“So what? Let them kill each other.”
So they attempted to do the same thing, except this time they didn’t even make it past the first group of thieves. Again, though, their ambushers got ambushed.
Another potion-buying spree led to another attempt at the same location. This time—now that they knew something of the ambushers’ numbers and tactics—they dispatched the first group handily, and then retreated to a place where they would have a few minutes’ respite before the second group attacked them. And this time—because she knew what to watch for—Zula was distinctly able to see two separate groups converging on them: the bandits, and the bandit fighters. And her theory about the latter group was borne out when they focused all their fire on the bandits but left Zula’s and Wallace’s characters alone. One of them even cast a healing spell on Zula’s character when her health was beginning to run low.
But then they retreated into the woods with no explanation, no attempts to communicate.
“I get it,” Wallace finally said. “They work for the Troll.”
“Interesting,” Zula said.
“Their job is to help ransom carriers make it through.”
“Well,” said Zula, causing her character to mount up, “let’s make the most of it.”
And so began what they had expected to be an hour-long ride.
In practice, five hours of intense and difficult play got them most of the way there. The Torgai Foothills—which, only two weeks ago, had been some of the most desolate territory in all T’Rain—were tonight overrun by roving bands of characters Good and Evil, Bright and Earthtone. Every bit of open land was littered with skeletons of departed characters and infested by ransom thieves fighting pitched battles against hastily formed coalitions of ransom carriers. Zula and Wallace joined up with one such group that was carrying a total of eight thousand gold pieces. It was reduced to a quarter of that size by successive ambushes and then joined another coalition with ten members, which later split up because, as they belatedly found out, they were going to different places: apparently, different REAMDE files specified different coordinates. Everything was hard fought and required multiple scouting missions, feints, and probing attacks.
Zula was not a gamer. She avoided people who were (another reason she’d liked Peter). She’d fallen into the job at Corporation 9592 not out of any desire to work in that industry but because of the family connection and the accident of knowing how to do what Pluto wanted. The character she’d created in the world of T’Rain was her first personal exposure to this world, and it had taken some getting used to. She had learned to understand and appreciate the game’s addictive qualities without really being addicted herself. Devoting this much time—six hours and counting—to a game session was a new behavior for her. She was only doing it to extricate herself and Peter from this freak situation they had gotten into. She had assumed that it would take about fifteen minutes and that then she would go home and never see Peter again, never see Wallace again.
Now it was light outside. She’d been awake for twenty-four hours. There was something deeply wrong about the situation, and the only thing that had kept her from simply running out the door of the building and flagging down the first car she saw and asking them to call 911 was the addictive quality of the game itself, her own inability to pull herself out of the make-believe narrative that she and Wallace had found themselves in. She’d always scorned people who compulsively played these games when they should have been studying or exercising. Now she was playing the game when she should have been calling the cops. And yet none of this crossed her mind until Wallace’s phone began to emit a Klaxon alarm sound, and she looked up and noticed that it was daytime, that her bladder was about to explode, and that Peter was asleep on the couch.
It wasn’t the first time that Wallace’s phone had rung. He had it programmed to make different ring sounds for different people. Until now his calls had all been generic electronic chirps, which he had silenced and ignored. But this was the sound of battle stations on an aircraft carrier. He snatched it up immediately and answered “Hello.” Not “Hello?” with the rising inflection that meant To whom am I speaking? but “Hello” with the full stop that meant I was wondering when you’d call.
The sound of the Klaxon had awakened Peter, who sat up on the couch and was dismayed to see that last night hadn’t just been a bad dream.
Zula got up and went to the bathroom and peed. She was debating whether she ought to look in the mirror or just shield her eyes from the sight of herself. She heard Peter cursing about something. She decided not to look in the mirror. All her stuff was in the shoulder bag anyway.
