Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Again the strange fixation on Vegas. So Jones was finally getting down to business. Based on the conversation she had overheard in Xiamen, she had a pretty good idea of his plan: go into a big entertainment complex in Sin City and kill as many people as possible, similar to what those Pakistani terrorists had done in the luxury hotels and railway station of Mumbai. The tricky bit being to get himself, his comrades-in-arms, and his stash of weapons across the U.S. border. Not that you couldn’t buy weapons in the States, but she had witnessed enough loadings and unloadings of their gear, by this point, to have a rough idea of their inventory, and she thought that they had with them certain items like fully automatic weapons and hand grenades that would be difficult to buy even in the Sweet Land of Liberty.

Jones went through a phase of rebooting the laptop several times consecutively, which made her think that he must have downloaded and installed some new software. An obvious guess was that he was rigging the machine in such a way that he could communicate secretly with his fellow jihadists.

The inherently soporific nature of software installation had its way with her, and she closed her eyes and then opened them to find that it was daytime.

Jones had fallen asleep right where he had been sitting, and Abdul-Wahaab was now hogging the laptop. Ershut was up cooking something steamy on the stove; her nose told her it was rice. Presently, some of this was served up to her in a plastic bowl decorated with pastel flowers. She wondered if these guys understood that they were a couple of hundred feet away from a grocery store that was probably a hundred times the size of the largest one they had ever seen in their lives.

As she was eating her rice, a car pulled up and parked next to them, causing the men to twitch curtains and peer out. They looked apprehensive and made reaching-for-weapons gestures, then their expressions became delighted. Mahir began shouting about how great Allah was. This woke up Jones, who took stock of the situation and told everyone to shut up. He pushed himself up out of the big captain’s chair, tottered down the steps on stiff legs, and unlocked and opened the door. Then he backed up so that three men could enter the RV. They had beards and huge grins. Jones shushed them and insisted that the door be hove to and relocked.

Then the place erupted with hearty greetings and laughter and a great deal more in the way of kind remarks about Allah. The only thing that could dampen these men’s spirits, it seemed, was the presence of Zula, which they found shocking and maybe even offensive when they noticed it.

The new arrivals looked Indian or Pakistani and, like Jones, seemed to use Arabic as a second or third language, which meant that Jones ended up speaking English to them. English they spoke very well and with minimal accents. Zula was able to infer that they had received an email from Jones last night and had come here—wherever “here” was—from Vancouver as soon as they had been able. Sycophants were the same everywhere, apparently; their most verbal member, who kept maneuvering to be closest to Jones, kept apologizing for not having arrived even sooner. This man—Sharjeel was apparently his name—looked, dressed, and acted like a Westernized grad student or high-tech employee. Watching him, Zula could only think of all the nonterrorist South Asians, happily assimilated into North American society, for whom an asshole like Sharjeel was their worst nightmare.

Having Sharjeel and his friends in the picture made her feel terrible, and it took a bit of thinking to work out why. Until now it had seemed that it would be only a matter of time before Jones and his crew would make a mistake and get noticed or caught. Jones had lived in the States, so he knew how things worked in North America. He was quite good at talking like an American black guy and was capable of being charming; evidently he had charmed this RV’s owners for a few minutes before pulling a gun on them. But he couldn’t stay awake 24/7, and he couldn’t do everything. His comrades, by contrast, were now deeply implanted in a culture where they did not speak the language and had no clue as to what was normal behavior. They got along okay in the wilderness, but in a place like this they could not even be allowed out of the RV.

This made Sharjeel and his buddies extremely useful to Jones and therefore distinctly unwelcome as far as Zula was concerned.

They made themselves useful immediately. One of them sat down in the huge rotating Captain Kirk driver’s chair at the front. For Jones proposed to venture into the Walmart with Sharjeel and the other of the new arrivals and wanted an English-speaking person to act as their front man. Which was to say that if some gregarious fellow RVer or Walmart security dick came around knocking on the driver’s-side door wanting to chat them up, it would be best if the person responding did not still have the dust of north Waziristan in the folds of his turban.

Jones scrounged a Strawberry Shortcake memo pad from the glove compartment and began to draw up a shopping list. Sometimes he wrote silently, other times he thought out loud. “Cooking oil… mosquito repellent… matches… cordless drill…”

“Tampons,” Zula called out.

“What brand?” Jones asked without skipping a beat. “Lite, Regular, Super, Ultra?”

“You’ve actually had a girlfriend?”

“I’ll get you a multipack and take your snarky answer to mean that you don’t much care,” Jones said. “Anything else, as long as I’m in the pink-and-pastel aisle?”

“Baby wipes, unscented preferably. Underwear. A pair of pants that hasn’t been peed in.”

“Sweat pants okay?”

“Whatever. Some socks, please.”

“Ah, you’re using the magic word all of a sudden.”

“Anything you see that’s made out of fleece.”

“Anything in Walmart that is made out of fleece,” Jones repeated fastidiously, copying it down. “That should be several truckloads’ worth.” Then he looked up at her. “Will there be anything else, or can I get back to planning atrocities?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Sharjeel monitored this uneasily.

After a few more minutes, Jones and Sharjeel and one of the newcomers, who was apparently named Aziz, all tromped down the steps out the side door and went scuffing away across the parking lot.

“Your family is very nice,” said a voice in English, after a while.

Zula had sunk into a sort of semicomatose state, a listless, timeless despondency in which she had been spending increasing amounts of time lately. Like a computer being awakened from its power-saving state, she was a bit slow to spin up her hard drive and unblank her screen and begin responding to inputs.

She gazed up the length of the RV to see the third of the newcomers, the one ensconced in the big Captain Kirk chair. He had seized control of the laptop and was apparently surfing. Zula guessed that he might have googled her or something.

It took all the will and self-control she had been developing during the last week and a half not to lose control of herself. The only thing that prevented it was a kind of instinctive awareness that this was probably just what the guy wanted; he was trying to say the most provocative thing he could think of. Circling around and poking at her, trying to learn what she was made of. Your family is very nice . She couldn’t believe he’d said that. What an asshole.

But she had opened the door to this by her improvisation, a few days ago, just after the jet crash, when she had revealed her full name to Jones. Of course, the first thing he would have done upon getting access to the Internet would be to learn everything about her, her uncle, her larger family. And he had probably left a trail of bookmarks on the laptop for this guy to follow. Maybe even set up a Zula wiki where jihadists all over the world were posting every piece of data they could find.