Reamde - Страница 60

“They are ready,” Csongor said. “You can begin pulling fuses.”

“Explain to them that the box is a mess, and it’s just going to take me a little bit longer to make sense of it.”

Csongor looked as if he really didn’t want to be the bearer of that message.

“If I just start pulling fuses indiscriminately,” Zula pointed out, “tenants are going to start coming down here to find out what’s wrong.”

Csongor went up the stairs and relayed that to Sokolov.

Zula was noticing that the newer circuits all had fuses in them but that several of the sockets for what she took to be fifth-floor apartments were vacant. She reckoned that empty sockets were probably a marker for vacant apartments. To discourage squatters and to prevent other tenants from pirating electricity, they would pull the fuse, thereby shutting off the power, to any unit that was not occupied. Scanning the whole panel, she saw that every floor had at least one or two vacant units but that they were most common on the fifth floor: not surprising since, in a building with no elevator, those were the least desirable apartments.

Her eye fell on a socket labeled with the character for 5, then 0, then the 5 character again; 505 was one of the two most likely candidates, the other being 405. But this socket didn’t have a fuse plugged into it.

She scanned up the panel until she found the sequence of characters that, she was fairly certain, represented 405. It had a fuse.

She reached out and unscrewed the fuse, then turned to Csongor and held the fuse up in the air. He gave a hand signal to Sokolov, who apparently relayed it up the steps.

But none of this was even necessary. Peter and Ivanov were already on their way down.

Zula screwed the fuse back in as they descended, restoring power to 405.

“Got it on the first try!” Peter announced, wiggling the PDA in the air in a triumphant style that Zula found a little chilling. “We found the Troll!”

“Zula,” said Ivanov, “nicely done.” As if she had removed a brain tumor. Then Ivanov drew up short, in a way that was almost funny. “Which apartment?” For he had realized that this information was still lacking. Only Zula knew the answer.

It had been a while since that many people had looked at her that raptly.

“It’s 505,” she said.

Sokolov spoke to Ivanov in Russian, raising some kind of objection. Or perhaps that was too strong a word. He was mentioning an interesting point.

Ivanov considered it and discussed it with Sokolov, but he had his eye on Zula the whole time.

He knew. She had done something wrong — given herself away somehow.

“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.”