“Motherfucker!” Csongor exclaimed.
Yuxia turned around slowly and looked at him. “Fate has given us a totally awesome foe,” she observed.
“Then we should do something totally awesome to him,” Csongor suggested. “In a bad way.”
“Not so easy, from the pervert capital of the world.”
She said it loudly. Faces bobbed up and popped around the edges of various computer monitors around the café, but Yuxia took no note of them. She had turned back to face the computer. Taking in some of Jones’s exploits, his death statistics, she shook her head convulsively. “This guy really sucks ass.”
“But you knew that,” Csongor said.
“No foolin’.”
RICHARD MADE NO friends during his drive through Elphinstone; but the dirty little secret of Canadians was that they drove like maniacs, so his speeding and light-running were not so far out of the norm as they might have been south of the border. The road that ran up the valley toward the Schloss had, in recent years, become a vector for sprawl and was now lined by the sorts of businesses that were excluded from the middle of town by its famously prim historic-preservation fatwa. But at the end of the day, Elphinstone wasn’t that big and could only support so many car dealerships and Tim Hortons, and so this kind of development petered out in the dead zone around the abandoned lumber mill. Beyond that the road funneled to two lanes and angled upward, then, a few miles later, began to wind like a snake and buck like a mule.
So it was inevitable that he would close in on the tail of a gigantic RV no more than thirty seconds after he’d reached that part of the road beyond which passing was completely out of the question. It was not quite the size of a semi. It had Utah plates. It needed a trip through the RV wash. Its back end was freckled with the usual bumper stickers about spending the grandchildren’s inheritance. And it was going all of about thirty miles an hour. Richard slammed on the brakes, turned on his headlights just to make it obvious he was there, and backed off to the point where he could see the rearview mirrors. Then he cursed the Internet. This sort of thing had never used to happen, because the road didn’t really lead anywhere; beyond the Schloss, it reverted to gravel and struggled around a few more bends to an abandoned mining camp a couple of miles beyond, where the only thing motorists could do was turn around in a wide spot and come back out again. But geocachers had been at work planting Tupperware containers and ammo boxes of random knickknacks in tree forks and under rocks in the vicinity of that turnaround, and people kept visiting those sites and leaving their droppings on the Internet, making cheerful remarks about the nice view, the lack of crowds, and the availability of huckleberries. Normally Richard and the Schloss’s other habitués would have at least another month of clear driving before those people began to show up, but these RVers had apparently decided to get a jump on the tourist season and be the first geocachers of the year to make it to the sites in question.
Richard allowed a decent interval of perhaps thirty seconds to pass, then laid on the horn, and kept laying it on until, less than a minute later, to his pleasant surprise, the RV’s brake lights came on and it eased its right wheels over onto the road’s meager shoulder at a place where it was only a little dangerous for him to pass. Not that anyone was ever coming the other way; but Richard had been taught the rudiments of passing in Iowa, where if you could not see an open lane all the way to the horizon, you bided your time. He barreled past the RV, and he would have rolled the window down and given the driver a friendly wave if he hadn’t been preoccupied. As it happened, he did not even look back at it; its driver was ensconced about thirty feet off the ground, and it was difficult to see into its bridge from where Richard was sitting.
Fifteen minutes later he was at the Schloss. He was feeling a powerful urge to get on the computer right away, but he figured he might be busy for a while, so he decided to get his affairs in order first. In normal times, he’d have done this in his private apartment, but this was the middle of Mud Month and no one was here. So he decided to make himself comfortable in the tavern, which had a huge screen that could be connected to a computer. Since the machine had been rigged up for use during Corporation 9592 retreats, it was powerful, fully up-to-date, connected to the Internet by a fat pipe, and assiduously maintained, from Seattle, by the IT department. Its audio outputs were plumbed into the tavern’s excellent sound system, and the seating in front of it consisted of very comfortable leather recliners and sofas. Richard raided the kitchen and stockpiled a few thousand calories’ worth of snacks and soft drinks, sending the Furious Muses into Condition Red. In his apartment he could have placated them by walking on the treadmill while playing, but the tavern was not so equipped. He deployed his laptop on a side table and got it hooked up to its charger. He made a last trip to the toilet. On his way out, he noticed a bucket that had been left under the counter by Chet or someone while tidying the place. Following an old instinct, he snatched this up and took it into the tavern with him, setting it next to the place where he would be playing. It had been a long time since he had played a game with such commitment that he needed to pee into a receptacle, and it might very well be overkill here. But he was alone in the Schloss, no one would ever know, he was a man in his fifties, and there were a lot of caffeinated beverages within easy reach.
