Gravity was of no more concern to Egdod than crabgrass to an archangel, so he could have taken flight directly from any balcony or open window, but the Torgai Foothills were six thousand miles away, which was a long trip even at the supersonic velocities of which Egdod was capable. So instead he made use of the ley line intersection that was directly beneath the mountain. Wary of being followed out of the Bagpipe Gulch intersection, he went to another LLI about a hundred miles away, underneath a large city that bestrode a great river flowing down out of the mountain range above the Torgai. But even this place had been thrown all out of whack by REAMDE, with long queues outside the moneychangers’ kiosks and healing potions at such a premium that they were being auctioned in the town square for ten times their usual market price. On his way to the city gates, Egdod was accosted several times by bands of warriors who assumed that he, or rather the spiky-haired pixie he was pretending to be, had come here to pay ransom in the Torgai Foothills. Don’t even think of going up there alone, was the general tenor of their remarks; pay us enough and we’ll escort you to the proper coordinates. Richard got rid of them quickly just by claiming that his/her errand had nothing to do with REAMDE. At the first opportunity, he made the character invisible and then, just in case he was being followed, superinvisible and then double-super and then hyperinvisible. For run-of-the-mill invisibility spells could be penetrated by countermeasures of varying strengths. Satisfied that no one could plausibly see him/her, he/she took to the air and flew the hundred miles to Torgai in a few minutes, plunging to treetop level at the end and flying nap-of-the-earth to get a better view of what was going on down there.
A lot was the quick answer.
Not that Richard didn’t already know this; but there was something about actually seeing it.
And besides, this was almost kind of like his job now. The CEO, who had actual responsibilities, could get by with reading the summaries and maybe allow himself to be seen checking out the T’Rain Gazette during his coffee break. But actually going to the place was a waste of his shockingly expensive time. Richard, however, as founder/chairman, receiving only token compensation, was almost expected to go and view spectacles of this kind, in roughly the same way that the Queen of England was expected to fly over derailments in a chopper.
A key difference was that he got to have inappropriate emotional responses. “This is fucking cool,” he remarked, gazing down from an altitude of perhaps a thousand feet at a corpse- and skeleton-strewn meadow where something like twenty different Medieval Armed Combat encounters were going on simultaneously. “We should pay these guys to do this all the time.”
“Which guys?”
“Whoever created this virus.”
“Oh.”
“Who did create it, by the way?”
“Unknown,” C-plus said, “but thanks to your niece, we’re pretty sure he’s in Xiamen.”
“The place with the terra-cotta soldiers?”
“No, you’re thinking of Xian.”
“Zula’s been helping you track these guys down?”
C-plus looked a bit taken aback. “I thought you were aware of it.”
“Of what?”
“Her participation. She said it was a side project that you had put her on.”
Had it been anyone else, Richard would have said, I have no idea what the hell you are talking about, but since it was family, his instinct was to cover for her. “There may have been some mission drift,” he speculated.
“Whatever. Anyway, we have an IP address in Xiamen, but nothing else.”
Richard put Egdod into auto-hover mode, then leaned back and took his hands off the controls. “Are the Chinese cops among those who have been pestering us to do something about this?”
“They were among the first to do so, is my understanding.”
“Then one way to shut them up—”
“—is to ask them to trace down this IP address for us. Yes, I agree; we would never hear from them again.”
“So are we going to do that?”
“I doubt it,” C-plus said, “because we’d be giving up information about our own internal procedures. And I’m pretty sure Nolan doesn’t want to do that.”
“And, come to think of it, I’m sure Nolan’s right,” Richard said. “I’m an idiot. Let’s not tell the Chinese government anything.”
“Are you asking me to pass that on to our CEO?” Corvallis said, in a tone of voice making it clear that, if flat out asked, he’d flat out refuse.
“Nah,” Richard said, “I have other reasons to ruin his day.”
Day 2
In the dark, driving through Xiamen was like driving through any other modern city, save that they were more exuberant, here, about lighting things up; the highway was illuminated with dashed lines of blue neon, and bright signs, some familiar corporate logos and others unreadable by Zula, erupted from the tops of buildings.
They stopped at a brand-new Hyatt not far from the airport and dropped off the two pilots. Then they followed what she took to be a ring road, since water was always on their right, until they were in the middle of what had to be the most crowded and built-up part of the island. This was more than a match for Seattle. The waterfront to their right was an unbroken series of low-slung passenger ferry terminals. To their left was a mixture of buildings: some brand-new skyscrapers, some pre-economic-miracle hotels and office structures rising to perhaps ten or fifteen stories, some vacant lots-cum-construction-sites, and a few tenacious patches of old three- to seven-story residential neighborhood buildings.
