Reamde - Страница 58

“Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”

THE DRIVE TOOK a little while; they could have done it faster on foot. Sokolov was in occasional touch with other Russians on his walkie-talkie, which Zula had to assume was some kind of whiz-bang encrypted device, otherwise the PSB would be all over them. Since two of the Russians were missing from the van, she reckoned that Sokolov had sent out an advance party.

Csongor, who had reasonable command of Russian, supplied running translation of the walkie-talkie traffic: “He sent two guys there when it was still dark. They found a way into the building. They have been hanging out in a room in the cellar that no one uses. Accessible by a back entrance. That is where we are going.”

Yuxia, following directions from Sokolov, steered them down a street so narrow that both rearview mirrors had to be folded in against the sides of the van, and local residents had to run out into the street to pull caged poultry and large flat baskets of green tea out of their path. After a few agonizingly slow and controversial minutes of this kind of progress, they came athwart of an alley, no wider than a doorway, on their right side. The Russian on the other end of the walkie-talkie connection yelped out a single word. “Stop,” Sokolov said.

They opened the right side door of the van. The Russians filed out of it into the alley and made a bucket brigade: Peter reached behind the seat and pulled out coolers and other gear, which he handed forward to Sokolov who tossed them a few feet to one of his men in the alley, and in this fashion the equipment was moved into the building’s back entrance. This was impossible to see clearly, back there in the darkness, but seemed to be twenty or thirty feet distant, on the alley’s left side. Meanwhile Zula tried to make sense of her surroundings as best she could from twisting around in her seat and craning her neck out the windows.

If the alley to their right was the back entrance, then this street ran along the side of the Troll’s building, and they were now parked at its back corner. The ground floor sported some large openings sealed off by grimy steel roll-up doors. Above those were some corrugated metal awnings, holed with rust, that stretched partway across the street above the van and made it impossible for her to see much of the upper stories.

Looking out the windshield, she could see an intersection about fifty feet ahead of them where this side street was crossed by a wider one that was crammed with the usual flow of mostly pedestrian and bicycle traffic. That street seemed to belong to a more well-illuminated part of the universe, and Zula guessed it was because construction was under way on the far side of it: the building across the street was covered with scaffolding and blue tarps, and beyond it was a gaping cavity in the city’s fabric where an arcology or something was being thrown up.

That was all Zula could see before Sokolov indicated it was time for them to make themselves useful. Csongor, Zula, and Peter clambered out over a folded-down van seat and exited into the alley. Sokolov closed the side door of the van, then followed them down the alley toward the back entrance. Yuxia, presumably following instructions from Ivanov who was still riding shotgun, pulled forward and out of view.

A minor controversy was under way in the alley, where an old lady was leaning out of her second-floor window hollering some kind of invective down at the Russians. Zula enjoyed a moment’s hope that this woman would call the PSB. Sokolov looked up at her for a few moments, then reached into his man-purse, pulled out a half-inch-thick stack of money, let her see it — this shut her up — and then hurled it at her. It shot past her through the window and thumped against something inside. She withdrew her head and closed the window. Sokolov never broke stride.

A half flight of concrete stairs descended into a basement corridor lit by a few bare lightbulbs. The security consultants waved them down a corridor for twenty paces or so, and into a room filled with blue-gray light sifting in through a couple of dirty sidewalk-level windows. This was situated adjacent to the bottom of what Zula guessed was the building’s main stairway. It wasn’t difficult to see that the building had been designed around a central core that included not only the stairway but all the other stuff that had to run vertically: the plumbing, the power, the sewer lines. So this room was replete with pipes, valves, meters, crazy electrical wiring, and fuse panels. There was no Internet gear — in fact, no post — Second World War technology at all — which was hardly surprising, but did raise the question as to where the REAMDE guys were getting their connectivity. But all the buildings in China were webbed together with improvised wire and so they were probably pirating it from somewhere else.

“Can we go to the roof?” Peter asked.

