Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Listen,” she said, “I just want to be positioned in Vancouver so that I can follow up on this lead at the next opportunity.”

“Truly, it’s not a lead,” he pointed out, “and the next opportunity will be on Monday; for voilà the weekend begins.”

She decided not to press on this for now. “Has anything new been learned?”

“This was a bear hunting party, two guides and three hunters and all the equipment you would expect, packed into an SUV. They departed eleven days ago. They were supposed to be gone for a week. So they are now late by four days and unheard from, disappeared with no trace.”

“The first time we spoke, I thought you said they had been missing for ten days.”

“Perhaps you heard such a thing, but I did not say it. The trouble might have started for them as early as eleven days ago, or as late as four.”

“Because you see the plane I’m looking for would have landed about thirteen days ago.”

“So the dates do not match,” he pointed out.

“But if they landed and holed up somewhere for a couple of days …”

“Where? Why is there no trace of this landing? Of the holing up somewhere?”

Silence. Olivia inched her car forward another length, stopped at the red light. She was next in the queue to cross the border.

What would Jones do? If he found himself stuck north of this imaginary line on the map?

If he had an SUV full of camping equipment?

He had lived in the wilds of Afghanistan for years at a time. Compared to that, a hike down the Cascades would be a piece of cake.

“He’s up there,” she insisted. “If he hasn’t crossed the border already, that is.”

Fournier sighed. “If you suppose he might have crossed the border, why do you not stay to the south of it?”

“Because all I can do is follow his trail,” she said, “and I’m going to pick that up in Canada.”

Silence. She imagined him pulling his glasses off, rubbing tired eyes, thinking of that glass of wine.

The light went green, the car ahead of her glided into another country.

“I must ring off,” she said. “I’m crossing the border.”

” Bienvenue à Canada, Ms. Halifax-Lin,” said Inspector Fournier, and disconnected.

EGDOD HAD JUST been joined by one of Corvallis’s favorite characters, a K’Shetriae Vagabond aligned (as of a few days ago) with the Earthtone Coalition. A longtime student of the game, Corvallis had developed a keen appreciation for luck, as in the odds of getting a propitious roll from Corporation 9592’s random number generators. Some character types and alignments were luckier than others. K’Shetriae Vagabonds were the luckiest of all. Recently Richard had placed his thumb on the scales and made all members of the Earthtone Coalition slightly luckier than their counterparts in the Forces of Brightness, and Corvallis had not been slow to take advantage of it, trading in all of his Bright kit for more tasteful and understated duds.

“He’s on the move,” Richard announced, speaking now into his computer. This was the only way he had left of communicating with C-plus. The demise of his Bluetooth headset had been followed, a few hours later, by that of his phone; and a man who had been peeing into a bucket for six hours certainly did not have the time to go rummaging around for a charger. But as long as Clover (for that was the name of Corvallis’s uncannily fortunate character) was within earshot of Egdod, Corvallis could hear whatever Richard said, albeit digitally transmogrified into the awe-inspiring timbre of Egdod.

“I notice you’re not referring to him as ‘the little fucker’ anymore,” said Clover, in a somewhat reedy, high-pitched voice that sounded nothing like Corvallis. Clover had an Irish accent to boot, this being a menu item commonly selected by American players who wanted to sound more like characters in movies.

“Okay, okay, he stopped being a little fucker when he raised an army of twelve hundred high-level characters and deployed them in battle array around his projected route of advance,” Richard admitted. “I have to admit I was wondering why he was taking so long to move away from that cave. I didn’t reckon that he was going to set the whole thing up like Sherman’s march to the sea.”

“Did you notice his leapfrogging cavalry screens?”

“Yes, I fucking noticed them.”

“I just thought it was a nice detail,” Clover added weakly.

“Well, before you get lost in admiration of the virus-writing son of a bitch, know that he might have information about my niece.”

“How can I be of service?” Clover sniffed.

“Feed me a running count of how many gold pieces he’s snarfed up. No, better yet, convert it into dollars.”

“A hundred and fifty. Dollars.”

“But that’s just floor sweepings he stumbled across. He hasn’t really gotten started.”

“Agreed. Anything else?”

“Call your buddies and see if you can put together a high-level raiding party. It doesn’t have to be as big as what the Troll has got. A few dozen people who know what they’re doing.”

“That should be easy enough.”

“When you’re ready, let me know; we’ll attack his flank and observe how he reacts. I’ll watch from above.”

“Like a god of Olympus,” Clover said.

“You think that’ll be a problem?”

“For a bunch of veteran T’Rain players to go into action, knowing that the eyes of Egdod are upon them? No, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.”

“Good.”

“By the way, he now has thirteen hundred dollars.”

LONG AGO, ZULA had got to a place where she could not be surprised, let alone outraged, by anything the jihadists did. This, she reckoned, must be the story of all radical groups, be they Taliban, Shining Path, or National Socialist. Once they had left common notions of decency in the dust—once they had abandoned all sense of proportionality—then it turned into a sort of competition to see who could outdo all the rest in that. Beyond there it was all comedy, if only you could turn a blind eye to the consequences. Anyway, they set up the camp stove and the coolers of food, the portable water bags and the sacks of Walmart groceries squarely in front of the tree where she was chained up, and expected her to do the cooking and cleaning.

The same thing had happened at the abandoned mine two weeks ago. Then, however, it had felt different to her. They had just survived a plane crash and their future had seemed uncertain; they had been holed up together in a cozy refuge; and, as ridiculous as it might sound, there had been a sense of shared hardship that had made Zula feel like pitching in. Now, of course, matters were rather different. There was a chain around her neck, for one thing. But the quality of the personnel had declined precipitously from those days. There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that “As hire As, and Bs hire Cs,” the point being that as long as you continued to recruit only the very best people, they would attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the second-raters would begin to seine up third-raters to act as their minions and advance their agendas. Zula almost felt as if she’d seen the whole ABC devolution happen in microcosmic form during the two scant weeks she had been rattling around western Canada with Jones and his crew. Jones was indisputably an A, and, in retrospect, those he had chosen to accompany him on the business jet had been As too in their own ways. Sharjeel was the very prototype of a B and he had brought with him Zakir, precisely the kind of C that people who quoted the “As hire As, Bs hire Cs” maxim dreaded bringing into their organization.

But Jones, being an A, seemed to understand this well enough and had sorted matters out accordingly. Their first few hours at the camp had been so quiet that Zula had actually dozed off on her camp pad for a little while; swathed in four layers of cheap fleece, she could sleep practically anywhere without the need for blankets or sleeping bag. She had awakened to find Zakir eyeing her in a manner that, at any time in her life prior to the advent of Wallace and Ivanov, she’d have found creepy. As it was, she found herself wondering whether Zakir could maintain that state of arousal once she had gotten her chain wrapped around his throat and her knee on his spine. During her confinement in the back of the RV, she had done many push-ups and many squats.