Then he called the cops.
As much as he wanted to hang around and watch them investigate the crime scene, he knew that the first thing they’d do would be to eject him from the premises and surround it with yellow tape. So he hung around only long enough to tell a drastically truncated version of the day’s story to the first cop who arrived on the scene. He admitted to cutting off the padlock and then walking around the apartment for a while, but he said nothing about his other activities.
Then he drove back to Corporation 9592. Along the way, it occurred to him that he had just confessed to breaking and entering; but somehow he didn’t think that Peter would press charges. Wedged in traffic because of an unholy conjunction of a Sounders game and a slow-moving freight train, he called C-plus. He had one of those rigs where his phone Bluetoothed the conversation into his car’s stereo system. The volume was turned up too loud; a blast of noise nearly blew the windows out of his vehicle. Some very unusual mixture of bellowing voices, clashing metal, and heavy respiration. He turned it down hastily.
“Richard.”
“C-plus. Busy?”
“Am I ever not?”
In the background, some guy was screaming single-word utterances in Latin. There was rhythmic tromping.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Maneuvers.” C-plus said. Then there was some kind of interruption, the sound of a hand shuffling the phone around.
“You’re in the National Guard?” But even as he was saying this, Richard was dismissing the possibility; they didn’t speak Latin in the National Guard.
“Roman Legion reenactment group,” C-plus explained.
“So you’re, like, marching around in sandals and a skirt?”
“The Roman caliga is far, far more than just a sandal, at least as that term is construed by modern-day persons,” C-plus began. “To begin with—”
“Okay, shut up,” Richard said.
C-plus sighed.
“Want to get involved with something way more interesting than what you’re actually being paid for?”
“Richard, if you are trying to trap me into griping about my job—”
“Furthest thing from my mind.”
“Even so, let me say that my normal work is incredibly interesting and uplifting.”
“It is so noted,” Richard said, “but I need your help with a personal project. Kind of a detective thing.”
“That REAMDE project?”
The question struck Richard as a bit odd and stymied him for a few seconds. “No,” he said. “If it were about computer viruses, I wouldn’t have even tried to con you into thinking it would be interesting.”
“What is it about then?”
“Come down to the IT lab and I’ll explain it.”
Corvallis raised his voice. “My legion has been getting ready for these maneuvers for three months!” he said. “I have responsibilities as the pilus posterior of my cohort—”
“It’s about Zula,” Richard said. “It’s important.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Richard got to the office about fifteen minutes later, retrieved the computer from the IT lab, and took it to a small conference room, where he got it booted up and hooked into a monitor. Corvallis showed up wearing a tunic of off-white, natural-looking wool that Richard was afraid he might have woven himself on a Roman-style loom. He had swapped his caligae for cross-trainers. With practically no small talk he made himself at home on this computer and began poking around in the files that Richard had copied over from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. The files and directories had nonintuitive, computer-generated names, and Richard didn’t recognize any of the file formats being used.
In the meantime, Richard’s curiosity had gotten the better of him. “Hey,” he said, “how come, when I told you I had a detective problem, you guessed it was about REAMDE?”
Corvallis shrugged. “I know Zula has been working on that with you.”
“Really?” Richard was startled by this; but then he remembered something Corvallis had said a few days ago, in the Prius, to the effect that Zula had somehow helped narrow the location of the virus writer down to Xiamen. “How long have you known of this supposed collaboration between me and Zula?”
“Since Tuesday morning.”
“Tuesday morning!?”
“Oh my God, Richard, settle down.”
“What time Tuesday morning?”
“Earlyish. I could check my phone.”
Silence.
“What the F is going on, Richard?”
“It’s like I said on the phone: Zula and her boyfriend have vanished. No one has seen or heard from them in almost a week.”
This rocked Corvallis back, and he said “Oh my God” in an altogether different tone. “When did they vanish?”
“Well, as it turns out, C-plus, one of the problems with vanishing is that it is difficult to pin down an exact time when it happened. If you had asked me twenty-four hours ago…” Richard paused, groping through the last day’s memories.
Twenty-four hours ago, he had not even been made aware, yet, that Zula was missing.
“Let’s just say that, as far as I know, you are the last person who talked to her.”
“Oh.”
“So what the fuck did you talk to her about?”
“Let go of my shoulders, please.”
“Hmm?”
“It doesn’t help, and it makes it hard for me to type.”
“Okay.” Richard relaxed his grip on the woolen tunic and backed away from Corvallis, hands in the air.
“She had been up all night—Monday night into Tuesday morning—playing.” Meaning, as Richard understood, playing T’Rain. “She said she was researching some gold movements connected with REAMDE.”
“Seems a little unusual right there,” Richard pointed out. “Tracking down viruses isn’t her department.”
Corvallis heard a rebuke in that and colored slightly. “It’s hard to believe, but at the time, I’d never even heard of REAMDE. Had you?”
“No,” Richard confessed.
“So I took what she said at face value. It was a special project you’d asked her to undertake.”
