He did not snap out of it until he was on final approach to the farm, driving along the county road where he had gone bicycle riding when he’d been a kid, and staring in fresh amazement at the colossal wind turbines that John and Alice had been putting up. There was a decent breeze today, and the machines were churning along about as fast as they were ever allowed to. All of them were eye-catching because of that movement, to the point where it almost made it a little difficult for him to keep his eyes on the road. But then his gaze fastened on one that happened to be directly ahead, because of a little squiggle that the road had to make to avoid a bend in the crick. It was down for repairs, apparently, because the blades had been feathered and so it was just standing there inert, the one dead thing in this whirling carnival of white blades.
Richard was able to pull over onto the shoulder and stomp the parking brake before he broke down weeping.
That was why his brain had been silent. Because it knew that Zula was dead.
He showed up at John and Alice’s front door with red eyes and found them in the same condition. They did not ask him what he had been doing, why all the flying around. It was just as well. From this remove, the gambit with D-squared and Skeletor seemed ludicrously far-fetched and beside the point.
He stayed there for a night, keeping his eyes on the floor whenever he moved about the house so that they would not accidentally light on a photograph of Zula. John didn’t talk much; he had a database of possible leads on his computer, which he worked at obsessively. But his computer, as Richard could see at a glance, was desperately sick with malware, running at about a hundredth of its normal speed and freezing up a few times an hour. He considered offering to help. But the fact that John was putting up with it was evidence that he knew it was hopeless, was just running in place. Alice was silent, inactive except for occasional bursts of manic energy, in some stage or another of grieving. The only person Richard felt comfortable hanging around with was Dad, so he spent most of the evening sitting next to him in the man cave, listening to the hissing and beeping of his bionic support system, watching whatever TV Dad felt like summoning up with the remote. People kept calling the house, but they didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like an actual death. You couldn’t send flowers. Hallmark didn’t make disappearance cards. It was sort of like the Patricia lightning strike all over again: too bizarre to pass smoothly along the greased channels of grieving and condolence.
Breakfast was better, with the three of them all talking about Zula, telling stories about her fondly, as people did of the dead. Dad listened to the stories and nodded and smiled at the right parts. Richard hugged them, got in the Grand Marquis, drove to the FBO, and was back in Seattle four hours later. That was Friday. During the weekend he stayed home, online most of the time, hovering over the Torgai in one window while, in others, scanning real-time statistics from T’Rain’s databases. He did not care about the details. He doubted that any of this was going to help at all. But he had made a determination, early last week, that it might conceivably help them get more information if the Torgai remained chaotic and did not fall under the control of any one particular Liege Lord. His expedition to Cambridge and to Nodaway had been solely to ensure the requisite level of chaos, and it seemed to have worked. Don Donald, after a slow start, was now five deep, with tens of thousands of tastefully appointed vassals, and he’d apparently had the good sense to delegate military decisions to players who had actually done this before. Skeletor meanwhile had dusted off his most powerful character, which he hadn’t played in several months, and had made a fairly impressive bid to penetrate all the way into the middle of the castle where D-squared’s character was holed up and assassinate him. At the last minute, he had been detected and killed so fast that he hadn’t had time to Sequester all his Virtual Property. So that stuff had fallen into the hands of the Earthtone Coalition (which couldn’t use it because it was so tawdry), and Skeletor’s character had emerged from Limbo naked and impoverished and considerably diminished in power. Which was probably for the better anyway, since Devin had other characters better suited to play the role of warrior king: less powerful but with deeper and more welldeveloped vassal networks.
Such entertainments had prevented Richard from thinking much about Zula all through the weekend and for most of Monday, which had been devoted to long, hairy, poorly run meetings about how the company should deal with this latest turn in the Wor. He had come home late with take-out Thai and slammed into the sofa and tried to watch a movie, but kept drifting from it to the screen of his laptop. This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.
It was during one such foray, the movie on pause, some Torgai conflagration burning in a window on the screen, when he noticed he had new email, tentatively flagged as spam. Subject heading: some Chinese characters. He deleted it without looking. But something about it was nagging at him. He didn’t read Chinese. But in the last few days he had been trying to learn some things about this place called Xiamen, hoovering up random stuff on the Internet. Some of the pages he’d found were in English, others in Chinese, many in a patchwork of both languages. But he had grown accustomed to seeing one Chinese character that stood out because of its simplicity: just a square with its bottom side missing, and a little cross-tick in its top side. It was half of the two-character symbol for “Xiamen.” And he might have been imagining things, but he fancied he had seen it in the subject line of that spam email. So he went to his trash folder and retrieved the message and opened it.
It contained no text at all, just three consecutive images, each one a photograph of a brown paper towel with words written on it in black pen.
The first line of the message on the towel was an email address at Corporation 9592 that Richard used only for personal communications. The second line was a date, bracketed in question marks: Friday before last, making it about three days after Zula and Peter had disappeared from the loft in Georgetown. So the note was about ten days old.
Uncle Richard,
Hope you will forward this to John and Alice if it ever gets rescued from the drain trap where I am going to hide it. I thought your email address was more likely to work than theirs. John’s PC has malware.
