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?”