“Really unlike her to just flat out lie,” Richard remarked.
“Anyway, she needed to identify a player who had cast a healing spell on her at some point during her playing session.” Corvallis had his laptop out now and began typing on it between utterances; and as he did, they degenerated from sentences to fragments. “In the Torgai Foothills.” Type, type, type. “Total mayhem.”
“Was it a member of her party?”
“No. Questing with one other. Getting killed a lot. Didn’t understand why at the time.”
“Because you didn’t know about REAMDE and the bandits and so on.”
“Yeah,” Corvallis said absently. After about fifteen seconds of typing, he said, “Okay.”
Richard bent forward, reached into the gully that ran down the center of the conference table, and extracted a video cable, which he threw across to Corvallis, who plugged it into his laptop. The projection screen at the end of the room lit up with a display consisting mostly of a terminal window: just lines of (to Richard) inscrutable text, the results of various queries that C-plus had been typing into a database. At the moment two character profiles were being displayed. These were just long strings of numbers and words. Corvallis typed a command that caused two windows to appear on the screen, each displaying a character profile in a more user-friendly form: a 3D rendering of a creature in T’Rain, the character’s name in a nice little cartouche, tables and plots of vital statistics. Like a police dossier as art-directed by medieval clerics. One of the windows depicted a female character, whom Richard recognized as belonging to Zula. The other was presented in a window whose palette, typeface, and art all said Evil. The portrait was not fixed, but kept shape-shifting among several different species, one of which was a redheaded T’Kesh.
“Who is the Evil T’K
esh Metamorph?” Richard asked.
“That is the character Zula was hanging out with the whole time she was logged on that night,” C-plus said. Speaking slowly and haltingly as he scanned some user’s customer profile, he continued: “Belongs to a longtime customer and heavy user named Wallace, based in Vancouver. But on the night in question”—(typing)—“he and Zula were logged on from the same place”—(typing)—“in Georgetown.”
“That’s consistent with what I saw earlier today. Zula’s car and a sports car from B.C. are both parked at her boyfriend’s loft in Georgetown.”
“So they must have all been there on the night in question—”
“And that is the place from which they ‘vanished.’ A word I like less the more I use it. Can you tell me anything more about this Wallace?”
“Not without violating the corporate data privacy policy.”
Corvallis shrank from the look that Richard now threw him and went back to typing.
A customer profile appeared on the screen, displaying Wallace’s full name, his address, and some information about his T’Rain playing habits. One stat jumped out at Richard. “Check out his last login.”
“Tuesday morning,” C-plus said. “He hasn’t been on since.” He typed a little more and pulled up a window displaying plots and charts of Wallace’s usage stats, covering the entire time he’d been a T’Rain customer. “That’s the longest he has gone without playing in the last two years.”
“And Zula?”
“Same,” C-plus said. “She hasn’t been on at all. And another thing? Neither of them logged out cleanly on Tuesday morning. Their connections went down at the same time, and the system logged them out automatically.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Richard said, remembering the severed wires in Peter’s shop. “Someone walked into the place and cut their Internet cable with a knife while they were playing.”
“Who would do that?” Corvallis asked.
“Peter was hanging around with creeps,” Richard said.
This now so obviously looked like a classic drug-dealing-related home invasion/mass murder scenario that Richard had to remind himself of why he was even bothering to continue thinking about it. “Zula wanted something from you. Just before this all happened.”
“Actually it was after,” Corvallis said.
“What do you mean?”
“Their connection went dead at 7:51.” Corvallis picked up his phone and thumbed away at it for a few minutes. “Zula called me at 8:42.”
“Okay. That’s interesting. She called you at 8:42 and told you this story about REAMDE investigation and said she needed to know who had cast a healing spell on her character.”
“Yeah, and it turned out to be some Chinese player logged in from Xiamen.”
“Which is how you first became aware that the virus originated there.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re telling me that Zula was the first person to figure that out.”
“Yes.”
“That strikes me as superodd.”
“How so?”
“Because if you leave out the whole REAMDE and Xiamen part of the story, this looks very simple. Peter was dealing in drugs or something. He got into business with the wrong people. Those people entered his loft and abducted him and took him away and killed him, and because Zula happened to be there with him, they did the same to her. But that doesn’t fit with this Wallace guy, and it certainly doesn’t fit in with the fact that Zula apparently traced REAMDE to Xiamen at almost exactly the same moment that she and everyone else in the apartment vanished.”
“Wallace seems to have kept a very low Internet profile,” Corvallis said.
“Yeah.” For Richard had been watching on the big screen as Corvallis googled the man and came up with very little: mostly genealogical sites of no use to them. “I’ll bet I know what he looks like though.” He was remembering the guy Peter had held the mysterious conference with at the Schloss.
“What do we know about the people who created REAMDE?” Richard asked.
“That’s not my department,” Corvallis reminded him. “That’s being investigated by people who specialize in that stuff.”
“Hacker kids in China, that’s what I heard.”
“Me too.”
