Neal Stephenson - Reamde

And then he could do nothing, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, except listen. And even the listening was not especially good, since he was separated from what he was listening to by a deck of ceiling tiles that had been designed specifically to muffle sound. And the intruders, at least for the first little while, were trying to move stealthily; they had no idea whether anyone was in this office or what sort of reception they should expect, and so they had to clear the place. Clear it, in the sense of a military or police unit going through every room of a house to make sure that no attackers were hiding anywhere. From what little Sokolov could infer based on sounds, they seemed to know what they were doing; they were not just walking around like idiots, clumped together, poking their heads into offices, but rather leapfrogging each other from doorway to doorway and communicating in single-word utterances, or perhaps through sign language. They had, in other words, been through some sort of training. And they had to be armed; it would not make sense for them to do what they were doing unless they had guns and had them out and ready to fire.

But finally there came a point when they began to converse in normal voices. Sokolov heard the faint metallic clicks of guns being put back in safe conditions.

The intruders—Sokolov guessed four or five of them—were not speaking Chinese. Having heard a lot of Central Asian languages, he guessed it was one of those, but he couldn’t understand a word of it. One time he heard a man speak roughly in Chinese and heard a meek Chinese voice answering back. They must have a hostage.

A lot of attention was paid, for a few minutes, to the computer. Sokolov had left this switched off, since it gave him the creeps to be sharing space with an intelligent machine that was connected to the Internet all the time. They booted it up and spent a little while clicking around. This rapidly grew boring for whoever was not actually doing it, and so at least one of the men began roaming around the office—Sokolov could see occasional reflected glints from his flashlight.

This man ended up directly below Sokolov. He was quiet for a few seconds, then he called out to his comrades.

A few of them now congregated below, and Sokolov knew that they were looking at the phone he had dropped.

A curious kind of conversation now took place, in which several voices would call out a few words in approximate unison, followed by a pause, followed by a repetition of the same. Sokolov was unsure what to make of it until he heard “Westin.” Then he understood that they were going through the photographs on the phone, looking at each one and trying to identify it.

Once they got to the end of the photos, there was general discussion for a while, which did not seem to lead anywhere. Nor would it. There was nothing interesting on the phone. Only the numbers of some dead men.

Then one of them began speaking in Chinese. Haltingly. As if reading.

Sokolov clearly heard the word “Gulangyu.”

It was the piece of paper: the one that had fallen to the table alongside the phone. It was the scrap on which he had copied out Meng Anlan’s address.

This got them excited in a way that the phone hadn’t and actually led to one of them taking out his own phone and making a call to someone. There was discussion in a language that Sokolov recognized as Arabic. Of this he knew a few words, but again the only thing he could distinguish through the ceiling tiles was “Gulangyu.”

That, and “Okay,” repeated several times.

Some calculation here. He could just slide the ceiling tile out of the way and begin shooting. No doubt he’d be able to get a few of them before they got their weapons off safety and began to shoot back. But when they did shoot back, it would be very difficult for him to move from this incredibly exposed position; and all they’d have to do would be to empty clips toward his general direction and he’d be dead soon.

Moreover, he was certain now that Jones was not among the men down there. These men were speaking a Central Asian language that Jones wouldn’t know. But when they made the phone call, they switched to Arabic. They must have been talking to Jones at that point. So even if, by some miracle, Sokolov could kill every man down there, he wouldn’t get Jones.

Now, maybe they were now planning an expedition to Olivia’s apartment. If so, he wanted to stop them before they got there.

Maybe he could wait until they were out of the room, then let himself down, track them to some place from which he could launch an attack, and get them all.

But they had just given Olivia’s address over the phone to Jones. So that cat was out of the bag. Even if he could stop all of these guys, that might not protect Olivia, if Jones was now on his way to her place independently.

Now there was a thought. If Sokolov went to Gulangyu now, was there a chance he might be able to intercept Jones there, and finish this thing tonight?

His mind was made up as soon as this thought entered it.

The men below were moving purposefully now, in a hurry to be quit of this place and to embark on their next mission. Sokolov waited until he was fairly certain that they were gone, then moved the tile a little and looked around. Nothing.

But they might have suspected he was up there, left someone behind to kill him when he emerged.

So he grabbed the steel girder, pulled himself up, got his legs free, swung them down and simply dropped straight through the ceiling tile, landing on the conference table and then executing a dive and roll from there toward the doorway. Somersaulting through that, he came up in a low crouch, weapon up, and turned and looked both ways. Nothing. But—

Scared the hell out of him. A man was lying on the floor no more than ten feet away.

But he was motionless, hands zip-tied behind his back. And he was naked.

On second thought, not exactly motionless. Still twitching. A huge stain was spreading out from the vicinity of his head, which was tilted back at a funny angle. His throat had been cut.

Sokolov retrieved his spare clip and other goods from the wreckage now strewn around the conference table, but paused on his way out of the suite to shine his flashlight over the dead man’s face. He was ethnic Chinese.

Why had they taken his clothes?

Because something about them made them useful.

A uniform. The guy was a cop, or a security guard.

“ NI YAO GAO de tamen ji quan bu ning .” Easy for Marlon to say. Hard for Yuxia to accomplish, locked as she was in a steel-walled cabin where everything of consequence seemed to be welded down. There was little in here that a person could smash or break. She tried smacking the glass of the porthole and nearly broke her hand. But there was a wooden chair that wasn’t nailed down, and she found that she could pick it up by its back and smash it into things. Her first few attempts went wild and crashed into the steel door, hard enough that the chair itself began to disintegrate and to send fragments of dry, broken wood bouncing back into her face. She brushed kindling out of her hair, then shifted to a double-handed grip on the largest part of the chair that was still in one piece and went back to work, finally beginning to strike home on the glass of the porthole itself. The glass wasn’t impressed. She hit it harder. Still nothing. Somehow this made her more enraged than Ivanov’s deception, being handcuffed to the steering wheel, Jones abducting Zula, being shoved facefirst into salt water.

She just wasn’t screaming enough. She began to let go with a deep grunt from her belly with every blow. Like that American tennis player, the big black woman, who screamed whenever she hit the ball. Anyway, to scream was part of raising hell, right? She wound up like a baseball player and lashed out with what was rapidly being reduced to a single short club of wood and screamed as loud as she could and just missed the porthole with a vicious blow. This made her even more angry, so she sucked in a breath and let go another scream and struck another wild blow that missed; and she began now to mix her screaming with curses that she had learned from the women of her village when they were very angry at the men in their lives, and finally she landed a strike on the porthole glass so hard that it cracked. The men of the boat had covered the porthole with paper and someone on the other side now snatched it down and looked through the broken glass just in time to see another chair-leg attack headed right for his face. He ducked out of the way as chips of glass flew out from the spreading fracture, and when he bobbed back up, he was screaming right back at her.