Neal Stephenson - Reamde

So nothing had happened. No information had made it out into the public sphere yet that established any link between those two names. He tried Jones’s name in connection with Xiamen and found nothing. With Yuxia’s help he was able to find some news stories in the Chinese media about a gas explosion and a failed terrorist attack that had taken place in Xiamen on the morning in question, but none of these made any reference to Jones or Zula or any of the other people Csongor knew to have been involved. So there had been some sort of totally effective clampdown on news.

“A FLARE JUST went up,” said a familiar voice on the phone.

Olivia recognized him, after a moment’s disorientation, as “Uncle Meng,” presumably calling from London.

She was disoriented because she had been talking to Mounties in Vancouver and hadn’t expected London calling.

“Hello?”

“I’m here. Sorry,” Olivia said. “What sort of flare?”

“We have a new actor in the GWOJ,” said Uncle Meng, who had adopted Seamus Costello’s acronym for the struggle in which they all—MI6, FBI, Mounties, the Forthrast family—were jointly engaged.

“What’s the new actor doing?”

“Google searches linking names like Zula with names like Abdallah Jones. Xiamen. Csongor.”

“Who the hell is Csongor?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Uncle Meng, “which makes me wonder whether this new actor has inadvertently identified himself.”

“Where is the new actor?”

“No idea,” said Uncle Meng. “Whoever he is, he is savvy about computer security, has set himself up with a clean and well-defended Linux installation of extremely recent vintage, is using some kind of hacker software to anonymize his packets. So we can’t guess where he might be.”

“Is anything showing up on public sites?”

“Not that we’ve noticed.”

“So the new actor isn’t blabbing.”

“No. Just fishing. Looking around to see if anyone else knows what he knows. And so far I would say that the answer is no.”

“Is there any action you would like me to take?” Olivia asked.

“You’ve already helped by letting me know you have no idea who Csongor is,” said Uncle Meng. “If I need anything else, I’ll let you know.” And he rang off, which was good since another call was coming in from a number that, judging by area code and prefix, was in the Vancouver offices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Her cross-border telephonic activities had been a sort of repeat, in miniature, of what she had gone through during her first day or two in the United States: starting with people whose names she knew and whose telephone numbers she had, obtaining other names and numbers, blindly groping through labyrinthine org charts until she actually managed to establish relationships with people who didn’t think she was crazy and to whom she could divulge a bit of sensitive information. In contrast to the United States, with its Tower of Babel–like security/intelligence apparatus, Canada offered a straightforward one-stop shopping arrangement in the form of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There was also an intelligence agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but when they had got wind of the sorts of questions Olivia was asking, they had simply referred her to the Mounties, who were better equipped to answer.

As she had hoped, this call was from one Inspector Fournier, whom everyone seemed to think was the man she really ought to be talking to. She excused herself from the room where she had been going over aerial photographs with FBI agents and wandered out into an empty office nearby, gazing out the window over the blue waters of Elliott Bay—for it was a perfect spring day, the sky was clear, the mountains were out—and staring at, without really seeing, containerships being jockeyed around at the port. After some polite chitchat with Inspector Fournier, she asked for, and received, permission to use up a quarter of an hour of his valuable time and launched into a summary of the SNAG theory and its possible relevance to Inspector Fournier’s sphere of responsibilities.

AFTER THE INITIAL spate of Google searching, Csongor went into a deep funk for a couple of hours. All during the desperate voyage of Szélanya he had been imagining that, if he could only get to a computer with an Internet connection, he’d be able to make things happen. In retrospect, it had not been a realistic assumption at all. But it had given him a reason to keep going through the occasional typhoon.

They had never really decompressed from the voyage. That was the problem. If they had beached Szélanya in an isolated cove and spent a little while eating coconuts and swimming in limpid waters, Csongor might now be psychologically ready to pivot into whatever the hell was going to happen to them next. But when Szélanya had ground to a halt, Csongor had allowed himself to relax for all of about thirty seconds—and during those thirty seconds, virtually all their money had been stolen. Since then it had been nonstop action; and now he was learning that his precious Internet was completely useless in tracking down Zula.

He was taken by sleep as suddenly and as completely as a man being swept off a deck by a wave.

A FEW HOURS into the Troll hunt, Richard’s Bluetooth headset began to bleat out a pathetic low-battery warning. He severed the phone connection to Corvallis, which was becoming less and less useful as Richard got up to speed. Embedded in a complex of spells and disguises about twenty deep, he had made his way to the Torgai Foothills by actually flying there directly, eschewing the crowded ley line network, which would have forced him to emerge at a place where his character—or rather the disguised version of it—might be noticed. Here he was fighting certain ineluctable features of the rule system. He didn’t want it understood that Egdod was on the move, and so he had disguised himself as one Ur’Qat, a K’Shetriae warrior mage of much lesser powers—but still powerful enough to survive alone in the war-torn Torgai Foothills.

Another reasonable step might be to make himself invisible. Egdod was capable of putting up invisibility spells that almost no one in the game could penetrate. And yet there was always a small probability that such a spell might fail. This was one of the ways they kept the game interesting: low-level characters always had a chance to defeat high-level ones. Even an Egdod could be detected. Better to disguise himself first as the less powerful Ur’Qat, and then have Ur’Qat cast an invisibility spell. Any spell that Ur’Qat could cast would be much less puissant and hence much more likely to be penetrated than one of Egdod’s. So there was a good chance that when Ur’Qat rode the ley line into the Torgai, he’d be noticed, invisibility spell or no; and then he might be attacked outright or, what would probably be worse, be covertly followed as he went sneaking around after Reamde. And perhaps the person following him would be one of Reamde’s minions. Egdod could always get to the Torgai in a big hurry, if he decided that this was warranted; but all signs pointed to that Reamde was slowly and patiently effecting a battle plan that was going to stretch out over many hours. As long as that continued to be the case, Egdod would content himself with flying from his fortress to the Torgai. Even moving at supersonic velocity, this took a while. But during the flight, Richard had been able to refamiliarize himself with certain spells and magical items that might soon come in handy. And, at least until Richard’s Bluetooth headset had croaked, he’d been able to get updates from Corvallis and to learn something about the minions that Reamde was summoning from, it appeared, all over south China.