Richard himself was not a user of the calendar app. He did most of his T’Rain questing solo, or in the company of one or two old friends, and so he didn’t need it; and the mere idea of needing to schedule his time that carefully made him dispirited. He used his phone for stuff like that, and the calendar app’s integration to the phone was clunky and not really worth putting up with. Even if it had worked, it just would have meant more crap showing up on his schedule, and fewer of the perfectly empty days that always gave him such a nice little endorphin rush when they appeared, as if by some act of divine grace, on his screen. Consequently, he was in no danger of being infected by REAMDE. And so, the morning after Peter and Zula had gone back to Seattle, when Richard woke up in his big, round, quasi-medieval bedchamber at the Schloss and checked his corporate email account, he was able to view the weekend’s spate of escalating SECURITY ALERT messages with some kind of detachment. There was a new virus; it was called REAMDE (sic), which was an accidental or deliberate/ironical misspelling of README; it had been simmering for a few weeks now, and in the last few days it had gone exponential, as these things commonly did. It was a consequence, really, of APPIS, and of all Richard’s efforts to turn T’Rain into a Profit Center above and beyond the mere world of hard-core gamers. As such, it was perfectly all right from a business and marketing standpoint; it would only generate stories in the tech press about how T’Rain had made the jump from a mere niche product for the prohibitively geeky to a business productivity app that mundanes felt that they had to have, along with their Excel and their PowerPoint, and Richard could already predict that at their next quarterly meeting they would see, in retrospect, a surge in sales precisely tracking the spike in free publicity generated by the advent of this terrible virus.
His calendar was clear for today, but prophesying a journey to Seattle tomorrow so that he could get up early on the following morning for another one of his whirlwind journeys to Nodaway and the Isle of Man. He considered using this REAMDE thing as a pretext for going to Seattle now, a day early. And he might have done just that, if more time had elapsed since his last interaction with Zula. But she had only just left, and he didn’t want to creep the poor girl out by turning into some kind of hovering stalker-uncle. Better for her to decide on her own that she was ready for a little more Richard time. So he left his schedule alone, reckoning he’d be busy all day anyway, with emails from friends and family members whose personal files were being held hostage by some mysterious troll on the Internet.
THERE WAS NO coming awake but a gradual reassembly of consciousness from parts that, while still functioning, had come unlinked. She was looking down on snow-spackled mountains as though seeing them in the opening screen of T’Rain and, at the same time, having a dream of walking barefoot through them. For it was barefoot that she and her group had walked most of the way from Eritrea to Sudan, and her dreams often took her back to that journey, as though the nerves in the soles of the feet were connected more tightly to the brain than any others. In her dream, the snow on the mountains was warm between her toes, which she knew made no sense; but it was explained as some magic that had been dreamed up by Devin Skraelin based on an oblique reference by Donald Cameron. And then she and Pluto had been given the job of making it real, rendering it from bits, and she was walking across it with a caravan of Eritrean refugees to make sure that it all held together.
When memory started working again, it told her that she had, for quite a long time, been lying on her side with eyes half open, gazing out a window. The mountains were passing by beneath her. The world was roaring and humming.
She was on a plane. Her seat smelled of good leather. It had been leaned all the way back to form a flat bed, and she had been covered with blankets. Nice ones. Not airline blankets.
She had not been raped or otherwise abused. A bandage was on her hand. She remembered the lilies and the knife.
And the latte. They had put Rohypnol in her latte.
She moved a little and found that her parts worked, though she was stiff from lying in one position too long.
She shifted her head away from the window and found herself looking down the barrel of a small plane’s fuselage.
Across the aisle was Peter, similarly reclined, gazing at her. She jumped a little when she saw that.
They were at the aft end of the cabin. At the forward end, Sokolov sat in a chair, reading glasses on the end of his nose, reviewing documents.
In the bulkhead that terminated the cabin just aft of them was a single door that, Zula guessed, led to a separate compartment. Since she couldn’t see Ivanov anywhere else, she assumed he must be in there.
“How long have you been awake?” Peter asked.
“A minute,” Zula said. “You?”
“Maybe half an hour. Hey, Zula!”
“What?”
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?”
Zula tossed off the blankets, got to her feet, and walked, a little unsteadily, up past Sokolov to the head of the plane. The cockpit door was closed, but beside it was another door leading to the lavatory.
Something scraped and thumped to the floor at her feet. She looked down to discover her shoulder bag. Sokolov had tossed it her way.
She looked up and locked eyes with him. “Thanks,” she said.
He gazed at her for a three-count and went back to his documents.
She went in, sat down, put her face in her hands, and peed.
Think.
How had Ivanov and company gotten them out of the country?
Uncle Richard sometimes flew in private jets when he went to the Isle of Man to pay court to Don Donald and wouldn’t stop talking about how easy, how “zipless” it was. No checkin. No security frisk. No wait. Just go straight to the plane and get on and go.
Zula didn’t know how the drug had affected her—had she been out cold? Merely groggy? Or in some compliant zombielike state? Anyway, the Russians could have bundled her and Peter into vehicles without anyone noticing and driven them straight onto the tarmac at Boeing Field and (if Uncle Richard was to be believed) right up to the side of the plane, where it wouldn’t have been that difficult to get them up the stairs and on board.
So really it would have been easy. Huge penalties would have obtained if they’d been noticed or caught, but these guys weren’t the type to concern themselves with such matters. In a sick way, she kind of liked that about them.
She went through her bag. Her passport was gone. The knife had been removed from her pocket. No car keys (not that they would have been of any use) or phone. There was a book she’d been reading, some of the odds and ends she’d collected from Peter’s place—cosmetics, tampons, hair stuff, hand sanitizer. A standard-issue Seattle fleece vest. Pens and pencils were all gone—because they were potential weapons? Because she could have used them to write a note calling for help? Someone had gone through her luggage—the larger bag she’d taken on the ski trip—and pulled out (thank God) underwear, a couple of T-shirts, a pair of shorts, and stuffed them into this bag.
So they were going someplace warm.
Think. When would her absence be noticed? It was common knowledge at work that she had gone skiing for the weekend. When she failed to show up for work today, people would assume she was sleeping in.
But eventually—in a few days, maybe?—people would get worried.
Then what?
Eventually they might look for her at Peter’s and find her car there, unless the Russians had taken it out and driven it into the murky waters of the Duwamish. But they would find no trace that anything had gone wrong.