“But they can establish a connection to Wallace just from the fact that his car is parked in the loft,” Richard said.
“I think that all you can really do is wait for them to gather more information about Wallace,” Corvallis said. “Let the investigation run its course.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Richard said. “Could you do me one other favor, though?”
“Sure.”
“Keep checking the T’Rain logs. Let me know if there is any more activity on any of these accounts.”
“Zula’s and Wallace’s?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll set up a cron job to do it right now,” Corvallis said.
“Once an hour?”
“I was thinking once a minute.”
“Now, that’s the spirit.” Richard considered it.
“Anything else?” C-plus asked, flexing his fingers, kind of like a boxer jumping up and down in the corner of the ring.
“There must also be, I would guess, a whole complex of many accounts connected with these kids in Xiamen, right?”
“In theory, yeah,” C-plus said. “But they seem to have been pretty savvy about protecting themselves. Like, instead of carrying the gold around on their persons, they have it stashed all over the Torgai Foothills.”
“Which would prevent anyone other than us from knowing where it was,” Richard said. “But because we have admin privileges, we can just search the database and find every pile of gold pieces in that region, correct?”
“Of course.”
“And then we can go back through the log files and identify the characters who moved the gold pieces to those stashes.”
“Sure.”
“So those characters should get placed on some kind of watch list. Whenever they log in, we track them. Watch what they’re doing. Check their IP addresses. Are they still in Xiamen? Or moving around? Do they have coconspirators in other places?”
Corvallis said nothing.
“What am I missing here?” Richard asked, starting to get a bit exercised.
“Nothing.”
“Why didn’t we do this a long time ago!?”
“Because,” C-plus said, “it’s exactly the kind of thing that the cops would ask us to do as part of an investigation, and official corporate policy is to tell the cops to go fuck themselves.”
“Hmm, so we’ve been hands-off with the REAMDE guys until now,” said Richard, talking loudly over a surge of hot shame. Furious Muses were beginning to pop up on his emotional radar like Soviet bombers coming over the Pole.
“Yeahhhh…”
“Well, until we can prove that there’s no connection between them and Zula’s disappearance, corporate policy has to change,” Richard said.
THE JIHADISTS’ KIT included several Chinese entrenching tools: bare wooden handles about the length of a man’s arm tipped with shovel-shaped blades that could be rotated into a few different positions, making them usable as picks or as shovels. Through a combination of stomping the snow down with their feet and using these tools to scrape and shovel a path, they created a lane from the plane’s door to the prefab building with the functioning woodstove. They then used it to transfer their baggage from the plane into the building. The jet had been on the ground for a few hours now and the temperature inside of it had been declining the whole time, to the point where Zula had been pulling blankets off the bed one at a time and wrapping them around herself, transforming herself into a semblance of a burqa-clad woman of the conservative Islamic world. She was startled, after a while, to hear loud hacking and ripping noises from inside the plane, then understood that they were wielding their tools to strip its interior of anything they could conceivably use. But this was only a guess since they had kept the cabin door closed, and reacted splenetically when she pulled it open to peek out.
Eventually, though, the time came when Jones shoved the door open, letting in a wash of cold but blessedly clean-smelling air, and beckoned to her, letting her know that her days of private jet travel were finally at an end. And none too soon for Zula’s taste.