Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“I can dream,” he said.

“So you want me to spend these two weeks looking for Jones?”

“Yes.”

She peeled his arm from her shoulders and ducked out from beneath him, spinning off the pillar to land with both feet in the surf. It came up to her ankles, with waves sloshing over her calves.

“I’m sorry I have this shit on my face,” she said. “Makes me feel stupid.”

“Is fine,” he said, averting his gaze shyly.

“Listen,” she continued, “Jones’s trail is cold. There’s nothing I can do in the next two weeks to find him.”

“Unless I give information.”

“Yes. Which I think you are free to do now.” She glanced over her shoulder, out into the mist that had descended over the strait between Kinmen and Xiamen. They could hear a boat out there, its motor putt-putting away at a low idle, occasionally throttling up as its driver followed the tide in toward them. “Your ride is here,” she pointed out. “You’ve got what you wanted—safe passage out of China. Tell me what you know. I’ll use it while you’re on that freighter. When you get to L.A., call me.”

“Tail number of Jones’s airplane is as follows,” Sokolov said, and then recited a string of letters and numbers. Olivia had him repeat it several times. “He took off from Xiamen at zero seven one three hours local time and headed south.”

“Why do you think he would go south?”

“Maybe headed for Mindanao,” Sokolov said, “where jihadists have camps. But I doubt it. Is probably a diversion. He will get over the ocean, drop to low altitude, disappear from radar, turn off transponder, and then do something else.”

“That’ll make it difficult to find him.”

“Not so difficult. You will see,” Sokolov said. He planted both hands on the pillar, pushed himself off, dropped into water that was now knee-deep, gazed over Olivia’s shoulder, trying to get a fix on the boat’s location from its sound. “Intelligence services will have tapes of radar. Now that you know when he took off, which direction he went, you can follow him on tapes for a little while. Get clues. Figure out where he might have gone. Narrow it down. And then”—he turned to look her right in the eye—” tell me where motherfucker went.”

“If he’s still alive in two weeks,” Olivia said, “I’ll tell you.”

“Good-bye,” he said. “I would give you kiss but do not want to damage professional makeup job.”

“It’s already damaged,” she pointed out.

“Okay then.” He wrapped his arms around her, gave her a long and quite thorough kiss. Then he spun her around and set her back down carefully on the top of the pillar, out of the inrushing surf. Turning his back on her immediately, he pulled the hood of the slicker up over his head, then began wading toward the sound of the boat that was idling somewhere out there in the fog. “Walk now or swim later,” he warned her, as he was disappearing.

In spite of that good advice, Olivia waited, wanting to hear the sound of the boat’s motor throttling up, taking him out of there.

What she heard instead was three short bursts of submachinegun fire. Then a series of sporadic pops. Followed by the sound of the boat screaming away at top speed.

AFTER A COUPLE of hours, Marlon came up to the bridge with tea service and a couple of military ration packets. As they wolfed these down, Csongor showed Marlon the chart of the Pescadores and explained the course he had been following, which he hoped would bring them into the center of the island group in another few hours.

Csongor then went down into a cabin, climbed into a bed, and arranged himself carefully, since he knew that he would fall asleep instantly and not move until awakened.

The thing that awakened him was a sudden heaving and heeling of the vessel. Csongor was unable to tell the time, but he sensed that he had been asleep for some time; his bladder was quite full and he actually felt rested. But daylight was still coming in through the porthole. He got up and staggered into the head and relieved himself, then pushed the cabin door open against the forces of the wind and (because the boat was listing) gravity. Something hit him in the face that was halfway between rain and mist. He could not see more than a few hundred meters in any direction.

The engine was still running. That was good.

He went up to the bridge where Marlon was planted exactly where Csongor had last seen him. According to the digital clock on the bulkhead, it was a little past three in the afternoon, which meant that Marlon had been running the ship alone for seven hours. He turned his face away from the screen of the GPS to look at Csongor, who was unnerved by the look on his face: haggard, wrecked by exhaustion and stress. “This is the worst video game of all time,” he said.

“Kind of a boring one,” Csongor allowed.

“Boring,” Marlon agreed, “and it doesn’t work. The user interface sucks ass.”

“What kinds of problems are you having?”

“It doesn’t shoot where you aim.”

It doesn’t shoot where you aim . What could that mean? Csongor drew closer and looked at the display on the GPS, showing the track they’d been following during the time he’d been asleep. He was expecting to see a straight line aimed directly at the Pescadores. Instead, he saw a track that gradually curved south, then jogged northward, then curved south again. Marlon, it seemed, had been trying to steer a straight line for their destination, but something had been pushing the boat inexorably southward. Once he had noticed this, he had tried to correct for it by aiming the boat back the other way. But the net result was that they were actually a little bit south of the Pescadores’ latitude at this point, perhaps ten kilometers away from the nearest of the islands, driving north-northeast in an effort to work their way back to it.

The mist had developed into rain, which was spattering the forward and port windows. “We are fighting the wind,” Csongor said.

“Now, yes.” Marlon said. “But that is new. Something else was bending us south.”

“There must be a current in the strait,” Csongor said.

“Current?”

“Like a river, a flow of water to the south.”

“Fuck!” Marlon said. “We would have been there by now, if I had known.”

“I thought it was like a car,” Csongor said. “It goes where you point it.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” Marlon said. “It goes where it wants.”

The vibration that they’d been feeling in their feet the entire time they’d been aboard devolved into a series of coughs and chugs, then reestablished itself for a few moments, and then ceased.

“Out of gas,” Csongor said.

“Game over,” Marlon said.

“No,” Csongor said. “Game continues. We just made it to the next level.”

THE HANDLE OF the sledgehammer was bright yellow plastic, a detail preposterous to Richard, who had paced up and down the length of the relevant aisle at Home Depot trying to find something less painfully embarrassing until the department manager had insisted that he make his choice and leave—it was closing time, nine o’clock.

Standing on the doorstep of Zula’s apartment at nine fifteen, gripping the ridiculous implement in brand-new, ergonomically designed work gloves (an impulse purchase, yanked from an aisleend display as the manager had harried him toward the checkout counters), he realized why he didn’t like it: the thing looked like a T’Rain sledgehammer. The realization struck him with such force that it queered his first blow, which caromed off Zula’s doorjamb and nearly took out his knee. Then he got a grip, not only on the yellow plastic handle, but on himself, and swung again, getting his hips into it and striking true. The door practically exploded. Supposing Zula turned up all right, he would have a talk with her about the virtues of physical security and devote an afternoon to beefing up her door.