“The address that we are working with,” he began, referring, as Zula understood, to the dotted quad written on the palm of Sokolov’s hand.
“Is part of a huge block controlled by an ISP,” Peter said. “This we know.”
“What if we attempted to narrow it down geographically?” Csongor said.
“We can’t exactly break into the headquarters of the ISP and interrogate their sysadmins…” Peter said, following Csongor’s line of thought.
“But those sysadmins must have some scheme for allocating all those addresses to different parts of the city,” Csongor said. “It might not be perfect, but…”
“But it probably won’t be random,” Peter said. “We could at least get an idea.”
It was Zula’s turn to feel like kind of a dunderhead, but working in a tech company had taught her that it was better to just come out and ask the question than to play along and pretend you understood. “How are you going to get that information?” she asked.
“Pounding the pavement,” Peter said, and looked to Csongor for confirmation.
Zula could tell from the look on Csongor’s face that he was not familiar with the idiom. “Going out on the streets,” she said, “and doing what?”
“I’ve heard they have Internet cafés all over the place there,” Peter said, “and if that’s true, we should be able to go in, pay some money, log on to a computer, and check its IP address. We write it down and move on to the next Internet café.”
“Or we could wardrive,” Csongor said.
Zula was vaguely familiar with the term: driving around with a laptop, looking for and logging on to unsecured Wi-Fi networks.
“Hotel rooms,” Peter said, nodding.
“Or just lobbies, even.”
“We could then build a map giving us a picture of how the ISP has allocated its IP addresses around the city. And that should make it possible for us to zero in on a neighborhood where the Troll lives. Maybe, if we get lucky, an Internet café that the Troll uses.”
Zula thought about it. “What I like about it,” she said, “is that it is kind of systematic and gradual, and so it should prove to our host that we are working on the problem in a steady way and getting results.”
This—keeping Ivanov happy, keeping his paranoia in check—was an aspect of the problem that Peter and Csongor had evidently not been thinking about very hard, and they gaped at her. She shook off a wave of mild irritation. “In management-speak, there are metrics that we can use to set expectations and show progress toward a goal.”
They weren’t sure whether she was joking. She wasn’t sure herself.
Why was she annoyed with them?
Because they were actually trying to solve the technical problem of locating the Troll. Which might have been Ivanov’s problem, but it wasn’t theirs. Theirs was Ivanov.
If they succeeded in finding the Troll, they’d have a worse problem: they’d be complicit in a murder plot.
But she did not make any further trouble, because there was something about their plan that she liked: it would get them out on the street, where they might be able to summon help or even escape. It was not clear to her what would happen to them if they went to the police and admitted that they had entered the country without visas, but it was unlikely to be worse than whatever Ivanov had in mind.
During this, she had been watching Sokolov from the corner of her eye. He still had a document on his lap, but he had not turned a page in a long time. He kept shushing the members of his squad, sometimes angrily. He was listening to them, trying to follow their conversation.
“Do you think they’ll allow us to go out on the street like that?”
“That’s the question,” Csongor admitted.
“They have to,” Peter said, “if they want to find the Troll.”
“Then I’ll try to sell it,” Zula said. “I’ll try to make him understand that this is the only way.” She made sure Sokolov could hear that much.
IN CSONGOR, ZULA had begun to recognize something that she had also seen in Peter and, indeed, that probably accounted for her having been attracted to Peter in the first place. Neither of these men had much in the way of formal education, since each had decided, during his late teens, to simply go out into the world and begin doing something. And each of them had found his way from there, sometimes with good and sometimes with bad results. Consequently, neither had much in the way of money or prestige. But each had a kind of confidence about him that was not often found in young men who had followed the recommended path through high school to college and postgraduate training. If she had wanted to be cruel or catty about it, Zula might have likened those meticulously groomed boys to overgrown fetuses, waiting endlessly to be born. Which was absolutely fine given that the universities were well stocked with fetal women. But perhaps because of her background in refugee camps and the premature death of her adoptive mother, she could not bring herself to be interested in those men. This quality that she had seen in Peter and now saw in Csongor was—and she flinched from the word, but there seemed little point in trying to distance herself from it through layers of self-conscious irony—masculine. And along with it came both good and bad. She saw the same quality in some of the men of her family, most notably Uncle Richard. And what she knew of him was that he was basically a good man, that he had done some crazy shit, hurt somepeople, felt bad about it, that he had gotten lucky, that he would die to protect her, and that his relations with women, overall, had not gone well.
