Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Not that Sokolov had any certainty of being forgiven. There were no guarantees. But this way he had a decent chance. Whereas if he sneaked around and tried to avoid them, they would surely take note of his lack of courtesy and approach him in a more suspicious frame of mind.

That much he had decided during the first half of his voyage across the Pacific. The question, then, was how to go about making contact with the people in question. Simply calling them from a pay telephone on the beach would be indiscreet and would suggest a kind of desperation.

On the other hand, if he climbed on a bus and went straight to Igor’s house, it would seem reasonable enough. For this was not the act of a desperate person. Certainly not that of one with something to hide, since it was to be expected that Igor would spread the news of Sokolov’s arrival via the grapevine. No, this was a good low-key way to say to those whom Ivanov had betrayed: I survived, I got out of China, I am not on the run, I have nothing to hide, you’ll be hearing from me once I have got my feet on the ground .

So in a sense this was a make-work visit. Sokolov still had enough dollars in his pocket to pay for a motel room and a bus ticket. He really needed nothing at all from Igor.

It was a social call.

And yet Igor sensed at some level that this made no sense. Which was why he was so worried. So suspicious.

Anyway, he consented, finally, to let Sokolov in his front door. A decidedly awkward exchange of greetings followed. He and Vlad and Sokolov ended up sitting around the kitchen table, which was strewn with Russian-language newspapers, mugs half full of cold coffee, and dirty cereal bowls. The chilly silver light, so characteristic of this part of the world, washed in through a mesh-covered window and made it possible to see everything without actually illuminating it.

“I just got off a containership from China,” Sokolov said. For if Igor conveyed nothing else to the grapevine, Sokolov wanted it known that this, and no other reason, was why he had been incognito for two solid weeks. “No Internet, no phone. I’ve been totally out of touch.”

“Made any phone calls?”

“I don’t have a phone. I’m telling you, I literally jumped off the fucking ship two hours ago and came straight here.”

“So you have heard nothing in two weeks.”

“Closer to three. It’s not as if we were doing a lot of communicating when we were in Xiamen.”

“Well, you need to check in. There are a lot of people confused. Pissed off.”

Sokolov grinned. “Heard from them, did you?”

“I thought I was a dead man,” said Igor, completely unamused. Sokolov glanced at Vlad, hoping to draw him into the conversation, but Vlad, a somewhat younger man than Igor—skinny, with long unkempt hair—had scooted his chair into the corner of the kitchen and was sitting there with his hands in the pockets of a bulky leather jacket, implicitly threatening to drill Sokolov with whatever was in his pocket. Vlad had been a minor player in the takeover of Peter’s apartment, but he was as deeply implicated as anyone else. Sokolov suspected him of being a meth user.

A plane took off from Sea-Tac, flying directly over the house, and made conversation impossible for a little while.

“Well, you look alive to me,” Sokolov said finally.

Igor nodded. “There was a sort of investigation, I guess you could call it. Certain people wanted to know where Ivanov had gone, what he had done. They were very suspicious. I tried to explain to them about Wallace. About the virus.” Igor shrugged his huge shoulders, a great rolling movement like a barrel falling off a truck. “What do I know about such things? I just told them what I had overheard. The hacker in China. T’Rain. Zula. Tried to make sense of it. After a while they calmed down.”

“There you have it,” Sokolov said. “I expected as much. Once they had it all explained. You did well.” This not so much for Igor’s ears as for those he might spread the story to later.

Igor now got an expectant look on his face. Rather than wait for him to say it, Sokolov said: “I’ll take care of it from here.”

“Good.”

“I just need to make my way back to them, you know, without getting in trouble with Immigration, with the law.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Which is why I came here,” Sokolov said. “I won’t be much trouble. Just need to take a shower. Get a bite to eat. Pull myself together. Then I’ll be on my way.”

“You need money?” Igor asked suspiciously.

“Not really.”

Igor softened. “Because I can lend you some if you need it.”

“As I said, I just need to collect myself for a few minutes. I’ll count my money and perhaps take you up on that offer.”

“The shower is that way,” said Igor, pointing with his eyes.

THE HOUSE’S FLOOR was spongy and uneven—being consumed from beneath, Sokolov guessed, by some combination of insects and rot. The frame of the bathroom door had sagged into a parallelogram, the flimsy hollow-core door was still a rectangle; he bashed it shut with his shoulder and then used the hook-and-eye lock that had been added onto it when the lockset had stopped working. This seemed to be ground zero for the mildewy scent that pervaded the entire bungalow. Sokolov turned on the shower, then jerked the curtain across its front so water wouldn’t splash out onto the floor. He took a seat, fully clothed, on the toilet, which was located behind the door, and got out his Makarov and chambered a round. That Igor would kick the door down and Vlad fire blindly into the shower stall was unlikely. But neither was it out of the question; and if it happened, Sokolov would be quite disappointed in himself if he had failed to be ready for it.

He checked his watch and made himself comfortable for fifteen minutes, during which time he thought about Olivia and Zula, Csongor and Yuxia and Peter.

Since Zula was the only one he’d seen escaping the building, he had been assuming that Csongor and Peter were dead and that Yuxia was in the custody of the Public Security Bureau. These facts were unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do about them.

Of Zula’s situation, he could only speculate. He had scanned some newspapers in the bookstore downtown where he had purchased the map. He’d seen no reference to Abdallah Jones. Then he had moved on to some weekly newsmagazines, where he hoped he might see some stories summarizing events of the last week or two. Nothing.

In several places he had noted posters bearing Zula’s face, sometimes alone, sometimes paired with Peter’s. They were stapled to telephone poles and bus stop bulletin boards, looking a bit yellow and starting to be encroached upon by advertisements for lost dogs and maid services.

A Google search would have told him much more. But he had seen—more to the point, not seen—enough in the newspapers to suspect that Jones was still lying low somewhere and that Zula, if alive, was still with him.

As for Olivia, he hoped and trusted that she had found her way safely home and was well on her way to forgetting about him. He had been reassured, back on Kinmen, to see a kind of intelligent guardedness on her face. I can’t believe I’m fucking this guy . He’d have been worried, on the other hand, if she had thrown hopeful or adoring looks at him. Now that they had been apart for a while, her rational mind would have seized the controls from whatever part of her brain found a man like Sokolov attractive and wrenched her back onto a safe and reasonable course.

He was not entirely happy about this. Under other circumstances, perhaps, it would have been worth pursuing. Sad that it was impossible. Not as sad as many other things in this world.