She emerged from the bathroom to find Wallace sitting rigidly in his chair, quite pale, mostly just listening, almost as if the phone had been shoved up his arse. Peter was pounding away furiously on his laptop. The T’Rain game had vanished from the screen of the computer that Wallace had been using and from Zula’s as well. In its place was a message letting them know that their Internet connection had been lost.
She smelled cigarette smoke.
No one was smoking.
“Tigmaster’s down too,” Peter said, “and all the other Wi-Fi networks that I can reach from here are password protected.”
“Who’s smoking?” she asked.
“Yes, sir,” Wallace finally said into his phone. “I’m doing it now. I’m doing it now. No. No, sir. Only three of us.”
He had gotten to his feet and was lurching toward Peter and Zula. He came very close, as if he couldn’t see them and was about to walk right through them. Then he stopped himself awkwardly. He took the phone away from his head long enough for them to hear shouting coming from its earpiece. Then he put it briefly to his head again. “I’m doing it now. I’m putting you on speakerphone now, sir.”
He pressed a button on the telephone and then laid it on his outstretched palm.
“Good morning!” said a voice. “Ivanov speaking.” He was somewhere noisy: behind his voice was a whining roar. The pitch changed. He was calling from an airplane. A jet. “Ah, I see you now!”
“You … see us, sir?” Wallace asked.
“Your buildink. The buildink of Peter. Out window. Just like in Google Maps.”
Silence.
“I am flyink over you now!” Ivanov shouted, amused, rather than annoyed, at their slowness.
A plane flew low over the building. Planes flew low over the building all the time. They were on the landing path for Boeing Field.
“Soon I will be there for discussion of problem,” Ivanov continued. “Until then, you stay on line. Do not break connection. I have associates on street around your place.”
Ivanov said this as if the associates were there as a favor, to be at their service. Peter edged toward a window, looked down, focused on something, and got a stricken look.
Meanwhile another voice was speaking in Russian to Ivanov. Someone on the plane.
“Fuck!” Wallace mouthed, and turned his head away as if the phone were burning his eyes with arc light.
“What?” Zula asked.
“I have correction,” said Ivanov. “Associates are inside buildink. Not just in streets around. Very hard workers—enterprising. Wi-Fi is cut. Phone is cut. Stay calm. We are landink now. Be there in a few minutes.”
“Who the fuck is this person on the phone!?” Peter finally shouted.
“Mr. Ivanov and, if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Sokolov,” said Wallace.
“Yes, Sokolov is with me!” said Ivanov. “You have good hearink.”
“Flying over the building—from where?” Peter demanded.
“Toronto,” Wallace said.
“How—what—?—!”
“I gather,” Wallace said, “that while we were playing T’Rain, Mr. Ivanov chartered a flight from Toronto to Boeing Field.”
Peter stared out the window, watched a corporate jet—Ivanov’s?—landing.
“Google Maps? He knows my name?”
“Yes, Peter!?
?? said Ivanov on the speakerphone.
“You might recall,” said Wallace, “that when I arrived, the first thing I did was to send an email message using the Tigmaster access point.”
“You lied to me, Wallace!” said Ivanov.
“I lied to Mr. Ivanov,” Wallace confirmed. “I told him that I was delayed in south-central British Columbia by car trouble and that I would email him the file of credit card numbers in a few hours.”
“Csongor was too smart for you!” Ivanov said.
“What the fuck is CHONGOR?” Peter asked.
“Who. Not what. A hacker who handles our affairs. My email message to Mr. Ivanov passed through Csongor’s servers. He noticed that the originating IP address was not, in fact, in British Columbia.”
“Csongor traced the message to this building by looking up the IP address,” Peter said in a dull voice.
Thunking noises from the phone. “We are in car,” said Ivanov, as if this would be a comfort to them.
“How can they already be in a fucking car?!” Peter asked.
“That’s how it is when you travel by private jet.”
“Don’t they have to go through customs?”
“They would have done that in Toronto.”
Peter made up his mind about something, strode across the loft, and pulled a hanging cloth aside to reveal a gun safe standing against the wall. He began to punch a number into its keypad.
