Reamde

He had awakened John and Alice right away, of course, and John had packed his bags and started driving through the night toward the Omaha airport, Alice calling ahead to arrange a morning flight to Seattle. Richard had called his jet leasing company to set up an ASAP flight to Xiamen, and they had warned him that he’d need a visa. He had stayed up into the small hours of the morning researching Chinese visa policies and learned that it all had to be done through a consulate, of which the nearest was in San Francisco, and so at five in the morning he had dropped an assistant off at Sea-Tac, sending her down with his passport and all the documentation needed to get a visa in ultra-super-expedited fashion. Richard had called John during a layover in Denver and revectored him to SFO so that he could hand his passport over to the same assistant. John had then caught the next flight up to Seattle. Recent text messages from the assistant suggested that all was proceeding according to plan and that she would probably be able to catch a six P.M. flight back to Seattle, which would get the visas into their hands at about eight and enable wheels up from Boeing Field as early as nine.

“I HAVE BEEN watching the Facebook page with I guess you could say trepidation,” Richard said. “No leaks about this yet.” He patted a hard copy of the paper towel message draped over the console between the car’s front seats.

“I’m sure there won’t be,” John said. “Your call came in the middle of the night, no one was in the house but me and Alice, no one knows a thing.”

For they had agreed that they would not divulge the existence of Zula’s note just yet; the news would make its way into the wild very rapidly, where it might complicate the investigation, or whatever this thing they were doing was called.

“Did your friend get any information on the fella who sent the email?” John asked.

“We don’t know that it’s a fella,” Richard reminded him. “Nolan’s on it, but it’s the middle of the night in China right now, and he doesn’t have a lot to go on. He said it’s the equivalent of a Hotmail address.”

“What do you mean?” John asked peevishly. He had a Hotmail address.

“An easy-to-get anonymous account frequently used by spammers,” Richard said. “What I’m trying to tell you is that whoever sent me that email probably wanted to do it in an anonymous, untraceable way.”

“Maybe we could trace him through the skyscraper.”

“We don’t know which skyscraper it is,” Richard pointed out. “Zula didn’t bother to specify that in the note. She probably assumed that, if the note were ever found, it would be obvious to everyone which building it came from.”

John considered it. “Instead what we have here is some kind of leaker or whistle-blower.”

“I would guess so.”

“How about the Seattle cops?”

“I called the detective and left a voice mail message. Told him we had evidence that Zula was alive and not in Seattle on Friday. Which I think takes it out of his jurisdiction.”

“It takes the missing persons part of it out of his jurisdiction,” John said. “But it means that crimes happened in Seattle. Murder and kidnapping and assault and God only knows what else…”

Richard nodded. “And I’m sure that the Seattle detectives who work on those kinds of crimes are going to be really interested in Zula’s note. But none of that has anything to do with us getting her back safe.”

“It most certainly does if the responsible parties can be identified, tracked down, extradited—”

“Something major happened in Xiamen on that Friday, only a few hours after Zula wrote that note,” Richard said. He had avoided mentioning this to John and Alice until now because he could not be certain it was actually connected to Zula and he didn’t want to confuse and upset them and add a vast number of additional bogus leads to John’s already torpid database.

“Go ahead, I’m listening,” John said, having heard nothing further than the hiss of tires on wet pavement, the washing-machine surge of the windshield wipers.

Richard sighed. “I’m trying to figure out where to begin.” He thought about the sheer level of energy he would have to summon in order to explain the investigations he had been pursuing with Corvallis, the state of the battle for the Torgai, and all the rest. And he felt overwhelmingly tired. “I am about to drive this thing right off the road,” he said. “Let’s get to my place and get some coffee.”