REAMDE

“I’d better see what’s going on,” he said, after a silence. A silence that had gone on for too long. He’d had too much time to think during that silence.

 

“Peter?” she said. Standing there with her wrist poised in what she’d hoped would be an inviting position, she felt like a girl in a prom dress, being stood up by her date.

 

“Just going to scope it out,” he assured her.

 

He had that same look about him, the same tone of voice, as the night they had driven back from B.C. He was in full dodging mode.

 

“Whatever is going on up there,” Zula said, “it has nothing to do with hackers. This is something bigger than that.”

 

“Back in a sec,” Peter said, and walked to the base of the stairs. He hesitated for a few moments, unable to meet her eye. “Whatever,” he muttered. He hunched his shoulders and began walking up the stairs.

 

MARLON COULD SEE four other da G shou clinging to various grids like spiders, looking for ways down. There were only three left in the apartment.

 

Moving around this way was not difficult. At least 50 percent of the building’s frontage consisted of grids just like the one Marlon was hanging from. The only aspect of this that was remotely problematic was finding ways to make the transition from one grid to the next. In many cases, this was made considerably easier by other features that had been attached to the outside of the building: awnings, brackets for external airconditioning units, bundles of cables, plumbing, downspouts, and quasi-European architectural bric-a-brac, cast in concrete.

 

Looking straight up, Marlon could see the bundle of wires that ran above the street to the building across the way. He could clearly make out the blue cat-5 cable that he and his partners had added to it when they had moved in. If he could climb up to it, he could shinny across the bundle to the opposite building. That seemed unnecessarily risky, though, when he could just climb down.

 

The window above him, on the fifth floor, exploded and showered him with glass. Marlon closed his eyes and bowed his head and let it rain down all over him. Then he began moving sideways as fast as he could, because the glass breaking was not just a one-time event: someone was up there systematically demolishing the window with a hard, heavy object. Risking a quick look up, he glimpsed that object and recognized it as a rifle butt. He moved sideways as rapidly as he could. His roommates were emerging from the same hatch he had used and looking his way; their instinct was to follow the leader. Marlon waved them furiously in the other direction, making significant glances up at the flailing rifle butt, and they quickly took his meaning.

 

People were screaming down on the street. He ignored them.

 

A shot sounded directly above him, then another, each one threatening to knock him loose with its shock wave. Metal flew, and he understood that the lock on a window grille had been shot out from the inside. Not knowing what this might portend, he began moving faster, more recklessly, and in a few moments reached the building’s corner. Below him, a narrow side street plugged into the large one that ran along the front. One floor below, an awning had been constructed sufficiently far in the past that the corrugated metal was thoroughly rusted and holed. Which was a good thing; he’d have slid off a new roof. This one would afford plenty of friction and numerous handholds. Marlon used the window grids to descend to that level and then used an airconditioner bracket and a downspout as handholds to make the move around the corner and get onto that awning. Following that horizontally for about ten meters he came to the midline of the building’s side wall, which was marked by a vertical column of small windows that shed light onto an internal stairway. Running parallel to that was a vertical cable bundle, very thick and dense, with many handholds. Marlon sank his fingers into it, got a solid grip, and then planted his shoes against the brick and began to walk down the side of the building like a human fly.

 

As he was passing the window on the second floor, he nearly lost his grip. A face had appeared briefly in the window, so close that he could have reached out and touched it had a dirty pane of glass not been in the way. It was the face of a white man, round, heavy, dark hair slicked back, the skin flushed with excitement. It was only there for a second. Then it disappeared as the man proceeded down the steps to the floor below.

 

But even through the glass and above the noise, Marlon could hear the man bellowing a single English word: “YOU!”

 

Curiosity, for Marlon, had now become a more powerful force than self-preservation. He’d been planted in one location for a few moments and now turned his attention back to the wire bundle, looking for his next set of handholds. He wanted to get down to the level below and see who YOU was.

 

But his attention was drawn by renewed movement in the window: another face, dimly seen through the dirt on the window, descending the stairs, rounding the turn at the landing. But this one was different in several ways. To begin with it was a dark-skinned face, something rarely seen in these parts. A couple of the other da G shou had mentioned seeing a black man in the building’s upper hallway, and Marlon had made fun of them for watching too much hoops on television. But there was no denying that Marlon was now seeing a black man, and a fairly tall one at that. He was carrying a rifle that Marlon recognized, from video games, as an AK-47. But unlike the first man, he was moving carefully, even furtively.

 

Rounding the turn on the landing, the black man turned his back to Marlon, descended a couple of steps, and crept to a halt.

 

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