Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“That brave, brilliant British girl who single-handedly tracked Jones down in Xiamen and collected priceless surveillance data on him and his cell for months? Yes, I believe we are talking about the same Olivia.”

“Maybe she should have taken a little more time off,” Freddie said. “Perhaps that sort of work didn’t suit her, lifestyle-wise.”

“Why are you saying that?”

“In the last day or so, she seems to have gone totally off the rails. She skipped out of a large and expensive FBI counterterror investigation. Just walked out of the room without explaining anything. Hightailed it up to Vancouver, leaving quite the electronic trail. Including communications with you. Crashed in a hotel room there and was bothering some poor Mountie about this same theory.”

“By ‘this same theory’ you mean the excellent theory that she and I have been developing.”

“Ah, so you have been working with her.”

“Go on.”

“Claimed she was headed to some place in B.C. called Prince George. Bought a ticket. Checked in for the flight. Never boarded it. Instead bought a ticket with cash, on short notice, and went back down to Seattle, still not bothering to explain to anyone what the hell she was doing. Did not give the FBI the courtesy of a call. Then, around the time that her plane was landing at Sea-Tac, there was a shootout in a house full of Russians, low-level criminal types, less than a mile away. An FBI surveillance operation was blown. No one knows where the hell she is. One of the guys who was under surveillance has disappeared. Russian security consultant, ex–special forces, apparently related to the whole Xiamen thing.”

“Sounds like you’ve been talking to the FBI quite a bit.”

Freddie made no comment, just rolled his eyes up from the secret documents and stared at Seamus over his glasses. “Yes?”

“Anything from the intel community?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because they can get information that the FBI can’t. And sometimes they’re not very nice about sharing.”

“This Olivia person,” said Freddie, “sent you a text message this morning, didn’t she?”

Seamus laughed. “I knew it.” He sat up, leaning forward across the table. “So the FBI, the cops, they’re clueless. They have no idea where she might have gone. But the intel community was tracking her phone. They have a rough idea.”

“Very rough,” said Freddie. “And getting rougher with every passing minute. But the presumption is that she wants to get across the border into Canada where she’ll have a better shot at clearing up her amazingly tattered visa status and getting home in one piece.”

“Which is what the intel community would like to happen,” Seamus said, “and so no one is going to drop a dime on her.”

“As long as she keeps her wits about her, I would guess she’ll be back in London in a couple of weeks, looking forward to, oh, about four decades of working behind a desk.”

“Okay,” Seamus said. “That’s all quite amusing. But what I really want to talk about is Jones.”

“Yes. You know where Jones is. You figured it out, apparently, while spending all night playing a video game in a provincial Internet café patronized by Australian sex tourists.”

“That is pretty much the size of it.”

“And the break that enabled you to put all this together came in the form of a telephone call from Olivia Halifax-Lin, made during her previous sudden disappearance from the FBI’s radar screens.”

“There’s no PowerPoint presentation, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Seamus said.

“If there were, would it have Olivia’s name on it?”

“Only if that would be advantageous.”

“It was a rhetorical question. Everyone knows that the idea came from her.”

Seamus said, “I’m guessing that is viewed as a bad thing?”

“Unless you have some hard evidence as to Jones’s whereabouts, it’s going to be treated as a highly speculative theory that was talked about, but never exactly written down, by an agent whose reputation could hardly sink any lower.”

“So it is about the PowerPoint.”

Freddie ignored this. “Seamus, you are a living example of the Peter Principle.”

Seamus looked down, mock shocked, toward his own genitalia.

“Not that one,” Freddie said. “Never mind. The point is that you have risen as high as you can get in the hierarchy without having to behave like a responsible manager.”

Seamus was half out of his chair, but Freddie calmed him by holding up one hand. “I will be the first to attest that you are as responsible as any man who ever lived when it comes to those in your command. If I had to go back to being a snake eater, I would want to be your subordinate. But above the level where you are now, you have to be able to justify your actions and your expenditures by supplying documentation, and you have to engage in all sorts of political maneuvers to make sure that the right people see your PowerPoint presentations at the right times. And you are a million miles away from being able to do this in the case of whatever theory you and Olivia have been cooking up. And consequently no one above you in the hierarchy is going to stick his or her neck out by supporting your theory.”

“Even if I were that kind of guy, Freddie, there isn’t time . We need to act now .”

“Give me something,” Freddie said.

“I got nothing to give, Freddie!”

“What you’re asking for right now is a nightmare from my point of view. Handing out fake passports to two random Chinese kids. What are you trying to achieve, Seamus? You want to make these two into American citizens? Put them in the Witness Protection Program?”

“Look,” Seamus said, “I just have to fucking get there. So I can check this out.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

“But these kids are with me, and I can’t just abandon them here.”

“I’m listening.”

“I could get in a taxi and go to the airport now. If they had an ounce of common sense, they would apply for asylum. Now, that would be a nightmare.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I’m just saying, they’re here, Freddie, and I ain’t sending them back to China. Either they go with me, now, or they camp out on your front yard and request asylum. They are very Internet-savvy.”

Freddie was frozen solid. Beginning to perspire a bit.

“If I wanted to threaten you,” Seamus continued, “I’d hit you where you live.”

“Where do I live?”

“Abdallah Jones killed a bunch of your guys.”

“They were your guys, Seamus.”

“I’m your subordinate. You gave the orders. Let’s call them our guys. Now I know where Jones is. I can get him. But I have this waif problem.”

“Wraith?”

“Waif. Waif. I’m being followed around by Chinese waifs. And one not-so-waiflike Hungarian. Prevents me from getting to Jones. Your personal fault.”

“You’re making this too hard,” Freddie said, after thinking about it for a while. “You just need some way to get them on a plane in Manila, and off the plane Stateside, without them being snatched by Immigration.”

“That would do, for now,” Seamus admitted. “We could work on the details later.”

“It’s too bad we can’t get them on a military flight,” Freddie said.

“How would that help us?”

“It would depart from an airbase here and land at a base in the States. Not that they don’t check papers. But we could finesse it much more easily.”

“Finesse it?”

“For me to get Immigration at a place like Sea-Tac to look the other way while you smuggled a couple of undocumented Chinese into the country, I would have to get a hundred fucking people involved, from several agencies,” Freddie said. “People would drag their feet, raise objections, screw it up.”