The Woman Who Stopped Traffic Read online

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing, strike that last bit – just call us as soon as you get a hit on Further Online Gaming.”

  “Yessir,” Ma said. “Stay tuned…”

  Finally, as the sun had almost disappeared behind the mountain range, Natalie arrived at the entrance to the hill village. A handsome young armourer called Brastias opened the gates. He was tall and swarthy, with long dark hair and a crimson robe collected over one shoulder. “Hail!” – and he held up a gold-braceleted hand.

  The horse clattered to a halt and surveyed its new surroundings. The village was arranged in concentric circles of cobble-stoned streets slicked wet with torchlight – all in the shadow of the castle. It was strangely real. Natalie would not have been surprised to find horse excrement, dying infants and dead animals, or whatever really belonged in medieval times, though all seemed safe and well for now.

  “You made it, just. You’ve completed your first task. Here, let me,” and Brastias gathered up the reins while she dismounted.

  She noticed the symbols modifying at the top of her screen.

  “The challenges become harder from here,” Brastias told her. “And you shouldn’t have journeyed that last part on your own. Whatever happened to the woodsman? He was supposed to escort you.”

  “Why is it so dangerous out there after dark?”

  Brastias stopped un-harnessing the horse and looked at her searchingly.

  “We’ll talk about Rage later,” he said. “I’ll take care of your mount. You’ll be sleeping in a room above the tavern. If you can ignore the noise, that is.”

  She could hear the merriment of the hostelry from where they stood. The sound of a lute drifted above the hubbub. Evidently the mead was in full flow – by the flagon-load.

  “OK, well at least tell me where I am.”

  “You’re in the old kingdom. This is where the knights errant set off from, on their treasure quests. But, you won’t be going anywhere just yet. For one thing, we’ve got to get you into a guild.” He was watering down the sweaty flanks of the horse, to the latter’s great contentment. “I’m going to propose you for the Most Holy Respected Order of the Knights Templar.”

  “Is that good?” she asked.

  He almost choked. “Just a bit!”

  He said: “If you can’t work through these quests with others, you won’t survive long out there. Or anywhere, for that matter.”

  As an enchantress, she was rather affronted by this chiding, but wouldn’t have minded had he invited her for a herb ale or two at the tavern. Alas, he had to attend to Phariance’s stabling for the night. As he walked her horse away, he turned and said:

  “Don’t you want to know your name?”

  “Sure!”

  “Caerleone. Caerleon is where the King – Arthur – was crowned. No one knew whether the word was masculine or feminine, so we added an ‘e’ on the end.” He shrugged as if to say he didn’t make the rules, then was gone.

  It seemed like a good point at which to pause. So far, she couldn’t detect anything about MultiQuest: Dark Ages that suggested malfeasance – at least, not as it related to thousands of trafficked girls on Clamor.us.

  She decided to do some research into the lore and history of these role-playing realms. Before long, she’d printed off a couple of hundred pages. So much for the paperless office indeed, she thought to herself. She blocked the still-warm pages, thrapping them down on the desk to form a neat pile, then started in, humming and rocking the foot of one leg as she read.

  UltimaOnline was indeed the granddaddy of them all. According to the articles, Ultima was created by an ardent Tolkienist called Richard Garriot, who exemplified the parallel other-world-ness of these fantasy games. Apparently he lived in liberal Austin, Texas, and collected things – strange things. For example, a lunar soil collector called Lunakod 21 that the Russians had sold him for $60,000.What made it strange was that it was still on the moon.

  “Hello?” – she stopped rocking her foot. For she thought she could hear a noise, from down the corridor. Perhaps it was just one of the vacuum cleaners whirring away at this hour. She checked her Spycatcher watch: fast approaching midnight.

