Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Long experience flying around the world on airplanes had conditioned him to relax, for it would be another half hour before they actually made it off the plane. But of course, this was not true in the case of a bizjet. He smelled damp, piney air coming in through the open door and realized that nothing was preventing him from climbing off.

“Thanks for the ride, Marlon,” he said, standing up and bashing his head on the ceiling again.

“Thanks for getting me out of there,” Marlon returned, grinning, and climbing up into a prudent stoop.

Seamus held up his index finger. “Don’t thank me until we get through the next fifteen minutes.”

“LET ME GET this straight,” Freddie’s boss had said, over the hyperencrypted voice conferencing link from Langley. Never a great thing to hear from the lips of someone considerably above you in chain of command.

“We’re not asking for any money,” Seamus had broken in, before Freddie could say anything.

“Noted,” the boss had said. “Always a plus.”

“Not asking you to print passports or diddle any paperwork.”

“The whole point,” Freddie had put in, perhaps a bit nervously, “is to leave no paper trail at all.”

“Two Chinese and a Hungarian, just basically parachuted into CONUS with no paperwork whatsoever.”

“The Hungarian is legit, he has a visa.”

“Two Chinese then.”

“Yeah.”

“Given that Chinese illegals are being shipped into the Port of Seattle by the containerload, it seems like it would hardly make a dent.”

“That’s the spirit!” Seamus had said. “And these are not your baseline economic migrants. They’re going to be running major corporations inside of a fortnight.”

“Not without green cards.”

“I think I’m going to marry the girl. That would take care of her status.”

Freddie had turned to look at him incredulously. “Does she know this?”

“She has no idea. Just a feeling.”

“A feeling on your part.”

“Halfway there. Pretty respectable progress.”

“What I’m really getting at,” the boss had said, “is whether you have any kind of long-term plan for these people—other than matrimony—that would lead to complications down the road.”

“Let’s not focus on hypothetical complications,” Seamus had said. “Let’s focus on the fact that these people have been in physical contact with Abdallah Jones, rammed his vehicle, shot him in the head, been tortured by him, in the very, very recent past. Seems worthy of a free ticket to Langley, don’t you think? Can’t we buy these kids a cup of coffee at least?”

“We can buy them a cup of coffee in Manila,” the boss had pointed out.

“Only at the risk of them getting arrested,” Seamus had returned. “At which point information is going to start gushing out like Jolly Ranchers from a ruptured piñata.”

“It would be easy at this end,” the boss had said, “provided they land at a military base. Getting them on a plane at your end, without passing through formalities, is outside of my scope.”

“Disavow all knowledge of our actions,” Seamus had said, “and we’re home free.” He glanced for confirmation at Freddie, who turned the corners of his mouth down—he was very good at this—and nodded.

“Easiest decision I ever made. Consider yourself disavowed.”

NONE OF WHICH really gave Seamus any idea of what to expect, twenty hours later, descending the wee, steep staircase to the hangar floor. Joint Base Lewis-McChord, was a combined army/air force facility, actually rather important to the global war on terror in that it was the home of the Stryker Brigades so heavily used in Afghanistan, as well as being an important special forces base. Seamus knew it well. It was about an hour’s drive south of Seattle, on a huge tract of forest whose soil and climate made Seattle’s seem arid by comparison.

What he was seeing now was like something from a David Lynch film in its surreal starkness. The jet, apparently on orders from the tower, had taxied directly into a small hangar that was otherwise completely empty. Powerful lights were on, as if trying to drive away the misty gray dimness flooding in through the hangar doors, which were rumbling shut, apparently driven by electric motors.

Nothing else was in here except for a maroon minivan with a BABY ON BOARD sticker in the window and an assortment of SUPPORT OUR TROOPS ribbons scattered around its liftgate. Standing next to the minivan was a man in civilian clothes. His bearing and haircut would have marked him as a military man even if Seamus hadn’t already known who he was: Marcus Shadwell. A major in a locally based special forces unit. Seamus had been in some funny places and situations with Marcus.

None funnier than this, apparently. “Where are they?” was how Marcus greeted him.

“They’re on the fucking plane, Marcus. What did you think, we bungeed them onto the roof rack?”

“Let’s get a move on,” Marcus said. “My orders are to get you off this base and into the civilian world.” He held up his hands, palms out, and pantomimed backing away. Then he whisked his hands together as if washing them.

THEY ENDED UP at a regional airport a few miles away, outside of Olympia, only because it was big enough to support a couple of car rental agencies. Seamus went in and grabbed an SUV. His credit card was good for that much, anyway. Marcus helped them transfer their absolutely minimal baggage from his minivan into their new ride as Marlon and Yuxia huddled in the backseat, chafing their arms and shivering. Csongor, by contrast, seemed very much in his element and looked around at everything curiously to a degree that Seamus found slightly irksome. There was a U.S. customs office at the airport, and Seamus was troubled by a paranoid fear that some armed and uniformed agents would swarm out of it and demand to see papers.

But no such thing happened.

“I’m out of here,” Marcus said.

“Appreciate it. Maybe we can catch up later,” Seamus said. But Marcus already had his back turned and was hustling toward the open driver’s-side door of his family van as if he expected gunfire to break out at any moment.

Driving at exactly the speed limit—difficult for him—Seamus got them out onto the interstate and backtracked a few miles to a strip mall complex out in the middle of nowhere, which he had noticed, and taken the measure of, as Marcus had driven them out into the civilian world. It was anchored by a Cabela’s outdoor superstore, where he reckoned they could get warm stuff. But this, like every other Cabela’s, was surrounded by restaurants and other small businesses that fed off the stream of Cabela’s traffic without actually competing with the mother ship.

They ended up in a teriyaki joint, confronted by live news coverage of the car bomb explosion on the Canada/U.S. border, showing on a flat-panel above the cash register with the sound turned down.

This, then, became the topic of the conversation Seamus had with the boss at Langley. He spent most of it outside, strolling up and down before the windows of the teriyaki place, watching the Thing, the Human Torch, and Not-so-Invisible Girl snarfing their teriyaki. Above them, pictures of the crater and the body bags on the TV. Out here, the rain was spitting into his face, which seemed fitting somehow.

“I’d say this operation is all over,” said the boss, “except for writing reports.”

“I don’t believe that,” Seamus said. “This thing with the car bomb is obviously…”

“…a diversion that Jones used to draw attention from his real plans.” the boss said, finishing his sentence.

This left Seamus speechless, an unusual state of affairs for him. “You got that too?” he finally asked.