THE PLANE DESCENDED for a while and then made a series of turns that seemed like a landing approach. In another half hour the sun would be down, but presently the light was shining almost horizontally across the landscape below them, casting distinct shadows and throwing the landforms and buildings into relief. That it was hot and humid was obvious even from up here. The physical geography was bewilderingly complicated: a lot of multipronged peninsulas groping toward a stew of large and small islands in a sprawling bay formed by the confluence of at least two major estuaries. With the exception of some silted-in bits and slabs of artificial land around the water’s edge, the landforms tended to be steep, mountainous, and green. As they descended it became easy to pick out Xiamen, which was a generally circular island, separated from the mainland by straits narrow enough that modern bridges had been thrown across, connecting it to what looked like industrial suburbs.
It was by far the largest island in the bay, with the exception of one, farther from the mainland, that rivaled it in size if not in population. For the round island of Xiamen was almost entirely developed, only the steepest bits in the interior remaining green. The big island east of it was shaped like a sponge that had been squeezed almost in half. It had some built-up areas, but they were scattered, low-lying towns separated by broad flat regions devoted to agriculture. Other parts of it were mountainous and appeared to be wilderness, albeit scarred by winding roads and speckled with curious installations, heavy on domes and antennas. “That’s the Taiwanese island, isn’t it?” Zula said.
“I would guess so,” said Csongor. “All that stuff is military; it looks like the crap that the Soviets used to build in Hungary.”
Another, smaller island passed under their wing. It too was notably underdeveloped compared to everything else. “The other one,” Csongor said. “One is Quemoy, the other is Matsu. I don’t know which is which.”
Moments later they were above Xiamen, and after another series of turns they came in for their landing.
The plane did not head for the terminal but instead taxied to a more low-slung part of the airport. This was crowded with other small private jets, and it was necessary to taxi past a score of them before finding a parking spot. Zula, of course, had no idea what Xiamen’s private jet terminal looked like on a normal day, but the scene that presented itself out the window looked extremely busy to her. Beyond the chain-link security fence, there were enough black cars jockeying for position that it was necessary for men in uniforms to stand abou
t waving their arms and blowing whistles. Some of them were admitted onto the tarmac to pull up alongside parked jets.
The security consultants had taken an interest in the proceedings and were pressing their faces against windows. “Germaniya,” said one of them. “Yaponiya,” said another.
“Names of countries,” Csongor explained. For Zula was on the wrong side of the plane and having a difficult time getting a clear view. “Some of these jets belong to governments. There’s yours right there.” And he rolled clear of a window and pointed toward one marked UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
“What’s going on?” Zula asked.
Csongor shrugged. “Some kind of conference maybe?”
“Taiwan,” Peter said. “I heard about this! It’s something to do with Taiwan.”
Zula goggled, not out of skepticism but because she didn’t normally look to Peter to be up to speed on current events. He shrugged. “Slashdot. There’s been some kind of hassle, connected with this. Denial-of-service attacks against Taiwanese ISPs.”
“Okay, yes! I did hear something about this,” Csongor said. “They are having diplomatic talks. But I didn’t realize it was happening in Xiamen.”
But this was the last they saw before Sokolov ordered that all the shades be pulled down.
After they came to a stop, Ivanov emerged from the aft cabin, talking on a phone, and exited the plane.
They turned off all the lights and sat there for an hour before Zula fell asleep.