This is my first damsel in distress letter, so I hope I am striking the right tone. I have a lot of time on my hands and a whole dispenser full of paper towels so I can produce several drafts if need be.
As you probably know if you are reading this, I am on the forty-third floor of an unfinished skyscraper in downtown Xiamen. I am being held captive—hate that word, but it fits—in a ladies’ room next to an office suite that is being used as a safe house by a Russian identifying himself as Ivanov, though this is clearly not his real name. I think that he used to be part of a Russian organized crime group but that he has betrayed them, or at least disappointed them to an extent that he thinks is going to end up being fatal. He was running some sort of financial scam with their pension fund money, working with a Scottish accountant in Vancouver by the name of Wallace, who was a very active T’Rain player. Wallace’s computer got infected with REAMDE …
… and the note went on to tell a story that, while bizarre in a lot of respects, explained much of what had been puzzling Richard for the last week. The narrative portion of the letter ended in what could only be called a cliffhanger: she and Peter and some other guy had seemingly identified the Troll, and she had the impression that the Russians were making preparations to go and snatch him. Assuming that the letter had been written early Friday morning Xiamen time, this fit perfectly with Corvallis’s statistics showing that the Troll and his minions had suddenly logged off and gone dark on Friday
morning.
The remainder of the letter consisted of a series of personal notes directed at various family members, clearly based on the assumption that Zula would never see any of them again. Richard had attempted to read it about ten times and been unable to get through it.
He had awakened John and Alice right away, of course, and John had packed his bags and started driving through the night toward the Omaha airport, Alice calling ahead to arrange a morning flight to Seattle. Richard had called his jet leasing company to set up an ASAP flight to Xiamen, and they had warned him that he’d need a visa. He had stayed up into the small hours of the morning researching Chinese visa policies and learned that it all had to be done through a consulate, of which the nearest was in San Francisco, and so at five in the morning he had dropped an assistant off at Sea-Tac, sending her down with his passport and all the documentation needed to get a visa in ultra-super-expedited fashion. Richard had called John during a layover in Denver and revectored him to SFO so that he could hand his passport over to the same assistant. John had then caught the next flight up to Seattle. Recent text messages from the assistant suggested that all was proceeding according to plan and that she would probably be able to catch a six P.M. flight back to Seattle, which would get the visas into their hands at about eight and enable wheels up from Boeing Field as early as nine.
“I HAVE BEEN watching the Facebook page with I guess you could say trepidation,” Richard said. “No leaks about this yet.” He patted a hard copy of the paper towel message draped over the console between the car’s front seats.
“I’m sure there won’t be,” John said. “Your call came in the middle of the night, no one was in the house but me and Alice, no one knows a thing.”
For they had agreed that they would not divulge the existence of Zula’s note just yet; the news would make its way into the wild very rapidly, where it might complicate the investigation, or whatever this thing they were doing was called.
“Did your friend get any information on the fella who sent the email?” John asked.
“We don’t know that it’s a fella,” Richard reminded him. “Nolan’s on it, but it’s the middle of the night in China right now, and he doesn’t have a lot to go on. He said it’s the equivalent of a Hotmail address.”
“What do you mean?” John asked peevishly. He had a Hotmail address.
“An easy-to-get anonymous account frequently used by spammers,” Richard said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that whoever sent me that email probably wanted to do it in an anonymous, untraceable way.”
“Maybe we could trace him through the skyscraper.”
“We don’t know which skyscraper it is,” Richard pointed out. “Zula didn’t bother to specify that in the note. She probably assumed that, if the note were ever found, it would be obvious to everyone which building it came from.”
John considered it. “Instead what we have here is some kind of leaker or whistle-blower.”
“I would guess so.”
“How about the Seattle cops?”
“I called the detective and left a voice mail message. Told him we had evidence that Zula was alive and not in Seattle on Friday. Which I think takes it out of his jurisdiction.”
“It takes the missing persons part of it out of his jurisdiction,” John said. “But it means that crimes happened in Seattle. Murder and kidnapping and assault and God only knows what else…”
Richard nodded. “And I’m sure that the Seattle detectives who work on those kinds of crimes are going to be really interested in Zula’s note. But none of that has anything to do with us getting her back safe.”
“It most certainly does if the responsible parties can be identified, tracked down, extradited—”
“Something major happened in Xiamen on that Friday, only a few hours after Zula wrote that note,” Richard said. He had avoided mentioning this to John and Alice until now because he could not be certain it was actually connected to Zula and he didn’t want to confuse and upset them and add a vast number of additional bogus leads to John’s already torpid database.
“Go ahead, I’m listening,” John said, having heard nothing further than the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the washing-machine surge of the windshield wipers.
Richard sighed. “I’m trying to figure out where to begin.” He thought about the sheer level of energy he would have to summon in order to explain the investigations he had been pursuing with Corvallis, the state of the battle for the Torgai, and all the rest. And he felt overwhelmingly tired. “I am about to drive this thing right off the road,” he said. “Let’s get to my place and get some coffee.”
