“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
“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
“Who is the Evil T’Kesh 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
“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.