Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“I HAVE BEEN watching the Facebook page with I guess you could say trepidation,” Richard said. “No leaks about this yet.” He patted a hard copy of the paper towel message draped over the console between the car’s front seats.

“I’m sure there won’t be,” John said. “Your call came in the middle of the night, no one was in the house but me and Alice, no one knows a thing.”

For they had agreed that they would not divulge the existence of Zula’s note just yet; the news would make its way into the wild very rapidly, where it might complicate the investigation, or whatever this thing they were doing was called.

“Did your friend get any information on the fella who sent the email?” John asked.

“We don’t know that it’s a fella,” Richard reminded him. “Nolan’s on it, but it’s the middle of the night in China right now, and he doesn’t have a lot to go on. He said it’s the equivalent of a Hotmail address.”

“What do you mean?” John asked peevishly. He had a Hotmail address.

“An easy-to-get anonymous account frequently used by spammers,” Richard said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that whoever sent me that email probably wanted to do it in an anonymous, untraceable way.”

“Maybe we could trace him through the skyscraper.”

“We don’t know which skyscraper it is,” Richard pointed out. “Zula didn’t bother to specify that in the note. She probably assumed that, if the note were ever found, it would be obvious to everyone which building it came from.”

John considered it. “Instead what we have here is some kind of leaker or whistle-blower.”

“I would guess so.”

“How about the Seattle cops?”

“I called the detective and left a voice mail message. Told him we had evidence that Zula was alive and not in Seattle on Friday. Which I think takes it out of his jurisdiction.”

“It takes the missing persons part of it out of his jurisdiction,” John said. “But it means that crimes happened in Seattle. Murder and kidnapping and assault and God only knows what else…”

Richard nodded. “And I’m sure that the Seattle detectives who work on those kinds of crimes are going to be really interested in Zula’s note. But none of that has anything to do with us getting her back safe.”

“It most certainly does if the responsible parties can be identified, tracked down, extradited—”

“Something major happened in Xiamen on that Friday, only a few hours after Zula wrote that note,” Richard said. He had avoided mentioning this to John and Alice until now because he could not be certain it was actually connected to Zula and he didn’t want to confuse and upset them and add a vast number of additional bogus leads to John’s already torpid database.

“Go ahead, I’m listening,” John said, having heard nothing further than the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the washing-machine surge of the windshield wipers.

Richard sighed. “I’m trying to figure out where to begin.” He thought about the sheer level of energy he would have to summon in order to explain the investigations he had been pursuing with Corvallis, the state of the battle for the Torgai, and all the rest. And he felt overwhelmingly tired. “I am about to drive this thing right off the road,” he said. “Let’s get to my place and get some coffee.”

BUT AS IT turned out, when they reached Richard’s condo, they went in opposite directions to start the coffeemaker, use the toilet, check email, make phone calls. By the time Richard was ready to talk again, John was asleep on the sofa, and by the time John had awakened from his nap, Richard had conked out on his bed. Later, both awake at the same time, they made sandwiches and looked out the window at the sun setting over the Olympics; the clouds were still heavy, but the red light was streaming in beneath them as if China itself were lurking just a few miles offshore, glowing red like a vast forge. Richard could not get out of his mind that they would soon be chasing that red light westward, and John did not seem talkative either. It was morning there now. Nolan, ensconced in his place in Vancouver, was sending emails, making phone calls, pulling strings, making arrangements for translators and fixers to meet the Forthrasts at the Xiamen airport, trying to get some idea of what the PSB there had been doing. The situation was impossibly hard to read. Was the PSB even aware of the existence of Zula’s note? Perhaps it had been leaked to Richard by some random plumber who wanted to do a good deed and not be identified. Or perhaps the PSB had known about it all along and had dangled it in front of Richard as a lure to bring him to Xiamen for interrogation. Or perhaps they had meant to keep it secret, but some leaker within the PSB had taken it upon himself to shoot Richard a copy. Nolan vacillated between urging Richard not to set foot in China at all and helping him get there as quickly as possible. Richard felt no qualms whatsoever; a member of his family was in trouble there and he had to go.

Corvallis had been tracking the assistant’s flight up from SFO. He showed up at the condo and helped carry John’s bag down to his Prius, which was waiting in the pickup/drop-off lane in front of the building. Richard and John ended up cramming themselves into the backseat together so that they could talk on the way down to Boeing Field.

He really didn’t want to talk about this, but he owed it to John to give him the information before they got on a plane to China.

“There were two separate incidents that we know about,” Richard said. “They seem to have happened a couple of hours apart. Incident number 2 is better documented: a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security checkpoint outside an international conference. A couple of Chinese cops got killed; there were injuries from shrapnel and flying glass.”

“How is this connected to Zula?” John asked.

“We have no idea. But incident number 1 is murkier and maybe more relevant. An apartment building blew up not far from downtown. It was put down to a gas explosion. That’s the official story. But Nolan has got some sources in Xiamen, sources we may be meeting tomorrow, who have been asking around, and word on the street is that the explosion happened in the middle of a gun battle that took place on the building’s upper floors.”

Silence for a while. Richard, who had been through all of this before, knew what John was thinking: he was in denial, trying to think of reasons why this had nothing to do with Zula.

“Now,” Richard continued, speaking as gently as he could, “we have learned from Zula’s note that she was with these Russians who had come into the country illegally and who were armed. We know that they were looking for the Troll.”

“The hackers who created the virus,” John translated.

“Yeah. If they succeeded in tracking down those hackers, then this Ivanov character might have been crazy enough to go in shooting. Who knows, maybe they even used grenades or satchel charges.”

“Why the hell would you use satchel charges?” John demanded. He had long gotten over the fact that Richard was a draft dodger. But he hated it when Richard strayed into topics of which Richard knew nothing and John had personal experience.

“I don’t know, John; I’m just trying to think of a reason why the building blew up. Because the building is gone. It is destroyed.”

“A satchel charge wouldn’t be powerful enough to bring down a multistory building.”

“Okay, well, maybe it was a gas explosion then, but it was set off as a result of the gun battle.”

“Maybe it had nothing to do with Zula at all!” John protested.

“But John, the thing is—as Corvallis here can explain much better than I—at the same time that this gun battle and explosion took place, the Troll dropped off the Internet. And hasn’t come back since.”