As she had guessed from looking at the arrangement of the concrete verticals passing through the ceiling space, the fire stairway was just on the other side of a wall, and all she had to do, in order to get into it, was to exit from this corridor into the elevator lobby and then pass through an adjoining door. During those few moments she would be in clear view of any guard who was posted at the reception desk of the safe house — but she knew that at least four of the seven security consultants were deployed outside the building, and she hoped that the desk might be unattended. It was easy enough to check this by pushing the door open slightly and peering through the crack.
No one was there. Deeper inside the suite she could see other security consultants pacing around, talking on phones, ransacking their luggage, but no one was looking out into the elevator lobby.
She exited, made two strides across the polished marble floor, opened the doorway to the fire stairs, and slipped in. Restraining the urge to just make a break for it, she used her butt to soften the closure of the door. Then she began to descend the stairway as fast as she could with twenty pounds of chain jangling in the bag around her neck and one end of it cuffed to her ankle.
The descent of forty-three floors gave her plenty of time to think about this in a way she hadn’t when she had just made the decision to do it. To the extent she’d thought about it at all, she had been thinking, What would Qian Yuxia do? or perhaps, What would Qian Yuxia think of me if she could see me curled up on the floor sobbing like a little girl?
Until now her complicity in all of this had been based on a certain kind of unspoken bargain that had been struck between her and Ivanov, a bargain that amounted to “we are treating you badly and will probably kill you but we could treat you a lot worse and we could kill you sooner.” Not much of a bargain, but then she hadn’t had much choice in negotiating the terms. The way she had been sucked into this terrible situation was bad enough, but the thought that she was now partly responsible for getting Yuxia ensnared in it too was intolerable.
In theory, Peter was being held hostage and might be answerable for her escape, but she doubted it. Peter had gone over to the other side. He was being useful to them. Killing him wouldn’t get her back. And as for Csongor — she hoped nothing bad would happen to Csongor, but she was also entitled to think of herself and her own survival.
Which was all she was thinking of when she hit the bottom of the stairwell, rounded a corner at speed, and caromed off a man who was standing right there for some reason. She spun away from him instinctively. He grabbed at her but had to settle for her shoulder bag. She left it in his grasp and kept running, the chain dragging out behind her as it uncoiled from the bag.
Then her leg was yanked out from under her, spinning her back and around as she fell so that, as she went down on the concrete floor, she could see a man standing twenty feet away, holding her empty shoulder bag, one foot stomped down on the end of the chain.
Sokolov.
He picked up the end of the chain. With his free hand he then made a one-word call on his mobile phone.
And then back up to the ladies’ room where the chain was detached from Sokolov, passed up into the ceiling space, and padlocked around a cast-iron pipe six inches in diameter.
RICHARD WAS IN the hammerbeam hall of a red sandstone castle on the Isle of Man, being announced by D-squared’s herald in a language that sounded vaguely French.
Once again his arrival had been unexpected (though not, as it turned out, unheralded). This time, the element of surprise was down to a backup that had developed in D-squared’s email pipeline. Don Donald used email when he was at Cambridge and when he was traveling, but he had banned Internet in his castle, and even installed a phone jammer in the dovecote. He came here to read, to write, to drink, to dine, and to have conversations, none of which activities could be improved by electronic devices. And yet he had this awkward problem that much of his livelihood was derived from T’Rain. And even though he did not play the game himself, professing to find the very ideal “frightful,” he couldn’t really ply that trade without communicating rather frequently with people at Corporation 9592.
Richard had once looked D-squared up on Wikipedia and learned that he was a laird or an archduke or something. This castle, however, was not his ancestral demesne. He had bought it, cash on the barrelhead. At first his staff had made use of a trailer parked outside its south bastion, placed there to serve as a portable office for the contractors who were fixing the place up. It was equipped with Internet and a laser printer on which emails that merited the attention of the lord of the manor could be printed up on A4 paper and conducted into the donjon in a leather wallet. Later the white paper was discontinued in favor of light brown pseudoparchment. This was a simple matter of taste. Modern paper, with its eye-searing 95 percent albedo, simply ruined the look that was slowly coming together inside the walls. The sans-serif typefaces were swapped out for faux-ancient ones. But it was not as if a man of Donald Cameron’s erudition could be taken in by a scripty-looking typeface chosen by an assistant from Word’s mile-long font menu. And the style and content of these messages from Seattle were every bit as jarring as the paper they were printed on. A medievalist, he quite liked being in a medieval frame of mind; in fact, had to be, in order to write. Sitting in his tower “with prospects, on a fair day, west to Donaghadee and north to Cairngaan,” writing with a dip pen at a thousand-year-old desk, he entered into a flow state whose productivity was rivaled only by that of Devin Skraelin. Suddenly to be confronted by a hard copy of an email in which a twenty-four-year-old Seattleite with a nose ring wrote something like “we r totally stressing out cuz chapter 27 is not resonating with 16 yo gamer demographic” was, to say the least, inimical to progress. Some way needed to be devised for important communications to get through to him without disturbing the requisite ambience.
Fortunately he had, without really trying, attracted a coterie of people who, depending on the point of view of the observer, might have been described as hangers-on, lackeys, squatters, parasites, or acolytes. They were of divers ages and backgrounds, but all of them shared D-squared’s fascination with the medieval. Some were blue-collar autodidacts who had made their way up through the ranks of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and others had multiple Ph.D.s and were fluent in extinct dialects. They had begun to show up at his doorstep, or rather his portcullis, when word had got out that he was considering the possibility of turning some parts of the castle into a reenactment site as a way to generate a bit of coin and to keep the castle from falling victim to the subtle but annihilating hazards of desuetude. In those days the plan had been to maintain a sort of firewall between the part of the manor where he lived and the part where the reenactment was to happen. But a few years’ experience had taught him that as long as one paid a bit of attention to weeding out the drunks and the mental defectives, the sorts of people who were willing to live in medieval style 24/7 were just the ones he needed to have around.
As easy and as tempting as it was to have some fun at the expense of D-squared and his band of medievalists, Richard had to admit that several of them were as serious and dedicated and competent as anyone he’d ever worked with in twenty-first-century settings; and in some very enjoyable conversations shared over mead or ale (brewed on-site, of course) they had managed to convince him that the medieval world wasn’t worse or more primitive than the modern, just different.
And so the email pipeline now worked like this: down in Douglas, which was the primary city of the Isle of Man, the girlfriend of one of the medievalists, who dwelled in a flat there (“I happen to rather like tampons”), would read D-squared’s email as it came in, filter out the obvious junk, and print out a hard copy of anything that seemed important, and zip it up in a waterproof messenger bag. When it came time to walk her dog, she would stroll up the waterfront promenade until she reached the wee elven train station at its northern end, where she would hand the bag to the station agent, who would later hand it over to the conductor of the narrow-gauge electrical train that wound its way from there up into the interior of the island. At a certain point along the line it would be tossed out onto the siding and later picked up by D-squared’s gamekeeper, who would carry it up the hill and place its contents on the desk of the in-house troubadour, who would translate it into medieval Occitan and then sing and/or recite it to D-squared at mealtime. The lord of the manor would then dictate a response that would follow the reverse route back down the hill to the girlfriend’s laptop and the Internet.