Reamde

and ridged with outcroppings of hard rock, leaving few alternatives as to where a landing strip might be constructed. And culture shock might have been a factor; maybe Pavel and Sergei, accustomed to big international airports and Hyatts, had not made allowances for north woods bush-pilot dash, and had imputed prudence, or at least sanity, to the architects of this strip.

Or maybe they had just been desperate and unable to make any other choice; or maybe they’d had guns to their heads.

The landing strip was part of an industrial complex that, from Zula’s point of view, wandered and sprawled aimlessly into parts of the valley that were hidden behind trees. Encouragingly, this included a small compound of buildings only a hundred meters or so from the landing strip. These all looked the same, and it was obvious enough that they were prefabricated structures that had been brought in on trucks and bolted together. Some of them looked like storage units, but one had a rust-fuzzed chimney protruding from the three feet of snow that covered its roof. Its south-facing wall was fortified by at least two cords of stacked wood. Zula watched through a window as one of the soldiers slogged over to it, moving at a pace of perhaps ten feet per minute as his legs broke through hip-deep snow on every step. When he finally reached the front door he destroyed its lock with a burst of submachine gun fire and staggered inside. A few minutes later, smoke began to emerge from the chimney.

THE DISCOVERY OF the hard-drive-equipped Wi-Fi unit under Peter’s stairs placed Richard at a distinct fork in the road. He reckoned that this property housed so much evidence of wrongdoing that the police would have to send someone around to investigate. The physical link between this crime scene and Zula—her car was parked right in the middle of it—might pump a bit of energy into the investigation of her disappearance. But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches.

And yet on the other hand, if the cops did finally get serious about this, they could do things he couldn’t, such as get access to phone and motor vehicle records.

So he adopted a hedging strategy. He unplugged the Wi-Fi hub and threw it in his car and drove it to the Seattle offices of Corporation 9592. There was an information technology department there, which had a little lab where they assembled and repaired computers. No one was there; it was Sunday. In a manner that would spark outrage tomorrow morning, when his depredations were noticed by technicians coming in for work, Richard opened up toolboxes and pulled computers from inventory and generally made a mess of things on someone’s workbench. He opened up the Wi-Fi hub and removed the drive. Following instructions drawn from all over the Internet, including even a YouTube video, he connected this to a computer and made a copy of all the files on the drive. He then drove the reassembled Wi-Fi device back to Peter’s building, where he plugged it in just as it had been before.

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?”