Curtis. Peter Curtis. It had taken Richard many hours of devious googling to pin down the surname of Zula’s boyfriend. The lad’s insistence on using a different pseudonym on every system that he accessed had made this maddeningly difficult. If Peter and Zula had checked in to the Schloss as regular guests, Richard would have been able to access Peter’s credit card data. As it had happened, though, they had stayed in Richard’s apartment as personal guests.
The decisive break in the case had been achieved by Vicki, she of the Grand Marquis ammo run and the bearskin rug anecdote. She was currently a senior at Creighton. She apparently had a serious case of insomnia or a large personal stash of Adderall. Vicki had access to Zula’s Facebook page and to her Flickr photo-sharing page. She also had some of her own photographs that she’d taken during the re-u. She had put together a portfolio of pictures of Peter and then made use of an Internet site that employed facial recognition technology to search the Internet for pictures of the same, or similar, faces. This had produced a lot of false positives, but several candidates had turned up, including a series of photographs taken at DefCon three years ago of a presentation given by a man identifying himself as 93+37. Richard had no idea how to pronounce this, but he could see that if 93+37 were flipped around in a mirror, the “9” would look a little bit like a “P,” the two central “3”s would look like “E”s, the “+” would still look like a “t,” and the terminal “7” would look a little bit like a lowercase “r,” yielding “Peter.” The sum of 93 and 37 was, of course, 130, and so Richard had gone to work googling various combinations of “130” and “93+37” with “security” and “hacker” and “pen test” and “Seattle” and “snowboard” until he had begun to establish some leads, in the form of message boards and chat rooms, that Peter, or a person weirdly similar to Peter, had been in the habit of using. And in this manner he had begun to establish a sense of what Peter was interested in, who he hung out with, and what he did in his spare time. He was, for example, strangely interested in something called tuck-pointing, which was the process of repairing old brick structures by putting fresh mortar—historically correct mortar, it went without saying—into the spaces between the bricks.
Parsing a series of messages posted on a snowboarding site, Richard guessed the name of the shop in Vancouver where Peter had purchased that high-tech snowboard he was so in love with. Some more searching had uncovered the name of the shop’s proprietor. Richard had reached him at an hour of the morning that was apparently considered to be punitively early in the snowboarding world. Richard had explained matters to the shopkeeper and persuaded him to go back into his records and dig up the name on Peter’s credit card. And this had thrown open the Google floodgates and enabled Richard to get the address of Peter’s building in Georgetown from King County real estate records.
At about nine in the morning, almost exactly twelve hours after breaching Zula’s apartment, he found himself circling the block in question. The yellow handle of his sledgehammer was projecting vertically from his passenger seat, all but announcing his intentions to anyone who looked into the windshield; like a fourteen-year-old boy trying to tame an erect penis, Richard kept pushing it down and it kept snapping back up. The building was not hard to identify; it had recently been tuck-pointed.
Since he did not have the benefit of sympathetic neighbors in this case, Richard parked on the street and made his first approach to the building as a pedestrian, sans sledgehammer. It was a brilliant sunny morning of the sort that Seattle would occasionally lay before its desperate residents in the early spring; wild rhododendrons in the vacant lot across the street were showing red blossoms, and hobbyist-pilots were taking off from Boeing Field in their little planes. Richard pounded for a while on what he took to be the front door, then wandered around back. Two large roll-up doors fronted on the alley. Between them was a single human-sized door. Richard was knocking on the latter when a pickup truck pulled into the alley and rolled to a stop, close enough that he could have reached out and touched it. The engine shut down and the door swung open. Out came a lean, close-cropped, stubbled Caucasian male in his thirties, dressed in a scarred brown leather jacket over faded and frayed Carhartts. “Looking for Peter?” he asked, stepping to the roll-up door on the right and inserting a key into a massive tamper-proof padlock that dangled from its hasp. Before Richard could answer, he continued, “I haven’t seen him in a week and a half.”
“Really.”
“Pisses me off too, because he’s my landlord, and I want him to fix my Internet. Do you have any idea where he is?” The man dropped to a squat, gripped a handle on the front of the big door, and stood up, heaving it open to reveal a dark bay filled with welding machines and the paintless steel tools and tables favored by those who worked with unbelievably hot things.
“I’m investigating his disappearance.”
The man straightened and turned to look at him. “You a cop?”
“Private investigator,” Richard said, “hired by the family.”
“So they don’t know where he is either?”
“He and his girlfriend went missing a week ago.”
“Exactly a week, or—”
“Last they were seen was Monday afternoon.”
“My Internet died Monday night, late.”
“Heard any disturbances, or—”
“No.”
“But you’re only here during business hours?”
“My hours are irregular,” the man said, “but I don’t sleep here.”
Richard nodded at the roll-up door on the left. It was secured by another massive padlock. “Is that his bay?”
“Yup.”
“I don’t suppose you have a key?”
The welder thought about it. “Yeah, I got one.”
“Mind if I borrow it?”
“Sorry, but I don’t lend out my equipment.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The man stepped forward into the darkness, reached out, grabbed something, and pulled hard, putting his weight into it. He began backing toward the alley. As he came into the light Richard saw that he was towing a two-wheeled cart loaded with a pair of gas cylinders, regulators, a length of hose, and a triple-barreled torch. “My key,” he said. “Opens just about anything.”
While the welder halved Peter’s padlock—a procedure that took all of about three seconds, once he got his torch up and running—Richard ambled around in the alley, looking at the upper-story windows that he supposed belonged to Peter’s living quarters. They were old-fashioned multipaned casement windows with metal frames. He noticed that one of them had a missing pane, right next to the latching handle on the inside.
“It’s all yours,” the welder announced, stepping back. “Mind your hand, it’s going to be hot for a while.”
Keeping well clear of the hot parts, Richard got the door unlatched and hauled it open.
Damn, but there were a lot of cars in here. As if Peter had been running a chop shop. In a few moments he identified Peter’s boxy van—the one he and Zula had taken up to B.C.—and Zula’s Prius, which had been parked as far back in the bay as it would go, apparently to make room for a little sports car that had been shoehorned into the remaining space. The latter had B.C. plates. The keys were still in its ignition.
Hands in pockets, Richard ambled around. The welder remained on the threshold of the big door, perhaps wisely declining to trespass.
“There’s your problem,” Richard announced. He was standing before half a sheet of plywood that had been screwed to the wall and used as a surface for mounting telecom stuff: cable modem, routers, punch-down blocks, phone gear. In two places, cables had been severed, their cut ends carefully pushed back into place so that the damage was not obvious. One was telephone, the other was the black coax line that had formerly run to the cable modem.
