“O M G,” said Marlon out loud.
Csongor looked at the screen. The ground was dropping out from beneath Lottery Discountz’s feet. Something was lifting him into the air. The others were coming with him.
James just laughed ruefully. “Oh man,” he finally said, “we are so fucked.”
Reamde, Thorakks, and Lottery Discountz were all together, standing on something translucent and bluish white, a platform that seemed to be about a hundred meters in the air above the ley line intersection. Csongor turned his point of view around and was startled to see a giant face glowering down at them. Utterly confused, he zoomed way out so that he could see his character from a greater distance.
He now perceived that he and Reamde and Thorakks were literally in the palm of a hand the size of a tennis court. The hand belonged to a towering, godlike figure standing like a colossus above the city of Carthinias, one foot planted at the ley line intersection, the other about a kilometer away near the Exchange.
Having gotten over his initial astonishment, Marlon was now furiously hitting keys, apparently trying to invoke various spells. Bubbles of light bloomed around his hands, but each was snuffed out by some sort of counterspell from the giant figure. Csongor finally had the presence of mind to mouse over the giant’s head and learned that this was a character named Egdod.
“Asshole,” Egdod proclaimed in a voice that once again obliged all three players to grope in panic for their volume knobs, “I could just kill you and take the gold—if that was what I wanted.”
Marlon sat back in despair and clapped his hands to the side of his head.
“Let’s go somewhere a little more private,” Egdod continued, and Csongor noticed that cloud formations were zipping past them, moving downward. He shifted his point of view down and saw that Carthinias was dropping away beneath Egdod’s sandaled feet. He was taking them up into the air like a Saturn V. Lottery Discountz’s health indicators were dropping at least as rapidly as their altitude was rising: hypoxia and hypothermia, as it turned out, being the main culprits. But then he noted that spells were being cast on him—and presumably the others too—such as “Heavenly Warmth” and “Breath of the Gods,” and his indicators began to climb again.
“Aiyaa!” Marlon exclaimed, having moved his hands around to cover his face altogether.
“Let me hear your voices,” Egdod commanded.
James, Csongor, and Marlon all reached for their headsets and slipped them on. Meanwhile, Egdod was explaining: “I’ll go through with the transaction just as I said. But first I want to hear everything you know about Zula.”
“I know nothing,” James announced, and a moment later Thorakks said the same thing in a different voice.
“I’ll deal with you later, Seamus Costello!” Egdod thundered.
Csongor, Marlon, and Yuxia all turned to look at “James,” who was blushing vividly.
Marlon knew more than Seamus, but he was still too taken aback—and perhaps exhausted—to speak coherently. He looked across the café at Csongor.
“Okay,” Csongor said. “The story so far.” And he launched into an account of what had transpired in Xiamen two weeks ago. Richard Forthrast (for Csongor had googled Egdod and learned that the owner of this godlike character was none other) knew a surprising amount about the safe house that Ivanov had set up in Xiamen and about the cast of characters. Csongor couldn’t guess how he might have come by that information and did not want to interrupt the narrative to ask. Until, that is, Richard said, “You must be the Eastern European hacker.”
“We think of ourselves as Central European,” said Csongor. “How did you know of me?”
“Zula mentioned you in her note.”
This silenced Csongor for long enough that Seamus had to break in and explain, “We’re still on the line, big guy … he’s just taking that in.”
“You have heard from Zula!?” Csongor finally exclaimed, exchanging a wild look with Marlon and Yuxia.
“She wrote a note,” Richard said regretfully, “before it all went down. Nothing since then, unfortunately.”
Having allowed his hopes to rise, Csongor had now to observe another silence as his spirits plunged. He looked up to see Seamus giving him a knowing look. “Well then,” Csongor finally said, and he went on to relate a brief account of the storming of the apartment building, Zula’s trick with the fusebox, and how that had all played out.
Richard listened in silence until a certain point in the story when he said, “So Peter is dead.”