A scout ascended to the roof and reported back via walkie-talkie that none of the REAMDE boys were hanging out there at the moment. So Peter and Zula, accompanied by Sokolov, climbed six stories to the top of the stairway. Access to the roof had formerly been sealed off by a door, but the lock had been jimmied.

The Troll’s terrace consisted of half a dozen plastic injection-molded chairs, a rusty folding table, a basketball hoop held up by a scaffolding made from plumbing parts, a tea service, a plastic tub containing a stack of magazines about the NBA, and an extension cord that trailed across the roof into the stairwell and was patched into the remains of a light fixture.

From that same light fixture, a length of cheap two-strand lamp cable ran up to the roof of the little shack that topped the stairwell, where it disappeared under a plastic bucket held in place with a brick. A blue Ethernet cable also went under that bucket.

Peter got a leg up from Sokolov, vaulted to the top of the shack, squirmed over to the bucket, removed the brick, and tilted it back to reveal a Wi-Fi device, green LEDs twinkling merrily.

The blue Ethernet cable ran from it across the roof to the front of the building, then disappeared through a drain hole in the roughly meter-high parapet. Zula followed the cable to the edge, leaned over the parapet, and peered down. She was now standing near the corner of the building diagonally opposite to where they had exited the van.

Sixty feet below her, she could see the van parked in front of the building’s main entrance, blocking traffic and creating controversy.

The blue cable had been tucked in alongside a vertical drainpipe that ran from the drain hole in the parapet down the front of the building. At some point the cable presumably peeled away from the drainpipe and entered the building through a window or some other opening, and that would mark the location of the Troll’s apartment. In a perfect world they would have been able to see that place from this vantage point and immediately pick out the apartment in question, but no such luck; it must be hidden beneath some horizontal feature that was blocking their view. And what with all the balconies, clotheslines, awnings, and external plumbing, there were plenty of those.

Not for the first time, Zula corrected herself: no, it was good luck, not bad, that they couldn’t figure it out; turning the Troll over to Ivanov would be a bad thing. She was a little perturbed by how easy it was for her to get caught up in the excitement of the hunt.

Peter drifted over to her, fixated on the screen of a PDA. “The name Golgaras mean anything to you?”

“It is the name of one of the continents of T’Rain,” Zula said.

“How about Atheron?”

“Same.”

“I’m picking up four Wi-Fi access points,” Peter said. “Two of them are set to the default names and have really weak signals — I’ll bet they are in that building across the street. Golgaras is very strong, and Atheron is considerably weaker.”

“Try unplugging that Wi-Fi unit under the bucket,” Zula suggested, “and see if one of them goes dead.”

Peter turned and headed back to the stairwell to try the experiment.

Zula had become interested in a bundle of improvised wiring that joined this building to the one across the street with the scaffolding and the blue tarps. It was connected to the front wall almost directly below her between the fourth and fifth stories. It was not attached at any one point but rather involved with the building through a spreading and ramifying root system. Zula was able to make out a single strand of blue Ethernet cable spiraling lazily around the outside of the bundle: the last piece of wire to have been added.

“Ivanov requests status report,” said Sokolov, who had crunched up behind her on the pea gravel. He had plugged an earpiece into his walkie-talkie.

“I think it’s in this corner of the building,” Zula said. “Below us somewhere. I’m going to guess it’s on the fourth or the fifth floor.”

Sokolov relayed this into a microphone clipped to his shirt collar.

“Golgaras went dead,” Peter reported. “Atheron is still transmitting.”

“Meaning?” Sokolov asked.

“We think that they have two WAPs,” Peter said. “One up here on the roof and probably one in their apartment.”

Sokolov put his hand to his ear and listened, then asked: “Ivanov asks: What is basis for guess of this corner?”

Zula directed his attention to the wire bundle below them. Peter and Sokolov bent over the parapet and saw what she had seen.

“We could narrow it down more,” Peter volunteered, “if we could get a look at the building from the front. See where the blue wires enter the structure.”