Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Costello has been after Jones for a long time,” Olivia guessed. “He takes pride in his work, or used to. Jones got the better of him more than once. Killed members of his team in sneaky and cowardly ways. Blew up civilians on his watch. Then left the country—went where Costello couldn’t get to him. Leaving Costello stuck in a backwater.”

“He is just your type,” Uncle Meng said gently. “Please do try not to fuck him.”

“How come it’s okay for James Bond?”

THE FLIGHT TO Dubai was all rich Arabs and City types. The Dubai-to-Manila leg was almost entirely Filipina domestic servants headed for home. The racial and cultural crossrip was far too heavy for Olivia to get thinking about, so she watched movies and played Tetris, finally falling asleep thirty minutes before they began their descent into Ninoy Aquino International Airport. It was late afternoon. Four days had now passed since she and Sokolov had parted ways at Kinmen. A car picked her up and took her to a business hotel in Makati where she ate room service steak, cleaned up, took her malaria pills, and went to bed.

She slept through three alarms and wake-up calls and made it down to the lobby fifteen minutes late. Seamus Costello was in the restaurant eating bacon and eggs, over easy. The reddish-yellow color of the runny yolks perfectly matched that of his beard, but even so he self-consciously wiped his chin before standing up to shake Olivia’s hand. He looked like a slightly over-the-hill backpacker, the kind of guy you’d strike up a conversation with on a rattletrap bus in Bhutan or Tierra del Fuego, borrow a joint from, ask for advice on where and where not to stay the night. He was lean, like a strip of bacon that had spent too long in the pan, and a bit north of six feet tall. He had green eyes that seemed just a little too wide open—though, she had to admit, any nonblack eyes looked that way after you’d been living in China for a while—and he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover. But he’d been to school—anyone in his job would probably have a master’s degree or better—and he could dress up his speech when he remembered to make the effort.

Which he didn’t, now. “Ya came this close,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger an eighth of an inch apart.

Delivered in the wrong tone, it would have been a rebuke or even mockery. But he had a trace of a smile on his face when he said it. The tone was philosophical.

He was congratulating her.

She shrugged. “Not close enough, I’m afraid.”

“Still. What was that like? Sittin’ there, day after day, listenin’ to yer man and his crew…”

“I don’t speak Arabic, unfortunately.”

“I’d not have been able to contain myself,” he said ruefully, staring out the window and getting a sort of mischievous-boy look on his face as he imagined (she guessed) going across that Xiamen street and walking up to Apartment 505 and gutting Abdallah Jones with a knife. “Ah, that fucking bastard.” He turned his eyes back to her. “So. You think he’s on Mindanao.”

“There is a cove not far from Zamboanga, sheltered enough that it would be a good place to ditch, deep enough that a plane would sink rapidly and become invisible to—”

“I’ve swum in it,” he said.

“Oh.”

Olivia was looking a little startled. “I read the report,” he explained. “I know what your working theory is. They ditched, just where you said, and went ashore. That whole area is lousy with Abu Sayyaf, it would have been easy for them to hook up with their brothers.” He chose to turn the Boston accent all the way up to eleven when pronouncing the word “brothers.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think I’m going to take you down there and we are going to check it out.”

“But what do you really think?”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said. “Tell you what, let’s go down there, I’ll show you around, and in another couple of days, once we’ve gotten to know each other, established a trust relationship, then we can each tell the other what we really think.” Then he pitched forward a bit. “What!? What!?” for a look of amusement had crept onto her face.

“I thought you were here,” she said, “because you were no good at politics.”

He put his palms together, fingertips nestled in his beard, like a Southie boy going to his First Communion. “I like to think I am here,” he said, “because I’m good at acquiring new skills. Which comes in handy in Zamboanga. Want some breakfast?”

“Are we going to miss our plane?”

“They’ll wait for us.”

THE REASON FOR his lack of urgency became plain when they got out the door and into Manila traffic, for which simple words like “bad” or “horrendous” were completely inadequate as descriptors. Two hours into the journey, they had traveled less than a mile from the hotel.

“Up for a stroll?” Seamus asked her.

“I would be up for just about anything that wasn’t this,” Olivia said. So he paid the taxi driver and they set out on foot, Olivia feeling inordinately proud of herself for having packed light and, moreover, done so in a bag that could be converted into a backpack. Seamus chivalrously offered to carry it for her but she shrugged him off, and they began walking between lanes of stationary traffic for a while until he steered them off to the edge of the road. The heat was fantastic, whooshing out from beneath the stopped vehicles and baking her bare legs. It abated somewhat as they worked their way out of the traffic jam and onto smaller streets. Seamus purchased two flimsy umbrellas from a street vendor, handed one to Olivia, and snapped the other open to keep the sun off his head. She followed his lead in that. Navigating by the sun, he maneuvered them into a residential neighborhood that started out seeming reasonably affluent and became somewhat less so as they got farther from Makati. But she never felt in any danger, out of a possibly fatuous belief that no harm could come to her when she was walking next to someone like him. They were noticed, and watched carefully, by hundreds of people, and followed by dozens. “Miss? Miss?” some of them called.

“It’s freaking them out that you’re carrying your own bag,” Seamus said, and so she finally surrendered it to him, leaving herself with nothing but a belt pack that was now serving in lieu of purse and the parasol. She’d assumed they were trying to get to the airport, which was definitely off to their left, or south; but Seamus kept taking them west, cutting across the occasional cemetery or basketball court, until they struck water: a very unappealing stagnant creek, half choked with plastic debris and smelling of sewage. Olivia couldn’t tell which way it was flowing, but Seamus made an educated guess and led her along its bank, occasionally holding out an arm to prevent her from toppling into it, until they got to a place where it widened into a little basin where actual boats were to be seen: long, slender double-outrigger canoes equipped with outboard motors. Seamus had no difficulty hailing one of these and inducing its owner to take them in the direction of Sangley Point. The hull was so narrow that Olivia could bridge it with her forearm. They sat amidships under an awning of sun-blasted canvas, Olivia in front, leaning back against her pack, and Seamus behind.

She knew that word “sangley,” at least; it was Chinese, from the dialect that was spoken around Xiamen, and it quite literally meant “business.”

They maneuvered down progressively wider channels for a quarter of an hour or so, the densely packed neighborhoods giving way to giant industrial zones and expanses of flat empty territory, then abruptly turned into a blunt channel that disgorged them directly into Manila Bay. For the first time Olivia was able to look about and get a clue as to where they were. They were headed for a claw of land reaching out into the bay a couple of miles ahead of them. A running conversation between Seamus and the pilot, in a mixture of Tagalog and English, led to a series of increases in the throttle, to the point where they were bounding and bouncing over chop, sending occasional gouts of spray into Olivia’s face. “He’s worried you don’t like it. Wants to go slow for you,” Seamus explained, and Olivia twisted around until she could make eye contact with the boatman, grinned, and gave him the thumbs-up.