“Yes,” Csongor said gently.
“You’re sure of this.”
“Absolutely sure.”
“Well, that is a shame,” Richard said, “and sooner or later I’ll get around to feeling like crap about it. But right now—focusing on practical matters—it is a problem for me because it prevents me from pursuing the only independent lead I have.”
“What lead is that?” Seamus demanded.
“Peter had surveillance cameras in his apartment. They probably recorded video of what went down there the night Wallace was killed and Peter and Zula were abducted. Unfortunately, those files were erased. Later, though, someone came back—probably an accomplice to the original crime—and got caught on video. I have a copy of the file. Unfortunately, it’s encrypted. I was hoping I could get the decryption key. But if Peter’s dead—”
“Hold on for a moment,” Csongor said. For Ivanov’s leather man-purse was sitting on the floor between his feet. The money had been stolen from it, but Peter’s and Zula’s wallets and other personal effects were still in there, sealed up in Ziploc bags. In a few moments, he was able to get Peter’s wallet out and find a certain compartment, sealed behind a tiny zipper, with a scrap of paper inside.
Something moved on the screen, and he noted that they had been joined by another character named Clover—apparently an invited guest of Egdod’s.
Five lines had been written on the paper. Each began with what was apparently the name of a computer and ended with what was obviously a password.
“Do you have a hostname or something for the system you are trying to crack?”
Clover answered: “This was not a server per se, just a backup drive on a network.”
“Brand name Li-Fi, by any chance?”
“The same.”
“Then here is the password,” Csongor announced and read out the corresponding series of symbols.
“On it,” said Clover, and then became still, a sure sign that its owner—whoever he was—was tending to something other than playing T’Rain.
“Pray continue,” Richard said, and so Csongor went on telling the story. He got some assistance now from Marlon, who was able to relate parts of it that Csongor had not seen or during which he had been unconscious. But just as they were trying to explain the explosion, and Marlon’s rescue of Csongor from the cellar, Clover woke up and interrupted: “That was the correct password. I was able to decrypt the file.”
“Can you email it to me?” Richard asked. From which Csongor inferred that Richard and whoever was playing Clover were not in the same place.
“I did it on your server,” Clover answered. “The files were already there. All I had to do was send the command.”
He rattled off the name of a directory.
Csongor and Marlon now resumed the narrative, a bit uncertainly as they sensed that they no longer had Richard’s full attention. This suspicion was borne out a few minutes later when Richard broke in: “I can see him.” His voice was husky and he spoke slowly, as if mildly stunned. “This guy finds a way to break in. I can’t hear anything—it’s all just body language—but let me tell you that I have hired a lot of guys in my time, and this guy is a schlub. A palooka. An epsilon minus.”
Csongor did not know the meaning of any of these terms, but Richard’s tone of voice was easy enough to read.
“I was half hoping it might have been Sokolov,” Richard explained. “But I guess that’s impossible—you guys were all in Xiamen by thi
s point. A day later he goes missing off Kinmen.”
Csongor looked at Marlon and Yuxia, who both threw up their hands. “You think Sokolov survived the explosion?” he asked.
“We know he did,” Seamus announced.
“That is hard to believe,” Yuxia said. “If you had been there—”
“We have the most direct and convincing possible testimony that he lived through it,” Seamus assured her, with a little wiggle of the eyebrows that made Yuxia blush.
“Sokolov is still alive,” Csongor repeated, trying to make himself believe it.
“I didn’t say that,” Richard put in. “He was involved in a gunfight off Kinmen the next day.”
“Let me tell you something,” Csongor said. “If he was in a gunfight, I am more worried about the people he was fighting against.” This drew an approving look and a nod from Seamus.
Richard continued, “The palooka comes in the front door carrying a piece of equipment that, based on other research I’ve been doing, matches the description of a plasma torch. He takes it upstairs and sets it up next to Peter’s gun safe and runs a huge extension cord down the stairs to Peter’s shop where he plugs it into a big-ass industrial outlet.”
