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
