“You confuse me,” Ivanov said. “Can you find Troll, or not?”
Peter looked at Zula.
“Why you look at Miss Zula? You are khacker genius, correct?”
Peter couldn’t get anything out.
ZULA WAS VERY tired, and her mind was in several places at once. The word “flashback” was much too fraught to describe what was happening in her mind. But it was the case that the mind pulled up memories that were germane to the impressions flooding into its sensory organs, and the first few years of her life related better to what was happening now than most of what she had experienced in small-town Iowa. She did not have the energy, the clarity, or what nerds denominated the “bandwidth” to deal with all aspects of this situation at once. Certainly the one that dominated was the sense that she was in danger. There was a technical side to it also. But neither of those explained the sick feeling that kept passing in waves through her abdomen. There was a moral aspect to this. She’d failed to see it at all until Wallace had been sent to the other room. For that, a man like Ivanov would probably see her as ridiculously naive. She could perhaps be forgiven that naïveté once.
Now, though, she was being asked to give up another person: a complete stranger, somewhere, who had created REAMDE. She had not volunteered for the job. Peter had betrayed her with a glance.
“Miss Zula? I apologize, I see that you are very tired,” Ivanov said. “But. You work at same company? Is possible?”
And the Iowa-girl response, of course, was always yes. Especially to a polite, older man in good clothes who had come such a long way.
For some reason she was remembering a moment when she had been something like fourteen years old, the apex of the crystal meth epidemic in Iowa. She had been home alone and had looked out the window to see a strange van coming down the road, very slowly. It had made a couple of passes by the house and then pulled into the driveway that led to their equipment shed. A couple of men had gotten out of the van, looking around nervously. Not knowing whether they might have come on a legitimate errand, Zula had made a phone call to Uncle John (as she called her second adopted dad), and Uncle John had extremely calmly talked her through the procedure of locking every door in the house, getting a shotgun and a box of shells, and hiding herself in the attic. His matter-of-fact instructions had been accompanied, and sometimes drowned out, by dim roaring, screeching, and thumping noises that, as she later understood, had resulted from his driving at a hundred miles an hour while he talked. Zula had barely gotten the attic stairs pulled up behind her when a lot of disturbing vehicular noises had ensued from outside, and she had peered out a gable vent to see Uncle John’s car in the middle of the front yard at the end of a long set of skid marks that completely surrounded the house (for he had orbited it once, checking for signs of forced entry) and John hobbling around it on his prosthetic legs to crouch behind and use it for cover while across the way the van screamed out onto the road with a door hanging open. A cloud of what she took for steam was rising from the side of the shed where they kept the anhydrous ammonia tank. A few minutes later the sheriff’s department was there in force, and Zula felt it safe to emerge from the attic. John yelled at her that she did not have permission to come down yet. Then he hugged her and told her that she was his wonderful girl. Then he asked about the whereabouts of the shotgun. Then he told her again how magnificent she was, and then he ordered her to go upstairs and not come out until he gave permission. She went upstairs and, peering out a window, saw what John did not want her to see: the ambulance men putting on their hazmat suits and placing a large brown wrinkled thing into a body bag. One of the thieves, startled, perhaps, by Uncle John’s sudden advent, had made a mistake with the anhydrous ammonia line and been sprayed with the chemical, which had sucked all the water out of his body.
It was in that moment, but never before and rarely since, that she had perceived a kind of subterranean through line, perhaps like one of those ley lines in T’Rain, running from her people in Eritrea to her people in Iowa.
“WITH A PHONE call,” Zula said, “I might be able to get more information about the Troll.”
Ivanov continued to gaze at her in an expectant way and, after a few moments, raised his eyebrows encouragingly.
“Then,” Zula added, “you could be on your way.”
Ivanov’s face stopped moving, as if hit by a blast of anhydrous ammonia.
“To continue solving your problem,” Zula added graciously, “or whatever it is you need to do.”
“A phone call,” Ivanov said, “to whom?”
“The company has a privacy policy.”
Ivanov’s face screwed up. “This sounds like bullshit.”
“There are rules,” Zula said. For Uncle Richard had explained to her, at the beginning of her employment at Corporation 9592, that most of the people she’d be working with were burdened with Y chromosomes and that what worked at Boy Scout camp should work here. Boys, he said, only want to know two things: who is in charge, and what are the rules. And indeed this worked magically. Ivanov nodded. “The company has information about names, addresses, demographics of its customers,” Zula continued. “But it doesn’t release that information. You don’t play the game under your own name — your real name. There’s no way that I, as a player, could ever track down the true real-world identity of the Troll or any other player.”
“But someone,” Ivanov said, “someone at company knows.”
“Yes, someone always knows.”
“Maybe rule gets broke sometimes, a little.”
“Generally not but…” Zula truncated the sentence since Ivanov was already making a this is bullshit gesture.
APPARENTLY SOMEONE WENT out for supplies, since their Russian was suddenly punctuated with phrases like “venti mocha.”
“Peter,” said Sokolov; the first sound he had made in a long time.
Peter looked up to find Sokolov nodding significantly at a webcam mounted at the top of the stairs, aimed down into the shop.
“You have two security cameras.”
Peter made no response.
“Or perhaps more?” Sokolov went on.
Peter considered it. “Three, actually,” he admitted.
“Ah,” Sokolov said.
For a few moments, Zula wondered how Sokolov could possibly have missed the third one. They were all pretty obvious: one aimed down the front hall at the street entrance; another in the shop, covering the alley doors; the third at the top of the stairs.
Then she got it. Sokolov was testing Peter.
Sokolov knew perfectly well that there were three cameras; he had gone over the whole place, seen everything. But he had said “two” just to see whether Peter would ’fess up to the existence of a third.
“Motion activated?” Sokolov asked.
“Yes.”
“Storing data where?”
“Here,” Peter said. “On my server.”
Sokolov made no sign that he had heard, but only stared into Peter’s eyes for several long seconds.
“And … on a backup drive,” Peter admitted. “Under the stairs.”
Sokolov finally took his gaze from Peter’s face and nodded. “Files will need to be erased.”
“Okay,” Peter said, sounding hugely relieved. He slapped his knees and rose to his feet. “Let’s do that.”
Watched carefully by Sokolov, Peter busied himself at a terminal for a while. In the meantime, a preposterous amount of car moving was going on. Peter’s Scion ended up parked on the street outside. Zula’s Prius was shifted deeper into the bay and Wallace’s sports car was moved in next to it, clearing the alley.