Reamde

by Neal Stephenson

  “Sokolov worries,” explained Csongor, “that the procedure is imperfect. Some additional scouting is recommended. But Ivanov counters that if we are too obvious, we may give warning to the Troll who might escape.”

  Ivanov nodded, though, as if he had taken Sokolov’s point. He then spoke in Russian to the security consultants.

  Three of them put their hands to their belts, unsnapped little black pouches and pulled out handcuffs. One of them approached Zula. He snapped a cuff around a heavy steel conduit that ran out of the floor, carrying power cables up to the fusebox. He grabbed Zula’s left hand and whacked the other manacle down across her wrist. Meanwhile Csongor was being handcuffed to a cold water pipe in another part of the room. A third consultant cuffed Peter to the iron banister at the base of the stairs.

  The other security consultants were on their feet, checking their gear and concealing their weapons. “We go to visit Troll in 505,” said Ivanov. “If you have spoken truthfully, then we achieve our goal and be on our way, everyone happy. If you have made little mistake, then we shall return to this room and have discussion of consequences. So. Is 505 the correct place? Or is it perhaps 405?”

  “It’s 505,” Zula said.

  “Very well,” said Ivanov, and issued orders. Sokolov, all the security consultants, and Ivanov began to ascend the stairs.

  THE BIG FAT Russian had been trying to create feelings of terror in Qian Yuxia’s heart and had been partly successful, but as she sat there alone, handcuffed to the steering wheel, the terror receded quickly and she was left feeling disappointed and offended. When he had called her yesterday and asked her to go fetch the van and organize a fishing trip, she had been flattered to have been chosen, from all the people in Xiamen, to be given such a responsibility. She had been up half the night riding buses into the little town in the country where she had parked the van, driving it back into Xiamen, and making preparations. As a special gesture to demonstrate how much she appreciated this opportunity, she had showed up early this morning with cups of coffee and muffins from a Western-style bakery.

  The worst part, though, was that the big man had sweet-talked her by telling big stories about how he would help her sell gaoshan cha in Europe, and she had fallen for it completely. These ­people, it seemed, had sized her up as some sort of country bumpkin. An opportunistic country bumpkin who would swallow any sort of lie if she thought it would help her sell tea.

  That much was merely offensive. But what really hurt was the fact that they had been right.

  All she had to do was roll the window down and start screaming and those people would spend the rest of their lives in prison.

  But the big man was powerful—he had money, he had soldiers, and all of them were armed.

  But if he was all that powerful, why did he have to get help from someone like Qian Yuxia in order to perform the simple act of borrowing a van?

  Because she was disposable. That was why. She was a nobody, all alone in the big city. No one would notice she had gone missing.

  So it was time to roll the window down and start screaming.

  But if she did that, the big man would do terrible things to Zula. He had promised it. Yuxia liked Zula and felt a sort of loyalty to her simply based on the fact that tears of shame had come into Zula’s eyes when she had spoken of her failure to warn Yuxia.

  Maybe there were some small things that she could do, short of screaming, to improve the situation a little bit. She surveyed her surroundings. Not her immediate surroundings, which tended to consist of people screaming at her for blocking the street, but more the middle distance. It was busy with people plying their trades and going about their errands. Carters went to and fro pulling their two-wheeled wagons piled with all sorts of goods. One carter, whose wagon was empty, had pulled up a couple of meters away from the van and had been keeping a close eye on Yuxia. Like a certain number of these guys he was gaunt and looked about ninety years old, which probably meant that it was difficult for him to compete against the younger, burlier carters. He had to make up for that with street smarts. He had seen them earlier, unloading stuff from the back of the van and passing it down the alley. He had seen the big man climb out of the van a minute ago and look at the front of the place with his binoculars. He knew that there were several Westerners inside the building and that something was going on in there. Like everyone else on this street he was always thinking about how to make things work to his advantage, and he had made the calculation that if he hung around in the vicinity of the van, flaunting his availability, then someone connected with this operation might dispatch him on some sort of errand.

