Reamde

The other computer, the one with the clean Linux install and the anonymized Net connection, was five steps away. Csongor kept wandering back to it. Yuxia seemed to have established some kind of chat-room connection to someone she knew back in China and was carrying on a sporadic exchange of messages. This relieved a huge emotional burden she’d been carrying ever since the beginning of their adventure. But there was a lot of downtime during which she was able to surf the web for information on Abdallah Jones and (as her investigation continued, and she developed leads) Zula Forthrast and Richard Forthrast and, for that matter, Csongor himself and Csongor’s brother in L.A. She had probably never used an Internet connection that was not hobbled by the Great Firewall, and she was already finding it addictive.

Csongor almost had to resort to impoliteness to get her to relinquish the machine for a few minutes. Then he carried out some Google searches, looking for pages that contained both “Zula” and “Abdallah Jones.” He pulled up a few pages about terrorism in the Horn of Africa, making reference to the Red Sea bay and the Eritrean port after which Zula had been named, but nothing about Zula Forthrast.

So nothing had happened. No information had made it out into the public sphere yet that established any link between those two names. He tried Jones’s name in connection with Xiamen and found nothing. With Yuxia’s help he was able to find some news stories in the Chinese media about a gas explosion and a failed terrorist attack that had taken place in Xiamen on the morning in question, but none of these made any reference to Jones or Zula or any of the other people Csongor knew to have been involved. So there had been some sort of totally effective clampdown on news.

“A FLARE JUST went up,” said a familiar voice on the phone.

Olivia recognized him, after a moment’s disorientation, as “Uncle Meng,” presumably calling from London.

She was disoriented because she had been talking to Mounties in Vancouver and hadn’t expected London calling.

“Hello?”

“I’m here. Sorry,” Olivia said. “What sort of flare?”

“We have a new actor in the GWOJ,” said Uncle Meng, who had adopted Seamus Costello’s acronym for the struggle in which they all—MI6, FBI, Mounties, the Forthrast family—were jointly engaged.

“What’s the new actor doing?”

“Google searches linking names like Zula with names like Abdallah Jones. Xiamen. Csongor.”

“Who the hell is Csongor?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Uncle Meng, “which makes me wonder whether this new actor has inadvertently identified himself.”

“Where is the new actor?”

“No idea,” said Uncle Meng. “Whoever he is, he is savvy about computer security, has set himself up with a clean and well-defended Linux installation of extremely recent vintage, is using some kind of hacker software to anonymize his packets. So we can’t guess where he might be.”

“Is anything showing up on public sites?”

“Not that we’ve noticed.”

“So the new actor isn’t blabbing.”

“No. Just fishing. Looking around to see if anyone else knows what he knows. And so far I would say that the answer is no.”

“Is there any action you would like me to take?” Olivia asked.

“You’ve already helped by letting me know you have no idea who Csongor is,” said Uncle Meng. “If I need anything else, I’ll let you know.” And he rang off, which was good since another call was coming in from a number that, judging by area code and prefix, was in the Vancouver offices of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Her cross-border telephonic activities had been a sort of repeat, in miniature, of what she had gone through during her first day or two in the United States: starting with people whose names she knew and whose telephone numbers she had, obtaining other names and numbers, blindly groping through labyrinthine org charts until she actually managed to establish relationships with people who didn’t think she was crazy and to whom she could divulge a bit of sensitive information. In contrast to the United States, with its Tower of Babel–like security/intelligence apparatus, Canada offered a straightforward one-stop shopping arrangement in the form of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. There was also an intelligence agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, but when they had got wind of the sorts of questions Olivia was asking, they had simply referred her to the Mounties, who were better equipped to answer.