Neal Stephenson - Reamde

What would a man like Peter have in his place that could be that interesting to Igor? It was easy to understand the attraction of the PC. All young men liked to play video games. What else? Peter didn’t do drugs.

Then Sokolov remembered Igor standing at the top of Peter’s stairs, examining a gun safe. Assuring Sokolov that it was locked.

“I won’t deny it,” Igor said, with a shrug to say it was really nothing, and a nervous laugh that argued to the contrary.

“Ivanov didn’t pay you well enough?”

“Nothing’s enough for a job like that one. Shit, I just thought it was going to be security. Bodyguard shit at the worst. Then it turned into—”

Sokolov nodded. “Of course, I can sympathize. I was as surprised as you were. I am just asking. It is important for me to know the facts. That’s all. When did you go back to the place?”

“Two days later, maybe,” said Igor, and glanced over to Vlad for confirmation. “We staked it out the night before. Made sure there were no cops, no surveillance. Found a way in. Nice and quiet.” Another glance into the corner.

“How did you get the safe open?” Sokolov asked, just guessing. “Quietly?”

“Plasma torch,” Vlad blurted out. Igor threw him a killing look, but Vlad didn’t even understand that he had stepped into a trap that Sokolov had put out for him.

“Weren’t you worried that it would damage the gun?”

“He kept it in a metal case,” Vlad said, and nodded into the same corner. This gave Sokolov an excuse, finally, to turn around and look. Resting on the top of a bookshelf at about head level was a long case of burnished aluminum, just the sort of thing a gun fancier would use to carry around an especially prized rifle. One end of it was marred with flecks and streaks of darker stuff: molten metal that had sprayed onto it and congealed.

Sokolov turned back around. “This torch didn’t set off the smoke alarms?”

Igor said, “We went around, found them all, pulled their batteries.”

“When you were going all over the place looking for those smoke alarms,” Sokolov went on, “you might have seen some security cameras.”

“Two of them,” Igor said. “We cut the wires, of course.”

Sokolov, who knew that there were actually three cameras, bit down hard until the urge to scream had passed. “Of course. But up until the moment you cut those wires, you were visible to the cameras.”

“Vlad’s good at computers,” Igor volunteered.

Vlad nodded, as if to confirm the validity of Igor’s assessment. “Obviously we had cut the Internet the first time we went there,” he said, “so we knew that the cameras couldn’t send data outside of the building.”

“What about inside the building, though?”

“Vlad traced the wires,” Igor said.

“I traced the wires,” Vlad confirmed, “to the server in his workshop. That’s where the video files from the camera were being stored. We used the plasma torch to completely destroy the hard drives in that server.”

“Did you also trace the wires to the wireless router under the stairs?”

“Of course,” Vlad said.

“Did you know that this router had a hard drive built into it? Used to back up all files on the network?”

Silence.

Vlad the computer expert was turning red. Igor noticed this and held out a hand to steady him. “It has been, what, two weeks,” Igor said. “Nothing has happened. The police know nothing of these things. They will never think to collect such evidence.”

Sokolov sat there impassively, waiting for Igor to figure it out.

“If they had found this, why have they not come to arrest us?” Igor demanded, sounding almost like a self-righteous, upstanding citizen, scandalized by the complacency of the local cops.

“Unless,” Vlad said, “they have put us under surveillance.”

“Why would they bother if they already have evidence?”

Vlad said, “It would be a major investigation. Not just of burglary but kidnapping, murder, other things. International spy shit. They don’t give a shit about people like us. A couple of burglars!” he scoffed. “They would put on the surveillance and hope that sooner or later someone more important would get in touch with us.”

Four eyes turned toward Sokolov.

There was a long pause. Igor raised the fingertips of both hands to his temples, making his huge fat hands into blinders, tunneling his vision at Sokolov.

“Fucking asshole!” Igor finally said. “Why did I let you into my house?”

“Stupid, greedy motherfucker,” Sokolov said. “The money wasn’t enough. You had to go back. Steal some more.”

“Hey, calm down!” Vlad squeaked. “We don’t even know if the cops found the video.”

“The uncle of Zula is a billionaire, moron,” Sokolov said. “He would bring in investigators of his own. There is nothing they would not find.”

Something occurred to Igor and he exclaimed “Fuck!” then made a grab for his phone. Sokolov’s hand jerked toward the Makarov in his jacket pocket, but he restrained the urge to draw a weapon—as did Vlad, watching him attentively.

Igor made a one-button call: a redial. “It’s better that you don’t come,” he announced into the phone. Then listened to a blast of verbal abuse that forced him to pull the device away from his ear. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’ll explain later. Turn the car around. Don’t come.”

“You invited some others to the pizza party?” Sokolov asked, after Igor had shut off his phone, terminating more furious denunciations.

Igor held his hands out. “I am sorry, Mr. Sokolov, but I must answer to certain people; and when you showed up, I had to make them aware of the fact that you were here.”

“Are there any other ways you have fucked me that I have not been made aware of yet?”

The fat hands became flesh pistols, index fingers aiming at Sokolov’s eyes. “I never should have worked with you. Now, the cops will come, I’ll do time. Be deported.”

“Doing time. Getting in trouble. All very normal for a man who breaks into another man’s house and steals his computer and his rifle. If you had just followed my orders—”

“Why should I take orders from you, motherfucker?”

“Because I actually know what I am doing.”

“Then how did you end up in this fucking situation?”

It was a fair question, and it rocked Sokolov for a moment.

In that interval, Vlad noticed something. “They’re coming,” he said.

Sokolov looked up at him to see that Vlad was gazing out the house’s front window.

“Who’s coming?” Igor asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” Vlad said.

Instinctively, Sokolov dropped to a crouch and peered over the sill of the front window, down the length of the cul-de-sac. A dark SUV, headlights on, was headed up the street, moving at little better than a walking pace.

“Why headlights?” Vlad asked.

“To blind us!” Igor said.

“It’s a rental,” Sokolov suggested. “The lights come on automatically.”

“Who rents a car for a bust like this?”

“Not cops,” Vlad supposed. “Guys from out of town.”

“What kind of guys?”

“Maybe private dicks? Hired by billionaire uncle?”

“Fuck!” Igor said, and stomped over to the corner of the living room. He hauled the rifle case down from the shelf.

“What were you thinking of doing with that?” Sokolov asked him. The two options he could think of were to hide it, so that it couldn’t be used as evidence, or to take it out and start using it.

“I am not going back to Russia,” Igor said. As if this answered the question. Which it didn’t. “I’ve got an escape route out the back.”