Reamde - Страница 54

This third wangba was on the top story of a four-story commercial building that fronted on a side street, perhaps wide enough to carry a car going in each direction if uncomplicated by pedestrians, bicyclists, or carters. It was a bit smaller than the first two they’d visited and had a younger clientele and a somewhat seedier vibe about it. There was a single PSB officer stationed at the entrance, but he didn’t have the high-tech system for monitoring what was shown on the customers’ terminals. A few mirrors were planted about the place, theoretically making it possible for him to look over people’s shoulders, but in order for it to work, he would have to care and he would have to look up from his glossy magazine (in Chinese, but exclusively concerned with the personnel and doings of the National Basketball Association), neither of which obtained. This wangba was considerably louder, not with music or with game sound tracks but with conversation. As they perceived after they paid their way in, the hubbub all emanated from one corner, where a dozen or so teenagers had locked down a cluster of terminals and were playing a game together, looking over each other’s shoulders and calling out warnings, orders, encouragement, mockery, and wails of despair.

As usual, Csongor went to one terminal while Yuxia and Sokolov went to another. Zula drifted over toward the corner where the young men were all playing. As soon as their screens came into view she recognized that they were playing T’Rain. The style in which they were communicating told her that they must all be part of a raiding party going on an adventure together; their characters were all in the same place in the T’Rain world, probably conducting a dungeon raid or fighting it out with a rival gang, and so a warrior might be calling out to a priest that he needed to be healed or a mage might be requesting protection from a menacing beast while he cast his spells. It was a common enough play style.

She could tell that they were badass. This was confirmed when she got into position for a better look at their characters: massively powerful and expensively equipped.

The landscape in which they were fighting looked strikingly familiar.

It was the Torgai Foothills.

They were fighting near the ley line intersection with the trebuchets.

She became aware, suddenly, that she had been watching for a few minutes and that Sokolov was right next to her, close enough that she could sense his warmth. He’d read the look on her face, come over to see what had transfixed her.

Feeling suddenly conspicuous, she turned away and walked back toward where Csongor was sitting. He was looking aghast at the screen of his terminal.

“What is going down?” Qian Yuxia wanted to know. “What is you guys’ problem?”

Sokolov turned to look at her. “Tomorrow we go fishing,” he announced. “Need iceboxes.”

HALF AN HOUR later Zula was chained to a sink in the women’s bathroom at the safe house.

When Sokolov had understood that the young men in the corner were in league with the Troll — that one of them might even be the Troll — when Csongor had beckoned him over and shown him an IP address on his screen that matched the one written on Sokolov’s hand — the Russian had acted with a combination of extreme dispatch and perfect calm that in other circumstances Zula would have admired. He had made a phone call. A few minutes later he had escorted Zula out to the street just as a taxi containing four security consultants had pulled up. One of these had remained in the taxi, and the others had stood around Zula in a manner that was not overtly threatening but that made it obvious she had no choice but to climb into the backseat. A few minutes later she and the security consultant were in the parking garage of the skyscraper, and a minute after that they were in the ladies’ room. The Russians, tired of escorting her to the bathroom and waiting in a stall, had somehow procured a length of chain about twenty feet long and padlocked one end of it to the U-bend of a drain trap beneath one of the sinks. The other end of the chain had a handcuff locked onto it, which ended up snapped around Zula’s ankle. Her luggage and her sleeping bag had already been deposited on the floor, along with a stack of rations, a modest heap of junk food, and a roll of paper towels. She had enough slack to reach the toilet, and she could get water from the sink. What more could a girl ask for?

This was the one time that she just went out of her mind crying. Fetal position, head banging on the floor. It was being chained that did it. She’d been through a lot of weird stuff, but no one had ever thought to chain her before.

Eventually she came up onto her hands and knees and made use of the paper towels.

Then she escaped.