“It just seems unlikely that they’d have the wherewithal to organize a home invasion in Seattle on a few hours’ notice.”
“Unless they have friends or something who live here. There are some sketchy characters down in the I.D.” By this Corvallis meant the International District, not all that far from Georgetown. As West Coast Chinatowns went, it was small—nothing compared to San Francisco’s or Vancouver’s—but still managed to produce the occasional gambling-den massacre straight out of a Fu Manchu novel.
“But even if the REAMDE gang knew that Zula was on to them, how would they be able to trace her to Peter’s loft in Georgetown?”
“They wouldn’t,” Corvallis said, “unless they had infiltrated Corporation 9592’s China operation and had access to our logs.”
“Noted,” Richard finally said, after thinking about it for a good long while. He pulled out his phone and accessed a little app that helped him figure out what time it was right now in China. The answer: something like three in the morning. He thumbed out an email to Nolan: Orb me when you wake up.
“But look,” Richard said, as soon as he heard the little swooshing noise telling him that the email was sent. “The reason I actually called you was because of this.” He rested a hand atop the PC he’d carried in from the IT lab and told Corvallis the story about the security cameras and the Wi-Fi hub in Peter’s place.
They transferred the video cable from the laptop to the PC and got it hooked up to power and a keyboard. Corvallis opened the directory containing the files copied from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. “Hmm,” he said immediately. “What was the brand name of the hub?”
Richard told him. Corvallis visited the company’s site and, with a bit of clicking around in their “Products” section, was able to pull up a picture of a device that Richard recognized as looking like Peter’s. He copied and pasted the model number into the Google search box, then appended the search terms “linux driver” and hit the button. The screen filled up with a number of hits from open source software sites.
“Okay.”
“What are you doing?” Richard asked.
“You said Peter was a geek, right?”
“Yeah. Computer security consultant.”
Corvallis nodded. “The format of the files from his hub suggests that they were created by Linux. And indeed when I do a little bit of searching I can see that it’s easy to download a Linux driver for this hub. It is Linux-friendly, in other words. So I suspect that what Peter did was set up a Linux-based system to manage his security cameras and perform automated backups and so on. And when he bought that hub, he junked the Windows-based software that shipped with it and reconfigured it to work directly under his Linux environment.”
“Which tells us what?”
“That we’re screwed.” Corvallis used a text editor to open one of the files that Richard had failed to open earlier. “See, the header on this file indicates that it is encrypted. All the files that you recovered from his hub have been encrypted in the same way. Peter didn’t want bad guys breaking into his system and snooping around in his security camera archives, so he set up his system with a script that encrypted all the video recordings before saving them to disk. And those encrypted files were then automatically backed up to the Wi-Fi hub.”
“And those are the files we are looking at now.”
“Yeah. But we’ll never get them open. Maybe the NSA could break this encryption. We can’t.”
“Can we know anything else? How old are the files? How big are they?”
With a bit more typing Corvallis produced a table showing the sizes and dates of the files. “Some are pretty huge,” he said, “which makes me think that they must be video files from t
he cameras you spoke of. Some are tiny. In terms of times and dates—”
They both scanned the table for a while, trying to see patterns.
“The tiny ones are regular,” Richard said. “Every hour, on the hour.”
“And the huge ones are totally sporadic,” Corvallis said. “Listen, it’s obvious that the tiny ones are being generated by a cron job.”
“Cron job?”
“A process on the server that does something automatically on a regular schedule. Those files are just system logs, Richard. The system just spits them out once an hour, and they get automatically backed up.”
“But let’s talk about the big files. The video files. It’s a motion-activated system,” Richard said. “Just look at it. There’s a file on Friday afternoon, which is when Peter would have been packing for the trip to B.C. Then nothing—except for the hourly log files, that is—until the middle of the night on the following Thursday. Which is weird. Because we know that a lot was going on in the place Tuesday morning. Why didn’t it get picked up by the cameras?”
“Actually, there is nothing at all—not even hourly log files—between midnight and ten A.M. on Tuesday,” Corvallis pointed out. He drew Richard’s attention to the table and traced his finger down the column listing the time/date stamps. “See, the cron job was functioning properly all through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Monday night, it did its thing at eleven P.M.…”
“But then there’s a gap,” Richard said. “No more little cron job files until ten in the morning on Tuesday.”
“After which,” Corvallis concluded, “it resumes its usual habits until Thursday at two A.M.”
“Coinciding with a big video file,” Richard pointed out. “The reason there’s nothing after that is because the server that was running the whole system got trashed. Someone came back to Peter’s place on Thursday, two days after Peter and Zula had vanished. Bastard probably knew it was empty; he must have been an accomplice, or a friend of one of the bad guys. Broke in through an upstairs window. Went downstairs, triggering the security camera and causing that last big file to be created. Opened the front door from the inside. Carried in a plasma cutter. Opened Peter’s gun safe. Stole something from in there. Noticed the computer that was logging the security videos and used the plasma cutter to destroy its hard drives.”
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