This was the first suggestion of actual wrongdoing that Richard had seen. Of course, the fact that Zula (and, apparently, Peter) had disappeared was more than sufficiently alarming that he’d thought of nothing else for the last couple of days. But in all of the investigating he had done so far, he had not seen actual evidence that human maleficence was involved. He suspected it, he feared it, but—as the Seattle detective assigned to Zula’s missing persons case doggedly pointed out—he couldn’t prove it. The appearance of those two severed wires thus struck him as deeply as a pool of blood or a spent shell casing.
He pulled out his phone and texted John: CALL OFF THE MOUNTIES. PETER’S CAR HERE. ZULA’S TOO. He decided not to mention the third car or the severed wires for now.
“You recognize this sports car?” Richard asked. His voice sounded funny to his own ears: dry and tight.
“Nope.”
“Well. I’m going to look upstairs.”
“Yup.”
He’d hoped that last night’s forced entry to Zula’s apartment would be the last time he’d have to expose himself to the possibility of seeing something horrible. Now here he was climbing another staircase toward another possible crime scene. This time he considered it much more likely he’d see something that would scar him for life. But it was his responsibility to shove his face into this particular psychological buzz saw and so he reckoned he should get on with it.
What he found, though, was not what he’d expected. Peter’s apartment contained no persons, living or dead. Nor were there any signs of violence or struggle, with two exceptions. One—which he had anticipated—was the missing windowpane, which had clearly been used by someone to break into the loft. The shattered glass was still sprayed over the floor below it.
The other was a wrecked gun safe standing against the wall in the corner of the loft. Something comprehensively bad had happened to it. Its finish had been burned away in a line that went all the way around its top, as though it had been attacked with a thermonuclear can opener. The entire top of the safe had been sliced off and thrown on the floor, where hot metal edges had burned into the wood. Instinctively Richard scanned the ceiling for smoke detectors and noted that they were all dangling open, their batteries removed.
This part seemed almost like a waste of time, but he stepped forward and looked down into the safe and verified that it was empty.
He walked back down the stairs and found the welder. “I could use your professional opinion on something.”
“Plasma cutter,” was the welder’s verdict, after he had come up the stairs and got a load of the ruined gun safe.
“Do you have one?”
“No!” said the welder, and shot him a look.
“I wasn’t accusing you,” Richard said, holding up his hands. “I was just curious what they look like.”
“It’s a box,” the welder said, holding up his hands to indicate size. “About yay big.”
“Portable.”
“Totally.”
“Portable enough to take it through yonder window?”
“That would be a bit of a stretch. I would recommend stairs.”
“So someone probably used the window to get inside and get a door open, then carried the plasma cutter up the stairs.”
“Yeah,” said the welder, “but I don’t think your average burglar carries one around on his person.”
“Agreed,” Richard said.
The welder looked over his shoulder, a little uneasily, at Peter’s apartment. “Seen anything else … funky?”
“No,” Richard said, “nothing funky.”
“Fuckin’ weird, man,” said the welder, and left.
Richard found his way to the front door, which had a deadbolt, a chain, and a pushbutton lock in the middle of the doorknob. The latter was locked, but the other two weren’t. After breaking in via the window, the burglar must have unlocked this door from the inside and used it to bring the plasma cutter in and out, and used the button to secure it behind him when he’d left.
So, to all appearances, the plasma-cutter gun-safe caper had happened when the place was already vacant.
But how did its being vacant square with the presence of three cars in the bay? And why would the sports car’s owner leave his key chain in the ignition? Generally, people needed their key chains for other purposes, such as getting into their houses.
Turning around, he noticed a red LED gleaming at him from the top of a shelving unit where Peter was in the habit of storing his raincoats, hats, and boots. He walked closer and found a little webcam, mounted there with a web of white nylon zip ties. An Ethernet wire trailed away from it and disappeared into a hole in the wall. Richard traced it back into the shop area where the cars were parked, and found a place, not far from the plywood panel with the telecommunications gear, where a computer must have sat at one time. It had been on the bottom shelf of a workbench. Above it were a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, but their cables dangled into the space below. A power cable and an Ethernet wire were there too.
Richard assumed that the computer must have been taken, until a minute later when he literally tripped over it while circling the sports car. The CPU—a simple rectangular box—had been thrown down on the concrete floor and attacked with the plasma cutter: a single pass cutting down the side of it, slicing through the stack of drives.
Richard cursed. He’d imagined he was on to something. Peter had set up security cameras around his place. Perhaps one of them had captured some footage of interest. But the intruder had anticipated this and made sure that the hard drive was destroyed.
He orbited all the cars, peering in through their windows, not wanting to disturb the evidence any more than he already had. Peter’s had not been fully unpacked; whatever had happened must have happened shortly after they’d gotten back to the place on Monday night.
He was jotting down the license plate number of the car from B.C. when his ears picked up a familiar clicking and whooshing noise: the sound of a hard drive coming awake and going to work.
Following the sound, and assisted by some conveniently placed Ethernet cables, he got underneath the flight of wooden stairs that led to Peter’s loft, and found a little box, mounted to an improvised shelf and plugged into an outlet through a string of extension cords. It was a Wi-Fi access point. A little bigger than most nowadays.
It was bigger, he realized, because it wasn’t just a Wi-Fi router. It was also a backup device. It had its own built-in hard drive.
NONE OF THE jihadists was in a great hurry to explain anything to Zula, but she pieced the following data together from looking out the windows and from half-understood Arabic.
They had been saved by the light of dawn, which had shown them a place to touch down: a landing strip that, however, was evidently too short for this kind of plane. It dead-ended in woods. Which seemed an awkward way to lay out a landing strip. But as Zula began to understand, the people who had put it there hadn’t been afforded a lot of choice. This was some sort of valley in high mountains. It was spacious enough, wandering across several square miles of high cold territory, but its shape was convoluted, and its bottom was hacked up by gullies and ridged with outcroppings of hard rock, leaving few alternatives as to where a landing strip might be constructed. And culture shock might have been a factor; maybe Pavel and Sergei, accustomed to big international airports and Hyatts, had not made allowances for north woods bush-pilot dash, and had imputed prudence, or at least sanity, to the architects of this strip.
Or maybe they had just been desperate and unable to make any other choice; or maybe they’d had guns to their heads.
