Reamde

Three of them put their hands to their belts, unsnapped little black pouches and pulled out handcuffs. One of them approached Zula. He snapped a cuff around a heavy steel conduit that ran out of the floor, carrying power cables up to the fusebox. He grabbed Zula’s left hand and whacked the other manacle down across her wrist. Meanwhile Csongor was being handcuffed to a cold water pipe in another part of the room. A third consultant cuffed Peter to the iron banister at the base of the stairs.

The other security consultants were on their feet, checking their gear and concealing their weapons. “We go to visit Troll in 505,” said Ivanov. “If you have spoken truthfully, then we achieve our goal and be on our way, everyone happy. If you have made little mistake, then we shall return to this room and have discussion of consequences. So. Is 505 the correct place? Or is it perhaps 405?”

“It’s 505,” Zula said.

“Very well,” said Ivanov, and issued orders. Sokolov, all the security consultants, and Ivanov began to ascend the stairs.

THE BIG FAT Russian had been trying to create feelings of terror in Qian Yuxia’s heart and had been partly successful, but as she sat there alone, handcuffed to the steering wheel, the terror receded quickly and she was left feeling disappointed and offended. When he had called her yesterday and asked her to go fetch the van and organize a fishing trip, she had been flattered to have been chosen, from all the people in Xiamen, to be given such a responsibility. She had been up half the night riding buses into the little town in the country where she had parked the van, driving it back into Xiamen, and making preparations. As a special gesture to demonstrate how much she appreciated this opportunity, she had showed up early this morning with cups of coffee and muffins from a Western-style bakery.

The worst part, though, was that the big man had sweet-talked her by telling big stories about how he would help her sell gaoshan cha in Europe, and she had fallen for it completely. These ­people, it seemed, had sized her up as some sort of country bumpkin. An opportunistic country bumpkin who would swallow any sort of lie if she thought it would help her sell tea.

That much was merely offensive. But what really hurt was the fact that they had been right.

All she had to do was roll the window down and start screaming and those people would spend the rest of their lives in prison.

But the big man was powerful—he had money, he had soldiers, and all of them were armed.

But if he was all that powerful, why did he have to get help from someone like Qian Yuxia in order to perform the simple act of borrowing a van?

Because she was disposable. That was why. She was a nobody, all alone in the big city. No one would notice she had gone missing.

So it was time to roll the window down and start screaming.

But if she did that, the big man would do terrible things to Zula. He had promised it. Yuxia liked Zula and felt a sort of loyalty to her simply based on the fact that tears of shame had come into Zula’s eyes when she had spoken of her failure to warn Yuxia.

Maybe there were some small things that she could do, short of screaming, to improve the situation a little bit. She surveyed her surroundings. Not her immediate surroundings, which tended to consist of people screaming at her for blocking the street, but more the middle distance. It was busy with people plying their trades and going about their errands. Carters went to and fro pulling their two-wheeled wagons piled with all sorts of goods. One carter, whose wagon was empty, had pulled up a couple of meters away from the van and had been keeping a close eye on Yuxia. Like a certain number of these guys he was gaunt and looked about ninety years old, which probably meant that it was difficult for him to compete against the younger, burlier carters. He had to make up for that with street smarts. He had seen them earlier, unloading stuff from the back of the van and passing it down the alley. He had seen the big man climb out of the van a minute ago and look at the front of the place with his binoculars. He knew that there were several Westerners inside the building and that something was going on in there. Like everyone else on this street he was always thinking about how to make things work to his advantage, and he had made the calculation that if he hung around in the vicinity of the van, flaunting his availability, then someone connected with this operation might dispatch him on some sort of errand.

Yuxia rolled down the window. She didn’t need to catch the carter’s eye because he was already staring right at her. “I need a locksmith,” she complained. “But my phone is dead.”

Then she glanced at the front of the apartment building just to make sure that the big man wasn’t seeing any of this. When she turned her attention back, the carter was gone.