  Yuxia rolled down the window. She didn’t need to catch the carter’s eye because he was already staring right at her. “I need a locksmith,” she complained. “But my phone is dead.”

  Then she glanced at the front of the apartment building just to make sure that the big man wasn’t seeing any of this. When she turned her attention back, the carter was gone.

  WHEN IVANOV’S HEAVY footsteps had receded, Peter muttered, “Thank God. We did it. Yes! We did it. This thing is over.”

  Zula just could not summon the energy to break the news to him that they hadn’t done it and that it wasn’t over. She found the fuse for Apartment 405 again and started to unscrew it.

  “What are you doing, Zula?” Csongor asked.

  Peter swiveled to look at her. “Yeah,” he said, “what are you doing?”

  “Warning them.”

  “Warning who!?”

  “The hackers in Apartment 405.” She pulled the fuse out, then stuck it back in. Then repeated. Each time she reestablished contact, she heard a little pop as a spark bridged the gap. “I wonder if they know Morse code,” she said, and began to jiggle the fuse in and out, making a little pattern: dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. Just like Girl Scout camp.

  “You just told Ivanov that they were in 505,” Peter said in a freakishly calm and thick voice, as though he had been gargling molasses.

  “Understandable confusion,” Zula said. “This panel is a mess. And who can read these Chinese numbers?”

  She found it impossible to talk and do the Morse code thing at the same time, and so she pulled the fuse away and looked around the cellar.

  Peter and Csongor were both just staring at her. Hoping, perhaps, that she was just pulling their legs? Hard to tell.

  It was important for them to understand. Zula sighed and looked at each of them in turn. “First of all, Ivanov is planning to kill us no matter what happens. That’s just obvious.” She let that hang in the still air of the cellar for a few moments. “Which doesn’t mean that we are going to die. Because Sokolov thinks Ivanov is crazy and he will intervene to prevent Ivanov from killing us. All of that is out of our hands. We’ve been asked to give up these hackers, who are basically just a bunch of harmless kids, so that Ivanov can kill them. And we just simply can’t do that. It’s just wrong. It’s not how people behave. So I lied to the Russians.”

  Peter said “Shit!” and dropped to his hands and knees—or rather hand and knee since one hand was fixed to a banister—and began feeling around on the floor like a man who’d lost a contact lens. But he couldn’t seem to find it. “Zula!” he hissed. “You have a bobby pin in there?”

  “You mean, in my hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  Zula could not hold back a sigh and an eye roll, but then she pulled a bobby pin from her hair and flung it at Peter.

  “Do you have any more?” asked Csongor.

  Zula threw him another one.

  People who watched too many movies about hackers had all sorts of ludicrous ideas about what they were capable of. In general, they hugely overestimated hackers’ ability to do certain things. But there was one area in which hackers were routinely underestimated, and that was lock picking. For them, picking locks was a nice way to kick back and relax after a long day of doing pen tests on corporate networks. No hacker loft was complete without a shoebox full of old
locks, handcuffs, and so on, that these guys would sit around and pick just for the fun of it. Zula had always been a spectator, not a participant, and now wished that she had paid more attention. But she was pretty sure that Peter and Csongor would have this part of the problem solved rather soon and that they could then run out the door and free Yuxia from her captivity in the van.

  “The Russians will go to 505 and kick the door down and probably make some noise,” Zula said. “I am hoping that this will alert the kids in 405 and that they’ll have a chance to get out of there.” Having nothing else to do, she went back to jiggling the fuse in the socket.

  “What about the people who are actually living in Apartment 505?” Peter asked. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “It’s vacant,” Zula said. But Peter’s question had made her nervous that she might have made a mistake, so she found the label that, she was pretty sure, read “505” and verified that the fuse socket was empty.

  Which it was. But this time she noticed a detail she’d missed the first time around. There was no fuse screwed into the socket, that much was true. But there was something gleaming in there, something other than an empty socket. She dropped to one knee to get a better look at it.