The landing strip was part of an industrial complex that, from Zula’s point of view, wandered and sprawled aimlessly into parts of the valley that were hidden behind trees. Encouragingly, this included a small compound of buildings only a hundred meters or so from the landing strip. These all looked the same, and it was obvious enough that they were prefabricated structures that had been brought in on trucks and bolted together. Some of them looked like storage units, but one had a rust-fuzzed chimney protruding from the three feet of snow that covered its roof. Its south-facing wall was fortified by at least two cords of stacked wood. Zula watched through a window as one of the soldiers slogged over to it, moving at a pace of perhaps ten feet per minute as his legs broke through hip-deep snow on every step. When he finally reached the front door he destroyed its lock with a burst of submachine gun fire and staggered inside. A few minutes later, smoke began to emerge from the chimney.
THE DISCOVERY OF the hard-drive-equipped Wi-Fi unit under Peter’s stairs placed Richard at a distinct fork in the road. He reckoned that this property housed so much evidence of wrongdoing that the police would have to send someone around to investigate. The physical link between this crime scene and Zula—her car was parked right in the middle of it—might pump a bit of energy into the investigation of her disappearance. But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.
And yet on the other hand, if the cops did finally get serious about this, they could do things he couldn’t, such as get access to phone and motor vehicle records.
So he adopted a hedging strategy. He unplugged the Wi-Fi hub and threw it in his car and drove it to the Seattle offices of Corporation 9592. There was an information technology department there, which had a little lab where they assembled and repaired computers. No one was there; it was Sunday. In a manner that would spark outrage tomorrow morning, when his depredations were noticed by technicians coming in for work, Richard opened up toolboxes and pulled computers from inventory and generally made a mess of things on someone’s workbench. He opened up the Wi-Fi hub and removed the drive. Following instructions drawn from all over the Internet, including even a YouTube video, he connected this to a computer and made a copy of all the files on the drive. He then drove the reassembled Wi-Fi device back to Peter’s building, where he plugged it in just as it had been before.
Then he called the cops.
As much as he wanted to hang around and watch them investigate the crime scene, he knew that the first thing they’d do would be to eject him from the premises and surround it with yellow tape. So he hung around only long enough to tell a drastically truncated version of the day’s story to the first cop who arrived on the scene. He admitted to cutting off the padlock and then walking around the apartment for a while, but he said nothing about his other activities.
Then he drove back to Corporation 9592. Along the way, it occurred to him that he had just confessed to breaking and entering; but somehow he didn’t think that Peter would press charges. Wedged in traffic because of an unholy conjunction of a Sounders game and a slow-moving freight train, he called C-plus. He had one of those rigs where his phone Bluetoothed the conversation into his car’s stereo system. The volume was turned up too loud; a blast of noise nearly blew the windows out of his vehicle. Some very unusual mixture of bellowing voices, clashing metal, and heavy respiration. He turned it down hastily.
“Richard.”
“C-plus. Busy?”
“Am I ever not?”
In the background, some guy was screaming single-word utterances in Latin. There was rhythmic tromping.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Maneuvers.” C-plus said. Then there was some kind of interruption, the sound of a hand shuffling the phone around.
“You’re in the National Guard?” But even as he was saying this, Richard was dismissing the possibility; they didn’t speak Latin in the National Guard.
“Roman Legion reenactment group,” C-plus explained.
“So you’re, like, marching around in sandals and a skirt?”
“The Roman caliga is far, far more than just a sandal, at least as that term is construed by modern-day persons,” C-plus began. “To begin with—”
“Okay, shut up,” Richard said.
C-plus sighed.
“Want to get involved with something way more interesting than what you’re actually being paid for?”
“Richard, if you are trying to trap me into griping about my job—”
“Furthest thing from my mind.”
“Even so, let me say that my normal work is incredibly interesting and uplifting.”
“It is so noted,” Richard said, “but I need your help with a personal project. Kind of a detective thing.”
“That REAMDE project?”
The question struck Richard as a bit odd and stymied him for a few seconds. “No,” he said. “If it were about computer viruses, I wouldn’t have even tried to con you into thinking it would be interesting.”
“What is it about then?”
“Come down to the IT lab and I’ll explain it.”
Corvallis raised his voice. “My legion has been getting ready for these maneuvers for three months!” he said. “I have responsibilities as the pilus posterior of my cohort—”
“It’s about Zula,” Richard said. “It’s important.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Richard got to the office about fifteen minutes later, retrieved the computer from the IT lab, and took it to a small conference room, where he got it booted up and hooked into a monitor. Corvallis showed up wearing a tunic of off-white, natural-looking wool that Richard was afraid he might have woven himself on a Roman-style loom. He had swapped his caligae for cross-trainers. With practically no small talk he made himself at home on this computer and began poking around in the files that Richard had copied over from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. The files and directories had nonintuitive, computer-generated names, and Richard didn’t recognize any of the file formats being used.
In the meantime, Richard’s curiosity had gotten the better of him. “Hey,” he said, “how come, when I told you I had a detective problem, you guessed it was about REAMDE?”
Corvallis shrugged. “I know Zula has been working on that with you.”
“Really?” Richard was startled by this; but then he remembered something Corvallis had said a few days ago, in the Prius, to the effect that Zula had somehow helped narrow the location of the virus writer down to Xiamen. “How long have you known of this supposed collaboration between me and Zula?”
“Since Tuesday morning.”
“Tuesday morning!?”
“Oh my God, Richard, settle down.”
“What time Tuesday morning?”
“Earlyish. I could check my phone.”
Silence.
“What the F is going on, Richard?”
“It’s like I said on the phone: Zula and her boyfriend have vanished. No one has seen or heard from them in almost a week.”
This rocked Corvallis back, and he said “Oh my God” in an altogether different tone. “When did they vanish?”
“Well, as it turns out, C-plus, one of the problems with vanishing is that it is difficult to pin down an exact time when it happened. If you had asked me twenty-four hours ago…” Richard paused, groping through the last day’s memories.
Twenty-four hours ago, he had not even been made aware, yet, that Zula was missing.
“Let’s just say that, as far as I know, you are the last person who talked to her.”
“Oh.”
“So what the fuck did you talk to her about?”
“Let go of my shoulders, please.”
“Hmm?”
“It doesn’t help, and it makes it hard for me to type.”
“Okay.” Richard relaxed his grip on the woolen tunic and backed away from Corvallis, hands in the air.
“She had been up all night—Monday night into Tuesday morning—playing.” Meaning, as Richard understood, playing T’Rain. “She said she was researching some gold movements connected with REAMDE.”
“Seems a little unusual right there,” Richard pointed out. “Tracking down viruses isn’t her department.”
Corvallis heard a rebuke in that and colored slightly. “It’s hard to believe, but at the time, I’d never even heard of REAMDE. Had you?”