They turned off the ring road into a place that had been landscaped recently. A huge steel door raised, and they descended into a parking structure beneath an office tower. The parking spaces hadn’t been striped yet, and the lighting was temporary. Construction tools and supplies were piled around.
The two vans had caravanned the whole way behind the black Mercedes. A Chinese man, dressed informally, but seeming to wield great authority, climbed out of the backseat of the Mercedes. Ivanov, who had been sitting next to him, climbed out of the other side. The Chinese man used a key card to summon an elevator. He held the door open as Ivanov, the seven security consultants, Zula, Peter, and Csongor crammed themselves aboard. Then he pushed himself in, swiped his card, and hit the button for the forty-third floor. All told, the building seemed to have fifty stories.
Standing in an elevator with a bunch of strangers felt a little awkward even in the best of circumstances. Never more so than now. Zula, and most of the others, stared at the control panel, which was ostentatiously high tech; above it was an electroluminescent screen that flashed the numbers of the floors as they went by and occasionally displayed Chinese characters as well, synchronized with a lush female voice speaking canned phrases in Mandarin.
Floor 43 sported a reasonably nice elevator lobby, lined in expensive-looking polished stone and equipped with men’s and women’s bathrooms. Beyond that, it consisted of two large office suites of equal size. The one to the left, as they stepped off the elevators, was completely unfinished. The floors were bare concrete. The ceilings were just the underside of Floor 44: corrugated steel deck frosted with foamy stuff and supported at wide intervals by huge zigzagging trusses. The suite to the right seemed to have been built out recently but never occupied. Double doors of plate glass, set in a plate-glass wall, gave way to a reception area containing a built-in desk but no furniture. Beyond that was an open space about the size of a tennis court, obviously destined to become a warren of cubicles. Around the perimeter were glass-walled offices of various sizes, each with a window. The largest of these was a conference room with a large built-in table and sprays of unconnected Ethernet cables hanging out of hatches in its center. Other than that there was no furniture in the whole place. The floor was covered in brown-gray carpet, and the ceiling was a grid of acoustical panels interrupted here and there by light fixtures and vent louvers.
It was, in other words, the most perfectly generic office environmen
t that could be imagined.
“Safe house,” Sokolov announced, and he indicated by gestures that Zula, Peter, and Csongor might wish to make themselves comfortable in the middle of the open space.
Ivanov departed in the company of the Chinese man.
Three of the security consultants set to work bringing up all the cargo that had been flown in on the plane and packed into the vans. They had been supplied with elevator key cards and so were free to come and go as they wished.
One of the security consultants was stationed at the reception desk, thereby controlling entry to and exit from the suite. As soon as all the cargo had been brought up, he connected the entry doors together with a cable lock.
One security consultant went into the men’s room, which was off the elevator lobby, and apparently bathed as best he could in the sink. Certain of the bags coming up from below contained bedrolls and personal effects. He selected one of these and carried it into a vacant office, where he rolled out a sleeping bag and lay down and stopped moving. Two of the cargo movers followed his lead as soon as they were finished with their job, while the third, after rooting around in bags for a while, distributed some thick black plastic packets that turned out to contain military rations. He assembled a portable stove on the floor, ignited it, and began to heat water.
Sokolov and one other security consultant made a thoroughgoing reconnaissance of the forty-third floor. They began by clambering up on the conference table. The consultant gave Sokolov a leg up, enabling his boss to pop up through a ceiling tile and commence an exploration of the crawl space above the ceiling. The ceiling grid itself was made of flimsy aluminum extrusions, suspended from the true ceiling by a web of wires, and completely incapable of supporting a person’s weight. Assuming that this half of the building was a mirror image of the vacant suite next door, however, there were heavy steel trusses at regular intervals, consisting of T-shaped beams connected by zigzagging rods of steel, and a reasonably acrobatic person could use those as monkey bars to travel around above the ceiling. Zula, Peter, and Csongor, sitting on the floor and eating their rations in the middle of the vacant space, heard Sokolov and scraping and clanging as he made his way overhead, and heard him thumping in an exploratory way on the walls that defined the boundary between this suite and the elevator lobby/bathroom core. The conclusion seemed to be that those walls went all the way up to the underside of Floor 44 and that this suite, therefore, could neither be escaped nor infiltrated by the common action-movie trick of moving around above the ceiling. In the same spirit, Zula looked around at the ventilation louvers and noted that they were all far too small to admit a human body.
Apparently satisfied that there were no tricky ways out of the safe house, Sokolov allocated offices. Zula got one all to herself. Peter and Csongor each got to share one with a security consultant.
