Reamde - Страница 44

“Okay, so we have one IP address at least,” Csongor said, during the drive.

Sokolov was taking phone pictures out the window, getting shots mostly of hotels. This five-minute adventure had told him that Western-style business hotels were the only places in Xiamen where they could do so much as draw breath without being the talk of the town for weeks afterward.

“Anywhere near the address space we’re interested in?” asked Zula.

“In fact, yes!” said Csongor. “They use the same ISP. Which isn’t saying much, of course.”

“It’s a start,” Zula said.

They went to the Hyatt and ordered breakfast.

In the vicinity of the airport, vast development projects were under way: a number of commercial real estate parks and one international conference center with a giant windowed sphere in front of it. Sokolov longed to hide himself in their anonymity and emptiness. But they were so disconnected from the city proper that he might as well have tried to hunt down the Troll from a shopping mall in Toronto.

Banners on every lamppost sported pictures of the local hero, Zheng Chenggong. A similar but much larger banner had been mounted to the front of the new conference center. Apparently this image was the official logo of the conference that had attracted the multinational fleet of small jets: something to do with patching up relations between Taiwan and mainland China.

As they picked at their omelets, Sokolov asked Csongor (who had logged on to the Hyatt’s Wi-Fi network) to google up a list of four- and five-star hotels. Csongor not only did that; he figured out a way to patch in to the Hyatt’s business center and printed out the list. A member of the hotel staff brought it to their table on a little tray.

They went outside and got in a taxi. Sokolov pointed to a hotel on Csongor’s printout, and the taxi took them there. It was back in the middle of town, closer to the waterfront. They went into the lobby and found a place to sit down. While Csongor got on the Internet, Sokolov watched the way guests interacted with the front desk staff and the concierge.

They did the same thing eight times at eight different hotels. It took them until midafternoon.

Then they took a taxi back to the hotel that had the best concierge. Sokolov had Zula go to the concierge, a young woman who spoke excellent English and gave every impression of actually enjoying her job. Zula explained that she and her friends wanted to go on a leisurely drive around town and see some of the less touristy sites, maybe go shopping in local markets.

The concierge led them out front and explained as much to a taxi driver. Sokolov, Zula, and Csongor crammed themselves into the taxi’s backseat. The driver offered to let Sokolov ride up front, but Sokolov wanted to remain partly concealed behind the tinted windows in the rear.

Until now they had never seen anything other than modern commercial districts, but within twenty seconds of their pulling out of the hotel drive, the taxi was deep in one of those older neighborhoods that had attracted Sokolov’s interest.

Csongor had a laptop open and was continually scanning for available Wi-Fi stations. Most of these were password protected, but every so often he found one that was open and checked its IP address.

Zula meanwhile was using Csongor’s phone, which had built-in GPS, to keep track of their latitude and longitude. This wouldn’t have been necessary in New York or some other city where they could have made sense of the street grid, but here it was the only way that they could tally Csongor’s observations against the physical geography of the city.

If the taxi moved much faster than walking pace, Wi-Fi stations came and went too quickly for Csongor to establish connections, but this rarely happened. Whenever a clear place opened up in traffic, it would be seized by a gaunt man in a conical hat pulling a two-wheeled cart. Those guys were all over the place; they seemed to have a stranglehold on transport of all goods weighing less than a ton. If the taxi driver honked for long enough, the offending carter would eventually pull aside and make way.

After they had been driving around somewhat aimlessly for twenty minutes, the taxi driver made a phone call and then handed his phone back to Zula. With a nervous glance toward Sokolov, Zula accepted the phone.

Then she smiled and took the phone away from her head. “It’s the concierge,” she explained. “She hopes we are enjoying the tour so far, and she wants to know what sorts of things we would like to shop for.”

“Some of the men carry small bags, like purses,” Sokolov said. “I want one.”

Zula relayed that into the phone and then handed it back to the taxi driver, who listened for a few moments, then snapped the phone shut and effected a course change. Ten minutes later they had pulled up in front of a little storefront piled high with leather goods. Sokolov and Zula got out of the taxi, leaving Csongor in the vehicle with his laptop.