  Cautiously, she read on. Most noteworthy in the Ultima saga was the early experience of the online version, when players began interacting with one another remotely. They started killing each other. Hence the invention of the reputational system that most games now abided by. Like in the real world, people couldn’t just do whatever they wanted without there being repercussions. Yet at one point it got so bad that Garriot had to split his gaming world into two parallel ‘facets’ – Felucca, where killing other players was OK, and Trammel, where, except under rare circumstances, it most certainly was not. Four-fifths of players chose to live in Trammel.

  And there it was a second time – the noise, from down the corridor. Or not so much a noise as a feeling, that she was being watched. She decided to call Stacey in Seattle, who thankfully picked up on the first ring:

  “Hi there!” Stacey said. “I saw your email about your Clamor profile. You find out who was behind it?”

  “Net yet,” Natalie said. She could imagine Stacey in the half-light of her computer, Microsoft Project purring away, a 24-oz Cherry Coke on the go. “Hey, does the name Cindy Bayley mean anything to you?”

  “Er – no. Should it?” Stacey said.

  “I don’t know. I think she may have been at our school.”

  “While we were there? Who is she?”

  “No, she’s well into her forties. She works for the FBI as a Special Agent.”

  “Is this connected with your fake profile page?”

  “Nuh-uh, it’s something different. Though it is related to Clamor.”

  “Have you checked the alumni database online?”

  “Yup, and there is a Cindy Bayley, who graduated in ‘eighty five. Just seems like a helluva coincidence, is all.”

  “Not really,” Stace said. “I mean, ours was a military school before, only going coed in the mid ‘80s – right? Sometimes it felt like half the student body was going into law enforcement. Or computers,” and a discreet burp came down the phone line. “Ah’ll bet she didn’t get too many DMRs!”

  Natalie laughed. Stacey had collected Dorm Misconduct Reports like bugs on a windshield, mostly for staying up too late. Then it occurred to her: the Honor Council. Their school had this special organization that reviewed more serious infractions of its Honor Code, which decreed that a lie was ‘the most detestable thing of which a person may be guilty’, that the truth was ‘the greatest virtue one may possess’, and that any dishonorable deed demanded action from the Honor Council ‘in accordance with its severity’. A specially bound edition of the Honor Code was given to each new student member. It listed the names of all those who’d gone before.

  That’s where the name Cindy Bayley was familiar from.

  Natalie didn’t want to mention the Honor Council to Stacey, who hadn’t been on it. She chatted on for a while before hanging up and returning to the pile of gaming articles.

  Over the years, she’d developed a method of speed-reading that involved scanning down the center of the pages, like the prow of a ship, the words parting as she went…

  Ultimately, everything came back to Tolkien, and his seminal otherworld of Middle Earth. The paperback version of Lord of The Rings came out in 1965. By the end of that decade, it had undergone two dozen successive reprints. It was wildly popular across American college campuses during the sixties.

  But then Natalie uncovered a second, darker strand in the background fantasy literature, dating more from the seventies: The Chronicles of Gor, written by a philosophy professor at City University of New York. A signature feature of the Gorean world was the ritual enslavement of women. It had spawned a life of its own – not only in the online world of Second Life, but also in real life, with Gorean fantasies reportedly being acted out in secret across the globe.

  And there it was again –
that noise from down the corridor. She was almost about to investigate when the phone lit up: Ben.

  “Natalie, Winston’s on. Winston, you got a name for us?”

  “I went through all the data sources you suggested, and drew a blank, and then I remembered that I met this guy who works as a programmer for Further Online Gaming!”

  “And?”

  “And he gave me the name of the owner, but I’m not sure if it’s gonna be good news or bad news, Ben –”

  “Winston!”

  “It’s owned offshore by the Farther Frontier Fund. By Paul Towse.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Natalie had no clear idea who Paul Towse was. She just wanted to leave the building. Yet she was drawn to the corridor from which she heard the noise. She stiffened as she set down the phone. The corridor was dark and empty as expected. Half way down, she found an office lit orange-green by a lava lamp. She entered. The orderliness of the space suggested it was Nguyen’s. It was – on the wall hung his Stanford engineering degree certificate. The desk surface was supremely neat, his laptop removed from its docking station. There were no photos. The only personal item was a small gold elephant that seemed to shape shift in the changing light of the lava lamp. She was about to leave when she noticed the red light blinking on his phone.

