“I beg your pardon?” Peter said, aghast at how this was going.
Wallace cracked up—another thing that, one suspected, he didn’t do often—and cast a glance at his laptop bag, which he’d left sitting on the empty chair next to him. “I could show you,” he said. “I could go to this place right now, in T’Rain.”
“You play T’Rain?” Peter inquired, seeing in this an opportunity for, at least, a conversational gambit.
“We all have our vices. Each brings its own brand of trouble. That connected with an addiction to T’Rain is less dangerous than many I could name. Speaking of which, what does a man have to do to get a club soda in this place?” Wallace spoke with a Scottish accent, which came as a surprise to Peter and created a one-second time lag in all Peter’s responses as he worked to understand what Wallace had just said. But once he’d parsed “club soda,” he turned in his chair, half rose, and secured the attention of a waiter.
Peter did not yet like the way the conversation was going. Wallace had thrown him completely off-balance by making the conversation about T’Rain and had pressed him into service as drink fetcher. Now, though, Wallace changed his attitude a bit, explaining himself, as if educating Peter. Doing him a favor. “This is the feast hall of King Oglo of the Northern Red Dwinn. I’ve been in it ten, maybe fifteen times.”
“You mean, your character’s been in it.”
“Yes, that is what I mean,” said Wallace, and he didn’t have to add you fucking shite-for-brains.
Wallace had come into the place wearing an overcoat, a garment that Peter had seen only in movies. Probably the only overcoat within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. A gentleman’s garment. About him were various other faint traces of white collarness. His red-going-white hair had been slicked back from his sun-mottled forehead, which sported a divot above the left temple where a skin cancer had been rooted out. Reading glasses hung on a gold chain from his neck. His shirt was open at the neck. Its sheer fabric would look good beneath a sharp suit but would afford him very little protection if he had to stop and change a tire. His right hand was anchored by a fat gold signet ring.
“I don’t play T’Rain myself,” Peter said, though this seemed pretty obvious by this point.
“What games do you play?”
“I like snowboarding. Shooting. Sometimes I—”
“That’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, what’s your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?” Wallace tapped his signet ring on the table.
Peter was silent for a few moments.
“And don’t try to tell me that there is none, because we both know why we’re here.” Tap tap tap.
“Yeah,” said Peter, “but that doesn’t mean it’s because of a vice.”
Wallace laughed, and not in the delighted way he’d laughed when he had recognized that he was sitting in the feast hall of King Oglo. “You reached me through certain individuals in Ukraine who are not exactly solid citizens. I checked you out. I have read all the postings you made, starting at the age of twelve, in hacker chat rooms, written in that ridiculous fucking spelling that you all use. Three years ago you went on record under your real name calling yourself a gray-hat hacker, which is as good as admitting that you were a black-hat before. And a year ago you signed on with this security consultancy where half of the founders have done time, for Christ’s sake.”
“Look. What do you want me to say? We’re here. We’re having this meeting. We both know why. So it’s not like I’ve been lying to you.”
“Very true. What I’m trying to establish is that you have been lying to everyone else, including, I’d guess, your cappuccino girlfriend over there. And it’s helpful for me to know what vices or troubles led you to tell those lies.”
“Why? I’ve got what you came for.”
“That’s what I am trying to establish.”
Peter reached into a large external pocket of his coat and pulled out a DVD case containing a single unmarked disk, white on top, iridescent purple on the bottom. “Here it is.”
Wallace looked disgusted. “That’s how you want to deliver it?”
“Is there a problem?”
“I brought a notebook computer. No DVD slot. Rather hoped you’d bring it on a thumb drive.”
Peter considered this. “I think that can be arranged. Hold on a second.”
“THAT GUY JUST tasked your boyfriend,” Richard remarked, shortly after Peter had sat down across from the stranger by the fire.
“Tasked?”
“Gave him a job to do. ‘Get the waiter’s attention. Order me a drink.’ Something of that nature.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s a tactic,” Richard said. “When you’ve just met someone and you’re trying to feel them out. Give them a task and see how they react. If they accept the task, you can move on and give them a bigger one later.”
“Is it a tactic you use?”
“No, it’s manipulative. Either someone works for me or they don’t. If they work for me, I can assign them tasks and it’s fine. If they don’t work for me, then I have no business assigning them tasks.”
“So you’re saying that Peter’s friend is manipulating him.”
“Acquaintance.”
“It’s some kind of business contact,” Zula guessed.
“Then why didn’t he just come out and say so?”
“That’s a good question,” Zula said. “He’s probably afraid I’d be mad at him if he interrupted our vacation for a business meeting.”
So he lied to you? Richard thought better of actually saying this. If he pushed too hard, he might get the opposite result from what he wanted.
Besides, Peter was now headed back over to the table.
“Does either of you have a thumb drive I could use?”
The question hung there like an invisible cloud of flatulence.