Reamde

This seemed like excellent progress (if you wanted to look at it that way) to Zula, considering that they had been in the building for all of about twenty minutes. But it only seemed to make Ivanov more pissed off.

She stepped over to the large, rusty steel box that, as anyone could see from all the cables and conduits diving into it, served as the building’s main electrical panel. Its door was hanging askew. She kicked it open. Uncle John had taught her to keep her hands in her pockets when approaching mysterious electrical equipment. She did so now.

The panel sported an array of flat round objects with little windows in them. These were planted in round sockets. Some of these were empty, revealing screw threads and electrodes similar to lightbulb sockets. Most of them, though, were occupied by the little windowed buttons. These tended to be labeled with strips of paper on which Chinese characters had been written by hand.

“What are those?” Peter asked. He had followed her over.

“Fuses,” Zula said. “I’ve heard of them.”

“Instead of circuit breakers?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, I see where you’re going,” Peter said, with a rush of geek energy.

Zula hadn’t been going anywhere, just wandering around looking at stuff. She looked at Peter. He had pulled out his PDA again. “Yup,” he said, “I can still see Atheron.” He looked up at her brightly, then glanced back to see whether Sokolov and Ivanov were paying attention. They weren’t. He checked the PDA again and his faced clouded over. “Shit, I lost it. Signal’s really weak.”

Csongor had drawn closer, so Peter explained: “Zula and I did this before, up on the roof. Atheron is their WAP in the apartment. I can’t log on—they put a password on it—but I can see the signal. If we cut the power by pulling the fuse, it should go off the air.”

Csongor’s eyes flicked over to the fuse panel. “Each apartment has a unique fuse?”

“So it would seem,” Zula said. “Labeled in Chinese.”

“Can anyone here read Chinese numbers?”

“Sort of,” Zula said.

Ivanov came over and asked a question in Russian. His eyes jumped from Peter to the fuse panel to Zula as words poured out of Csongor. Peter added the caution that his PDA could not quite pick up Atheron from here in the cellar and so, with a lot more talking than really seemed necessary, the following arrangement was worked out. Most of the security consultants stayed in the cellar doing what they’d been doing the whole time anyway, which was tinkering with weapons and ammunition from the rod-and-reel cases and the coolers. Peter ascended partway up the stairs with the PDA, getting more centrally located in the building so that he could pick up a consistent signal from Atheron. Ivanov was sticking to Peter; he wanted to see this thing happen with his own eyes and so he would be looming over Peter’s shoulder through the entire experiment. Csongor remained at the base of the stairs where he could see and talk to Zula, who was stationed at the fuse panel, and Sokolov was in the stairwell somewhere between Csongor and Ivanov, so that he could exchange hand signals with both of them.

While all of this was being worked out, Zula prepared to bullshit her way through the project of reading, or pretending to be able to read, Chinese numerals.

The numbers actually mounted on the doors of the apartments were Arabic. But whatever electrician or custodian had labeled these fuses in the cellar had used the Chinese system.