There had been some turnover during the last week. Zula was beginning to lose track of all the players. Of the three who had come out from Vancouver the morning after they’d stolen the RV, Zakir was still here, of course, holding the end of Zula’s neck chain as if walking a dog; and Sharjeel, who was the snappy, efficient, vaguely weasel-like one, seemed to have become one of Jones’s most important deputies. Ershut, the burly blue-collar man who had come over on the jet, was playing his accustomed role, moving piles of stuff around and sorting things into stacks. Mahir and Sharif, the lovers, were not in evidence. Neither was Aziz, the third of the Vancouverites. Abdul-Wahaab was strutting around, staring into the distance and talking importantly on multiple phones, checking his wristwatch. But at least four new guys were in evidence: the sniper on top of the RV, another openly armed man who seemed to be pulling guard duty on the ground nearby (he had found a place of concealment in the trees, but Zula could see him), and two wiry, bearded fellows who looked as if they had come for a long big-game hunting expedition. Even then Zula sensed she had not seen all of them, and that others were riding around, somewhere in this general vicinity, in the small fleet of cars that Jones’s network had managed to scare up during the almost two weeks he’d been in the country.
They kept faltering in whatever it was they were supposed to be doing, and Sharjeel kept exhorting them to get off their asses and make some progress. Over the course of an hour they packed several backpacks as full as they would go, and roped and lashed and bungeed more stuff to the outsides of them, and put yet more stuff into garbage bags and plastic coolers that they carried in their arms, and then they trudged off into the woods, following a path that one of the more nimble members of the group had scouted. This took them up along the side of the ruin. They made extremely slow progress because of the steepness of the ground, the undergrowth, and the mud. But in perhaps half an hour—though it seemed longer—they emerged, sweating, into a patch of relatively level ground about the size of a badminton court, sparsely occupied by big old trees that, being evergreens, would give them some cover from the air, but open and flat enough that tents and tarps could be pitched and sleeping bags rolled out. Zakir’s first act was to pass the free end of Zula’s neck chain around a large tree in the middle of this space and padlock it. This freed him to lie down on his back on a blue foam pad until he was rebuked for laziness by Abdul-Wahaab. He got up and went to work. Zula filched his pad and sat down on it. Until now she had tried to pay as little attention as possible to the padlocks at the ends of the chain, since she was afraid that if she showed too much interest in them she’d be giving something away. Hopeless apathy was a much better stance for her to feign. But no one was paying her much attention now, so she let her gaze travel down the length of the chain to the place where it was locked around the tree trunk. There were two padlocks in Zula’s universe. One was a big heavy brass thing, made to stand up to the elements, which they had taken from the mining camp. The other had been removed from the toolbox in the back of the pickup truck; it was smaller, made of steel, with a blue rubber ring molded into its base to keep it from banging and clattering as the box was moved around. Zula had a key to that one. For a while she had simply kept it in her pocket, but as it had become clear that something was about to happen, she had found herself lying awake worrying about the possibility that she might be searched and it might be confiscated. She had soaked a tampon in water until it swelled up, then shoved the key into the middle of it and shoved it right up her ass. It was there now.
The padlock fixing the chain to the tree was the big brass one. She couldn’t see the one at her neck, but she could explore it with her fingers and feel the rubber ring around its base. This was the lock that she could open.
WHEN THE DA G shou created a new T’Rain character for possible resale to a rich lazy Westerner, they didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking up a clever name for it, so they just mashed together a few word fragments perhaps skimmed from random Google searches and spam; or at least that was Csongor’s best guess as to why he was now wandering around T’Rain in the guise of a fat merchant named Lottery Discountz. It was possible to change the name—as well as take care of the fatness—for a modest fee, but he sensed that if he succumbed to the temptation to begin fiddling with such trivialities so soon, hours would pass without his actually getting anything done. He had his hands full just learning how to make his character move around the place.
He had shimmered into existence in a rented room upstairs of an inn at an important crossroads just outside the southwestern gate of Carthinias, which, as he had learned in a spasm of googling and wiki trawling, was one of the five largest cities in T’Rain. It tended to get left alone during wars, since its markets were useful to everyone, and it never took sides—it was too fractious a place to arrive at a firm political consensus on anything, and the last ruler who had tried to involve it in foreign intrigues had been defenestrated and deposed by a well-organized mob of …
There he went again, getting all caught up in seductive details. None of this mattered. The point was that Carthinias was a commercial entrepôt. It was the best place to connect with moneychangers. This would happen in a place called the Exchange. Just a few minutes after waking up in the inn, Lottery Discountz had passed through the city’s gate in the halting, meandering gait that marked him as an absolute newbie, and since then he had been caroming drunkenly along its narrow streets, trying to find this Exchange. Or rather trying to work out how the navigational user interface worked, which amounted to the same thing.
