Reamde

two Russians who had checked in at the same time three days ago. It had taken them a while to find the right rooms, but the first of the pilots she’d called, Pavel, had picked up the phone on the first ring. Contrary to what Jones thought, he hadn’t been lounging around watching pornography and drinking. He had been waiting.

Of course, what he’d been waiting for was the voice of Ivanov, speaking Russian. Zula speaking English had come as a distinct surprise. But she’d been able to convince Pavel that, yes, she was that girl who had been on the flights earlier in the week. That something had gone awry with the plan. And that it really would be in his best interest to come down and meet with her in the hotel bar.

Pavel and the other pilot, Sergei, approached her somewhat warily, looking her up and down. As just about any sane person would.

“Please,” she said, with a gesture. “Sit down.”

Even that took some persuading.

But that was okay. She didn’t have to persuade Pavel and Sergei of anything else. Just to sit down at this table.

As soon as Pavel and Sergei had taken their seats, the two men in the windbreakers got up and brought their club sodas over and joined them. Five now at the table. Pavel and Sergei were now even more taken aback than they had been to begin with. But proceedings were interrupted by a waitress who came over to take their orders. Zula noted with approval that both pilots asked for nonalcoholic drinks.

One of the men in the windbreakers—Khalid—announced, “Tonight, you will fly to Islamabad.”

He then smiled sweetly as Pavel and Sergei broke out into nervous laughter.

“Where is Ivanov?” Pavel wanted to know. He had asked it several times during the phone call. But Zula had never answered it directly until now.

“Dead,” she said, and looked significantly at Khalid.

Pavel and Sergei didn’t believe it for a moment. But only for a moment.

“Who is this man?” Pavel asked her.

Khalid set down his drink, reached up, grasped his zipper pull, and drew it down to his belly. The garment parted to reveal a sort of vest, sewn out of canvas, sporting a row of long, slender vertical pockets around the midriff. Each of the pockets was bulging full. From the top of each protruded a cylinder of clear plastic, like a piece of kitchen wrap that had been rolled around a flattened tube, about the size of a jumbo burrito, of amorphous yellowish-white stuff, a little bit like pie crust dough that hadn’t been rolled out yet. Electrical wires emerged from the top of each dough-tube. They were all linked together and ran up to Khalid’s shoulder and then down the sleeve of his windbreaker. He had his hand in his lap, but now coyly displayed it to Pavel and Sergei, letting them see a black plastic object topped with a red button.

Pavel and Sergei couldn’t make sense of it for a few moments. Of course it was obviously an explosive vest. Yet to see one right there on a person’s body was so shocking that the mind couldn’t accept it at first. As if you had found Hitler in your kitchen.

“I’ve been instructed to tell you a lot of gruesome stuff about what happens when it goes off,” Zula said. “Do I need to? I mean, the gist of it is that it’ll not only kill us but basically bring down half of the building.”

Neither Pavel nor Sergei had anything to say.

The windbreaker was zipped back up.

The waitress brought them their drinks. Zula asked for the check.

“I’ve also been instructed to tell you that there are two taxis waiting outside. Pavel goes in the first, Sergei in the second. One of these guys with the vests will ride in each taxi, to preserve, I guess, the threat. We’ll go straight to the airport and depart for Islamabad as soon as you can get through your preflight checklist. Are there any questions?”

There were no questions.

Leading the four men out across the lobby, Zula felt like a terrorist.

It felt sort of cool.

Not that she was in danger of signing up with these guys any time soon. The burqa requirement, the stoning, and so on pretty much ruled that out. But she had been so powerless for so long (and yet not that long—less than a week). Striding out of the Hyatt with enough PETN in her wake to take down the building gave her some weird vicarious feeling of power. The tired businessmen checking in at the registration desk were still giving her the same up-and-down body scan look. And yet she didn’t care what they thought of her any longer. She had gone beyond all that, was part of a reality much bigger and more intense than anything they could possibly imagine. They and their opinions of her were irrelevant. Puny.

To be a man who had been helpless his entire life? And to have this power? To be able to access this feeling that she was just tasting now? It must be the most potent drug in the world.

When she climbed into the backseat of the taxi, she could see from the look on Jones’s face that he was high on that drug too. “I badly want to turn this thing around and go back into town,” he remarked. He was fiddling with the screen of his phone.

“Why?”

“We found Sokolov.”

Suddenly she wasn’t high on the drug anymore. She hoped it wasn’t too obvious in her face.

“Or at least, we know where he went. Place on Gulangyu.”

So what’s going to happen now? she wanted to ask. But she didn’t want to get in trouble for putting her nose where it didn’t belong.

He was looking at her as if reading her mind. He wanted to tell her. Wanted her to ask.

She refused to give him that satisfaction.

“They’re going there now,” he said, “and they’re going to take care of him.”

IF HIS EXPERIENCE as the creator of REAMDE had taught Marlon anything at all, it was that something always got massively screwed up with any plan, and you never knew what that something was until it happened. In this case, it was that Csongor rowed too hard. Marlon had first encountered the Hungarian in extremely chaotic circumstances, and for most of their acquaintance he had been too distracted to really pay close attention to the man’s physical presence. At 190 centimeters, Marlon considered himself unusually tall. But in looking at Csongor, he’d had the unaccustomed experience of seeing one who was taller. And he was tempted to guess that Csongor was twice his weight, but he knew that couldn’t be possible. He carried some weight around his midsection, but none of it was what you’d call flab; his head was big and wide, but it did not support any redundant chins. The power with which he pulled on the oars gave Marlon the nervous feeling that the boat was being jerked out from under him, and that was just in normal rowing. During the last minute or so before their collision with the fishing boat, Csongor had finally gotten it into his head that he was rowing for his life, and possibly for Zula’s, and had hauled on the oars with so much power that Marlon had instinctively crouched lower in the boat and put a steadying hand on each gunwale.

Csongor, of course, could not see where he was going and so in the final moments Marlon, not trusting his ability to communicate in English, began pointing this way and that, telling him which way to steer. He had neglected to allow for the fishing boat’s bow wave, which caused their prow to pitch up sharply at the very end; then one of the tires slung along its sides bashed into them and flipped the boat over in an instant. Marlon, who saw it coming, jumped straight up off his bench even as the little boat was spinning out from under him and managed to snag the rim of a tire with one hand. The other hand followed it an instant later, which was a good thing because otherwise he’d have lost his grip. The larger vessel was moving faster than he’d estimated, and it positively yanked him forward. This drew all of his attention for a moment, but then he looked back along the side and saw the capsized rowboat rapidly falling away to aft, and no sign of Csongor.

Then a hand broke the water and groped up and pawed uselessly at the upturned hull. Another hand joined it. The boat jerked straight down, as if grabbed from beneath by a shark. Csongor was trying to find a way to get his weight on top of it, but it was rapidly falling away to aft. Finally Csongor’s torso rose partway out of the water and a hand shot up and grabbed the rim of the last tire. Instantly Csongor was buried in a bow wave of his own making, the same thing that had hit Marlon a few moments earlier: he was being pulled through the sea by the tow rope of his arm, and his head was breaking the waves. But with some more struggling and wrestling, he was able to get the second arm out of the water and grip one of the ropes by which the tire was suspended, and then do a