“Gun safe?” Csongor asked wonderingly.
“Not from around here, are you?” Richard asked. “Believe it or not, they are as common in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave as, let’s say, bidets are in France. Anyway, the picture now gets completely fucked up as this guy turns on the torch and slices the safe open. Just takes the top right off. Fast-forwarding here—I think he’s waiting for the metal to cool down. Then he reaches into the top and pulls out—oh, for goodness’ sake. Who knew that our Peter was a gun nut?”
“What are you seeing?” Seamus asked.
“A nice metal case. Inside of it, a really tricked-out AR-15,” Richard said, and then he rattled off a lot of verbiage that seemed significant to him and to Seamus but meant nothing to Csongor: “Picatinny rails on all four sides, mounted with Swarovski optics and what might be a laser sight. Tac light. Tactical bipod. Yes, whatever other shortcomings he might have had, Peter was very good at adding items to his shopping cart.”
“So this goon must have noticed the gun safe during the snatch and made up his mind to come back later and see what was inside.”
“If so, he hit the jackpot. I’m looking at probably four thousand bucks’ worth of rifle. Want to see a picture?”
“Sure.”
There was a brief interlude for clicking and typing, and then Seamus said, “Got it,” and began paying attention to something on his screen. Csongor, having nothing else to do at the moment, got up and walked around behind him to see what it was. Evidently T’Rain contained some sort of facility for mailing image files back and forth, and Egdod had used it to send this JPEG to Thorakks. It was a surprisingly well-resolved picture of a bulky man with a shaved head, holding an assault rifle, sans clip, and examining his action. “Not my cup of tea,” Seamus said after inspecting it for a little while, “but I concur that Peter was a gun nut and that Mr. Potatohead is feeling very pleased with himself at the time this picture is taken.”
“Do you recognize him?” Richard asked.
Csongor was obliged to return to his post and put his headset back on. “No,” he said. “In none of my dealings with Ivanov, in Xiamen or otherwise, did I ever see this man.”
“He’s a local freelancer, Richard,” Seamus pronounced. “A temp.”
“Maybe I’ll send the picture to the Seattle cops, then,” Richard said. “Help them clear up some loose ends.”
“Save yourself the trouble,” said Seamus. “I can get it to the cops, and then some. But it’s not going to help finding Zula now.”
“I know that,” Richard said.
And then there was silence for a few moments. Csongor was unwilling to admit this to himself, but, although the last couple of hours’ machinations in T’Rain had been diverting, and the opportunity to exchange information with Richard had felt, for a few minutes, like an enormous breakthrough, it was all turning out to be a dead end. The most it might lead to was that Mr. Potatohead would be arrested, and the story of Zula and Peter’s abduction, and Wallace’s murder, would be explained to the satisfaction of the Seattle Police Department. But none of this would be of any help in finding Zula now or in stopping Jones.
Richard seemed to be reaching the same conclusion. “Interesting,” he finally said, “but all kind of useless.”
Seamus was ready for it. “You don’t know that,” he said. “The way it works is, you follow these leads and you work them until something breaks. Everything we have done here is extremely constructive whether or not you can see a way through to the end.”
“All I know is, I’ve been sitting on my ass for close to twenty-four hours,” said Richard, now sounding as bad as Csongor felt. “Thinking, hoping, you guys would know where Zula is. Now it’s something like four, five in the morning, I’m at the end of my tether, we have come up with nothing very useful. And some asshole tourist is knocking on my door, probably wanting to empty his holding tank or get directions to the geocaching site. So I’m going to break off for a little.”
And indeed Csongor now noticed that the clouds were rushing up past them and the city of Carthinias growing larger and larger as they plummeted toward it. Presently they came to a soft landing exactly where they had started, and Egdod shrank to human size.
“The money?” Marlon asked. “Not for me—for my friends in China.”
