REAMDE

Then John spent three days teaching Olivia all that he could about scuba diving.

 

Then he took her back to the airport, gave her a great big salty/sandy hug, and put her on another plane. She was sad to see the last of him but also a little bit relieved. Less than twelve hours after she’d first come aboard his boat, Olivia and John had started having sex, and hadn’t stopped until ten minutes before the stroll to the airport. This was by far the fastest time Olivia had ever gone zero to sixty with any man; she was thrilled, shocked, and embarrassed by it and understood that if she had stayed on that boat for even one more day, the whole situation would have started to go sour and maybe even blown up her career.

 

Flying back into Singapore with John’s handprints almost palpable on her, she followed instructions to go and dine at a particular restaurant. There she met a man named Stan, whose attempts to dress like a tourist did very little to hide the fact that he was a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. Stan and Olivia ate noodles together and then proceeded by taxi to Sembawang Wharves, where Olivia boarded an American destroyer in a long raincoat with the hood up while carrying a large umbrella. It wasn’t raining.

 

The destroyer seemed impatient for her to arrive, and cast off its lines and headed out to sea even while she was being shown to her accommodations. Somewhat to her relief, Olivia did not find herself having impulsive sex with Stan or any other members of the destroyer’s crew.

 

A day and a half later, under heavy clouds just before daybreak, she was transferred to a Royal Navy submarine that had been waiting for them out in the middle of nowhere. Here the accommodations were the tiniest imaginable, and she saw all sorts of circumstantial evidence that men and stuff had been hastily and grudgingly moved aside for her benefit. A waterproof pouch awaited her. It contained a cheap but reasonably presentable business suit from a Shanghai tailor who had evidently been supplied with her measurements. There was also a purse, prepacked with her Chinese identity card; her Chinese passport; a somewhat used wallet containing credit cards, money, photos, and other plausible wallet contents; half-used-up containers of the same cosmetics she used normally, mostly Shiseido stuff that could be obtained in any city in the world; and other purse junk, such as used train tickets, receipts, candy, cough drops, breath mints, tampons, dental floss, hotel give-away sewing kit, Krazy Glue, and, inevitably, a condom, expiration date three years ago, artfully timeworn so it would look like she had thrown it into her purse after a mandatory safe sex workshop and forgotten about it.

 

The captain of the sub handed her a sealed envelope, half an inch thick, covered with warnings as to its secrecy. She opened it up to find three items:

 

? A letter from her boss telling her to establish the precise whereabouts of Abdallah Jones. This document did not bother to point out, or even hint at, the terrible things that would happen to Jones soon afterward. This only made it feel heavier in her hands, as if it had been typed out onto a sheet of uranium.

 

 

 

? The dossier of her Chinese alter ego. Most of this she had written herself and had memorized, but they’d apparently included it in case she wanted to do some last-minute cribbing.

 

 

 

? An addendum explaining how the hell her alter ego had suddenly found herself in Xiamen. This she read closely, since it all came as a surprise to her.

 

 

 

Aboard the sub was a squad of Special Boat service men. One of them showed her a place where an extra pod had been welded onto the hull of the submarine, like a wen on a camel. This could be accessed through a system of hatches. Olivia was quite certain that it was the most expensive single object she had ever seen in her life. The pod was a tiny submarine, capable of holding up to half a dozen men. “Or five men and one woman, if it comes to that,” the SBS man said. In some ways it was a simple vessel. It was not made to be filled with air or to withstand the pressure of the ocean. The seawater filled it, and the occupants wore scuba gear. But in other respects it was loaded with what she took to be fantastically complex navigation and stealth technology.

 

She spent a day on the sub, mostly alone, though they did throw a nice dinner for Olivia in the officers’ mess and made several toasts to her, to her fine qualities, to her mission, to her good luck, et cetera, et cetera.

 

And that was when she started to get scared.

 

You’d think it would have happened earlier. It wasn’t as though hints had been lacking as to the nature of the plan. But the thing that got to her emotionally about that dinner was precisely the tradition of it: hundreds of years of Royal Navy men going out to strange parts of the world to do spectacularly imprudent things. It was a way for those who weren’t going to show their appreciation—a precursor of survivor’s guilt.

 

It hadn’t occurred to her before, but: she had to cross the Chinese border somehow. Crossing at any legal port of entry would leave traces impossible to reconcile with her cover story. Even if she did it with fake papers and then threw them away, they’d have photos of her, and you had to assume they were using digital face recognition software now. Theoretically she could have hiked across the border from some place like Laos or Tibet, but that seemed awfully Victorian. They simply didn’t have time. So it was going to be this. At three in the morning she put on the scuba gear and carried her waterproof pouch to the miniature pod-sub, where, as promised, five of the SBS men were waiting. Some kind of long and tedious procedure followed, involving lots of checklists. The thing filled with water and started to move independently of the big submarine.

 

Neal Stephenson's books