He turned everything on and booted T’Rain. While it was starting up, he noticed an annoying gleam of window light on the screen and went over to drop the wooden blinds. Then, just for good measure, he went all around the room and dropped the blinds on all the windows. For the sun might have the bad manners to move around and shine in from other directions. As he was finishing, movement caught his eye outside, and he noticed the RV he’d passed earlier, creeping up the road, slowing down even more so that its occupants could admire a roadside view of the Schloss. He gave it the evil eye, trying to use some kind of ESP to tell them to get lost. Sometimes such people would come up the drive and want to enter the place and use the facilities. Richard didn’t care as long as staff were in the place to deal with them, but he could see it getting unpleasant in a hurry if affable, retired RVers with vast amounts of time on their hands managed to get a foot in the door. To his relief, the giant vehicle picked up speed, leaving the Schloss’s driveway behind.
“I’m strapping in,” he announced to Corvallis over a Bluetooth earpiece that he had just worried into the side of his head. He slammed down into a leather sofa, glanced around to be sure that all he might need was within arm’s reach, and pulled the wireless keyboard onto his lap.
“He’s still there,” C-plus answered, “assembling a war band.”
“How many so far?” Richard asked. But Corvallis’s answer, if there was one, was drowned out by a cataract of awesome fanfares, kettledrum solos, pipe organ chords, and pseudo-Gregorian chanting emerging from subwoofers, tweeters, flat-panel speakers, and other noise-making technologies arrayed all about Richard.
“I take it,” Corvallis finally said, when it seemed safe to crawl out from under his desk in Seattle, “that you are logging on as Egdod.”
“If ever there was a time…”
“You know that if the Troll gets the slightest hint that Egdod even knows of his existence…”
“Egdod isn’t even going to pick his nose until he has surrounded himself with every disguise and cloaking device known to our servers.”
“He’s really smart. And fast. I’ve watched him take down a few wandering bad guys. And the kids in his posse are every bit as formidable.”
“Ever make a raccoon trap?”
“No,” C-plus said. “I was told they carried rabies, and I couldn’t see why it would be desirable to catch one.”
“You drill a hole into a tree stump, or something, big enough to admit the raccoon’s hand. But you drive some nails in around the edge of the hole and bend their heads inward so that he has to thread his little paw between them to get it into the hole. Then you leave a piece of bait in the hole. The raccoon insinuates his
hand into this thing and grabs the bait. But he can’t pull his hand out between the nails unless he lets go of it. He ends up trapped by his refusal to let go, you see.”
“Have you ever actually done that? I mean, I know you had a very rural childhood and everything, but…”
“Of course not,” Richard scoffed. “What the hell was I going to do with a rabid animal welded to a tree stump?”
“That’s why I was asking…”
“It probably doesn’t even work. It’s just a metaphor.” But Richard did not follow up on this statement because he had become rather preoccupied with setting up the many layers of shields and disguises and wards that Egdod needed in order to venture out of the house.
“So,” Corvallis finally said, “the application of the metaphor, I’m guessing, is as follows. Right now the Troll could log out and lose nothing. He’s like a raccoon who hasn’t put his hand into the stump yet. But it looks like he’s fixing to go out with his posse and Find and unHide a lot of the gold they’ve stashed around the Torgai. Then he’ll try to carry it out to a moneychanger. At that point, he’s like a raccoon who has grabbed the bait. If you attack him and he gets killed, or just logs out, he doesn’t get the money he needs.”
