Reamde - Страница 28

“But someone,” Ivanov said, “someone at company knows.”

“Yes, someone always knows.”

“Maybe rule gets broke sometimes, a little.”

“Generally not but…” Zula truncated the sentence since Ivanov was already making a this is bullshit gesture.

APPARENTLY SOMEONE WENT out for supplies, since their Russian was suddenly punctuated with phrases like “venti mocha.”

“Peter,” said Sokolov; the first sound he had made in a long time.

Peter looked up to find Sokolov nodding significantly at a webcam mounted at the top of the stairs, aimed down into the shop.

“You have two security cameras.”

Peter made no response.

“Or perhaps more?” Sokolov went on.

Peter considered it. “Three, actually,” he admitted.

“Ah,” Sokolov said.

For a few moments, Zula wondered how Sokolov could possibly have missed the third one. They were all pretty obvious: one aimed down the front hall at the street entrance; another in the shop, covering the alley doors; the third at the top of the stairs.

Then she got it. Sokolov was testing Peter.

Sokolov knew perfectly well that there were three cameras; he had gone over the whole place, seen everything. But he had said “two” just to see whether Peter would ’fess up to the existence of a third.

“Motion activated?” Sokolov asked.

“Yes.”

“Storing data where?”

“Here,” Peter said. “On my server.”

Sokolov made no sign that he had heard, but only stared into Peter’s eyes for several long seconds.

“And … on a backup drive,” Peter admitted. “Under the stairs.”

Sokolov finally took his gaze from Peter’s face and nodded. “Files will need to be erased.”

“Okay,” Peter said, sounding hugely relieved. He slapped his knees and rose to his feet. “Let’s do that.”

Watched carefully by Sokolov, Peter busied himself at a terminal for a while. In the meantime, a preposterous amount of car moving was going on. Peter’s Scion ended up parked on the street outside. Zula’s Prius was shifted deeper into the bay and Wallace’s sports car was moved in next to it, clearing the alley.

During these efforts, Zula’s phone was retrieved and presented to her, by Ivanov, as if it were a Swarovski necklace.

“ZULA.”

“C-plus, hi.”

“It’s not often that I have the pleasure of talking to someone in the magma department.”

“C-plus, that is because I am working on a side project here — long story — that Richard sort of put me on.”

“Management by founder,” Corvallis said, in a tone of ironic disapproval. Supposedly, “management by founder” — a term of art for Richard doing whatever struck his fancy — had been eradicated from Corporation 9592 a few years ago when professional executives had been parachuted in to run things.

“Yeah. So, an informal project. Call it research. Having to do with some, uh, unusual gold movements connected with a virus called REAMDE.”

“Funny. Had never heard of it until I came to work this morning. Now, it’s all anyone will talk about.”

“It exploded over the weekend. Look, I just need one piece of information.”

“Where should I look?”

“My log. Several hours ago.”

Typing. “Wow, you died a lot last night!”

“Sure did.”

Typing. “Then you unceremoniously logged out.”

“Power failure in Georgetown, the Internet went down.”

“Okay. You were having some fun in the Torgai hills, looks like.”

“Yeah. An ill-fated expedition.”

“I’ll say. So. What is it you need?”

“During the early part of it, someone cast a healing spell on me. Not a member of my group. It would have happened at maybe three in the morning our time, when my character was near a certain ley line intersection…”

“Well, only one healing spell was cast on you all night, so it’s pretty easy.”

“You’ve got the log entry?” For in the world of T’Rain, a little sparrow could not fall from its nest without the event being logged and time-stamped.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Zula couldn’t help but notice the effect that her half of the conversation was having on Ivanov. He turned and gestured to Sokolov, who stepped nearer, as if the Troll were about to jump out of Zula’s phone and make a run for it.

“Who cast that healing spell on me, C-plus?”

“Hard to say.”

“What do you mean?” Zula asked, a bit sharply.

“It’s literally hard to say. My Chinese is a little weak.”

“So the name of the character is in Chinese?”

Ivanov and Sokolov looked at each other as only Russians could look at each other when the Chinese came into it.

“Yeah, and he or she didn’t bother to slap a Western handle onto it.”

This was part of Richard and Nolan’s efforts to make T’Rain as Chinese friendly as possible. In other such games, each player had to use a name written in Latin characters, but in T’Rain it was optional.

