They fetched up parallel to a mountain stream, mostly buried under ice with snow on it. In some places it was open to the sky, and there it was possible to see that it was running broad and shallow, easily fordable by the truck. They rumbled and juddered across it, crept up its bank for half a mile, then struck out in what seemed to Zula like a random direction, plowing directly into the woods and attacking a steep uphill slope as a way of getting out of this valley. Tree branches were pushed out of the way by the windshield, bending back until they either snapped off or else whipped in through the open driver’s-side window where Jones had to beat them back with his left arm. She wondered why he would not simply roll up the window until she noticed little blue cubes of safety glass that had been sprayed all over the cab, and understood that the glass had been shattered. It seemed obvious enough that this must have happened when they were stealing the truck yesterday. She hoped that they had merely punched out the window so that they could get in and hot-wire it. Then she noted a key chain dangling from its ignition. They must have stolen it from a person who had been driving it. They must have killed that person.
A CB radio was mounted in the dashboard, and after they had got well clear of the camp and reached a decent stopping place — a flat spot in the forest, where they were well sheltered beneath the trees, and the snow wasn’t too deep — Jones turned it on. Then, after a glance back over his shoulder toward Zula, he flicked his knife open, severed its microphone cable, and hurled the mike out through the vacant window frame. It skittered away through the undergrowth like a furtive mammal. He turned the volume up and began to scan through the available channels.
Nothing. They really were out in the middle of nowhere.
It had been set to Channel 4 when turned on. Jones put it back on 4 and left it running. Occasionally it would cough out some noise, but nothing that could be identified as words.
Jones put the truck in gear and attacked another slope. It seemed that they were going up more than down, which didn’t make sense to Zula. But when they crawled over the next ridgeline, open country suddenly stretched out before them, foothills diminishing and descending into lowlands that were no longer covered in snow.
YESTERDAY, MONDAY, HAD been one of those days when Dodge had got to work early with the intention of getting a hell of a lot accomplished, only to arrive at the realization, just after lunch, that nothing was going to happen. Because it was no longer up to him. He had a whole company — a whole structure of vassals — to drag along in his wake, and it just took them a long time to get mobilized.
He’d have thought that $3 million lying there for the taking would have been able to command their attention. But it took them a long time to grasp this. Egdod had to grab a few vice presidents’ characters by the scruffs of their virtual necks and fly them over Torgai and point out the exposed gold caches for them to really get it.
A companywide memo might have gone some ways toward waking people up, but, as his finger was hovering over the Send button, he realized that this would be a terrible mistake. It would be certain to leak beyond the company network and find its way out into the wild, where it would trigger a gold rush. The one thing they had going in their favor was that no one, outside of Corvallis and Richard and a few others, really had any idea how much money was sitting there. Had this knowledge become public, every T’Rain player in the world would have made a beeline, or rather a ley line, for the Torgai, and things would have gone even more completely out of control. The mere Internet rumor that some gold had been seen there had already triggered a fairly well-organized invasion by those three thousand blue-haired K’Shetriae, which was nothing in the big scheme of things and yet still required strenuous work by Richard to beat it back in some way short of dropping a comet on the head of their Liege Lord.
Nothing came in all day from the Isle of Man. But when Richard woke up on Tuesday, he found a lot of company email, subject line “Plot thickens …,” which, when he traced it back to its root, turned out to concern a fifty-thousand-word novella that D-squared had posted on the T’Rain site a few hours ago. This to the evident surprise of his manager/editor here in Seattle, who’d had no idea that the Don was even contemplating any such project. Richard clicked on the link and opened the document. Its opening words were “The Torgai Foothills.” He stopped reading there, closed his laptop, got out of bed, and put on some clothes. He took the elevator down to the parking garage of his condo tower in downtown Seattle, got in his car, and drove straight to Boeing Field. Not until he was ensconced in a comfy seat on the jet, arcing northward over British Columbia on a direct route to the Isle of Man, did he open his laptop again and commence reading in earnest.
Day 8
She remembered being brought home to her adoptive parents’ house for the first time and seeing, among so many other new and amazing things, a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelves in the living room. So many large books, identically bound except for the volume numbers printed on their spines, had naturally drawn her attention. Patricia, Richard’s sister and Zula’s new mom, had explained to her that these contained anything that you could ever possibly want to know, on any topic, and had pulled one down to look up the entry on Eritrea. Zula, completely missing the point, had assured Patricia that she would never on any account touch those books. Patricia had let out a shocked laugh and explained that no, on the contrary, all of those books were there specifically for her, Zula; they and the knowledge in them were, in effect, Zula’s property.
Zula had inherited the set and doggedly lugged it around to a succession of dorm rooms, student flophouses, and studio apartments. Her arrival in the United States had coincided pretty nearly with the advent of full-time high-speed Internet, and she had likewise been encouraged to make free use of that, though it had never been quite the same, to her, as the Britannica.
From the age of eight onward, then, Zula had been raised in an environment that had been all about the free and frictionless flow of information into her young mind. She hadn’t fully appreciated this until she had found herself in this predicament where no one saw any point in telling her anything at all. Traveling with Jones’s band of jihadists, she almost felt nostalgic for the good old days of Ivanov and Sokolov, who had at least bothered to supply explanations of what was going on. Those two had bought into a Western mind-set in which it was important for things to make sense; and, needing the services of Zula and Peter and Csongor, they had been forced to keep them briefed.
Csongor. Peter. Yuxia. Even Sokolov. Whenever her mind went back over those events in Xiamen it snagged on those names, those faces. The mere fact of Peter’s death would have prostrated her for a week in normal circumstances. She was now asking herself a hundred times a day what had become of the others. Were any of them alive? If so, were they wondering what had become of Zula?