Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Toronto,” Wallace said.

“How—what—?—!”

“I gather,” Wallace said, “that while we were playing T’Rain, Mr. Ivanov chartered a flight from Toronto to Boeing Field.”

Peter stared out the window, watched a corporate jet—Ivanov’s?—landing.

“Google Maps? He knows my name?”

“Yes, Peter!” said Ivanov on the speakerphone.

“You might recall,” said Wallace, “that when I arrived, the first thing I did was to send an email message using the Tigmaster access point.”

“You lied to me, Wallace!” said Ivanov.

“I lied to Mr. Ivanov,” Wallace confirmed. “I told him that I was delayed in south-central British Columbia by car trouble and that I would email him the file of credit card numbers in a few hours.”

“Csongor was too smart for you!” Ivanov said.

“What the fuck is CHONGOR?” Peter asked.

“Who. Not what. A hacker who handles our affairs. My email message to Mr. Ivanov passed through Csongor’s servers. He noticed that the originating IP address was not, in fact, in British Columbia.”

“Csongor traced the message to this building by looking up the IP address,” Peter said in a dull voice.

Thunking noises from the phone. “We are in car,” said Ivanov, as if this would be a comfort to them.

“How can they already be in a fucking car?!” Peter asked.

“That’s how it is when you travel by private jet.”

“Don’t they have to go through customs?”

“They would have done that in Toronto.”

Peter made up his mind about something, strode across the loft, and pulled a hanging cloth aside to reveal a gun safe standing against the wall. He began to punch a number into its keypad.

“Oh holy shit,” Zula said.

Wallace hit the mute button on his phone. “What is Peter doing?”

“Getting his new toy,” Zula said.

“His snowboard?”

“Assault rifle.”

“I have lost connection to Wallace!” Ivanov said. “Wallace? WALLACE!”

“Peter? PETER!” Wallace shouted.

“Who is there?” Ivanov wanted to know. “I hear female voice sayink holy shit.” Then he switched to Russian.

Peter had got the safe open, revealing the assault rifle in question: the only thing he owned on which he had spent more time shopping than the snowboard. It had every kind of cool dingus hanging off it that money could buy: laser sight, folding bipod, and stuff of which Zula did not know the name.

Wallace said, “Peter. The gun. In other circumstances, maybe. These guys here, down on the street? You might have a chance. Local guys. Nobodies. But.” He waved the phone around. “He’s brought Sokolov with him.” As if this were totally conclusive.

“Who the fuck is Sokolov?” Peter wanted to know.

“A bad person to get into a gunfight with. Close the safe. Take it easy.”

Peter hesitated. On the speakerphone, Ivanov had escalated to shouting in Russian.

“I’m dead,” Wallace said. “I’m a dead man, Peter. You and Zula might live through this. If you close that safe.”

Peter seemingly couldn’t move.

Zula walked over to him. Her intention, in doing so, was to close the safe before anything crazy happened. But when she got there, she found herself taking a good long look at the assault rifle.

She knew how to use it better than Peter did.

On the speakerphone, the one called Sokolov began to speak in Russian. In contrast to Ivanov, he had all the emotional range of an air traffic controller.

“Zula?” Wallace asked, in a quiet voice.

Down in the bay, the voice of Sokolov was coming out of someone’s phone. Feet began to pound up the steps.

“Clips,” Peter said. “I don’t have any clips loaded. Just loose cartridges. Remember?”

Peter, that is not a home defense weapon, she had told him when he’d bought himself the gun for Christmas. If you fire that thing at a burglar, it’s going to kill some random person half a mile away.

“Well then,” Zula said, and slammed the door.

They turned to see a great big potato of a shaven-headed man reaching the top of the steps. He swiveled his head to take a census of the people in the room: Peter and Zula, then Wallace. Then his head snapped back to Peter and Zula as he took in the detail of the gun safe. The look on his face might have been comical in some other circumstances. Zula displayed the palms of her hands and, after a moment, so did Peter. They moved away from the gun safe. The big man hustled over and checked its door and verified that it was locked. He muttered something and they heard it echo, an instant later, on Wallace’s speakerphone.

Wallace unmuted it. “I am sorry, Mr. Ivanov,” he said. “We had a little argument.”

“Makink me nervous.”

“Nothing to be nervous about, sir.”

“This can’t just be about the credit card numbers,” Peter said. “No one would charter a private jet just because you lied to them in an email about when the credit card numbers would be available.”

“You’re right,” Wallace said. “It’s not just about the credit card numbers.”

“What’s it about then?”

“Larger issues raised by last night’s events.”

“Such as?”

“The integrity and security of all the other files that were on my laptop.”

“What kind of files were those?”

“It’s unbelievably fucking stupid for you to ask,” Wallace pointed out.

“Explanation is comink,” said Ivanov. “We are here.”

Zula stepped closer to one of the windows in the front of the building and saw a black town car pulling up.

Two men who had been loitering outside approached the car and opened its back doors.

From the passenger side emerged a stout man in a dinner jacket. From behind the driver emerged a lithe man in pajamas, a leather jacket thrown over the pajama top. Both had phones pressed to their heads, which they now, in perfect synchrony, folded shut and pocketed.

One of the two loiterers escorted the new arrivals to Peter’s front door. This opened into a corridor leading back to the groundfloor bay where the cars were parked.

The other loiterer was clad only in jeans and a T-shirt, which made him underdressed for the weather. He went over to a beat-up old van parked in front of the building. He opened the rear cargo doors, leaned in, and then heaved a long object onto his shoulder. He backed away and kicked the van’s doors shut. The object on his shoulder was a box about four feet in length and maybe a foot square, bearing the logo of the big home improvement store down the street, and labeled CONTRACTOR’S PLASTIC 6 MIL POLYETHYLENE SHEETING. He carried it into the bay and pulled the front door closed behind him.

THE MAN IN the pajamas came up the stairs first and spent a few moments strolling around the room looking at everything and everyone. “Vwallace,” he said to Wallace.

“Sokolov,” Wallace said in return.

From the way that Wallace had spoken of him, Zula had half expected Sokolov to be eight feet tall and carrying a chainsaw. She was pretty certain, though, that he was not carrying any weapons at all. He was wiry, looking perhaps like a shooting guard for the Red Army basketball team. His thinness made it easy to underestimate his age, which was probably in the middle forties. He had sandy hair with traces of gray. It looked as if it had been buzz cut about six months ago and little tended since then. His chin was stubbled, but he didn’t naturally grow whiskers on his cheeks. He had a big nose and a big Adam’s apple and large eyes whose color was difficult to pin down, as it depended on what he was looking at. When he looked at Zula, they were blue and showed no trace of personal connection, as if viewing her through a one-way mirror. Same with Peter. He went into the bathroom and looked behind the door. He checked the closets. He looked behind sofas and under beds. He found the door that led into the adjoining unit where Peter had been hanging sheetrock. He disappeared into it for a few moments, then emerged and said a word in Russian.