Reamde

“It’s 3:30,” Jones said. “We’ll be under way in moments. I estimate half an hour to get there, half an hour to reconnoiter the place and get in and show him this.” He yanked the thumb drive out, held it up as if they could all see what was on it, then put it into the breast pocket of his shirt and smoothed a Velcro flap over it. “Then he’ll have to pack some items, I should imagine, which might take another half an hour, and then another half hour to get to the rendezvous point below. So figure we meet there at 5:30 and get under way. Sharjeel, give the men another hour to sleep. Wake her up at 4:00 so that when you rouse the men at 4:30, water will be hot and breakfast ready. That’s time for eating, for morning prayers, and for packing. Jahandar and Ershut will, inshallah, come up here at around 5:30 to let you know that we are ready to go; when you see them, lead the rest of the expedition down to the trail. Ershut, we may need to display her.”

A minute later Jones, Abdul-Ghaffar, Ershut, and Jahandar got up and walked away into the woods, headed downhill into the mining complex, leaving Sharjeel the only one keeping watch over the camp. Zula was tempted to make a run for it then. But then she’d be bracketed between the aroused camp and Jones’s contingent. Not a good situation. After five thirty, though, most of these men would be gone for good, leaving her with only four guards, two of whom were incompetent. That would be the time to make a break for it.

To be precise, she needed to make her break during the interval between five thirty and whenever it was that they were supposed to kill her. No schedule had been set for that yet, or if it had, they’d been discreet enough to do it out of her hearing.

Even if they intended to keep her alive indefinitely, she had an obligation to get free as soon as possible. After the jet crash, with Jones’s gun in her face, she’d blurted out the one thing she could think of that might keep her alive. And she didn’t imagine that Richard or anyone else in the family would fault her for it. But soon, as consequence, Richard was going to be in their power; and if he ended up taking Jones down his usual pathway into northern Idaho, it would lead them straight to the cabin where Uncle Jake and his family lived. She was obligated to do whatever she could to help them out of the mess she’d put them in.

To bears, she added boots as something to be thinking about. Zakir was a big lumbering man, but Sayed the graduate student was a good inch shorter than Zula. She made up her mind to have a look at what was on his feet the next time he emerged from his tent.

LOTTERY DISCOUNTZ HAD now spent enough time loitering just above the lower reaches of the trading pit to give his owner a loose understanding of how it all worked. He’d been foxed, at first, by the fact that T’Rain was wired for sound. The easiest way to communicate with characters in one’s immediate vicinity was simply to talk. But there was, in addition, an old-school chat interface. You could type little messages, like the Internet pioneers of yore, and they would appear in scrolling windows on the screens of anyone who was listening. It was plainly the case that Marlon and the rest of the da G shou couldn’t live without it. So the next time Csongor focused his attention on the money-trading pit, he experimented with turning on the chat interface. For one thing he’d noticed about the place was that, for a trading pit, it was strangely quiet. It was visually loud, and ridiculously active, but almost no one was speaking.

It all became clear when he interrogated the chat interface and discovered that there were no fewer than a dozen discrete channels to which he could listen here. Doing so, he was treated to waterfalls of jargon-laden statements in as many separate windows.

Snarph: WTS RG 50 BUX PP NOW

Opening a browser window atop his view of the game, he did some googling and learned how to translate such utterances: “WTS” meant “want to sell,” “RG 50” meant that the quantity for sale amounted to fifty or so pieces of Red Gold, “BUX” meant that Snarph’s player wanted American dollars (other commonly seen options being “EUR,” “LBS,” “YEN,” and “RMB”), “PP” meant that he wanted to clear the transaction using PayPal, and “NOW” meant the obvious.

Working laboriously from a translation key that he found on a wiki, he typed in

Lottery Discountz: WTS IG XX BUX WU 1HR

Which meant “I wish to exchange a yet-to-be-divulged amount of Indigold for dollars in about one hour, settling the transaction by means of a Western Union wire transfer.”