Reamde

SEAMUS DOCKED THE little hard drive into a gadget that inhaled all its contents without altering them and squirted them down a high-bandwidth connection to the United States for, she guessed, decryption and analysis. Then he went back to his quarters and took a shower. Olivia took one of her own, not because she was dirty but because she had that cottony, icky feeling that came from lying on a sofa for a whole day playing a stupid game. She wanted to get some exercise but didn’t see how it was possible. In the courtyard of their little compound, Seamus’s team had set up some kind of body-weight exercise system involving ropes, and she’d seen them out there going at it yesterday. But that was exercise with a purpose—This might give me a tiny edge on the next mission—whereas she wanted to do something wholesome like go for a walk.

There was a couple of hours’ hiatus. Food was eaten, email checked. Then Seamus spun his laptop around. It was playing a video window: a reasonably high-definition feed from a small, windowless, brightly lit room. A man, stripped to the waist, was sitting in a wooden chair, hands behind him as if cuffed. His features were Malay/Filipino, but he had been growing a scruffy beard. One eye was closed off by a huge shiner, and at the places where bony ridges had once sat close beneath the skin, butterfly bandages were straining to hold lacerations closed. The swelling extended down toward his chin, and she wondered whether his jaw might have been broken. He was mumbling in some language that Olivia didn’t recognize.

One of Seamus’s men, whom she had previously pegged as Hispanic, scooted closer, plugged in a pair of large, expensive-looking headphones, and leaned forward to listen. After a few moments, he began to rattle off sentence fragments in English: “It’s like I said before … honest to God … I’ll tell you anything you want to hear, you know this now … but you want the truth, don’t you? The truth is we didn’t see him. Didn’t hear anything until a few days ago. Then we got word … send out emails, you know. They could be anything, just random.”

Seamus explained, “According to the analysts at Langley, that laptop was used to send out a bunch of junk emails starting a few days ago.”

“Like spam?” someone asked.

“They were just cutting and pasting random scraps of text from instruction manuals, encrypting it, sending it out. Trying to create the illusion of traffic. False chatter.” Seamus swiveled his eyes to look at Olivia. Then he made a little jerk of his head toward the door. She got up, headed for the exit, and he followed in her wake, all the way to her quarters.

“This is not about fucking, I assume?” she asked.

He rolled his eyes. “No, I’m in a completely different state of mind now; I regret what I said earlier.”

“Very well,” she said levelly.

“Though that is a cute haircut.”

This was certainly an attempt to bait her, and so she remained silent and, she hoped, inscrutable.

“What I really wanted to tell you was that … you’ve got what you came here for,” Seamus said.

“What did I come here for, do you imagine?”

“Evidence to support the theory you really believe.”

“Which is?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I thought I would get your opinion,” Olivia said, “before showing my hand.”

He stuck his tongue in his cheek and thought about it.

“It’s not poker,” she said. “There’s no disadvantage in your telling me what you think. We’re both trying to get the same rat bastard.”

“If Jones had something as awesome as a bizjet,” Seamus said, “would he use it to scurry like a mouse back into the nearest hole? I think not.”

“He’d do something really cool, like fly it into a building,” Olivia said, nodding.

Seamus held up one admonishing finger. “Oh, no,” he said, “because that would involve dying, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose very likely, yes.”

“And he doesn’t want to die.”

“For a man who doesn’t want to die, he puts himself in some quite dodgy situations,” she pointed out.

“Oh, I think he’s conflicted,” Seamus said. “Someday he’s going to be a martyr. Someday. This is what he keeps telling himself. Then he looks around himself, at the wack jobs and goat fuckers he has to work with, and he sees how much more he has to offer the movement by staying alive. Putting his expertise to work, his languages, his ability to blend in. And so the day of martyrdom keeps getting postponed.”

“Convenient for him, that.”

Seamus grinned and shrugged. “I actually don’t know whether the man is a coward, or really trying to use his skills in the most productive way by staying alive. I’d love to ask him that someday. Before sticking a knife into his belly.”

“So. He didn’t come here. He didn’t crash it into a building. He didn’t get caught. Where’d he go?”

“All of his instincts,” Seamus said, “would move him in the direction of the United States.”