Reamde: A Novel Read online

  “That one can’t be Csongor,” Sokolov, “since they don’t really know him.”

  “Then either Peter or Zula always stays here. Unless—?”

  “Zula will not create trouble if she knows Peter is hostage,” Sokolov began. “However, if the situation is reversed—”

  “I knew it!” Ivanov slammed the table, and his face turned red. To him, Sokolov’s vague suspicion that Peter might be the kind of guy who would betray Zula was ontologically the same as a You-Tube video of him actually doing it. He seemed ready to kill Peter on the spot. Sokolov, for his part, was gratified that Ivanov trusted his intuitions in this way, but he could not help wondering if he’d judged Peter unfairly.

  “This is just my guess,” Sokolov said.

  “No, you are right! Peter stays here then. Zula goes out with Csongor. And you send two of your men with them at all times.”

  “Sir, I request permission to go out with them alone,” Sokolov said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I have seen nothing of the city other than what I can see from this window.”

  “Fine. Good idea. Go out and learn more of the place. You’ll see more than you want to see, I can tell you that.”

  Sokolov turned toward the window. The hackers, as Ivanov called them, were standing outside, awaiting orders. He indicated with a movement of his head that they should enter.

  Csongor, Zula, and Peter filed into the room and stood across the conference table from Ivanov, pretending they had not noticed the sack full of currency. Ivanov switched to English. “Much time has gone by sleepink, flyink, sleepink. Easy to forget nature of mission. Do you recall mission?”

  “Figure out who the Troll is,” Peter said.

  Ivanov stared at Peter as if he had said something deeply offensive. And in truth, there was nothing Peter could have said that would have helped him.

  “Find motherfucker who fucked me!” Ivanov shouted, so loudly that he could have been heard in Vladivostok.

  He let that one ring in their ears for a few moments. The hackers were physically shriveling, like raisins.

  “You need to pound pavement!” Ivanov asserted.

  Peter’s eyes flicked toward Sokolov.

  “You look at me!” Ivanov shouted.

  “Yes, sir,” Peter said. “Yes. We need to move around the city, get on the Internet in different places, check the IP addresses—”

  “And send distress call home to mama!?” Ivanov inquired.

  Peter’s face had been red from the beginning, but now it got redder.

  “You, stay here,” Ivanov said. “Help make map or somethink.” He looked at Zula. “Lovely Zula, you pound pavement in company of Csongor.” He turned his attention to Csongor. “Csongor, you are only person who touches computer.” He shook his finger. “No email, no Facebook, no Twitter. And if there is some other such thing I have not heard of yet—none of that either!”

  In English, Ivanov said, “Only exception to rule: Zula can play T’Rain if necessary. Csongor, Sokolov will watch carefully, make sure nothink funny happens.”

  Zula and Csongor nodded.

  Ivanov half turned and extended a hand toward Sokolov. “Sokolov will be present at all times to protect you from harm and ensure rules are followed. If rules are broken in serious way, if Zula goes to powder room and never comes back, any other such problem, then I must have extremely serious conversation with Root of All Evil here.” He extended his hands toward Peter in a gesture whose natural conclusion would have been out-and-out strangulation.

  “Everyone understand rules?” Ivanov said.

  Everyone nodded.

  “Go pound pavement.” He reached into the bag, pulled out as many stacks of bills as he could grab in a single hand, and slid them down the table to Sokolov. “Except for Peter. You.” He gestured toward Peter as if the room contained more than one person of that name. “Stay for brief discussion.”

  Sokolov picked up the money, then backed to the door and held it open as Zula and Csongor exited the room. No one could look at Peter, who had become a nearly unbearable sight on grounds of posture alone: shoulders drawn together, body trembling, back of neck brilliant red. Sokolov was favorably impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants. Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common if it was a straightforward matter of extreme emotional stress. Pants pissing was completely unproductive and suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion. Sokolov could have forgiven Peter for shitting his pants, but if he had pissed his pants, then it really would have been necessary to get rid of him. In any case, Peter had done neither of these things yet.

  A minute or two later, though, after they had gathered near the reception area with their water bottles and day packs, Sokolov noted Zula—who had kept a stony face through most of this—looking with concern through the glass wall of the conference room at Peter, who was still being arraigned, or something, by Ivanov.

  Something had changed, though. Ivanov was still gesturing, but instead of punching and strangling, his hands were making neat little chopping gestures on the tabletop, sketching concentric circles, reaching out toward the city beyond the window and gathering in imaginary stuff and pouring it out on the table. Peter was nodding his head and even moving his jaw from time to time.

