Reamde - Страница 27

To her own considerable surprise and then shame, she began crying. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands.

“I am eediot!” Ivanov exclaimed. “I am stupidest man in world.” He stood up. Afraid that he was going to come over and comfort her, Zula tensed and forced herself to hold it in for a moment. She dared not look up. Through her tears and her fingers she could see Ivanov’s polished shoes moving around. He stepped out of the room. She let go of a train of little gasps and sobs, mixed now with self-anger and frustration that she was being such a stupid girl. She hadn’t cried in a serious way since her mother’s funeral.

Ivanov was back in the room after no more than fifteen seconds. She could hear his footsteps behind the sofa. She flinched as something limp and heavy fell across her shoulders. “What is wrong with you?” Ivanov wanted to know. He was addressing Peter. She realized that Ivanov had grabbed Peter’s arm and draped it over Zula’s shoulders and was now tamping it down into place like wet cement in a form. She got it under control then, certainly not because Peter had his arm around her shoulders but because of a kind of humor, albeit very dark, that was in the situation: the man Ivanov, whoever and whatever he was, jetting in from Toronto to give Peter lessons in how to be chivalrous to his girlfriend, and Peter trapped, unable to explain that they had just broken up.

Ivanov scattered orders to everyone in the room. People went into motion; phones were unfolded. Zula sat up straight, pushing back against the weight of Peter’s arm, and Peter, terrified of what would happen to him if he disobeyed Ivanov, left it where it was, a dead weasel draped over her shoulders.

“Only thing I actually believe is that someone fucked me,” Ivanov announced, with the customary nod of apology toward Zula. “You know any Russian? Kto Kvo. A saying of Lenin. It means ‘who whom?’ Today I am the whom. The one who is fucked. I am dead man. As dead as him.” He nodded toward the adjoining room. Zula heard her lungs filling with a gasp. Ivanov continued, “That is not question. Question is manner of my death. I have some time remainink. Maybe a fortnight. Would like to spend it well. It is too late for me to die gloriously. But I can die better than him.” Another nod. “I can die as a who, not as a whom. I can show my brothers that I was fighting for them to very end, in spite of khorrendous losses. I think they will understand this. I will be a forgiven dead man instead of a smashed insect. Only thing I need is: who is the who?”

Peter finally took his arm off Zula, who sat up fully straight and regarded Ivanov directly. Ivanov looked back at them — but mostly at her — with an interested expression. As if this were a highly formal, academic sort of drawing-room inquiry. “Do you understand question?”

“You want to know who did this to you?”

“I would use different verb but yes.”

They all sat there silently for a few moments. They could hear the engine of a vehicle starting down below, they could hear men talking on phones.

“You want the identity of the Troll. The person who created the virus,” Peter said.

“Yes!” Ivanov snapped, faintly irritated.

“And if we can give you that information, then … we’re cool?”

“Khool?” Ivanov demanded, clearly in no mood to be negotiating — if that was what this was called — with Peter.

“I mean, then it’s good? Between you and us?”

Now, kind of an interesting moment.

Though the whole situation was laden with implicit threat, Ivanov had not lifted a finger, nor intimated that he ever would, against Peter or Zula. His eyebrows went up and he regarded Peter, now, in a new light: as a man who had just, in a manner of speaking, issued a threat against himself. Volunteered that he owed Ivanov something and that consequences would be due him if he failed to deliver.

Ivanov made a little shrug, as if to say, The thought had never crossed my mind, but now that you mention it … “You are most generous.”

During this whole interlude, Peter had been realizing his mistake and was now trying to backpedal in quicksand. “You understand that the virus writer could be anywhere in the world, that he’s probably gone to great lengths to hide his identity, cover his tracks…”

“You confuse me,” Ivanov said. “Can you find Troll, or not?”

Peter looked at Zula.

“Why you look at Miss Zula? You are khacker genius, correct?”

Peter couldn’t get anything out.

