“That is the character Zula was hanging out with the whole time she was logged on that night,” C-plus said. Speaking slowly and haltingly as he scanned some user’s customer profile, he continued: “Belongs to a longtime customer and heavy user named Wallace, based in Vancouver. But on the night in question”—(typing)—“he and Zula were logged on from the same place”—(typing)—“in Georgetown.”
“That’s consistent with what I saw earlier today. Zula’s car and a sports car from B.C. are both parked at her boyfriend’s loft in Georgetown.”
“So they must have all been there on the night in question—”
“And that is the place from which they ‘vanished.’ A word I like less the more I use it. Can you tell me anything more about this Wallace?”
“Not without violating the corporate data privacy policy.”
Corvallis shrank from the look that Richard now threw him and went back to typing.
A customer profile appeared on the screen, displaying Wallace’s full name, his address, and some information about his T’Rain playing habits. One stat jumped out at Richard. “Check out his last login.”
“Tuesday morning,” C-plus said. “He hasn’t been on since.” He typed a little more and pulled up a window displaying plots and charts of Wallace’s usage stats, covering the entire time he’d been a T’Rain customer. “That’s the longest he has gone without playing in the last two years.”
“And Zula?”
“Same,” C-plus said. “She hasn’t been on at all. And another thing? Neither of them logged out cleanly on Tuesday morning. Their connections went down at the same time, and the system logged them out automatically.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Richard said, remembering the severed wires in Peter’s shop. “Someone walked into the place and cut their Internet cable with a knife while they were playing.”
“Who would do that?” Corvallis asked.
“Peter was hanging around with creeps,” Richard said.
This now so obviously looked like a classic drug-dealing-related home invasion/mass murder scenario that Richard had to remind himself of why he was even bothering to continue thinking about it. “Zula wanted something from you. Just before this all happened.”
“Actually it was after,” Corvallis said.
“What do you mean?”
“Their connection went dead at 7:51.” Corvallis picked up his phone and thumbed away at it for a few minutes. “Zula called me at 8:42.”
“Okay. That’s interesting. She called you at 8:42 and told you this story about REAMDE investigation and said she needed to know who had cast a healing spell on her character.”
“Yeah, and it turned out to be some Chinese player logged in from Xiamen.”
“Which is how you first became aware that the virus originated there.”
“Yeah.”
“So you’re telling me that Zula was the first person to figure that out.”
“Yes.”
“That strikes me as superodd.”
“How so?”
“Because if you leave out the whole REAMDE and Xiamen part of the story, this looks very simple. Peter was dealing in drugs or something. He got into business with the wrong people. Those people entered his loft and abducted him and took him away and killed him, and because Zula happened to be there with him, they did the same to her. But that doesn’t fit with this Wallace guy, and it certainly doesn’t fit in with the fact that Zula apparently traced REAMDE to Xiamen at almost exactly the same moment that she and everyone else in the apartment vanished.”
“Wallace seems to have kept a very low Internet profile,” Corvallis said.
“Yeah.” For Richard had been watching on the big screen as Corvallis googled the man and came up with very little: mostly genealogical sites of no use to them. “I’ll bet I know what he looks like though.” He was remembering the guy Peter had held the mysterious conference with at the Schloss.
“What do we know about the people who created REAMDE?” Richard asked.
“That’s not my department,” Corvallis reminded him. “That’s being investigated by people who specialize in that stuff.”
“Hacker kids in China, that’s what I heard.”
“Me too.”
“It just seems unlikely that they’d have the wherewithal to organize a home invasion in Seattle on a few hours’ notice.”
“Unless they have friends or something who live here. There are some sketchy characters down in the I.D.” By this Corvallis meant the International District, not all that far from Georgetown. As West Coast Chinatowns went, it was small—nothing compared to San Francisco’s or Vancouver’s—but still managed to produce the occasional gambling-den massacre straight out of a Fu Manchu novel.
“But even if the REAMDE gang knew that Zula was on to them, how would they be able to trace her to Peter’s loft in Georgetown?”
“They wouldn’t,” Corvallis said, “unless they had infiltrated Corporation 9592’s China operation and had access to our logs.”
“Noted,” Richard finally said, after thinking about it for a good long while. He pulled out his phone and accessed a little app that helped him figure out what time it was right now in China. The answer: something like three in the morning. He thumbed out an email to Nolan: Orb me when you wake up.
“But look,” Richard said, as soon as he heard the little swooshing noise telling him that the email was sent. “The reason I actually called you was because of this.” He rested a hand atop the PC he’d carried in from the IT lab and told Corvallis the story about the security cameras and the Wi-Fi hub in Peter’s place.
They transferred the video cable from the laptop to the PC and got it hooked up to power and a keyboard. Corvallis opened the directory containing the files copied from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. “Hmm,” he said immediately. “What was the brand name of the hub?”
Richard told him. Corvallis visited the company’s site and, with a bit of clicking around in their “Products” section, was able to pull up a picture of a device that Richard recognized as looking like Peter’s. He copied and pasted the model number into the Google search box, then appended the search terms “linux driver” and hit the button. The screen filled up with a number of hits from open source software sites.
“Okay.”
“What are you doing?” Richard asked.