Reamde

“Palaces and stuff he inherited, I guess. I’m just saying, he looks like a tattered old professor, but behind that facade he burns through specie like a rap star.”

Devin was thinking. “You’re referring to the money in Torgai. Vast hoards of gold rumored to be just lying there for the taking.”

“Don’t be coy, man; we all know what those three thousand K’Shetriae were thinking. No one is going into the Torgai for its scenic beauty.”

“It is so obvious,” Devin marveled. “So. Friggin’. Obvious. He never cared about playing the game until there was money on the ground. Never went in once. Just wanted to”—and here Devin held his hands aloft and made fluttering motions with his fingers, like an airborne faerie sprinkling dew over rose petals —“craft ancient dead languages. Imbue the history of T’Rain with a grammar and a rhetoric.”

“And cash royalty checks.”

“Egg-ZACT-ly!” Devin snapped, looking around himself in a kind of shocked, prim way, as if he had never accepted one penny of compensation. “But the minute some Troll dumps a few tons of gold on the ground, he gets an account and turns into Ozzy Fucking Mandias.”

Richard’s instincts told him that, having gotten Skeletor into this state, the most effective way to keep him there would be to show exaggerated nonchalance. “Now, Devin,” he said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “you said yourself that it was a team sport. And part of being on a team is having a captain or a pope or what have you.”

“I’ve had characters in the game since the beginning,” Devin said righ­teously. “Over a hundred of them.”

“So the database says,” Richard said.

“Now I won’t sit here and try to tell you that no one has ever sworn fealty to me. I run vassal networks, sure. Sometimes maybe three deep. You can’t understand the workings of the game unless you’ve played it at that level.”

Richard just kept nodding, raising his eyebrows from time to time in an I’m with you, buddy sort of effort.

“I could be seven deep!” Devin said. “Could have been years ago!” Meaning that his hierarchy of vassals would be seven tiers deep, enough to give him tens of millions of followers. Only one player in the game had ever gotten to that level. Richard had been just hours away from sending Egdod down to liquidate him when the player had choked on a bite of wurst, alone before his monitor screen in Ostheim vor der Rhon, no one around to give him a Heimlich.

“I know that about you, Devin, and I do think it’s testimony to your, if I may say, midwestern sense of plain dealing and self-effacement that you have showed such restraint. Of course, one of the problems with us midwesterners is that—”

“We just let people run roughshod over us, yeah, I know that,” Devin said, with an involuntary flick of the eyes toward his steel building full of lawyers.

“Well,” Richard said, after a longish pause, “I don’t want to keep you from your training schedule.”

“S’okay, my doctor’s after me to ease up a little.”

“I’m actually on my way up to visit the family, but it seemed only fair to stop by and fill you in a little on my conversation with the Don.”

“Appreciate it,” Devin muttered, and then his eyes refocused. “Yeah, I heard you had some trouble with your niece?”

“Am still having it, actually.”

“She hasn’t turned up yet?”

Richard had vague misgivings about this phrasing, since it seemed to imply that Zula had some choice in the matter. He wondered how many other people were assuming that Zula had just decided to go on the lam and put her family through the torments of hell just because.

“Whatever trouble she’s in,” Richard said, “does not seem to have resolved.”

“Well. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Devin offered.

Richard couldn’t think of a polite way to say, You’re about to go do it, and so he just nodded.

AFTER DITCHING THE Suburban, they drove for three hours. Zula reckoned that they would be heading for the hills, but instead they entered into some place whose roads were equipped, in standard-issue North American style, with streetlamps, convenience stores, and stoplights. After cruising through that sort of environment for about fifteen minutes, Jones swung the wheel and trundled the giant vehicle into a vast parking lot. A neon-lit Walmart logo careered across the windshield. Jones pulled into a parking space, or rather a series of several consecutive spaces, and shut off the engine. After taking a last searching look around the parking lot, he reached up and jerked a curtain across the entire eight-foot expanse of the windshield, affording him and his coconspirators privacy.

Earlier in the evening, Ershut and Abdul-Wahaab had been given the assignment to chain Zula by her ankle to the grab bar in the shower stall. Like so many of the routine chores that filled the day-to-day lives of this roving band of terrorists, this one had occasioned a huge amount of what sounded to an Iowan like violent argument. Ninety percent of this had focused on the mysterious padlock that they had found locked to the last link of the chain. No one seemed to know where it had come from. This, of course, was because Zula had put it there when none of them had been looking. But as she had been hoping, they never cottoned on to it. Jones, becoming annoyed by the sheer volume of their debate, had glanced at it and, after a few moments, identified it as the lock that had formerly belonged to the toolbox from the stolen truck. Rummaging around in the external pocket of a knapsack, he had found that truck’s key chain and thrown it to Ershut, who, after a few minutes’ trial and error (for it had a lot of keys on it) had managed to get the new lock open. He had then used it to fix that end of the chain to the shower stall grab bar and pocketed the key—which, quite naturally, he’d assumed was the only key. The next and final phase of the operation had been to adjust the length of the chain around Zula’s ankle, giving her enough slack that she could get to the toilet, or retreat into the bedroom and curl up on the floor, but not enough to climb up on the bed; for that would have put her within reach of the windows. For this they used the padlock for which Zula didn’t have a spare key.

When it had become obvious that she was going to be kept in this situation for a long time, she had raked blankets and pillows down from the bed and formed a little nest on the floor where she had dozed during the drive. The RV was capable of sleeping at least half a dozen when all of its seats and benches had been folded down and turned into beds, and all the jihadists except for Jones had found places to lie down and were sawing logs, refreshing themselves after a long day of cold-blooded murder and aimless driving around. Curled up in her nest in the back, Zula gazed down a forty-foot-long tunnel to the other end where Jones had pivoted the driver’s seat around to face backward and set a laptop across his knees. Its blue-white light illuminated his face, turning it into a constrasty and off-color mask. No sleeping for him, at least not yet.

She would have been mystified by his decision to park in a Walmart were it not for the fact that her great- aunt and great-uncle, based out of Yankton, South Dakota, were inveterate RVers, forever showing slides and telling stories of their wanderings at the re-u, and she knew from them that Walmart had a policy of rolling out the welcome mat for such people, even to the point of distributing the company’s own rebranded version of the Rand McNally Road Atlas on which the locations of all Walmarts were highlighted. It was a near certainty that a copy of that very document was lodged in the console up next to Jones where this vehicle’s late owners had been in the habit of repositing all such items. Jones, of course, would not know this. But he seemed nothing if not adaptable. It might be that this was a spur-of-the-moment decision: he had blundered into this central British Columbian town, happened to drive by their Walmart, noticed that the only vehicles in the parking lot were overnighting RVs, and decided to adopt a “when in Rome” strategy. Or, what was more likely, he had spent a while interrogating the former owners at gun- or knifepoint before slaying them, had learned about their habits, rifled their wallets, extracted their PIN numbers and passwords by making false promises that he would not harm them.

The laptop was not the same computer that Sharif had been using on the jet. This one was part of the haul of random consumer booty that had fallen into Jones’s hands along with the RV. Jones had evidently been able to obtain a Wi-Fi connection from the Walmart, since he was mostly just mousing and clicking: classic web-surfing behavior. There was a fine moment of comedy when he apparently clicked his way onto the website of some casino