He was beginning to hear words coming from Marlon’s mouth, which pulled him out of the imaginary world and brought him back into the Internet café in the Philippines. Marlon, who had played almost silently for the last couple of hours, was now communicating directly, in Mandarin, with one of his lieutenants. Or perhaps they were generals. Csongor could only speculate at the size of his army now. Marlon’s voice was calm, quiet, but insistent, and his hands were prancing around the keyboard like spiders on a hot skillet.
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.
“Heard” being more likely, since weather had been overcast almost the entire time. The pilots were by no means convinced that they’d achieved anything like a proper search of the area. Consequently, the investigation had been at a standstill for the last few days. The families—who had flown up to B.C. and who now seemed to be operating some sort of crisis center out of a hotel in Prince George—the nearest conurbation that even remotely resembled a major city—were insistent that something must be wrong and were coming dangerously close to saying impolite things about the RCMP’s conduct of the investigation.
Reading between the lines, it was easy enough to make out what was going on. The police—though they wouldn’t dream of saying so openly—were almost certain that the hunters and guides were all dead, probably as a result of driving over a cliff in fog. If they were merely stuck, they’d have made their situation known on the radio, or they’d have hiked out to a major road, something they were more than equipped to do. But the police couldn’t just come out and say that. So they had to manage the situation by expressing confidence that the aerial search would turn something up sooner or later. Beyond that, there was little that they could do other than make comforting and reassuring noises when cornered by reporters or distraught wives.
Olivia, needless to say, had a different theory altogether. It was difficult to imagine anything crazier-sounding than that a nest of international terrorists had stolen a business jet from Xiamen, crashed it in the mountains of British Columbia, murdered a Suburban-load of bear hunters, and headed for the border.
On the positive side, though, it should be an easy enough hypothesis to investigate. The Suburban might be four-wheel drive, but it was unlikely that Jones and company had driven it off-road for a thousand kilometers. They’d have taken the path of least resistance.
Actually, she reflected as she googlemapped British Columbia, it wasn’t merely the path of least resistance. It was the path. This region did not have a road grid. It just had a road. Unless they had taken an extremely circuitous route along logging tracks in the mountains—unlikely, this early in the year—or looped around far to the east, into northern Alberta, they’d have had to proceed south on Highway 97.
And why not? If Jones had managed to hijack the Suburban out in the middle of nowhere, he’d have understood perfectly well that he had only a few days—perhaps just a few hours—in which to do something useful with it before some kind of alert was sent out. He would have headed straight for the U.S. border along Highway 97, through Prince George (actually right in front of the hotel where the families of his victims had set up their base camp), and down into the more ramified system of highways that spread across southern B.C. If he didn’t make it across the border right away, he’d look for a way to ditch the Suburban where it wouldn’t be noticed, and he’d transfer to some other vehicle.
And then he’d think up a way to cross the border, probably out in the middle of nowhere. Something that would be difficult to prevent even if they knew it was going to happen and had a full-scale manhunt under way.
They wouldn’t need to buy food, since they could eat camp rations stolen from the hunters. Hell, for that matter they could just go hungry for a day; it wouldn’t be the first time.
The only thing they would need would be petrol. Gas.
Another look at the map.
If they had acquired the Suburban up in the region where the search was going on, and if its tank had been reasonably full, they’d have been able to make it all the way to Prince George before having to refuel. Of course, there were other refueling stations scattered along the road north of there—people had to buy gas somewhere—but Jones would have avoided those instinctively, not wanting to make a memorable impression on the proprietors, who might have recognized the Suburban as belonging to a local guide service. No, he’d have taken it all the way to the relative anonymity of Prince George and then he’d have bought his petrol in the largest, most impersonal gas station he could find.
Tomorrow she would be driving north to Prince George. Somewhere in that town there must be a surveillance camera that had caught the image she needed. And if she could only sweet-talk its owners into giving her a copy of that image, then she could use it as a sort of sluice gate to divert a great deal of misdirected Jones-hunting energy into a more profitable channel
Tonight, though, she had to sleep. Was, in fact, sleeping.
