Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  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.

  “Can we go to the roof?” Peter asked.

  A scout ascended to the roof and reported back via walkie-talkie that none of the REAMDE boys were hanging out there at the moment. So Peter and Zula, accompanied by Sokolov, climbed six stories to the top of the stairway. Access to the roof had formerly been sealed off by a door, but the lock had been jimmied.

  The Troll’s terrace consisted of half a dozen plastic injection-molded chairs, a rusty folding table, a basketball hoop held up by a scaffolding made from plumbing parts, a tea service, a plastic tub containing a stack of magazines about the NBA, and an extension cord that trailed across the roof into the stairwell and was patched into the remains of a light fixture.

  From that same light fixture, a length of cheap two-strand lamp cable ran up to the roof of the little shack that topped the stairwell, where it disappeared under a plastic bucket held in place with a brick. A blue Ethernet cable also went under that bucket.

  Peter got a leg up from Sokolov, vaulted to the top of the shack, squirmed over to the bucket, removed the brick, and tilted it back to reveal a Wi-Fi device, green LEDs twinkling merrily.

  The blue Ethernet cable ran from it across the roof to the front of the building, then disappeared through a drain hole in the roughly meter-high parapet. Zula followed the cable to the edge, leaned over the parapet, and peered down. She was now standing near the corner of the building diagonally opposite to where they had exited the van.

  Sixty feet below her, she could see the van parked in front of the building’s main entrance, blocking traffic and creating controversy.

  The blue cable had been tucked in alongside a vertical drainpipe that ran from the drain hole in the parapet down the front of the building. At some point the cable presumably peeled away from the drainpipe and entered the building through a window or some other opening, and that would mark the location of the Troll’s apartment. In a perfect world they would have been able to see that place from this vantage point and immediately pick out the apartment in question, but no such luck; it must be hidden beneath some horizontal feature that was blocking their view. And what with all the balconies, clotheslines, awnings, and external plumbing, there were plenty of those.

  Not for the first time, Zula corrected herself: no, it was good luck, not bad, that they couldn’t figure it out; turning the Troll over to Ivanov would be a bad thing. She was a little perturbed by how easy it was for her to get caught up in the excitement of the hunt.

  Peter drifted over to her, fixated on the screen of a PDA. “The name Golgaras mean anything to you?”

  “It is the name of one of the continents of T’Rain,” Zula said.

  “How about Atheron?”

  “Same.”

  “I’m picking up four Wi-Fi access points,” Peter said. “Two of them are set to the default names and have really weak signals—I’ll bet they are in that building across the street. Golgaras is very strong, and Atheron is considerably weaker.”

  “Try unplugging that Wi-Fi unit under the bucket,” Zula suggested, “and see if one of them goes dead.”

  Peter turned and headed back to the stairwell to try the experiment.

  Zula had become interested in a bundle of improvised wiring that joined this building to the one across the street with the scaffolding and the blue tarps. It was connected to the front wall almost directly below her between the fourth and fifth stories. It was not attached at any one point but rather involved with the building through a spreading and ramifying root system. Zula was able to make out a single strand of blue Ethernet cable spiraling lazily around the outside of the bundle: the last piece of wire to have been added.

  “Ivanov requests status report,” said Sokolov, who had crunched up behind her on the pea gravel. He had plugged an earpiece into his walkie-talkie.

  “I think it’s in this corner of the building,” Zula said. “Below us somewhere. I’m going to guess it’s on the fourth or the fifth floor.”

  Sokolov relayed this into a microphone clipped to his shirt collar.

  “Golgaras went dead,” Peter reported. “Atheron is still transmitting.”

  “Meaning?” Sokolov asked.

  “We think that they have two WAPs,” Peter said. “One up here on the roof and probably one in their apartment.”

  Sokolov put his hand to his ear and listened, then asked: “Ivanov asks: What is basis for guess of this corner?”

  Zula directed his attention to the wire bundle below them. Peter and Sokolov bent over the parapet and saw what she had seen.

  “We could narrow it down more,” Peter volunteered, “if we could get a look at the building from the front. See where the blue wires enter the structure.”

  Sokolov relayed that. There was a short pause.

  “Fuck,” Sokolov said in English, and looked down. On his face, anger was mixed with something like embarrassment.

  Zula and Peter followed his gaze and saw Ivanov emerging from the passenger seat of the van. He went around to the side door, opened it up, rummaged around for a minute, and pulled out a pair of binoculars, which he pressed to his face and aimed up their way.

  Sokolov recoiled from the parapet and reached out to grab Peter and Zula, but they were already following, dropping down low where they couldn’t be seen from the street.