“No,” Richard confessed.
“So I took what she said at face value. It was a special project you’d asked her to undertake.”
“Really unlike her to just flat out lie,” Richard remarked.
“Anyway, she needed to identify a player who had cast a healing spell on her at some point during her playing session.” Corvallis had his laptop out now and began typing on it between utterances; and as he did, they degenerated from sentences to fragments. “In the Torgai Foothills.” Type, type, type. “Total mayhem.”
“Was it a member of her party?”
“No. Questing with one other. Getting killed a lot. Didn’t understand why at the time.”
“Because you didn’t know about REAMDE and the bandits and so on.”
“Yeah,” Corvallis said absently. After about fifteen seconds of typing, he said, “Okay.”
Richard bent forward, reached into the gully that ran down the center of the conference table, and extracted a video cable, which he threw across to Corvallis, who plugged it into his laptop. The projection screen at the end of the room lit up with a display consisting mostly of a terminal window: just lines of (to Richard) inscrutable text, the results of various queries that C-plus had been typing into a database. At the moment two character profiles were being displayed. These were just long strings of numbers and words. Corvallis typed a command that caused two windows to appear on the screen, each displaying a character profile in a more user-friendly form: a 3D rendering of a creature in T’Rain, the character’s name in a nice little cartouche, tables and plots of vital statistics. Like a police dossier as art-directed by medieval clerics. One of the windows depicted a female character, whom Richard recognized as belonging to Zula. The other was presented in a window whose palette, typeface, and art all said Evil. The portrait was not fixed, but kept shape-shifting among several different species, one of which was a redheaded T’Kesh.
“Who is the Evil T’Kesh Metamorph?” Richard asked.
“That is the character Zula was hanging out with the whole time she was logged on that night,” C-plus said. Speaking slowly and haltingly as he scanned some user’s customer profile, he continued: “Belongs to a longtime customer and heavy user named Wallace, based in Vancouver. But on the night in question”—(typing)—“he and Zula were logged on from the same place”—(typing)—“in Georgetown.”
“That’s consistent with what I saw earlier today. Zula’s car and a sports car from B.C. are both parked at her boyfriend’s loft in Georgetown.”
“So they must have all been there on the night in question—”
“And that is the place from which they ‘vanished.’ A word I like less the more I use it. Can you tell me anything more about this Wallace?”
“Not without violating the corporate data privacy policy.”
Corvallis shrank from the look that Richard now threw him and went back to typing.
A customer profile appeared on the screen, displaying Wallace’s full name, his address, and some information about his T’Rain playing habits. One stat jumped out at Richard. “Check out his last login.”
“Tuesday morning,” C-plus said. “He hasn’t been on since.” He typed a little more and pulled up a window displaying plots and charts of Wallace’s usage stats, covering the entire time he’d been a T’Rain customer. “That’s the longest he has gone without playing in the last two years.”
“And Zula?”
“Same,” C-plus said. “She hasn’t been on at all. And another thing? Neither of them logged out cleanly on Tuesday morning. Their connections went down at the same time, and the system logged them out automatically.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Richard said, remembering the severed wires in Peter’s shop. “Someone walked into the place and cut their Internet cable with a knife while they were playing.”
“Who would do that?” Corvallis asked.
“Peter was hanging around with creeps,” Richard said.
This now so obviously looked like a classic drug-dealing-related home invasion/mass murder scenario that Richard had to remind himself of why he was even bothering to continue thinking about it. “Zula wanted something from you. Just before this all happened.”
“Actually it was after,” Corvallis said.
“What do you mean?”
“Their connection went dead at 7:51.” Corvallis picked up his phone and thumbed away at it for a few minutes. “Zula called me at 8:42.”
“Okay. That’s interesting. She called you at 8:42 and told you this story about working with me on the REAMDE investigation and said she needed to know who had cast a healing spell on her character.”
“Yeah, and it turned out to be some Chinese player logged in from Xiamen.”
“Which is how you first became aware that the virus originated there.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re telling me that Zula was the first person to figure that out.”
“Yes.”
“That strikes me as superodd.”
“How so?”
“Because if you leave out the whole REAMDE and Xiamen part of the story, this looks very simple. Peter was dealing in drugs or something. He got into business with the wrong people. Those people entered his loft and abducted him and took him away and killed him, and because Zula happened to be there with him, they did the same to her. But that doesn’t fit with this Wallace guy, and it certainly doesn’t fit in with the fact that Zula apparently traced REAMDE to Xiamen at almost exactly the same moment that she and everyone else in the apartment vanished.”
“Wallace seems to have kept a very low Internet profile,” Corvallis said.
“Yeah.” For Richard had been watching on the big screen as Corvallis googled the man and came up with very little: mostly genealogical sites of no use to them. “I’ll bet I know what he looks like though.” He was remembering the guy Peter had held the mysterious conference with at the Schloss.
“What do we know about the people who created REAMDE?” Richard asked.
“That’s not my department,” Corvallis reminded him. “That’s being investigated by people who specialize in that stuff.”
“Hacker kids in China, that’s what I heard.”
“Me too.”
“It just seems unlikely that they’d have the wherewithal to organize a home invasion in Seattle on a few hours’ notice.”
“Unless they have friends or something who live here. There are some sketchy characters down in the I.D.” By this Corvallis meant the International District, not all that far from Georgetown. As West Coast Chinatowns went, it was small—nothing compared to San Francisco’s or Vancouver’s—but still managed to produce the occasional gambling-den massacre straight out of a Fu Manchu novel.
“But even if the REAMDE gang knew that Zula was on to them, how would they be able to trace her to Peter’s loft in Georgetown?”
“They wouldn’t,” Corvallis said, “unless they had infiltrated Corporation 9592’s China operation and had access to our logs.”
“Noted,” Richard finally said, after thinking about it for a good long while. He pulled out his phone and accessed a little app that helped him figure out what time it was right now in China. The answer: something like three in the morning. He thumbed out an email to Nolan: Orb me when you wake up.
“But look,” Richard said, as soon as he heard the little swooshing noise telling him that the email was sent. “The reason I actually called you was because of this.” He rested a hand atop the PC he’d carried in from the IT lab and told Corvallis the story about the security cameras and the Wi-Fi hub in Peter’s place.
They transferred the video cable from the laptop to the PC and got it hooked up to power and a keyboard. Corvallis opened the directory containing the files copied from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. “Hmm,” he said immediately. “What was the brand name of the hub?”
