Reamde

JONES AND COMPANY had done a creditable job of it, maintaining the injured-hiker pretense until the moment Richard had opened the door, then instantly cutting the power and the Internet. Apparently they had scoped out the property and found the utility shed up by the dam, broken into it, and stationed a man there with bolt cutters. Probably Ershut. Richard had been observing Jones’s men, learning their names and qualities, and had identified Ershut as a Barney. This being a term from the original Mission: Impossible television series that only made sense to people of Richard’s vintage, or hipsters who liked to watch primeval TV shows on YouTube. Anyway, if ever there was a man who would be stationed in a utility shed with bolt cutters, it would be Ershut. The other one, Jahandar, had probably been perched in a tree watching the action unfold through a telescopic sight. But once the door was open and the cables severed, Jahandar moved to another perch closer to the building, with a view across the dam and down the road to Elphinstone, while Jones and Ershut and Mitch Mitchell made themselves at home in the Schloss.

Mitch Mitchell was Richard’s secret and unspoken name for the gringo who wanted, in the worst way, to be addressed as Abdul-Ghaffar. Having no idea what the man’s actual birth certificate name might have been, Richard—who simply could not bring himself to take the Abdul-Ghaffar thing seriously—had to make one up that went with his face and personality.

“How long you got?” had been Richard’s first question to Mitch Mitchell, when he’d taken in the melanoma scar.

“Inshallah, long enough to strike a blow for the faith,” he had responded. Richard had just barely managed to not roll his eyes, but Mitch seemed to have detected some faint trace of mockery. “But it depends,” he had added, “on whether it has gone to the brain.”

“No comment on that,” Richard had said.

“I hate to break in,” Jones said, “just when the two of you are getting off on the right foot. But I need to show you an MPEG, if that’s all right.”

“Is this MPEG going to answer any of my questions about Zula?” Richard asked.

“Many of them, undoubtedly,” Jones said.

Until that point Richard had been engaging in a staredown with Mitch Mitchell, who apparently wanted Richard to believe that the melanoma had very much gone to his brain, and perhaps wiped out some of his behavioral inhibitions; but this seemed important enough for Richard to shift his gaze to Jones. He had seen various pictures of the man on the Internet and in the pages of the Economist and was still experiencing some of that disorientation that sets in when you find yourself in the actual presence of a famous person.

“Well, let’s withdraw to the tavern then, if you don’t mind being in a place that serves alcohol.”

“As long as you’re not serving it now,” Jones said.

“Are you kidding? It’s five in the morning.”

The jest fell flat. Richard led them into the tavern, where T’Rain was still displayed on the big screen. A sizable crowd of people had gathered around Egdod. They were all exhibiting minor bothaviors such as breathing, scratching, and shifting their weight from foot to foot. But nothing was happening. This because (as a large dialog box superimposed on the screen was proclaiming) Richard had lost his Internet connection, and so nothing he saw here reflected what was “actually” (whatever that meant) going on in the T’Rain world. He fired off the command-key combo that shut down the game and was greeted by the usual Windows desktop. Jones meanwhile had shoved a thumb drive into a USB slot on the front of the computer. This showed up as a removable drive. Richard opened it to find one file: Zula.mpeg.

“This isn’t going to infect my computer with a virus, is it?” he asked. Again, it was difficult to get a laugh out of these guys.

He double-clicked the icon. Windows Media Player opened up and showed him crappy webcam footage of his niece, sitting on a rumpled bed in a black room, reading yesterday’s issue of the Vancouver Sun.

“Tried to get the Globe and Mail,” Jones said apologetically, “but they were all out.”

So that was it. Jones wanted to be the guy making the smart-ass quips.

Richard broke down weeping, and they had to leave him alone for a couple of minutes.

“FOR NOW, YOUR assistance in getting across the border would do nicely” had been Jones’s answer, when Richard had got his composure back and had asked them what they wanted.

This surprised him a bit. He was so accustomed to people wanting his money. Being asked for his services as a smuggler filled him with a kind of pride, and almost made him grateful to Jones—as if Jones had done him a favor by showing respect for certain of Richard’s hidden qualities that no one else gave a shit about anymore.

“You’re almost there,” Richard said. “Go south. You can’t miss it.”