Reamde

“I think it’s in this corner of the building,” Zula said. “Below us somewhere. I’m going to guess it’s on the fourth or the fifth floor.”

Sokolov relayed this into a microphone clipped to his shirt collar.

“Golgaras went dead,” Peter reported. “Atheron is still transmitting.”

“Meaning?” Sokolov asked.

“We think that they have two WAPs,” Peter said. “One up here on the roof and probably one in their apartment.”

Sokolov put his hand to his ear and listened, then asked: “Ivanov asks: What is basis for guess of this corner?”

Zula directed his attention to the wire bundle below them. Peter and Sokolov bent over the parapet and saw what she had seen.

“We could narrow it down more,” Peter volunteered, “if we could get a look at the building from the front. See where the blue wires enter the structure.”

Sokolov relayed that. There was a short pause.

“Fuck,” Sokolov said in English, and looked down. On his face, anger was mixed with something like embarrassment.

Zula and Peter followed his gaze and saw Ivanov emerging from the passenger seat of the van. He went around to the side door, opened it up, rummaged around for a minute, and pulled out a pair of binoculars, which he pressed to his face and aimed up their way.

Sokolov recoiled from the parapet and reached out to grab Peter and Zula, but they were already following, dropping down low where they couldn’t be seen from the street.

“He is insane,” Sokolov said, quite matter-of-factly, as though remarking that Ivanov was 1.8 meters in height. He certainly did not say it in the ironic admiring way that a certain type of young American male might have done. But before he could elaborate on the topic, his eyes went out of focus as he received a transmission from Ivanov.

“We go down now,” Sokolov said.

They met Ivanov in the cellar. He had taken a phone picture of what, from his standpoint, had been the upper left quadrant of the building’s façade. Of course the screen of his phone could not even come close to resolving an object as slender as an Ethernet cable from that distance, but he was able to point out the place where, with the help of his binoculars, he had seen both of the blue wires entering the building: a small hole, most likely a vent for a kitchen fan, above the fourth story and below the fifth.

They counted the windows between the corner of the building and the location of that hole. Then they sent a security consultant up to one of the lower floors (assuming that they all had the same layout) and had him go all the way to the end of the corridor and then count doors back from there, noting the apartment numbers on the doors.

As this was going on, Zula managed to peel Csongor off from the center of discussion. “Yuxia is out there alone in the van!” she exclaimed. “If we could get to her—”

Csongor shook his head. “Ivanov took the keys from the ignition,” he said. “They are in his pocket.”

“Oh.”

“His left front trouser pocket, should that information become somehow relevant.”

“Still, she could honk the horn—call for help—”

“One of the Russians raised the same issue,” Csongor said, and fell silent.

“And?”

“Ivanov is not worried.”

“Why not?”

“Yuxia called you ‘girlfriend.’ ”

“So?”

“So they think maybe you and Yuxia are lesbians.” Csongor blushed to an extent visible even in the dimly and bluely lit basement.

“Holy crap,” Zula said. “Tomorrow remind me to have a good laugh about that if I haven’t been tortured to death.”

“But I think that this ‘girlfriend’ is a way that black women greet each other, even if they are heterosexuals.” Something about the look on Csongor’s face indicated that this wasn’t just a foray into urban American slang but that it was of possible direct bearing on his future happiness. Zula permitted herself a moment of amazement on how the male reproductive drive could obtrude on situations where it was worse than useless. She even considered telling a little white lie.

“You are correct,” Zula finally said. “She just picked up the expression from a movie or something.”

“You and Yuxia are just friends,” Csongor said with relief so evident that Zula felt her face heat up.

“Just friends who have known each other for all of, like, twenty-four hours,” Zula said.

“Ivanov believes otherwise,” Csongor said, “and he told Yuxia that if she made any trouble, he would do bad things to you.”

“Well,” Zula said, “that much might be true.”

Csongor didn’t enjoy hearing this.

“But even though Yuxia and I are not lovers,” Zula pointed out, “threatening me might still change the way she makes decisions.”

The door-counting Russian came back with a rough sketch. From this and the phone image of the front of the building, they were able to figure out which door would give access to the unit in question, supposing they knew whether it was on the fourth or the fifth floor. But there was no way to settle that question by looking at the building from the outside. The upshot was that the Troll probably lived in unit 405 or unit 505.