“Clover will see about making the da G shou whole,” Richard said, “at competitive rates. Good luck getting the money into China.” As he spoke, it was possible to hear a doorbell ringing in the background. The sound radiated incongruously over downtown Carthinias.
RICHARD STRIPPED OFF his headset and threw the keyboard off his lap, leaving Egdod mute and motionless for the time being. He reached down between his knees and found the pee bucket with his hand, then moved it well out of the way so he wouldn’t kick it over. He stood up slowly, partly because his body had stiffened up and partly because he didn’t want all the blood to rush out of his brain at once. He checked the time: 4:42 A.M. Who the hell was ringing his doorbell? In addition to which they had been pounding the hell out of every door and window they could find for the last couple of minutes. All the signs pointed to some sort of minor emergency: drunken teenaged mountain bikers who had flipped over their handlebars, or campers chased out of their tents by bears, or an RV gone off the road. It happened a few times a year, though rarely so early in the season.
He shambled out of the tavern and into the lobby, moving awkwardly, trying to make out if all of that had been worth it. From Zula’s paper towel note he had already known the first part of the story, and from British Spy Chick he’d learned some of the last bit. So all that he’d gained from nearly twenty-four hours’ solid game playing was a picture of some asshole stealing Peter’s rifle, more detail about what had happened in that apartment building in Xiamen, and a very large quantity of Indigold.
Overall, he decided that it had been worth it. He knew a great deal more now of how Zula had comported herself during the apartment building showdown and in the hours afterward, and all of it made him proud and would make the rest of the family proud when it went up on the Facebook page and when, in future years, they retold the story at the re-u. And that was all true whether Zula was alive or, as seemed likely, dead.
“All right already,” he shouted. He approached the main entrance and hit a switch that turned on the lights in the driveway.
Two men were standing there, sort of wrapped around each other. They looked like backpackers. One of them, a burly middle-aged man, was supporting a taller fellow who was all bundled up in warm clothes with a hood pulled up over his head. The latter’s leg was encased, from the knee down, in a splint that had been improvised from tree branches, duct tape, and climbing rope. His head was bowed as if he were only semiconscious or perhaps doubled over in pain. br />
Nothing Richard hadn’t seen before. He unlocked the front door and pulled it open.
“Thank God you’re here, Mr. Forthrast!” the man exclaimed, very loudly, as if he wished to be heard by someone else—someone who was not standing directly in front of him.
The lights went out.
The injured man, who until this moment had been draped over his comrade’s shoulders, stood up straight and took his full weight evenly on both feet.
Richard by now knew that something funny was going on but was too fuzzy-headed from sleep deprivation and T’Rain playing to do anything other than watch it play out before him like a cut scene in a video game. The tall man reached up and stripped the hood away from his face. But Richard could not see much of him because of the darkness.
“Good morning, Richard,” he said. His voice sounded like that of a black man, but his accent told that he was not from around here. His companion had unzipped his jacket and pulled something out. Richard heard the sound of a round being chambered into a semiautomatic pistol. This man backed up a pace and aimed it at Richard’s face. Richard flinched. In all the time he had spent messing around with guns, he’d never had one aimed at him before.
“You’d be Jones?” Richard said.
“That I would. May we come inside? I’ve been tracking your website—the one that keeps asking whether anyone has seen Zula—and I’ve come to give you news and claim the reward.”
“Is she alive?”
“Not only is she alive, Richard, but you have the power to keep her that way.”
“WELL, THAT HAPPENED,” Seamus announced. He crossed his arms over his chest and used his legs to shove his chair back from the computer.
Csongor had already logged out. Never again, he suspected, would Lottery Discountz walk the streets of Carthinias. Marlon was still engaged, typing chat messages—apparently aimed at the character called Clover, who seemed to be Egdod’s bagman. On his screen it was possible to see Clover and Reamde standing so close that their heads were almost touching. Thorakks loitered a few meters away and Egdod—suddenly poignant in his smallness and aloneness—just stood there.