“Not yet.”
“If we can turn it into an excuse for more pavement pounding,” Zula suggested, “it might help us.”
“Help you how?”
“Help us,” she repeated.
She realized that she kind of wanted to kill him. She was sure that the feeling would pass. But she was also sure that it would come back. “Do whatever you want with the information,” she said, and walked away.
“ARE YOU INSANE?” Ivanov asked him.
Sokolov was flummoxed. Ivanov accusing him, Sokolov, of being insane. So unexpected. He could not think of anything to say.
He had been telling the story of the day. At first he had merely summarized, which was generally what superiors wanted their subordinates to do for them, but Ivanov had insisted on hearing everything in great detail. And so, after suffering quite a few interruptions, Sokolov had settled into a much more detailed storytelling style, and Ivanov had listened carefully all the way through the account of the “shopping” expedition, tipping the concierge, and walking home along the waterfront.
It would not be the first time Sokolov had been tongue lashed by the boss, so he just stood there at attention and waited for it.
Ivanov laughed. “I do not care,” he said, “what the fucking buildings are made of. Whether the walls can, or cannot, be penetrated by number 4 buckshot. About the options for escaping the building in the event of a tactical retreat. What the fuck are you thinking, Sokolov? Are you thinking that this is the Siege of Grozny? This is not the Siege of Grozny! It is very simple. Find the Troll. Go to where he lives. Enter his apartment. Take him out of there and bring him to me.”
Sokolov had nothing to say.
“Did I hire the wrong guy?”
“That is possible, sir,” Sokolov said. “Those guys you found in Seattle—the ones who did Wallace—they are more the type for this kind of job.”
“Well, those guys in Seattle ARE NOT HERE!” Ivanov said, crescendoing, during that sentence, from a mild conversational tone to a shout that could detonate stored ammunition. “Instead, I have YOU! And your extremely expensive guys out there!”
Sokolov might have pointed out that he and his expensive guys were security consultants and that Ivanov had lately been asking them to do some pretty weird things. But he didn’t see how it would improve Ivanov’s mood.
“Another thing,” Ivanov continued, “what the fuck was the point of coming back along the waterfront? Are you under the impression that the Troll lives in a ferry terminal?”
“Reconnoitering the ground,” Sokolov said. “Getting to know the field of operations.”
Ivanov was nonplussed. “The ground—the field of operations—is where the Troll lives. And he doesn’t live in a ferry terminal.”
Sokolov said nothing.
“I don’t get it, Sokolov. Explain your thinking to me.”
“Tactical maneuver in this city is going to be nearly impossible,” Sokolov said. He nodded at a window. “Just look at it. All the space is taken up. But the water is a different story. It’s crowded, yes. But it’s the only option we’ve got if we need to—”
“To what, Sokolov?”
“To fall back. Improvise. Move creatively.”
There was now a silence of perhaps thirty seconds as Ivanov marshaled every resource of energy and strength at his disposal to control his rage.
Sokolov wasn’t the least bit worried about what would happen when Ivanov lost that struggle and blew his stack. He was much more worried about what was going on in the boss’s circulatory system in the meantime. For during all their comings and goings today, he had managed to spend a few minutes on some hotel lobby Internet terminals, and he had confirmed that Ivanov was on two varieties of blood pressure medication.
Assuming, of course, that he was still actually taking his pills.
So what really worried Sokolov was that this visible struggle to hold in his fury was driving Ivanov’s blood pressure up to levels normally seen only in deep-sea oil wells. Flaking off more bits of stuff that were going straight to his brain.
If Ivanov dropped dead, how the hell would they get out of this country?
So lost did Sokolov get in these ruminations that he forgot that Ivanov was still alive, still in the room, and still in the middle of a conversation with him.
“Your job,” Ivanov finally said, extremely quietly, “is not to move creatively. There will be no falling back. No improvising.”
“I understand, sir,” Sokolov said, “but it is simply a normal practice to be familiar with the area and to have some kind of backup plan.”
It felt like a reasonable thing to say, but it seemed to disturb Ivanov more deeply than anything Sokolov had done during the entire interview. It was not merely that Ivanov thought a backup plan was unnecessary. He actually thought Sokolov was up to something fishy. Sokolov’s interest in a backup plan made him actively suspicious.
But Sokolov was not above doing some tactical maneuvering, some falling back, even here. He shrugged, as if the backup plan remark had been mere whimsy. “Anyway,” he said, “I got an idea.”
“Yes? What kind of idea?”
Sokolov took a few steps over to the window and looked down toward the waterfront. It was only about seven in the evening and so people were still flooding and surging by the thousands in and out of the ferry terminals’ gates. Ivanov turned to the window as well, tried to see whatever it was that Sokolov was looking at.
“Yes?” Ivanov prompted him, after a few moments.
“I can’t see any just now,” Sokolov said. “They are not that numerous compared to the commuters, the students, and so on.”
“Who are these people you can’t see any of?”
“Fishermen.”