Richard told him. Corvallis visited the company’s site and, with a bit of clicking around in their “Products” section, was able to pull up a picture of a device that Richard recognized as looking like Peter’s. He copied and pasted the model number into the Google search box, then appended the search terms “linux driver” and hit the button. The screen filled up with a number of hits from open source software sites.
“Okay.”
“What are you doing?” Richard asked.
“You said Peter was a geek, right?”
“Yeah. Computer security consultant.”
Corvallis nodded. “The format of the files from his hub suggests that they were created by Linux. And indeed when I do a little bit of searching I can see that it’s easy to download a Linux driver for this hub. It is Linux-friendly, in other words. So I suspect that what Peter did was set up a Linux-based system to manage his security cameras and perform automated backups and so on. And when he bought that hub, he junked the Windows-based software that shipped with it and reconfigured it to work directly under his Linux environment.”
“Which tells us what?”
“That we’re screwed.” Corvallis used a text editor to open one of the files that Richard had failed to open earlier. “See, the header on this file indicates that it is encrypted. All the files that you recovered from his hub have been encrypted in the same way. Peter didn’t want bad guys breaking into his system and snooping around in his security camera archives, so he set up his system with a script that encrypted all the video recordings before saving them to disk. And those encrypted files were then automatically backed up to the Wi-Fi hub.”
“And those are the files we are looking at now.”
“Yeah. But we’ll never get them open. Maybe the NSA could break this encryption. We can’t.”
“Can we know anything else? How old are the files? How big are they?”
With a bit more typing Corvallis produced a table showing the sizes and dates of the files. “Some are pretty huge,” he said, “which makes me think that they must be video files from the cameras you spoke of. Some are tiny. In terms of times and dates—”
They both scanned the table for a while, trying to see patterns.
“The tiny ones are regular,” Richard said. “Every hour, on the hour.”
“And the huge ones are totally sporadic,” Corvallis said. “Listen, it’s obvious that the tiny ones are being generated by a cron job.”
“Cron job?”
“A process on the server that does something automatically on a regular schedule. Those files are just system logs, Richard. The system just spits them out once an hour, and they get automatically backed up.”
“But let’s talk about the big files. The video files. It’s a motion-activated system,” Richard said. “Just look at it. There’s a file on Friday afternoon, which is when Peter would have been packing for the trip to B.C. Then nothing—except for the hourly log files, that is—until the middle of the night on the following Thursday. Which is weird. Because we know that a lot was going on in the place Tuesday morning. Why didn’t it get picked up by the cameras?”
“Actually, there is nothing at all—not even hourly log files—between midnight and ten A.M. on Tuesday,” Corvallis pointed out. He drew Richard’s attention to the table and traced his finger down the column listing the time/date stamps. “See, the cron job was functioning properly all through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Monday night, it did its thing at eleven P.M.…”
“But then there’s a gap,” Richard said. “No more little cron job files until ten in the morning on Tuesday.”
“After which,” Corvallis concluded, “it resumes its usual habits until Thursday at two A.M.”
“Coinciding with a big video file,” Richard pointed out. “The reason there’s nothing after that is because the server that was running the whole system got trashed. Someone came back to Peter’s place on Thursday, two days after Peter and Zula had vanished. Bastard probably knew it was empty; he must have been an accomplice, or a friend of one of the bad guys. Broke in through an upstairs window. Went downstairs, triggering the security camera and causing that last big file to be created. Opened the front door from the inside. Carried in a plasma cutter. Opened Peter’s gun safe. Stole something from in there. Noticed the computer that was logging the security videos and used the plasma cutter to destroy its hard drives.”
Corvallis nodded. “That fits,” he said. “As soon as that computer was destroyed, the hourly log files stopped coming in.”
“The only part that doesn’t make sense is the gap on Tuesday morning,” Richard said. “As if the power went out for a while. But that can’t be it. The machine had a UPS.”
Corvallis was shaking his head. “A power outage would have showed up in these logs. I’m seeing nothing.”
“So how do you explain it?”
“There’s an obvious and simple answer, which is that the files were manually erased,” Corvallis said. “Someone who knew how the system worked went in between nine and ten A.M. on Tuesday and wiped out all files generated since midnight.”
“But this is the backup drive we’re looking at,” Richard reminded him.
Corvallis looked up at him. “That’s why I’m saying it had to be someone who was familiar with the system. He knew about the backup drive, and he was careful to erase both the original and the backup files.”
“Peter, in other words, is the one who did this,” Richard said.
“That’s the simplest explanation.”
“Either he was working with the bad guys—”
“Or he had a gun to his head,” Corvallis said, then winced at the look that came over Richard’s face.
“So where does that leave us?” Richard asked, somewhat rhetorically.
“The data from here,” said Corvallis, indicating the PC, “is all stuff that the cops should be able to analyze, the same way we have been doing. But unless they can get the NSA to decrypt the video files, it won’t go any further than we’ve already gone. The other stuff—the T’Rain logs that we used to make the connection to Wallace—they can’t get unless they come in our front door with a court order.”
“But they can establish a connection to Wallace just from the fact that his car is parked in the loft,” Richard said.
“I think that all you can really do is wait for them to gather more information about Wallace,” Corvallis said. “Let the investigation run its course.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Richard said. “Could you do me one other favor, though?”
“Sure.”
“Keep checking the T’Rain logs. Let me know if there is any more activity on any of these accounts.”
“Zula’s and Wallace’s?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll set up a cron job to do it right now,” Corvallis said.
“Once an hour?”
“I was thinking once a minute.”
“Now, that’s the spirit.” Richard considered it.
“Anything else?” C-plus asked, flexing his fingers, kind of like a boxer jumping up and down in the corner of the ring.
“There must also be, I would guess, a whole complex of many accounts connected with these kids in Xiamen, right?”
“In theory, yeah,” C-plus said. “But they seem to have been pretty savvy about protecting themselves. Like, instead of carrying the gold around on their persons, they have it stashed all over the Torgai Foothills.”
“Which would prevent anyone other than us from knowing where it was,” Richard said. “But because we have admin privileges, we can just search the database and find every pile of gold pieces in that region, correct?”
“Of course.”
“And then we can go back through the log files and identify the characters who moved the gold pieces to those stashes.”
“Sure.”
“So those characters should get placed on some kind of watch list. Whenever they log in, we track them. Watch what they’re doing. Check their IP addresses. Are they still in Xiamen? Or moving around? Do they have coconspirators in other places?”
Corvallis said nothing.
“What am I missing here?” Richard asked, starting to get a bit exercised.
“Nothing.”
“Why didn’t we do this a long time ago!?”
