Neal Stephenson - Reamde

The bungalow’s walls were thin, and beneath the hiss of the shower he could hear Igor’s voice as a kind of indistinct throbbing, difficult to make out except when he pronounced distinct words like “ Da, da! ” During the intervals when Igor was silent, Sokolov heard nothing from Vlad. Apparently Igor was talking to someone on the phone. This was not surprising, and, as a matter of fact, Sokolov was pretending to take this shower precisely to give Igor an opportunity to make a next move: try to kill him, or else call people in his network and begin spreading the news.

He turned off the shower, turned on the faucet, pulled a disposable razor out of his bag, and shaved using a sliver of soap that had been left on the edge of the sink. He kept the Makarov handy. But if they’d been going to do it, they’d have done it while they thought he was in the shower.

While he was shaving, he heard Igor place another phone call, this one in English. Igor seemed to be ordering a pizza from Domino’s.

This did not seem to be the act of a man who was about to murder his guest, so on one level Sokolov relaxed a little bit. It did raise new questions, though. Why was Igor now showing hospitality? Any man in his right mind would want Sokolov out of the house pronto. Had he been ordered, by someone on the telephone, to stall Sokolov? Keep him in the house until someone else could be sent out to deal with him?

Anyway, he rinsed his face, splashed water into his stubbled scalp to make it look as if he’d actually showered, pulled his stuff together, wrenched the door open, and stepped back out into the bungalow’s living room. Vlad was playing a video game on a tricked-out PC that was connected to a large flat-screen monitor. Igor was watching and supplying commentary, but tore his attention away to greet Sokolov. “Please, make yourself comfortable,” he said, rolling forward as if he intended to rise to his feet. He had a beer in his hand. “Would you like a beer? I’ll get one for you.”

“No thanks, not now.”

“I ordered pizza. It should be here in forty minutes. I thought you might be hungry.”

“Thanks, that sounds delicious. It’s been forever since I had pizza.” These words came out of his mouth somewhat mechanically; his mind was going too fast to make genuine conversation.

“Noodles and rice for two weeks, eh?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“On the freighter—Chink food only, I’ll bet.”

Sokolov shook his head. “The crew was Filipino; they eat different stuff. It was fine. Just no pizza, that’s all.”

“How the hell did you talk your way on board that thing? From what I’ve heard, the Chinese cops must have been going crazy.”

Sokolov shrugged. “It’s a big port. Famous for smuggling. It’s always possible to find a way out of such places.”

“But you were alone—and you don’t speak Chinese?”

So, one thing at least was obvious, which was that whomever Igor had been talking to on the phone had asked him to wheedle more information from Sokolov on how he had made his way from a gunfight in a collapsing apartment building in Xiamen to Igor’s house in Tukwila, and to probe for inconsistencies in the story—to the extent that Igor even had the intellectual equipment for such an undertaking. Perhaps the pizza stalling maneuver was solely to keep Sokolov in the house long enough for Igor to ask a series of such questions. Or perhaps a carload of men was on its way to the house right now to fetch Sokolov and subject him to a more rigorous examination. In either case, it wouldn’t look good for Sokolov to bolt out of the house, spurning the pizza, as much as announcing that he had something to hide.

He had, of course, been surveying the place for exits and had noticed that, for such a small structure, it was actually rather difficult to get out of. There seemed to be a lot of property crime in the neighborhood, and it was obvious enough that Igor and Vlad were not above dealing in stolen goods, and possibly in drugs as well, so they had been assiduous about putting bars or steel mesh over their windows. The only exits were the doors.

“What the hell,” Sokolov said. “I think I will have a beer. It’s okay, I can get it myself.” For Igor had already sunk back into the depths of his black leather sofa and was not the sort to get up again quickly. Sokolov went back into the kitchen and confirmed his memory that it led to a sort of back porch with an exit to the yard behind the house. He stepped into the porch and examined the door, a flimsy thing that had been beefed up with more steel mesh and a number of extra bolts. He opened all of these and confirmed that he could now yank the door open with a single quick gesture.

Then back to the living room with his beer. He had been a little worried that Igor would be suspicious at the amount of time he had taken to fetch a beverage, but his host was deeply absorbed with the progress of the video game. Sokolov dragged a chair into a position where he could look out the front window of the house and straight down the length of the cul-de-sac.

There followed about forty-five minutes of desultory conversation. Occasionally Igor would ask him a question about what had happened in Xiamen and Sokolov would relate a bit of the story, but sooner or later they always drifted back into video-game watching.

A small car came up the street, but it was just the pizza delivery. “I’ll get more beer,” Sokolov said, and went into the kitchen. He found a large pot in the cabinet next to the stove, put it in the sink, and began running hot water into it. Then he went to the fridge and got more beers and ferried them out to the living room. Igor was on his feet, undoing the front door locks, greeting the pizza delivery boy. Sokolov set the beers down on the coffee table. Then he went back into the kitchen and took the pot, now containing several liters of warm water, and placed it on the range and turned the burner on high. When the water was boiling, it might serve as a sort of weapon or at least a distraction.

They ate pizza and drank beer. Vlad had paused his video game. This was not running on a console, such as an Xbox; it ran on a personal computer. Not a boring beige box such as you would see in an office. A PC made specifically for young male game players with a tech fetish, all tricked out with multicolored LEDs and complex molded shapes recalling the hull of an alien spacecraft. When Sokolov had first seen this thing, just after walking into Igor’s house a couple of hours ago, his mind had snagged on it for a moment, then moved on. Ever since, something about it had been nagging at him. But he’d had other things to think about.

Now, finally, it came to him. He remembered where he had seen this thing before.

This was Peter’s computer.

They must have come back to Peter’s place at some point while Sokolov had been embroiled in China and stolen whatever looked good to them.

It must have been very soon after they had gone to Xiamen, because once Peter and Zula had been reported missing, the cops would have gone there, turned it into a crime scene, made it a very hazardous place to carry out a burglary.

Which meant that the cops must have gone there after Vlad and Igor had ransacked it.

Which meant that, instead of finding the carefully cleaned-up, evidence-free scene that Sokolov had arranged, they would have found evidence of said ransacking.

“You are making me nervous, with this look on your face!” Igor complained.

Sokolov glanced up to see that Igor was, in fact, looking a little edgy.

Sokolov cleared his throat. “You went back to that place,” he said, “and took some things.”

Here, Sokolov would not have been surprised to see Igor dart a guilty look at the fancy PC, which was sitting on the floor so close that he could have set his beer on top of it. But instead Igor threw a nervous look into the corner of the room behind Sokolov. By dint of a supreme effort of will, Sokolov resisted the temptation to turn around and look at whatever it was. Some loot from the apartment, obviously, that Igor considered more valuable or that in some sense loomed larger in his imagination than the PC.