From all that he’d heard of such games, Csongor was astonished that he had not yet been jumped and killed for sport. There were certainly characters in the streets who looked capable of it. They ignored him. Every so often another merchant, or some lower-status character such as an errand boy, would bow to him, doff his hat, and utter some sort of polite greeting. It appeared that Lottery Discountz had status. One of the ways this was manifested in the game was that characters of a generally nonviolent sort would greet him respectfully. Perhaps it also explained why no one had gutted him in the street yet. But he had the idea that he was getting less and less respect the more he blundered about, so after another spate of wiki checking and turning over rocks in the user interface, he found out that indeed his general level of respectability had been declining steadily since the moment he had left his room at the inn. Apparently this was because he’d been failing to bow and doff his hat in return. The people he’d been inadvertently snubbing had been sending in bad reports of him. So he learned how to bow and doff his hat—it was a simple command-key combination—and ran up and down the street for a bit being extremely polite to everyone he met and rebuilding his reputation before he got killed.
Which he did anyway. Forcing him to learn the procedure for getting a character out of Limbo and back in the world of the living. But after that, in fairly short order, he was able to make his way to the Carthinias Exchange and stroll up and down its gilded colonnades, bowing and doffing, and listening in on the almost totally incomprehensible exchanges of chitchat among its denizens. For everything was couched in a highly compressed jargon optimized for non-native-English speakers who liked to type with the Caps Lock button engaged. It was, he realized, the T’Rain equivalent of the cryptic hand signals employed by commodities brokers who needed to communicate pithy instructions across a riotous trading pit.
Being in any virtual world, of course, required some ability to suspend one’s disbelief and enter into the consensual hallucination. So far Csongor had only experienced a few moments of this, and it had mostly been during simple activities such as bumping around his room at the inn or walking down the street. In this place he was finding it completely impossible, partly because he couldn’t follow what was going on and partly because, of all places in T’Rain, the fictional premise was most threadbare here. The entire point of this market was to move money back and forth between the virtual economy of T’Rain and that of the real wo
rld. When money moved out, it had to be destroyed—permanently and irrevocably removed from the T’Rain universe. This was accomplished by sacrificing it to gods. The amount of gold to be transferred would be taken to one of several temples that stood on craggy acropoli around the limits of the city and handed over to priests or priestesses who would employ some sort of ritual to make it cease to exist: in some cases, hurling it into cracks in the earth to be deatomized by supernatural forces; in others, piling it up on elevated sky altars from which it would, after the proper incantations were intoned, simply disappear. Repulsed and dismayed by the jargon-spouting traders in the Exchange, Csongor wandered up into those rocky hills and observed some of those rites. They did everything out in the open, in full view of sparsely attended observation galleries, probably to make it clear that it was all on the up-and-up and that none of the priests was sneaking a bit of extra gold into the pockets of his toga. Over the course of a quarter of an hour’s watching, Csongor saw something like half a million gold pieces ceasing to exist on one such altar, which—taking into account the fact that it was just one of half a dozen or so such establishments, and that it appeared to run at this pace around the clock—suggested (doing some math in his head, here) that on the order of $10 billion was passing out of T’Rain every year.
Ten billion a year.
Marlon needed to transfer $2 million out.
Csongor put his face in his hands, which was what he always did when thinking hard about something. Back at the hotel, he had taken the trouble to shave, and it was strange to feel his smooth cheeks. This arithmetic wasn’t that difficult, but he was tired and disoriented.
Ten billion a year worked out to something like a million dollars per hour. So they were going to have to monopolize the Carthinias Exchange for something like two solid hours. Either that, or eke the money out in smaller increments over a longer span of time.
Which, he realized, was what the merchants thronging the colonnades must be doing for a living: aggregating tiny transactions into big ones, or taking awkwardly huge ones and breaking them up into chunks of more convenient size, so that the holy money-furnaces could run at a steady pace day and night.
Understanding this much helped break him out of the state of hopeless despair into which he had been plunged by his initial stumblings about. Lottery Discountz was, for a moment, alone and safe on a marble bench in the viewing gallery of a temple where gold was being swallowed, digested, and shat out as worthless manure by a giant mutant beetle. It was safe to be Away from Keyboard for a few minutes.
Csongor got up and paced around to stretch his legs. Yuxia was perched on a chair in a fetal position, sleeping. Marlon was engaged precisely as he had been for a great many hours. But when Csongor circled around behind him to look at his screen, he saw that the “orc chart” had become as ramified as a two-hundred-year-old maple tree. Marlon had mobilized an army. At a glance, Csongor guessed that it couldn’t be less than a thousand strong.
Noting a strange glare coming from one end of the café, Csongor turned to look and realized, after a few moments’ disorientation, that the sun was coming up.
INSPECTOR FOURNIER WAS startled, and perhaps slightly irritated, that Olivia had made the decision to go bombing up the road to Vancouver without even mentioning it to him. She sensed him wishing that Commonwealth immigration policies could be tightened up a bit, so as to make it more difficult for inquisitive Brit spies to jump back and forth between nations. The Friday aspect of this certainly wasn’t helping; presumably Fournier had plans for the evening, even for the whole weekend, and now he was learning that he would be at least nominally obligated to act as this woman’s host.
