The Woman Who Stopped Traffic

by Daniel Pembrey

  Natalie didn’t reply, commenting instead: “This just all feels so weird to me, Brastias. Adam I mean! You know, like who you are, in MultiQuest?”

  “An armourer?” and he raised one eyebrow in acknowledgment. “That’s the other thing I need to talk with you about. Stuff’s been happening up on the Scintanel Plateau that may have a bearing on this.”

  “Bearing on what?”

  “Vogel, Malovich,” he said. “Either that, or it’s one helluva coincidence.”

  “Give me an hour or so to get back in the game.”

  She had already uninstalled the ‘mq:hot-MOD-els’ patch from her laptop, allowing MultiQuest: Dark Ages to run normally again. If others chose to see her in that ridiculous get-up then that was their problem. She had in fact been playing the unmodified version for an hour or so each morning, receiving training in swordsmanship, jousting and even un-mounted combat. By way of graduation acknowledgment, she’d been given her own sword: a rather dull-looking piece, unlikely to command much of a premium on eBay, but still tempered to battle-grade. She’d also come by a quite fetching fighting cape, the shoulder-clasp of which was fashioned with innumerable emeralds.

  It was a three-hour, hard-riding horse journey up onto the Scintanel Plateau in the foothills of the Atalantans – beyond which lay the polar regions to the north, and the never worlds to the west. The view back to the Quorn Valley was spectacular, causing them to stop every so often and rest their horses. Riding with her and Brastias was a white-robed cleric called Tolemy, who hailed from someplace out east. He was carrying their identification standard – for the Order of the Knights Templar. Natalie studied it for the first time. It was a circular design, with ancient-looking letters and symbols running round the edge. In the center were two knights on the same horse, wearing full battle regalia and bearing pointed shields with red crosses. The horse that the knights shared looked to be acquitting itself of the extra load pretty well. Tolemy explained that the image depicted the Order’s earlier state of poverty. Knights needed to share horses back then. Thereafter, as a result of countless treasure quests, the Order had become one of the wealthiest in the realm. The motto meant: ‘Not for self but for God’. Tolemy spoke with pride, yet in a most sombre way. Natalie wondered why.

  On they rode, up into the higher air. Nearing the edge of the plateau, she halted Phariance, allowing the others to catch up.

  “Where d’you learn to ride like that?” Brastias asked, breathless.

  “A rider’s only as good as her mount,” she said, patting Phariance’s foaming neck. The horse’s ears flicked this way and that. “What’s this?” she said.

  Ahead of them was a solitary tree, lichen-covered and bent over by the wind. Hanging upside down from a branch was an emaciated man, perhaps a vassal or a retainer. Quite dead.

  He hung by one leg, the calf of the other folded horizontal – making a characteristic upside-down ‘4’: the signature shape of the Hangman tarot card. Natalie thought of Josie at the Silicon Bean café – her shoulder tattoo. She couldn’t help wonder whether the likes of Josie were already avid players of MultiQuest. Her red, black and blue skin art had looked recent. But Natalie needed to keep her head in the game now.

  Tolemy arrived and set down his standard. “I’m afraid to say,” he breathed hard, “that this arrangement has a particular meaning in these lands, and an inauspicious one at that: as a harbinger of darkness, and doom.” His words dripped disapproval. “It’s acquired almost cult-like status.”

  The three riders climbed up on to the plateau, a wide expanse of grassland. The wind made a continuous low whistle, occasionally ascending to a high-pitched wail. Directly in front of them was a semi-circle of pavilions, brilliantly colored – in scarlets and lime-greens – yet utterly wrecked, the high gusts ripping through the tattered remnants.

  Brastias turned his horse to face hers while Tolemy attended to something.

  “We need to talk about Rage,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who he is we’re not exactly sure. Sightings have been rare and perhaps apocryphal at that. What we do know is that he came from the east by south-east, and that he’s been making his way west ever since. That he’s known first-and-foremost by his wake – of murder and plunder. We also know that among his entourage are various beasts of prey: this here being the work of a pride of lions, let loose.” He looked at her knowingly.

