“Could you help me peel back the layers?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Of your Machiavellian strategy? Because I can see that there is way more calculation and cynicism going on here than I can ever possibly comprehend — ”
“It’s simple,” Richard insisted. “There are all of about two layers. We have no way to track down the da G shou. Hell, forget about even tracking them down. We have no way to even gather more data about the little fuckers until we can get them to log on, right?”
“Right. Unless we get into bed with the Chinese police.”
“Yeah,” Richard scoffed, “which for reasons I won’t explain is now even less likely than it was yesterday. So. It seems from your graph that they are scared shitless and unwilling to log on. But they must be aware that they have two million bucks Hidden in the Torgai. Sooner or later, they’ll want to come after that money. If it so happens that the Torgai gets conquered by three thousand K’Shetriae, or whatever, who can use the money on the ground to put up all kinds of walls and wards and force fields and shit, and thereby lock out the da G shou, then the da lose all incentive to try to come back. They never log on. We never see them again. On the other hand, if we can keep things nicely unstable in the Torgai region, and turn it into a chaotic battleground, then that gives the da all sorts of opportunities to sneak back into the place and go rooting around for their Hidden gold…”
“And then they’ll pop up on the watch list,” said Corvallis, nodding, “and we can start gathering data on them.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe find the Liege Lord,” Corvallis went on. “Only he would have access to the whole two million.”
“Oh yeah, of course!” Richard said. “I had forgotten about that detail.” For, according to the rules of how the Hiding spells worked, if a vassal Hid something, then not only could the same vassal find and unHide it later; but the same privileges were granted to that vassal’s lord, and the lord’s lord, and so on, all the way up to the Liege Lord of the network. The two million in gold might have been Hidden by hundreds of different vassals within the da G shou’s hierarchy, any one of whom would only be able to see and retrieve the gold that he (or his own vassals) had personally Hidden; but somewhere there must be a Liege Lord who would have the power to personally, single-handedly retrieve all of it.
“Do you know who the Liege Lord is?” Richard asked.
“Of course, in the sense of knowing the account number. But the name and address are fake, as with all of these.”
“Okay,” Richard said, pulling his laptop in closer, adjusting the screen angle for action. “I’m going to get in touch with D-squared. Or rather, his troubadour. And I’m going to make sure he understands that there’s enough gold lying around in the Torgai Foothills to finance the Earthtone Coalition for a year. And I’m going to see whether that gets his creative juices flowing.”
“What about those three thousand K’Shetriae?” asked Corvallis, nervously eyeing a map. “Could your man Egdod summon a meteor storm or a plague or something?”
Richard gave him a look that, to judge from his reaction, must have been pretty damned baleful. “Just to slow them down a little,” C-plus said, holding up his hands.
“Of course Egdod could summon a meteor storm or a plague,” Richard said, “but I would prefer to avoid deus ex machina stuff, and so as soon as I get done with this email I’ll call a meeting for tomorrow morning.”
“Agenda?”
“Figuring out some less obvious way to fuck up the Bright invasion of the Torgai Foothills.”
Day 7
The back end of the double-wide was a bunkhouse, divided into half a dozen small rooms each equipped with bunk beds that had been knocked together out of two-by-fours and drywall screws. The beds still had thin foam mattresses. They gave Zula a room of her own, then nailed the door shut behind her and nailed a scrap of plywood over the outside of its window. She spent a long and shivering night under the bare minimum of blankets needed to keep her from perishing outright of hypothermia. When morning came, and they pulled the nails out of her door, she went to the front room, which was warm because of the stove. She curled up on the sofa under as many blankets as she could scavenge and did not move for a long time.
They had destroyed the lock on the filing cabinet and found a lot of papers belonging to the mining company: pay records, receipts, assay reports, hardcopies of spreadsheets. But they also found a survey map of the area, and a road map of British Columbia.
Jones and the most senior-looking of the soldiers, an Afghan named Abdul-Wahaab, took as many of the warm clothes as they could fit on their bodies, bundled themselves up, packed food and water for a couple of days’ journey, and, after a lengthy study of the survey map, trekked off into the woods. Zula, peering out through a gap between blankets, watched them go and thought that she understood their strategy: the snow was less deep in the trees, and it seemed that they were able to move a bit more rapidly there.
Nothing else happened for the rest of the day. Zula did not move much from the sofa. The three remaining soldiers took turns going out in pairs to explore the vicinity, but they couldn’t stay out for long because of the shortage of winter clothing. One was always left behind, presumably to keep an eye on Zula. Sometimes they came back with trophies scavenged from other buildings: tools, first aid kits, dead flashlights, worn-out hoodies, work gloves, pornographic magazines, bars of soap, cans of oil. The scavenging developed momentum as they found more warm things to wear. During the afternoon, they put considerable effort into moving snow away from a travel trailer that had been left parked about a hundred meters from the headquarters building. This had been visible yesterday as an anomalous snow drift. Now it was revealed as an Airstream trailer, Zula guessed between twenty and thirty feet long. It had been jacked up to take the weight off its wheels and a shed roof of corrugated fiberglass had been affixed to one side, creating a sheltered outdoor space that, when cleared of snow, proved to contain a picnic table and some lawn chairs. From its interior they scavenged more kitchen ware, blankets, a foam mattress, packets of instant coffee and quick-cook oatmeal.
Zula had not really slept in a few days, but that afternoon, out of some combination of exhaustion, depression, and jet lag, she finally did fall into a deep slumber that lasted until some time after sundown. Then she got out of bed and took it upon herself to melt some more snow. Her Crocs had been confiscated and so she had to make her snow-collection forays barefoot. The pain in her feet reminded her of just how impossible it would be to get away from these people until she could solve the equipment problem. When she had a full pot of warm water, she carried it into the lavatory and gave herself a sponge bath using a bar of soap that had been left there years ago by departing miners. When she was done, she dried herself off using paper towels (a bale of them had also been left behind) and then emerged feeling weirdly and inappropriately energetic. She cooked some rice and some lentils, which were eaten, though not relished, by all (the kitchen had salt and pepper but no other seasonings).
The three jihadists made for quite a study. Two of them, Mahir and Sharif, were native Arabic speakers who, she collected, had gravitated from their home countries (Mahir looked pure Middle Eastern, Sharif had a bit of a North African look about him) to Afghanistan where they had become part of Jones’s organization. The third, Ershut, was some kind of Central Asian who seemed to speak limited Arabic. Ershut was not tall, but he was stocky and powerful and tended to get saddled with grunt work, which he always seemed to accept as his lot in life. It was he who had loaded much of the heavy gear from the fishing vessel onto the smaller boat that they’d taken into Xiamen, and who had loaded it from the boat into the taxi and from the taxi into the plane. He was pious without showing the demented fanaticism of the late Khalid; during one of her lavatory forays on the jet last night, Zula had found him praying in the aisle of the main cabin, having apparently divined the direction to Mecca by looking at the on-screen map displayed on the flat-screen TV. One of his first acts in this place had been to scavenge a carpet scrap from a back room and get it pointed a little bit south of east.