BUT AS IT turned out, when they reached Richard’s condo, they went in opposite directions to start the coffeemaker, use the toilet, check email, make phone calls. By the time Richard was ready to talk again, John was asleep on the sofa, and by the time John had awakened from his nap, Richard had conked out on his bed. Later, both awake at the same time, they made sandwiches and looked out the window at the sun setting over the Olympics; the clouds were still heavy, but the red light was streaming in beneath them as if China itself were lurking just a few miles offshore, glowing red like a vast forge. Richard could not get out of his mind that they would soon be chasing that red light westward, and John did not seem talkative either. It was morning there now. Nolan, ensconced in his place in Vancouver, was sending emails, making phone calls, pulling strings, making arrangements for translators and fixers to meet the Forthrasts at the Xiamen airport, trying to get some idea of what the PSB there had been doing. The situation was impossibly hard to read. Was the PSB even aware of the existence of Zula’s note? Perhaps it had been leaked to Richard by some random plumber who wanted to do a good deed and not be identified. Or perhaps the PSB had known about it all along and had dangled it in front of Richard as a lure to bring him to Xiamen for interrogation. Or perhaps they had meant to keep it secret, but some leaker within the PSB had taken it upon himself to shoot Richard a copy. Nolan vacillated between urging Richard not to set foot in China at all and helping him get there as quickly as possible. Richard felt no qualms whatsoever; a member of his family was in trouble there and he had to go.
Corvallis had been tracking the assistant’s flight up from SFO. He showed up at the condo and helped carry John’s bag down to his Prius, which was waiting in the pickup/drop-off lane in front of the building. Richard and John ended up cramming themselves into the backseat together so that they could talk on the way down to Boeing Field.
He really didn’t want to talk about this, but he owed it to John to give him the information before they got on a plane to China.
“There were two separate incidents that we know about,” Richard said. “They seem to have happened a couple of hours apart. Incident number 2 is better documented: a suicide bomber blew himself up at a security checkpoint outside an international conference. A couple of Chinese cops got killed; there were injuries from shrapnel and flying glass.”
“How is this connected to Zula?” John asked.
“We have no idea. But incident number 1 is murkier and maybe more relevant. An apartment building blew up not far from downtown. It was put down to a gas explosion. That’s the official story. But Nolan has got some sources in Xiamen, sources we may be meeting tomorrow, who have been asking around, and word on the street is that the explosion happened in the middle of a gun battle that took place on the building’s upper floors.”
Silence for a while. Richard, who had been through all of this before, knew what John was thinking: he was in denial, trying to think of reasons why this had nothing to do with Zula.
“Now,” Richard continued, speaking as gently as he could, “we have learned from Zula’s note that she was with these Russians who had come into the country illegally and who were armed. We know that they were looking for the Troll.”
“The hackers who created the virus,” John translated.
“Yeah. If they succeeded in tracking down those hackers, then thi
s Ivanov character might have been crazy enough to go in shooting. Who knows, maybe they even used grenades or satchel charges.”
“Why the hell would you use satchel charges?” John demanded. He had long gotten over the fact that Richard was a draft dodger. But he hated it when Richard strayed into topics of which Richard knew nothing and John had personal experience.
“I don’t know, John; I’m just trying to think of a reason why the building blew up. Because the building is gone. It is destroyed.”
“A satchel charge wouldn’t be powerful enough to bring down a multistory building.”
“Okay, well, maybe it was a gas explosion then, but it was set off as a result of the gun battle.”
“Maybe it had nothing to do with Zula at all!” John protested.
“But John, the thing is—as Corvallis here can explain much better than I—at the same time that this gun battle and explosion took place, the Troll dropped off the Internet. And hasn’t come back since.”
The back of Corvallis’s neck turned red. They drove past Peter’s loft. Everyone observed silence for a while. According to Zula’s note, a man—Wallace—had died in there.
Only a couple of minutes later, they turned off Airport Way into the frontage road that led to the FBO.
Considering the net worth of its clientele, one might have expected a glitzier place. But it was just a boxy two-story office building that faced the frontage road—a public thoroughfare—on one end and the restricted zone of the airport tarmac on the other. The airfield’s tall cyclone fence ran right up to one wall and then continued on the other side. As they pulled off the road, they entered a parking lot with only a few cars scattered about; at its opposite end this was terminated by the fence, or rather by a large rolling gate set into it. Corvallis pulled up to it and stopped. Richard clambered out of the car. As soon as the personnel inside recognized his face, they hit the button that caused the gate to trundle open. Richard waved Corvallis forward, and he drove onto the tarmac and directly to a bizjet that was parked no more than fifty feet away. Richard followed on foot and greeted the pilot by name as he emerged from the cockpit and descended the stairway. Corvallis parked at a respectful distance from the plane’s landing gear and then popped the Prius’s hatchback, and the men formed a bucket brigade to move the luggage up into the plane’s cargo hold. Richard was more than normally aware of these details since he knew that two weeks earlier Zula had passed through the same gate with the Russians.
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