Reamde

“Never mind,” she said. “I was only wondering if there might be a spare computer around here that I might use.”

“For, like, secure email?”

“No. For playing T’Rain.”

“I thought you said you didn’t play.”

“I don’t,” she admitted, “but this needs to change.”

“Needs!?”

“Professional reasons,” she said.

For she now knew that the missing person called Zula was connected to Corporation 9592—was, in fact, the cofounder’s niece—and that her abduction from Seattle to Shanghai had been somehow related to the activities of the nest of hackers who had lived in the apartment below Jones’s. While she did not feel the need to spend a huge amount of time on T’Rain, and certainly didn’t want to go to the point of having her own personal doll created on a 3D printer, she needed to know a little more about the game.

Twelve hours later, she knew more than she needed to—and yet she still wanted to know more. What was the secret hiding place of the Black Pearls of the Q’rith? What combination of spells and herbs was needed to rouse the Princess Elicasse from her age-long slumber beneath the Golden Bower of Nar’thorion? Where could she get some Qaldaqian Gray Ore to forge new Namasq steel arrowheads to shoot with her Composite Bow of Aratar? And were those the right kind of ranged weapons, anyway, to use against the Torlok that was barring her passage across the Bridge of Enbara? She could have obtained answers to all these questions from Seamus and his band of lost boys, but she knew that any answers provided would only lead to more questions, and she had already pestered them far too many times. They seemed terribly busy, anyway, planning something.

Something violent.

Something in the real world. Not far away.

She collected these impressions during brief moments of lucidity when she pulled herself out of the game to ask a question, fetch more junk food, or go to the W. C. At these times the men would all clam up and pointedly look the other way until she had once again ensconced herself in front of the game.

It was something like three in the morning. She went back to her trailer, tossed and turned until dawn, seeing images of T’Rain whenever she closed her eyes, then finally went to sleep and was awakened in midafternoon by Seamus pounding on her door.

He had even more things strapped to him than usual: a Camel-Bak; extra magazines for his Sig; hard-shell knee pads.

He invited himself in and squatted down, leaning back against the wall. Stretching his quads.

­” People are going to die tonight because of that theory you and your colleagues spun up in London,” he said.

“The theory that Jones flew the jet down here,” she said.

“Yeah. That theory. So before people die for it—keeping in mind one of them might be me—I just thought I would pay a little social call, shoot the breeze, and eventually, you know, get around to asking you whether you still believe in that theory. But it turns out that when I am getting ready to go on one of these operations, I’m not much in the mood for small talk.”

Olivia nodded. “He took off southbound. If he had turned it into a martyrdom operation—crashed it into something—we’d know. If it had landed somewhere and been noticed, we’d know. So he didn’t do either of those things. He flew it somewhere he could land it and hide it without being noticed. This place is easily reachable from Xiamen, he knows it well, has friends and connections here…”

“You mentioned all those things before,” Seamus said.

Olivia was silent.

“All I’m saying: here I am. Seamus. Alive and well. Not your best friend, but someone you know a little. As far as I can tell, you don’t hate me. You tolerate my presence. Maybe even like me a tiny little bit. I’m about to leave. Let’s say I come back in a body bag tomorrow morning. Let’s say that happens. You get on a plane and fly back to London. As you are sitting on that long, long airplane flight, at some point when you’re over India or Arabia or fucking Crete or something, are you going to go, like”—he smacked himself in the face and adopted a look of chagrin, shook his head, rolled his eyes—” ‘Shit, you know, that theory actually sucked. ‘Is that going to happen?”

“No,” Olivia said. “It’s the best theory we have.”

“We being the guys sitting around the table in London?”

“Yes.”

“How about you, Olivia? Is it the best theory you have?”

“Does it matter?” That answer had sprung to her lips surprisingly quickly.

His face froze for a few seconds, and then he smiled without showing his teeth. “No,” he said, “of course not.”

Then he pushed himself away from the wall, rose to his feet, spun on the balls of his black-on-black running shoes, and walked out.

She sat there without moving for twenty minutes, until she heard the helicopters taking off.