REAMDE

 

There was now a train that would take arriving passengers directly from Sea-Tac to a downtown station that was practically in the basement of Corporation 9592’s headquarters. In every way it was faster, safer, and more efficient than the antiquated procedure of driving to the airport in a private vehicle to pick up a visitor. Richard had become somewhat cold-blooded about simply telling people to get on the goddamned train. But today the incoming passenger was John, and there was no question that this called for the ancient, full-dress ceremony: checking the flight’s true arrival time on the Alaska Airlines website, driving to the airport, napping in the phone lot, the long radio silence suddenly broken by one-word text messages blossoming on his phone (LANDED, TAXIING, STILL TAXIING!, WAITING TO DEPLANE, FAT LADY BLOCKING AISLE), the carefully timed plunge into the moil of the arrivals curb. John, a legless senior citizen/combat veteran, could have gotten special dispensation from airport authorities on at least three pretexts, but he seemed to find it amusing to stomp out the doors under his own power with his bags slung over his shoulders and to navigate on dead stilts through the vehicular mosh pit to the back of Richard’s SUV. He had packed for a long trip: a trip to China.

 

It had only been something like four days since Dodge had left Iowa, which was well under the threshold for hugging. And if they weren’t going to hug, there seemed little point in shaking hands. Anyway their hands were busy, pulling the SUV’s liftgate down. John, ever the older brother, initiated the move, and Richard, feeling as if he were being some kind of a bad host, reached up only a fraction of a second later and got his hands on the thing just as it was starting to move down. Four Forthrast hands slammed it shut with much more force than was really called for, and then they parted, each walking up his own side of the vehicle, and climbed into the front seats in unison.

 

“You can scoot that back,” Richard said, of John’s seat.

 

“It’s fine,” John insisted, speaking to Richard from across a cultural divide that never got any easier to navigate. The idea being that even if John’s seat were positioned too far forward—limiting his legroom and reducing his level of physical comfort—the mere act of scooting it back a few inches was, by midwestern standards, a gratuitous waste of energy as well as an implicit admission that the scooter was the sort of person who could not handle a little bit of trouble.

 

Richard paused for a moment, sat back, and asked himself whether he should be driving at all. It was noon. He had not slept at all last night. Then he pulled himself together, looked in both mirrors, checked his blind spot, and accelerated smoothly into traffic. Just like in driver’s ed.

 

“You’ve got most of a day to kill before we leave for China,” Richard said, once they had made it out onto I-5. He had adjusted to the cultural thing now, so he didn’t say “a few hours to relax” or “freshen up” or “recover from the flight,” any of which would have been construed as Richard implying that John was not up to the stress of modern airline travel. Just “kill” implying that things really weren’t moving fast enough for Richard’s taste. “My condo is just down the street from the office, so you can go there and take a shower if you want, get on the Internet…”

 

“I’d like to sit down with you and look at it again,” John said.

 

“You’re not going to see anything new,” Richard said.

 

“Certain words are difficult to make out on my copy. Zula’s handwriting was never the best…”

 

“Your copy is my copy, John. Listen to me. We are talking about digital files here. What I emailed you is an exact, perfect copy of what I received from the guy in China. Looking at my copy is not going to help.”

 

“On the second page,” John insisted, “there’s one line that’s sketchy.”

 

“It is a handwritten note on brown paper towels,” Richard said. “The guy just spread it out on a counter and aimed his phone camera at it and prayed to his gods. The image quality is poor. But your copy is as good as mine. The only way to extract more information is to go to China, and we’re doing that in eight hours.”

 

“Why can’t we leave sooner?” John asked, though he already knew.

 

“The visas,” Richard reminded him.

 

Neal Stephenson's books