NEAL STEPHENSON

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‘Why? Why the hell do you care about me?”

“That would be a tangent from our main conversation, which is about all the phases of the plan.”

“Okay. We just finished Phase Two.”

“Now, in Phase Three, which is ongoing, we allow them to think that they are making an incredible, heroic escape, running down the street toward the pier.”

“Phase Four!” shouts Livio, the lieutenant.

“Scusi,” the man with the glass eye says, scooting his chair back, folding his napkin back onto the table. He gets up and walks out of the dining room. Hiro follows him above deck.

A couple of dozen Russians are all trying to force their way through the gate onto the pier. Only a few of them can get through at once, and so they end up strung out over a couple of hundred feet, all running toward the safety of the Kodiak Queen.

But a dozen or so manage to stay together in a clump: a group of soldiers, forming a human shield around a smaller cluster of men in the center.

“Bigwigs,” the man with the glass eye says, shaking his head philosophically.

They all run crablike down the pier, bent down as far as they can go, firing the occasional covering burst of machine-gun fire back into Port Sherman.

The man with the glass eye is squinting against a cool, sudden breeze. He turns to Hiro with a hint of a grin. “Check this out,” he says, and presses a button on a little black box in his hand.

The explosion is like a single drumbeat, coming from everywhere at once. Hiro can feel it coming up out of the water, shaking his feet. There’s no big flame or cloud of smoke, but there is a sort of twin geyser effect that shoots out from under. neath the Kodiak Queen, sending jets of white, steamy water upward like unfolding wings. The wings collapse in a sudden downpour, and then the Kodiak Queen seems shockingly low in the water. Low and getting lower.

All the men who are running down the pier suddenly stop in their tracks.

“Now,” Binocular Man mumbles into his lapel.

There are some smaller explosions down on the pier. The entire pier buckles and writhes like a snake in the water. One

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