Ivanov listened raptly, breaking in from time to time. Half of the time this was to compliment her, since he seemed convinced that any female who did not receive a compliment every five minutes would stab him with an ice pick in his sleep. The other half of the time it was to ask a question. Some of these were keenly insightful, and others betrayed a disturbing lack of technical understanding.
Once these preliminaries were out of the way, Ivanov began to drill down on the question of Wallace’s culpability. Was the infection chargeable to any carelessness on his part? How, in other words, did the virus spread?
Zula told him what she’d learned, which was that REAMDE was actually spread through a security hole in Outlook, an extremely popular piece of software that, among other things, managed calendars, contacts, and whatnot. In order to do anything significant in T’Rain, you needed to run a reasonably deep vassal network. Coordinated group activities thus became an essential part of game play. Which meant that several of the players in your feudal hierarchy had to be online at the same time, to transact business and conduct war parties, dungeon raids, and the like. Those activities had to be scheduled around Little League practices, dentist appointments, studying for final exams, and so on, and so a stand-alone scheduling system, existing only inside of the T’Rain app, didn’t really serve. A third-party add-on had been created that built a tunnel between T’Rain and Outlook. Most T’Rain players used it. The add-on worked by sending messages back and forth, consisting of invitations to participate in group raids and the like. Most of these were pure text, but it was possible to attach images and other files to such invitations, and therein lay the security hole: REAMDE took advantage of a buffer overflow bug in Outlook to inject malicious code into the host operating system and establish root-level control of the computer, whereupon it could do anything it wanted, including encrypting the contents of all connected drives. First, though, it sent the virus onward to everyone in the victim’s T’Rain contact list.
There was another detail, mentioned on the internal wiki, that she did not share with Ivanov: the security hole in Outlook had been known for a while and most antivirus programs were hip to it. But hard-core gamers were still vulnerable since they ran T’Rain in fullscreen mode and so were oblivious to the increasingly hysterical warnings being hurled onto their screens by their virus-protection software.
Another detail she elected not to share: Wallace had almost certainly gotten the virus from Uncle Richard’s computer, spread via the thumb drive.
“So Wallace used this add-on,” Ivanov said, using air quotes, “and got infected by this virus.”
“Completely innocently, yes,” Zula said. During the first part of her lecture she’d been surfing on a burst of energy that had carried her most of the way through, but in the last ten minutes or so, exhaustion had come over her, and she had slowed down and begun to mumble her words and to begin sentences she didn’t know how to end. Now, she dimly realized that the upshot of all she’d said, in Ivanov’s mind, might be that Wallace had screwed up and deserved to be punished. This now left her almost paralyzed.
To her own considerable surprise and then shame, she began crying. She leaned forward and put her face in her hands.
“I am eediot!” Ivanov exclaimed. “I am stupidest man in world.” He stood up. Afraid that he was going to come over and comfort her, Zula tensed and forced herself to hold it in for a moment. She dared not look up. Through her tears and her fingers she could see Ivanov’s polished shoes moving around. He stepped out of the room. She let go of a train of little gasps and sobs, mixed now with self-anger and frustration that she was being such a stupid girl. She hadn’t cried in a serious way since her mother’s funeral.
Ivanov was back in the room after no more than fifteen seconds. She could hear his footsteps behind the sofa. She flinched as something limp and heavy fell across her shoulders. “What is wrong with you?” Ivanov wanted to know. He was addressing Peter. She realized that Ivanov had grabbed Peter’s arm and draped it over Zula’s shoulders and was now tamping it down into place like wet cement in a form. She got it under control then, certainly not because Peter had his arm around her shoulders but because of a kind of humor, albeit very dark, that was in the situation: the man Ivanov, whoever and whatever he was, jetting in from Toronto to give Peter lessons in how to be chivalrous to his girlfriend, and Peter trapped, unable to explain that they had just broken up.
Ivanov scattered orders to everyone in the room. People went into motion; phones were unfolded. Zula sat up straight, pushing back against the weight of Peter’s arm, and Peter, terrified of what would happen to him if he disobeyed Ivanov, left it where it was, a dead weasel draped over her shoulders.
“Only thing I actually believe is that someone fucked me,” Ivanov announced, with the customary nod of apology toward Zula. “You know any Russian? Kto Kvo. A saying of Lenin. It means ‘who whom?’ Today I am the whom. The one who is fucked. I am dead man. As dead as him.” He nodded toward the adjoining room. Zula heard her lungs filling with a gasp. Ivanov continued, “That is not question. Question is manner of my death. I have some time remainink. Maybe a fortnight. Would like to spend it well. It is too late for me to die gloriously. But I can die better than him.” Another nod. “I can die as a who, not as a whom. I can show my brothers that I was fighting for them to very end, in spite of khorrendous losses. I think they will understand this. I will be a forgiven dead man instead of a smashed insect. Only thing I need is: who is the who?”
Peter finally took his arm off Zula, who sat up fully straight and regarded Ivanov directly. Ivanov looked back at them — but mostly at her — with an interested expression. As if this were a highly formal, academic sort of drawing-room inquiry. “Do you understand question?”
“You want to know who did this to you?”
“I would use different verb but yes.”
They all sat there silently for a few moments. They could hear the engine of a vehicle starting down below, they could hear men talking on phones.
“You want the identity of the Troll. The person who created the virus,” Peter said.
“Yes!” Ivanov snapped, faintly irritated.
“And if we can give you that information, then … we’re cool?”
“Khool?” Ivanov demanded, clearly in no mood to be negotiating — if that was what this was called — with Peter.
“I mean, then it’s good? Between you and us?”
Now, kind of an interesting moment.
Though the whole situation was laden with implicit threat, Ivanov had not lifted a finger, nor intimated that he ever would, against Peter or Zula. His eyebrows went up and he regarded Peter, now, in a new light: as a man who had just, in a manner of speaking, issued a threat against himself. Volunteered that he owed Ivanov something and that consequences would be due him if he failed to deliver.
Ivanov made a little shrug, as if to say, The thought had never crossed my mind, but now that you mention it … “You are most generous.”
During this whole interlude, Peter had been realizing his mistake and was now trying to backpedal in quicksand. “You understand that the virus writer could be anywhere in the world, that he’s probably gone to great lengths to hide his identity, cover his tracks…”