Neal Stephenson - Reamde

The taxi then pulled back out of the skyscraper’s basement and onto the waterfront boulevard. A few minutes later they were back at the pier. Khalid and one of the other jihadists now joined them in the taxi, and Jones told the driver to head for the Hyatt by the airport. Once the taxi had pulled out onto the main road, he pulled out his phone, looked at Zula, and said, “Here is where you are going to be magnificently cooperative.”

“WHAT ARE YOU asking her?” Csongor demanded.

“Which side of the boat she is on,” Marlon said, taking the phone away from his head for a moment. Then he put it back and listened. “She is on that side.” He waved his hand out toward the open sea.

Csongor looked at the fishing vessel. It was perhaps a hundred meters away from them. If he stopped rowing, and it kept going on a straight course, it would pass just in front of them, leaving them on its starboard side—which was to say, the side facing toward the island. Marlon was telling him that Yuxia was in a cabin on the port side.

To say that they were trying to intercept the larger vessel would have been to imply, somehow, that they had a plan. Which, in turn, would have been to imply that Marlon and Csongor had been communicating with each other as to what they ought to do. Neither of these was true. Earlier, they had made use of the cover afforded by darkness, and the fact that their out-of-gas boat was incapable of making noise, to move around and keep an eye on the terrorists’ activities. This had nearly brought them to grief when the faster launch that had met the fishing boat had suddenly come roaring toward them. Since then Csongor had been rowing with all his might. And when he had rehydrated with a few bottles of water and filled his belly with noodles, his might was considerable, and he was able to jerk the little boat across the flat water like a water skater. But why was he doing it? What was the plan? No idea.

“What are we—” Csongor began, but Marlon cut him off. He was hanging up the phone. “I told her gao de tamen ji quan bu ning, ” he said.

“What does that mean?”

Marlon grinned, stalling Csongor while he worked through the translation. “Make it so that not even their dogs and chickens are at peace.”

“Meaning?”

“Raise hell, more or less.”

“Okay. Then what?” Csongor stopped rowing and looked at Marlon.

Marlon nodded significantly toward the oncoming vessel. “The wheels,” he said.

Csongor turned and looked. Marlon had used the wrong English word, but it was obvious what he was referring to. Every discarded tire in the entire industrialized world seemed to have ended up here on the Chinese coast, where they were used by the locals in the same way that their landlubber cousins used bamboo: as the Universal Substance out of which all other solid objects could be made. Sometimes they had to be hugely reprocessed in order to serve their intended function. In other cases, they still looked like tires. Every boat—nay, every floating object—in this universe was protected on all sides by tires slung from its gunwales on ropes, lined up in rows like shields on a Viking ship. This one was no exception. They dangled just above the waterline. It would be easy to reach up from the rowboat, grab one, and use it to climb aboard the larger vessel. The wheels .

“This is not a video game,” Csongor said. “It is real.”

“Then get real, asshole!” Marlon suggested.

It was neither polite nor well phrased, but Csongor took the meaning.

“You want to take that boat,” Csongor said. Just to make sure that he and Marlon understood each other.

“You know of any other way to get out of China?”

“Where are we going to go?”

“Wherever!”

“How are we going to—”

“Listen!” Marlon said. “She’s doing it.”

Csongor turned back toward the fishing vessel, which was now startlingly close to them, and heard banging and screaming and the voices of angry men. A steel latch clanked, a door was hauled open, and the cacophony, which had been muffled, radiated out over the water: a woman’s voice, hardly recognizable as Yuxia’s, shouting and, he guessed, cursing, and the sound of glass smashing. Men telling her to knock it off.

“Remember this?” Marlon asked.

Csongor looked at Marlon, becoming a little more visible to him now because of the light diffusing from the fishing boat’s windows, and saw him holding one of the objects that they had earlier marked as stun grenades.

“Take two,” Csongor said. He reached into his pocket, took out the second stun grenade, and handed it to Marlon. He looped the strap of the purse over his shoulder, just so he wouldn’t lose track of it in whatever was to follow, and pulled out the pistol. Jones had identified it, earlier, as a Makarov. He drew back the slide just to verify that there was a round in the chamber.

Then he slipped it into his waistband, grabbed the oars, and began to pull like hell. He had glimpsed an opportunity, however unlikely, to get himself out of China.

SOKOLOV AWOKE TO a perfectly silent office. And yet lodged in his short-term memory was the sound of an elevator door opening.

He willed himself not to go back to sleep and soon heard faint voices.

Feeling in the dark, he verified that his pistol and flashlight were where he had left them, next to his head. He drew one knee, then the other up to his chest so that he could tie his shoes. Whoever they were, the visitors were moving cautiously, reconnoitering, discussing. It was not a break-the-door-down-and-barge-in type of visit.

They would have been stopped by the glass doors. Sokolov had sealed them with the cable lock. They would be trying to find a way around those doors, debating whether to just break the glass. The noise would be stupendous, but it was the middle of the night, and the building was mostly vacant.

Not knowing how many there were or what their intentions might be, Sokolov decided to retreat and lurk. He stood up and got one foot into the loop of Ethernet cable he had tied earlier, then put his weight on it and straightened the leg, thrusting his head and shoulders up through the vacancy in the ceiling.

He let the gun, the clip, and the flashlight rest for the time being on top of an adjoining tile. Then he reached up and got a grip on the heavy steel. Once that was done, it was easy to raise his knees up and go completely upside down, hanging by his hands while endeavoring to thrust his lower legs through the triangular openings in the truss. That accomplished, he was able to hang by his knees, head down, hands free.

He pulled up the cable loop after him and let it rest off to one side atop the ceiling grid.

From the direction of the entrance came a couple of exploratory thumps, followed by a tremendous crash and a long decrescendo of high-pitched clattering as glass fragments sprayed all over the floor of the lobby. He listened for a few moments, just to get some sense of how many there were and how they were moving. Then he picked up the loose ceiling tile from where he had laid it and set it into its position.

As he was doing so, something caught his eye on the table below: his phone, and a scrap of paper. They’d been in the back pocket of his suit trousers. Normally he wore pants with zip pockets and kept them zipped. That way, he never had to worry about things falling out of them when he was something other than upright and vertical, and this in turn left him free to make use of all of his hard-earned diving and rolling skills.

But Jeremy Jeong’s business suit had turned that training into bad habits.

There was nothing to be done about it; he could hear the intruders making their way into the office. He carefully fitted the missing tile back into its place. Then he picked up his flashlight and put it into his mouth, leaving it turned off for the time being. He picked up the Makarov and chambered a round with a slow careful movement of the slide, muffling the sound as best he could with his hand. The spare clip was a bit of a problem, since he was still hanging upside down and none of his pockets could be relied upon. He left it where it was for now, but practiced laying his hand on it in the dark until he could touch it on the first try.