Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Peter did not yet like the way the conversation was going. Wallace had thrown him completely off-balance by making the conversation about T’Rain and had pressed him into service as drink fetcher. Now, though, Wallace changed his attitude a bit, explaining himself, as if educating Peter. Doing him a favor. “This is the feast hall of King Oglo of the Northern Red Dwinn. I’ve been in it ten, maybe fifteen times.”

“You mean, your character’s been in it.”

“Yes, that is what I mean,” said Wallace, and he didn’t have to add you fucking shite-for-brains .

Wallace had come into the place wearing an overcoat, a garment that Peter had seen only in movies. Probably the only overcoat within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. A gentleman’s garment. About him were various other faint traces of white collarness. His red-going-white hair had been slicked back from his sun-mottled forehead, which sported a divot above the left temple where a skin cancer had been rooted out. Reading glasses hung on a gold chain from his neck. His shirt was open at the neck. Its sheer fabric would look good beneath a sharp suit but would afford him very little protection if he had to stop and change a tire. His right hand was anchored by a fat gold signet ring.

“I don’t play T’Rain myself,” Peter said, though this seemed pretty obvious by this point.

“What games do you play?”

“I like snowboarding. Shooting. Sometimes I—”

“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, what’s your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?” Wallace tapped his signet ring on the table.

Peter was silent for a few moments.

“And don’t try to tell me that there is none, because we both know why we’re here.” Tap tap tap.

“Yeah,” said Peter, “but that doesn’t mean it’s because of a vice.”

Wallace laughed, and not in the delighted way he’d laughed when he had recognized that he was sitting in the feast hall of King Oglo. “You reached me through certain individuals in Ukraine who are not exactly solid citizens. I checked you out. I have read all the postings you made, starting at the age of twelve, in hacker chat rooms, written in that ridiculous fucking spelling that you all use. Three years ago you went on record under your real name calling yourself a gray-hat hacker, which is as good as admitting that you were a black-hat before. And a year ago you signed on with this security consultancy where half of the founders have done time, for Christ’s sake.”

“Look. What do you want me to say? We’re here. We’re having this meeting. We both know why. So it’s not like I’ve been lying to you.”

“Very true. What I’m trying to establish is that you have been lying to everyone else, including, I’d guess, your cappuccino girlfriend over there. And it’s helpful for me to know what vices or troubles led you to tell those lies.”

“Why? I’ve got what you came for.”

“That’s what I am trying to establish.”

Peter reached into a large external pocket of his coat and pulled out a DVD case containing a single unmarked disk, white on top, iridescent purple on the bottom. “Here it is.”

Wallace looked disgusted. “That’s how you want to deliver it?”

“Is there a problem?”

“I brought a notebook computer. No DVD slot. Rather hoped you’d bring it on a thumb drive.”

Peter considered this. “I think that can be arranged. Hold on a second.”

“THAT GUY JUST tasked your boyfriend,” Richard remarked, shortly after Peter had sat down across from the stranger by the fire.

“Tasked?”

“Gave him a job to do. ‘Get the waiter’s attention. Order me a drink.’ Something of that nature.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s a tactic,” Richard said. “When you’ve just met someone and you’re trying to feel them out. Give them a task and see how they react. If they accept the task, you can move on and give them a bigger one later.”

“Is it a tactic you use?”

“No, it’s manipulative. Either someone works for me or they don’t. If they work for me, I can assign them tasks and it’s fine. If they don’t work for me, then I have no business assigning them tasks.”

“So you’re saying that Peter’s friend is manipulating him.”

“Acquaintance.”

“It’s some kind of business contact,” Zula guessed.

“Then why didn’t he just come out and say so?”

“That’s a good question,” Zula said. “He’s probably afraid I’d be mad at him if he interrupted our vacation for a business meeting.”

So he lied to you? Richard thought better of actually saying this. If he pushed too hard, he might get the opposite result from what he wanted.

Besides, Peter was now headed back over to the table.

“Does either of you have a thumb drive I could use?”

The question hung there like an invisible cloud of flatulence.

“I want to transfer some pictures between computers,” he explained.

Richard and Zula and Peter had all been lounging around the place for a while, occasionally checking email or messing around with vacation photos, and so Richard had his laptop bag between his feet. He pulled it up into his lap and groped around in an external pocket. “Here you go,” he said.

“I’ll get it right back to you,” Peter said.

“Don’t bother,” Richard said, peeved, in a completely school-marmish way, by Peter’s failure to use the magic words. “It’s too small. I was going to buy a new one tomorrow. Just erase whatever’s on it, okay?”

PETER RETURNED to the table, pulled out his laptop, and inserted the thumb drive. His computer, a Linux machine, identified it as a Windows file system, which was just what he needed since Wallace’s machine was also a Windows box. Finding several files in it, Peter erased them. Then he popped the DVD out of its case and pushed it into the slot.

“Why don’t you just use the local copy on your machine?” Wallace asked him.

“Ooh, good trick question!” Peter said. “It’s like I told you. There is only one copy. It’s on the DVD. I am not about ripping you off.” The DVD appeared as an icon on his desktop. He opened it up, and it showed but a single file. He dragged that over to the thumb drive’s icon and waited for a few seconds as the files were transferred. “Now, two copies,” he said. He dismounted the thumb drive and removed it. “Voilà,” he said, holding it up. “The goods. As promised.”

“Not until I agree that it is what you have claimed.”

“Go ahead and check it out!”

“Oh, I’ve looked at the sample you sent. They were all legit credit card numbers, just like you said. Names, expiration dates, and all the rest.”

“So what are you getting at?”

“Provenance.”

“Isn’t that a city in Rhode Island?”

“Since you are an autodidact, Peter, and I have a soft spot for autodidacts, I’ll forgive you for not knowing the word. It means, where did the data come from?”

“What does that matter, if it’s good data?”

Wallace sighed, sipped his club soda, and looked around the feast hall. As if willing forth the energy needed to go on with this stupid conversation. “You are misconstruing this, young man. I’m trying to help you.”

“I wasn’t aware I needed any help.”

“This is proactive help. You understand? Retroactive help—the kind you’re thinking of—is throwing a drunk the life preserver after he’s fallen off the pier. Proactive help is grabbing him by the belt and pulling him to safety before he falls.”

“Why should you even give a shit?”

“Because if you end up needing help, boy, owing to a problem with the provenance of these credit card numbers, then I’m going to need it too.”