UNTIL SOKOLOV WOKE up that morning in the safe house and literally smelled the coffee—for the day shift had awakened at 0600 local time and begun to brew it on the camp stove—he did not understand how completely fucked he was, how interesting the situation had become. And then he felt astonished and ashamed that he’d let events get so far ahead of him. He had been defeated by Ivanov at the game of Normal. Getting on a plane and flying somewhere to do a job: What could be more normal than that? But Ivanov had not shared with him any information about how they would actually get into the country. Now men nominally under Sokolov’s control had done murder in the United States and they were in China illegally, and at the mercy of whatever local gangsters or officials Ivanov had cut a deal with.
Though, to be fair, those people were at Ivanov’s mercy as well, because they didn’t understand that Ivanov was crazy. And once they came to understand that Ivanov was not only crazy but traveling in the company of seven warriors and three hackers, they would begin having nightmares about all the consequences that would fall on their heads if those people actually began to do the sorts of things that they were in the habit of doing.
What kind of bullshit had Ivanov told them? Probably that he wanted to smuggle some high-value goods into the country through the private jet terminal. Two vanloads’ worth of stuff. Bootleg caviar or something else expensive enough to justify leasing a private jet.
No. Prostitutes. High-value specialty prostitutes. That’s what he must have told them.
The office in which Sokolov was sleeping had a whiteboard mounted to its wall, and he longed to stand up and begin drawing a diagram of the situation. It would be a complicated diagram. Fortunately, no markers were available; drawing diagrams probably was not a smart idea. He had to carry everything in his head. He lay there, smelling the coffee and staring up at the ceiling tiles. There were nine of them, a three-by-three grid, making up most of the office’s ceiling. He assigned himself the one in the middle. The rest of the grid looked something like this:
Ivanov
Ivanov’s Chinese contacts
The Troll
Sokolov’s employer
Sokolov
The Squad
Csongor
Peter
Zula
This grid didn’t come into existence without some iterations, some failed attempts. Wallace, for example, and the local talent Ivanov had called up in Seattle. Zula’s uncle. None of these was worth thinking about right now.
So he went through the grid evaluating each part of it in turn.
IVANOV:
Sokolov badly wanted to get connected to Vikipediya and learn about strokes. Also about certain medications he had seen among Ivanov’s personal effects, whose names he had memorized. He knew that Internet usage in China was monitored by the PSB, the Public Security Bureau, and wondered whether the mere act of accessing Vikipediya as opposed to Wikipedia would cause a red thumbtack, or its modern, digital equivalent, to be stuck into a map at the local PSB headquarters as a way of saying Russians here. How many Russians were in Xiamen legitimately, that is, with visas? Probably not all that many, and so if the red thumbtack appeared in an unexpected part of town, it could lead to trouble. Pavel Pavlovich, one of his platoon-mates in Afghanistan, had taken mortar shrapnel in the forehead, going into his brain, and had seemingly recovered; but afterward his personality was different: he seemed a little crazy, unable to control certain impulses, and after a regrettable incident involving a rocket-propelled grenade, they had sent him home. Sokolov was developing a theory that Ivanov suffered from high blood pressure—a theory that could easily be confirmed if he could look up the names of those medications—and that it had been worse than usual recently because of the trouble he had gotten into with the obshchak. When he had received the phone call from Csongor, alerting him to the inconsistency in Wallace’s story, his already high blood pressure had spiked and—according to this theory—he had suffered a little stroke that had damaged him in the same way as the shrapnel had done poor Pavel Pavlovich. On the flight from Toronto to Seattle, Ivanov had slept most of the way, and Sokolov, looking at him, had thought he seemed sunken, damaged, exhausted. But when he was awake, he was a demon.
IVANOV’S CHINESE CONTACTS:
Probably no longer relevant, but they deserved a ceiling tile all their own because they were mysterious. Had they simply arranged for Ivanov to drive those two vans through security and then forgotten about him, moving on to other corrupt activities? Or were they now actively paying attention to Ivanov and his crew, worrying about Ivanov? Because if these faceless, nameless Chinese were worried about Ivanov, then they would soon have plenty to worry about; and if they became sufficiently worried, there might be some effort to liquidate Ivanov and everyone with him. Since Sokolov knew nothing of how Ivanov had managed all this, there seemed little he could do about it other than make certain that their activities remained innocuous for as long as possible. The very strangeness of their errand would be enormously helpful in that regard. Speaking of which…
THE TROLL:
Nothing to worry about in and of himself, since he was almost certainly just a lone teenager working out of his bedroom, and so this ceiling tile was more a placeholder for Troll-related issues and questions; for example, what the hell would they do when they actually found him? Perhaps even more worrisome: What would they do if they couldn’t find him?
