Reamde

“Your confusion is understandable, but I was inquiring, not as to nationality, but as to language,” said the man with the assault rifle. “I’ll endeavor to make my questions less ambiguous in future.” He was speaking with some sort of British accent. He squatted down next to Ivanov’s corpse and began slapping it all over. “This the dude who cuffed you?” he asked, switching seamlessly to Ebonics.

A faint jingle sounded from one of Ivanov’s pockets. The man reached in and drew out a handful of change, sorted through it, and pulled out one item that was not a coin: a handcuff key. “Bingo,” he said. Slinging the assault rifle over his shoulder, he stood, strode over to Zula’s side, and unlocked the end of her handcuff that was locked around the pipe. “Freedom!” he proclaimed brightly.

“Thank you!” Zula exclaimed.

“Is an illusion,” he continued, and snapped the manacle shut around his right wrist, chaining his right arm to Zula’s left. Then he pocketed the key.

“Who are you?” she asked, squirming out from beneath Csongor.

“You can call me Mr. Jones, Zula,” he answered. He now let the assault rifle slip down off his shoulder, grabbed it by the barrel, and looked at it wistfully. “Difficult to fire with one hand,” he pointed out. He turned to look at her. His face was intelligent and not unattractive. “What’s the only thing more attention getting, on the streets of Xiamen, than two niggers handcuffed together?”

“I give up.”

“Two niggers handcuffed together with a Kalashnikov.” He laid the weapon on the floor. Then his eye fell on Ivanov’s semiautomatic. He picked it up with his unencumbered left hand. “Nice piece,” he said. “A 1911, if I’m not mistaken.”

Even in the midst of so many distractions, some part of Zula’s mind found it curious that Mr. Jones could be anything less than totally certain that Ivanov’s gun was a 1911. Obviously it was a 1911. He transferred it to his right hand, then put his thumb on its hammer, which was drawn back in ready-to-fire position. He pulled the trigger and carefully let the hammer down so that it wouldn’t fire. Then he reached across with his left and racked the slide once, ejecting a live round, chambering a fresh one, and automatically recocking the hammer. “Cocked,” he muttered. With a bit of fumbling, he taught himself how to apply the safety. “And locked.” Then, clearly wishing that his right hand were not encumbered, he transferred the weapon back into his left and stuck it in his pants. “Come on,” he said, “some kind of fascinating destiny is waiting for us out there. Inshallah.”

He grabbed her hand and started walking toward the exit. She tried to peel away and drop to Csongor’s side, but Mr. Jones simply let go of her hand and allowed the handcuff chain to go taut, so that the metal bit into her already-raw wrist and jerked her along in his path. She sprawled and staggered in his wake and bounced off a wall, where a filthy window, set in a well below street level, grudgingly allowed dim, confused gray light to seep in through several layers of bars and mesh, and thick lashings of rain-driven dirt.

Framed in that window was the face of a man, a young Chinese man, staring into her eyes. No more than arm’s length away. How long had he been watching events in the cellar?

But he might as well have been a talking head on a television screen for all that he could help her now. Jones gave another yank, pulling her closer, then reestablished his grip on her hand and began pulling her up the stairs.

AS HE WAS shinnying along the cable bundle, Sokolov had more time than was really good for him to develop that theme of the high explosives and the detonators in the burning apartment just a few meters away. Old instincts began to take over, and he noticed that his mouth was frozen in a yawn; this was so that his eardrums would not burst in the event of an explosion. Every time he advanced his hands to a new position, he took care to sink his fingers deeply into the wire bundle so that he could not be jarred loose by a shock wave. He kept his chin tucked against his chest, though every so often he would let it hang back so that he could get an upside-down view of the office building. For an agonizingly long time, this did not seem to be getting any closer, and so he forced himself not to check for a while. Then he looked again and saw that it was no more than two meters away. He reached forward as far as he dared, got a good solid grip into the guts of the wire bundle, and let go with his legs. He was now hanging a little more than arm’s length from the point where the wire bundle penetrated a gap between two hanging tarps.

The tarps flashed as if someone were taking a photograph from across the street. Sokolov began to open his mouth and to tighten his grip on the wires during the fraction of a second that elapsed between then and the arrival of the shock wave. This struck him like a wrecking ball and hurled him bodily into the tarps.