Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Since Lottery Discountz was doing nothing except observing the trade pit, Csongor rose, stretched, and strolled over to have a look. Yuxia too seemed to have been stirred awake by the sound of someone speaking in Mandarin and opened her eyes slightly, then stiffened, remembering where she was. Her eyes fixed and focused on something across the room. Csongor followed her gaze and saw that the morning shift, if that was the right word for it, was filtering into the café. For the last few hours they’d had the whole place almost to themselves, but there were a couple of new arrivals who had ensconced themselves behind terminals in Yuxia’s line of sight. One of them was just in the act of glancing away. Csongor, hardly a stranger to girl-watching, reckoned Yuxia must have caught him looking and was now giving him the evil eye. Not wanting to get caught up in that exchange, Csongor got to where he could look over Marlon’s shoulder and view his monitor.

The last half-dozen times Csongor had checked, he had seen nothing on Marlon’s screen that looked remotely like a virtual sword and sorcery world. Instead it had been countless overlapping panes containing ramified orc charts, bar graphs, fluctuating statistical displays, and scrolling columns of chat. All that was gone now, replaced by something that looked a little more like it: a melee at the throat of a narrow pass between foothills. Several members of Marlon’s army—not the main group, but one of his flank guards—had been attacked as they forded a stream that ran through the pass. It looked like a carefully laid ambush, and half a dozen of them were already lying dead in the shallows. But reinforcements were hurtling into the combat zone on land, in the air, and over the water, engaging the ambushers in many single combats that merged and divided as one fighter came to the aid of another, then wheeled about to contend with some new threat.

“Problems?” Csongor asked.

“No,” Marlon said, “we will kick their asses.”

“Are you going to do any ass kicking?” Csongor asked. Because he had noticed that Reamde was just biding his time on a boulder in the middle of the stream.

“Not needed,” Marlon said. “I am observing.”

“What do you see?”

Marlon took a long time to answer. Then he spoke as if these observations were just coming into his awareness: “They are very good. Experienced characters. Not just kids. But they have not fought together before.”

“How can you tell?”

“They don’t know how to help each other as an experienced raiding party would. And they look different.” Marlon raised his hand from the keyboard for the first time in, Csongor guessed, several hours to point out one of the attackers. “See? Definitely Bright.” Then he moved to indicate another. “Him? Earthtone. Why are they fighting together?”

Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he brought his hand sharply down to the keyboard and used the keys to spin his point of view around and up. He was looking up into the starry sky now. Hovering up there were two characters, suspended magically in midair, gazing down. Clicking on them brought up little windows showing their portraits and their names. Csongor could not read, from this distance, the microscopic type.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Not who they say they are,” Marlon said.

“What does it mean?”

“This is not the real attack,” Marlon said. “Real attack is later.”

“How much money do you have?”

“Of gold pieces, two million.”

Marlon converted it. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Five thousand, roughly, for every member of the ambushing party.

Why would that not be the real attack? Who expected to get more than $5,000 for a few seconds’ fighting in a video game?

“You are still hoping for the amount we discussed earlier?” Csongor asked.

“We can’t stop now,” Marlon said. “We get it all or nothing tonight.”

“Actually, the sun has been up for hours.”

“Whatever.”

BY THE TIME Olivia had reached her hotel in downtown Vancouver, she had thought herself into a deep funk about Inspector Fournier and what she feared was his obstructive attitude toward the investigation. She was therefore pleasantly surprised when the desk clerk, while checking her in, noticed something interesting on the screen of her computer, and then looked up brightly to inform Olivia that she had a message waiting. A manila envelope was produced. Its heft suggested it might contain ten or twenty pages of material. Once she had checked in to her room and sorted herself out a bit, she opened it up and found that it contained faxed copies of police reports, both local and Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Her higher-ups at MI6 were insistent that she always keep them apprised of her whereabouts. She had been delinquent about that ever since leaving Seattle, so she checked in with them. It would be something like six in the morning in London now.

Then she settled in to read the reports of the missing hunters: a retired oil industry engineer from Arizona and his two sons, aged thirty-two and thirty-seven, from Louisiana and Denver, respectively, all experienced hunters, who had traveled up to B.C. to celebrate the old man’s sixty-fifth birthday by bagging a grizzly. They’d hired a guide company that prided itself on catering to serious old-school hunters. To judge from the tone of certain promotional passages on its website, this was to set it apart from competing firms that offered a posher, and presumably much more expensive, experience. Clients were offered a money-back guarantee that they would actually kill a bear at some point during the weeklong expedition.

Apparently this pitch had been convincing to the two sons, who had pooled their cash to purchase the trip as a surprise for their dad. From the police reports, and from the brutally depressing website that the missing men’s family had put up, beseeching the universe for information, it was clear that these were no dilettantes; the father had lived all over the world during his career and had lost no opportunity to hunt big game wherever it was to be gone after, frequently bringing his boys along with him. The guides were no tenderfeet either: one of them—a cofounder of the company—had been doing this for three decades, and the other was a First Nations man whose people had been living in the area for tens of thousands of years. They were in a two-year-old, four-wheel-drive Suburban well equipped with tire chains, winch, and anything else that might be needed to drive out of trouble or survive when hopelessly stuck.

Which was part of their method, and part of the problem now faced by the police. For since the guides were not anchored to a cushy lodge, they could roam wherever hunting was best, and since they were offering a money-back guarantee, they had something of an incentive to do just that. In the course of a week’s hunting, they might move among several favorite bear-hunting sites distributed over an area hundreds of kilometers on a side, almost all of which was mountainous, and only just becoming passable without snow machines. By far the most reasonable theory was that they had taken the Suburban one kilometer too far, skidded off the road, and become hopelessly lodged in a streambed or snowbank.

Or at least that had seemed the most reasonable theory during the first couple of days that they had been reported overdue. Consequently the search-and-rescue efforts had been all about crisscrossing the region in light aircraft, looking for a crashed vehicle or a distress beacon, and scanning the radio frequencies on which they might send out a distress call. Phone coverage in most of the region was out of the question, but the Suburban had a citizens’-band radio, and presumably they’d fire it up and call for help as soon as they saw an airplane. Or heard one.