REAMDE

“It appears that Manu and a few other young guys are living together in one of the units. We don’t know which one,” Peter said. “They put up the basketball hoop on the roof. They go up there and hang around drinking beer and smoking and playing ball until all hours.”

 

 

“With laptops,” Csongor said, shaking his head in disbelief.

 

“Yeah, even at two in the morning they have the laptops going. Their real office is somewhere down below, but they’ve obviously set up Wi-Fi to the roof.”

 

“So it’s believed that the Troll is one of these guys,” Zula said, trying to put this all together, “or that maybe they all, collectively, are the Troll. They’re running REAMDE out of this apartment. They’re having a problem with bandits attacking their victims when they go to the ley line intersection with ransom and so they are paying mostly younger kids to hang out at the wangba all day killing the bandits. Manu goes to the wangba to oversee them, but he’s constantly in touch with the apartment by phone.”

 

“Five minutes after Manu departed from the wangba,” Csongor said, “another guy showed up dribbling a basketball and took his place.”

 

“The bandit-killers work in shifts around the clock,” Zula said, translating that.

 

During the last minute or so, the security consultants had been climbing into the van and taking seats one by one. There weren’t enough seats and so one of them ended up sort of wedged into the space between the driver’s and passenger’s buckets up front. Sokolov slammed the rear doors closed and got in last and claimed a space that had been reserved for him.

 

“Everyone ready?” Yuxia called out, in a voice that easily penetrated to the back row.

 

Response was muted but affirmative.

 

Ivanov looked to the security consultant seated between him and Yuxia, and they exchanged a nod. Ivanov reached out with his left hand and placed it over Yuxia’s right hand, clamping it in place on the steering wheel. At the same moment, the security consultant reached forward and slapped a handcuff down over Yuxia’s wrist. A moment after that he had snapped the other half of the cuff over the steering wheel. Ivanov removed his hand.

 

“What the fuck!?” Yuxia exclaimed, pulling her hand back, testing the cuff, still convincing herself that this was really happening.

 

“For your benefit,” Ivanov explained.

 

“Benefit!?”

 

“When there is investigation by PSB, they will see handcuff, see that you had no choice, find you innocent.”

 

“Innocent of fishing?”

 

Ivanov opened his jacket, letting Yuxia see a shoulder holster. “Huntink.” He snapped his fingers and Sokolov handed him a map printed, apparently, from Google. It showed a satellite photo of Xiamen with streets superimposed.

 

“Zula! What is going on, girlfriend?” Yuxia called.

 

“They kidnapped me,” Zula said. “I tried to escape last night and warn you but they caught me. I am sorry you got mixed up in this.” She had told herself last night that this would be the last of crying, but tears came freely to her eyes now.

 

Yuxia caught that detail in the rearview mirror. “I am going to fuck you up, motherfucker!” she told Ivanov.

 

“Perhaps later,” Ivanov said dryly.

 

“It won’t help to talk to him like that, Bigfoot,” Zula said.

 

“We go now,” Ivanov said, “and all will be fine at end of day, exception being for Troll.” He reached over and shifted the van into drive, then gave Yuxia an expectant look.

 

“Who is Troll?” Yuxia said in a sullen voice. But she gave it some gas and pulled out onto the waterfront road.

 

Now that they were in movement toward a destination only half a mile away, a fairly basic question occurred to Zula: “Why are we even being brought along on this? Anyone know?”

 

“Apparently the building contains something like eighty separate units,” Peter said. “Some vacant, some not. These guys don’t know which unit the Troll is living in. They can’t just go down the hallways kicking in eighty doors; somebody will call the cops.”

 

“That still doesn’t answer my question,” Zula said.

 

“They have convinced themselves,” Csongor said, “that if the three of us get inside the building, we can determine which unit contains the Troll.”

 

“Why do they believe that?”

 

“Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”

 

THE DRIVE TOOK a little while; they could have done it faster on foot. Sokolov was in occasional touch with other Russians on his walkie-talkie, which Zula had to assume was some kind of whiz-bang encrypted device, otherwise the PSB would be all over them. Since two of the Russians were missing from the van, she reckoned that Sokolov had sent out an advance party.

 

Csongor, who had reasonable command of Russian, supplied running translation of the walkie-talkie traffic: “He sent two guys there when it was still dark. They found a way into the building. They have been hanging out in a room in the cellar that no one uses. Accessible by a back entrance. That is where we are going.”

 

Yuxia, following directions from Sokolov, steered them down a street so narrow that both rearview mirrors had to be folded in against the sides of the van, and local residents had to run out into the street to pull caged poultry and large flat baskets of green tea out of their path. After a few agonizingly slow and controversial minutes of this kind of progress, they came athwart of an alley, no wider than a doorway, on their right side. The Russian on the other end of the walkie-talkie connection yelped out a single word. “Stop,” Sokolov said.

 

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