  A disk of silver metal was lodged in the socket.

  The fuse had been bypassed; someone had jammed a coin into it, which was a very unsafe thing to do for a number of reasons.

  “What are you seeing?” Csongor asked.

  “I wonder if 505 might actually have some squatters living in it?” Zula said. “Can I borrow your flashlight?”

  Csongor tossed her the tiny LED flashlight that he carried in his pocket. She aimed it into the hole and verified that the gap between the contacts had in fact been bridged by a silver coin stuffed into the hole.

  It was not a Chinese coin, or any kind of coin that Zula had ever seen. It was stamped, not with an image of a person’s profile or any other sort of normal coin art, but a crescent moon with a little star between its horns.

  THE CARTER RETURNED after a few minutes. A small, bald man was trotting behind him, carrying a bag of tools.

  As he drew closer Yuxia got his attention through the windshield and waved him over toward the passenger’s seat. She unlocked the door. He opened it and climbed in, a bit tentatively, since it might be considered improper for a strange man to enter a vehicle with a solitary female.

  “Close the door please, I need to talk to you for a moment,” Yuxia said.

  He closed the door, giving her a weird look, as if Yuxia might be running the world’s most complicated and opaque scam. Which perhaps she was. For the time being, though, she was not allowing him to see her handcuffed wrist.

  The carter had pulled up close along the driver’s side of the van. “Go over there please and wait,” Yuxia said, nodding at the front of the building. “I will pay you for your trouble once my problem is solved.”

  The carter, somewhat suspicious and somewhat reluctant, withdrew a couple of meters.

  Yuxia turned to the locksmith and gave him a big smile. “Surprise!” she exclaimed, and displayed the handcuff.

  She was afraid that the poor man might have a heart attack. Yuxia had her left hand on the lock button, ready to lock him in the van if he tried to bolt. He probably would have done exactly that if she had been a man, but because she was a young woman he apparently felt that the decent thing was to hear her out.

  “A bad man did this to me,” she said, “and so, as you can see, it is probably a matter for the police. I will call them once I am free. But right now I really need to get this thing off my wrist. Can you help me, please?”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s hurting me very badly,” she whined. Talking this way was not her style, but she had seen other women do it with effect.

  The locksmith cursed under his breath and unzipped his bag.

  LIKE ANY RUSSIAN, Sokolov enjoyed a game of chess. At some level he was never not playing it! Every morning he woke up and looked at the tiles on the ceiling of the office that was his bedroom and reviewed the positions of all the pieces and thought about all the moves that they might make today, what countermoves he would have to make to maximize his chances of survival.

  He had heard somewhere, though, that, mathematically speaking, the game of Go was more difficult than chess, in the sense that the tree of possible moves and countermoves was much vaster: far too vast even for a supercomputer to work through all the possibilities. Computer chess programs had been written that could challenge a Kasparov, but no computer program could give a high-level Go player a game that was even moderately challenging. Supposedly you couldn’t even think about Go as a logical series of specific moves and countermoves; you had to think visually, recognizing patterns and developing intuitions.

  As of thirty seconds ago—when Zula had done whatever the hell she had done—this had changed from a game of chess into a game of Go.

  It might be that Zula had made the decision to give Ivanov what he wanted, sell out the Troll, and hope for Ivanov’s mercy. If that were the case, then a few seconds from now they would be invading an apartment full of terrified Chinese hackers and something regrettable was going to happen. Why, oh why, had Ivanov come in from the van? Why was he following them up the stairs? If he’d simply stayed down in the van, Sokolov might have been able to finesse the situation, perhaps emerge from the building with one hacker in tow while letting the others escape. Perhaps Ivanov would have been satisfied with scaring the hell out of that one hacker, roughing him up a little bit. After which Sokolov would have had to divine the boss’s intentions regarding Zula. He’d already made up his mind that he would, if necessary, physically intervene to protect her. Even if it meant killing Ivanov.

