Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Sokolov was now confronted, therefore, with a partially dismantled machine, whose hard drive—a steel brick about the size of a sandwich—had been unplugged but not yet physically removed from the case. Reconnecting it was idiotically simple, since the plugs only fitted into the sockets one way. He rebooted the machine and it came up as normal. The Internet seemed to work, but he did not do any surfing, since almost anything he looked at might tip off the PSB. Olivia had written out the URL of a popular Chinese chat site that featured occasional English language conversations. He typed it into the browser’s address bar and went there, then navigated to the room she had specified. It seemed very quiet, and he didn’t see any of the coded phrases that she had told him to look for. This was hardly surprising since she probably had not even made it to the wangba yet.

What he really needed to do was sleep, so that he could be sharp tomorrow. He hated to waste the hours of darkness, during which it was easier for him to move about without drawing too much attention. But there was no reason to move about, nothing to be doing. He strolled up and down the length of the office suite a couple of times, looking out at the galaxy of colored lights spread below, the neon letters he didn’t know how to read.

He knew already that in spite of his immense tiredness, he would not sleep well.

His command had been wiped out today. All of the men under him were dead. They had wives, mothers, girlfriends back in Russia who were waiting to hear from them and who did not know, yet, that they were gone forever. He had pushed this out of his mind until now, since thinking of it was useless. He had been leading men for a long time, since he had been promoted to the rank of corporal and assigned responsibility for a squad. Given the nature of the places where he had been sent, casualties had been frequent and severe. He had written letters home to those grieving mothers and wives. He had used the same old tired verbiage about how these men had fallen while fighting for the motherland: a difficult claim to make during the invasion of Afghanistan, only slightly easier in Chechnya.

If he had pen and paper here, and the addresses of the bereaved, what comforting lies would he write? These men had been mercenaries working for a shady organization whose sole motive was profit.

As was he.

Even if it were possible to instill a sense of personal loyalty to an organized crime cartel—which, come to think of it, must not be all that difficult, since men fought and died for such groups all the time—the fact was that this had not been a bona fide operation but a colossal mistake, undertaken by a man who had defrauded that group and gone half mad.

Even that could be explained. It would take an ingenious bit of explaining, but it did add up to a coherent state of affairs, as far as it went. What he’d never be able to put into a letter was the fact that they had accidentally stumbled into a bomb factory run by a cell of jihadists.

No wonder the Chinese authorities were calling it a gas explosion. It wasn’t that they were trying to cover anything up. It just made for a simpler explanation.

If he were going to tell the families anything, it would have to be that they had died in a gas explosion, or a car accident, or some other such meaningless and random eventuality of war. Like the American soldiers who were getting electrocuted while taking showers in their shoddily constructed military bases. Who wrote those letters?

As he paced back and forth gazing out over the streaming and pulsing lights of the city, he saw that there was really only one way to make sense of the entire situation, if by “make sense” was meant “bring it to a conclusion such that proper letters could be written to the mothers of the men who had died this morning.” And that was to hunt down Abdallah Jones and kill him.

He squatted down on his haunches, stretching the sore and battered muscles of his legs in a way that hurt but felt good, and crossed his elbows atop his knees and rested his chin on his forearms and stared out at China.

Everything was clear to him, except how he was going to get out of this country. That all depended on Olivia. Helpless as a baby in her bare feet, her aloneness. And yet infinitely more powerful, more capable than Sokolov in this context.

There had been an odd moment there, toward the conclusion of their interview, when she had insisted that he was not welcome to stay in her apartment. A strange thing for her to bring up. As if Sokolov would have expected any such consideration. And yet she had felt it important to make this explicit. Why? Because she was attracted to him, as he was to her, and that made it imperative that scruples be observed, rules followed.

He tucked his chin, let himself fall back on his buttocks, rolled out flat, whipped his arms behind him and slapped the carpeted floor to break his fall, as in SAMBO. It would not be the worst place he’d ever slept. Even better if he got the Makarov out of his waistband. So he did that, placing it up next to his head, and he pulled the spare clip out of the breast pocket of the suit jacket and a little flashlight from the back pocket of the trousers and placed them all right next to each other. He unlaced Jeremy Jeong’s shoes. But rather than slip them off, he decided to learn from the lesson of Olivia and keep them on his feet loosely, just in case there were any more gas leaks.

Sleep did not come, though, since he could not stop thinking about how vulnerable he would be if someone came into the safe house.

He slung his CamelBak over his shoulders and went into the conference room. The big table was wired for Internet, a trunk line of gray wires zip-tied together beneath it. With some quick knife work he peeled loose a run of cable a few meters long and draped it over his neck. He planted a chair in the middle of the table, stood on it, reached up, and pushed a ceiling tile out of the way.

Above him, as he remembered, was a zigzagging steel truss. It was out of his reach, but in a couple of tries he was able to toss the end of the cable through it and then feed more cable up so that the loose end bent down of its own weight and came within his reach. He jerked it down and tied the ends together to form a loop that dangled through the ceiling hole to about a meter above the table’s surface.

Then he placed the chair back on the floor, lay down in the middle of the conference table, and slept soundly.

“THE POINT TO be conveyed by this little demonstration should be obvious to anyone with a bit of imagination. And you are obviously that kind of girl. So I, personally, consider it a waste of time. But my colleagues here are earthy chaps. They like concreteness. They don’t trust their ability to communicate across cultural and language barriers.”

Jones was preceding Zula down a steel-runged ladder into the ship’s hold.

“Or,” he added brightly, “perhaps they are just sadists.”

At this, Zula whipped her head around and got a brief whirling impression of a large, poorly illuminated space with several men in it, and Yuxia seated on a chair in the middle. Her instincts, of course, told her to get out of there. But Jones’s lieutenant—she had figured out that his name was Khalid—was above her on the stairs, practically treading on her hands.

The ship’s engines had started up some minutes ago, anchor had been weighed, and they had pulled out of the crowded cove and begun swinging around to the back side of the island, which seemed to be completely unpopulated. It was exposed to weather from the sea and it lacked a natural harbor, so it was probably accounted worthless. In this space belowdecks, the engines made a maddening racket. But as Zula cleared the bottom rung and touched down on the deckplates, the throttle was eased back to a low idle, just enough to make a bit of headway and keep the vessel under control.