Neal Stephenson - Reamde

It was important for them to understand. Zula sighed and looked at each of them in turn. “First of all, Ivanov is planning to kill us no matter what happens. That’s just obvious.” She let that hang in the still air of the cellar for a few moments. “Which doesn’t mean that we are going to die. Because Sokolov thinks Ivanov is crazy and he will intervene to prevent Ivanov from killing us. All of that is out of our hands. We’ve been asked to give up these hackers, who are basically just a bunch of harmless kids, so that Ivanov can kill them. And we just simply can’t do that. It’s just wrong. It’s not how people behave. So I lied to the Russians.”

Peter said “Shit!” and dropped to his hands and knees—or rather hand and knee since one hand was fixed to a banister—and began feeling around on the floor like a man who’d lost a contact lens. But he couldn’t seem to find it. “Zula!” he hissed. “You have a bobby pin in there?”

“You mean, in my hair ?”

“Yeah.”

Zula could not hold back a sigh and an eye roll, but then she pulled a bobby pin from her hair and flung it at Peter.

“Do you have any more?” asked Csongor.

Zula threw him another one.

People who watched too many movies about hackers had all sorts of ludicrous ideas about what they were capable of. In general, they hugely overestimated hackers’ ability to do certain things. But there was one area in which hackers were routinely underestimated, and that was lock picking. For them, picking locks was a nice way to kick back and relax after a long day of doing pen tests on corporate networks. No hacker loft was complete without a shoebox full of old locks, handcuffs, and so on, that these guys would sit around and pick just for the fun of it. Zula had always been a spectator, not a participant, and now wished that she had paid more attention. But she was pretty sure that Peter and Csongor would have this part of the problem solved rather soon and that they could then run out the door and free Yuxia from her captivity in the van.

“The Russians will go to 505 and kick the door down and probably make some noise,” Zula said. “I am hoping that this will alert the kids in 405 and that they’ll have a chance to get out of there.” Having nothing else to do, she went back to jiggling the fuse in the socket.

“What about the people who are actually living in Apartment 505?” Peter asked. “Did you ever think of that?”

“It’s vacant,” Zula said. But Peter’s question had made her nervous that she might have made a mistake, so she found the label that, she was pretty sure, read “505” and verified that the fuse socket was empty.

Which it was. But this time she noticed a detail she’d missed the first time around. There was no fuse screwed into the socket, that much was true. But there was something gleaming in there, something other than an empty socket. She dropped to one knee to get a better look at it.

A disk of silver metal was lodged in the socket.

The fuse had been bypassed; someone had jammed a coin into it, which was a very unsafe thing to do for a number of reasons.

“What are you seeing?” Csongor asked.

“I wonder if 505 might actually have some squatters living in it?” Zula said. “Can I borrow your flashlight?”

Csongor tossed her the tiny LED flashlight that he carried in his pocket. She aimed it into the hole and verified that the gap between the contacts had in fact been bridged by a silver coin stuffed into the hole.

It was not a Chinese coin, or any kind of coin that Zula had ever seen. It was stamped, not with an image of a person’s profile or any other sort of normal coin art, but a crescent moon with a little star between its horns.

THE CARTER RETURNED after a few minutes. A small, bald man was trotting behind him, carrying a bag of tools.

As he drew closer Yuxia got his attention through the windshield and waved him over toward the passenger’s seat. She unlocked the door. He opened it and climbed in, a bit tentatively, since it might be considered improper for a strange man to enter a vehicle with a solitary female.

“Close the door please, I need to talk to you for a moment,” Yuxia said.

He closed the door, giving her a weird look, as if Yuxia might be running the world’s most complicated and opaque scam. Which perhaps she was. For the time being, though, she was not allowing him to see her handcuffed wrist.

The carter had pulled up close along the driver’s side of the van. “Go over there please and wait,” Yuxia said, nodding at the front of the building. “I will pay you for your trouble once my problem is solved.”

The carter, somewhat suspicious and somewhat reluctant, withdrew a couple of meters.

Yuxia turned to the locksmith and gave him a big smile. “Surprise!” she exclaimed, and displayed the handcuff.

She was afraid that the poor man might have a heart attack. Yuxia had her left hand on the lock button, ready to lock him in the van if he tried to bolt. He probably would have done exactly that if she had been a man, but because she was a young woman he apparently felt that the decent thing was to hear her out.

“A bad man did this to me,” she said, “and so, as you can see, it is probably a matter for the police. I will call them once I am free. But right now I really need to get this thing off my wrist. Can you help me, please?”

He hesitated.

“It’s hurting me very badly,” she whined. Talking this way was not her style, but she had seen other women do it with effect.

The locksmith cursed under his breath and unzipped his bag.

LIKE ANY RUSSIAN, Sokolov enjoyed a game of chess. At some level he was never not playing it! Every morning he woke up and looked at the tiles on the ceiling of the office that was his bedroom and reviewed the positions of all the pieces and thought about all the moves that they might make today, what countermoves he would have to make to maximize his chances of survival.

He had heard somewhere, though, that, mathematically speaking, the game of Go was more difficult than chess, in the sense that the tree of possible moves and countermoves was much vaster: far too vast even for a supercomputer to work through all the possibilities. Computer chess programs had been written that could challenge a Kasparov, but no computer program could give a high-level Go player a game that was even moderately challenging. Supposedly you couldn’t even think about Go as a logical series of specific moves and countermoves; you had to think visually, recognizing patterns and developing intuitions.

As of thirty seconds ago—when Zula had done whatever the hell she had done—this had changed from a game of chess into a game of Go.

It might be that Zula had made the decision to give Ivanov what he wanted, sell out the Troll, and hope for Ivanov’s mercy. If that were the case, then a few seconds from now they would be invading an apartment full of terrified Chinese hackers and something regrettable was going to happen. Why, oh why, had Ivanov come in from the van? Why was he following them up the stairs? If he’d simply stayed down in the van, Sokolov might have been able to finesse the situation, perhaps emerge from the building with one hacker in tow while letting the others escape. Perhaps Ivanov would have been satisfied with scaring the hell out of that one hacker, roughing him up a little bit. After which Sokolov would have had to divine the boss’s intentions regarding Zula. He’d already made up his mind that he would, if necessary, physically intervene to protect her. Even if it meant killing Ivanov.

On the other hand, it might be that Zula had sent them on a wild goose chase. That they were about to break into a vacant apartment. In which case all hell was going to break loose when Ivanov realized that Zula had fucked him and that the hackers who had fucked him earlier were escaping from the building. That was really the point where it turned into a game of Go, because Sokolov couldn’t even begin to think rationally about the tree of moves and countermoves that would branch out from such an event.