Reamde

It was during one such foray, the movie on pause, some Torgai conflagration burning in a window on the screen, when he noticed he had new email, tentatively flagged as spam. Subject heading: some Chinese characters. He deleted it without looking. But something about it was nagging at him. He didn’t read Chinese. But in the last few days he had been trying to learn some things about this place called Xiamen, hoovering up random stuff on the Internet. Some of the pages he’d found were in English, others in Chinese, many in a patchwork of both languages. But he had grown accustomed to seeing one Chinese character that stood out because of its simplicity: just a square with its bottom side missing, and a little cross-tick in its top side. It was half of the two-character symbol for “Xiamen.” And he might have been imagining things, but he fancied he had seen it in the subject line of that spam email. So he went to his trash folder and retrieved the message and opened it.

It contained no text at all, just three consecutive images, each one a photograph of a brown paper towel with words written on it in black pen.

The first line of the message on the towel was an email address at Corporation 9592 that Richard used only for personal communications. The second line was a date, bracketed in question marks: Friday before last, making it about three days after Zula and Peter had disappeared from the loft in Georgetown. So the note was about ten days old.

Uncle Richard,

Hope you will forward this to John and Alice if it ever gets rescued from the drain trap where I am going to hide it. I thought your email address was more likely to work than theirs. John’s PC has malware.

This is my first damsel in distress letter, so I hope I am striking the right tone. I have a lot of time on my hands and a whole dispenser full of paper towels so I can produce several drafts if need be.

As you probably know if you are reading this, I am on the forty-third floor of an unfinished skyscraper in downtown Xiamen. I am being held captive—hate that word, but it fits—in a ladies’ room next to an office suite that is being used as a safe house by a Russian identifying himself as Ivanov, though this is clearly not his real name. I think that he used to be part of a Russian organized crime group but that he has betrayed them, or at least disappointed them to an extent that he thinks is going to end up being fatal. He was running some sort of financial scam with their pension fund money, working with a Scottish accountant in Vancouver by the name of Wallace, who was a very active T’Rain player. Wallace’s computer got infected with REAMDE …

… and the note went on to tell a story that, while bizarre in a lot of respects, explained much of what had been puzzling Richard for the last week. The narrative portion of the letter ended in what could only be called a cliffhanger: she and Peter and some other guy had seemingly identified the Troll, and she had the impression that the Russians were making preparations to go and snatch him. Assuming that the letter had been written early Friday morning Xiamen time, this fit perfectly with Corvallis’s statistics showing that the Troll and his minions had suddenly logged off and gone dark on Friday morning.

The remainder of the letter consisted of a series of personal notes directed at various family members, clearly based on the assumption that Zula would never see any of them again. Richard had attempted to read it about ten times and been unable to get through it.