When she woke up, it was still dark. People were up and moving around, but not talking. Everyone was getting their stuff. Zula followed suit. Sokolov was lodged in the cockpit door again, slapping each of his men on the shoulder as they filed off.
Csongor, who had an actual wristwatch, said that six hours had passed since the plane had landed.
When Zula reached the head of the aisle, Sokolov held out a hand to stop her, then handed her a black bundle. It smelled like new clothing. She took it in both hands and let it unfold. It was a black hoodie printed with the name of a fashion designer, flagrantly bootleg.
“Not my style,” she said.
“Later we get you fur coat,” Sokolov said.
She locked eyes with him. He had perhaps the best poker face she had ever seen; she could not get the slightest hint as to whether he was engaging in deadpan humor, cruel sarcasm, or actually intending to get her a fur coat.
“That’s not my style either.”
He shrugged. “Put this on; we worry about style later.”
She put it on. He reached around behind her neck, grasped the hood, and pulled it up to cover her head, then forward so that her face was shrouded. Then he gave her a pat on her shoulder to let her know she could proceed. In a strange way that made her hate herself, she enjoyed the sensation of the pat.
Descending the stairs, she saw that two vans were idling right next to the plane. Standing next to the first one was a security consultant, watching her carefully. At the base of the stairs was another, who did not touch her but walked next to her as she proceeded to the van.
She was directed to the backseat where she sat in the middle between two security consultants who made sure that her seat belt was tightly fastened. Csongor ended up in front of her and Peter was, apparently, in the other van.
Sokolov gave a directive. The vans went into motion, driving through a gate in the security barrier and out onto an airport road. A black Mercedes pulled in ahead of them. Zula kept waiting for the moment when they’d roll up to a security checkpoint, but it didn’t happen. They never got checked at all. At some point they merged into traffic on a highway. They were in China.
CHET HAD TO drive into Elphinstone to pick up some supplies for the Mud Month shutdown, so he gave Richard a lift to the town’s one-runway airport. A twin-engine, propeller-driven airplane awaited him there, and Chet, who knew the drill, simply drove right up to it, rolled down his window, and exchanged some banter with the pilot while Richard pulled his bag out of the back of Chet’s truck and heaved it through the plane’s tiny door. Thirty seconds later they were in the air. Richard, who made this journey a couple of dozen times a year, had set up a deal with a flying service based out of the Seattle suburb of Renton, and so all this was as routine as it could be. The amount of time he would spend in the air was less than what some Corporation 9592 employees would spend in their cars this morning, stuck on floating bridges or bottled up behind random suburban fender benders.
The first and last thirds of the route were entirely over mountains. The middle third traversed the irrigated basin around Grand Coulee Dam. No matter how many times Richard flew it, he was always startled to see the ground suddenly level out and develop a rectilinear grid of section-line roads, just like in the Midwest. Early on, the pattern was imposed in fragments scattered over creviced and disjoint mesas separating mountain valleys, but presently these flowed together to form a coherent grid that held together until it lapped up against some terrain that was simply too rugged and wild to be subjected to such treatment. The only respect in which these green farm-squares differed from the ones in the Midwest was that here, many of them sported inscribed circles of green, the marks of center-pivot irrigation systems.
Richard could never look at them without thinking of Chet. For Chet was a midwestern boy too and had grown up in a small town in the eastern, neatly gridded part of South Dakota where he and his boyhood friends had formed a proto-motorcycle gang, riding around on homemade contraptions built from lawnmower engines. Later they had graduated to dirt bikes and then full-fledged motorcycles. The world’s unwillingness to supply Chet with all the resources he needed for upkeep and improvement of his fleet of bikes had led him into the business of small-town marijuana dealing, which must have seemed dark and dangerous at the time, but that now, in these days of crystal meth, seemed as wholesome as running a lemonade stand. Chet had logged a huge number of miles riding around on those section-line roads, which he preferred to the state highways and the interstates since there was less traffic and less of a police presence.
