages, that she was British.

“Thank you, but I am a Russian of somewhat unusual habits and will not be taking this opportunity to get drunk.”

She was a little slow to take that sentence in, but she got the gist of it. Her Russian was, perhaps, slightly better than his English. They would have to switch back and forth and watch each other’s faces.

“I am going to take every opportunity I can find,” she responded, and went over to the bar—really just a cabinet with a few bottles in it—and took out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

“You should not become heavily intoxicated,” he said, “since further action may be required soon.”

The look she gave him made it evident that she was at some pains to avoid laughing in his face.

Where had he gone wrong?

By assuming that she would trust him.

It was a logical assumption. If the spy Olivia were more experienced, she would know right away that trusting him was the correct move. She could trust him because he was completely fucked and he needed her—a Chinese-looking person who could pass for a local—to help him.

Why then no trust?

Because he had crashed through her office window at a particularly difficult moment and aimed an assault rifle at her and then broken into her apartment, probably.

“How did you get in here?” she asked.

“Plan D,” he said in English.

“And what is Plan D?”

“The fourth plan that I attempted. It took me all afternoon.”

He could have explained it, but it was idiotic to be discussing things in the past when they needed to discuss the future.

Still she was giving him the evil eye over the rim of her whiskey glass.

Pulling these items, one by one, from the pockets of Jeremy Jeong’s suit, he placed her ID card, her phone, her keys, and a few other items on the kitchen counter. Each one produced a little exclamation of surprise and delight from Olivia. “To prove I am not fucking asshole,” he explained.

She went for the phone first and checked the “Recent Calls” menu to see whether Sokolov had been so stupid as to use it. The answer, as he could have told her, was no.

“This is huge,” she said, slapping the ID card off the counter and pocketing it.

“Name on card is not Olivia?”

“Name on card is Meng Anlan.”

“Ah.”

“So you can’t read any Chinese at all.”

“Correct.”

“How did you even get here? Never mind. Plan D.” Still jumping back and forth between Russian and English. Sokolov could tell that she’d learned her Russian in an academic setting, was more comfortable with abstractions and formal sentence structure, had no idea how to express herself colloquially.

“You were conducting surveillance on the jihadists?” he asked. “Or the hackers who lived in the flat below them?”

“The jihadists.”

“The name of the leader? The Negro?”

“Abdallah Jones.”

Sokolov nodded. He had heard of Jones, seen his photograph in newspaper articles.

“You are employed by MI6?”

She made a visible effort to maintain a poker face, then seemed to realize its futility and nodded.

“MI6 has emergency extraction procedure?”

“Resources,” Olivia corrected him, “that they could call on. To improvise such a procedure.”

That sounded like a procedure to him. “You activate this procedure how?”

“If I had no other choice, I would make a certain phone call,” she said, “but that’s to be avoided if I can use Internet.”

“You have computer here?”

“Not anymore,” she said. “And even if I did, I wouldn’t do it from here. I’d go to a wangba .”

“Have you done this?”

She shook her head. “No government ID, no wangba access,” she said. “But now that I have this…?” She wiggled the ID and smiled.

“We go to wangba ?”

It looked like she was about to say yes. Then her face hardened. “Who’s ‘we,’ white man?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She closed her eyes, shook her head. “It’s an old American joke.”

“I enjoy jokes. Tell me joke.”

“You know the Lone Ranger?”

“Cowboy in mask? Has Indian friend?”

“Yes. So the Lone Ranger and Tonto get ambushed by some Comanches and they get chased up into a box canyon and they end up hiding behind some rocks shooting at the Indians, and the Lone Ranger looks at his friend and says, ‘Well, Tonto, it looks like we’re surrounded.’ To which Tonto replies—”

“Who is ‘we,’ white man?”

“Yes.”

“Is funny joke,” Sokolov said.

“That’s a strange thing for you to say since I don’t see the slightest trace of amusement on your face.”

“Is Russian sense of humor. What you call dry.”

“Okay.”

“Joke has meaning.”

“Yes, Mr. Sokolov, it has meaning.”

“Why should you help poor fucked Russian? That is the meaning.”

“More importantly,” Olivia said, “why should MI6 help you? Because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what I want or am willing to do. It matters what MI6 is willing to do. And while they might be willing to pull out all the stops to get my arse out of China, I can’t necessarily persuade them to do the same in your case.”

“Tell them I have useful information.”

“Do you?”

Sokolov shrugged. “Probably not. But that is beside the point.”

“If I tell them you have useful information, and it turns out that you don’t, I look like an idiot.”

“Perhaps more important things are to be worried about now than whether you look like idiot when safe in London eating fish and drinking beer.”

She spent a while thinking about it.

“I know British,” he said. “Looking like idiot is part of being British. Happens all the time. They understand. Have procedures.”

“Can you get access to Internet later?” she asked him.

“Hmm, difficult,” Sokolov said. “Why?”

“Right now I need to take the ferry back into town and go to a wangba and send out my little distress call,” she said. “Later I’ll probably get instructions on where to go, what to do. I’ll need to convey that information to you somehow.”

Sokolov balked.

“Were you thinking you were going to stay here? Because you are not going to stay here,” Olivia told him. “For obvious reasons, Meng Anlan can’t have a Russian commando mercenary sleeping on her fucking sofa. You need to find a place to spend the night, and you need to figure out how you are going to access the Internet. Because if you can do that, then I can send you a message in a chat room or something.”

“Mmm,” Sokolov remarked. “There is solution.”

“Yes?”

“I have place to stay. With Internet. I will go there. Wait for instruction.”

A pause. “Really?” she asked.

“Dangerous,” he admitted. “Perhaps fucking stupid. But maybe will be fine.”

“Does it involve tying up or killing any of my neighbors?”

“Not unless you have neighbor you don’t like.”

She didn’t know how to take that.

“Humor,” he explained. Then he nodded out the window. The sun was getting low over Fujian, and orange light was gleaming in the windows of the skyscrapers across the water. “Is over there,” he explained. “No problem for you.”

“Then let’s go,” she said. “Obviously we have to leave this building separately. I can be a lookout for you. Tell you when the stairwell is clear, when it’s safe for you to move.”

“Very good.”

“We will walk to the ferry terminal separately and take separate boats,” she said. “After that, I can promise nothing.”