MOST OF CSONGOR’S time in T’Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a systems administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented him from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin’s knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he’d be able to break through in the end. The advances he had made in understanding the Carthinias Exchange had raised his spirits a bit. On the other hand, watching Marlon run a small war was crushing his morale. The immense power of Marlon’s character, his inventory of spells, weapons, and magical items, the size of his army, and his facility in soaking up relevant data from the boggling array of displays and interfaces on his screen and acting immediately upon that information, all bespoke many years’ experience playing the game and made it clear to Csongor that he was as out of his league here as he would have been on the field at a World Cup soccer match. Nevertheless, the dogged sysadmin in him would not concede defeat and kept gazing stupidly over Marlon’s shoulder, trying to make sense of what was happening and to pick up a few tips as to how he might make better use of Lottery Discountz’s cruelly limited set of powers.
For that reason he was completely surprised and utterly unprepared when Qian Yuxia stormed across the Internet café and hurled a cup of water into the face of a man who had been sitting there for approximately the last half hour. “I am not a friggin’ T-bird!” she exclaimed.
Then she said it again.
“You want a T-bird, go look some other place!”
Csongor had never heard the English expression T-bird before, but Yuxia had now uttered it three times, so he was pretty certain he was hearing it correctly. He had no idea what it meant.
The victim of the assault was a tall, lanky white man with a scraggly blond beard and green eyes that looked alert and more bemused than angry. He had been surprised by the water in the face, but after that he had sprung to his feet and turned to face his assailant. Not in a threatening manner—he was careful to keep some distance—but in a way that made it clear he was ready to address any follow-up assault should Yuxia care to mount one. He was looking at her interestedly and was by no means afraid or even embarrassed. But the moment Csongor went into movement, this fellow noticed it, and he shifted his position as if to make ready for any threat from that quarter. The green eyes gave Csongor a quick head-to-toe scan and locked in immediately on the right front pocket of Csongor’s baggy trousers, which happened to contain a loaded Makarov. Somehow he seemed to guess what was banging around in that pocket. And this fact changed everything. The man showed both of his palms to Csongor, a gesture that said both Look, my hands are empty and Stop where you are. Csongor faltered, not so much out of obedience as because he was nonplussed by the stranger’s behavior.
“It’d be a good thing for all of us,” the man said in strangely accented English, “if you could keep your hands north of your navel, as you’ll note I’m doing, and maintain a little distance. Then we can have a productive conversation. Until then, it’s going to be all about what we’re carryin’. And since you are new to these parts, let me tell you, we don’t want to go there.”
If Csongor had heard this correctly, the man had just threatened to pull out a gun and shoot him.
As if to confirm that his interpretation of matters was correct, the two other customers in the café bolted, leaving only Csongor, Yuxia, Marlon, an
d the newcomer.
While taking the threat quite seriously, Csongor was not as intimidated as he might have been prior to events in Xiamen. “My life has already ‘gone there,’ so I am not afraid to ‘go there’ again if you are causing a problem for my friend,” he said.
Yuxia, sensing that the situation wasn’t what she’d assumed at first, had backed off a couple of paces and sidestepped a bit closer to Csongor. Meanwhile the Filipino man running the front desk had stuck his head into the room to investigate. Csongor’s eyes darted toward him. The blond man, noting this, pivoted that way, relaxing his hands, and rattled off a sentence in what Csongor gathered was the Filipino language. He sounded and looked quite cheerful. Whatever he said erased the apprehensive look from the manager’s face and caused him to nod and back out smiling.
“What did you say to him?” Yuxia asked.
“Since you are so sensitive about being mistaken for a T-bird, I probably shouldn’t tell you,” the man said. “But I told him that you and I were having a little tiff, a common sort of dispute in a place like this, and that we had settled it.”
“What is a T-bird?” Csongor asked.
“A tomboy,” said the man. “In this context, a real or fake lesbian who caters to mongers who get off on that sort of thing.”
Far from wanting to pull a gun and shoot the man, Csongor now wanted to stand here and ask him questions all day. It was such a pleasure to be around someone who actually knew what the hell was going on.
“What is your name?” Yuxia asked.
“James O’Donnell,” the man decided.
“Are you a monger?” she asked.
“No. But please don’t tell anyone.”
Yuxia laughed. “Why? You are ashamed to not be a disgusting pervert?”
“Because that’s the only reason to be here?” Csongor guessed.
The man calling himself James nodded. “Any Western male in a town like this who is not a sex tourist will only arouse suspicion and curiosity. I’m guessing the locals are fascinated by him.” And he nodded toward Marlon, who had glanced up from his monitor once or twice during all this but, since there’d been no gunplay, had not seen fit to interrupt his work.
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