“Because,” C-plus said, “it’s exactly the kind of thing that the cops would ask us to do as part of an investigation, and official corporate policy is to tell the cops to go fuck themselves.”
“Hmm, so we’ve been hands-off with the REAMDE guys until now,” said Richard, talking loudly over a surge of hot shame. Furious Muses were beginning to pop up on his emotional radar like Soviet bombers coming over the Pole.
“Yeahhhh…”
“Well, until we can prove that there’s no connection between them and Zula’s disappearance, corporate policy has to change,” Richard said.
THE JIHADISTS’ KIT included several Chinese entrenching tools: bare wooden handles about the length of a man’s arm tipped with shovel-shaped blades that could be rotated into a few different positions, making them usable as picks or as shovels. Through a combination of stomping the snow down with their feet and using these tools to scrape and shovel a path, they created a lane from the plane’s door to the prefab building with the functioning woodstove. They then used it to transfer their baggage from the plane into the building. The jet had been on the ground for a few hours now and the temperature inside of it had been declining the whole time, to the point where Zula had been pulling blankets off the bed one at a time and wrapping them around herself, transforming herself into a semblance of a burqa-clad woman of the conservative Islamic world. She was startled, after a while, to hear loud hacking and ripping noises from inside the plane, then understood that they were wielding their tools to strip its interior of anything they could conceivably use. But this was only a guess since they had kept the cabin door closed, and reacted splenetically when she pulled it open to peek out.
Eventually, though, the time came when Jones shoved the door open, letting in a wash of cold but blessedly clean-smelling air, and beckoned to her, letting her know that her days of private jet travel were finally at an end. And none too soon for Zula’s taste.
She emerged to find the cabin darker than she’d expected, since the interior had been wrecked, and shards of plastic wall-stuff and bats of insulation were dangling in front of the windows. Moreover, the cockpit door was closed, blocking any light from that direction. As Zula proceeded up the aisle, staggering and sliding over debris, she perceived that the door had taken heavy damage, perhaps from the same tree limb that had killed Pavel, and that a lake of blood had seeped out from under it to freeze or coagulate in front of the jet’s main entrance. She had no choice but to walk through it and track it out onto the snow beyond, which was already stained with red for a distance of several meters from the side of the plane. But when she looked up and away from the terrorists’ gore-track, she saw a clean white overcast sky and smelled pine trees and rain. This was not the bitter dry Arctic cold of midwestern winter, with temperatures far below freezing. This was the heavy drenching chill of the northwestern mountains, which somehow felt colder to Zula, even though the temperature was tens of degrees warmer. She drew the blankets tighter around her body and followed the track toward the heated building. No one escorted her. It did not seem that they were even watching her. They knew, as did she, that if she tried to make a run for it, she would bog down in deep snow with her first step and freeze to death before getting beyond rifle range.
The building was dark and it was stifling; they had overdone it with the wood-burning stove. The sharp tang of hot iron reminded her of the smell of Khalid’s blood, and it did not hide the musty and mildewy funk of the long-shut-up building. The front room occupied the full width of the structure, which she pegged at eighteen or twenty feet, since this was a double-wide. The back right corner of the room was an L-shaped kitchen. Cabinet doors hung open. At whatever time that this facility had been mothballed, abandoned, or shut down for the winter, it had evidently been stripped of all items worth picking up and carrying away. Remaining was a sparse, motley array of cooking and serving ware, mostly consisting of the cheapest stuff that could be purchased at a Walmart. The woodstove was in the room’s left front quadrant. A banged-up aluminum saucepan, packed with snow, was rocking and sizzling on its top. Behind it was a rectangular table seating six: evidently as much for working as for dining, since behind it, against the wall, were a desk and a filing cabinet. To the right, as she walked in, were a sofa, a chair, a coffee table, and an old television set sitting on top of a VCR—a detail that dated the place more effectively than any other clue. In the back wall was a door leading to a corridor that ran back for some distance. She assumed that a lavatory and smaller offices or bunkrooms might branch off from it.
The jihadists had brought food with them, in the form of military rations, as well as rice and lentils, which could of course be cooked with melted snow. One of the soldiers seemed to have been put in charge of that project. Two others were exploring a neighboring building that seemed to have been a maintenance shop. They were looking for tools, and they were finding a situation analogous to what obtained in the kitchen: all the good stuff had been taken, leaving only junk that wasn’t worth moving: rusty shovels and worn-out push brooms. But shovels were just what they needed, since the task at hand, apparently, was to turn the jet into a coffin for Pavel and Sergei and Khalid. Zula inferred that they were worried about being spotted from the air. In that case the pilots had done them a large favor by crashing the plane in trees. A long skid mark led to the wreck, but snow had begun to fall during the time they had been here and would soon erase this. It only remained to cover the plane itself with some combination of snow and hacked-off foliage. This project went much faster once they had liberated some tools from the shed, but even so it occupied Jones and the other surviving jihadists for the remainder of the day. They kept themselves warm by working hard, and when they came in for breaks they wanted to eat. Supplying them with food somehow became Zula’s responsibility. This was ridiculous, but no more so than anything else that had happened to her in the last week, so she pretended to go about it cheerfully, deciding that it might improve her life expectancy and enlarge her freedom of action if she made herself useful rather than staying in a fetal position under a pile of blankets, which was what she felt like doing. The front room had windows and therefore views out three sides, and so this also enabled her to move about and look around and try to get some conception of where they were.
During the last couple of hours of the flight, Zula had not followed the plane’s course on the electronic map, and so she did not know in what part of B.C. they had actually landed. In a vague way, she thought of B.C. as being a vastly scaled-up Washington State, which was to say that the western part was rain forest ramping up to snow-covered but not especially high mountains, and the interior was, generally speaking, a big basin, tending to dryness, with hills and mountains generously scattered about, and the eastern fringe was even larger mountains: the Rockies and their tributary ranges. The place where she and the terrorists now found themselves looked dry and rocky to her, which made her think that they must be well into the interior. But Zula’s time in the Pacific Northwest had gotten her used to the concept of microclimates (a considerable adjustment for one who had grown up in a place where the climate was as macro as it could possibly be), so she knew that it was best not to go making assumptions; it was quite possible that they were only a few miles from salt water and that this valley was dry merely because it lay in the rain shadow of coast-facing mountains. From here it might be rain forest in all directions; or it might be desert. They might be hard up against the border of the Yukon or they might be only a three-hour drive from downtown Vancouver. She simply had no idea. And neither, she suspected, did Abdallah Jones.
