Reamde

Then she went to the empty dining area and opened up Seamus’s laptop—he had given her a guest account—and played T’Rain for the rest of the afternoon, through into the evening, and then all night. Every so often she would stop and try to adjudge whether she was tired enough to go to sleep. But she knew perfectly well that no such thing would happen until Seamus and his men had come back.

They were back at about nine in the morning. Olivia had passed out on the sofa, gotten perhaps three hours’ sleep in spite of herself. All six of them came in together, filthy and sweaty and in some cases bloody; but none of them was seriously injured. She got the sense that they had been speaking very loudly and uninhibitedly, but the volume dropped to almost zero as soon as her sleepy head popped up from behind the back of the sofa. She caught Seamus’s eye. He was staring at her fixedly, peeling things off himself, dropping them on the floor.

The other men drifted out and tromped off to their barracks. She couldn’t avoid the impression that they had wanted to throw down their stuff and relax here and that her presence in the room had ruined it.

Seamus sidestepped around. He was carrying a gray plastic laptop under one arm. Not his usual machine. He set it on the coffee table, then sat down in a chair arranged at ninety degrees to the couch. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and carefully placed the tips of his fingers together and flexed his hands against each other, as if checking to see whether all the little joints in the fingers still worked. Some of his knuckles had been bleeding.

He looked Olivia straight in the eye and said, in a mild but direct tone of voice, “Do you want to fuck?”

She must have looked a little surprised.

“Sorry to be so blunt,” he went on, “but surviving one of these things always makes me incredibly horny. This, and going to funerals. Those are the triggers for me. So I just thought I would ask. I feel like I could rip off a great one just now. Tip-top. So I’m just checking. Just on the off chance you might be in the mood for something, you know, totally hot and meaningless.”

Olivia could well imagine it: the mischievous grin spreading across her lips, scampering back to the guest cabin, crowding into the shower, and getting banged senseless by this hormonally enraged man-child.

“Um, I sort of am actually,” Olivia said earnestly, “but I think it’s a temptation I can resist for now.” Feeling that this required more explanation, she added, “I was specifically told not to, actually.”

He looked impressed. “Really!”

“Yeah.”

“Someone actually bothered to issue you an order forbidding coitus with me.”

“Yeah. More I think directed at me and my reputation than yours.”

He looked crestfallen.

“But I’m sure yours is amazing! Your reputation, that is.”

He nodded.

“Did it go all right then?” she asked.

“Yeah! Why do you ask?”

“Just coz you’ve got blood all over you.”

“Do you know what I do for a living?”

She no longer felt like bantering back.

Seamus leaned back, reached into a cargo pocket, pulled out a little black case, unsnapped it to reveal a set of tiny screwdrivers. He flipped the laptop upside down, selected a tool, began to undo little screws. “The objective was to enter one of their encampments and grab at least one subject for interrogation. And to get any other evidence that might be useful along the way. Like this.” He patted the laptop. “Not really a good helicopter-gunship-assault kind of mission. We had to land some distance away and go in on foot and surprise them.”

“ ‘Surprise’ being, I guess, quite a mild term for how you approached these blokes.”

“It’s an incomplete term. They were definitely surprised.” Seamus had removed all the little screws he could find. He paused, looking at the laptop, still all together in one piece. “Jones has been known to booby-trap these things and then leave them lying around,” he said. “But this one was not left lying around. It was being used when we entered the hut.” He popped the back off. Olivia couldn’t help flinching. But there were no lumps of plastique inside. Seamus chose another screwdriver and began to remove the screws that held its little hard drive into place. “I’ll upload this to Langley while I’m taking my shower.”

“What about the other part of the mission?”

“Grabbing a subject?”

“Yeah.”

“Done.”

“Where is he?”

“In the hands of our Filipino colleagues.”