During college she’d rented a house with some other girls. The kitchen drain kept getting clogged. They didn’t have money to hire a plumber. Zula had not grown up on an Iowa farm for nothing. The key thing you had to know was that the pipe nuts that held drain traps in place, though they looked huge and immovable, were generally applied finger-tight, since all that was necessary was to compress an internal O-ring around the pipe, and cranking it down with a wrench would not make it seal any better, in fact would only inflict damage.

The plumber who had installed the drain trap to which Zula had been chained had stronger hands than Zula did, but she was eventually able to move the nuts and yank out the U-bend.

She piled the loose chain into her shoulder bag and then slung that over her shoulder.

She then climbed up on a toilet and from there to the top of one of the partitions between the stalls and moved a ceiling tile aside. She had a flashlight in her bag — another Iowa-farm-girl residual habit — and used it to look around for whatever it was that had made Sokolov so concerned when he had first seen it.

This was not totally obvious at first, and so she clambered up into the space above the ceiling and got a grip on one of those zigzaggy trusses and used it to crab-walk away from the safe house and toward the core of the building. The elevator shafts were nearby, but they were clad in concrete and there was no obvious way to get inside of them; even if she had been able to do so, it wasn’t clear how that would have helped her.

When she was certain that she must have passed beyond the limits of the ladies’ room, she reached down, pried up a ceiling tile, and looked into the space below. It seemed to be a utility corridor, dark at the moment.

She let herself down onto the upper surface of the metal grid in which the ceiling tiles were fixed. This supported her weight but was destroyed in the process: the flimsy extrusions bent downward and the adjoining tiles folded and cracked. It didn’t matter. She got a grip on the ruined grid and let herself down until her feet were dangling maybe three feet above the floor, then let herself drop.

As she had guessed from looking at the arrangement of the concrete verticals passing through the ceiling space, the fire stairway was just on the other side of a wall, and all she had to do, in order to get into it, was to exit from this corridor into the elevator lobby and then pass through an adjoining door. During those few moments she would be in clear view of any guard who was posted at the reception desk of the safe house — but she knew that at least four of the seven security consultants were deployed outside the building, and she hoped that the desk might be unattended. It was easy enough to check this by pushing the door open slightly and peering through the crack.

No one was there. Deeper inside the suite she could see other security consultants pacing around, talking on phones, ransacking their luggage, but no one was looking out into the elevator lobby.

She exited, made two strides across the polished marble floor, opened the doorway to the fire stairs, and slipped in. Restraining the urge to just make a break for it, she used her butt to soften the closure of the door. Then she began to descend the stairway as fast as she could with twenty pounds of chain jangling in the bag around her neck and one end of it cuffed to her ankle.

The descent of forty-three floors gave her plenty of time to think about this in a way she hadn’t when she had just made the decision to do it. To the extent she’d thought about it at all, she had been thinking, What would Qian Yuxia do? or perhaps, What would Qian Yuxia think of me if she could see me curled up on the floor sobbing like a little girl?

Until now her complicity in all of this had been based on a certain kind of unspoken bargain that had been struck between her and Ivanov, a bargain that amounted to “we are treating you badly and will probably kill you but we could treat you a lot worse and we could kill you sooner.” Not much of a bargain, but then she hadn’t had much choice in negotiating the terms. The way she had been sucked into this terrible situation was bad enough, but the thought that she was now partly responsible for getting Yuxia ensnared in it too was intolerable.

In theory, Peter was being held hostage and might be answerable for her escape, but she doubted it. Peter had gone over to the other side. He was being useful to them. Killing him wouldn’t get her back. And as for Csongor — she hoped nothing bad would happen to Csongor, but she was also entitled to think of herself and her own survival.

Which was all she was thinking of when she hit the bottom of the stairwell, rounded a corner at speed, and caromed off a man who was standing right there for some reason. She spun away from him instinctively. He grabbed at her but had to settle for her shoulder bag. She left it in his grasp and kept running, the chain dragging out behind her as it uncoiled from the bag.