SOKOLOV’S EMPLOYER:
Sokolov worked for a security consultancy based out of St. Petersburg, with discreet branch offices in Toronto, New York, and London, that derived much of its income from working for people like Ivanov. As in any business, customer satisfaction was of paramount importance. Usually this meant doing whatever one was told to do by the client to whom one was assigned. At least in theory there ought to be exceptions in the rules for brain-damaged clients. But, to keep things simple, the company’s founders, all retired Spetsnaz brass, had carried over the chain of command, culture, and traditions from the military unit where they had built their careers and from which they hired most of their employees. Going over the boss’s head was frowned on and could lead to miserable repercussions on Sokolov. He might find out the hard way, for example, that Ivanov wasn’t crazy at all and was actually carrying out direct orders from higher up. If so, the mission—whatever the hell it was—was important, and screwing it up would cause only that much more trouble for Sokolov.
SOKOLOV:
He had taken this job because he thought it would be simple and easy compared to being active-duty military. Until recently he had not been wrong. For exactly that reason he had been somewhat bored. Now he was far from bored but feeling many of the same stresses that had caused him to retire from active duty in the first place. Was it possible to find a station in life with just the right level of interest? Was it possible to be normal without being someone’s dupe?
THE SQUAD:
Sokolov had worked with most of them before, and they would carry out his orders professionally and with no questions asked. Though rumors did circulate that sometimes the higher-ups would plant a spy in such a unit, reporting home via a back channel, and this might be especially true in very strange situations like this one. He had summoned them on extremely short notice and had been unable to supply an explanation of where they were going or what the mission might be.
CSONGOR:
The least of Sokolov’s worries. Obviously the Hungarian did not want to be here, but he knew the rules of the game, had been tangled up with Ivanov for a long time, and would be docile as long as he believed he would get out of the situation alive.
PETER:
Sokolov put the odds at 100 percent that Peter would, sooner or later, do something stupid and cause enormous trouble. Peter would do this because he believed he was clever and because he thought only of himself. It would be safer to take him out and shoot him now, but disposing of the body would be difficult and the shock of it would probably disturb the equilibrium of Zula.
ZULA:
>
The only person here whom Sokolov might be able to deal with productively. “Productive” being the operative word here in that she seemed like one who might do something not utterly predictable and not capable of being done by Sokolov himself.
She was also a problem of large proportions in that Ivanov would almost certainly want to liquidate her, and she was the only person involved in this clusterfuck who didn’t actually deserve it. Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov’s habit and his professsion for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man. He had always been worried that he might get into a situation like this one. It had never happened until now.
HE GOT COFFEE and went into the meeting room before anyone else got there. He spent a while looking out the window, appraising the battleground.
From this remove it did not look hugely different from other places; just more crowded. Humidity and smog caused buildings that were only a few blocks away to be shrouded in mist, like matte paintings in the background of an old Soviet movie, creating the feeling that everything was farther away than it really was. This made it difficult to get a sense of how far the city sprawled. The hot and humid climate was inconvenient, since it limited the sorts of things that one could carry in one’s clothing, or else forced one to go about conspicuously and suspiciously bundled up. This, however, would not really be a problem until they set out to liquidate the Troll, and based on what Zula and Peter and Csongor had been saying on the plane, they wouldn’t have that information for a few days at least.
This building was situated on the inland side of the six-lane avenue that ran along the waterfront. Across that avenue was an arcade of ferry terminals that stretched along the shore for at least a kilometer, fronting on a waterway that was as busy as any that Sokolov had ever seen. Because he had been looking at maps, he knew that this body of water was a strait separating Xiamen from a smaller island about a thousand meters away, but it was impossible not to read it as a river: a mighty river like the Volga or the Danube. But the docks were linked to the terminals by hinged gangways, confirming that this water was salt and that it rose and fell with the tides. Plying the strait was an astoundingly dense and various traffic, ranging from skiffs up to freighters, but dominated by two types of craft: tubby, double-decker passenger ferries, and a type of vessel that he hadn’t seen before but that was evidently the traditional working craft of these waters: an open, flat-decked boat rising no more than a meter above the waterline, shingled along both sides with old tires, averaging maybe ten meters long, with a little boathouse, or at least an awning, toward the stern, sheltering the engine, the steering gear, and the operator. These were so densely packed in some areas that it was a wonder they could move at all, and each was carrying something different: passengers, a drum of lubricant, a pallet of shrink-wrapped cargo, a cooler packed with ice and fish. Weaving and zipping among these larger, slower vessels were white speedboats carrying passengers in orange life vests: fast water taxis for the well-heeled, he guessed. Some of them were headed directly across the strait to the little island, which was steep and green and seemed to consist largely of parks and villas. Obviously it was older and more affluent than the suburbs that Sokolov could see reaching toward Xiamen from every direction, difficult to resolve through the haze, but much more heavily built up.
