Reamde

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.

They opened the right side door of the van. The Russians filed out of it into the alley and made a bucket brigade: Peter reached behind the seat and pulled out coolers and other gear, which he handed forward to Sokolov who tossed them a few feet to one of his men in the alley, and in this fashion the equipment was moved into the building’s back entrance. This was impossible to see clearly, back there in the darkness, but seemed to be twenty or thirty feet distant, on the alley’s left side. Meanwhile Zula tried to make sense of her surroundings as best she could from twisting around in her seat and craning her neck out the windows.

If the alley to their right was the back entrance, then this street ran along the side of the Troll’s building, and they were now parked at its back corner. The ground floor sported some large openings sealed off by grimy steel roll-up doors. Above those were some corrugated metal awnings, holed with rust, that stretched partway across the street above the van and made it impossible for her to see much of the upper stories.

Looking out the windshield, she could see an intersection about fifty feet ahead of them where this side street was crossed by a wider one that was crammed with the usual flow of mostly pedestrian and bicycle traffic. That street seemed to belong to a more well-illuminated part of the universe, and Zula guessed it was because construction was under way on the far side of it: the building across the street was covered with scaffolding and blue tarps, and beyond it was a gaping cavity in the city’s fabric where an arcology or something was being thrown up.

That was all Zula could see before Sokolov indicated it was time for them to make themselves useful. Csongor, Zula, and Peter clambered out over a folded-down van seat and exited into the alley. Sokolov closed the side door of the van, then followed them down the alley toward the back entrance. Yuxia, presumably following instructions from Ivanov who was still riding shotgun, pulled forward and out of view.

A minor controversy was under way in the alley, where an old lady was leaning out of her second-floor window hollering some kind of invective down at the Russians. Zula enjoyed a moment’s hope that this woman would call the PSB. Sokolov looked up at her for a few moments, then reached into his man-purse, pulled out a half-inch-thick stack of money, let her see it—this shut her up—and then hurled it at her. It shot past her through the window and thumped against something inside. She withdrew her head and closed the window. Sokolov never broke stride.