Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Apparently satisfied that there were no tricky ways out of the safe house, Sokolov allocated offices. Zula got one all to herself. Peter and Csongor each got to share one with a security consultant.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Zula announced. Sokolov drew himself up and made a sort of bow and escorted her to the lobby, where the guard undid the cable lock and opened the doors. Sokolov went into the women’s room ahead of Zula, vaulted up on the counter, popped a ceiling tile, and reconnoitered. Apparently he did not entirely like what he saw because he came back down in a pensive mood. After thinking about it for a few moments, he withdrew into one of the toilet stalls, closed the door, made himself comfortable on the toilet, and said, “Okay, I wait. Is okay!”

She went into a different stall and peed. She could hear Sokolov thumbing away on a PDA or something. She emerged from the stall, stood before a sink, and took off all her clothes. Using a bar of soap from her bag and a roll of paper towels issued by Sokolov, she gave herself a stand-up sponge bath. Then—fuck it, Sokolov was trapped—she bent over and shampooed her hair. This took a good long time because of the difficulties entailed in rinsing. As she was finishing up she jumped a little, hearing male voices, but then she realized that Sokolov had opened up communications on some kind of walkie-talkie system.

The result of this procedure was going to be extreme frizziness, but there was little point in concerning herself with that. A now useless instinct warned her that if Peter took a picture of her tomorrow, it would make a hilarious and embarrassing Facebook posting. She wondered how long she would have to go without posting on Facebook before that silence, in and of itself, warned her friends that something was amiss. Then she remembered it would boot her absolutely nothing even if they did realize that something was wrong.

That, she now realized, was the point of the black hoodie. The airport probably had security cameras. Supposing that her friends and family were able to put out a worldwide all-points bulletin for her, the Xiamen authorities would not be able to pick out her face on their security footage.

She pulled on some clean clothes, brushed her teeth, pulled all her stuff together, and called out “Okay.” Sokolov emerged from the stall. They went back into the office suite. The cable lock was reinstated behind them. Zula had noted the location of a door off the elevator lobby that apparently led to a fire stair, and she wondered how many flights down she could get before a security consultant would catch up with her. They were probably practiced at vaulting over the railings, or some other high-speed stair-descending technique that she didn’t know about.

Peter had tried to talk her into taking a parkour class in Seattle. She wished she’d said yes.

Sokolov extended a hand, reminding her of the location of her private office, and she heard “Thank you” coming out of her mouth before it occurred to her how stupid that was.

The office had floor-to-ceiling windows with views inland, though if she got her face close to the glass she could also see toward the water. The closest building of comparable height was half a mile away, and she reckoned she might be able to get someone’s attention by dancing naked in front of the window, or using her light switch to blink S-O-S in Morse code. Since her office had a glass wall on its inner side, though, any such antics would have been obvious to the security consultants drinking coffee a few feet away.

So for now she decided that she would actually try to sleep instead of hatching any Nancy Drew/Scooby-Doo-style escape plots. And to her surprise she found herself being rousted out of bed some time later by Peter. As usual she had no idea what time it was, but it was broad daylight outside. “In twenty minutes we are havink meetink,” Peter said.

She made another trip to the bathroom, supervised using the same procedure as before. While she was standing in front of the mirror, changing into a different T-shirt, she caught sight of herself for a moment, and this for some reason caused an irresistible wave of grief and melancholy to break over her. She turned on both faucets, rested the heels of her hands on the counter, and put her weight on them, then allowed herself a sobbing fit that went on for maybe half a minute.

Then she splashed water on her face and announced, to her own reflection, “Okay.”

SOKOLOV HAD BEEN doing a lot of thinking about insanity: what it was. Its causes. When Ivanov had begun to suffer from it. Whether it had completely taken Ivanov’s mind or rather came and went in waves. Every so often Ivanov would blink and look about him with a surprised, almost childlike expression, as though a sane part of his mind had come awake, regained control of the body, and found itself in a predicament concocted, while it had been asleep, by the part of Ivanov that was completely out of his fucking mind.

But on the other hand Sokolov owed his life—his survival in Afghanistan, in Chechnya—to his ability to see things through the eyes of the adversary, and in this case that meant trying to put himself in Ivanov’s shoes. This reversal of perspective was not always easy. One frequently had to work at it for some days, observing the other, gathering data, even conducting little experiments to see how the other reacted to things. His men in Chechnya had thought that he, Sokolov, was crazy because he had sometimes taken actions that made no evident tactical sense, solely as a way of proving or disproving a hypothesis as to what the Chechens were thinking, what they wanted, what they were most afraid of.

What they considered normal .

This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was.

Applied to the current situation, the question was: Could it be considered normal to divert rather large amounts of obshchak funds to charter a private jet from Toronto to Seattle and thence to Xiamen in order to track down and liquidate a person—probably a kid—who had written a virus and held some files hostage for $73?

UNTIL SOKOLOV WOKE up that morning in the safe house and literally smelled the coffee—for the day shift had awakened at 0600 local time and begun to brew it on the camp stove—he did not understand how completely fucked he was, how interesting the situation had become. And then he felt astonished and ashamed that he’d let events get so far ahead of him. He had been defeated by Ivanov at the game of Normal. Getting on a plane and flying somewhere to do a job: What could be more normal than that? But Ivanov had not shared with him any information about how they would actually get into the country. Now men nominally under Sokolov’s control had done murder in the United States and they were in China illegally, and at the mercy of whatever local gangsters or officials Ivanov had cut a deal with.

Though, to be fair, those people were at Ivanov’s mercy as well, because they didn’t understand that Ivanov was crazy. And once they came to understand that Ivanov was not only crazy but traveling in the company of seven warriors and three hackers, they would begin having nightmares about all the consequences that would fall on their heads if those people actually began to do the sorts of things that they were in the habit of doing.

What kind of bullshit had Ivanov told them? Probably that he wanted to smuggle some high-value goods into the country through the private jet terminal. Two vanloads’ worth of stuff. Bootleg caviar or something else expensive enough to justify leasing a private jet.