Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Peter and Csongor were in the backseat. Qian Yuxia was behind the wheel. Next to her, riding shotgun, was Ivanov, talking to Yuxia in the charming style of which he had exhibited flashes during the interview in Peter’s loft in Seattle. They were talking about gaoshan cha, high mountain tea, and Ivanov’s plan to distribute it in Russia, where he was certain it would be enormously successful.

Zula was strongly encouraged to enter the van by its side door and sit in the back between Peter and Csongor. As she climbed in Yuxia greeted her with, “Good morning, girlfriend, you ready to catch some lunkers?” and Zula nodded back at her, wondering if there was anything she could say at this moment that would persuade Yuxia to put the van in gear and shove the gas pedal all the way to the floor. That would lead to a situation where they were far away from the security consultants but Ivanov would still be in the van with them. It seemed almost inconceivable that he wasn’t carrying a weapon of some kind. So what would it boot them unless Yuxia had the presence of mind to drive straight to a Public Security Bureau station and crash its front gates?

“Lots to talk about,” Peter remarked, fixing her with a dirty look.

“What the hell is she doing here?” Zula asked Csongor.

“For this operation, a van was necessary,” Csongor said. “When Ivanov heard about Yuxia, he said, ‘She’s perfect, give me her phone number,’ and then he called her and talked her into this.”

“Okay.” Zula said, not in the sense of I accept this but rather I see how horrible this is . She had a fretful feeling, now, of having missed a hell of a lot during her captivity in the ladies’ room. “But yesterday—what happened?”

“After Sokolov put you in the taxi at the wangba, he told Yuxia that it was time to buy ice chests now, and so the two of them left.” Csongor paused, maybe looking for a way to say the next part diplomatically. “I think it was on his way back from that errand that he ran into you.”

“Actually, I ran into him,” Zula said, “but go on.”

“What was that about anyway?” Peter demanded. “You could have gotten us killed!”

A new thing happened now, which was that Csongor torqued his great barrel-shaped torso toward Zula and leaned forward so that he could get a clear view of Peter. He braced one hand against the seat in front of him. The other he let fall on the top of the seat close to Zula’s head, carefully not touching her but making her feel half enveloped. He fixed Peter with a gaze that Zula would have found intimidating had it been aimed at her. Csongor’s head seemed as big as a basketball and his eyes were wide open and unblinking and aimed at Peter’s face as if connected by steel guy wires. “It was about her having her shit together,” Csongor said.

“But the Russians—” Peter began, shocked by the sudden turn in Csongor’s personality.

“The Russians loved it,” Csongor said flatly. Then, looking at Zula: “They were talking about you half the evening. You can be sure there are no hard feelings on their account. Or on mine.”

“What about him, though!?” Peter demanded, with a glance up at Ivanov. “His are the only feelings we have to worry about.”

“I’m not so sure that is the case—”

Zula held up both hands between them, then made the fists-crashing-together gesture again. “Let’s go back to the wangba if you don’t mind, since I know nothing.”

“Okay,” Csongor said. “The other Russians came upstairs and hung around with me for a while and kept an eye on the T’Rain players you spotted. We were there for six hours watching those guys. It became sort of obvious that one of them was the boss. Tall guy, a little older than the others, in a Manu jersey.”

“Manu jersey?”

“Manu Ginobili,” Peter said, almost angry that Zula did not understand the reference. “He plays for the Spurs.”

“Manu, as we called him, never played T’Rain himself, he didn’t get into it emotionally, just watched what was going on and talked on his phone constantly and told the other guys where they should send their characters and what they should do. So one of those guys”—Csongor pointed with his chin at the security consultants behind the van—“went down to the street and kept hailing taxis until he got one whose driver spoke a little bit of English. He handed the driver a stack of money and said, ‘You can keep this if you help me.’ And what he told the driver was that they were going to sit there for a while, possibly all night long, but that eventually a kid in a Manu jersey was going to emerge and then they were going to follow him.”

“I’ve never heard of Manu Ginobili,” Zula said. “Is he really such a common cultural referent that—”

“Yes,” said Peter and Csongor in unison.

“So,” Csongor continued, “after another few hours, Manu came out of the wangba, and the taxi driver followed him into one of those backstreet neighborhoods and Manu went into a certain building. The Russian and the taxi driver stayed there for another couple of hours, just watching the building, and Manu didn’t come out again. But later we did see him up on the roof shooting hoops with some other young men.”

“There’s a basketball court on the roof?”

“Not a court,” Peter said, again fuming over what he saw as an inane question. “Just a hoop! We can see it clearly from the safe house.”

“Really?”

“Really. It is all of half a mile from here, as the crow flies.”

“We can look right down on it. We were up half the night watching them through binoculars,” Csongor said.

“So it’s an office building? Apartments?” Zula asked.

“Strictly apartments,” Csongor said.

“A dump,” said Peter. “Half the block is vacant.”

“How can anything be vacant in this town?”

“One block away is a construction site,” Csongor said. “The area is under development. The building and the ones around it are probably going to be demolished within a year.”

“The taxi driver was extremely helpful once he saw the wad of cash,” Peter said. “He got out of the taxi for a smoke, asked around on the street a little bit, learned some more about the building.”

“And?”

“And it has kind of a seedy reputation. The landlord can’t write long-term leases in a building that he’s itching to tear down. But he hates leaving money on the table. So he rents on a month-to-month basis to anyone who’s willing to pay in cash, no questions asked.”

“I get the picture,” Zula said.

“So, as an example, there are various foreign tenants,” Csongor said.

“Like Filipinos?”

“No,” Csongor said with a laugh, “ internal foreigners.”

“What does that mean?”

“Chinese people who come from parts of China that are so far away and so different that they might as well be foreign countries.”

“Economic migrants,” Peter said. “Their equivalent of Mexicans.”

“Okay,” Zula said, “but Manu is not one of those.”

“It appears that Manu and a few other young guys are living together in one of the units. We don’t know which one,” Peter said. “They put up the basketball hoop on the roof. They go up there and hang around drinking beer and smoking and playing ball until all hours.”

“With laptops,” Csongor said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Yeah, even at two in the morning they have the laptops going. Their real office is somewhere down below, but they’ve obviously set up Wi-Fi to the roof.”

“So it’s believed that the Troll is one of these guys,” Zula said, trying to put this all together, “or that maybe they all, collectively, are the Troll. They’re running REAMDE out of this apartment. They’re having a problem with bandits attacking their victims when they go to the ley line intersection with ransom and so they are paying mostly younger kids to hang out at the wangba all day killing the bandits. Manu goes to the wangba to oversee them, but he’s constantly in touch with the apartment by phone.”