Neal Stephenson - Reamde

A snow-covered pine branch was pressed against the airplane window.

Khalid was still lying on his side on the floor. The amount of blood was beyond her wildest expectations. Jones was standing in it, staring into her face.

“Pavel and Sergei are dead,” he announced.

“From the crash or—?”

“Pavel, I should say, was done in by a largish tree branch that came in through the windscreen and clobbered him in the throat. Sergei fared rather better until one of my colleagues entered the cockpit with a large knife and put him down.”

He watched her carefully as this little scene played out in her mind’s eye.

“You knew it would happen,” he said. “And you understand why. Both of them had been in the Russian Air Force, you know. Dropping napalm on ­people like me. Touching that they made you part of the deal. I must hand it to the Russians. As much as I hate them and would like to see the entire country sterilized, it is true that they know how to treat a lady.”

Zula looked him in the eye. Making the obvious comparison.

“Which brings me to the subject of you,” he admitted with a sigh. He turned slightly, revealing a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand. She flinched, and he immediately raised the weapon to cover her. Zula had been so carefully inculcated in gun range etiquette that to have any weapon pointed her way was far more shocking than it would have been to any person unused to firearms. “It has been a great pleasure knowing you,” Jones said, as if he were seeing her off at the train station. “Really it has. In a perfect world—no—in a better world—I would now say to you something like ‘Zula, will you please accept Islam and become a mujahid and fight alongside us?’ and you would answer ‘Of course, I have seen the light of Islam’ and it would be so. The problem with that scenario being that, not so many hours ago, you made a reasonably sincere-looking commitment to be submissive and cooperative, and then you killed my best man with a DVD.”

She averted her gaze. Did it make any sense to feel guilty?

“ Love Actually, of all things—a film for which I have always secretly harbored a soft spot, but that I will never again be able to enjoy in quite the same way. And that is why, as much as I hate to do it, I must now, for the good of the cause—”

“My uncle has six hundred million dollars,” Zula said.

That rocked him back.

“Really,” he said after a while.

“Really. If you don’t believe me, check it out. And if I’m wrong, you can give me the Khalid treatment.”

“Meaning what you did to him, or what he did to the schoolteacher?”

Zula had no answer.

“Because I’m perfectly capable of doing either, or both, with or without your say-so,” Jones pointed out.

“It’s true,” she insisted.

He considered it for a while. Then he caught her looking. “Oh, I believe you,” he assured her. “I’m just trying to work out whether it matters . You’re suggesting some sort of ransom deal? Of course you are. But it’s not clear to me how we would set up such a transaction, or what good the money would do us, even if we could take delivery of it without every police and special forces unit in the world descending upon us. It would be difficult enough in Waziristan. In Canada?” He scoffed.

“My uncle can get you across the U.S. border,” she tried.

Jones grinned.

She realized that Jones genuinely liked her. Was, at some level, looking for an excuse not to kill her. “No, really?” he asked. “The same uncle?”

“The same one.”

“The black sheep,” he said, piecing it together. “The one you went to visit in British Columbia.”

“We’re in British Columbia,” she reminded him.

“I really must meet this chap,” Jones said, switching to his sarcastic-posh accent.

“I’m sure it can be arranged.”

“Then if you don’t mind,” he said, “my four comrades and I are now going to be quite busy for a while, trying not to die. If we are able to string a ­couple of nonfatal days together, we may then return to your proposal.”

“How can I help?” Zula asked.

“Stop killing ­people,” he suggested.

Curtis . Peter Curtis . It had taken Richard many hours of devious googling to pin down the surname of Zula’s boyfriend. The lad’s insistence on using a different pseudonym on every system that he accessed had made this maddeningly difficult. If Peter and Zula had checked in to the Schloss as regular guests, Richard would have been able to access Peter’s credit card data. As it had happened, though, they had stayed in Richard’s apartment as personal guests.

The decisive break in the case had been achieved by Vicki, she of the Grand Marquis ammo run and the bearskin rug anecdote. She was currently a senior at Creighton. She apparently had a serious case of insomnia or a large personal stash of Adderall. Vicki had access to Zula’s Facebook page and to her Flickr photo-sharing page. She also had some of her own photographs that she’d taken during the re-u. She had put together a portfolio of pictures of Peter and then made use of an Internet site that employed facial recognition technology to search the Internet for pictures of the same, or similar, faces. This had produced a lot of false positives, but several candidates had turned up, including a series of photographs taken at DefCon three years ago of a presentation given by a man identifying himself as 93+37. Richard had no idea how to pronounce this, but he could see that if 93+37 were flipped around in a mirror, the “9” would look a little bit like a “P,” the two central “3”s would look like “E” s, the “+” would still look like a “t,” and the terminal “7” would look a little bit like a lowercase “r,” yielding “Peter.” The sum of 93 and 37 was, of course, 130, and so Richard had gone to work googling various combinations of “130” and “93+37” with “security” and “hacker” and “pen test” and “Seattle” and “snowboard” until he had begun to establish some leads, in the form of message boards and chat rooms, that Peter, or a person weirdly similar to Peter, had been in the habit of using. And in this manner he had begun to establish a sense of what Peter was interested in, who he hung out with, and what he did in his spare time. He was, for example, strangely interested in something called tuck-pointing, which was the process of repairing old brick structures by putting fresh mortar— historically correct mortar, it went without saying—into the spaces between the bricks.

Parsing a series of messages posted on a snowboarding site, Richard guessed the name of the shop in Vancouver where Peter had purchased that high-tech snowboard he was so in love with. Some more searching had uncovered the name of the shop’s proprietor. Richard had reached him at an hour of the morning that was apparently considered to be punitively early in the snowboarding world. Richard had explained matters to the shopkeeper and persuaded him to go back into his records and dig up the name on Peter’s credit card. And this had thrown open the Google floodgates and enabled Richard to get the address of Peter’s building in Georgetown from King County real estate records.

At about nine in the morning, almost exactly twelve hours after breaching Zula’s apartment, he found himself circling the block in question. The yellow handle of his sledgehammer was projecting vertically from his passenger seat, all but announcing his intentions to anyone who looked into the windshield; like a fourteen-year-old boy trying to tame an erect penis, Richard kept pushing it down and it kept snapping back up. The building was not hard to identify; it had recently been tuck-pointed.