(It was, Zula realized, just another business meeting. The only thing missing was the PowerPoint presentation. Some of the group — presumably the Cs — were being given the shit work, and Jones had to soften them up first with the meal and the fake camaraderie.)
Staying behind to enjoy Zula’s excellent campfire cuisine would be Zakir, Ershut, and two others. One of these, Sayed, Zula had mentally classified as a graduate student: a quiet man, closer to forty than thirty, who seemed markedly uncomfortable in the camping and hiking milieu. It was obvious to Zula why he and Zakir were being left behind — she’d have made exactly the same choice — and both of them looked some combination of disappointed and relieved.
Ershut, though, was dumbfounded. The same went for Jahandar, an Afghan whom Zula had last seen perched on the top of the RV with a sniper rifle and a pair of binoculars. Zula herself had to make a modest effort to hide her own astonishment, for if ever there was a man cut out for a long trek down the length of a mountain range in hostile territory, it was Jahandar. To the point where Zula had some difficulty in imagining how they had smuggled him this deep into a Western democracy. They must have drugged him, packed him into a crate, shipped him over by air freight direct from Tora Bora, and kept him pent up on a mountaintop until now. Everything about his appearance — the hat, the beard, the glare, the battle scars — should have got him arrested on sight in any municipality west of the Caspian Sea. Anyway, never mind how they’d managed it, Jahandar was here, and he was pissed. And this encouraged the normally taciturn Ershut to voice objections of his own to Jones’s plan.
They kept glancing over at her. As if to say, How many people does it take to keep tabs on a girl chained to a tree?
Jones gave her a glance too: a knowing look, as if to say, I can tell you understand more than you let on. He pushed his dirty plate in her direction, then rose to his feet and made gestures indicating that Ershut and Jahandar should come with him. They strolled away from the campfire until they had reached a place from which they could not be easily heard, where they continued the conversation in lower tones. Jones was filling them in on some aspect of the plan that did not need to be shared with the entire group just now.
Or perhaps it was only Zula with whom they did not wish to share it. For at some point, a few minutes into their discussion, the three of them all turned their heads to look her way, paused in their deliberations for a few heartbeats, and then looked back together, turning their backs on her to continue the discussion in a more reasonable timbre. All the tension was gone from their body language.
They had decided to kill her.
It would not happen right away. But at some point after the main group had been launched toward the border, Ershut or Jahandar would cut her throat — not, she guessed, before she’d cooked them a meal and done the dishes — and then they would set out in pursuit of the main body. And knowing the two of them, they’d have little difficulty in catching up. Zakir and Sayed, she guessed, would be left behind to throw dirt on her corpse.
The meal broke up, and the men scattered into the darkness beyond the reach of the firelight, leaving her with a pile of dirty paper plates and some pots that needed scrubbing. Most of them went to bed. Jahandar made himself tea with the water she had been heating for dishes, then retreated to a position a short distance up the hill, whence he could survey the whole camp and all below it. He took his rifle with him.
Zula did the dishes. Imagining Jahandar’s crosshairs on her forehead.
SEVERAL HOURS OF despair had given way to the vague notion, more in Csongor’s heart than his head, that he was beginning to make sense of the Carthinias Exchange and its diverse actors. There was a trading pit in the middle of the place, a full 360-degree amphitheater of polished stone steps, perhaps thirty meters — the limit of shouting distance — at its top, funneling in and down to a tiny, flat floor no more than three meters across. The thing was split neatly in half through the middle, though there were no screens or fences or visual cues to make this obvious; it could be inferred by noticing that different sorts of people tended to congregate on each side: on the one, merchants who were trying to get money out of the world, and on the other, priests from the temples, trying to make full use of their money-annihilating capacity by undercutting the competing priests.
So much for the side-to-side split. Csongor sensed that there was some kind of top-to-bottom stratification as well, and he was developing a theory that the people down toward the bottom were trading in larger blocs of money, while the upper levels were for small-timers. To outward appearances, none of these merchants was carrying much gold into the pit and none of the priests was carrying much out of it. Accordingly, he had guessed at first that they were only trading in paper and that the actual transfer of specie was happening in a bank or warehouse somewhere. But then he noticed small, sparkly objects trading hands, generally making their way from the small-timers at the top down toward the heavy hitters in the lower pit. Some wiki searching told him that T’Rain had several types of metal even more precious than gold, though the vast majority of characters in the world never even laid eyes on the stuff; it was used only to effect colossal transactions. One sort of coin — Red Gold — was worth a hundred gold pieces. A Blue Gold piece was worth a hundred of those, and Indigo Gold, or Indigold for short, worth a hundred of those; which meant, if Csongor’s mental calculation was accurate, that a single Indigold coin had a value, in the real world, of something like $75,000.
It seemed of the highest importance to T’Rain’s art directors that these coins look as flashy as their high value implied, and so they gleamed, sending out flashes of colored light as they were passed from hand to hand. Plain old yellow stuff was changing hands in the plaza around the amphitheater, frequently being bulk converted, by strolling moneychangers, into Red Gold coins that were making their way over the rim of the pit and transacting lively commerce in its upper reaches, making a flashing red constellation, as if LEDs were blinking all over the place. But farther down, the predominant color was Blue; and at the bottom it deepened to Indigo.
The transaction that Marlon hoped to pull off would amount to something like thirty pieces of Indigold, or three thousand of the Blue stuff. Since carrying around three thousand pieces of anything was not practical, Csongor had little choice but to set up a relationship with one of the big traders down in the bottom of the pit who, (a) dealt in Indigold all the time, and (b) was controlled by players who could wire funds to the Philippines. But precisely because such characters were carrying around such immense amounts of money, security here was suffocating, with the innermost and lowest ring of the amphitheater guarded by a ring of extremely fearsome-looking guards, standing shoulder to shoulder and looking outward, and walled, roofed, and domed by nested layers of shimmering light that Csongor recognized, vaguely, as magical spells. In T’Rain, figuring out how powerful another character was was a far more complicated proposition than in other such games where you could merely compare levels. Csongor lacked the experience to judge another character’s abilities, but he knew a few rules of thumb and had little doubt that even the small-time traders around the rim could strike Lottery Discountz dead just by giving him a cross look.
Which gave him the notion that he might be able to get close to the center of the action precisely because he was so harmless. He tried the experiment of simply walking across the plaza to the edge of the pit and then clambering down on to the topmost bench. No one cared. He moved down another. No reaction. Things began to get crowded and he had to sidestep this way and that to find gaps in the crowd of traders, but no one paid him any particular note. He was close to the dividing line between the merchant side and the priestly side, and he heard priests calling out “Benison!” and coming together with merchants to exchange money. Benisons, as he’d learned, were a way for players to transfer real money into T’Rain; the character would pray to a god, a charge would be placed on the player’s credit card, and the gold pieces would simply appear on an altar somewhere, or turn up at the end of a rainbow in a mountain glade controlled by this or that faction of priests, and then they would transfer it through markets like this one to the prayerful recipients. Csongor eavesdropped on a few such transactions and noted that they were typically in the thousands of GP range, which was to say, a handful of Red Gold pieces. But after he had worked his way down into the middle reaches where Blue Gold changed hands, he still, from time to time, heard a priest calling out, instead of “Benison!” the phrase “Miraculous Benediction.” He looked this up and learned that, every so often, when a character prayed for a Benison, he got a hundred or a thousand times as much as he had asked (and as his player had paid) for. It was a lucky break, like finding a hundred-dollar bill in a box of Cracker Jacks.