Neal Stephenson - Reamde

He seemed to get along okay in Arabic, but it was gradually becoming clear to her that it was not his native language; he spoke slowly, stopping and starting as he worked his way through sentences, and from time to time, as he listened to the man on the other end, he would get a bemused grin on his face and, she thought, request clarification.

None of which seemed to be standing in the way of his making a plan. The first part of the conversation had been start-and-stop, with a lot of wandering down blind alleys and then suddenly backing out of them. Or so Zula judged from the tone of Jones’s voice, his gestures. But suddenly in the last few minutes Mr. Jones and his interlocutor seemed to have hit on a plan that they liked; he finally lifted his eyes from the back of the seat in front of him and began to look around brightly and to drop “Okay” into his utterances.

They were on the eastern curve of the island. This was its least built-up part, but no one would mistake it for an unspoiled natural space. Part of the road was built on reclaimed land, running over the top of a seawall, so along those stretches the water was right below Zula’s window. In other sections, a broad sandy beach stretched between road and shore. Occasionally the road would divert inland, ceding the waterfront to a golf course or residential complex. They had been going clockwise around the island for a long time—Zula didn’t have a watch, but she judged it must have been at least two hours. Now, at a command from the phone, the taxi driver executed a U-turn and began to head north, going counterclockwise up the eastern limb.

“OMYGOD,” YUXIA SAID, “he’s turning around.”

“Why would he do that?” Csongor asked rhetorically.

“He fears we are following him,” Marlon theorized.

They blew by the taxi, which had pulled into a crossover lane in the median strip and was waiting for an opening in the oncoming traffic. Its rear windows were so deeply tinted that they could see nothing through them. But the driver was clearly visible, holding the steering wheel in one hand, pressing a phone to his ear with the other. And paying no attention at all to them.

“Why is he talking on the phone?” Yuxia asked, shouldering the van into a gap in traffic and getting into the left lane.

“I think I am wrong,” Marlon said. “He did not look like a man who thought he was being followed.”

Csongor, the foreigner, was the first to put it together: “He doesn’t speak English,” he said. “And Zula and the terrorist don’t speak Chinese. They have someone on the phone who is translating.”

Yuxia braked hard, triggering a storm of furious honking, and veered onto the next crossover.

“Which raises the question,” Csongor continued, “who is helping this guy?”

A gap in traffic presented itself fortuitously, so instead of coming to a full stop Yuxia just rolled across the oncoming lanes and pulled around on the shoulder, waited for a few cars to blow by, then accelerated. They had not lost much ground on the taxi, which had had worse luck with the traffic and was being driven more conservatively in any case. But if anyone was looking back through those tinted windows, it would have to be obvious, now, that the battered van was tailing them.

Marlon shrugged, telling him that the answer was obvious: “He has friends around here.”

“But they’re all dead.”

“Not all. There must be some others. In another building.”

“Then why did they not simply go straight to that building?” Csongor asked. “Why drive around the island for hours?”

“He wanted to see if he was being followed?” Marlon said. “But we have been obviously following him and he did not notice.”

“Not that obvious,” said the offended Yuxia, triggering a brief exchange of recriminations in Mandarin.

“He’s been organizing something. Some kind of drop-off or exchange,” Csongor said, tamping down the argument. “Using the backseat of that taxi as his office.”

“Fuck, man,” Marlon said. “I should never have got into this van.”

“You’re just getting that now?” Yuxia asked. Still a little irked at him.

“You said you were going to give me a ride,” Marlon said, looking at Csongor.

“You can get out whenever you want,” Csongor said.

Yuxia said something in Mandarin that appeared to reinforce Csongor’s offer with considerable vigor.

“Seriously,” Csongor said, “you saved my life, that is enough for one day.”

“Who saved mine?” Marlon asked. “Mine, and my friends’?”

Csongor turned to look at him curiously.

“By flashing the power on and off. Warning us.”

“Oh,” Csongor said. He had quite forgotten this detail in the midst of so many other happenings. “That was Zula.” He nodded in the direction of the taxi, a couple of hundred meters ahead of them.

“And that is why the big man—Ivanov—was so angry,” Marlon said, working it out. “Because he knew that Zula had messed up his plan to kill us.”

“Yes.”

“I see.” Marlon nodded, then drew in a deep breath and began stroking his beardless chin absentmindedly. Finally, he came to some sort of decision and sat up straighter. “I have done nothing wrong today. The cops can’t charge me with anything.”

“Except REAMDE,” Csongor reminded him.

“For that,” Marlon said, “I’m already fucked anyway. But that’s a small thing in all of this. So I will go with you for a little while longer and see what happens.”

“You sure will,” Csongor said.

WHENEVER THE LOOKING was good, Mr. Jones looked out across the water. Zula tried to follow his gaze. But there wasn’t much to see. Directly across a narrow strait, close enough that a good swimmer could have reached it in a few hours, was the smaller of the two Taiwanese islands. Perhaps that accounted for the barrenness of the coast, and the lack of shipping traffic. Over the course of a few minutes, their orbit turned them away from that fragment of foreign territory. A larger, more built-up headland came into view off to their right, and they began to see more maritime traffic, since the water to their right was now a strait, about a mile wide, between Xiamen and another part of the ­People’s Republic. The road diverged from the shore to make room for a container port built on flat reclaimed land, indistinguishable, to Zula’s eye, from the same facility on Harbor Island in Seattle, with all the same equipment and the same names stenciled on the containers. A series of huge apartment complexes hemmed them in to landward. Then the sea rushed in to meet the road again, and all traffic was funneled onto a causeway-and-bridge complex that they had already crossed a few times today; it spanned an inlet, an arm of the sea that penetrated the round shell of the island and meandered off into its interior.

Looking perpendicularly out the window as they hummed across the bridge, Mr. Jones saw something. He seemed to be focusing on a typical Chinese working vessel that had peeled off from the longshore traffic and was cutting beneath the bridge to enter the inlet: a long flat shoe in the water, a pilothouse built on its top toward the stern, cargo stacked and lashed down on the deck forward. A man had clambered to the top of one such stack and was standing with his elbows projecting to either side of his head; Zula realized he was looking at them through binoculars. His elbows came down and he made a gesture that she could recognize as whipping out a phone and pressing it to his head.

Mr. Jones’s rang. He answered it and listened for a few moments. His eyes swiveled forward to lock on the back of the taxi driver’s head. After listening to a long speech from the man on the boat, he said, “Okay,” and handed the phone to the taxi driver again.