Neal Stephenson - Reamde

To be a man who had been helpless his entire life? And to have this power? To be able to access this feeling that she was just tasting now? It must be the most potent drug in the world.

When she climbed into the backseat of the taxi, she could see from the look on Jones’s face that he was high on that drug too. “I badly want to turn this thing around and go back into town,” he remarked. He was fiddling with the screen of his phone.

“Why?”

“We found Sokolov.”

Suddenly she wasn’t high on the drug anymore. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious in her face.

“Or at least, we know where he went. Place on Gulangyu.”

So what’s going to happen now? she wanted to ask. But she didn’t want to get in trouble for putting her nose where it didn’t belong.

He was looking at her as if reading her mind. He wanted to tell her. Wanted her to ask.

She refused to give him that satisfaction.

“They’re going there now,” he said, “and they’re going to take care of him.”

IF HIS EXPERIENCE as the creator of REAMDE had taught Marlon anything at all, it was that something always got massively screwed up with any plan, and you never knew what that something was until it happened. In this case, it was that Csongor rowed too hard. Marlon had first encountered the Hungarian in extremely chaotic circumstances, and for most of their acquaintance he had been too distracted to really pay close attention to the man’s physical presence. At 190 centimeters, Marlon considered himself unusually tall. But in looking at Csongor, he’d had the unaccustomed experience of seeing one who was taller. And he was tempted to guess that Csongor was twice his weight, but he knew that couldn’t be possible. He carried some weight around his midsection, but none of it was what you’d call flab; his head was big and wide, but it did not support any redundant chins. The power with which he pulled on the oars gave Marlon the nervous feeling that the boat was being jerked out from under him, and that was just in normal rowing. During the last minute or so before their collision with the fishing boat, Csongor had finally gotten it into his head that he was rowing for his life, and possibly for Zula’s, and had hauled on the oars with so much power that Marlon had instinctively crouched lower in the boat and put a steadying hand on each gunwale.

Csongor, of course, could not see where he was going and so in the final moments Marlon, not trusting his ability to communicate in English, began pointing this way and that, telling him which way to steer. He had neglected to allow for the fishing boat’s bow wave, which caused their prow to pitch up sharply at the very end; then one of the tires slung along its sides bashed into them and flipped the boat over in an instant. Marlon, who saw it coming, jumped straight up off his bench even as the little boat was spinning out from under him and managed to snag the rim of a tire with one hand. The other hand followed it an instant later, which was a good thing because otherwise he’d have lost his grip. The larger vessel was moving faster than he’d estimated, and it positively yanked him forward. This drew all of his attention for a moment, but then he looked back along the side and saw the capsized rowboat rapidly falling away to aft, and no sign of Csongor.

Then a hand broke the water and groped up and pawed uselessly at the upturned hull. Another hand joined it. The boat jerked straight down, as if grabbed from beneath by a shark. Csongor was trying to find a way to get his weight on top of it, but it was rapidly falling away to aft. Finally Csongor’s torso rose partway out of the water and a hand shot up and grabbed the rim of the last tire. Instantly Csongor was buried in a bow wave of his own making, the same thing that had hit Marlon a few moments earlier: he was being pulled through the sea by the tow rope of his arm, and his head was breaking the waves. But with some more struggling and wrestling, he was able to get the second arm out of the water and grip one of the ropes by which the tire was suspended, and then do a pull-up that got his head out of the water so that he could breathe.

Marlon looked away and tended to his own problems for a moment. His upper body was out of the water, but his legs were being dragged along, creating powerful suction that threatened to rip him off the tire. Inching, like a rock climber, to a slightly better grip, he was able to lift a leg out and drape it over the adjoining tire, and this both reduced the suction and gave him leverage to clamber up and get better handholds. He worked his way to a place where he was standing with one foot on the tire’s rim and reaching up over his head with both hands to grip the boat’s gunwale.

He risked a look back and saw that Csongor had achieved similar results. The little rowboat was nowhere to be seen. Csongor was holding on with one hand, using the other to pat himself down, verifying that the gun was still where he had put it, the shoulder bag still slung across his body.

Then he began climbing, and Marlon followed suit. In a few moments, he was able to vault over the gunwale and land in a crouch on the main deck. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. From the sounds of it, Yuxia was still doing an excellent job of raising hell on the other side.

Csongor, squatting back at the stern, looked across to the opposite side, then turned to Marlon and shrugged, indicating that he saw nothing. He rose to his feet, took the pistol out of his pocket, checked it, and then began to walk around the back of the superstructure.

Marlon took one of the stun grenades out of his pocket and got his finger into its ring. Then he walked across the front of the superstructure, sticking close to its front bulkhead in case anyone might be looking down from the bridge, and peeked around the corner. Perhaps three meters aft, light was shining from an open hatch. Two men, a large one and a smaller one, were standing on the catwalk outside, looking in. The larger of the two got a snarling look on his face and strode over the high threshold into the cabin. As soon as he was out of the way, Marlon was able to look all the way aft to the stern of the boat and see Csongor’s bulky form there.

Marlon began to walk aft. Csongor began to walk forward. The smaller man who was still out on the gangway noticed Marlon first, and his whole body went into a kind of spasm. There was no helping it; he couldn’t prevent himself from being astonished at the sight of a stranger on his boat. Marlon caught his eye and pointed suggestively aft. The man turned to look in the direction indicated and saw Csongor raising a pistol and aiming at his face. While this poor fellow was thus distracted, Marlon pulled the pin out of the stun grenade—this was surprisingly difficult—and then reached around and chucked it into the cabin. He noticed, then, that the door opened outward, and so he gave it a shove and clanged it shut and leaned against it just in time to feel a mighty boom through his butt and feel a blast of hot air and shattered glass smack him in the back of the head.

SOKOLOV HAD A key card that would enable him to summon an elevator, but he reckoned that the jihadists might be down in the lobby, in view of the indicator panel. They might notice one of the lifts going into motion and stopping at 43. If so, they could simply kill him when the door opened. So he took the stairs instead, just as Zula had done the other day. He took them fast, bounding over banisters and caroming off walls. But he was still moving a hell of a lot slower than those guys in the elevator.

Fearing that the fire exit to the outside might set off an alarm, he took a chance on the door to the lobby, pushing it open slightly first to check for an ambush. No one was there.