Neal Stephenson - Reamde

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.”