“How is this possible?” Wallace demanded.
Upstairs, Zula was already reading about how it was possible.
“It’s not just possible, it’s actually pretty easy, once your system has been rooted by a trojan,” Peter said. “This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It is hard to turn this kind of virus into a profitable operation,” Peter said, “because there has to be a financial transaction: the payment of the ransom. And that can be traced.”
“I see,” Wallace said. “So if you’re in the malware business, there are easier ways to make money.”
“By running botnets or whatever,” Peter agreed. “The new wrinkle here, apparently, is that the ransom is to be paid in the form of virtual gold pieces in T’Rain.”
“So until now, this has been a technical possibility, but few people have used it on a large scale,” Wallace said, working it through. “But these fuckers have figured out a way to use T’Rain as a money-laundering system.”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “And I’m guessing, since you drove all the way down here and left, as I now see, eight voice mails on my phone, that your backup drive in the safe also got infected.”
“Yeah, it fucked everything it could reach,” Wallace said. “It must have passed into my system from that fucking thumb drive you handed me, and then — ”
“Don’t try to make this my fault. I use Linux, remember? Different OS, different malware.”
“Then how did this fucking virus get on to my laptop?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said.
Zula did know, because she was skimming pages of technical analyses of the REAMDE virus. One of the ways it propagated was through thumb drives and other removable media. And Peter had borrowed one of Richard’s old thumb drives so that he could transfer something into Wallace’s computer. Richard’s machine must be infected with REAMDE; but he wouldn’t know or care, since he was protected by corporate IT.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Peter continued. “All that matters is — ”
“It does matter for establishing culpability,” Wallace said. “Which may be of interest to him.”
“All I’m saying is, we have to address the problem,” Peter said.
“Brilliant analysis there, Petey boy. It’s quarter to three. I’m already forty-five minutes late. I bought myself a bit of time by sending an email with some bullshit to the effect that my car broke down in the Okanagans. But the clock is ticking. We have got to decrypt that file!”
“No,” Peter said, “we have to pay the ransom.”
“Fuck that.”
“It is not possible to decrypt the file,” Peter said. “If we had the NSA working on it, we could probably decrypt it. But as matters stand, you’re screwed unless you pay the ransom.”
“We’re screwed,” Wallace corrected him, “since this is all much too complicated to explain to him. He is not a computer guy. Has never heard of T’Rain, or any other massively multiplayer online game, for that matter. Might just barely understand the concept of a computer virus. All he’ll understand is that he doesn’t have what he paid for.”
“Then it’s like I said. We pay the ransom.”
Quite a long silence.
“I was hoping,” Wallace said, “that there was another copy of the file.”
“I already told you — ”
“I know what you fucking told me,” Wallace said. “I was hoping that you were lying.”
“Is this all just another ruse to find out whether or not I am lying?”
“You’re just clever enough to be stupider than if you weren’t clever at all,” Wallace said. “This is quite real. I very badly want you to tell me, right now, Peter, that you lied to me earlier and that you have a backup copy of the file on one of your machines here.”
And then Wallace dropped his voice to a low growl and talked for about two minutes. During this time, Zula could not make out a single word that Wallace was saying.
When he was finished, all Peter could say, for a minute or so, was the f-word. He said it in about a dozen different ways, like an actor searching for just the right reading.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he finally said, very close to sobbing, “because I was telling you the truth before. There really is no other copy!”
Now it was Wallace’s turn to say the f-word a lot.
“So we have to pay the ransom,” Peter said. “A thousand gold pieces?”
“That’s what it says,” Wallace answered.
“How much is that in real money?”
“Seventy-three dollars.”
Peter, after a moment, let out a burst of laughter that sounded eerie to Zula. He was close to hysteria. “Seventy-three dollars? This whole problem can be solved for seventy-three bucks!?”
“Raising the funds isn’t the hard part,” Wallace said.
Something about the sound of Peter’s laugh told Zula it was time to call 911. Best to do it from a landline so that the dispatcher would have the building’s address. She got up as quietly as she could and padded around to the corner where Peter had all his kitchen stuff. A cordless phone was bracketed to the wall. She picked up the handset and turned it on, then put it to her ear to check for a dial tone.
Instead of which, she heard a series of touch-tone beeps.
Someone else was on the line, on another extension, dialing a different number.
“Welcome to Qwest directory assistance,” said a recorded voice.
“Good morning, Zula,” said Wallace on the other extension. “I know you’re in the building because your computer suddenly popped up on Peter’s network. I’ve been keeping an eye on the phone down here. It’s got a handy little indicator, tells me when another extension is in use.”
The phone went dead. Down below, Zula could hear ripping and snapping noises as Wallace did something violent to the line. “What are you doing!?” Peter exclaimed, more confused than anything else.
“Getting us all on the same level,” Wallace said. She could hear him bounding up the stairs.
ZULA CARRIED A bike messenger shoulder bag rather than a purse. She’d left it on the floor at the top of the stairs. Wallace stirred a hand through it, plucked out her phone, then her car keys. With his other hand he closed the lid on her laptop and picked it up. “When you’re feeling more sociable, I’d be pleased to see you below,” he announced, then turned and walked back down the stairs.
She heard her Prius beep as he unlocked it with the key fob. For some reason that broke her out of her paralysis. She walked over to her bag. She was starting to wish she’d listened to all her relatives in Iowa who thought of Seattle as being only one step above Mogadishu and who kept importuning her to get a concealed weapons permit and buy a handgun. In an outside pocket of the bag she did have a folding knife, which she now found and slipped into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she came down the stairs to see Wallace slamming the passenger door of the Prius and hitting the lock button. He pocketed the key chain. “Your mobile and Peter’s are safe and sound inside the car,” he announced. Zula didn’t understand this use of “mobile” until she reached the base of the steps and saw two phones resting side by side on the car’s dashboard.
“Fucking rude of me, ain’t it?” Wallace said, looking her hard in the eye. “But for us to solve this problem we need to trust each other and to focus, and you kids nowadays substitute communicating for thinking, don’t you? So let’s think.”
She could feel Peter’s gaze on her, knew that if she turned to face him, a channel would open up between them and he would try to say something, by a gesture or a look on his face, probably by way of apology. She did not do so. Peter needed to issue an apology much more than she needed to receive one, and, in keeping with Wallace’s suggestion, she wanted to focus on solving the problem and getting out of here.