Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Five minutes after Manu departed from the wangba, ” Csongor said, “another guy showed up dribbling a basketball and took his place.”

“The bandit-killers work in shifts around the clock,” Zula said, translating that.

During the last minute or so, the security consultants had been climbing into the van and taking seats one by one. There weren’t enough seats and so one of them ended up sort of wedged into the space between the driver’s and passenger’s buckets up front. Sokolov slammed the rear doors closed and got in last and claimed a space that had been reserved for him.

“Everyone ready?” Yuxia called out, in a voice that easily penetrated to the back row.

Response was muted but affirmative.

Ivanov looked to the security consultant seated between him and Yuxia, and they exchanged a nod. Ivanov reached out with his left hand and placed it over Yuxia’s right hand, clamping it in place on the steering wheel. At the same moment, the security consultant reached forward and slapped a handcuff down over Yuxia’s wrist. A moment after that he had snapped the other half of the cuff over the steering wheel. Ivanov removed his hand.

“What the fuck !?” Yuxia exclaimed, pulling her hand back, testing the cuff, still convincing herself that this was really happening.

“For your benefit,” Ivanov explained.

“ Benefit!? ”

“When there is investigation by PSB, they will see handcuff, see that you had no choice, find you innocent.”

“Innocent of fishing ?”

Ivanov opened his jacket, letting Yuxia see a shoulder holster. “Huntink.” He snapped his fingers and Sokolov handed him a map printed, apparently, from Google. It showed a satellite photo of Xiamen with streets superimposed.

“Zula! What is going on, girlfriend?” Yuxia called.

“They kidnapped me,” Zula said. “I tried to escape last night and warn you but they caught me. I am sorry you got mixed up in this.” She had told herself last night that this would be the last of crying, but tears came freely to her eyes now.

Yuxia caught that detail in the rearview mirror. “I am going to fuck you up, motherfucker!” she told Ivanov.

“Perhaps later,” Ivanov said dryly.

“It won’t help to talk to him like that, Bigfoot,” Zula said.

“We go now,” Ivanov said, “and all will be fine at end of day, exception being for Troll.” He reached over and shifted the van into drive, then gave Yuxia an expectant look.

“Who is Troll?” Yuxia said in a sullen voice. But she gave it some gas and pulled out onto the waterfront road.

Now that they were in movement toward a destination only half a mile away, a fairly basic question occurred to Zula: “Why are we even being brought along on this? Anyone know?”

“Apparently the building contains something like eighty separate units,” Peter said. “Some vacant, some not. These guys don’t know which unit the Troll is living in. They can’t just go down the hallways kicking in eighty doors; somebody will call the cops.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Zula said.

“They have convinced themselves,” Csongor said, “that if the three of us get inside the building, we can determine which unit contains the Troll.”

“Why do they believe that?”

“Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”

THE DRIVE TOOK a little while; they could have done it faster on foot. Sokolov was in occasional touch with other Russians on his walkie-talkie, which Zula had to assume was some kind of whiz-bang encrypted device, otherwise the PSB would be all over them. Since two of the Russians were missing from the van, she reckoned that Sokolov had sent out an advance party.

Csongor, who had reasonable command of Russian, supplied running translation of the walkie-talkie traffic: “He sent two guys there when it was still dark. They found a way into the building. They have been hanging out in a room in the cellar that no one uses. Accessible by a back entrance. That is where we are going.”

Yuxia, following directions from Sokolov, steered them down a street so narrow that both rearview mirrors had to be folded in against the sides of the van, and local residents had to run out into the street to pull caged poultry and large flat baskets of green tea out of their path. After a few agonizingly slow and controversial minutes of this kind of progress, they came athwart of an alley, no wider than a doorway, on their right side. The Russian on the other end of the walkie-talkie connection yelped out a single word. “Stop,” Sokolov said.

They opened the right side door of the van. The Russians filed out of it into the alley and made a bucket brigade: Peter reached behind the seat and pulled out coolers and other gear, which he handed forward to Sokolov who tossed them a few feet to one of his men in the alley, and in this fashion the equipment was moved into the building’s back entrance. This was impossible to see clearly, back there in the darkness, but seemed to be twenty or thirty feet distant, on the alley’s left side. Meanwhile Zula tried to make sense of her surroundings as best she could from twisting around in her seat and craning her neck out the windows.

If the alley to their right was the back entrance, then this street ran along the side of the Troll’s building, and they were now parked at its back corner. The ground floor sported some large openings sealed off by grimy steel roll-up doors. Above those were some corrugated metal awnings, holed with rust, that stretched partway across the street above the van and made it impossible for her to see much of the upper stories.

Looking out the windshield, she could see an intersection about fifty feet ahead of them where this side street was crossed by a wider one that was crammed with the usual flow of mostly pedestrian and bicycle traffic. That street seemed to belong to a more well-illuminated part of the universe, and Zula guessed it was because construction was under way on the far side of it: the building across the street was covered with scaffolding and blue tarps, and beyond it was a gaping cavity in the city’s fabric where an arcology or something was being thrown up.

That was all Zula could see before Sokolov indicated it was time for them to make themselves useful. Csongor, Zula, and Peter clambered out over a folded-down van seat and exited into the alley. Sokolov closed the side door of the van, then followed them down the alley toward the back entrance. Yuxia, presumably following instructions from Ivanov who was still riding shotgun, pulled forward and out of view.

A minor controversy was under way in the alley, where an old lady was leaning out of her second-floor window hollering some kind of invective down at the Russians. Zula enjoyed a moment’s hope that this woman would call the PSB. Sokolov looked up at her for a few moments, then reached into his man-purse, pulled out a half-inch-thick stack of money, let her see it—this shut her up—and then hurled it at her. It shot past her through the window and thumped against something inside. She withdrew her head and closed the window. Sokolov never broke stride.

A half flight of concrete stairs descended into a basement corridor lit by a few bare lightbulbs. The security consultants waved them down a corridor for twenty paces or so, and into a room filled with blue-gray light sifting in through a couple of dirty sidewalk-level windows. This was situated adjacent to the bottom of what Zula guessed was the building’s main stairway. It wasn’t difficult to see that the building had been designed around a central core that included not only the stairway but all the other stuff that had to run vertically: the plumbing, the power, the sewer lines. So this room was replete with pipes, valves, meters, crazy electrical wiring, and fuse panels. There was no Internet gear—in fact, no post–Second World War technology at all—which was hardly surprising, but did raise the question as to where the REAMDE guys were getting their connectivity. But all the buildings in China were webbed together with improvised wire and so they were probably pirating it from somewhere else.