Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Twelve hours later, she knew more than she needed to—and yet she still wanted to know more. What was the secret hiding place of the Black Pearls of the Q’rith? What combination of spells and herbs was needed to rouse the Princess Elicasse from her age-long slumber beneath the Golden Bower of Nar’thorion? Where could she get some Qaldaqian Gray Ore to forge new Namasq steel arrowheads to shoot with her Composite Bow of Aratar? And were those the right kind of ranged weapons, anyway, to use against the Torlok that was barring her passage across the Bridge of Enbara? She could have obtained answers to all these questions from Seamus and his band of lost boys, but she knew that any answers provided would only lead to more questions, and she had already pestered them far too many times. They seemed terribly busy, anyway, planning something.

Something violent.

Something in the real world. Not far away.

She collected these impressions during brief moments of lucidity when she pulled herself out of the game to ask a question, fetch more junk food, or go to the W. C. At these times the men would all clam up and pointedly look the other way until she had once again ensconced herself in front of the game.

It was something like three in the morning. She went back to her trailer, tossed and turned until dawn, seeing images of T’Rain whenever she closed her eyes, then finally went to sleep and was awakened in midafternoon by Seamus pounding on her door.

He had even more things strapped to him than usual: a Camel-Bak; extra magazines for his Sig; hard-shell knee pads.

He invited himself in and squatted down, leaning back against the wall. Stretching his quads.

­” People are going to die tonight because of that theory you and your colleagues spun up in London,” he said.

“The theory that Jones flew the jet down here,” she said.

“Yeah. That theory. So before people die for it—keeping in mind one of them might be me—I just thought I would pay a little social call, shoot the breeze, and eventually, you know, get around to asking you whether you still believe in that theory. But it turns out that when I am getting ready to go on one of these operations, I’m not much in the mood for small talk.”

Olivia nodded. “He took off southbound. If he had turned it into a martyrdom operation—crashed it into something—we’d know. If it had landed somewhere and been noticed, we’d know. So he didn’t do either of those things. He flew it somewhere he could land it and hide it without being noticed. This place is easily reachable from Xiamen, he knows it well, has friends and connections here…”

“You mentioned all those things before,” Seamus said.

Olivia was silent.

“All I’m saying: here I am. Seamus. Alive and well. Not your best friend, but someone you know a little. As far as I can tell, you don’t hate me. You tolerate my presence. Maybe even like me a tiny little bit. I’m about to leave. Let’s say I come back in a body bag tomorrow morning. Let’s say that happens. You get on a plane and fly back to London. As you are sitting on that long, long airplane flight, at some point when you’re over India or Arabia or fucking Crete or something, are you going to go, like”—he smacked himself in the face and adopted a look of chagrin, shook his head, rolled his eyes—” ‘Shit, you know, that theory actually sucked. ‘Is that going to happen?”

“No,” Olivia said. “It’s the best theory we have.”

“We being the guys sitting around the table in London?”

“Yes.”

“How about you, Olivia? Is it the best theory you have?”

“Does it matter?” That answer had sprung to her lips surprisingly quickly.

His face froze for a few seconds, and then he smiled without showing his teeth. “No,” he said, “of course not.”

Then he pushed himself away from the wall, rose to his feet, spun on the balls of his black-on-black running shoes, and walked out.

She sat there without moving for twenty minutes, until she heard the helicopters taking off.

Then she went to the empty dining area and opened up Seamus’s laptop—he had given her a guest account—and played T’Rain for the rest of the afternoon, through into the evening, and then all night. Every so often she would stop and try to adjudge whether she was tired enough to go to sleep. But she knew perfectly well that no such thing would happen until Seamus and his men had come back.

They were back at about nine in the morning. Olivia had passed out on the sofa, gotten perhaps three hours’ sleep in spite of herself. All six of them came in together, filthy and sweaty and in some cases bloody; but none of them was seriously injured. She got the sense that they had been speaking very loudly and uninhibitedly, but the volume dropped to almost zero as soon as her sleepy head popped up from behind the back of the sofa. She caught Seamus’s eye. He was staring at her fixedly, peeling things off himself, dropping them on the floor.

The other men drifted out and tromped off to their barracks. She couldn’t avoid the impression that they had wanted to throw down their stuff and relax here and that her presence in the room had ruined it.

Seamus sidestepped around. He was carrying a gray plastic laptop under one arm. Not his usual machine. He set it on the coffee table, then sat down in a chair arranged at ninety degrees to the couch. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and carefully placed the tips of his fingers together and flexed his hands against each other, as if checking to see whether all the little joints in the fingers still worked. Some of his knuckles had been bleeding.

He looked Olivia straight in the eye and said, in a mild but direct tone of voice, “Do you want to fuck?”

She must have looked a little surprised.

“Sorry to be so blunt,” he went on, “but surviving one of these things always makes me incredibly horny. This, and going to funerals. Those are the triggers for me. So I just thought I would ask. I feel like I could rip off a great one just now. Tip-top. So I’m just checking. Just on the off chance you might be in the mood for something, you know, totally hot and meaningless.”

Olivia could well imagine it: the mischievous grin spreading across her lips, scampering back to the guest cabin, crowding into the shower, and getting banged senseless by this hormonally enraged man-child.

“Um, I sort of am actually,” Olivia said earnestly, “but I think it’s a temptation I can resist for now.” Feeling that this required more explanation, she added, “I was specifically told not to, actually.”

He looked impressed. “Really!”

“Yeah.”

“Someone actually bothered to issue you an order forbidding coitus with me.”

“Yeah. More I think directed at me and my reputation than yours.”

He looked crestfallen.

“But I’m sure yours is amazing! Your reputation, that is.”

He nodded.

“Did it go all right then?” she asked.

“Yeah! Why do you ask?”

“Just coz you’ve got blood all over you.”

“Do you know what I do for a living?”

She no longer felt like bantering back.

Seamus leaned back, reached into a cargo pocket, pulled out a little black case, unsnapped it to reveal a set of tiny screwdrivers. He flipped the laptop upside down, selected a tool, began to undo little screws. “The objective was to enter one of their encampments and grab at least one subject for interrogation. And to get any other evidence that might be useful along the way. Like this.” He patted the laptop. “Not really a good helicopter-gunship-assault kind of mission. We had to land some distance away and go in on foot and surprise them.”

“‘Surprise’ being, I guess, quite a mild term for how you approached these blokes.”