“Sounds dangerous.”
“I can fight off bandits and raiders,” he said coolly, “just not an army.”
With that he launched the T’Rain application proper and typed in a username and a password. A gallery of characters was displayed on the screen, all blinking and breathing and scratching themselves. Beneath each one was a parchment-textured scroll labeled, apparently, with its name. Most of these were written in Chinese. Csongor’s eye was drawn to one of these, which he had seen before, depicted in the original ransom note. It was a troll. Its name, neatly printed in Latin letters, was REAMDE.
Marlon double-clicked on Reamde. The image grew to fill the screen, taking on resolution and three- dimensionality as the others faded and flattened. Reamde spun around, turning his back on them. They were now looking over the troll’s shoulder. He had been sleeping in a cave and had just now stood up to look about his surroundings. In a quick series of preprogrammed movements, Reamde pulled on clothes, armor, weapons, and boots and slung a bag over his shoulder. Then, responding to commands from Marlon’s fingers, he broke into a trot, headed down the cave toward the exit: a starry night sky, showing through a rough aperture. A few moments later Reamde stepped out into the world of T’Rain.
“Bingo,” Corvallis said. “He is on the system. He just stepped out of his cave. It looks like he’s going to be active for a while.”
It was 8:23 A.M. Richard was standing next to his Land Cruiser beside the runway at Elphinstone’s tiny airport, watching a Cessna climb into the sky and bank south. He had just stuffed John and Jake into it and handed a couple of ancient C-notes to its pilot.
Just twenty-four hours ago, John and Richard and Jake had landed here. A single day of sitting around had been quite enough, so John had volunteered that he might rent a car and drive Jake back across the border and spend a little time with Jake’s family in Idaho. Richard—hoping it didn’t seem as if he were rushing his brothers out the door—had called a bush pilot of his acquaintance and made it happen on about thirty minutes’ notice. The roar of the Cessna’s takeoff run had drowned out the sound of Richard’s phone ringing, but he’d felt it vibrating against his butt and whipped it out moments before it had gone to voice mail.
“Do we know where he is?” Richard asked.
“Still working on that, but we think the Philippines.”
“That would kind of make sense,” Richard mused. “The shit hits the fan in China, he gets out of the country, lies low for a while, finally pops his head up when he needs cash.” The Cessna was just a faintly droning mote in a cloudy pink sunrise. He let his bottom slam down into the ragged seat of the Land Cruiser.
“Shit,” Richard said, glancing back and forth helplessly between his phone and the gearshift lever. “I can’t drive stick and talk on the phone.”
“Probably just as well,” Corvallis mused, “on those twisty mountain roads.”
“Just keep track of what he’s up to, okay? Don’t do anything that would spook him.”
“I’m not even logged in,” C-plus said. “Just tracking him with database queries.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Mostly looking for his friends. Putting a posse together.”
“So that he can go and gather gold,” Richard said. “I’ll be at the Schloss in half an hour. Call me if that seems warranted.” He hung up, stuck his phone into his jacket pocket, then opened the door and dumped tepid coffee out of his travel mug and got that stowed. There was some crap on the dashboard; he swept it off onto the floor, where it was going to end up anyway. Then he peeled out of the parking lot and began to haul ass in the direction of the Schloss.
CSONGOR, WHO WAS no T’Rain player, was struck by how little screen real estate was actually devoted to viewing the world of the game. From what little he could see, it was quite a beautiful place, with highly detailed, realistically rendered landforms, scattered clouds drifting overhead illuminated by a full moon, and trees whose leaves and branches stirred convincingly in the wind. A bat was orbiting in the clear space before the cave’s entrance, and crickets, or something, were singing in the undergrowth. But he had to perceive all these things through a sort of rectangular porthole, not much larger than his hand, in the middle of a screen that was otherwise claimed by windows: one showing a full-length portrait of Reamde himself, with an array of statistics plotted in diverse colorful, ever-fluctuating widgets. Large-scale and small-scale maps showing where he was in the world. A sort of radar plot with bogeys of different colors moving about on it. Three different chat windows in which conversations, 75 percent in Chinese and 25 percent in English, streamed upward in fits and starts, like steam rising from boiling pots. Gridded displays that apparently depicted the inventory of weapons, potions, and magical knickknacks that Reamde was carrying on his person. A sort of roster, tall and skinny, running the entire height of the monitor on its far left, each entry consisting of a thumbnail portrait of a T’Rain character; the character’s name, sometimes in Chinese and sometimes in European glyphs; and various fields of data that, Csongor guessed, indicated whether that person was logged on, where they were, and what they were up to. Perhaps three dozen entries were packed into the list, and all but three of them were grayed out. Even as Csongor was noticing this, Marlon moved the cursor to the top of the list and clicked a column heading that caused it to be rearranged: the few who were shown in full color were all moved up to the top. He clicked on one of them and began typing in a pop-up window that suddenly appeared next to the character’s icon. The process of typing in Chinese was completely mysterious to Csongor; as Marlon’s fingers hopped all over the keyboard, a little window flashed onto the screen as some piece of software tried to guess what Marlon was trying to say and suggested possible completions. The sheer quantity and variety of data being rammed into Marlon’s face by, Csongor guessed, at least a thousand discrete user-interface widgets on this huge screen, was overwhelming to his tired brain. But Marlon seemed to have been banking his energies during their sea voyage and was at last getting an opportunity to do what he did best.
A red bogey had been approaching on the radar display and Csongor had been worried that Marlon, preoccupied with his chat windows, was not noticing it. But then he fired off a complex command key combination that caused almost all of the windows to vanish, leaving only the ones that were relevant during combat. Something happened very fast, making no sense at all to Csongor, whose ideas as to what video-game combat should look like were, he guessed, hopelessly old-fashioned. The few times he had tried to play popular video games in Internet cafes in Budapest he had been vanquished in microseconds by opponents who, to judge from the nature of their taunting, were very young, possibly still in the single digits. Csongor now got the sense that Marlon was one of those kids who had grown up without losing any of his skills. In any case, the foe who had been sneaking up on Reamde was dead, and his corpse looted, in less time than it would have taken Csongor to reach out and get a sip of coffee from a cup next to the keyboard, and then all the windows verged back on the screen and Marlon resumed his chat.
Csongor had been assuming that absolute, respectful silence was the correct behavior for him to be engaging in, but Marlon seemed so adept at multitasking that this now seemed like ridiculous, fusty, Old World etiquette. “Getting in touch with the da G shou?” he asked.
“Yes,” Marlon said.
“So they are okay?”
“At least some of them.” He typed for a while. “They have been waiting.”
“For you?”
“For a way to get the money out.”
“How is that going to work, anyway?” For Csongor had learned enough to know that the da G shou all used self-sus accounts, which was to say that they were not linked to credit cards. This was convenient for Chinese kids just starting out, but made it harder to transfer profits out of the world.
“It can be arranged,” Marlon said. “There are money transfer agents who do it. Normally we work with ones in China but we can find others, anywhere in the world. They can send us money here, by Western Union.” Marlon looked up from the screen for the first time since he had logged in. “I saw a Western Union sign as we were coming in on the bus. It is only half a kilometer from here.”
