Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Notes were jotted and verbal representations made to the effect that she should see certain specialized doctors and therapists at some vague time in the future. A follow-up was scheduled.

Then, off to MI6 for a surprisingly civil brunch and preliminary round of drinking with persons of gratifyingly high rank. Then the windowless conference room she had been anticipating and dreading. Her primary debriefer was none other than “Meng Binrong,” the Englishman who had been telephonically playing the role of her uncle during her time in Xiamen. He was blond-going-white, blue-eyed, with the classic florid English drinker’s complexion, energetic, mistakable for a man in his fifties or even late forties. But certain giveaways—the fact that he found it necessary to mow his eyebrows, the sheer number of burst capillaries—suggested he was older than that. Not eager to volunteer details about himself, but it was obvious from the sorts of things he knew—and didn’t know—and from the way he spoke Cantonese and Mandarin (the former with perfect fluency, the latter a bit choppily), that he had spent his young life in Hong Kong. To Olivia he had always been a gruff voice on the phone, her uncle and boss, her one connection to what was for her the real world. But never more than a play-actor. From certain things he now said and certain assumptions he made, it now became clear to Olivia that this man—who never quite got around to stating his name—had been responsible for running the operation.

Where did that put him, she had to wonder? Was the operation considered a success or a failure? Or was it naive to think that MI6 would even bother assigning such facile designations to undertakings of such complexity? Supposedly they had garnered loads of intelligence from tapping Jones’s communications. No one could complain about that. The fact that he’d gotten away was unfortunate. But how could they possibly have anticipated—

“What the fuck happened?” asked Uncle Meng, careful to say it in measured and melodious tones.

“Everything I know, I know from talking to Mr. Y,” Olivia said, using the code name that she and George Chow had employed for Sokolov.

“Do you know his real name?”

“Does it matter right now?”

Uncle Meng just stared at her with his amazingly pale eyes.

“It’s just that I thought we were after Jones.”

“You know perfectly well that we are.”

“The whole situation with Mr. Y is extremely confusing to me,” Olivia said. “Because of what happened at the end.”

“Mr. Chow said that you claimed to have heard gunfire from out on the water.”

“The claim stands.”

“Mr. Y seems like quite the trouble magnet.”

“Does that put me in the category of trouble?”

“Why? Was he drawn to you?”

“I’d say it was mutual.”

Uncle Meng considered it. “So. You have feelings for Mr. Y. You think you heard him exchanging gunfire with un-known persons, somewhere out in the mists of the Orient. You are worried about what has become of him. And so here we are circling round each other and talking to no purpose because the conversation has become all about him.”

“Yes.”

“So let’s talk about Jones.”

“All right.”

“The entire point of trying to put Mr. Y on that ship to Long Beach was to secure his cooperation—to get some information he supposedly had as to where Jones was going. Did you get that information from him?”

“Jones was able to get control of a business jet parked at the FBO at Xiamen Airport,” Olivia said. She stood up, turned to the whiteboard, and wrote down its tail number. “Mr. Y observed it taking off at zero seven one three hours local time.” She wrote that down too. “It headed south.”

The conference room was well supplied with younger aides, one of whom, at a nod from Uncle Meng, commenced typing furiously.

Olivia said, “You’ll find that it’s leased to, or maybe even owned by, a Russian national based out of Toronto, and that it had flown into Xiamen a few days earlier.”

“Is this Russian national the same person as Mr. Y?”

“No, Mr. Y worked for him as a security consultant.”

“That being a euphemism for the sort of chap who leaves a pile of corpses in the hall outside of your flat.”

“They deserved it,” Olivia said.

Uncle Meng raised his shorn eyebrows at this, but not in a disapproving way.

“Do we know who else is aboard that plane?”

“I don’t know the ins and outs of flying,” Olivia said, “but I’ve been turning it over in my mind and I can’t but think that its usual pilots must be at the controls. Jones must have coerced them somehow.”

“I don’t disagree, but I was really asking about the bloody terrorists.”

“Not many of Jones’s crew could have survived what happened in that building,” Olivia said. “I’m amazed that Jones did. But he can’t have been acting alone. So he must have had some other safe house or support network that he drew on later.”

“The yacht club,” said Uncle Meng, using a bit of jargon that he and Olivia had devised during the course of the operation. They’d been unable to get many details, but they were fairly certain that Jones had traveled by sea from the Philippines to Taiwan and from there to Xiamen, and that he was getting supplies and personnel through some such connection, probably small fishing vessels passing stuff back and forth, literally and figuratively under the radar.

They ended up drawing a time line on the whiteboard. There was a gap of many hours between the explosion of the apartment building and Mr. Y’s startling and timely arrival—which seen from this remove had a touching Romeo-esque quality—on “Meng Anlan’s” balcony. This was at least tangentially relevant to Jones’s movements, since it was assumed that the men who’d been sent to her apartment had been acting at Jones’s behest. Olivia made her best guess as to the time of the phone conversation between Mr. Y and Jones, of which she had overheard Sokolov’s half while they’d been out on the stolen water taxi. Sokolov had known somehow that Jones was at the airport. He had guessed that some female named Zula was with him. He had threatened to find and dispatch Jones in some exceptionally cruel style if he did anything to Zula.

After that, the time line sported another white space until 0713 in the morning yesterday, China time, when the jet had taken off. Then a very long blank space encompassing the thirty-six hours between that moment and “NOW.” A few tentative marks were later drawn into that space, denoting when Olivia had made contact with George Chow, when Sokolov had disappeared into the mist, and the spans of time occupied by Olivia’s flights from Kinmen to Taipei, Taipei to Singapore, Singapore to London.

Then a difficult pause.

“It might have been convenient for us to have known,” said Uncle Meng, “just a bit earlier than now, that Abdallah Jones was in the air, in a jet with such-and-such tail number.”

Olivia was ready for this. Had been thinking about it. “By the time I got that information out of Mr. Y, Jones had already been in the air for eight hours. Because of what happened—the gunfire—I considered the operation blown and no longer trusted George Chow, so I didn’t give him the tail number. We had to get out of Kinmen anyway. By the time we reached Taipei, Jones had been in the air for at least ten hours. I had no secure line of communications from there by which to reach you. By the time I reached Singapore, it had been long enough that Jones’s plane was almost certainly no longer airborne.”

Uncle Meng seemed unconvinced. But before this awkward topic could be developed further, one of the younger, laptop-smacking analysts piped up with the following news: “Yesterday a missing persons report was filed on someone named Zula. A Yank. Adopted from Eritrea, hence the unusual name. Female, early twenties, lives in Seattle, which is where the report was filed.”