All of which was unusual and picturesque but probably did not bear directly on the mission. Sokolov turned his attention to the picket line of buildings like this one that stood along the inland side of the big avenue. There were a few other modern blue-glass skyscrapers, and some construction sites where new ones were being erected. But at least half of the frontage was claimed by buildings of older vintage, sporting the logos of hotels and Western food chains. Directly below them was a building of perhaps a dozen stories with a huge KFC sign on its top. Its entryway was choked by taxis, which made Sokolov think that it must be a hotel, probably catering not to Westerners but to Chinese business travelers. It fronted on a traffic exchange. In the center was a raised circle in the middle with traffic lights on it, but other than that, this was just a hectare or so of pavement that—as was obvious from Sokolov’s point of view—had, over and over again, been slit open and trenched and cabled and repaved. It supported a steady flow of taxis, buses, motor scooters, the occasional Lexus or Mercedes. On the opposite side of the exchange was a curving building with a panoramic billboard, colorful photos of fashion models and liquor bottles, offices fronting on the intersection, their nature unguessable by Sokolov since they didn’t have any English in their signs. The architects of these buildings had lavished a huge amount of attention on rooftop antenna masts, which were far more massive and squat and wide-stanced than was really called for by pure engineering considerations. They must have been trained in the Soviet Union and been steeped in the mid-twentieth-century statist mindset that a building without a radio transmitter was like a battleship without guns. It was a technology and a reason largely forgotten now but preserved in the architecture in the same way as church steeples. What really mattered to the mission at hand was not radio transmitters. It was that zany web of patched pavement cuts splattered all over the streets below, where Internet had been laid down.
He kept noticing basketball courts and realized that, from where he stood, he could see four of them, all new and well tended.
On patches of open ground here and there, he saw people executing slow, formalized movements, then recalled that Chinese liked to do calisthenics.
Not far away, a broad street led away from the water for at least two kilometers. It was lined with expensive-looking Western-style storefronts. It ran along ground that was table flat, but off to its right a kilometer or so, spines of gray stone rose out of the ground, supporting tufts and copses of dark green vegetation. Remnants of ancient fortifications, steep and ivy matted, were grafted onto the rock, and newer buildings grew out of those.
These parts of the city—the ferry terminals, the skyscrapers and skyscrapers-to-be, the older generation of high-rise buildings, the basketball courts, the shopping street, the outcroppings of stone—were the special bits. All told, they accounted for perhaps 25 percent of the city’s surface area. The remainder was all the same: an undifferentiated expanse of close-packed buildings, four or five stories high, often with blue roofs (why blue?) built on a warren of streets so narrow that, in general, he could not see the pavement, but had to infer, from the pattern of crevices between buildings, that streets must exist. In the rare places where such streets aligned with his sight lines, enabling him to see all the way to the bottom, they appeared to be paved not with asphalt but with human beings in motion, and vehicles marooned in the sea of people.
He felt certain that the Troll lived in a neighborhood very much like one of these. He needed to know what it would be like to move and fight in such a place. His initial thought was “more like Grozny than Jalalabad,” but he would have to do much better than that. He did not even know, for example, whether Xiamen had any sort of underground mass transit system that could be put to use.
A faint humming sound alerted him to the approach of wheeled luggage. He turned to see Ivanov approaching from the direction of the elevator lobby, towing a black rollaway bag. One of the squaddies jumped up and offered to help him with it, but Ivanov brushed him off with a flicking gesture and came straight for the conference room. Sokolov opened the door. Ivanov entered without breaking stride, heaved the bag up, and slammed it down on the conference table. “You may open it.”
Sokolov unzipped the top flap and peeled it back. The entire bag was filled with magenta currency.
“Our obshchak,” Ivanov joked. At least Sokolov hoped he was joking.
All the notes were the same denomination: 100 RMB. They were printed in an uneasy mixture of purplish reds, and each bore a portrait of the young Mao Zedong. None of the bills was loose; they had been stacked into bundles of various sizes. Sokolov picked up
a small one.
“Ridiculous country,” Ivanov said. “One hundred is the largest denomination that exists. You know how much it is worth? Fourteen dollars. They print nothing larger because if they did, it would be counterfeited instantly. So changing money is a huge problem. I am already tired.”
The small bundle consisted of nine 100-RMB notes with a tenth wrapped around it.
“So that is the local equivalent of a C-note,” Ivanov said.
Sokolov replaced it, reached deeper into the bag, and pulled out a stack of bills having the approximate proportions of a brick. He looked questioningly at Ivanov.
Ivanov shrugged. “Ten thousand dollars or something.” Then he shook his finger at Sokolov. “But remember: money goes a long way in China!”
“How do they carry it around?” Sokolov asked wonderingly.
“Purses,” said Ivanov.
Sokolov replaced the brick.
“What are your orders?” he asked.
“Get the hackers in here and make a plan for finding the Troll.”
“They have been talking about it,” Sokolov said. “They want to go out on the streets. Pound the pavement.” He gave the expression in English.
“Will they make trouble? Try to run off?”
“Peter might.”
“Always keep one here as insurance.”
“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.
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