There was no doubt, however, that this facility was a mine. It would be wrong to call it “abandoned,” since the doors had been locked and some low-value infrastructure had been left in place: just the sort of gear that would be needed to reboot the operation if the owners ever had a mind to do so. Her first guess was that it had been shut down for the winter, but various clues suggested that it had gone unused for a number of years. She knew enough of geology to understand that mineral prices fluctuated, and that, depending on the tenor of the underlying ore, a mine that was profitable in some years might not be worth operating in others. This could be one of those.
Busying her hands with stoking the fire, and occupying her brain with such immediate and practical thoughts, she was almost completely unmindful of what had happened at the end of last night’s airplane journey. When this did come into her thoughts, she was shocked by how little effect it had had on her, at least in the short term. She developed three hypotheses:
1. The lack of oxygen that had caused her to pass out almost immediately after she’d killed Khalid had interfered with the formation of short-term memories or whatever it was that caused people to develop posttraumatic stress disorder.
2. This was just a temporary reprieve. Later, if she survived, the trauma of last night would come back to mess her up.
3. Possibly because of devastating experiences earlier in her life, she was some kind of a psychopath, a born killer; the comfortable circumstances under which she’d been living until a week ago had made it possible for this to go unnoticed, but now stress was bringing it out.
She considered hypothesis 3 to be quite unlikely, since she didn’t feel the least bit psychopathic, but included it in the list out of respect for the scientific method.
One thing had certainly changed, though: she had fought back and she had eliminated one of these guys. What was to say she couldn’t do it again?
The answer came to her immediately: after they had landed, Jones had been about to kill her. She had saved her life only by offering herself as a hostage: a resource by which something might be extorted from Uncle Richard. She guessed it was a one-time reprieve and that any future homicides would be dealt with a little more sternly.
RICHARD’S PHONE BEGAN to warble an eldritch, theremin-inspired tune. He picked it up and saw a graphic of a crystal ball with a colored miasma swirling through it, partly obscuring a picture of Exalted Master Yang. YOU ARE BEING ORBED, it said.
He was in his office at Corporation 9592, where he had been preoccupied drafting a status report for his brother John. Since he knew it would end up on Facebook, he had been trying to make it as informative as possible without divulging any of Corporation 9592’s proprietary information. This was not going very well, and so he was glad of the distraction. He activated the Orb app, which put up a screen that made it look as though he were sitting at a plank table in a medieval castle, holding a grapefruit-sized sphere of magically imbued crystal in one hand and stroking it with the other. The hands in question belonged to Egdod. The face in the orb was that of Exalted Master Yang, Nolan’s primary character, the most powerful martial artist in the world of T’Rain, capable of killing a man with his eyebrow. “You called?” he said.
“Isn’t it still way early there?”
“I am in Sydney,” Nolan said, “two hours later.” The cadences of his voice were familiar, but they had been electronically reprocessed by the Orb app to make him sound like Exalted Master Yang, whose age was well into the quadruple digits, and who rarely spoke above a whisper, lest he inadvertently decapitate his interlocutor with his twenty-seventh-level Lion Roar power.
“Why?”
“I felt it was time to be in a place with a legal system.”
“Things too hot for you in Beijing?”
“Not hot. Just … weird. Harri wanted to get out.” Harri, short for Harriet, was Nolan’s wife: a black Canadian lingerie model and power forward. Certain things about China she found a bit odd.
“Related to the REAMDE investigation?” Richard would not have spoken so bluntly had Nolan been in Beijing. The Orb app encrypted all voice traffic, so point-to-point communications were secure; but if anyone were listening in on Nolan’s apartment, they’d have been able to hear what both he and Richard were saying.
“Until yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“They started asking me questions about terrorists.”
Richard had no answer for that.
“And Russians,” Nolan added helpfully.
“Wait a sec,” Richard said. “You’re saying that the same cops who had been pestering you about REAMDE suddenly changed the topic to terrorists and Russians?”
“No,” Nolan said, “a different set of cops. Like the investigation was handed off to new guys.”
“Did you tell them anything?” Richard blurted out. Then he wished he could haul it back.
“What could I tell them!?” Nolan demanded. “The whole thing was totally bizarre!”
Good, Richard thought, please let it stay that way. He was dumbfounded to hear about the terrorists and the Russians—this made no sense whatsoever—but he supposed that the Chinese authorities must take a rather dim view of both groups; and if they had somehow dreamed up a connection between them and REAMDE, it would in no way simplify the project of getting to the bottom of Zula’s disappearance.
“Are there any terrorists in China?”
“As of the day before yesterday,” Nolan said, “there is one less.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” Richard said. For he had done some googling for Xiamen-related news that he could actually read (there was very little available in English) and found all channels swamped by coverage of an event, a couple of days ago, in which a suicide bomber, stopped by security outside the gates of a convention center in Xiamen, had blown himself up and taken two guards with him. He had interpreted the story as sheer noise, of no possible relevance. “But what possible connection could there be between that and REAMDE? Other than the coincidence that they’re in the same town?”
“None at all,” Nolan said, “but that doesn’t stop the cops—you know how they are.”
Richard actually had no idea how Chinese cops were, but he decided to let this go. “How long are you going to stay in Sydney?” he asked.
“Until Harri gets finished shopping,” Nolan said vaguely. “Then to Vancouver.” Meaning their primary Western Hemisphere residence.
A flash of white in the doorway: Corvallis, coming in hot, tunic swinging. His face said that he had news. “Gotta de-Orb you,” Richard announced. “Call me when you get to Vancouver.” He severed the connection. “Yeah?”
“Got some stats on those guys,” said C-plus, and swiveled his laptop around to display a graph: a red line ascending a ski jump and then falling off a cliff.
“Which guys?”
“Like you said. I came up with a sort of watch list of all the da G shou,” Corvallis said. “Or people likely to be associated with them. Added up their clicks per minute.” Meaning the number of times per minute that these players hit a key or a mouse button. The figure would be zero, of course, for a player who was not logged in, and some frighteningly high number for one who was embroiled in combat, and somewhere in between for someone who was logged in but just wandering around or socializing. “This is summed over about a hundred different da G shou—affiliated characters, showing the last two weeks.”
Beyond that, C-plus didn’t have to say much, since the graph spoke for itself. It started at a low-to-middling level, then ascended exponentially over the course of several days, then suddenly dropped to almost zero. After that, a few spikes poked up through the noise floor, but there was basically nothing.
“I can’t read the time scale from here,” Richard said.
“It gets huge last week, when REAMDE was spiking and you were flying over the Torgai,” Corvallis said. “It flatlines around five in the afternoon on Friday.”
“Seattle time?”
“Yeah.”
