Neal Stephenson - Reamde

CSONGOR WOKE UP nagged by the vague sense that there was something useful he could be doing and, after a few moments, remembered what it was: he was supposed to be locating a T’Rain moneychanger, preferably in Switzerland, but potentially anywhere in the world outside of China. It was 3:41 A.M.; he had been sleeping upright in a chair for almost three hours. He looked over at Marlon and found him in exactly the same pose as before. Yuxia was sitting in front of the other computer, but she was nodding off. He tried to move, discovered his neck had gone stiff, devoted a minute to stretching himself out. Then he strolled over for a look over Marlon’s shoulder. He was astonished to discover that the troll Reamde still had not moved from the cave entrance. But it would be wrong to think that nothing had happened this whole time, for the roster window on the left side of the screen was now filled from top to bottom with character portraits in full color, each with its own little continually-fluctuating-and-updating status display. While Csongor had been sleeping Marlon had recruited several dozen other players to help him. Marlon slapped a function key, and the roster window expanded to fill most of the screen, then rearranged itself into a sort of hierarchical tree structure with Reamde ensconced at the top.

“Your org chart?” Csongor asked.

“Orc chart,” Marlon said.

INSPECTOR FOURNIER GOT back to Olivia at about three thirty in the afternoon, letting her know that they had conducted a simple search of police records and found nothing about weird private jet landings or roving bands of Middle Eastern terrorists. The only thing that had been flagged as even moderately peculiar was that a group of hunters had gone missing in north-central B.C., about ten days ago.

Forty-five minutes later—having made a quick raid on her hotel room to grab her stuff and check out—Olivia was northbound on Interstate 5, stopped almost totally dead in the inevitable Friday afternoon rush hour jam-up. But she was moving. She was moving, she was convinced, in the general direction of Abdallah Jones.

IN SOME RESPECTS, Abdallah Jones’s jihadists were so hapless that they almost— almost —aroused feelings of sympathy in Zula’s breast, exciting what little she had in the way of maternal instincts. But certain things they were quite good at and went about with commendable efficiency. One of those was camping out. And after more than a week of aimlessly wandering about the highways and byways of British Columbia in an RV, they were clearly so ready to camp out.

She had flattered herself that, as they drew closer to the Schloss, they’d move her up to the front of the RV and consult her for directions. But it seemed that they had scored a GPS from one of the many Walmarts they had raided during their wanderings and were now simply using it to zero in on the coordinates of the place where she had taken photographs of the collapsed mining structure a few weeks ago. They closed and locked the door of her cell so she’d not be a distraction; and so she spent the last few hours of the journey alone in the dark, running through the exercise program she had invented for herself and trying to guess their location from what few sensory cues penetrated the insulated walls of the room. They passed through a town; she guessed Elphinstone. They bought groceries; she guessed at the Safeway. Then they left town and began to ascend (her ears were popping) on a winding road. Almost certainly the one that ran up the valley toward the Schloss. Someone honked furiously at them for a while, then sped past; as a little joke to herself, she imagined it might be Uncle Richard. Then she suddenly knew with certainty that it must have been Uncle Richard.

They reached a place where the road became gravel and then shut off the RV’s engine. Nothing happened, from her point of view, for an hour; she could feel the suspension rocking as men climbed off, presumably going to reconnoiter. Muffled discussions were going on up ahead of her, and stuff was being unloaded. Almost had to be given that the RV had become so crammed with camping gear during the last week that it was difficult to move around in it.

Then she heard the sound she’d been waiting for ever since they’d constructed this prison cell and put her in it: the heavy clinking of the chain as someone dug it out of whatever storage bin it had been heaped in.

Scrabbling at the door. Then it was kicked open. Zakir—the big soft-bodied Vancouverite—was standing there, eyeglasses slightly askew, the chain all piled up in his arms. Shaving and bathing had not been such a priority with him these last several days.

“I’ll be needing your neck,” he announced, with elaborate, sarcastic fake-politeness.

CSONGOR DIDN’T HAVE the faintest idea how to go about making contact with a T’Rain money-laundering specialist, but he supposed that the direct approach couldn’t hurt. He began generating some appropriate Google queries and soon enough began to get a sense for the correct buzzwords and search terms.

The problem turned out to be that none of these people had websites per se. They were post-web and post-email. You got in touch with them by catching up with their toons in T’Rain.

So Csongor began downloading the Linux version of T’Rain to this computer; and while that was going on, he began reading up on the game, trying to learn some of the basics so that he would not be utterly helpless when he entered the world.

The download process was a very slick one that had its own theme music, which blasted out of the machine’s speakers for a few moments before Csongor figured out how to turn down the volume. Marlon noticed it. “Are you going in?” he asked. He sounded a bit uneasy.

“To find moneychangers.”

“But you don’t have a toon.”

“That is true, Marlon.”

“You’ll have to start a new one. That’s not going to work. He’ll just get killed over and over again.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“My homeboys and I used to make our living selling toons to guys like you.”

“They weren’t like me.”

“Anyway, I’ll lend you one for free.”

“WE HAVE VERY probably identified Csongor,” came the voice of Uncle Meng through Olivia’s phone, with no preliminary helloing or chitchat about the weather. “Your email was helpful.” For Olivia, following their earlier conversation, had sent Uncle Meng an email describing the contents of Zula’s paper towel codex.

Nothing then for a few moments. An aid truck, lights flashing, was trying to force its way through the traffic jam, laying on its horn and obliging drivers to creep aside.

“Everything all right?” Uncle Meng asked.

“Fine. I’m on a freeway traveling much more slowly than walking pace.” She had been on the road for half an hour and had not even passed out of the city limits of Seattle. “What did you find?”

“Csongor Takács, twenty-five years old, freelance Internet security consultant and sysadmin, based out of Budapest. Known connections to organized crime figures. Has not logged on to any of his usual servers, Facebook, et cetera, in three weeks.”

Olivia probably should have been thinking about something else, but she was wondering whether she should call Richard. For the one detail she couldn’t get out of her head was that this Csongor had been doing Google searches on Zula’s name. He knew who she was. But he didn’t know where she was. Was it reading too much into a Google search to say that he was worried about her?

That he was, in other words, a good guy?

“Where does this get us?” she asked.

“Like all the other intelligence concerning the Russians, it gets us nowhere,” Uncle Meng said. Not harshly. Sounding a bit regretful. “It is interesting background material, helping explain the events leading up to Jones’s flight from Xiamen. But the nature of Csongor’s Google searches tells us that—”