This wasn’t like crossing a stretched steel cable in a military training camp. The bundle was a skein of perhaps two dozen separate wires, as gaily colored as a maypole. Some of the wires were electrical, some telephone, some data, some not clearly identifiable. He couldn’t get his hand around the whole bundle, and so every time he swung forward he had to thrust his fingertips like a blade into the heart of the thing and get a grip on whatever presented itself. This had worked the first few times, but on his last grab he had aimed wrong, missed the bundle, and snatched one single wire, a blue Ethernet cable that spiraled around all the other wires, and now his weight was pulling all the slack out of that one wire and peeling it loose from the bundle. He reached up with his free hand, whipped it around the taut blue line, and pulled himself up enough to get that first hand free, then repeated, ascending the wire but not gaining altitude since the blue wire was still giving up slack. He was only an arm’s length below the bundle but couldn’t quite reach it. Finally the wire stopped giving way and held fast and he kicked up with his legs, making himself upside down for a moment, and got both legs wrapped around the whole bundle. The rifle, and a CamelBak water pouch that he was wearing on his back, fell to the ends of their straps and dangled. He allowed himself a few seconds to catch his breath before he began shinnying along the bundle as rapidly as he could manage. This was much slower than the hand-over-hand technique and made him feel like an incompetent civilian, but he could not risk doing it the other way. In any case, he was not too worried about being shot at since the apartment was now completely engulfed in flames. Solvent cans burst open and vomited storms of combustible vapor from windows.
YUXIA WAS BEMUSED by the length of time it took the locksmith to work on the van’s ignition. Her family’s hotel in the mountains of Fujian was well stocked with DVDs of Western action movies, which could be had for next to nothing in Xiamen. From watching these, Yuxia had learned that any vehicle in the world could be started in a few seconds just by striking at the steering column until wires fell out and then touching the wires together until a spark was observed. And yet this locksmith turned it into an elaborate procedure that centered around picking the lock itself. It was quite obvious from the look on his face that he was extremely disturbed by all the gunfire taking place above, and that this was not making him get the job done any faster.
Yuxia was, of course, rather disturbed herself. She had reacted somewhat impulsively in handcuffing the poor locksmith to the steering wheel. At the time, only a few shots had been fired, and she had assumed that this would be the last of it, and that he would have the engine hot-wired in a few moments anyway. He was overreacting—using this as a pretext to abandon Yuxia, and, by extension, Zula and Csongor and Peter. But since then it had developed into what sounded like a full-scale war, and pieces of debris kept clattering down onto the van’s roof. Every time it happened the locksmith was startled and seemed to lose his place in the lock-picking project. It dragged on for what seemed like a year, and Yuxia began to lose her nerve, as she felt both terrified to be in this predicament and guilty over what she had done to the locksmith. Nothing prevented her from exiting the van and running away. And yet every time she thought about it seriously, something big would slam down onto the van’s roof and remind her that it was a good thing to have steel over her head. And life really would be much easier for her if she could get this van out of here.
So preoccupied did she become with such thoughts that she was startled when she heard the van’s engine come to life. The dashboard lights came on and the tachometer needle rose off its pin.
The locksmith let out a curse, threw down the tools he’d been working with, and attacked the manacle with something else. This time it took him only a few seconds. Then he was gone, leaving the handcuff dangling from the steering wheel and half of his tools on the floor of the van. He didn’t bother to shut the passenger door.
Yuxia reached over, pulled the door shut, then settled herself in the driver’s seat again and put the vehicle into gear.
Then she took one last look back at the apartment building. What about Zula and her two hacker boys? The one who was bad for her, and the one who was good for her?
CSONGOR WAS A bit slower than Peter when it came to picking his handcuff. Zula noticed that he was sticking his tongue out as he worked. Somehow, from that, she concluded it was best to remain absolutely still and not distract him.
She, however, was growingly distracted by a sound that was echoing down the stairwell and getting louder every second. It was a human voice, repeating the same utterance, again and again, as if the speaker were an actor trying to memorize an elusive snatch of dialog. At the beginning she could only make out a few of the more percussive consonants, but as the speaker got closer, one flight at a time, she was able to piece the sounds together into words.
He was saying: “You FUCKINK bitch! You FUCKINK bitch! You FUCKINK bitch!…”
It was Ivanov and he was saying this in a tone, more of astonishment than of anger, as if the degree of fucking-bitchness exhibited today by Zula went far beyond all known historic precedents, to the point where Ivanov himself almost could not credit the testimony of his own senses. As he proceeded, his astonishment only mounted, and when he said “FUCKINK” his voice would flutter, for a moment, up into a falsetto before collapsing back into “bitch.”
In spite of all her efforts not to, she glanced at Csongor to see how he was doing. He reacted immediately, which told her that he could hear it too and that he understood its significance.
Then the chant was interrupted with a sudden “YOU!”
Ivanov was only two, perhaps three flights above them. His footfalls had stopped.
He had to be talking to Peter; but Peter made no response that Zula could hear.
“All by yourself?” Ivanov asked. He had to repeat the question and insist that Peter supply an answer. Finally Zula was able to make out some sort of faint response, kind of a yelping sound, from Peter.
“And where is your lovely girlfriend then?”
The conversation, if that was the right word for it, was nothing more than a series of utterances from Ivanov:
“Ah, brave Peter goes ahead to scout for danger? Zula waits behind, ready to follow? Shall we go and have conversation with Zula? No? Vwy not? Perhaps story is lie? Yes? Is lie? Zula is in cellar for other reason? Maybe because she is CHAINED TO PIPE!? Because BRAVE BOYFRIEND left her behind? TO DIE? While BRAVE BOYFRIEND ran away LIKE FUCKINK RAT?”
A hand came down gently on Zula’s shoulder, and she jumped away so violently that she practically split the skin on her wrist when the manacle pulled her up short. But it was only Csongor. He had gotten free. He put a finger to his lips, then dropped to one knee, in the attitude of a man proposing marriage, and went to work on her handcuff with the bobby pin. At first he tried to get access to the keyhole on the manacle that encircled her wrist, but this was pointed downward and it was difficult for him to get the right angle on it, so he gave up on that and began working on the one that was locked around the pipe, which was tilted toward him conveniently.