“Are you a Big-Footed Woman?”
Yuxia looked at her like she was an idiot and extended a blue boot.
Zula shrugged. “But you might have a very small foot inside there!”
“I am Hakka,” said Qian Yuxia, as if that should put this entire part of the conversation to rest immediately. “I told you yesterday.”
“Sorry, I forgot the name.”
“What is up? Why are you here?”
Sokolov had now drawn close enough that Zula felt it best to stick to the script. Because they had worked out a script yesterday. “You’ve heard about the conference? About Taiwan?”
“Yes, what are you, the ambassador of Eritrea?”
“I’m here with the American delegation,” Zula said. “Csongor, here, is with the Hungarians and—”
“Ivan Ivanovich,” said Sokolov, with a courtly nod.
“Ivan is with the Russians. We have a couple of days off and so we are just—”
“Chillin’?”
“Yes. Chillin’.”
“Is one of these guys your boyfriend?”
“No. Why?”
Qian Yuxia gave Zula a playful backhanded slap on the arm, as if to chide her for being a slow pupil. “I want to know if it is cool to flirt with them!”
“Sure, go ahead!” Zula had been kind of assuming that Qian Yuxia was a dyke. Maybe she wasn’t. Or maybe she was a dyke who found it amusing to flirt with heterosexual males.
“Your hotel doesn’t have Internet!?”
“Of course it does.” Which did not answer the implicit question. “Csongor is such a nerd that he can’t go a whole hour without checking his email.”
“Hmm. Well, here is a place.”
Yuxia had led them across an intersection and down a side street lined with little shops. Next to one of these, a stairway led up and into the interior of a building. It was unmarked except for an old piece of World of Warcraft paraphernalia, the head of a creature called a Tauren, pasted to the wall. Like a medieval tavern sign, almost.
They paused there for a moment.
“They are called stairs,” said Qian Yuxia.
YESTERDAY IT HAD seemed as though they were harvesting an impressively large number of IP addresses and latitude/longitude pairs. When Csongor had actually produced a map of these, though, and overlaid it on an image of Xiamen, it had looked discouraging: their data somehow managed to be sparse and clumpy at the same time. A few trends had been evident, though, and had given them reason to believe that the IP address still written in fading ink on Sokolov’s hand was assigned to an access point, not way out in the suburbs, not near the university, and not even in one of the more far-flung parts of the island, but within a kilometer or two of the safe house.
They could probably see the Troll’s building from their window. Which was a little bit like saying that you could see Earth from the moon. But it was a kind of progress.
The general plan for today, then, was to visit all the Internet cafés they could find that lay in the general zone of interest, and try to get some finer-grained data.
While making this plan in the presence, and under the close supervision, of Ivanov, they had all spoken confidently of Internet cafés, as if it were a subject on which they were knowledgeable. And why not? They were hackers; they were from Seattle; Peter’s loft was all of about a mile from the world headquarters of Starbucks, an organization that had shotgunned the planet with coffee bars featuring Wi-Fi.
They had, in other words, been assuming three things of Chinese Internet cafés: (1) that they were all over the place, (2) that they were easy to find, and (3) that they served coffee; that is, that they were literally cafés, as in small cozy places where customers could curl up with a laptop to check their email.
The pathetic na?veté and Seattle-centrism of these assumptions had already begun to infiltrate Zula’s awareness but clobbered her in the teeth as she followed Qian Yuxia to the top of the stairs. The helpful strangers who had been giving them useless directions always seemed to be saying that the Internet café was “upstairs of” or “in the back of” such-and-such a business, and this had given Zula the idea that they were talking about tiny backroom enterprises.
Now she understood that these business had to be upstairs of, or in the back of, other enterprises because they were so enormous. This one occupied an entire floor of the building. Brand-new PCs with flat-panel screens were packed in together as tightly as the laws of thermodynamics would allow, and essentially all of them were in use. There were at least a hundred people in here, all wearing headphones and therefore weirdly silent.
“Holy Jesus,” Csongor said.
“What?” asked Yuxia.
“It is ten times as big as the biggest one we have ever seen,” Zula explained.
“This is only half of it,” said Yuxia, nodding toward another stair that led up to an additional story. “How many you want?”
“I beg your pardon?”