Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Asshole, they’ll be covering the back exit!” Vlad pointed out. No doubt correctly. “You won’t get more than a couple of steps!”

The SUV came to a stop, directly in front of the house, headlights glaring brightly enough, on this dull overcast day, to make it impossible to count the number of people inside.

Its driver’s-side door opened and a pair of blue-jeaned legs dropped to the ground. The driver stepped out from behind the door and slammed it shut. Short hair did nothing to hide the fact that this was a woman. An Asian woman. She stepped out farther from the SUV’s headlight glare.

It was Olivia. And she had apparently come here alone.

“What the fuck !?” Vlad shouted, holding up his hands. He would have been ready for a whole carload of heavily armed federal agents. But not this.

Sokolov spun around to face Vlad and raised an index finger to his lips, shushing him. Glancing up toward the ceiling in a gesture that any Russian would recognize: Remember, someone is listening to us . Vlad, wide-eyed, seemed to take this in. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. Okay, I’ll shut up .

They were distracted by a crisp mechanical clunking noise from the other side of the room. Sokolov looked over to see that Igor had pulled the rifle out of the case. It was some sort of AR-15 variant. The sound had been made by him drawing the bolt carrier back, locking the action into an open state. As Sokolov watched, Igor plucked out one of several loose cartridges that had been rattling around loose inside the case, manually fed it into the breech, and slapped the side of the weapon, releasing the bolt and letting it slam the cartridge into firing position.

Sokolov noticed that his Makarov was in his hands, aimed at Igor.

Olivia rang the doorbell.

“Get down!” Sokolov shouted in English. Unsure whether she’d heard him, he pivoted and fired a round through the door, far above Olivia’s head. That should give her the general idea.

“Kill him!” Igor shouted, apparently to Vlad. Then he raised the rifle and aimed it at the front door.

Vlad was fumbling in his pocket. But he was poorly trained and was having trouble getting the weapon out. “Run out the back door,” Sokolov suggested. “There’s no one there.”

“How would you know?” Vlad asked.

“Do it or I’ll fucking kill you,” Sokolov said, aiming his Makarov at Vlad.

“I told you, he’s setting us up! Mother fucker !” Igor shouted, letting the barrel of the rifle drop and using his free hand to pull a revolver out of the waistband of his trousers.

Sokolov pivoted and fired two rounds into Igor’s midsection, waited for him to hit the floor, then fired one more.

Vlad was crouching on the floor next to the PC with his hands on top of his head, completely unmanned. An utterly ruthless, animal instinct within Sokolov told him to simply execute this miserable person, who could only cause trouble for him. But he could not bring himself to do it.

“I suggest you run. Fast,” Sokolov said.

“Why bother? Didn’t you say we were under surveillance?”

“By someone,” Sokolov said. He had crossed the room and picked up the rifle. Setting his pistol down for a moment, he hauled back on the rifle’s bolt carrier, ejecting the round that Igor had chambered, then set the rifle into its case, which he slammed shut. He carried it to the front door, which he opened. Olivia was no longer there. The SUV was in motion, making a three-point turn in the middle of the cul-de-sac, getting turned around into position for a getaway.

Then it stopped.

Nothing happened for a few moments.

Then she kicked open the passenger door.

EXCEPT FOR THE part about his niece being held hostage and he himself being the captive of murderous jihadists, this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. He had never understood vacations, never really taken them. But sometimes he talked to people who did understand and take them, and the story they seemed to tell had something to do with getting away from one’s normal day-to-day concerns, putting all that stuff out of one’s mind for a while, and going somewhere new and having experiences. Experiences that were somehow more pure and raw and true—the way small children experienced things—precisely because they were non sequiturs, complete departures from the flow of ordinary life.

Which Richard was totally incapable of, normally. Looking back, he could see that the majority of his breakups with the women who lived on in his superego as the Furious Muses had occurred in conjunction with attempts to go on vacation. He had never gone on vacation in any place that did not have high-speed Internet. Even the private jet in which he flew to those vacation sites had its own always-on Net connection. This probably qualified him as a serious head case, but he liked nothing more than to sit on a beach underneath a palm frond cabana in Bali, stripped to the waist, sipping an exotic drink from a coconut shell, watching waves roll in from a blue ocean, while wandering around T’Rain via the computer on his lap, firing off memos and bug reports to his technical staff. He could think of nothing more relaxing.

Except for what he was doing now. If only the bad parts of it could be done away with. He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.

JONES AND COMPANY had done a creditable job of it, maintaining the injured-hiker pretense until the moment Richard had opened the door, then instantly cutting the power and the Internet. Apparently they had scoped out the property and found the utility shed up by the dam, broken into it, and stationed a man there with bolt cutters. Probably Ershut. Richard had been observing Jones’s men, learning their names and qualities, and had identified Ershut as a Barney. This being a term from the original Mission: Impossible television series that only made sense to people of Richard’s vintage, or hipsters who liked to watch primeval TV shows on YouTube. Anyway, if ever there was a man who would be stationed in a utility shed with bolt cutters, it would be Ershut. The other one, Jahandar, had probably been perched in a tree watching the action unfold through a telescopic sight. But once the door was open and the cables severed, Jahandar moved to another perch closer to the building, with a view across the dam and down the road to Elphinstone, while Jones and Ershut and Mitch Mitchell made themselves at home in the Schloss.

Mitch Mitchell was Richard’s secret and unspoken name for the gringo who wanted, in the worst way, to be addressed as Abdul-Ghaffar. Having no idea what the man’s actual birth certificate name might have been, Richard—who simply could not bring himself to take the Abdul-Ghaffar thing seriously—had to make one up that went with his face and personality.

“How long you got?” had been Richard’s first question to Mitch Mitchell, when he’d taken in the melanoma scar.

“ Inshallah, long enough to strike a blow for the faith,” he had responded. Richard had just barely managed to not roll his eyes, but Mitch seemed to have detected some faint trace of mockery. “But it depends,” he had added, “on whether it has gone to the brain.”

“No comment on that,” Richard had said.

“I hate to break in,” Jones said, “just when the two of you are getting off on the right foot. But I need to show you an MPEG, if that’s all right.”

“Is this MPEG going to answer any of my questions about Zula?” Richard asked.

“Many of them, undoubtedly,” Jones said.