Reamde

without really seeing, containerships being jockeyed around at the port. After some polite chitchat with Inspector Fournier, she asked for, and received, permission to use up a quarter of an hour of his valuable time and launched into a summary of the SNAG theory and its possible relevance to Inspector Fournier’s sphere of responsibilities.

AFTER THE INITIAL spate of Google searching, Csongor went into a deep funk for a couple of hours. All during the desperate voyage of Szelanya he had been imagining that, if he could only get to a computer with an Internet connection, he’d be able to make things happen. In retrospect, it had not been a realistic assumption at all. But it had given him a reason to keep going through the occasional typhoon.

They had never really decompressed from the voyage. That was the problem. If they had beached Szelanya in an isolated cove and spent a little while eating coconuts and swimming in limpid waters, Csongor might now be psychologically ready to pivot into whatever the hell was going to happen to them next. But when Szelanya had ground to a halt, Csongor had allowed himself to relax for all of about thirty seconds—and during those thirty seconds, virtually all their money had been stolen. Since then it had been nonstop action; and now he was learning that his precious Internet was completely useless in tracking down Zula.

He was taken by sleep as suddenly and as completely as a man being swept off a deck by a wave.

A FEW HOURS into the Troll hunt, Richard’s Bluetooth headset began to bleat out a pathetic low-battery warning. He severed the phone connection to Corvallis, which was becoming less and less useful as Richard got up to speed. Embedded in a complex of spells and disguises about twenty deep, he had made his way to the Torgai Foothills by actually flying there directly, eschewing the crowded ley line network, which would have forced him to emerge at a place where his character—or rather the disguised version of it—might be noticed. Here he was fighting certain ineluctable features of the rule system. He didn’t want it understood that Egdod was on the move, and so he had disguised himself as one Ur’Qat, a K’Shetriae warrior mage of much lesser powers—but still powerful enough to survive alone in the war-torn Torgai Foothills.

Another reasonable step might be to make himself invisible. Egdod was capable of putting up invisibility spells that almost no one in the game could penetrate. And yet there was always a small probability that such a spell might fail. This was one of the ways they kept the game interesting: low-level characters always had a chance to defeat high-level ones. Even an Egdod could be detected. Better to disguise himself first as the less powerful Ur’Qat, and then have Ur’Qat cast an invisibility spell. Any spell that Ur’Qat could cast would be much less puissant and hence much more likely to be penetrated than one of Egdod’s. So there was a good chance that when Ur’Qat rode the ley line into the Torgai, he’d be noticed, invisibility spell or no; and then he might be attacked outright or, what would probably be worse, be covertly followed as he went sneaking around after Reamde. And perhaps the person following him would be one of Reamde’s minions. Egdod could always get to the Torgai in a big hurry, if he decided that this was warranted; but all signs pointed to that Reamde was slowly and patiently effecting a battle plan that was going to stretch out over many hours. As long as that continued to be the case, Egdod would content himself with flying from his fortress to the Torgai. Even moving at supersonic velocity, this took a while. But during the flight, Richard had been able to refamiliarize himself with certain spells and magical items that might soon come in handy. And, at least until Richard’s Bluetooth headset had croaked, he’d been able to get updates from Corvallis and to learn something about the minions that Reamde was summoning from, it appeared, all over south China.

CSONGOR WOKE UP nagged by the vague sense that there was something useful he could be doing and, after a few moments, remembered what it was: he was supposed to be locating a T’Rain moneychanger, preferably in Switzerland, but potentially anywhere in the world outside of China. It was 3:41 A.M.; he had been sleeping upright in a chair for almost three hours. He looked over at Marlon and found him in exactly the same pose as before. Yuxia was sitting in front of the other computer, but she was nodding off. He tried to move, discovered his neck had gone stiff, devoted a minute to stretching himself out. Then he strolled over for a look over Marlon’s shoulder. He was astonished to discover that the troll Reamde still had not moved from the cave entrance. But it would be wrong to think that nothing had happened this whole time, for the roster window on the left side of the screen was now filled from top to bottom with character portraits in full color, each with its own little continually-fluctuating-and-updating status display. While Csongor had been sleeping Marlon had recruited several dozen other players to help him. Marlon slapped a function key, and the roster window expanded to fill most of the screen, then rearranged itself into a sort of hierarchical tree structure with Reamde ensconced at the top.

“Your org chart?” Csongor asked.

“Orc chart,” Marlon said.

INSPECTOR FOURNIER GOT back to Olivia at about three thirty in the afternoon, letting her know that they had conducted a simple search of police records and found nothing about weird private jet landings or roving bands of Middle Eastern terrorists. The only thing that had been flagged as even moderately peculiar was that a group of hunters had gone missing in north-central B.C., about ten days ago.

Forty-five minutes later—having made a quick raid on her hotel room to grab her stuff and check out—Olivia was northbound on Interstate 5, stopped almost totally dead in the inevitable Friday afternoon rush hour jam-up. But she was moving. She was moving, she was convinced, in the general direction of Abdallah Jones.

IN SOME RESPECTS, Abdallah Jones’s jihadists were so hapless that they almost— almost—aroused feelings of sympathy in Zula’s breast, exciting what little she had in the way of maternal instincts. But certain things they were quite good at and went about with commendable efficiency. One of those was camping out. And after more than a week of aimlessly wandering about the highways and byways of British Columbia in an RV, they were clearly so ready to camp out.

She had flattered herself that, as they drew closer to the Schloss, they’d move her up to the front of the RV and consult her for directions. But it seemed that they had scored a GPS from one of the many Walmarts they had raided during their wanderings and were now simply using it to zero in on the coordinates of the place where she had taken photographs of the collapsed mining structure a few weeks ago. They closed and locked the door of her cell so she’d not be a distraction; and so she spent the last few hours of the journey alone in the dark, running through the exercise program she had invented for herself and trying to guess their location from what few sensory cues penetrated the insulated walls of the room. They passed through a town; she guessed Elphinstone. They bought groceries; she guessed at the Safeway. Then they left town and began to ascend (her ears were popping) on a winding road. Almost certainly the one that ran up the valley toward the Schloss. Someone honked furiously at them for a while, then sped past; as a little joke to herself, she imagined it might be Uncle Richard. Then she suddenly knew with certainty that it must have been Uncle Richard.

They reached a place where the road became gravel and then shut off the RV’s engine. Nothing happened, from her point of view, for an hour; she could feel the suspension rocking as men climbed off, presumably going to reconnoiter. Muffled discussions were going on up ahead of her, and stuff was being unloaded. Almost had to be given that the RV had become so crammed with camping gear during the last week that it was difficult to move around in it.

Then she heard the sound she’d been waiting for ever since they’d constructed this prison cell and put her in it: the heavy clinking of the chain as someone dug it out of whatever storage bin it had been heaped in.

Scrabbling at the door. Then it was kicked open. Zakir—the big soft-bodied Vancouverite—was standing there, eyeglasses slightly askew, the chain all piled up in his arms. Shaving and bathing had not been such a priority with him these last several days.

“I’ll be needing your neck,” he announced, with elaborate, sarcastic fake-politeness.

CSONGOR DIDN’T HAVE the faintest idea how to go about making contact with a T’Rain money-laundering specialist, but he supposed that the direct approach couldn’t hurt. He began generating some appropriate Google queries and soon enough began to get a sense for the correct buzzwords and search terms.

The problem turned out to be that none of these people had websites per se. They were post-web and