Having finished his preparations, Abdul-Wahaab made one last orbit around the big SUV, inspecting his work, then reached into the open driver’s-side door. Zula heard a distant thunk as he released the parking brake. The Suburban began to roll forward down the ramp. He walked, then ran alongside, keeping his right hand on the steering wheel, then peeled away from it just before it nosed into the water. It lost most of its velocity in the first few yards, plashing up a concentric wave that spread out into the lake, but it never stopped moving. Air burbled up out of the engine compartment. It slid forward into the lake, instantly filling with water, and disappeared, leaving a trail of bubbles that slowly moved away from shore as the vehicle found its way down to the lake bottom. The terrain all around was rocky and steep, and Zula had no doubt that the bottom dropped away precipitously beyond the end of the paved ferry-ramp. The lake must be a hundred meters deep, and the Suburban would come to rest at the very bottom of it.
Jones pulled out of the maintenance yard and got the RV pointed uphill. Abdul-Wahaab stormed in through the side door to accept the enthusiastic congratulations and prayerful thanks of his colleagues. Abdallah Jones steered the RV out onto the open highway, turned on the headlamps, and proceeded in some random direction at, Zula guessed, a speed well within the posted limits.
Day 10
“I mean, did you see what happened to those three thousand K’Shetriae, beginning of this week?” Richard asked.
Skeletor quickly averted his gaze and pretended to study the pattern of the red Formica tabletop.
Richard continued, “The ones who tried to go in and establish some kind of order in the Torgai Foothills?”
“I know the ones you’re talking about.” Devin Skraelin shook his head and gazed moodily out the window of the trailer. Apparently as a result of Richard’s ducking into this place a week ago, fleeing from Devin’s staff like a camper trying to get in out of the mosquitoes, it had now become the unofficial Dodge/Skeletor meeting place, a Reykjavik or a Panmunjom. It had only been a week since that meeting, and yet it seemed a lot longer. Hell, it seemed to have happened in some parallel universe. The universe in which Zula had not yet disappeared.
“I was there for some of it,” Devin said, snapping Richard’s mind back—if not to reality, then from reality. “Just hovering, invisible.” He wanted Richard to understand that he had not wielded any of his characters’ superamazing powers to sway the battle. “It was carnage, no doubt about it. Not what we—what they—expected.”
“You can say ‘we,’” Richard said quickly. He held up his hands, palms out. “I am so far past the point of thinking that the writers have to be these, like, neutral, dispassionate forces in the world.”
Skeletor was nodding, like he’d been wondering for years when Richard was finally going to get it. “It just doesn’t work,” he said. “We already talked about Good versus Evil and how that failed.”
“Totally ridiculous,” Richard said, as if it were some huge admission. “Just a weak effort on our part. ‘How can we get two groups fighting, competing? I know, we’ll have one group be Good and one Evil.’ Exactly the kind of thing you’d expect to come out of a corporate committee.”
Skeletor was just nodding, still mostly gazing out the window but occasionally flicking his eyes back Richard’s way, perhaps looking for signs of sarcasm.
“We should have just left it to you guys,” Richard concluded.
“The way I see it, it’s really a sport,” Devin said. “Maybe not like soccer, but like some combination of fencing and chess. Now, it has to be story driven, of course.” He held up his hand like a pupil volunteering to erase the chalkboard. “Happy to help out there.”
In exchange for vast sums of money, Richard mentally added. But he just kept nodding. Looking interested. As if there were any doubt as to what would come next.
Devin continued, “But in the end if you don’t have that competitive element, you’ve got nothing, business-wise. And for those who want solo questing and one-on-one competition, it’s there. You can do that. But the real attraction is in the team sport angle, the social thing. Being part of an army. An alliance.”
“Wearing a uniform,” Richard said. “Having a mascot.”
“Yeah, and that is what the Bright versus Earthtone thing turned into. Whether we intended it or not.” Devin was being a bit slippery there. A week ago Richard would have been furious at his treachery, at this blithe admission. Devin might even have sensed this, the potential for an explosion, and declined to reveal what he had just now come out and said so baldly. Now he’d said it because he could sense somehow that Richard didn’t actually give a shit. Richard had moved on.
“I just came from Cambridge,” Richard said.
“Mass?”
“England. Where Donald lives half the time.”
“Ah.”
“I want you to know that he’s fine with all of this.”
It seemed pretty clear that Devin had not been expecting this turn in the conversation, and he got a preoccupied look about him.
“He’s a quick study. You think I’m joking. But no. For a guy who has never played a video game in his life—”
“Donald Cameron has his own character in the world now!?” Skeletor exclaimed, in somewhat the same tone of voice as a tribune might have said, Hannibal has crossed the Alps with elephants!?
“Very weak, of course,” Richard said reassuringly. “Didn’t even have shoes, for a while.”
“I don’t care about what he’s wearing on his feet! I care about his—”
“Vassal tree? Yes. I understand. He’s not quite as quick to get going on that front as you’d imagine. Still learning the ropes. I explained how it all works. He was reluctant to swear fealty to a more established character.”