  Should she check his messages? Of course not. Why not? He’d know someone had – but, he wouldn’t know who.

  She walked over to the desk, picked up the handset and pressed the Audix button: “Welcome to Audix. For help at any time press star, h. Please enter extension and pound sign.” She entered his four-digit extension: “Please enter password and pound sign.”

  What would he have chosen? Nothing as obvious as the last four digits of his cell phone surely: “Login incorrect. Please try again.”

  Natalie searched her brain for possibilities. Then she punched in 6878, the keypad numbers corresponding to MUST.

  “You have two new messages.” Yes!

  The first was from a mechanic at what sounded like an auto-repair shop. The man was harried, perhaps catching up on a day’s unanswered calls: “The boring and recalibrating work is all done. Tell ya, it packs a helluva punch. It’s ready when you are.” Apparently Nguyen’s car was ready for pick-up. The next wasn’t even a message. A silence followed by a click: someone deciding not to leave a message. Which didn’t exactly tell her much.

  From the corner of her eye, she detected movement through the door. She froze. Then moved over to it, her heart beating painfully loudly in her chest. Her fingers felt for the doorframe, cold and foreign. Still there was no one in the corridor.

  She eased her way down its darkened length, into the empty entrance lobby. No one. Through the smoked glass entrance, she could see her car – and a vehicle moving along the street beyond, tail lights retreating to red dots. She made for the door. Her head turned involuntarily to the meeting room off the lobby. White light from outside filtered through the blinds into sharp ridges – the harsh lines warping in one place, around the shape of someone sat there. Her heart almost jumped out of her chest… but no, it was just a jacket left over a chair. Jesus.

  She hurried out of the building and hit the UNLOCK button on her key fob, the thunk resounding round the empty parking lot. The key trembled in her hand; it took a couple of seconds to turn it in the ignition, the engine starting on the second attempt.

  She made for the 101 Freeway, checking over her shoulder at each semi-deserted intersection – to satisfy herself that no one was concealed across the back seat.

  The freeway was mostly empty. Just the occasional eighteen-wheeler, which she swept past. Green signs flew by overhead: the airport, the entrance to the city. Still, for the entire journey back, she could not bring herself to look in the rear-view mirror. Just in case someone was staring straight back at her.

  * * *

  Meantime, Ben stood on the narrow fire-escape accessed from his fifth floor window. He rested into the crook of an angled ladder that joined his balcony to the one above. The breeze was soft. A sea of lights and traffic sounds heaved below: Fisherman’s Wharf and the Marina District, blocked by the black bay. The view of Golden Gate Bridge was part obscured by a protruding roofline. Still, it was what had drawn him into taking the place within five minutes of first seeing it. Traffic on the big bridge was light at this hour, mostly eighteen-wheelers, slow moving and tiny like glow worms.

  Dammit Chevalier, what have you started here?

  He thought again about Natalie’s question, about why men had such a thing for Asian women. The more he thought about it, the more he registered how many of the guys he knew did seem to have a thing about Asian women. Those client entertainment evenings… He’d found a neutral enough, historical-sounding answer – or so he’d thought. But the real answer was neither neutral nor historical. Because, according to the fantasy, they’re small and always youthful-looking, even when older! Because they do subservience with kinkiness like no other. Wasn’t that the idea?

  He thought back to his discovery, aged eight, of a pile of Playboys hidden at the bottom of his dad’s drawer. They were a source of wonderment to him at the time: these exotic older women, seemingly from another planet, willing to take off all their clothes – just for him! A strange awakening sensation had coursed through him, an intoxicating tumescence – blood filling that remote part of his body, his hands trembling as he turned those pages with growing amazement.

