Reamde

THE CARTER RETURNED after a few minutes. A small, bald man was trotting behind him, carrying a bag of tools.

As he drew closer Yuxia got his attention through the windshield and waved him over toward the passenger’s seat. She unlocked the door. He opened it and climbed in, a bit tentatively, since it might be considered improper for a strange man to enter a vehicle with a solitary female.

“Close the door please, I need to talk to you for a moment,” Yuxia said.

He closed the door, giving her a weird look, as if Yuxia might be running the world’s most complicated and opaque scam. Which perhaps she was. For the time being, though, she was not allowing him to see her handcuffed wrist.

The carter had pulled up close along the driver’s side of the van. “Go over there please and wait,” Yuxia said, nodding at the front of the building. “I will pay you for your trouble once my problem is solved.”

The carter, somewhat suspicious and somewhat reluctant, withdrew a couple of meters.

Yuxia turned to the locksmith and gave him a big smile. “Surprise!” she exclaimed, and displayed the handcuff.

She was afraid that the poor man might have a heart attack. Yuxia had her left hand on the lock button, ready to lock him in the van if he tried to bolt. He probably would have done exactly that if she had been a man, but because she was a young woman he apparently felt that the decent thing was to hear her out.

“A bad man did this to me,” she said, “and so, as you can see, it is probably a matter for the police. I will call them once I am free. But right now I really need to get this thing off my wrist. Can you help me, please?”

He hesitated.

“It’s hurting me very badly,” she whined. Talking this way was not her style, but she had seen other women do it with effect.

The locksmith cursed under his breath and unzipped his bag.

LIKE ANY RUSSIAN, Sokolov enjoyed a game of chess. At some level he was never not playing it! Every morning he woke up and looked at the tiles on the ceiling of the office that was his bedroom and reviewed the positions of all the pieces and thought about all the moves that they might make today, what countermoves he would have to make to maximize his chances of survival.

He had heard somewhere, though, that, mathematically speaking, the game of Go was more difficult than chess, in the sense that the tree of possible moves and countermoves was much vaster: far too vast even for a supercomputer to work through all the possibilities. Computer chess programs had been written that could challenge a Kasparov, but no computer program could give a high-level Go player a game that was even moderately challenging. Supposedly you couldn’t even think about Go as a logical series of specific moves and countermoves; you had to think visually, recognizing patterns and developing intuitions.

As of thirty seconds ago—when Zula had done whatever the hell she had done—this had changed from a game of chess into a game of Go.

It might be that Zula had made the decision to give Ivanov what he wanted, sell out the Troll, and hope for Ivanov’s mercy. If that were the case, then a few seconds from now they would be invading an apartment full of terrified Chinese hackers and something regrettable was going to happen. Why, oh why, had Ivanov come in from the van? Why was he following them up the stairs? If he’d simply stayed down in the van, Sokolov might have been able to finesse the situation, perhaps emerge from the building with one hacker in tow while letting the others escape. Perhaps Ivanov would have been satisfied with scaring the hell out of that one hacker, roughing him up a little bit. After which Sokolov would have had to divine the boss’s intentions regarding Zula. He’d already made up his mind that he would, if necessary, physically intervene to protect her. Even if it meant killing Ivanov.

On the other hand, it might be that Zula had sent them on a wild goose chase. That they were about to break into a vacant apartment. In which case all hell was going to break loose when Ivanov realized that Zula had fucked him and that the hackers who had fucked him earlier were escaping from the building. That was really the point where it turned into a game of Go, because Sokolov couldn’t even begin to think rationally about the tree of moves and countermoves that would branch out from such an event.

So he didn’t. He gave it up and accepted the fact that he would have to work intuitively, like a Go player. Even though he had never played Go in his life.