REAMDE

“So what do you want me to do?”

 

 

“My homeboys and I used to make our living selling toons to guys like you.”

 

“They weren’t like me.”

 

“Anyway, I’ll lend you one for free.”

 

“WE HAVE VERY probably identified Csongor,” came the voice of Uncle Meng through Olivia’s phone, with no preliminary helloing or chitchat about the weather. “Your email was helpful.” For Olivia, following their earlier conversation, had sent Uncle Meng an email describing the contents of Zula’s paper towel codex.

 

Nothing then for a few moments. An aid truck, lights flashing, was trying to force its way through the traffic jam, laying on its horn and obliging drivers to creep aside.

 

“Everything all right?” Uncle Meng asked.

 

“Fine. I’m on a freeway traveling much more slowly than walking pace.” She had been on the road for half an hour and had not even passed out of the city limits of Seattle. “What did you find?”

 

“Csongor Takács, twenty-five years old, freelance Internet security consultant and sysadmin, based out of Budapest. Known connections to organized crime figures. Has not logged on to any of his usual servers, Facebook, et cetera, in three weeks.”

 

Olivia probably should have been thinking about something else, but she was wondering whether she should call Richard. For the one detail she couldn’t get out of her head was that this Csongor had been doing Google searches on Zula’s name. He knew who she was. But he didn’t know where she was. Was it reading too much into a Google search to say that he was worried about her?

 

That he was, in other words, a good guy?

 

“Where does this get us?” she asked.

 

“Like all the other intelligence concerning the Russians, it gets us nowhere,” Uncle Meng said. Not harshly. Sounding a bit regretful. “It is interesting background material, helping explain the events leading up to Jones’s flight from Xiamen. But the nature of Csongor’s Google searches tells us that—”

 

“He’s as in the dark as we are,” Olivia said. “Please do let me know if that changes.”

 

“Oh, I most certainly shall,” said Uncle Meng, and rang off as abruptly as he had started the conversation.

 

Olivia chewed on her thumbnail for perhaps thirty seconds, wondering if she ought to just pull over and run this investigation from the shoulder of the road for a while. But there was nothing she could do about the traffic. She picked up her phone, navigated to the “Recent Calls” list, and punched in Richard Forthrast’s number.

 

It rang a few times. But then finally his voice came on the line. “British spy chick,” he said.

 

“Is that how you think of me?”

 

“Can you give me a better description?”

 

“You didn’t like my fake name?”

 

“Already forgot it. You’re in my phone directory as British Spy Chick.”

 

“I was thinking of you,” she said, “and thought I should check in. How are you and your brothers doing?”

 

He laughed. “We were about to kill each other, so I put them on a plane to Bourne’s Ford this morning.”

 

“Ah. It sounds charming.” Olivia heard herself dribbling out meaningless words, trying to make a decision as to what she should or shouldn’t tell Richard.

 

“The Troll is logged on,” he announced.

 

“He is!?”

 

“And he’s on the move. And I’m tracking him. Which means I’m busy. I want you to call this number”—he rattled off a number with a 206 area code—“and talk to Corvallis and get the details.”

 

“Which details are those?” she asked distractedly, trying to impress the number into her memory.

 

“The Troll’s IP address,” Richard said. “So you can track him. He’s in the Philippines. With your resources you can probably get his exact coordinates and hit him with a drone attack, or something.”

 

“No comment on that.”

 

“But don’t,” Richard urged her, “because I want to get some information out of him first. After that, you can hit him with all the Hellfire missiles you want.”

 

She didn’t know what to say. Was having trouble with Richard’s sense of humor.

 

He tried again: “Track him all you want. Just don’t spook him. Most important of all, don’t try to follow him in T’Rain. Because he’ll know. He’ll be on to you in a second.”

 

She hung up and punched in the number of Corvallis about a tenth of a second ahead of the moment when it slipped from her memory forever.

 

A new voice came on: “British spy, er, woman?”

 

“You can say ‘chick’ if you want, I shan’t file a complaint.”

 

“We tried to get him to take sensitivity training, but he kept blowing it off.”

 

“Oh, compared to some I deal with, your boss is exquisitely refined. Don’t worry about it.”

 

“Richard said you might call.”

 

“Yes. You think that the Troll is in the Philippines?”

 

“Yeah, but we don’t have the resources here to nail it down better—his IP address is part of a batch that is allocated over a pretty wide geographic area. Would you like to write down the dotted quad?”

 

“Love to,” Olivia said, “but I’m driving. Sort of. So I’m going to do something else instead.”

 

“Uh, okay, what’s that?”

 

“I’m going to give your number to a colleague of mine who is actually in the Philippines. Seamus Costello is his name. He’ll know what to do with it.”

 

“Happy to help out.”

 

“And then he’ll probably ask you a lot of questions about how to make his character more powerful.”

 

Corvallis had been typing. “Looks like Thorakks is pretty friggin’ powerful already.”

 

“How did you know about that!?”

 

“T’Rain is one big database,” Corvallis said, “and it is my—well, let’s just say that I am its master.”

 

“Please don’t tell me Seamus is logged on right now.”

 

“He signed off three hours ago,” Corvallis said. “It is about seven in the morning there.”

 

“Where? Can you tell where he was logged in from?”

 

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