Neal Stephenson - Reamde

A red bogey had been approaching on the radar display and Csongor had been worried that Marlon, preoccupied with his chat windows, was not noticing it. But then he fired off a complex command key combination that caused almost all of the windows to vanish, leaving only the ones that were relevant during combat. Something happened very fast, making no sense at all to Csongor, whose ideas as to what video-game combat should look like were, he guessed, hopelessly old-fashioned. The few times he had tried to play popular video games in Internet cafés in Budapest he had been vanquished in microseconds by opponents who, to judge from the nature of their taunting, were very young, possibly still in the single digits. Csongor now got the sense that Marlon was one of those kids who had grown up without losing any of his skills. In any case, the foe who had been sneaking up on Reamde was dead, and his corpse looted, in less time than it would have taken Csongor to reach out and get a sip of coffee from a cup next to the keyboard, and then all the windows verged back on the screen and Marlon resumed his chat.

Csongor had been assuming that absolute, respectful silence was the correct behavior for him to be engaging in, but Marlon seemed so adept at multitasking that this now seemed like ridiculous, fusty, Old World etiquette. “Getting in touch with the da G shou?” he asked.

“Yes,” Marlon said.

“So they are okay?”

“At least some of them.” He typed for a while. “They have been waiting.”

“For you?”

“For a way to get the money out.”

“How is that going to work, anyway?” For Csongor had learned enough to know that the da G shou all used self-sus accounts, which was to say that they were not linked to credit cards. This was convenient for Chinese kids just starting out, but made it harder to transfer profits out of the world.

“It can be arranged,” Marlon said. “There are money transfer agents who do it. Normally we work with ones in China but we can find others, anywhere in the world. They can send us money here, by Western Union.” Marlon looked up from the screen for the first time since he had logged in. “I saw a Western Union sign as we were coming in on the bus. It is only half a kilometer from here.”

“So tomorrow morning, when they open up, we could have cash waiting for us.”

“I could have cash waiting for me,” Marlon corrected him, “but I will be glad to share it with you and Yuxia.”

Csongor flushed slightly but kept on talking through his embarrassment: “What is the procedure?”

“Try to find some more of the da G shou and get them logged on,” Marlon said. “One of them can go looking for a foreign money transfer agent and the rest of us can create a raiding party and collect gold.”

“You have never dealt with non-Chinese money transfer agents before?”

“Why would we?” Marlon asked.

“Let me make some contacts,” Csongor proposed, looking over at the computer he had secured earlier. Yuxia had finished typing and now appeared to be web surfing. “I can probably find one in Hungary. If not there, then Austria.”

“Are those near—I don’t know the name—dot C H?”

It took Csongor a moment to put this together. Then he understood it as a reference to Internet domain names ending in “.ch.”

“Switzerland,” Csongor said. Confoederatio Helvetica .

“The place with the banks,” Marlon said.

“Yes, Switzerland is close to Austria and Hungary.”

“Try Switzerland,” Marlon suggested gently, then turned his attention back to the game; for at almost the same moment, two more creatures’ faces had flashed from gray to color and leaped to the top of the roster. Csongor had an image of teenaged boys all over south China—terrified refugees who had spent the last two weeks staying one step ahead of the cops, hiding out in flophouses or cadging spare beds from shirttail relatives in the country—receiving bulletins on their phones, sprinting to the nearest wangbas, slamming their arses into chairs, cracking their knuckles, and going into action.

Csongor moved toward Yuxia and looked over her shoulder. She had opened up a web browser and was looking at a Wikipedia page. The title of the article was “Abdallah Jones.” It sported a photograph of a man Csongor had once tried to shoot in the head on a pier in Xiamen.

“Mother fucker !” Csongor exclaimed.

Yuxia turned around slowly and looked at him. “Fate has given us a totally awesome foe,” she observed.

“Then we should do something totally awesome to him,” Csongor suggested. “In a bad way.”

“Not so easy, from the pervert capital of the world.”

She said it loudly. Faces bobbed up and popped around the edges of various computer monitors around the café, but Yuxia took no note of them. She had turned back to face the computer. Taking in some of Jones’s exploits, his death statistics, she shook her head convulsively. “This guy really sucks ass.”

“But you knew that,” Csongor said.

“No foolin’.”

RICHARD MADE NO friends during his drive through Elphinstone; but the dirty little secret of Canadians was that they drove like maniacs, so his speeding and light-running were not so far out of the norm as they might have been south of the border. The road that ran up the valley toward the Schloss had, in recent years, become a vector for sprawl and was now lined by the sorts of businesses that were excluded from the middle of town by its famously prim historic-preservation fatwa. But at the end of the day, Elphinstone wasn’t that big and could only support so many car dealerships and Tim Hortons, and so this kind of development petered out in the dead zone around the abandoned lumber mill. Beyond that the road funneled to two lanes and angled upward, then, a few miles later, began to wind like a snake and buck like a mule.

So it was inevitable that he would close in on the tail of a gigantic RV no more than thirty seconds after he’d reached that part of the road beyond which passing was completely out of the question. It was not quite the size of a semi. It had Utah plates. It needed a trip through the RV wash. Its back end was freckled with the usual bumper stickers about spending the grandchildren’s inheritance. And it was going all of about thirty miles an hour. Richard slammed on the brakes, turned on his headlights just to make it obvious he was there, and backed off to the point where he could see the rearview mirrors. Then he cursed the Internet. This sort of thing had never used to happen, because the road didn’t really lead anywhere; beyond the Schloss, it reverted to gravel and struggled around a few more bends to an abandoned mining camp a couple of miles beyond, where the only thing motorists could do was turn around in a wide spot and come back out again. But geocachers had been at work planting Tupperware containers and ammo boxes of random knickknacks in tree forks and under rocks in the vicinity of that turnaround, and people kept visiting those sites and leaving their droppings on the Internet, making cheerful remarks about the nice view, the lack of crowds, and the availability of huckleberries. Normally Richard and the Schloss’s other habitués would have at least another month of clear driving before those people began to show up, but these RVers had apparently decided to get a jump on the tourist season and be the first geocachers of the year to make it to the sites in question.

Richard allowed a decent interval of perhaps thirty seconds to pass, then laid on the horn, and kept laying it on until, less than a minute later, to his pleasant surprise, the RV’s brake lights came on and it eased its right wheels over onto the road’s meager shoulder at a place where it was only a little dangerous for him to pass. Not that anyone was ever coming the other way; but Richard had been taught the rudiments of passing in Iowa, where if you could not see an open lane all the way to the horizon, you bided your time. He barreled past the RV, and he would have rolled the window down and given the driver a friendly wave if he hadn’t been preoccupied. As it happened, he did not even look back at it; its driver was ensconced about thirty feet off the ground, and it was difficult to see into its bridge from where Richard was sitting.