“You got it,” Richard said. “And so it’s at that moment that I’ll try to pin this little prick down for a minute and have a conversation with him.”
CSONGOR HAD ALWAYS done his best thinking while pacing irritably back and forth: a trait that probably explained why he had not performed up to his full potential in traditional academic settings. It served him well now. What Marlon was doing was fascinating. More for its intricacy, and for Marlon’s fierce attention to its microscopic details, than for what was actually happening on the screen. For Reamde had not moved more than a few virtual paces from the cave exit. In a way, Csongor could not take his eyes off it, but in another way he could not stand to watch for more than a minute or two at a time, and this led to pacing.
The other computer, the one with the clean Linux install and the anonymized Net connection, was five steps away. Csongor kept wandering back to it. Yuxia seemed to have established some kind of chat-room connection to someone she knew back in China and was carrying on a sporadic exchange of messages. This relieved a huge emotional burden she’d been carrying ever since the beginning of their adventure. But there was a lot of downtime during which she was able to surf the web for information on Abdallah Jones and (as her investigation continued, and she developed leads) Zula Forthrast and Richard Forthrast and, for that matter, Csongor himself and Csongor’s brother in L.A. She had probably never used an Internet connection that was not hobbled by the Great Firewall, and she was already finding it addictive.
Csongor almost had to resort to impoliteness to get her to relinquish the machine for a few minutes. Then he carried out some Google searches, looking for pages that contained both “Zula” and “Abdallah Jones.” He pulled up a few pages about terrorism in the Horn of Africa, making reference to the Red Sea bay and the Eritrean port after which Zula had been named, but nothing about Zula Forthrast.
So nothing had happened. No information had made it out into the public sphere yet that established any link between those two names. He tried Jones’s name in connection with Xiamen and found nothing. With Yuxia’s help he was able to find some news stories in the Chinese media about a gas explosion and a failed terrorist attack that had taken place in Xiamen on the morning in question, but none of these made any reference to Jones or Zula or any of the other people Csongor knew to have been involved. So there had been some sort of totally effective clampdown on news.
“A FLARE JUST went up,” said a familiar voice on the phone.
Olivia recognized him, after a moment’s disorientation, as “Uncle Meng,” presumably calling from London.
She was disoriented because she had been talking to Mounties in Vancouver and hadn’t expected London calling.
“Hello?”
“I’m here. Sorry,” Olivia said. “What sort of flare?”
“We have a new actor in the GWOJ,” said Uncle Meng, who had adopted Seamus Costello’s acronym for the struggle in which they all—MI6, FBI, Mounties, the Forthrast family—were jointly engaged.
“What’s the new actor doing?”
“Google searches linking names like Zula with names like Abdallah Jones. Xiamen. Csongor.”
“Who the hell is Csongor?”
“I’ve no idea,” said Uncle Meng, “which makes me wonder whether this new actor has inadvertently identified himself.”
“Where is the new actor?”
“No idea,” said Uncle Meng. “Whoever he is, he is savvy about computer security, has set himself up with a clean and well-defended Linux installation of extremely recent vintage, is using some kind of hacker software to anonymize his packets. So we can’t guess where he might be.”
“Is anything showing up on public sites?”
“Not that we’ve noticed.”
“So the new actor isn’t blabbing.”
“No. Just fishing. Looking around to see if anyone else knows what he knows. And so far I would say that the answer is no.”
“Is there any action you would like me to take?” Olivia asked.
“You’ve already helped by letting me know you have no idea who Csongor is,” said Uncle Meng. “If I need anything else, I’ll let you know.” And he rang off, which was good since another call was coming in from a number that, judging by area code and prefix, was in the Vancouver offices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Her cross-border telephonic activities had been a sort of repeat, in miniature, of what she had gone through during her first day or two in the United States: starting with people whose names she knew and whose telephone numbers she had, obtaining other names and numbers, blindly groping through labyrinthine org charts until she actually managed to establish relationships with people who didn’t think she was crazy and to whom she could divulge a bit of sensitive information. In contrast to the United States, with its Tower of Babel–like security/intelligence apparatus, Canada offered a straightforward one-stop shopping arrangement in the form of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There was also an intelligence agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but when they had got wind of the sorts of questions Olivia was asking, they had simply referred her to the Mounties, who were better equipped to answer.