  Years later, delving into American cultural constructs at college, Playboy became a source of curiosity bordering on fascination to Ben: how this magazine, born in a decade as culturally conservative as the fifties, could have found such widespread acceptance. The owner had struck a deal with the upwardly mobile men of the ‘50s and ‘60s: if you dress in this way, if you live in this manner, travel to these places, consume to this level – you’ll have access to these women. And mass-market advertisers couldn’t get enough of it.

  For Ben’s dad, the overall ethos had sort of worked too. A man whose parents had tasted such undiluted bitterness during the Depression era found himself married to a sweet and well-educated woman from affluent Mill Valley.

  He sighed, leaning more heavily in to the ladder, his arms crossing more tightly.

  You could tell a lot, growing up in suburban San Jose, by where the kids wanted to play. The homes of the parents who truly loved one another were a magnet for them. The Silvermans’ house had not been. A weird aura of frustration and failure hung over the infrequent family gatherings, evening mealtimes too. Over time, Jack Silverman – brilliant professionally, a lauded police detective – had retreated as a father figure. He seemed to lose confidence as a man, inside the family unit. And for Ben, as an only child, that meant an acute loneliness, a lifelong search for approval, beginning with the pretty and popular girls in grade school.

  He reflected on his own casual and ongoing relationship with pornography. The client evenings spent at Gentlemen’s Clubs, the weekends in Nevada with his college buddies. Todd’s bachelor party in Reno, organized with the help of Playboy BachelorParty.com. One moment stood out from that weekend, and it wasn’t the toast to his best friend from college. Rather, Petra: a waif of a woman he found in a strip club they spent the last night in. He legs looked too fragile to support her body. Even the ultraviolet light of the club’s rear seating area couldn’t disguise her pallor. He chatted away with her anyway, hardly able to believe she was 18. It was late and the cocktails were flowing. She’d do for a lap dance or two. Then she asked whether he wanted ‘extra services’. There was a beseeching look in her eyes, the look of a girl who’d long since lost the right to say No. The look of a girl who was perhaps in real trouble, with someone.

  Later, crossing the parking lot in the safety of his loud group, he thought again about Petra: about what fate the rest of that night held for her. He’d half a mind to go back and help. But, drunkenly, he’d reasoned that trying to save a prostitute was a great way to wind up in the emergency room.

>   What really amazed Ben Silverman was how acceptable porn had become in mainstream culture. How Paul Towse could be revealed as the owner of an online fantasy role-play game that was, according to Natalie Chevalier, linked with sex trafficking via the web’s foremost social networking site. Was it really possible that pornography, big business, technology and people trafficking could be telescoping together this way?

  The timing was interesting. For he was due to have dinner with his boss Steven Schweitzer, Schweitzer’s boss Leonard Carmichael and Paul Towse himself – the very next evening. This evening, he corrected himself, eyeing his expensive wristwatch.

  CHAPTER 15

  Natalie slept as badly as expected and awoke puzzled, troubled. Puzzled by the lack of outward connection between MultiQuest and Clamor, troubled because she’d checked Nguyen’s voicemail. She smacked her forehead with open palm: just how many other people had chorused “MUST!” with him over Saturday brunch recently? Of course he’d know it was her. She sat up and sighed heavily.

  Perhaps Ray was right. Perhaps she really was blighted by these blind spots. One of which seemed to be that every time she became frightened, it triggered within her this urge to violate against other peoples’ privacy: invading their hard drives with malware, ferreting through their office voice mail... Why hadn’t she just gone to Nguyen or the FBI with what she’d found, as any sensible person would have done?

  She swung her legs to the side of the hotel bed. Filled with pins and needles, her left leg felt like a lump of wood. She rubbed it, then picked up Cindy Bayley’s business card from the bedside table, playing with its edge.

  But first she wanted to speak with Winston Ma, about that MultiQuest connection. She texted Ben for Ma’s number, received a response within seconds and was soon on the phone with the intern-who-never-sleeps:

  “Heeyyy, Natalie! How’s it goin’?”