Richard consulted his time zone app. “Eight in the morning Xiamen time,” he said. “Hold on a sec.” He used his browser’s history menu to pull up one of those English-language stories about the suicide bomber in Xiamen. “That’s a couple of hours before the terrorist blew himself up.”
“Say what!?”
“Never mind.”
“Since then, the da G shou have been losing control over the Torgai region to incursions by more powerful factions,” C-plus reported. “An army of three thousand K’Shetriae is advancing on its northern border as we speak.”
“Bright, or Earthtone?”
“Bright.”
“Hmm. Gold must be lying knee-deep on the ground.”
“Some places, yes. But a lot of it has been Hidden.” A catch in his voice signaled his use of the word’s majuscular form. It had not been hidden in the sense of being stashed under a pile of leaves, but Hidden by the use of magical spells. “Basically, all of the gold that the da G shou could recover before they went dark on Friday is Hidden, and everything that has been deposited since then is just lying there for the taking.”
“How much has been Hidden?”
“You want that in gold pieces or—”
“Dollars.”
“About two million.”
“Holy Christ.”
“Another three million is lying on the ground.”
“That is just the last couple of days’ ransom money, you’re saying.”
“Yes,” Corvallis said, “but the drop rate is declining rapidly as the infection gets under control. Ninety percent of our users have now downloaded the security patch. So it’s not going to go much beyond that.”
“Okay,” Richard said, “so what is my situation, if I’m a da G shou? I know where two million dollars’ worth of gold pieces is Hidden but I have lost control of the territory where it’s stashed.”
“You have to sneak in,” Corvallis said, “and recover the stuff one stash at a time…”
“… and then sneak out and get to an MC without being ripped off,” Richard concluded. In the back of his mind, he was worrying about how he was going to explain this to John—definitely not a T’Rain kind of guy. “Which could actually be difficult to pull off, if the Torgai falls under the control of people who know what they’re doing. I mean, with that kind of money at stake, there would be plenty of financial incentive to set up a heavy security cordon.”
“A Weirding Ward costs about one gold piece per linear meter,” C-plus said, referring to a type of invisible force-field barrier that could be erected by sufficiently powerful sorcerers.
“Cheaper if you harvest the Filamentous Cobwebs yourself,” Richard retorted, referring to the primary ingredient needed to cast a Weirding Ward.
“Not as easy as you make it sound, given that the Caves of Ut’tharn just got placed under a Ban of Execration,” countered Corvallis, referring, respectively, to the best place to gather Filamentous Cobwebs and a powerful priestly spell.
“Who did that? Sorry, I haven’t been keeping up the last couple of days…”
“The High Pontiff of the Glades of Enthorion.”
“Sounds Earthtone to me.”
“You got it.”
“Some kind of strategic move in the Wor?”
“I’m not privy to the High Pontiff’s innermost thoughts.”
“Anyway,” Richard said, “that Ban wouldn’t prevent Earthtones from getting in there, if they were exempted from the Ban by a Frond of Peace that had been consecrated by the said Pontiff.”
“I forgot about the Frond of Peace loophole,” said Corvallis, crestfallen.
“It’s okay, you’re new here.”
C-plus considered it. “So you’re saying that Earthtones might actually have an advantage over Brights in seizing control of the Torgai.”
“Kind of,” Richard said.
Corvallis raised an eyebrow.
“More to the point,” Richard went on, “this gives us a way to encourage Earthtones. Make them think they have a chance of turning back those three thousand Bright K’Shetriae you mentioned, and getting control of the three million bucks’ worth of gold pieces that they can see—which would go a long ways toward financing the Wor.”
“Could you help me peel back the layers?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Of your Machiavellian strategy? Because I can see that there is way more calculation and cynicism going on here than I can ever possibly comprehend—”
“It’s simple,” Richard insisted. “There are all of about two layers. We have no way to track down the da G shou. Hell, forget about even tracking them down. We have no way to even gather more data about the little fuckers until we can get them to log on, right?”
“Right. Unless we get into bed with the Chinese police.”
“Yeah,” Richard scoffed, “which for reasons I won’t explain is now even less likely than it was yesterday. So. It seems from your graph that they are scared shitless and unwilling to log on. But they must be aware that they have two million bucks Hidden in the Torgai. Sooner or later, they’ll want to come after that money. If it so happens that the Torgai gets conquered by three thousand K’Shetriae, or whatever, who can use the money on the ground to put up all kinds of walls and wards and force fields and shit, and thereby lock out the da G shou, then the da lose all incentive to try to come back. They never log on. We never see them again. On the other hand, if we can keep things nicely unstable in the Torgai region, and turn it into a chaotic battleground, then that gives the da all sorts of opportunities to sneak back into the place and go rooting around for their Hidden gold…”
“And then they’ll pop up on the watch list,” said Corvallis, nodding, “and we can start gathering data on them.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe find the Liege Lord,” Corvallis went on. “Only he would have access to the whole two million.”
“Oh yeah, of course!” Richard said. “I had forgotten about that detail.” For, according to the rules of how the Hiding spells worked, if a vassal Hid something, then not only could the same vassal find and unHide it later; but the same privileges were granted to that vassal’s lord, and the lord’s lord, and so on, all the way up to the Liege Lord of the network. The two million in gold might have been Hidden by hundreds of different vassals within the da G shou’s hierarchy, any one of whom would only be able to see and retrieve the gold that he (or his own vassals) had personally Hidden; but somewhere there must be a Liege Lord who would have the power to personally, single-handedly retrieve all of it.
“Do you know who the Liege Lord is?” Richard asked.
“Of course, in the sense of knowing the account number. But the name and address are fake, as with all of these.”
“Okay,” Richard said, pulling his laptop in closer, adjusting the screen angle for action. “I’m going to get in touch with D-squared. Or rather, his troubadour. And I’m going to make sure he understands that there’s enough gold lying around in the Torgai Foothills to finance the Earthtone Coalition for a year. And I’m going to see whether that gets his creative juices flowing.”
“What about those three thousand K’Shetriae?” asked Corvallis, nervously eyeing a map. “Could your man Egdod summon a meteor storm or a plague or something?”
Richard gave him a look that, to judge from his reaction, must have been pretty damned baleful. “Just to slow them down a little,” C-plus said, holding up his hands.
“Of course Egdod could summon a meteor storm or a plague,” Richard said, “but I would prefer to avoid deus ex machina stuff, and so as soon as I get done with this email I’ll call a meeting for tomorrow morning.”
“Agenda?”
“Figuring out some less obvious way to fuck up the Bright invasion of the Torgai Foothills.”