  Peter was interested.

  “Is okay,” Sokolov said. “He works for Ivanov now.”

  IVANOV HAD OFFERED to rent them a car and driver, but Sokolov guessed they would learn more by using taxis. They took the elevator down to the parking garage, found a fire exit, climbed up a windowless concrete stairway, and emerged into a strip of landscaping. This led along the side of the building out to the edge of the waterfront avenue. Sokolov pivoted and took a phone picture of the building from which they had just emerged. Later, when he wanted to go back to the safe house, he could show it to a taxi driver. They were already perspiring freely, or perhaps that was just the humidity condensing on their artificially chilled skin. Sokolov had acquired a blazer from an airport shop in Vladivostok, which he now removed, folded, and placed in his shoulder bag on top of the magenta bundles.

  The drivers of the taxis that flocked and schooled in the plaza before the KFC-topped hotel were confounded by, and almost indignant at, the manner in which the three Westerners had seemingly teleported into existence in this normally unfrequented corner. It was clearly their habit to keep an eye on every place from which a possible customer could sortie. Westerners on foot, unnoticed and unpestered, were as much an affront to civic order as gushing fire hydrants and warbling car alarms. Sokolov had the feeling that the next time they came out of that fire exit, there would be at least one taxi waiting for them. It was not a good feeling.

  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, s
imply 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.”

  Zula relayed that into the phone and then handed it back to the taxi driver, who listened for a few moments, then snapped the phone shut and effected a course change. Ten minutes later they had pulled up in front of a little storefront piled high with leather goods. Sokolov and Zula got out of the taxi, leaving Csongor in the vehicle with his laptop.

  As Sokolov had come to expect, this was the most sensational thing that had happened in this district of Xiamen since Zheng Chenggong had chased away the Dutch pirates and so, as they shopped for luggage, they were enjoyed by a vast audience of fascinated neighbors, aged family members of the proprietors who had been hastily summoned from upstairs via phone, random passersby, flabbergasted carters, and professional beggars who carefully tracked their every movement, talked about them, and found sudden humor in details so minor that Sokolov was not entirely sure what they were reacting to. He quickly settled on a leather man-purse that looked as if it could comfortably accommodate several currency bricks, with plenty of room left over for some ammo clips and a ­couple of stun grenades, and he was about to pay the quoted price when Zula intervened and proposed a somewhat lower figure. This led to haggling, which, as it turned out, Zula was good at. Not in the sense of being an absolute bitch about it but in the sense of remaining on good terms with the proprietor even while firmly insisting that the price was too high. And so finally Sokolov was granted an unbroken stretch of twenty or thirty seconds in which he could actually turn his attention to the neighborhood and try to gather in some impressions of the place.

  Al
l the buildings were made of concrete, or perhaps bricks or stone blocks with mortar troweled over them. It didn’t really matter. The point was that the walls would stop low-velocity rounds and shotgun pellets, and you couldn’t kick your way through them. They would not burn very easily. Depending on how much rebar had been used—and his guess was that the builders had cut plenty of corners in that department—these structures, compared to wood- or steel-framed ones, would be more vulnerable to collapse under the exceptionally stressful conditions that frequently obtained when men like Sokolov were earning their pay. They were four or five stories high, which meant that they did not have elevators and that, if it was like Europe, the highest floors would house the poorest people. Ground floors tended to be retail; upper stories were offices (on larger streets) or apartments (smaller). Apartments quite frequently sported small balconies, but these had invariably been retrofitted with grids of steel bars, even on the upper floors—apparently burglars here climbed walls and abseiled from rooftops. The grids themselves looked eminently climbable and so might be handy for gaining access to a roof when doors were locked, or to depart from a building when stairwells were filled with products of combustion or men with guns who wanted to kill him. Some ropes might come in handy. But really, when wasn’t that the case?

  Street widths ranged from one meter (pedestrians only) to perhaps eight meters (all traffic).

  Wiring was external and informal in the extreme. Some of the bundles strung across streets were as thick as his torso, and it was obvious that they had begun as one individual wire that had accreted more wires over time.

  “Okay,” Zula said, “one hundred.” She was looking at him. So was the shopkeeper.

  Sokolov pulled a C-note equivalent ten-stack from his pocket, peeled off a bill, and handed it over. The man-purse was his. The audience began to disperse. Show was over.

  Back in the taxi, Sokolov said: “Same procedure. Buy some other stuff.”

  “What would you like to buy?”

  “Does not matter.”