“So tomorrow morning, when they open up, we could have cash waiting for us.”
“I could have cash waiting for me,” Marlon corrected him, “but I will be glad to share it with you and Yuxia.”
Csongor flushed slightly but kept on talking through his embarrassment: “What is the procedure?”
“Try to find some more of the da G shou and get them logged on,” Marlon said. “One of them can go looking for a foreign money transfer agent and the rest of us can create a raiding party and collect gold.”
“You have never dealt with non-Chinese money transfer agents before?”
“Why would we?” Marlon asked.
“Let me make some contacts,” Csongor proposed, looking over at the computer he had secured earlier. Yuxia had finished typing and now appeared to be web surfing. “I can probably find one in Hungary. If not there, then Austria.”
“Are those near—I don’t know the name—dot C H?”
It took Csongor a moment to put this together. Then he understood it as a reference to Internet domain names ending in “.ch.”
“Switzerland,” Csongor said.
“The place with the banks,” Marlon said.
“Yes, Switzerland is close to Austria and Hungary.”
“Try Switzerland,” Marlon suggested gently, then turned his attention back to the game; for at almost the same moment, two more creatures’ faces had flashed from gray to color and leaped to the top of the roster. Csongor had an image of teenaged boys all over south China—terrified refugees who had spent the last two weeks staying one step ahead of the cops, hiding out in flophouses or cadging spare beds from shirttail relatives in the country—receiving bulletins on their phones, sprinting to the nearest
Csongor moved toward Yuxia and looked over her shoulder. She had opened up a web browser and was looking at a Wikipedia page. The title of the article was “Abdallah Jones.” It sported a photograph of a man Csongor had once tried to shoot in the head on a pier in Xiamen.
“Mother
Yuxia turned around slowly and looked at him. “Fate has given us a totally awesome foe,” she observed.
“Then we should do something totally awesome to him,” Csongor suggested. “In a bad way.”
“Not so easy, from the pervert capital of the world.”
She said it loudly. Faces bobbed up and popped around the edges of various computer monitors around the cafe, but Yuxia took no note of them. She had turned back to face the computer. Taking in some of Jones’s exploits, his death statistics, she shook her head convulsively. “This guy really sucks ass.”
“But you knew that,” Csongor said.
“No foolin’.”
RICHARD MADE NO friends during his drive through Elphinstone; but the dirty little secret of Canadians was that they drove like maniacs, so his speeding and light-running were not so far out of the norm as they might have been south of the border. The road that ran up the valley toward the Schloss had, in recent years, become a vector for sprawl and was now lined by the sorts of businesses that were excluded from the middle of town by its famously prim historic-preservation fatwa. But at the end of the day, Elphinstone wasn’t that big and could only support so many car dealerships and Tim Hortons, and so this kind of development petered out in the dead zone around the abandoned lumber mill. Beyond that the road funneled to two lanes and angled upward, then, a few miles later, began to wind like a snake and buck like a mule.
So it was inevitable that he would close in on the tail of a gigantic RV no more than thirty seconds after he’d reached that part of the road beyond which passing was completely out of the question. It was not quite the size of a semi. It had Utah plates. It needed a trip through the RV wash. Its back end was freckled with the usual bumper stickers about spending the grandchildren’s inheritance. And it was going all of about thirty miles an hour. Richard slammed on the brakes, turned on his headlights just to make it obvious he was there, and backed off to the point where he could see the rearview mirrors. Then he cursed the Internet. This sort of thing had never used to happen, because the road didn’t really lead anywhere; beyond the Schloss, it reverted to gravel and struggled around a few more bends to an abandoned mining camp a couple of miles beyond, where the only thing motorists could do was turn around in a wide spot and come back out again. But geocachers had been at work planting Tupperware containers and ammo boxes of random knickknacks in tree forks and under rocks in the vicinity of that turnaround, and people kept visiting those sites and leaving their droppings on the Internet, making cheerful remarks about the nice view, the lack of crowds, and the availability of huckleberries. Normally Richard and the Schloss’s other habitues would have at least another month of clear driving before those people began to show up, but these RVers had apparently decided to get a jump on the tourist season and be the first geocachers of the year to make it to the sites in question.
Richard allowed a decent interval of perhaps thirty seconds to pass, then laid on the horn, and kept laying it on until, less than a minute later, to his pleasant surprise, the RV’s brake lights came on and it eased its right wheels over onto the road’s meager shoulder at a place where it was only a little dangerous for him to pass. Not that anyone was ever coming the other way; but Richard had been taught the rudiments of passing in Iowa, where if you could not see an open lane all the way to the horizon, you bided your time. He barreled past the RV, and he would have rolled the window down and given the driver a friendly wave if he hadn’t been preoccupied. As it happened, he did not even look back at it; its driver was ensconced about thirty feet off the ground, and it was difficult to see into its bridge from where Richard was sitting.
Fifteen minutes later he was at the Schloss. He was feeling a powerful urge to get on the computer right away, but he figured he might be busy for a while, so he decided to get his affairs in order first. In normal times, he’d have done this in his private apartment, but this was the middle of Mud Month and no one was here. So he decided to make himself comfortable in the tavern, which had a huge screen that could be connected to a computer. Since the machine had been rigged up for use during Corporation 9592 retreats, it was powerful, fully up-to-date, connected to the Internet by a fat pipe, and assiduously maintained, from Seattle, by the IT department. Its audio outputs were plumbed into the tavern’s excellent sound system, and the seating in front of it consisted of very comfortable leather recliners and sofas. Richard raided the kitchen and stockpiled a few thousand calories’ worth of snacks and soft drinks, sending the Furious Muses into Condition Red. In his apartment he could have placated them by walking on the treadmill while playing, but the tavern was not so equipped. He deployed his laptop on a side table and got it hooked up to its charger. He made a last trip to the toilet. On his way out, he noticed a bucket that had been left under the counter by Chet or someone while tidying the place. Following an old instinct, he snatched this up and took it into the tavern with him, setting it next to the place where he would be playing. It had been a long time since he had played a game with such commitment that he needed to pee into a receptacle, and it might very well be overkill here. But he was alone in the Schloss, no one would ever know, he was a man in his fifties, and there were a lot of caffeinated beverages within easy reach.
He turned everything on and booted T’Rain. While it was starting up, he noticed an annoying gleam of window light on the screen and went over to drop the wooden blinds. Then, just for good measure, he went all around the room and dropped the blinds on all the windows. For the sun might have the bad manners to move around and shine in from other directions. As he was finishing, movement caught his eye outside, and he noticed the RV he’d passed earlier, creeping up the road, slowing down even more so that its occupants could admire a roadside view of the Schloss. He gave it the evil eye, trying to use some kind of ESP to tell them to get lost. Sometimes such people would come up the drive and want to enter the place and use the facilities. Richard didn’t care as long as staff were in the place to deal with them, but he could see it getting unpleasant in a hurry if affable, retired RVers with vast amounts of time on their hands managed to get a foot in the door. To his relief, the giant vehicle picked up speed, leaving the Schloss’s driveway behind.
“I’m strapping in,” he announced to Corvallis over a Bluetooth earpiece that he had just worried into the side of his head. He slammed down into a leather sofa, glanced around to be sure that all he might need was within arm’s reach, and pulled the wireless keyboard onto his lap.
“He’s still there,” C-plus answered, “assembling a war band.”
“How many so far?” Richard asked. But Corvallis’s answer, if there was one, was drowned out by a cataract