ZULA WAS VERY tired, and her mind was in several places at once. The word “flashback” was much too fraught to describe what was happening in her mind. But it was the case that the mind pulled up memories that were germane to the impressions flooding into its sensory organs, and the first few years of her life related better to what was happening now than most of what she had experienced in small-town Iowa. She did not have the energy, the clarity, or what nerds denominated the “bandwidth” to deal with all aspects of this situation at once. Certainly the one that dominated was the sense that she was in danger. There was a technical side to it also. But neither of those explained the sick feeling that kept passing in waves through her abdomen. There was a moral aspect to this. She’d failed to see it at all until Wallace had been sent to the other room. For that, a man like Ivanov would probably see her as ridiculously naive. She could perhaps be forgiven that naïveté once.

Now, though, she was being asked to give up another person: a complete stranger, somewhere, who had created REAMDE. She had not volunteered for the job. Peter had betrayed her with a glance.

“Miss Zula? I apologize, I see that you are very tired,” Ivanov said. “But. You work at same company? Is possible?”

And the Iowa-girl response, of course, was always yes. Especially to a polite, older man in good clothes who had come such a long way.

For some reason she was remembering a moment when she had been something like fourteen years old, the apex of the crystal meth epidemic in Iowa. She had been home alone and had looked out the window to see a strange van coming down the road, very slowly. It had made a couple of passes by the house and then pulled into the driveway that led to their equipment shed. A couple of men had gotten out of the van, looking around nervously. Not knowing whether they might have come on a legitimate errand, Zula had made a phone call to Uncle John (as she called her second adopted dad), and Uncle John had extremely calmly talked her through the procedure of locking every door in the house, getting a shotgun and a box of shells, and hiding herself in the attic. His matter-of-fact instructions had been accompanied, and sometimes drowned out, by dim roaring, screeching, and thumping noises that, as she later understood, had resulted from his driving at a hundred miles an hour while he talked. Zula had barely gotten the attic stairs pulled up behind her when a lot of disturbing vehicular noises had ensued from outside, and she had peered out a gable vent to see Uncle John’s car in the middle of the front yard at the end of a long set of skid marks that completely surrounded the house (for he had orbited it once, checking for signs of forced entry) and John hobbling around it on his prosthetic legs to crouch behind and use it for cover while across the way the van screamed out onto the road with a door hanging open. A cloud of what she took for steam was rising from the side of the shed where they kept the anhydrous ammonia tank. A few minutes later the sheriff’s department was there in force, and Zula felt it safe to emerge from the attic. John yelled at her that she did not have permission to come down yet. Then he hugged her and told her that she was his wonderful girl. Then he asked about the whereabouts of the shotgun. Then he told her again how magnificent she was, and then he ordered her to go upstairs and not come out until he gave permission. She went upstairs and, peering out a window, saw what John did not want her to see: the ambulance men putting on their hazmat suits and placing a large brown wrinkled thing into a body bag. One of the thieves, startled, perhaps, by Uncle John’s sudden advent, had made a mistake with the anhydrous ammonia line and been sprayed with the chemical, which had sucked all the water out of his body.

It was in that moment, but never before and rarely since, that she had perceived a kind of subterranean through line, perhaps like one of those ley lines in T’Rain, running from her people in Eritrea to her people in Iowa.

“WITH A PHONE call,” Zula said, “I might be able to get more information about the Troll.”

Ivanov continued to gaze at her in an expectant way and, after a few moments, raised his eyebrows encouragingly.

“Then,” Zula added, “you could be on your way.”

Ivanov’s face stopped moving, as if hit by a blast of anhydrous ammonia.

“To continue solving your problem,” Zula added graciously, “or whatever it is you need to do.”

“A phone call,” Ivanov said, “to whom?”

“The company has a privacy policy.”

Ivanov’s face screwed up. “This sounds like bullshit.”

“There are rules,” Zula said. For Uncle Richard had explained to her, at the beginning of her employment at Corporation 9592, that most of the people she’d be working with were burdened with Y chromosomes and that what worked at Boy Scout camp should work here. Boys, he said, only want to know two things: who is in charge, and what are the rules. And indeed this worked magically. Ivanov nodded. “The company has information about names, addresses, demographics of its customers,” Zula continued. “But it doesn’t release that information. You don’t play the game under your own name — your real name. There’s no way that I, as a player, could ever track down the true real-world identity of the Troll or any other player.”