  She now understood the primary villain’s identity in the game, and the parallel with Vogel’s death. But was Rage really another player – or a ‘non-player character’, i.e. one operated by the game itself?

  They circled the scene, remaining mounted and vigilant. Various men lay fallen. Tolemy was attending to one in particular.

  “John de Monfrey,” Brastias said. “Le roi père, or father king. One of the regional successor kings chosen by Arthur himself, and a patron of our Order.”

  Tolemy had reconstituted the body, laying him out in chain mail, visor closed and palm of right hand rested on heart. For some unexpected reason, she thought of her dad’s death, or disappearance. Her chest became heavy and, feeling her eyes well, she walked her horse forward a few strides.

  Between two torn-apart pavilions was another figure: a young woman, kneeling – with hands and feet bound. The catch in Natalie’s throat was checked by something else: a tumbling sensation inside. For the young woman had been beheaded.

  “You see why I needed to bring you here? Why your protection is so important?” Brastias said, rejoining her.

  “What were these people doing up here anyway?” she managed.

  “Preparing for a tourney.”

  She nodded, as though at some destiny she was powerless to avert. “I’ve seen enough,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Tolemy finished his pre-funeral benedictions, rising slowly from where John de Monfrey lay slain. Then they spurred their horses and galloped back down, re-entering the walled village shortly before nightfall.

  CHAPTER 24

  Tom Nguyen had still not returned her calls from Friday night. There wasn’t much point continuing her report till he did. She left the hotel to eat dinner in Chinatown and consider the week’s tumultuous events. The lengthy drives down to Sunnyvale and the Monterey Peninsular had afforded her some measure of reflection on what had taken place, but so much had happened now.

  It was almost impossible to take it all in. Since last Saturday: the strange Sunday strategy session in Sunnyvale presided over by Wisnold, the identity theft on Clamor and the revealing of the ‘Wu’ symbol up in Seattle, Malovich dead and his killer appearing on CCTV behind the Silicon Bean, Vogel’s own extraordinary death at his property in Monterey, the time she felt watched in the Clamor offices, the even spookier night at home with Towse at the top of Pacific Heights… and then there was MultiQuest, this Rage character and the killings there – not to mention an armourer who happened to be an FBI Agent who’d just handed her a gun! “So how was your week?” she imagined calling Stacey or Melinda in Seattle. Her life was heading in a new, unreal trajectory. Or maybe it had a logic of its own?

  She just needed time to think.

  For Sunday turned out to be no day of rest. Cindy Bayley woke her at 7:30am asking her to breakfast, pulling up at the Keaton not twenty minutes later, with Brastias, or rather Adam Lau, in the passenger seat. Natalie jumped in the back and Cindy’s bright blue eyes met hers.

  “Well ain’t your Sunday morning just got a whole lot better honey,” said Cindy. “Coffee an’ eggs-over-easy, on the Feebies.”

  And with that, Cindy navigated her Yukon into the light, northbound traffic on Grant.

  Cindy explained in rather cryptic fashion how they were in town following a tip off from another law enforcement agency: for health-related reasons, they may have to go in and rescue a group of smuggled girls approaching their destination point. Right here in the city. Cindy said she’d been hoping to maintain surveillance for longer, to cast the net wider in preparation for a
larger, more coordinated bust. It all sounded rather vague and disjointed but the intelligence gathered suggested the destination for the girls was nearby, so they couldn’t stray far.

  Cindy knew of a good local diner in neighboring North Beach. The two agents seemed remarkably relaxed, considering. Perhaps it was their way of dealing with the limitless intrusions of work. The cold front had lingered over the city. Large raindrops still fell, but intermittently, the car’s moisture-sensitive wipers only occasionally reacting. Adam resumed a briefing about the events in MultiQuest, and the character called Rage:

  “Sometimes these characters turn out to be NPCs,” he was telling Cindy.

  “NPCs?”

  “Non Player Characters, controlled by the software of the game itself. As opposed to a human player, that is. But the consensus view among the gamers I’ve talked to is that he’s a Player Character alright. If we could get his account details from the game company, or his ISP – and any related email correspondence, we could crack this case wide open.”