  On the other hand, it might be that Zula had sent them on a wild goose chase. That they were about to break into a vacant apartment. In which case all hell was going to break loose when Ivanov realized that Zula had fucked him and that the hackers who had fucked him earlier were escaping from the building. That was really the point where it turned into a game of Go, because Sokolov couldn’t even begin to think rationally about the tree of moves and countermoves that would branch out from such an event.

  So he didn’t. He gave it up and accepted the fact that he would have to work intuitively, like a Go player. Even though he had never played Go in his life.

  For now he had to operate on the assumption that Zula had given them correct information and that Apartment 505 would contain something like ten young male hackers, mostly asleep. They would not be armed in any significant way. He had gone over this with his squad the night before and reminded them of it this morning before leaving the safe house: their tactical approach must be to flood the apartment in the first five seconds after breaching the door. Every one of those hackers had to be found and divested of his phone and his computer before he could send out distress calls. The landlines had to be found and cut. The entire apartment had to be explored. It might be one single space or it might be a warren of smaller rooms. Some of those back rooms might have means of escape: ways out onto fire escapes or balconies. The plan, then, was to pile through the door the moment it was knocked down and leave one man to secure the center while the other six scattered as far and as deep into the apartment’s recesses as they could go. Once they had found and secured the periphery they would work their way back into the center, driving the hackers before them. Everyone would end up in the same place, and then a conversation could begin.

  All the men knew that plan, were equipped for it, were ready for it. From the stairs they trooped out into the fifth-floor corridor, which conveniently for them was empty at the moment. Sokolov was leading the way, but as they passed 503 he looked over his shoulder and made room for Kautsky, the biggest man in the squad, the door breaker. Kautsky was armed with a combination sledge-hammer/ax/crowbar that could make short work of any door. The ones in this building looked particularly flimsy, so Sokolov had no worries about getting through rapidl
y. Kautsky would be their man in the middle, the first one through, who would hold the center and block the exit while the others flooded in behind him and flowed to the edges. Ivanov had no scripted part in this plan, since he was supposed to be waiting down in the van, but Sokolov hoped that he would have the good sense to stay well to the rear, in the hallway, long enough for things to get under control. Then he could come in and wreak whatever revenge it was that he had been dreaming of.

  Kautsky planted himself in front of 505 and wound up with the hammer, then looked back at Sokolov, awaiting his cue. Sokolov looked back toward Ivanov. He needn’t have worried. Climbing stairs was not Ivanov’s strong point, and he was only just now emerging from the stairway, breathing heavily, still a good twenty meters away from them. Before Ivanov could catch up with them and fuck up the entire operation, Sokolov gave Kautsky a nod, and the hammer fell.

  AS THE LOCKSMITH worked on the manacle around Yuxia’s wrist, she chewed the nail of her free thumb and scanned the street and the front of the building.

  In a minute, she’d be free to get out of the van. The easiest thing then would be simply to disappear into the crowd on the street and hope that the PSB did not somehow follow her. A dubious gamble, considering that a PSB officer had been standing half a block away looking suspiciously at the van for the last couple of minutes.

  But the van belonged to the family enterprise in Yongding. If she abandoned it here, it would be traced to her immediately.

  She could go into that building and try to figure out what was going on. That was what a plucky heroine would do in a movie, but it didn’t seem like a very wise idea in real life.

  Or she could summon the PSB herself. But funny things sometimes happened when the PSB got involved. It wasn’t always about punishing the wrongdoers and helping the victims. Everyone knew that there were all sorts of connections between criminal groups and the government. Yuxia knew very little about these Russians. Less than an hour had passed since they’d put the cuff on her wrist and she hadn’t had time yet to sift through her memories of them and piece together a theory as to what they were really up to. But they had to be either spies or gangsters. If they were the latter, they might have connections with local gangsters, and if that were the case, there was no telling what bad things might happen to Yuxia if she ratted them out to the PSB and some mole within the PSB ratted her out in turn.