Neal Stephenson - Reamde

After another half an hour, it became evident that they had worked their way around the southern end of the island and were now looking up its eastern face. Stretched between the hills at either end, like a taut sail between two spars, was a long beach that was absolutely deserted. Driblets of heavily eroded stone were strewn across it from place to place, but for the most part it was an almost perfectly flat expanse of sand that had been dropped by some longshore current as it tripped over the headland they had just circumnavigated. Above it rose a dune held together by some low green vegetation sparkling with yellow flowers and studded with random pieces of garbage that had apparently been hurled off the edge of the bluff above. For backing up against the top of the slope was a jumbled skyline of low houses that, as they now realized, was simply the other side of the island’s one and only town. They had gone halfway around the island and were now looking at the town’s back, huddling against the incoming weather from the South China Sea.

They pulled the boat up onto the beach, which was littered with garbage of a more seaborne nature, and left it among some half-dissolved boulders where it might be slightly less conspicuous. Csongor sat down nearby in the shade of a rock, shading himself under the parasol, and waited, hoping that Marlon would get back soon and that no one would come to ask him what business he had here. Marlon hiked up into the town, carrying a small amount of cash from Ivanov’s man-purse, and returned half an hour later with two shrink-wrapped bricks of water bottles and some noodles in Styrofoam bowls, already lukewarm but exquisitely satisfying to Csongor. Marlon had already eaten, and so he took a turn at the oars now and rowed the boat back south again while Csongor filled his belly. On their first swing around the southern end of the island, they had noticed a few deep clefts in the rocks: corridors of water no more than a couple of meters wide, where soft layers of rock had been eaten away by the waves. It was late afternoon and these were already deep in shadow. They rowed the boat into one of them and let an incoming wave carry them forward until its keel skidded against the bed of gravel and jetsam that was trying to fill this crevice up. It was cool in here, and they felt invisible and safe. So much so that both men were almost overcome now by a powerful need to sleep. But they took turns keeping each other awake until their stomachs had digested the food and the feeling had passed. Then Marlon clambered up out of the slot and disappeared again for a while.

Csongor was awakened by someone shaking his shoulder. It was Marlon. The sky overhead was deep twilight.

“The boat is moving,” Marlon announced.

Csongor was still coming to terms with the fact that he was where he was; it had not all been just a bad dream.

“Back to Xiamen?”

“No. Toward us!”

The tide had receded, and so both men had to get out of the boat and shove it down the rock chute for a few meters to refloat it. The space was too narrow to deploy the oars, and so they had to push it out against wave action by pawing at the rock walls. But eventually they got out to a place where they could row again, and then Csongor saw the boat in question immediately. The smaller vessel—the one with the taxi crater in its cargo deck—was not in evidence. The fishing boat was motoring along directly in front of them, only a few hundred meters off their bow, headed for the dark, uninhabited side of the island.

Without gas for their motor, it was, of course, out of the question for them to follow this vessel. Csongor assumed that it was about to turn into the open sea and disappear. But instead it cut its engines to a low growling idle and kept station in front of the beach for a while—long enough for them to row halfway to it. Then they were scared out of their minds by a smaller vessel, similar in its general lines to the one that had earlier absorbed the hits from the taxi and the van, which came motoring around the north end of the island and made straight for the fishing boat, eventually tying up alongside it. Marlon and Csongor meanwhile backed water and pulled toward the shelter of the rocks. It was dark enough by this point that there was little chance of their being seen, as long as they maintained a prudent separation.

An hour passed. Muffled thuds and voices told them that people and goods were being moved from the fishing vessel to the launch. Then the launch revved its engine and made off to the south, rapidly disappearing around the end of the island, which suggested that it might be headed back toward Xiamen.

After a little while, the fishing vessel too began to head south, moving at an extremely slow pace, perhaps just as a way to save fuel. But by this time Marlon and Csongor had rowed back out into the open water and placed themselves directly in its path.

THE BOAT CARRYING Zula, Jones, and Jones’s crew retraced the course taken earlier up the strait between Xiamen and Gulangyu. But just as they were clearing the northern end of the battery of passenger ferry terminals, the skipper cut the throttle and began to steer a course toward shore, aiming for a dark patch along the waterfront. As they drew in closer, ambient light from the buildings of downtown made it possible to see a few mean little piers hosting a motley assortment of smaller craft. Nevertheless, they were sturdy enough to support vehicles. A taxi was waiting on one of them. Leaning against it, a dark human form suspended between the bluish pane of a phone screen and the bobbing red star of a cigarette.

In addition to the skipper, Jones, and Zula, there were six men on the boat. Two of them scrambled up from its prow onto the pier and made the boat fast, then padded over to the taxi and greeted the man who had been waiting for them.

Following, as instructed, one pace behind Jones, Zula disembarked. He led her to the taxi. The two of them climbed into the backseat where tinted windows would make them invisible. It was the same taxi they’d been in earlier in the day.

One man climbed, quite cheerfully, into the vehicle’s trunk. An additional two crammed themselves into the backseat along with Zula and Jones, and another got into the front passenger seat. The others stayed with the boat.

They drove to the skyscraper that contained the safe house. The men asked questions, which Jones translated into English for Zula; he then translated her answers back into Arabic. They were all mundane but very practical questions about fire exits, guard stations, the underground parking garage, and so on. The interrogation went on for longer than the drive, and so the driver circled the block a few times as Jones’s men satisfied their curiosity.

Finally the taxi pulled into the same covered entrance where, a very long time ago, Zula and Peter and Csongor and all of the Russians had climbed into the rented van and bantered with Qian Yuxia.

The man in the passenger seat climbed out and entered the lobby, where he engaged in conversation with a security guard seated behind a sweeping marble-clad desk.

After a few minutes, he turned half around, while keeping his eye fixed on the guard, and made a little wave back toward the taxi.

The entrance to the underground garage was just ahead of them, down a ramp that was sealed off by a steel door. This now groaned into movement and lifted out of their way. The taxi pulled into it and navigated to an elevator bank, where the two men in the backseat hopped out and liberated the one in the trunk. As they were doing this, the doors of one of the elevators slid open to reveal the first man standing next to the security guard. The guard had his hands behind his back, and he had a pistol to his head. All of them crowded into the elevator, and the doors closed.