  “That’s a toughie,” Cindy said. “Proving probable cause to a judge, based on events in some virtual world?”

  He said: “Do we need to wait for a beheading to demonstrate probable cause? A high status individual called John was killed by a bunch of lions, at the instigation of a character called Rage.” He let that hang there.

  Cindy was silent for a second, then said: “OK, lemme see what I can do.” She turned her attention back to Natalie.

  “We got something to show ya, girlfriend,” and she nodded to Adam, who passed back a piece of paper. “We found this among Malovich’s papers. Scribbled along the bottom of a power point presentation.”

  “Let’s go round clockwise,” Cindy said, keeping her eyes on Grant and the festooned stores of Chinatown. “Starting at seven o’clock: the ‘fifty one percent’ circled, annotated ‘Clamor’ – we’re guessing the goal of whatever’s going on here is majority control. Adding up all the percentages above gets you to fifty one.”

  “From left to right, “ Adam took over: “the thirty nine percent we assume to be Wisnold’s.”

  “Why Wisnold’s?” Natalie said.

  He shrugged. “Only he, as founder, would have such a large stake.”

  “Not true,” Natalie said. “Jon Vogel also had around forty percent of the company.” But it got her thinking, about Ben’s account of his meeting with Wisnold and Swaine, and the young CEO’s apparent urge for control.

  “OK,” Adam said, correcting his copy.

  “I know Malovich had five percent,” Natalie said, reading across the row.

  “What about the one per cent?” Adam asked.

  “Could have been any number of people,” Natalie said.

  “Nancy Wu?” Cindy asked.

  Natalie wondered why Nancy. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I could make a call.”

  “That’s OK, we’ll handle it. We just wanted to get some extra context before firing off questions. The six percent,” she resumed, “making up the fifty-one total: this seems to go with an entity called Multiworld. You ever heard of that?”

  “The investment bank handling the IPO was trying to find that out too. They were having a hell of a time doing so. Apparently certain disclosure forms, I forget which, were never filled out when this Multiworld entity invested. The bankers even tried calling the Aruba Chamber of Commerce to see if they knew.”

  “Aruba, huh. And did they?”

  “I don’t know.” Natalie looked over the names on the right hand side of the sheet, recognizing ‘Surefar’ – Surefar Enjoy of course being the password-protected website she’d accessed from the illicit Clamor profiles. Then she remembered Cindy’s previous comments about organized crime in the Bay Area – the escort and prostitution rings, the ‘daisy chains’ handling the cash and the mysterious ‘burn’ companies thwarting investigative efforts. Perhaps only now was the puzzle being solved. But how, she wasn’t clear.

  And something struck her as odd: “If it is Malovich’s five per cent shown here, his death means that this no longer sums to fifty-one. His options go away, raising everyone else’s stake by five per cent, but that would only get you to forty eight point something – not enough for majority control.” There seemed to be other questions they were overlooking, but Natalie couldn’t quite think which. She said: “Maybe Yuri wasn’t directly involved, but it was enough that he suspected something to get himself killed.”

  “How would the killer have known though – that Malovich knew, when this sheet lay buried in a pile of papers behind his desk?” Adam asked.

  “We don’t know,” Cindy said. “Maybe he mentioned his suspicions to someone.”

  Natalie looked at the right hand side again – the arrows and dollar signs pointing back to Multiworld. If it meant that these organizations were funding Multiworld’s acquisition of stakes in Clamor, then the sums involved would have needed to be large. Was that possible? Was that what Malovich had suspected? The question mark he’d written alongside seemed to suggest that he didn’t know either.

  “What are ‘LLA’ and ‘Sayonara’?” Natalie asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Cindy said matter-of-factly. “We can’t tell you as much as we’d like to.”

  They were getting snarled up in traffic, trying to drop down to the North Beach section of Columbus Avenue. Natalie knew what Surefar Enjoy was. And wasn’t Sayonara an old war movie about some marriage between a serviceman and a Japanese girl – in Korea? It seemed to fit a pattern. “But if these organizations are doing what I strongly suspect them of doing, why can’t you close them down anyway?” Natalie said.

