Reamde

WHEN IVANOV’S HEAVY footsteps had receded, Peter muttered, “Thank God. We did it. Yes! We did it. This thing is over.”

Zula just could not summon the energy to break the news to him that they hadn’t done it and that it wasn’t over. She found the fuse for Apartment 405 again and started to unscrew it.

“What are you doing, Zula?” Csongor asked.

Peter swiveled to look at her. “Yeah,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“Warning them.”

“Warning who!?”

“The hackers in Apartment 405.” She pulled the fuse out, then stuck it back in. Then repeated. Each time she reestablished contact, she heard a little pop as a spark bridged the gap. “I wonder if they know Morse code,” she said, and began to jiggle the fuse in and out, making a little pattern: dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot. Just like Girl Scout camp.

“You just told Ivanov that they were in 505,” Peter said in a freakishly calm and thick voice, as though he had been gargling molasses.

“Understandable confusion,” Zula said. “This panel is a mess. And who can read these Chinese numbers?”

She found it impossible to talk and do the Morse code thing at the same time, and so she pulled the fuse away and looked around the cellar.

Peter and Csongor were both just staring at her. Hoping, perhaps, that she was just pulling their legs? Hard to tell.

It was important for them to understand. Zula sighed and looked at each of them in turn. “First of all, Ivanov is planning to kill us no matter what happens. That’s just obvious.” She let that hang in the still air of the cellar for a few moments. “Which doesn’t mean that we are going to die. Because Sokolov thinks Ivanov is crazy and he will intervene to prevent Ivanov from killing us. All of that is out of our hands. We’ve been asked to give up these hackers, who are basically just a bunch of harmless kids, so that Ivanov can kill them. And we just simply can’t do that. It’s just wrong. It’s not how people behave. So I lied to the Russians.”

Peter said “Shit!” and dropped to his hands and knees—or rather hand and knee since one hand was fixed to a banister—and began feeling around on the floor like a man who’d lost a contact lens. But he couldn’t seem to find it. “Zula!” he hissed. “You have a bobby pin in there?”

“You mean, in my hair?”

“Yeah.”

Zula could not hold back a sigh and an eye roll, but then she pulled a bobby pin from her hair and flung it at Peter.

“Do you have any more?” asked Csongor.

Zula threw him another one.

People who watched too many movies about hackers had all sorts of ludicrous ideas about what they were capable of. In general, they hugely overestimated hackers’ ability to do certain things. But there was one area in which hackers were routinely underestimated, and that was lock picking. For them, picking locks was a nice way to kick back and relax after a long day of doing pen tests on corporate networks. No hacker loft was complete without a shoebox full of old locks, handcuffs, and so on, that these guys would sit around and pick just for the fun of it. Zula had always been a spectator, not a participant, and now wished that she had paid more attention. But she was pretty sure that Peter and Csongor would have this part of the problem solved rather soon and that they could then run out the door and free Yuxia from her captivity in the van.

“The Russians will go to 505 and kick the door down and probably make some noise,” Zula said. “I am hoping that this will alert the kids in 405 and that they’ll have a chance to get out of there.” Having nothing else to do, she went back to jiggling the fuse in the socket.

“What about the people who are actually living in Apartment 505?” Peter asked. “Did you ever think of that?”

“It’s vacant,” Zula said. But Peter’s question had made her nervous that she might have made a mistake, so she found the label that, she was pretty sure, read “505” and verified that the fuse socket was empty.

Which it was. But this time she noticed a detail she’d missed the first time around. There was no fuse screwed into the socket, that much was true. But there was something gleaming in there, something other than an empty socket. She dropped to one knee to get a better look at it.

A disk of silver metal was lodged in the socket.

The fuse had been bypassed; someone had jammed a coin into it, which was a very unsafe thing to do for a number of reasons.

“What are you seeing?” Csongor asked.

“I wonder if 505 might actually have some squatters living in it?” Zula said. “Can I borrow your flashlight?”

Csongor tossed her the tiny LED flashlight that he carried in his pocket. She aimed it into the hole and verified that the gap between the contacts had in fact been bridged by a silver coin stuffed into the hole.

It was not a Chinese coin, or any kind of coin that Zula had ever seen. It was stamped, not with an image of a person’s profile or any other sort of normal coin art, but a crescent moon with a little star between its horns.