  “He is insane,” Sokolov said, quite matter-of-factly, as though remarking that Ivanov was 1.8 meters in height. He certainly did not say it in the ironic admiring way that a certain type of young American male might have done. But before he could elaborate on the topic, his eyes went out of focus as he received a transmission from Ivanov.

  “We go down now,” Sokolov said.

  They met Ivanov in the cellar. He had taken a phone picture of what, from his standpoint, had been the upper left quadrant of the building’s façade. Of course the screen of his phone could not even come close to resolving an object as slender as an Ethernet cable from that distance, but he was able to point out the place where, with the help of his binoculars, he had seen both of the blue wires entering the building: a small hole, most likely a vent for a kitchen fan, above the fourth story and below the fifth.

  They coun
ted the windows between the corner of the building and the location of that hole. Then they sent a security consultant up to one of the lower floors (assuming that they all had the same layout) and had him go all the way to the end of the corridor and then count doors back from there, noting the apartment numbers on the doors.

  As this was going on, Zula managed to peel Csongor off from the center of discussion. “Yuxia is out there alone in the van!” she exclaimed. “If we could get to her—”

  Csongor shook his head. “Ivanov took the keys from the ignition,” he said. “They are in his pocket.”

  “Oh.”

  “His left front trouser pocket, should that information become somehow relevant.”

  “Still, she could honk the horn—call for help—”

  “One of the Russians raised the same issue,” Csongor said, and fell silent.

  “And?”

  “Ivanov is not worried.”

  “Why not?”

  “Yuxia called you ‘girlfriend.’ ”

  “So?”

  “So they think maybe you and Yuxia are lesbians.” Csongor blushed to an extent visible even in the dimly and bluely lit basement.

  “Holy crap,” Zula said. “Tomorrow remind me to have a good laugh about that if I haven’t been tortured to death.”

  “But I think that this ‘girlfriend’ is a way that black women greet each other, even if they are heterosexuals.” Something about the look on Csongor’s face indicated that this wasn’t just a foray into urban American slang but that it was of possible direct bearing on his future happiness. Zula permitted herself a moment of amazement on how the male reproductive drive could obtrude on situations where it was worse than useless. She even considered telling a little white lie.

  “You are correct,” Zula finally said. “She just picked up the expression from a movie or something.”

  “You and Yuxia are just friends,” Csongor said with relief so evident that Zula felt her face heat up.

  “Just friends who have known each other for all of, like, twenty-four hours,” Zula said.

  “Ivanov believes otherwise,” Csongor said, “and he told Yuxia that if she made any trouble, he would do bad things to you.”

  “Well,” Zula said, “that much might be true.”

  Csongor didn’t enjoy hearing this.

  “But even though Yuxia and I are not lovers,” Zula pointed out, “threatening me might still change the way she makes decisions.”

  The door-counting Russian came back with a rough sketch. From this and the phone image of the front of the building, they were able to figure out which door would give access to the unit in question, supposing they knew whether it was on the fourth or the fifth floor. But there was no way to settle that question by looking at the building from the outside. The upshot was that the Troll probably lived in unit 405 or unit 505.

  This seemed like excellent progress (if you wanted to look at it that way) to Zula, considering that they had been in the building for all of about twenty minutes. But it only seemed to make Ivanov more pissed off.

  She stepped over to the large, rusty steel box that, as anyone could see from all the cables and conduits diving into it, served as the building’s main electrical panel. Its door was hanging askew. She kicked it open. Uncle John had taught her to keep her hands in her pockets when approaching mysterious electrical equipment. She did so now.

  The panel sported an array of flat round objects with little windows in them. These were planted in round sockets. Some of these were empty, revealing screw threads and electrodes similar to lightbulb sockets. Most of them, though, were occupied by the little windowed buttons. These tended to be labeled with strips of paper on which Chinese characters had been written by hand.

  “What are those?” Peter asked. He had followed her over.

  “Fuses,” Zula said. “I’ve heard of them.”

  “Instead of circuit breakers?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, I see where you’re going,” Peter said, with a rush of geek energy.

  Zula hadn’t been going anywhere, just wandering around looking at stuff. She looked at Peter. He had pulled out his PDA again. “Yup,” he said, “I can still see Atheron.” He looked up at her brightly, then glanced back to see whether Sokolov and Ivanov were paying attention. They weren’t. He checked the PDA again and his faced clouded over. “Shit, I lost it. Signal’s really weak.”