  Cindy bristled. “Trafficking – primarily of young women – is the third biggest illicit industry in the world. Yet compared to arms control or the War on Drugs, the policing of sex trafficking is still in the stone age. Now why is that? Maybe because at the end of the day, sex trafficking is driven by prostitution, which in turn is fed by porn, and the majority of men – cops, medics and judges included – are users, one way or another.”

  Outside, the cause of the traffic hold-up became clear: whistles and percussive chaos surrounded them as a banner went past announcing ‘North Beach Gay Pride Day – Find us on Clamor.us’.

  “But if the supply was shut down?” Natalie said, looking back down at the sheet.

  “Oh honey, let me put this in context. Korea. A country the size of Indiana, with an estimated 330,000 sex workers, 80,000 brothels and 70 red light districts. Porn and prostitution contribute twenty billion bucks to its GDP – more than electricity and gas combined!” Cindy was drumming her fingernails on the steering wheel. The march moved past them slowly, horns and yells rising above the rattle and din. Having given up on breakfast in North Beach, Cindy was trying to get back to Columbus southbound, supposedly still open to traffic.

  “Then what? What can be done?” asked Natalie, sensing Cindy’s deeper despair.

  “Criminalize the purchase of sex services, right here in the US. Like Sweden has. Move the risk and responsibility back onto the johns, where it belongs!”

  “Sex services including pornography?”

  A large man went past dressed entirely in black leather, complete with peaked cap. He was pushing himself along on a pink bicycle. He looked to be having fun with it, the parody of it all. He waved at them. Adam narrowed his gaze quizzically. His lapel was crackling…

  “10-4,” he replied, then to Cindy: “ICE has the address, half-a block from Mission. Mission and Sixth. They want to go in.” So Immigration and Customs Enforcement was handling the operation.

  “When?” Cindy asked.

  “Right now.”

  “Shit, thanks a bunch guys,” she said, using her horn, to no avail: it merely blended in with the carnivalesque chaos. She reached beneath the steering column for a fuzz light and thrust it on the roof, flipping the siren on. It was absolutely deafening, immediately parting the nearside of Columbus. To the crowd’s surprise and catcalls, they roared through,
soon joining Market, speeding down to Mission – Adam checking the magazine and action of his weapon as they went. Things seemed to happen faster than Natalie could process. There was a series of radio exchanges, the car nosed into a narrow alleyway, accelerated frighteningly then sluthered to a halt on wet cardboard behind a black sports utility vehicle and an ageing container vehicle open at the rear. Doors flew open. Adam turned to Natalie and raised his left palm like he was stopping traffic: Stay Here, then the assembled group of agents disappeared down a passageway between the two buildings. She saw Adam pull back the slide of his Glock; she glimpsed the white letters ‘I’, ‘C’, ‘E’ emblazoned across broad shoulders of navy-blue windcheaters, glowing strangely in the gloom.

  Then all was quiet. No gunshots. No great drama. The loud drone and dull thud of a chopper hovering, a common enough sound. Just another Sunday morning in the city. A smell emanated from the rear opening of that container: in the enclosed alleyway, it was like a garbage truck that hadn’t been emptied, ever.

  She reached forward and closed the Yukon’s front doors.

  Time ticked on: ten, twenty minutes.

  Two ICE agents came out the passageway, walked past the car: “– younger all the time,” she could hear one of them saying. Then Adam reappeared, waving her back.

  “Did you get anyone?” she asked.

  “The Dragon, as he’s known in these parts: Dragan Voransky, a 34 year old Armenian. Your garden-variety, street level pimp. He won’t talk, and he’ll probably be back at it within two years.”

  The passageway was strewn with busted furniture, rotting garbage and broken glass, which the other agents stepped into to let them pass. At the far end, in a musty alcove formed by a rusted water-heater and a huge fan, trembled a huddle of young girls, wearing soiled lingerie, none of them even in their teens from what Natalie could tell. One of them had a badly cut foot. An agent was tending to the gathering mess of crimson.