“Oh holy shit,” Zula said.
Wallace hit the mute button on his phone. “What is Peter doing?”
“Getting his new toy,” Zula said.
“His snowboard?”
“Assault rifle.”
“I have lost connection to Wallace!” Ivanov said. “Wallace? WALLACE!”
“Peter? PETER!” Wallace shouted.
“Who is there?” Ivanov wanted to know. “I hear female voice sayink holy shit.” Then he switched to Russian.
Peter had got the safe open, revealing the assault rifle in question: the only thing he owned on which he had spent more time shopping than the snowboard. It had every kind of cool dingus hanging off it that money could buy: laser sight, folding bipod, and stuff of which Zula did not know the name.
Wallace said, “Peter. The gun. In other circumstances, maybe. These guys here, down on the street? You might have a chance. Local guys. Nobodies. But.” He waved the phone around. “He’s brought Sokolov with him.” As if this were totally conclusive.
“Who the fuck is Sokolov?” Peter wanted to know.
“A bad person to get into a gunfight with. Close the safe. Take it easy.”
Peter hesitated. On the speakerphone, Ivanov had escalated to shouting in Russian.
“I’m dead,” Wallace said. “I’m a dead man, Peter. You and Zula might live through this. If you close that safe.”
Peter seemingly couldn’t move.
Zula walked over to him. Her intention, in doing so, was to close the safe before anything crazy happened. But when she got there, she found herself taking a good long look at the assault rifle.
She knew how to use it better than Peter did.
On the speakerphone, the one called Sokolov began to speak in Russian. In contrast to Ivanov, he had all the emotional range of an air traffic controller.
“Zula?” Wallace asked, in a quiet voice.
Down in the bay, the voice of Sokolov was coming out of someone’s phone. Feet began to pound up the steps.
“Clips,” Peter said. “I don’t have any clips loaded. Just loose cartridges. Remember?”
Peter, that is not a home defense weapon, she had told him when he’d bought himself the gun for Christmas. If you fire that thing at a burglar, it’s going to kill some random person half a mile away.
“Well then,” Zula said, and slammed the door.
They turned to see a great big potato of a shaven-headed man reaching the top of the steps. He swiveled his head to take a census of the people in the room: Peter and Zula, then Wallace. Then his head snapped back to Peter and Zula as he took in the detail of the gun safe. The look on his face might have been comical in some other circumstances. Zula displayed the palms of her hands and, after a moment, so did Peter. They moved away from the gun safe. The big man hustled over and checked its door and verified that it was locked. He muttered something and they heard it echo, an instant later, on Wallace’s speakerphone.
Wallace unmuted it. “I am sorry, Mr. Ivanov,” he said. “We had a little argument.”
“Makink me nervous.”
“Nothing to be nervous about, sir.”
“This can’t just be about the credit card numbers,” Peter said. “No one would charter a private jet just because you lied to them in an email about when the credit card numbers would be available.”
“You’re right,” Wallace said. “It’s not just about the credit card numbers.”
“What’s it about then?”
“Larger issues raised by last night’s events.”
“Such as?”
“The integrity and security of all the other files that were on my laptop.”
“What kind of files were those?”
“It’s unbelievably fucking stupid for you to ask,” Wallace pointed out.
“Explanation is comink,” said Ivanov. “We are here.”
Zula stepped closer to one of the windows in the front of the building and saw a black town car pulling up.
Two men who had been loitering outside approached the car and opened its back doors.
From the passenger side emerged a stout man in a dinner jacket. From behind the driver emerged a lithe man in pajamas, a leather jacket thrown over the pajama top. Both had phones pressed to their heads, which they now, in perfect synchrony, folded shut and pocketed.
One of the two loiterers escorted the new arrivals to Peter’s front door. This opened into a corridor leading back to the groundfloor bay where the cars were parked.