“Where are you now?” he asked.
“Waiting in line at the border crossing.” The electronic signs were claiming that she’d be through in another ten minutes, which seemed pessimistic. That would put her directly into Vancouver’s outer suburbs; she’d be downtown in an hour. This fact embarrassed her. It had taken maybe fifteen seconds after the end of her first conversation with Fournier to realize that she had to go to Canada now, and she had gone into action without explaining to anyone—not even her FBI hosts—what she was doing. It would take too long for her to explain matters to everyone. She would make phone calls from her car as she was driving, explain it then. But then she had ended up managing matters with Richard and Uncle Meng, Seamus and the mysterious Csongor, and had quite forgotten to call ahead. No wonder Fournier was irked. It was a couple of hours past the normal close of business, he was in the office late, delaying his dinner and thinking about getting into a glass of wine, giving her a courtesy call to let her know what was going on—only to learn that she trying to penetrate his borders at this very moment.
“Listen,” she said, “I just want to be positioned in Vancouver so that I can follow up on this lead at the next opportunity.”
“Truly, it’s not a lead,” he pointed out, “and the next opportunity will be on Monday; for voilà the weekend begins.”
She decided not to press on this for now. “Has anything new been learned?”
“This was a bear hunting party, two guides and three hunters and all the equipment you would expect, packed into an SUV. They departed eleven days ago. They were supposed to be gone for a week. So they are now late by four days and unheard from, disappeared with no trace.”
“The first time we spoke, I thought you said they had been missing for ten days.”
“Perhaps you heard such a thing, but I did not say it. The trouble might have started for them as early as eleven days ago, or as late as four.”
“Because you see the plane I’m looking for would have landed about thirteen days ago.”
“So the dates do not match,” he pointed out.
“But if they landed and holed up somewhere for a couple of days …”
“Where? Why is there no trace of this landing? Of the holing up somewhere?”
Silence. Olivia inched her car forward another length, stopped at the red light. She was next in the queue to cross the border.
What would Jones do? If he found himself stuck north of this imaginary line on the map?
If he had an SUV full of camping equipment?
He had lived in the wilds of Afghanistan for years at a time. Compared to that, a hike down the Cascades would be a piece of cake.
“He’s up there,” she insisted. “If he hasn’t crossed the border already, that is.”
Fournier sighed. “If you suppose he might have crossed the border, why do you not stay to the south of it?”
“Because all I can do is follow his trail,” she said, “and I’m going to pick that up in Canada.”
Silence. She imagined him pulling his glasses off, rubbing tired eyes, thinking of that glass of wine.
The light went green, the car ahead of her glided into another country.
“I must ring off,” she said. “I’m crossing the border.”
”Bienvenue à Canada, Ms. Halifax-Lin,” said Inspector Fournier, and disconnected.
EGDOD HAD JUST been joined by one of Corvallis’s favorite characters, a K’Shetriae Vagabond aligned (as of a few days ago) with the Earthtone Coalition. A longtime student of the game, Corvallis had developed a keen appreciation for luck, as in the odds of getting a propitious roll from Corporation 9592’s random number generators. Some character types and alignments were luckier than others. K’Shetriae Vagabonds were the luckiest of all. Recently Richard had placed his thumb on the scales and made all members of the Earthtone Coalition slightly luckier than their counterparts in the Forces of Brightness, and Corvallis had not been slow to take advantage of it, trading in all of his Bright kit for more tasteful and understated duds.
“He’s on the move,” Richard announced, speaking now into his computer. This was the only way he had left of communicating with C-plus. The demise of his Bluetooth headset had been followed, a few hours later, by that of his phone; and a man who had been peeing into a bucket for six hours certainly
did not have the time to go rummaging around for a charger. But as long as Clover (for that was the name of Corvallis’s uncannily fortunate character) was within earshot of Egdod, Corvallis could hear whatever Richard said, albeit digitally transmogrified into the awe-inspiring timbre of Egdod.
“I notice you’re not referring to him as ‘the little fucker’ anymore,” said Clover, in a somewhat reedy, high-pitched voice that sounded nothing like Corvallis. Clover had an Irish accent to boot, this being a menu item commonly selected by American players who wanted to sound more like characters in movies.
“Okay, okay, he stopped being a little fucker when he raised an army of twelve hundred high-level characters and deployed them in battle array around his projected route of advance,” Richard admitted. “I have to admit I was wondering why he was taking so long to move away from that cave. I didn’t reckon that he was going to set the whole thing up like Sherman’s march to the sea.”
“Did you notice his leapfrogging cavalry screens?”
“Yes, I fucking noticed them.”
“I just thought it was a nice detail,” Clover added weakly.
“Well, before you get lost in admiration of the virus-writing son of a bitch, know that he might have information about my niece.”
“How can I be of service?” Clover sniffed.
“Feed me a running count of how many gold pieces he’s snarfed up. No, better yet, convert it into dollars.”
“A hundred and fifty. Dollars.”
“But that’s just floor sweepings he stumbled across. He hasn’t really gotten started.”