One evening in 1977 he had been riding south from a lucrative rendezvous in Pipestone, Minnesota. It was a warm summer night; the moon and the stars were out. He leaned back against his sissy bar and let the wind blow in his long hair and cranked up the throttle. Then he woke up in a long-term care facility in Minneapolis in February. As was slowly explained to him by the occupational therapists, he had been found in the middle of a cornfield by a farmer’s dog. It seemed that his nocturnal ride had been terminated by a sudden west-ward jog in the section-line road. Failing to jog, he had flown off straight into the cornfield, doing something like ninety miles an hour. The corn, which was eight feet tall at that time of the year, had brought him to a reasonably gentle stop, and so he had sustained surprisingly few injuries. The long, tough fibrous stalks had split and splintered as he tore through them, but his leathers had deflected most of it. Unfortunately, he had not been wearing a helmet, and one splinter had gone straight up his left nostril into his brain.
The recovery had taken a while. Chet had gotten most of his brain functions back. He had not lost any of his wits, unless discretion and social skills could be so designated, so he had devoted a lot of attention to the question of why the transit-brandishing pencil-necks who had laid out the section lines a hundred years ago had been so particular about sticking to a grid pattern and yet had perversely inserted these occasional sideways jogs into the grid. Examining maps, he noticed that the jogs only occurred in north-south roads, never east-west.
The answer, of course, was that the earth was a sphere and so it was geometrically impossible to cover it with a grid of squares. You could grid a good-sized patch of it, but eventually you would have to insert a little adjustment: move one row of sections east or west relative to the row beneath it.
It being the 1970s, and Chet being a high school dropout with a damaged brain, he could not help but perceive something huge in this discovery. Nor could he avoid coming to the con
clusion that the mistake he had made on that beautiful moonlit night had been a sort of message from above, a warning that, during the grubby, day-to-day work of small-town pot dealing, he had been failing to attend to larger and more cosmic matters.
He had moved west, as Americans did in those days when they were searching for the cosmic. A few hundred miles short of the Pacific, he had fallen in with the biker group that collaborated with Richard on his backpack smuggling scheme. Among them he had acquired a sort of shamanistic aura and become the high priest of a breakaway faction calling itself the Septentrion Paladins to distinguish themselves from their predominantly Californian parent group. They had moved north of the border and established themselves in southern B.C. A second, near-fatal crash had only enhanced Chet’s mystical reputation.
Not long after Chet had been released from the hospital after the second crash, the Septentrion Paladins had embarked on a project to, as Chet put it, “get in touch with our masculinity.”
When this policy initiative had abruptly been made known to Richard in the middle of a barroom conversation on seemingly unrelated topics, awe and horror had struggled for supremacy in his mammalian brain as his reptilian had begun to tally all exits, conventional and un-, from the bar; lubricated his whole body with sweat; and jacked his pulse rate up into a frequency range that had probably jammed Mounties’ radar guns out on Highway 22. For he had known these men all too well in their premasculine days and could not imagine what they were about to get up to now. Over the course of the next few minutes’ marginally coherent discussion, however, he pieced together that what Chet really meant was that they would stay in touch with their masculinity but with a more modest body count. The change in emphasis seemed to coincide with some of the surviving principals’ getting married and having kids. They got rid of most of their guns and took advantage of Canada’s surprisingly easygoing sword laws, riding around the provincial byways with five-foot claymores strapped to their backs. They met in forest clearings to engage in mock duels and jousts with foam weapons, and they went to Ren Faires to hoist tankards with their newfound soul brothers in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Roaring down the byways of southern B.C. with the cross hilts of their claymores projecting above their shoulders, they had become a familiar feature of that self-consciously quirky part of the world. Barely visible behind concentric shells of tinted glass and perforated sunscreens, children in minivans had pointed to them and waved with lavish enthusiasm. The Septentrion Paladins had become the subjects of offbeat-slash-heartwarming featurettes on regional television news broad-casts, and they had ceased to commit crimes.
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