Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“How is it cool?” Csongor asked. “You have a plan?”

“I have to get to a wangba, ” Marlon said, “and see what is happening in the Torgai. But I think I can get a lot of money.”

“Enough to get us to Manila?”

Marlon grinned broadly. Sort of an affectionate reaction to Csongor’s naïveté. “Much more than that,” he said.

RICHARD FORTHRAST took her a short distance up Airport Way to a neighborhood he called Georgetown. He swung around a corner and slowed down in midblock to draw her attention to a building that, he said, was the very one from which his niece and the subject named Peter Curtis had been abducted a little more than two weeks ago. Then he proceeded to a nearby drinking establishment, in front of which was parked a long row of Harley-Davidsons. The barmaid in chief, an intense woman with many tattoos, greeted him by name and asked him “Any news yet?” and then got a brooding look when he shook his head no. They occupied the last available booth. The waitress already knew Richard’s order but brought menus for Olivia and John. Olivia had been steeling herself for a bottle of watery yellow American beer but was surprised to find a dozen and a half beers, ales, and stouts of various descriptions, all available on draft. She requested a pint of bitter and a salad. John Forthrast ordered a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon and a hamburger. This triggered some kind of ancient sibling grievance between the two brothers. “You’re in a city where you could eat anything,” Richard reminded him. “Would it kill you to—oh never mind.” The latter clause with a glance toward Olivia and a reckoning that this wasn’t the time to revive what showed every sign of being a worn-out argument.

“I don’t like spicy food,” John muttered doggedly.

“Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?” Olivia asked.

“Both,” Richard said. “It started out as a pure simulacrum, a few years ago, before the economy crashed, when it was hip for twentysomethings to move down here and dress in Carhartts and utili-kilts. But they did such a good job of it that actual blue-collar people began to show up. And then the economy did crash, and the hip people discovered that they were, in actual point of fact, blue collar, and probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks and college degrees, and they program the lathes in computer languages. I was trying to come up with a name for them. Cerulean-collar workers, maybe.”

“Do a lot of people stop by here on their way to the private jet terminal?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Food and drink arrived, precipitating a lull, and then Olivia began trying to explain herself with great care to avoid saying who she worked for, though this must have been obvious, and how she knew what she knew. “Since I can’t say much,” she concluded, “I had been rather hoping that I might get some clues or some insights from you. And the fact that you already know the names of Sokolov and Ivanov suggests to me that I am not barking up the wrong tree.”

Richard pulled out an iPad and brought up images of the note that Zula had written on the paper towels, which Olivia, of course, read with fascination.

There was a sense in which all things to do with Zula and the Russians were a red herring. MI6 couldn’t care less about them. They just wanted Jones, and any intelligence that they might be able to glean as a by-product of hunting for him. They’d had a quite satisfactory arrangement going in Xiamen, which had been destroyed by the Russians’ intervention. Everything to do with T’Rain and REAMDE was a distraction; for Olivia to hang out in a biker bar with the founder and chairman of Corporation 9592 was acceptable as an off-hours diversion but should under no circumstances be confused with actual productive work. Thus the official line. But having just finished a very long and expensive wild-goose chase to Zamboanga, an officially sanctioned mission that had put Seamus’s men to a lot of effort and danger and apparently led to several deaths, Olivia was now inclined to view the party line with a great deal of skepticism. She had a vague sense that drinking with Richard Forthrast might in the long run be more productive than flying to Manila had been. But she couldn’t explain how, yet, and so she didn’t think she’d be filing an expense report. Which turned out to be a nonissue in any case, since Richard picked up the check before giving her a lift back to her hotel.

It was not until eleven o’clock the following morning that she was really able to get down to work on the NAG, the North American Gambit, which was her name for the theory that Jones had found some way to fly his stolen business jet directly from Xiamen to this continent. Here in the Seattle office of the FBI, signs were obvious that her local contacts were being controlled by persons in Washington, D.C., who were quite serious about working this theory in a systematic way. This was both good and bad. Obviously it was helpful that they liked her theory well enough to take it seriously and devote resources to its investigation. But whoever was running this project in D.C. was an Organization Man or Woman, someone with a studious engineer-like mind-set, who spent a lot of time worrying about accountability. No Seamus Costello, in other words. It seemed that a lot of duplication of effort was going on in which that hypothetical flight was being wargamed and flight-simulated in precisely the way that had already been done at MI6 more than a week ago. Ever newer and better “resources” were being “brought online” and ever more “scary-smart” analysts being “looped in” and “brought up to speed.” These developments were relayed second- and thirdhand to Olivia, and it was obvious from the tones of the emails and the expressions on people’s faces that she was expected to be gratified by each of these improvements. And yet from this remove, thousands of miles from whatever Beltway conference room where all the action was taking place, all these enhancements yielded zero results other than additional delays. It was not until about twenty-four hours after her meeting with Richard Forthrast that she finally began to get access to some of the data she needed to evaluate the NAG in a serious way: lists of the tail numbers of private airplanes that had landed at U.S. airports around the time in question (a week and a half ago now, long enough to give her the sense that she was pursuing a hopelessly cold trail) and high-resolution satellite images of out-of-the-way bits of the northwestern United States where computer-image-processing algorithms had detected white shapes that looked like they might conceivably be jet airplanes.

Early in the afternoon she received a text message from Richard Forthrast informing her that he was just a few blocks away, killing time at the Greyhound station, and would she like to grab a cup of coffee? The honest answer was that she was right in the middle of something and she didn’t have time, but the message was tantalizingly mysterious, and coffee sounded good, and Richard was generally fun to hang out with. So she took the elevator to the ground floor and walked to the Greyhound station and found Richard and John sitting on a bench, reading the New York Times and Reader’s Digest, respectively, waiting for a bus from Spokane that had been delayed by weather on Snoqualmie Pass. Jacob Forthrast had decided to come out from his compound in Idaho and spend a little time with his two older brothers. “He feels useless” was Richard’s explanation—just the sort of bleak and pitiless analysis that could only happen between siblings—“and when he found out we weren’t going to China after all, he hopped on a bus.” He was looking up at Olivia over his reading glasses and his New York Times and must have seen in her face certain questions she was too polite to ask: Does he not have a car? Is he too poor to pay for an airline ticket? Richard folded up his newspaper and treated Olivia to a brisk little explanation of Jake’s belief system, delivered in a way that made it seem like he’d done it lots of times before and wanted it done properly. His tone was studiedly noncommittal, making it clear that he didn’t agree with Jake about anything, but there was nothing he could do about it, and so there was no point getting hung up on the essential ridiculousness of it all.