Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  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.

&n
bsp; “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—”

  “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 J
ones 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.”

  It took Olivia—trying to think, now, of so many things at once—a few moments to understand. “They’re together,” she blurted out. “Csongor and the Troll.” Then, after a couple of lane changes: “Why would they be together?”

  “Unknown,” said Uncle Meng, “but perhaps your contact can simply ask them. I myself am going to bed.”

  IT HAD TAKEN Zula a certain amount of time simply to get used to having open space around her, and a sky above.

  They were at the turnaround at the end of the road, a few miles past the Schloss, at the base of the avalanche of planks that was the ruin of the old mining complex. It sloped up above their heads at what seemed like a forty-five-degree angle, though she doubted it could really be that steep. Sprays of boards, snaggled at their ends with bent, wrenched-out nails, made black sunbursts against the sky. Blackberries and ivy were trying to lash together what carpenter ants and gravity had torn asunder. A few hundred meters up the slope, she knew, the old railway bed cut across the middle of this wreck. A month ago she and Peter had been snowshoeing on it. A month in the future, mountain bikers would be riding on it. But now it was a mud sluice channeled by seasonal runnels that would have to be packed with gravel and pounded smooth before anyone could use it for anything. In a few weeks, the work crews would be along to begin that maintenance, but for now it was as abandoned as it ever got.