Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

Zula Forthrast, an adopted Eritrean, is given a job by her billionaire uncle, Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, at his company which runs an MMORPG called "T'Rain", which has made Richard rich and famous. Zula and her boyfriend, Peter, visit Richard's cat-skiing resort. Desperate for money, Peter sells a database of stolen credit card numbers to a shady contact, who is in fact working for the Russian mob. The transaction inadvertently results in a T'Rain-based ransomware virus infecting the contact's laptop and rendering the only copy of the database useless. Ivanov, a senior gangster behind the deal, tracks Peter down and coerces him and Zula to help him find the virus creators in Xiamen, China.

Upon arriving in China, Peter, Zula, and Sokolov (a former Spetsnaz security consultant hired by Ivanov), locate the virus creators’ apartment. The Russian team prepares to raid the apartment, only to be misdirected by Zula into a random apartment, which coincidentally happens to house Islamic terrorists preparing to bomb an international conference soon to take place in the city. In the subsequent gun battle, Ivanov kills Peter, and Abdallah Jones, the head of the Islamist cell, murders Ivanov. The hackers flee the building as a fire sets off the stored explosives and causes it to collapse. Jones flees with Zula as his hostage.

Jones and Zula covertly fly from China into the Canadian wilderness and move south toward the US border. Jones plans to use Zula to force Richard to help him cross the border using a secret smuggling route. Meanwhile, Sokolov narrowly escapes from Xiamen by sea and begins to hunt down Jones in order to save Zula, eventually entering the US. An MI6 agent posted to Xiamen to manage surveillance on Jones is reassigned to locate Jones in cooperation with the CIA but suspects that both agencies' traditional approaches are misguided, eventually uniting with Sokolov to travel to the US-Canada border directly based on intuition.

Eventually, all of the main characters converge on Richard's ski resort and its US-side counterpart, where Richard's brothers live with a community of Christian isolationists and heavily armed Second Amendment fanatics. The terrorists camp in a location near the resort and inform Richard of their hostage, forcing him to lead them into the US while a small team detonates a suicide bomb near a border crossing as a distraction. After being used as bait, Zula manages to escape and heads out to rescue her uncle. Meanwhile, US-based terrorist cells converge on the community from the south, and protagonists and terrorists end up battling in a massive gunfight. In the end, the terrorists are stopped and Richard kills Jones.