  Csongor had drawn closer, so Peter explained: “Zula and I did this before, up on the roof. Atheron is their WAP in the apartment. I can’t log on—they put a password on it—but I can see the signal. If we cut the power by pulling the fuse, it should go off the air.”

  Csongor’s eyes flicked over to the fuse panel. “Each apartment has a unique fuse?”

  “So it would seem,” Zula said. “Labeled in Chinese.”

  “Can anyone here read Chinese numbers?”

  “Sort of,” Zula said.

  Ivanov came over and asked a question in Russian. His eyes jumped from Peter to the fuse panel to Zula as words poured out of Csongor. Peter added the caution that his PDA could not quite pick up Atheron from here in the cellar and so, with a lot more talking than really seemed necessary, the following arrangement was worked out. Most of the security consultants stayed in the cellar doing what they’d been doing the whole time anyway, which was tinkering with weapons and ammunition from the rod-and-reel cases and the coolers. Peter ascended partway up the stairs with the PDA, getting more centrally located in the building so that he could pick up a consistent signal from Atheron. Ivanov was sticking to Peter; he wanted to see this thing happen with his own eyes and so he would be looming over Peter’s shoulder through the entire experiment. Csongor remained at the base of the stairs where he could see and talk to Zula, who was stationed at the fuse panel, and Sokolov was in the stairwell somewhere between Csongor and Ivanov, so that he could exchange hand signals with both of them.

  While all of this was being worked out, Zula prepared to bullshit her way through the project of reading, or pretending to be able to read, Chinese numerals.

  The numbers actually mounted on the doors of the apartments were Arabic. But whatever electrician or custodian had labeled these fuses in the cellar had used the Chinese system.

  Zero was a circle. One, two, and three were represented by the appropriate number of horizontal lines. Four could be remembered because it was a square with some extra stuff inside of it. Beyond that, however, the numerals were nonobvious. With a bit of help from Yuxia, she had been trying to learn them. In some contexts, where numbers were arranged in a predictable order, this was easy. Reading random numbers would have been impossible for her. The situation with this fuse box was somewhere between those extremes. At the top of the box she was seeing some labels that weren’t numbers at all—she guessed that they must say things like “cellar” or “laundry room.” Below that she began to see numbers that began with a single horizontal line, meaning 1, and after several of those she saw some with two horizontal lines, and after that a bunch with three lines, and so on. So it seemed that the fuses were laid out in a somewhat logical fashion according to floor and apartment number. But all of this was more in the nature of general trends than absolute rules; it was obvious that the building had been rewired several times and that available fuse sockets had been put to use willy-nilly. She had to carry out a kind of archaeological dig in her head to reconstruct how it had come to be this way. Toward the bottom of the panel she began to see the squarish character that meant four, and below that, the less obvious glyph that she was pretty sure meant five. So the fuse that would kill the Atheron signal was probably in the bottom half-dozen or so rows of the grid. But this was the part of the box that had been most heavily exploited by opportunistic rewirers in more recent decades and so there was a lot more noise and misdirection for her to sift through here.

  “They are ready,” Csongor said. “You can begin pulling fuses.”

  “Explain to them th
at the box is a mess, and it’s just going to take me a little bit longer to make sense of it.”

  Csongor looked as if he really didn’t want to be the bearer of that message.

  “If I just start pulling fuses indiscriminately,” Zula pointed out, “tenants are going to start coming down here to find out what’s wrong.”

  Csongor went up the stairs and relayed that to Sokolov.

  Zula was noticing that the newer circuits all had fuses in them but that several of the sockets for what she took to be fifth-floor apartments were vacant. She reckoned that empty sockets were probably a marker for vacant apartments. To discourage squatters and to prevent other tenants from pirating electricity, they would pull the fuse, thereby shutting off the power, to any unit that was not occupied. Scanning the whole panel, she saw that every floor had at least one or two vacant units but that they were most common on the fifth floor: not surprising since, in a building with no elevator, those were the least desirable apartments.

  Her eye fell on a socket labeled with the character for 5, then 0, then the 5 character again; 505 was one of the two most likely candidates, the other being 405. But this socket didn’t have a fuse plugged into it.

  She scanned up the panel until she found the sequence of characters that, she was fairly certain, represented 405. It had a fuse.

  She reached out and unscrewed the fuse, then turned to Csongor and held the fuse up in the air. He gave a hand signal to Sokolov, who apparently relayed it up the steps.

  But none of this was even necessary. Peter and Ivanov were already on their way down.

  Zula screwed the fuse back in as they descended, restoring power to 405.

  “Got it on the first try!” Peter announced, wiggling the PDA in the air in a triumphant style that Zula found a little chilling. “We found the Troll!”