“Why the hell should he!? With a few text messages he could be an Emperor!”
“If he knew how to send text messages, yes.”
“How many vassals does he have? Are they powerful?”
“I haven’t checked since the FBO at Cranfield.”
“The huh?”
“In about ten hours. So I have no idea.”
“Why would he suddenly start? Why now?”
“Between you and me—and really, Devin, this must never leave this trailer—” Richard leaned in, held up his hands, rubbed his thumb against his fingertips.
“How could he possibly be in need of money?”
“Have you ever paid taxes in the U. K.? Tried to fix up a sandstone castle on the Isle of Man? Not to mention his other properties.” Richard just made the last part up.
“What other properties?”
“Palaces and stuff he inherited, I guess. I’m just saying, he looks like a tattered old professor, but behind that façade he burns through specie like a rap star.”
Devin was thinking. “You’re referring to the money in Torgai. Vast hoards of gold rumored to be just lying there for the taking.”
“Don’t be coy, man; we all know what those three thousand K’Shetriae were thinking. No one is going into the Torgai for its scenic beauty.”
“It is so obvious,” Devin marveled. “So. Friggin’. Obvious. He never cared about playing the game until there was money on the ground. Never went in once. Just wanted to”—and here Devin held his hands aloft and made fluttering motions with his fingers, like an airborne faerie sprinkling dew over rose petals—“craft ancient dead languages. Imbue the history of T’Rain with a grammar and a rhetoric.”
“And cash royalty checks.”
“Egg-ZACT-ly!” Devin snapped, looking around himself in a kind of shocked, prim way, as if he had never accepted one penny of compensation. “But the minute some Troll dumps a few tons of gold on the ground, he gets an account and turns into Ozzy Fucking Mandias.”
Richard’s instincts told him that, having gotten Skeletor into this state, the most effective way to keep him there would be to show exaggerated nonchalance. “Now, Devin,” he said in a perfectly reasonable tone, �
�you said yourself that it was a team sport. And part of being on a team is having a captain or a pope or what have you.”
“I’ve had characters in the game since the beginning,” Devin said righteously. “Over a hundred of them.”
“So the database says,” Richard said.
“Now I won’t sit here and try to tell you that no one has ever sworn fealty to me. I run vassal networks, sure. Sometimes maybe three deep. You can’t understand the workings of the game unless you’ve played it at that level.”
Richard just kept nodding, raising his eyebrows from time to time in an I’m with you, buddy sort of effort.
“I could be seven deep!” Devin said. “Could have been years ago!” Meaning that his hierarchy of vassals would be seven tiers deep, enough to give him tens of millions of followers. Only one player in the game had ever gotten to that level. Richard had been just hours away from sending Egdod down to liquidate him when the player had choked on a bite of wurst, alone before his monitor screen in Ostheim vor der Rhön, no one around to give him a Heimlich.
“I know that about you, Devin, and I do think it’s testimony to your, if I may say, midwestern sense of plain dealing and self-effacement that you have showed such restraint. Of course, one of the problems with us midwesterners is that—”
“We just let people run roughshod over us, yeah, I know that,” Devin said, with an involuntary flick of the eyes toward his steel building full of lawyers.
“Well,” Richard said, after a longish pause, “I don’t want to keep you from your training schedule.”
“S’okay, my doctor’s after me to ease up a little.”
“I’m actually on my way up to visit the family, but it seemed only fair to stop by and fill you in a little on my conversation with the Don.”
“Appreciate it,” Devin muttered, and then his eyes refocused. “Yeah, I heard you had some trouble with your niece?”
“Am still having it, actually.”
“She hasn’t turned up yet?”
Richard had vague misgivings about this phrasing, since it seemed to imply that Zula had some choice in the matter. He wondered how many other people were assuming that Zula had just decided to go on the lam and put her family through the torments of hell just because.
“Whatever trouble she’s in,” Richard said, “does not seem to have resolved.”
“Well. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Devin offered.
Richard couldn’t think of a polite way to say, You’re about to go do it, and so he just nodded.
AFTER DITCHING THE Suburban, they drove for three hours. Zula reckoned that they would be heading for the hills, but instead they entered into some place whose roads were equipped, in standard-issue North American style, with streetlamps, convenience stores, and stoplights. After cruising through that sort of environment for about fifteen minutes, Jones swung the wheel and trundled the giant vehicle into a vast parking lot. A neon-lit Walmart logo careered across the windshield. Jones pulled into a parking space, or rather a series of several consecutive spaces, and shut off the engine. After taking a last searching look around the parking lot, he reached up and jerked a curtain across the entire eight-foot expanse of the windshield, affording him and his coconspirators privacy.
