Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“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.