As Sokolov had come to expect, this was the most sensational thing that had happened in this district of Xiamen since Zheng Chenggong had chased away the Dutch pirates and so, as they shopped for luggage, they were enjoyed by a vast audience of fascinated neighbors, aged family members of the proprietors who had been hastily summoned from upstairs via phone, random passersby, flabbergasted carters, and professional beggars who carefully tracked their every movement, talked about them, and found sudden humor in details so minor that Sokolov was not entirely sure what they were reacting to. He quickly settled on a leather man-purse that looked as if it could comfortably accommodate several currency bricks, with plenty of room left over for some ammo clips and a couple of stun grenades, and he was about to pay the quoted price when Zula intervened and proposed a somewhat lower figure. This led to haggling, which, as it turned out, Zula was good at. Not in the sense of being an absolute bitch about it but in the sense of remaining on good terms with the proprietor even while firmly insisting that the price was too high. And so finally Sokolov was granted an unbroken stretch of twenty or thirty seconds in which he could actually turn his attention to the neighborhood and try to gather in some impressions of the place.

All the buildings were made of concrete, or perhaps bricks or stone blocks with mortar troweled over them. It didn’t really matter. The point was that the walls would stop low-velocity rounds and shotgun pellets, and you couldn’t kick your way through them. They would not burn very easily. Depending on how much rebar had been used — and his guess was that the builders had cut plenty of corners in that department — these structures, compared to wood- or steel-framed ones, would be more vulnerable to collapse under the exceptionally stressful conditions that frequently obtained when men like Sokolov were earning their pay. They were four or five stories high, which meant that they did not have elevators and that, if it was like Europe, the highest floors would house the poorest people. Ground floors tended to be retail; upper stories were offices (on larger streets) or apartments (smaller). Apartments quite frequently sported small balconies, but these had invariably been retrofitted with grids of steel bars, even on the upper floors — apparently burglars here climbed walls and abseiled from rooftops. The grids themselves looked eminently climbable and so might be handy for gaining access to a roof when doors were locked, or to depart from a building when stairwells were filled with products of combustion or men with guns who wanted to kill him. Some ropes might come in handy. But really, when wasn’t that the case?

Street widths ranged from one meter (pedestrians only) to perhaps eight meters (all traffic).

Wiring was external and informal in the extreme. Some of the bundles strung across streets were as thick as his torso, and it was obvious that they had begun as one individual wire that had accreted more wires over time.

“Okay,” Zula said, “one hundred.” She was looking at him. So was the shopkeeper.

Sokolov pulled a C-note equivalent ten-stack from his pocket, peeled off a bill, and handed it over. The man-purse was his. The audience began to disperse. Show was over.

Back in the taxi, Sokolov said: “Same procedure. Buy some other stuff.”

“What would you like to buy?”

“Does not matter.”

“Tea? There seem to be a lot of people selling tea.”

“Tea then.”

“Teapot to make it in?”

“Yes.”

“I need to hit a drugstore.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a girl.”

“Fine. Hit drugstore. Repeat procedure.”

They repeated procedure for a while. Zula bought tea from a small, energetic woman in blue boots and a tea service from an old lady in a side alley. It became somewhat routine, and Sokolov even began to feel somewhat comfortable standing in the open bays of the shops as Zula haggled. It seemed to work for Csongor, who reported that he was gathering more data the whole time. But Sokolov did not see much more during the last hour than he had during the first ten minutes. The physical layout of these neighborhoods did not vary much from one block to the next. But it would be easy to get lost, and only a lifelong resident would be able to find his way out. The hazy conditions made it difficult to get a fix on the location of the sun, so celestial navigation was out.

He had the taxi driver take them back to where they’d started, and he slipped the concierge a C-note wad. Then they walked home along the waterfront, giving Sokolov a chance to see how the ferry lines operated and Csongor a chance to wardrive some of the Wi-Fi hotspots in the terminals’ various waiting rooms and snack bars. When Colonel Sanders hove into view, Sokolov called ahead to warn his squad that they were coming, and when they reached the office building, the steel door was already open for them.