Reamde

A half flight of concrete stairs descended into a basement corridor lit by a few bare lightbulbs. The security consultants waved them down a corridor for twenty paces or so, and into a room filled with blue-gray light sifting in through a couple of dirty sidewalk-level windows. This was situated adjacent to the bottom of what Zula guessed was the building’s main stairway. It wasn’t difficult to see that the building had been designed around a central core that included not only the stairway but all the other stuff that had to run vertically: the plumbing, the power, the sewer lines. So this room was replete with pipes, valves, meters, crazy electrical wiring, and fuse panels. There was no Internet gear—in fact, no post–Second World War technology at all—which was hardly surprising, but did raise the question as to where the REAMDE guys were getting their connectivity. But all the buildings in China were webbed together with improvised wire and so they were probably pirating it from somewhere else.

“Can we go to the roof?” Peter asked.

A scout ascended to the roof and reported back via walkie-talkie that none of the REAMDE boys were hanging out there at the moment. So Peter and Zula, accompanied by Sokolov, climbed six stories to the top of the stairway. Access to the roof had formerly been sealed off by a door, but the lock had been jimmied.

The Troll’s terrace consisted of half a dozen plastic injection-molded chairs, a rusty folding table, a basketball hoop held up by a scaffolding made from plumbing parts, a tea service, a plastic tub containing a stack of magazines about the NBA, and an extension cord that trailed across the roof into the stairwell and was patched into the remains of a light fixture.

From that same light fixture, a length of cheap two-strand lamp cable ran up to the roof of the little shack that topped the stairwell, where it disappeared under a plastic bucket held in place with a brick. A blue Ethernet cable also went under that bucket.

Peter got a leg up from Sokolov, vaulted to the top of the shack, squirmed over to the bucket, removed the brick, and tilted it back to reveal a Wi-Fi device, green LEDs twinkling merrily.

The blue Ethernet cable ran from it across the roof to the front of the building, then disappeared through a drain hole in the roughly meter-high parapet. Zula followed the cable to the edge, leaned over the parapet, and peered down. She was now standing near the corner of the building diagonally opposite to where they had exited the van.

Sixty feet below her, she could see the van parked in front of the building’s main entrance, blocking traffic and creating controversy.

The blue cable had been tucked in alongside a vertical drainpipe that ran from the drain hole in the parapet down the front of the building. At some point the cable presumably peeled away from the drainpipe and entered the building through a window or some other opening, and that would mark the location of the Troll’s apartment. In a perfect world they would have been able to see that place from this vantage point and immediately pick out the apartment in question, but no such luck; it must be hidden beneath some horizontal feature that was blocking their view. And what with all the balconies, clotheslines, awnings, and external plumbing, there were plenty of those.

Not for the first time, Zula corrected herself: no, it was good luck, not bad, that they couldn’t figure it out; turning the Troll over to Ivanov would be a bad thing. She was a little perturbed by how easy it was for her to get caught up in the excitement of the hunt.

Peter drifted over to her, fixated on the screen of a PDA. “The name Golgaras mean anything to you?”

“It is the name of one of the continents of T’Rain,” Zula said.

“How about Atheron?”

“Same.”

“I’m picking up four Wi-Fi access points,” Peter said. “Two of them are set to the default names and have really weak signals—I’ll bet they are in that building across the street. Golgaras is very strong, and Atheron is considerably weaker.”

“Try unplugging that Wi-Fi unit under the bucket,” Zula suggested, “and see if one of them goes dead.”

Peter turned and headed back to the stairwell to try the experiment.

Zula had become interested in a bundle of improvised wiring that joined this building to the one across the street with the scaffolding and the blue tarps. It was connected to the front wall almost directly below her between the fourth and fifth stories. It was not attached at any one point but rather involved with the building through a spreading and ramifying root system. Zula was able to make out a single strand of blue Ethernet cable spiraling lazily around the outside of the bundle: the last piece of wire to have been added.

“Ivanov requests status report,” said Sokolov, who had crunched up behind her on the pea gravel. He had plugged an earpiece into his walkie-talkie.