Neal Stephenson - Reamde

He took pictures of the plaza and the hotel. Ostensibly. In truth, of course, what he was really doing was using the viewfinder of his phone to stare back at all the Chinese people who were staring at them.

Sokolov had never been a spy per se, but he had undergone a bit of training in basic spycraft as part of his transition into private commerce. Spies were supposed to have a strong intuitive sense of when they had been noticed, when someone else’s eyes were on them. Or at least that was the line of bullshit that the spycraft trainers liked to lay on their students. If true, then no Western spy could tolerate even a few seconds’ exposure to a Chinese street, since that internal sense would be setting off alarms continuously—and by no means false alarms. If they had dressed up in clown suits, strapped strobe lights to their foreheads, and sprinted out into traffic firing tommy guns into the air, they would not have drawn more immediate and intense scrutiny than they did simply by entering this public space as non-Chinese persons. Sokolov could only laugh. He had thought it might be otherwise, simply because Xiamen had such a long history of contact with the outside world.

Of course, it would be that way everywhere. They were not merely noticed. They were famous .

And, because he did everything in the backseat of a car with tinted windows, Ivanov did not understand these realities. Sokolov would never be able to explain to him the difficulty of doing anything discreetly in this city.

“Into hotel. Use Internet,” Sokolov said. Shrugging off propositions from taxi drivers, they trudged along the edge of the plaza to the hotel, leaving in their wake a hundred ordinary Chinese citizens who stopped in their tracks to stare at them as they went by. A fair proportion of these literally had their mouths hanging open. Sokolov, determinedly not meeting their eyes, looked at other things and counted eight security cameras that he could see .

Observed from various distances by at least six uniformed members of the security forces, operating in pairs, they trudged up the steps of the hotel. Two dozen taxi drivers, sitting in their vehicles outside, watched their every move through the hotel’s glass doors, in case they might change their minds and come back out.

As he’d expected, most of the hotel’s clientele were Chinese, and so their little party came in for further inspection as they stood around uncertainly in the lobby. He’d imagined that they might be able to sit down on some comfortable chairs and order tea and look at newspapers. But this was not that sort of lobby. Rather than make an ongoing spectacle of themselves, Sokolov led the others straight to the elevators and hit the button with the image of Colonel Sanders next to it. A minute later they were on the roof. But the restaurant wasn’t open yet.

“I got Wi-Fi,” said Csongor, looking at the screen of his PDA.

“Fine,” Sokolov said. “We leave.”

They took the elevator back down, walked out the front doors, and got into a taxi. “Hyatt,” Sokolov said. He knew there was a Hyatt because the pilots were lodged there. It was out near the airport.

“Okay, so we have one IP address at least,” Csongor said, during the drive.

Sokolov was taking phone pictures out the window, getting shots mostly of hotels. This five-minute adventure had told him that Western-style business hotels were the only places in Xiamen where they could do so much as draw breath without being the talk of the town for weeks afterward.

“Anywhere near the address space we’re interested in?” asked Zula.

“In fact, yes!” said Csongor. “They use the same ISP. Which isn’t saying much, of course.”

“It’s a start,” Zula said.

They went to the Hyatt and ordered breakfast.

In the vicinity of the airport, vast development projects were under way: a number of commercial real estate parks and one international conference center with a giant windowed sphere in front of it. Sokolov longed to hide himself in their anonymity and emptiness. But they were so disconnected from the city proper that he might as well have tried to hunt down the Troll from a shopping mall in Toronto.

Banners on every lamppost sported pictures of the local hero, Zheng Chenggong. A similar but much larger banner had been mounted to the front of the new conference center. Apparently this image was the official logo of the conference that had attracted the multinational fleet of small jets: something to do with patching up relations between Taiwan and mainland China.

As they picked at their omelets, Sokolov asked Csongor (who had logged on to the Hyatt’s Wi-Fi network) to google up a list of four- and five-star hotels. Csongor not only did that; he figured out a way to patch in to the Hyatt’s business center and printed out the list. A member of the hotel staff brought it to their table on a little tray.

They went outside and got in a taxi. Sokolov pointed to a hotel on Csongor’s printout, and the taxi took them there. It was back in the middle of town, closer to the waterfront. They went into the lobby and found a place to sit down. While Csongor got on the Internet, Sokolov watched the way guests interacted with the front desk staff and the concierge.

They did the same thing eight times at eight different hotels. It took them until midafternoon.

Then they took a taxi back to the hotel that had the best concierge. Sokolov had Zula go to the concierge, a young woman who spoke excellent English and gave every impression of actually enjoying her job. Zula explained that she and her friends wanted to go on a leisurely drive around town and see some of the less touristy sites, maybe go shopping in local markets.

The concierge led them out front and explained as much to a taxi driver. Sokolov, Zula, and Csongor crammed themselves into the taxi’s backseat. The driver offered to let Sokolov ride up front, but Sokolov wanted to remain partly concealed behind the tinted windows in the rear.

Until now they had never seen anything other than modern commercial districts, but within twenty seconds of their pulling out of the hotel drive, the taxi was deep in one of those older neighborhoods that had attracted Sokolov’s interest.

Csongor had a laptop open and was continually scanning for available Wi-Fi stations. Most of these were password protected, but every so often he found one that was open and checked its IP address.

Zula meanwhile was using Csongor’s phone, which had built-in GPS, to keep track of their latitude and longitude. This wouldn’t have been necessary in New York or some other city where they could have made sense of the street grid, but here it was the only way that they could tally Csongor’s observations against the physical geography of the city.

If the taxi moved much faster than walking pace, Wi-Fi stations came and went too quickly for Csongor to establish connections, but this rarely happened. Whenever a clear place opened up in traffic, it would be seized by a gaunt man in a conical hat pulling a two-wheeled cart. Those guys were all over the place; they seemed to have a stranglehold on transport of all goods weighing less than a ton. If the taxi driver honked for long enough, the offending carter would eventually pull aside and make way.

After they had been driving around somewhat aimlessly for twenty minutes, the taxi driver made a phone call and then handed his phone back to Zula. With a nervous glance toward Sokolov, Zula accepted the phone.

Then she smiled and took the phone away from her head. “It’s the concierge,” she explained. “She hopes we are enjoying the tour so far, and she wants to know what sorts of things we would like to shop for.”

“Some of the men carry small bags, like purses,” Sokolov said. “I want one.”