Neal Stephenson - Reamde

It took Olivia—trying to think, now, of so many things at once—a few moments to understand. “They’re together,” she blurted out. “Csongor and the Troll.” Then, after a couple of lane changes: “Why would they be together?”

“Unknown,” said Uncle Meng, “but perhaps your contact can simply ask them. I myself am going to bed.”

IT HAD TAKEN Zula a certain amount of time simply to get used to having open space around her, and a sky above.

They were at the turnaround at the end of the road, a few miles past the Schloss, at the base of the avalanche of planks that was the ruin of the old mining complex. It sloped up above their heads at what seemed like a forty-five-degree angle, though she doubted it could really be that steep. Sprays of boards, snaggled at their ends with bent, wrenched-out nails, made black sunbursts against the sky. Blackberries and ivy were trying to lash together what carpenter ants and gravity had torn asunder. A few hundred meters up the slope, she knew, the old railway bed cut across the middle of this wreck. A month ago she and Peter had been snowshoeing on it. A month in the future, mountain bikers would be riding on it. But now it was a mud sluice channeled by seasonal runnels that would have to be packed with gravel and pounded smooth before anyone could use it for anything. In a few weeks, the work crews would be along to begin that maintenance, but for now it was as abandoned as it ever got.

This was exactly where she’d thought they were going, but even so it seemed surreal and dreamlike to her: the sensation of cool fresh air on her skin, the smell of the cedars and of the mud, and, of course, the fact that she was surrounded by jihadists and that she had a chain padlocked around her neck. Now that they were out in the middle of nowhere, the jihadists had finally gone native and begun to carry weapons more openly. One of them was sitting cross-legged on the roof of the RV, which had been parked across the road, barring access to the turnaround loop, which was where they had dumped out and were sorting through their camping gear. This man had a rifle in his lap and a pair of binoculars hanging around his neck, which he picked up from time to time and used to gaze down the valley. To Zula it was clear enough that if any geocaching tourists or local cops came up the road to investigate, he would wait until he could see the whites of their eyes through the windshield and then shoot them dead.

There had been some turnover during the last week. Zula was beginning to lose track of all the players. Of the three who had come out from Vancouver the morning after they’d stolen the RV, Zakir was still here, of course, holding the end of Zula’s neck chain as if walking a dog; and Sharjeel, who was the snappy, efficient, vaguely weasel-like one, seemed to have become one of Jones’s most important deputies. Ershut, the burly blue-collar man who had come over on the jet, was playing his accustomed role, moving piles of stuff around and sorting things into stacks. Mahir and Sharif, the lovers, were not in evidence. Neither was Aziz, the third of the Vancouverites. Abdul-Wahaab was strutting around, staring into the distance and talking importantly on multiple phones, checking his wristwatch. But at least four new guys were in evidence: the sniper on top of the RV, another openly armed man who seemed to be pulling guard duty on the ground nearby (he had found a place of concealment in the trees, but Zula could see him), and two wiry, bearded fellows who looked as if they had come for a long big-game hunting expedition. Even then Zula sensed she had not seen all of them, and that others were riding around, somewhere in this general vicinity, in the small fleet of cars that Jones’s network had managed to scare up during the almost two weeks he’d been in the country.

They kept faltering in whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, and Sharjeel kept exhorting them to get off their asses and make some progress. Over the course of an hour they packed several backpacks as full as they would go, and roped and lashed and bungeed more stuff to the outsides of them, and put yet more stuff into garbage bags and plastic coolers that they carried in their arms, and then they trudged off into the woods, following a path that one of the more nimble members of the group had scouted. This took them up along the side of the ruin. They made extremely slow progress because of the steepness of the ground, the undergrowth, and the mud. But in perhaps half an hour—though it seemed longer—they emerged, sweating, into a patch of relatively level ground about the size of a badminton court, sparsely occupied by big old trees that, being evergreens, would give them some cover from the air, but open and flat enough that tents and tarps could be pitched and sleeping bags rolled out. Zakir’s first act was to pass the free end of Zula’s neck chain around a large tree in the middle of this space and padlock it. This freed him to lie down on his back on a blue foam pad until he was rebuked for laziness by Abdul-Wahaab. He got up and went to work. Zula filched his pad and sat down on it. Until now she had tried to pay as little attention as possible to the padlocks at the ends of the chain, since she was afraid that if she showed too much interest in them she’d be giving something away. Hopeless apathy was a much better stance for her to feign. But no one was paying her much attention now, so she let her gaze travel down the length of the chain to the place where it was locked around the tree trunk. There were two padlocks in Zula’s universe. One was a big heavy brass thing, made to stand up to the elements, which they had taken from the mining camp. The other had been removed from the toolbox in the back of the pickup truck; it was smaller, made of steel, with a blue rubber ring molded into its base to keep it from banging and clattering as the box was moved around. Zula had a key to that one. For a while she had simply kept it in her pocket, but as it had become clear that something was about to happen, she had found herself lying awake worrying about the possibility that she might be searched and it might be confiscated. She had soaked a tampon in water until it swelled up, then shoved the key into the middle of it and shoved it right up her ass. It was there now.

The padlock fixing the chain to the tree was the big brass one. She couldn’t see the one at her neck, but she could explore it with her fingers and feel the rubber ring around its base. This was the lock that she could open.

WHEN THE DA G shou created a new T’Rain character for possible resale to a rich lazy Westerner, they didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking up a clever name for it, so they just mashed together a few word fragments perhaps skimmed from random Google searches and spam; or at least that was Csongor’s best guess as to why he was now wandering around T’Rain in the guise of a fat merchant named Lottery Discountz. It was possible to change the name—as well as take care of the fatness—for a modest fee, but he sensed that if he succumbed to the temptation to begin fiddling with such trivialities so soon, hours would pass without his actually getting anything done. He had his hands full just learning how to make his character move around the place.

He had shimmered into existence in a rented room upstairs of an inn at an important crossroads just outside the southwestern gate of Carthinias, which, as he had learned in a spasm of googling and wiki trawling, was one of the five largest cities in T’Rain. It tended to get left alone during wars, since its markets were useful to everyone, and it never took sides—it was too fractious a place to arrive at a firm political consensus on anything, and the last ruler who had tried to involve it in foreign intrigues had been defenestrated and deposed by a well-organized mob of…