A few years ago when we dug the book out of the vegetable garden, and made all of that money, and transferred the property to the East House Trust, and ceased to become its legal owners, it felt as if I had sawed my right leg off. But only for a few days. When it became obvious that this made absolutely no practical difference, I forgot it had happened. Since then it has only entered my awareness when we receive a property tax bill or some such, and I see the official name on the address label. Today, however, it is much on my mind, as it gives me a sort of detached emotional status from which to view all of these goings-on. SUVs, obviously belonging to some sort of government agency, are parked on the streets around us, drawing comment from the neighbors. Presumably they are spying on us, but they make no effort to cross the property line.
At two in the morning, three people climbed over the back fence and caused us all sorts of alarm before we recognized them: Felix Dorn, Esme Overkleeft, and Julie Lee. They had got together for late-night drinks at the Apostolic Café and made the decision to defect from DODO to join our little ragtag reboot thereof (Julie being the obvious instigator given her romance with Mortimer). Then they all stayed up all night talking. Now they are sleeping in shifts in Mei’s old room, the guest room, and the floor of my sewing room. (Chira Lajani, they report, counts herself among us in spirit, but dares not defect openly from DODO lest it interfere with her younger siblings’ immigration status. She might be able to function as a mole, but these are early days yet.) From them we were able to get more news of what has been going on at the Walmart. Our access to the message traffic on the ODIN system was of course cut off the moment Mortimer left the building, and since then we were limited to what we could glean from television news reports and Internet rumors. The powers that be at DODO—which by this point basically means Gráinne, since she seems to control Blevins absolutely—are not even aware that Felix, Esme, and Julie have come over to our side, and may not appreciate that fact until the three of them fail to show up for work on Monday morning. In the meantime they still have access to the ODIN system over their phones.
This has enabled us to solve a riddle that bedeviled our minds from the very beginning of Magnus’s siege at the Walmart.
Clearly, Magnus made the rounds of the Viking world and recruited a sort of all-star team of marauders who were willing to follow his lead.
And on one level it makes sense for them to raid a Walmart, which to them would be a poorly guarded storehouse of near-infinite wealth.
But beyond that it makes no sense at all. They must either stay in the present, or return to the past via the ATTO.
If they stay in the present, they will inevitably be caught, tried, and put in prison. Magnus must know this.
If they return to the past, they’ll do so naked and empty-handed. Why, therefore, go to the effort of sacking a Walmart and gathering loot they can’t take with them? Magnus must understand this too.
According to the “over the fence” gang—Julie, Felix, and Esme—the answer was pieced together yesterday afternoon by the DOSECOPS people who have access to surveillance camera footage from the Walmart.
As soon as they had the electronics department fortified behind plywood and blue tarps, and their hostages secured (except for the one unfortunate who was rolled out into the parking lot after being blood-eagled), Magnus raided the pharmacy section and secured a large amount of lidocaine, which is a topical anesthetic.
In the meanwhile, some of the hostages were being chained to computers in the electronics section and put to work downloading information on certain topics. To make a long story short, it appears that during his sojourn in the present day, Magnus became aware of the fact that the New World contained an amount of gold and silver that was beyond the dreams of the most avaricious Vikings. Their longships were perfectly capable of making the voyage across the Atlantic by hopping from Iceland to Greenland to Newfoundland and thence down the coast. What they lacked was information: nautical charts showing the way, and land maps of Mexico and Peru and other gold-rich areas. And so this is the sort of information that the hostages were put to work downloading and printing out on paper.
Magnus’s Vikings then took turns lying facedown on the floor. Lidocaine was smeared on their bare backs and the treasure maps carved into their skin using hobby knives from the store’s art supply section.
This procedure has apparently been going on all night. When the DOSECOPS people understood what was going on, they cut power to the building. But the Vikings were ready for that with candles and lamps from the camping section, and by then they had already printed out everything they needed on paper. The ATTO has its own built-in power supply capable of running for days; Frank made sure of that. One of DODO’s spy drones has been circling above the store and has been picking up bursts of GLAAMR suggesting that some of the Vikings are already being Sent back. So they must have a witch among them who is ensconced in the ATTO doing the Sending and god only knows what else.
All of this information is several hours old, and I’m writing it late Saturday morning. The television news shows no change in status at the Walmart, which of course doesn’t reflect what might be happening within the ATTO; the police haven’t raided yet, no hostages have been released; it is a standoff.
It appears that what is going to happen—or already has happened, many centuries ago, on this or some other Strand—is that Magnus’s band of “all-star” berserkers will end up in tenth-century Scandinavia with detailed maps carved into their backs showing them how to traverse the Atlantic and Caribbean and sack the Americas for their unimaginable wealth of precious metals, then bring it all back to Scandinavia, or anywhere else they feel like living.
It is difficult to see how this could be stopped. DODO could Send some DOers even further back in time to try to change history to somehow foil Magnus’s plan, but two can play at that game—Magnus can just as well Send people further back yet to intercept the DOers, and so on.