“I need to use the bathroom,” Zula announced. Sokolov drew himself up and made a sort of bow and escorted her to the lobby, where the guard undid the cable lock and opened the doors. Sokolov went into the women’s room ahead of Zula, vaulted up on the counter, popped a ceiling tile, and reconnoitered. Apparently he did not entirely like what he saw because he came back down in a pensive mood. After thinking about it for a few moments, he withdrew into one of the toilet stalls, closed the door, made himself comfortable on the toilet, and said, “Okay, I wait. Is okay!”
She went into a different stall and peed. She could hear Sokolov thumbing away on a PDA or something. She emerged from the stall, stood before a sink, and took off all her clothes. Using a bar of soap from her bag and a roll of paper towels issued by Sokolov, she gave herself a stand-up sponge bath. Then—fuck it, Sokolov was trapped—she bent over and shampooed her hair. This took a good long time because of the difficulties entailed in rinsing. As she was finishing up she jumped a little, hearing male voices, but then she realized that Sokolov had opened up communications on some kind of walkie-talkie system.
The result of this procedure was going to be extreme frizziness, but there was little point in concerning herself with that. A now useless instinct warned her that if Peter took a picture of her tomorrow, it would make a hilarious and embarrassing Facebook posting. She wondered how long she would have to go without posting on Facebook before that silence, in and of itself, warned her friends that something was amiss. Then she remembered it would boot her absolutely nothing even if they did realize that something was wrong.
That, she now realized, was the point of the black hoodie. The airport probably had security cameras. Supposing that her friends and family were able to put out a worldwide all-points bulletin for her, the Xiamen authorities would not be able to pick out her face on their security footage.
She pulled on some clean clothes, brushed her teeth, pulled all her stuff together, and called out “Okay.” Sokolov emerged from the stall. They went back into the office suite. The cable lock was reinstated behind them. Zula had noted the location of a door off the elevator lobby that apparently led to a fire stair, and she wondered how many flights down she could get before a security consultant would catch up with her. They were probably practiced at vaulting over the railings, or some other high-speed stair-descending technique that she didn’t know about.
Peter had tried to talk her into taking a parkour class in Seattle. She wished she’d said yes.
Sokolov extended a hand, reminding her of the location of her private office, and she heard “Thank you” coming out of her mouth before it occurred to her how stupid that was.
The office had floor-to-ceiling windows with views inland, though if she got her face close to the glass she could also see toward the water. The closest building of comparable height was half a mile away, and she reckoned she might be able to get someone’s attention by dancing naked in front of the window, or using her light switch to blink S-O-S in Morse code. Since her office had a glass wall on its inner side, though, any such antics would have been obvious to the security consultants drinking coffee a few feet away.
So for now she decided that she would actually try to sleep instead of hatching any Nancy Drew/Scooby-Doo-style escape plots. And to her surprise she found herself being rousted out of bed some time later by Peter. As usual she had no idea what time it was, but it was broad daylight outside. “In twenty minutes we are havink meetink,” Peter said.
She made another trip to the bathroom, supervised using the same procedure as before. While she was standing in front of the mirror, changing into a different T-shirt, she caught sight of herself for a moment, and this for some reason caused an irresistible wave of grief and melancholy to break over her. She turned on both faucets, rested the heels of her hands on the counter, and put her weight on them, then allowed herself a sobbing fit that went on for maybe half a minute.
Then she splashed water on her face and announced, to her own reflection, “Okay.”
SOKOLOV HAD BEEN doing a lot of thinking about insanity: what it was. Its causes. When Ivanov had begun to suffer from it. Whether it had completely taken Ivanov’s mind or rather came and went in waves. Every so often Ivanov would blink and look about him with a surprised, almost childlike expression, as though a sane part of his mind had come awake, regained control of the body, and found itself in a predicament concocted, while it had been asleep, by the part of Ivanov that was completely out of his fucking mind.
But on the other hand Sokolov owed his life—his survival in Afghanistan, in Chechnya—to his ability to see things through the eyes of the adversary, and in this case that meant trying to put himself in Ivanov’s shoes. This reversal of perspective was not always easy. One frequently had to work at it for some days, observing the other, gathering data, even conducting little experiments to see how the other reacted to things. His men in Chechnya had thought that he, Sokolov, was crazy because he had sometimes taken actions that made no evident tactical sense, solely as a way of proving or disproving a hypothesis as to what the Chechens were thinking, what they wanted, what they were most afraid of.
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What they considered normal.
This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was.
Applied to the current situation, the question was: Could it be considered normal to divert rather large amounts of obshchak funds to charter a private jet from Toronto to Seattle and thence to Xiamen in order to track down and liquidate a person—probably a kid—who had written a virus and held some files hostage for $73?
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