The other loiterer was clad only in jeans and a T-shirt, which made him underdressed for the weather. He went over to a beat-up old van parked in front of the building. He opened the rear cargo doors, leaned in, and then heaved a long object onto his shoulder. He backed away and kicked the van’s doors shut. The object on his shoulder was a box about four feet in length and maybe a foot square, bearing the logo of the big home improvement store down the street, and labeled CONTRACTOR’S PLASTIC 6 MIL POLYETHYLENE SHEETING. He carried it into the bay and pulled the front door closed behind him.
THE MAN IN the pajamas came up the stairs first and spent a few moments strolling around the room looking at everything and everyone. “Vwallace,” he said to Wallace.
“Sokolov,” Wallace said in return.
From the way that Wallace had spoken of him, Zula had half expected Sokolov to be eight feet tall and carrying a chainsaw. She was pretty certain, though, that he was not carrying any weapons at all. He was wiry, looking perhaps like a shooting guard for the Red Army basketball team. His thinness made it easy to underestimate his age, which was probably in the middle forties. He had sandy hair with traces of gray. It looked as if it had been buzz cut about six months ago and little tended since then. His chin was stubbled, but he didn’t naturally grow whiskers on his cheeks. He had a big nose and a big Adam’s apple and large eyes whose color was difficult to pin down, as it depended on what he was looking at. When he looked at Zula, they were blue and showed no trace of personal connection, as if viewing her through a one-way mirror. Same with Peter. He went into the bathroom and looked behind the door. He checked the closets. He looked behind sofas and under beds. He found the door that led into the adjoining unit where Peter had been hanging sheetrock. He disappeared into it for a few moments, then emerged and said a word in Russian.
The word must have meant “all clear” because the man in the dinner jacket now came up the steps. Right behind him was the T-shirted man who had fetched the roll of plastic from the back of the van. After looking around the place, paying special attention to the vacant u
nit, Ivanov said something to this man that caused him to turn around and go back downstairs.
Ivanov was blue-eyed but his hair was dark, made darker yet by some sort of pomade or oil that he had used to slick it back from his forehead, which was an impressive round dome. His complexion was pale but flushed by the chilly air outside. Over his dinner jacket he was wearing a black overcoat well tailored to his frame, which, to put it charitably, was stocky. But he moved well, and Zula got the idea that he could have given a good account of himself in a hockey brawl. Probably had done so, many times, when younger, and prided himself on it. He paid considerably more notice to Peter and Zula than Sokolov had done. Wallace he almost ignored, as if keeping the speakerphone off the floor had been the most useful thing that the Scotsman could possibly achieve today. He sized Peter up and shook his hand. Over Zula, he made a bit of a fuss, because he was that kind of guy. It didn’t matter why he was here, what sort of business he had come to transact. Women just had to be treated in an altogether different way from men; the presence of a single woman in the room changed everything. He kissed her hand. He apologized for the trouble. He exclaimed over her beauty. He insisted that she make herself comfortable. He inquired, several times, whether the temperature in the room was not too chilly for a “beautiful African” and whether he might send one of his minions out to fetch her some hot coffee. All of this with meaningful glances at Peter, whose manners came off quite poorly by comparison.
The man in the T-shirt came up the stairs with the box of contractor plastic on his shoulder. Behind him was the other one who had been loitering on the street, carrying a staple gun. When they reached the top of the steps, they looked at Ivanov, who gestured with his head toward the door that led to the adjoining apartment. They went into it and closed the door behind them. Sokolov watched curiously.
Finally they were all sitting down together: Wallace, Peter, and Zula on the sofa, facing Ivanov, who was in the largest chair. Behind Ivanov was Sokolov, who sometimes stood with hands clasped behind his back and at other times paced quietly around the loft, gazing out the windows.
“I am confused,” Ivanov said, “as to why you send email complaining of car breakdown in southern part of B.C. when car works fine and is actually in warehouse of Peter, in Seattle—a man I have not had pleasure to meet before.”