As she had hoped, this call was from one Inspector Fournier, whom everyone seemed to think was the man she really ought to be talking to. She excused herself from the room where she had been going over aerial photographs with FBI agents and wandered out into an empty office nearby, gazing out the window over the blue waters of Elliott Bay—for it was a perfect spring day, the sky was clear, the mountains were out—and staring at, without really seeing, containerships being jockeyed around at the port. After some polite chitchat with Inspector Fournier, she asked for, and received, permission to use up a quarter of an hour of his valuable time and launched into a summary of the SNAG theory and its possible relevance to Inspector Fournier’s sphere of responsibilities.
AFTER THE INITIAL spate of Google searching, Csongor went into a deep funk for a couple of hours. All during the desperate voyage of Szélanya he had been imagining that, if he could only get to a computer with an Internet connection, he’d be able to make things happen. In retrospect, it had not been a realistic assumption at all. But it had given him a reason to keep going through the occasional typhoon.
They had never really decompressed from the voyage. That was the problem. If they had beached Szélanya in an isolated cove and spent a little while eating coconuts and swimming in limpid waters, Csongor might now be psychologically ready to pivot into whatever the hell was going to happen to them next. But when Szélanya had ground to a halt, Csongor had allowed himself to relax for all of about thirty seconds—and during those thirty seconds, virtually all their money had been stolen. Since then it had been nonstop action; and now he was learning that hi
s precious Internet was completely useless in tracking down Zula.
He was taken by sleep as suddenly and as completely as a man being swept off a deck by a wave.
A FEW HOURS into the Troll hunt, Richard’s Bluetooth headset began to bleat out a pathetic low-battery warning. He severed the phone connection to Corvallis, which was becoming less and less useful as Richard got up to speed. Embedded in a complex of spells and disguises about twenty deep, he had made his way to the Torgai Foothills by actually flying there directly, eschewing the crowded ley line network, which would have forced him to emerge at a place where his character—or rather the disguised version of it—might be noticed. Here he was fighting certain ineluctable features of the rule system. He didn’t want it understood that Egdod was on the move, and so he had disguised himself as one Ur’Qat, a K’Shetriae warrior mage of much lesser powers—but still powerful enough to survive alone in the war-torn Torgai Foothills.
Another reasonable step might be to make himself invisible. Egdod was capable of putting up invisibility spells that almost no one in the game could penetrate. And yet there was always a small probability that such a spell might fail. This was one of the ways they kept the game interesting: low-level characters always had a chance to defeat high-level ones. Even an Egdod could be detected. Better to disguise himself first as the less powerful Ur’Qat, and then have Ur’Qat cast an invisibility spell. Any spell that Ur’Qat could cast would be much less puissant and hence much more likely to be penetrated than one of Egdod’s. So there was a good chance that when Ur’Qat rode the ley line into the Torgai, he’d be noticed, invisibility spell or no; and then he might be attacked outright or, what would probably be worse, be covertly followed as he went sneaking around after Reamde. And perhaps the person following him would be one of Reamde’s minions. Egdod could always get to the Torgai in a big hurry, if he decided that this was warranted; but all signs pointed to that Reamde was slowly and patiently effecting a battle plan that was going to stretch out over many hours. As long as that continued to be the case, Egdod would content himself with flying from his fortress to the Torgai. Even moving at supersonic velocity, this took a while. But during the flight, Richard had been able to refamiliarize himself with certain spells and magical items that might soon come in handy. And, at least until Richard’s Bluetooth headset had croaked, he’d been able to get updates from Corvallis and to learn something about the minions that Reamde was summoning from, it appeared, all over south China.
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