Earlier in the evening, Ershut and Abdul-Wahaab had been given the assignment to chain Zula by her ankle to the grab bar in the shower stall. Like so many of the routine chores that filled the day-to-day lives of this roving band of terrorists, this one had occasioned a huge amount of what sounded to an Iowan like violent argument. Ninety percent of this had focused on the mysterious padlock that they had found locked to the last link of the chain. No one seemed to know where it had come from. This, of course, was because Zula had put it there when none of them had been looking. But as she had been hoping, they never cottoned on to it. Jones, becoming annoyed by the sheer volume of their debate, had glanced at it and, after a few moments, identified it as the lock that had formerly belonged to the toolbox from the stolen truck. Rummaging around in the external pocket of a knapsack, he had found that truck’s key chain and thrown it to Ershut, who, after a few minutes’ trial and error (for it had a lot of keys on it) had managed to get the new lock open. He had then used it to fix that end of the chain to the shower stall grab bar and pocketed the key—which, quite naturally, he’d assumed was the only key. The next and final phase of the operation had been to adjust the length of the chain around Zula’s ankle, giving her enough slack that she could get to the toilet, or retreat into the bedroom and curl up on the floor, but not enough to climb up on the bed; for that would have put her within reach of the windows. For this they used the padlock for which Zula didn’t have a spare key.
When it had become obvious that she was going to be kept in this situation for a long time, she had raked blankets and pillows down from the bed and formed a little nest on the floor where she had dozed during the drive. The RV was capable of sleeping at least half a dozen when all of its seats and benches had been folded down and turned into beds, and all the jihadists except for Jones had found places to lie down and were sawing logs, refreshing themselves after a long day of cold-blooded murder and aimless driving around. Curled up in her nest in the back, Zula gazed down a forty-foot-long tunnel to the other end where Jones had pivoted the driver’s seat around to face backward and set a laptop across his knees. Its blue-white light illuminated his face, turning it into a constrasty and off-color mask. No sleeping for him, at least not yet.
She would have been mystified by his decision to park in a Walmart were it not for the fact that her great-aunt and great-uncle, based out of Yankton, South Dakota, were inveterate RVers, forever showing slides and telling stories of their wanderings at the re-u, and she knew from them that Walmart had a policy of rolling out the welcome mat for such people, even to the point of distributing the company’s own rebranded version of the Rand McNally Road Atlas on which the locations of all Walmarts were highlighted. It was a near certainty that a copy of that very document was lodged in the console up next to Jones where this vehicle’s late owners had been in the habit of repositing all such items. Jones, of course, would not know this. But he seemed nothing if not adaptable. It might be that this was a spur-of-the-moment decision: he had blundered into this central British Columbian town, happened to drive by their Walmart, noticed that the only vehicles in the parking lot were overnighting RVs, and decided to adopt a “when in Rome” strategy. Or, what was more likely, he had spent a while interrogating the former owners at gun- or knifepoint before slaying them, had learned about their habits, rifled their wallets, extracted their PIN numbers and passwords by making false promises that he would not harm them.
The laptop was not the same computer that Sharif had been using on the jet. This one was part of the haul of random consumer booty that had fallen into Jones’s hands along with the RV. Jones had evidently been able to obtain a Wi-Fi connection from the Walmart, since he was mostly just mousing and clicking: classic web-surfing behavior. There was a fine moment of comedy when he apparently clicked his way onto the website of some casino in Vegas, and the voice of Frank Sinatra boomed out of the computer’s speakers, stirring a couple of the men half awake before Jones found the volume control and stifled it.
Again the strange fixation on Vegas. So Jones was finally getting down to business. Based on the conversation she had overheard in Xiamen, she had a pretty good idea of his plan: go into a big entertainment complex in Sin City and kill as many people as possible, similar to what those Pakistani terrorists had done in the luxury hotels and railway station of Mumbai. The tricky bit being to get himself, his comrades-in-arms, and his stash of weapons across the U.S. border. Not that you couldn’t buy weapons in the States, but she had witnessed enough loadings and unloadings of their gear, by this point, to have a rough idea of their inventory, and she thought that they had with them certain items like fully automatic weapons and hand grenades that would be difficult to buy even in the Swee
t Land of Liberty.
Jones went through a phase of rebooting the laptop several times consecutively, which made her think that he must have downloaded and installed some new software. An obvious guess was that he was rigging the machine in such a way that he could communicate secretly with his fellow jihadists.
The inherently soporific nature of software installation had its way with her, and she closed her eyes and then opened them to find that it was daytime.
Jones had fallen asleep right where he had been sitting, and Abdul-Wahaab was now hogging the laptop. Ershut was up cooking something steamy on the stove; her nose told her it was rice. Presently, some of this was served up to her in a plastic bowl decorated with pastel flowers. She wondered if these guys understood that they were a couple of hundred feet away from a grocery store that was probably a hundred times the size of the largest one they had ever seen in their lives.
As she was eating her rice, a car pulled up and parked next to them, causing the men to twitch curtains and peer out. They looked apprehensive and made reaching-for-weapons gestures, then their expressions became delighted. Mahir began shouting about how great Allah was. This woke up Jones, who took stock of the situation and told everyone to shut up. He pushed himself up out of the big captain’s chair, tottered down the steps on stiff legs, and unlocked and opened the door. Then he backed up so that three men could enter the RV. They had beards and huge grins. Jones shushed them and insisted that the door be hove to and relocked.
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