Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“He’s as in the dark as we are,” Olivia said. “Please do let me know if that changes.”

“Oh, I most certainly shall,” said Uncle Meng, and rang off as abruptly as he had started the conversation.

Olivia chewed on her thumbnail for perhaps thirty seconds, wondering if she ought to just pull over and run this investigation from the shoulder of the road for a while. But there was nothing she could do about the traffic. She picked up her phone, navigated to the “Recent Calls” list, and punched in Richard Forthrast’s number.

It rang a few times. But then finally his voice came on the line. “British spy chick,” he said.

“Is that how you think of me?”

“Can you give me a better description?”

“You didn’t like my fake name?”

“Already forgot it. You’re in my phone directory as British Spy Chick.”

“I was thinking of you,” she said, “and thought I should check in. How are you and your brothers doing?”

He laughed. “We were about to kill each other, so I put them on a plane to Bourne’s Ford this morning.”

“Ah. It sounds charming.” Olivia heard herself dribbling out meaningless words, trying to make a decision as to what she should or shouldn’t tell Richard.

“The Troll is logged on,” he announced.

“He is!?”

“And he’s on the move. And I’m tracking him. Which means I’m busy. I want you to call this number”—he rattled off a number with a 206 area code—“and talk to Corvallis and get the details.”

“Which details are those?” she asked distractedly, trying to impress the number into her memory.

“The Troll’s IP address,” Richard said. “So you can track him. He’s in the Philippines. With your resources you can probably get his exact coordinates and hit him with a drone attack, or something.”

“No comment on that.”

“But don’t,” Richard urged her, “because I want to get some information out of him first. After that, you can hit him with all the Hellfire missiles you want.”

She didn’t know what to say. Was having trouble with Richard’s sense of humor.

He tried again: “Track him all you want. Just don’t spook him. Most important of all, don’t try to follow him in T’Rain. Because he’ll know. He’ll be on to you in a second.”

She hung up and punched in the number of Corvallis about a tenth of a second ahead of the moment when it slipped from her memory forever.

A new voice came on: “British spy, er, woman?”

“You can say ‘chick’ if you want, I shan’t file a complaint.”

“We tried to get him to take sensitivity training, but he kept blowing it off.”

“Oh, compared to some I deal with, your boss is exquisitely refined. Don’t worry about it.”

“Richard said you might call.”

“Yes. You think that the Troll is in the Philippines?”

“Yeah, but we don’t have the resources here to nail it down better—his IP address is part of a batch that is allocated over a pretty wide geographic area. Would you like to write down the dotted quad?”

“Love to,” Olivia said, “but I’m driving. Sort of. So I’m going to do something else instead.”

“Uh, okay, what’s that?”

“I’m going to give your number to a colleague of mine who is actually in the Philippines. Seamus Costello is his name. He’ll know what to do with it.”

“Happy to help out.”

“And then he’ll probably ask you a lot of questions about how to make his character more powerful.”

Corvallis had been typing. “Looks like Thorakks is pretty friggin’ powerful already.”

“How did you know about that!?”

“T’Rain is one big database,” Corvallis said, “and it is my—well, let’s just say that I am its master.”

“Please don’t tell me Seamus is logged on right now.”

“He signed off three hours ago,” Corvallis said. “It is about seven in the morning there.”

“Where? Can you tell where he was logged in from?”

Typing. “The Manila Shangri-La Hotel. Club Level. Would you like his room number?”

“I have his cell,” Olivia said, “but if I want to fuck with him—which I do—it would be better to call his landline, wouldn’t it?”

“THIS FRICKIN’ PHONE is attached to the wall by an actual wire,” said Seamus Costello, with a mix of horror and disgust, when he became awake enough to understand such facts. “How the hell are you reaching me over a wire !?”

“You have a few things to learn about spycraft,” Olivia said sternly. “Really, I’m surprised. I hope you can be trusted with the information I’m about to give you.”

“What information is that?”

“I’m not sure actually,” Olivia admitted, “but it’s a lead. In the Philippines. Which is where you happen to be stuck.”

“I check into hotels like this,” Seamus said, “specifically not to be reminded of this fact.”

“Well, get on this, and maybe it’ll be your ticket out of there.”

“GWOJ-related?”

“Of course.”

“Where the hell are you, anyway?”

“Northbound on Interstate 5 at the blistering velocity of three miles per hour. Whoops, I take it back, now I’m stopped.”

“Like Manila all over again, eh?”

“Except I can’t just abandon the vehicle.”

“Northbound from… San Diego? L.A.?”

“Seattle,” Olivia said, and gave him a brief summary of what she’d been doing since she’d left Manila.

“All righty,” Seamus said, once he’d taken all of this in. “So the main thrust of the investigation, as far you’re concerned, is the SNAG, and you’re going to Vancouver to follow up a possible lead there… but what does that have to do with me?”

“Seamus, you are a highly trained operative with an exceptional skill set. Catlike reflexes and a killer instinct second to none.”

Seamus already suspected that he was being set up in some way, so he refused to say a single word.

Olivia continued, “Thousands of foes have fallen under the swingeing impact of your Targadian Bladed War Mace.”

“Any time you want to start making sense, I’m ready.”

“There’s a mission now that requires a warrior of your skills.” And Olivia went on to describe what was going on involving the Troll. Most of the important bits were contained in the first few sentences; after that, she sensed herself trailing off to insignificance. Traffic was beginning to loosen, she found herself changing lanes, multitasking more than she really wanted to.

Finally Seamus interrupted her: “Am I to understand that this kid was living ten feet away from Jones for months? And that he was right in the middle of the Xiamen ‘gas explosion’?”

“Yes on both counts.”

“That’s all you had to tell me. Where is the little fucker?”

“That’s for you and your stupendous national intelligence apparatus to figure out.” And she gave him the IP address.

“I’m on it,” he said.

“Just one thing…”

“Yeah?” Seamus, who had been sweetly confused and sleepy-headed early in the conversation, was fully awake now, and impatient, and didn’t care if Olivia knew it.

Actually, sort of wanted Olivia to know it.

“The kid is good. Don’t try to take him on.”

“Thorakks can handle the kid. Good luck with the SNAG.” And he hung up.

Which was fine because Uncle Meng was calling back.

It occurred to her that it was now something like one in the morning in London. Uncle Meng sounded some combination of drunk and tired. He was in his club or something.

“We have indications that Csongor—assuming that’s who our Tor-using Googler is—might be trying to establish links with a T’Rain moneychanger.”