REAMDE

She gazed up the length of the RV to see the third of the newcomers, the one ensconced in the big Captain Kirk chair. He had seized control of the laptop and was apparently surfing. Zula guessed that he might have googled her or something.

 

It took all the will and self-control she had been developing during the last week and a half not to lose control of herself. The only thing that prevented it was a kind of instinctive awareness that this was probably just what the guy wanted; he was trying to say the most provocative thing he could think of. Circling around and poking at her, trying to learn what she was made of. Your family is very nice. She couldn’t believe he’d said that. What an asshole.

 

But she had opened the door to this by her improvisation, a few days ago, just after the jet crash, when she had revealed her full name to Jones. Of course, the first thing he would have done upon getting access to the Internet would be to learn everything about her, her uncle, her larger family. And he had probably left a trail of bookmarks on the laptop for this guy to follow. Maybe even set up a Zula wiki where jihadists all over the world were posting every piece of data they could find.

 

So that was the situation. Zula chained by the ankle, out of the laptop’s reach. The man in the driver’s seat looking, she had to guess, at her cousins’ Facebook pages, their Flickr albums, the websites they must have put up during the last week in an effort to figure out what had become of her.

 

Ten seconds with her hands on that laptop and she could bring the wrath of God down on these people and end the whole thing. A fact that they understood perfectly well. Hence the chain. One padlock at her ankle, the other on the grab bar in the shower stall.

 

The latter was special in that Zula happened to have a key to it in her pocket.

 

She could take the key out at any time and be free within seconds. Free to move about within the RV, that is. But there was always someone awake, someone watching her. The key was her one chance. She had to use it wisely. Her first move had to be a success.

 

The man with the laptop stared at her for a while, waiting for a reaction. Then his attention drifted back to the laptop. He poked it and stroked it for a few moments, then glanced up to see Zula looking at him. He spread his hands apart and gripped the machine by its edges, spun it around, and picked it up to aim the screen toward Zula. From almost the other end of the RV she could not see very well, but she could make out several pictures of herself, which she recognized as having been taken during the re-u or other family get-togethers. Above them were words in block letters, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?, and a telephone number with a 712 area code: western Iowa.

 

The mere sight of this from thirty feet away brought up a welter of emotions. Joy and fierce pride that her family was on the case. Extreme sadness that it had happened at all. Rage that this man was now trying to use it to manipulate her emotional state. Embarrassment that he was, to some extent, succeeding.

 

“What’s your name?” she asked.

 

“You may address me as Zakir,” he answered.

 

The man who was willing to be addressed as Zakir was big and doughy compared to all the other jihadists Zula had encountered lately. Probably a cubicle dweller in his professional life. A member of an IT support group for an insurance company, she decided. Bored with his job, unable to get a girlfriend, feeling conflicted about the way he had sold himself out to the Western system, he had somehow made contact with a group of al-Qaeda-affiliated wack jobs during a family visit to Pakistan and ended up on a list of guys to call in Vancouver if ever the global movement needed some assistance on the ground there. And now here he was and loving it. No doubt shocked to have been rumbled at three in the morning and put in a car to this Walmart rendezvous, he was killing some time doing the one thing he was indubitably good at, which was screwing around with computers.

 

Neal Stephenson's books