“He or she — so, no demographics or personal data about the player?”

“It’s transparently a load of crap generated by a bot or something,” Corvallis said.

“Credit card?”

“It’s a self-sus.”

Another one of Richard and Nolan’s innovations. In most online games, you had to link your account to a credit card number to cover the monthly fees. Not so Chinese teen friendly. But since T’Rain had hard currency money plumbing built into its guts, this too was somewhat optional; if your character was turning a profit, for example, by selling gold, you could pay your monthly fee by having it deducted automatically from your character’s treasure chest. These were called self-sustaining accounts.

“Is there any way to get any hard information at all about who runs that character?”

Zula didn’t like the effect that this had on Ivanov’s face.

“I can give you the IP address that they were connected from.”

“That’d be fantastic!” Zula said, hoping that she was really selling its fantasticness to Ivanov. She gestured for something to write with. Sokolov wheeled and plucked a Sharpie from a mug on a side table. Perhaps it was a bit odd that he knew the location of every pen in the room better than Peter did, but maybe it was his job to spot everything in his vicinity that could be used as an improvised weapon. Sokolov bit the cap off and held out his palm for Zula to write on. She took the pen and rested her writing hand on Sokolov’s, which had taken a lot of abuse and was missing the end of one finger, yet was as warm as any other man’s.

“Ready?” Corvallis asked.

“Shoot,” said Zula, then cringed at the choice of word.

Corvallis, speaking extremely clearly and crisply, recited four numbers between 0 and 255: a dotted quad, or Internet Protocol address. Zula wrote them down on the palm of Sokolov’s hand. Ivanov watched with spectacular intensity, then gave her a wondering look.

He knew what it was.

It was the same sort of thing that Csongor had used to detect Wallace’s lie and route him to Peter’s place. And having seen it work perfectly once, Ivanov supposed it could not fail to work again.

“Thanks,” Zula said, “and my next question — ”

Typing. “It’s one of a large block of addresses allocated to an ISP in Shyamen.”

“Come again?”

Corvallis spelled it, and she wrote it on Sokolov’s flesh: X–I-A-M-E-N.

This triggered furious but comically silent activity among Ivanov and his minions.

“You can google it yourself,” Corvallis said, and Zula — who was, in spite of everything, still being watched intently by Sokolov — resisted the temptation to say No, I can’t. “Formerly called Amoy,” he continued, in a singsongy voice to indicate that he had googled it. “A port city in southeastern China, at the mouth of the Nine Dragons River, just across the strait from Taiwan. Two and a half million people. Twenty-fifth largest port in the world, up from thirtieth. Blah, blah, blah. Pretty generic, for a Chinese city.”

“Thanks!”

“Sorry I couldn’t get more specific.”

“Gives me something to work on.”

“Anything else I can help you with?”

Yes. “No.”

“Have a good one!” And he was gone.

The word “Bye” was hardly past Zula’s lips when Sokolov had pulled the phone from her hand. He knew how to work it and pulled up its web browser and googled Xiamen.

She had been vaguely aware for a while of some gratifying smells in the room: flowers and coffee.

Ivanov, smiling, approached her with a vast bouquet of stargazer lilies cradled in his arms. They still bore the plastic wrap and barcode from the grocery store up the hill. “For you,” he announced, bestowing them on her. “For because I made you cry. Least I could do.”

“That is very sweet of you,” she said, trying through all her exhaustion to sell it.

“Latte?” he asked. For the T-shirted man was at his side with a cardboard tray crowded with cups from Starbucks world HQ, whose colossal green mermaid loomed over Georgetown like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

“Love one,” she said, and she didn’t have to lie about that.

Since the visitors were now all busy, she carried the flowers into the kitchen area and laid them on a cutting board so that she could cut the ends off the stems and put them in water. Idiotic. But it, like so many of her nice-Iowa-girl impulses, was like a brainstem reflex. It wasn’t the flowers’ fault that they’d been purchased by gangsters. The latte was enormously pleasurable, and she popped the lid off and threw it away so that she could sink her lips into the warm foam and gulp from it. Peter owned no vases, but she found an earthenware water pitcher that would support the flowers and filled it with water. Then she set about the messy business of tearing away the plastic wrappers and the rubber bands that held the flowers’ stems together.