Reamde полностью

Richard’s instincts told him that, having gotten Skeletor into this state, the most effective way to keep him there would be to show exaggerated nonchalance. “Now, Devin,” he said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “you said yourself that it was a team sport. And part of being on a team is having a captain or a pope or what have you.”

“I’ve had characters in the game since the beginning,” Devin said righ­teously. “Over a hundred of them.”

“So the database says,” Richard said.

“Now I won’t sit here and try to tell you that no one has ever sworn fealty to me. I run vassal networks, sure. Sometimes maybe three deep. You can’t understand the workings of the game unless you’ve played it at that level.”

Richard just kept nodding, raising his eyebrows from time to time in an I’m with you, buddy sort of effort.

“I could be seven deep!” Devin said. “Could have been years ago!” Meaning that his hierarchy of vassals would be seven tiers deep, enough to give him tens of millions of followers. Only one player in the game had ever gotten to that level. Richard had been just hours away from sending Egdod down to liquidate him when the player had choked on a bite of wurst, alone before his monitor screen in Ostheim vor der Rhön, no one around to give him a Heimlich.

“I know that about you, Devin, and I do think it’s testimony to your, if I may say, midwestern sense of plain dealing and self-effacement that you have showed such restraint. Of course, one of the problems with us midwesterners is that—”

“We just let people run roughshod over us, yeah, I know that,” Devin said, with an involuntary flick of the eyes toward his steel building full of lawyers.

“Well,” Richard said, after a longish pause, “I don’t want to keep you from your training schedule.”

“S’okay, my doctor’s after me to ease up a little.”

“I’m actually on my way up to visit the family, but it seemed only fair to stop by and fill you in a little on my conversation with the Don.”

“Appreciate it,” Devin muttered, and then his eyes refocused. “Yeah, I heard you had some trouble with your niece?”

“Am still having it, actually.”

“She hasn’t turned up yet?”

Richard had vague misgivings about this phrasing, since it seemed to imply that Zula had some choice in the matter. He wondered how many other people were assuming that Zula had just decided to go on the lam and put her family through the torments of hell just because.

“Whatever trouble she’s in,” Richard said, “does not seem to have resolved.”

“Well. Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” Devin offered.

Richard couldn’t think of a polite way to say, You’re about to go do it, and so he just nodded.

AFTER DITCHING THE Suburban, they drove for three hours. Zula reckoned that they would be heading for the hills, but instead they entered into some place whose roads were equipped, in standard-issue North American style, with streetlamps, convenience stores, and stoplights. After cruising through that sort of environment for about fifteen minutes, Jones swung the wheel and trundled the giant vehicle into a vast parking lot. A neon-lit Walmart logo careered across the windshield. Jones pulled into a parking space, or rather a series of several consecutive spaces, and shut off the engine. After taking a last searching look around the parking lot, he reached up and jerked a curtain across the entire eight-foot expanse of the windshield, affording him and his coconspirators privacy.