Reamde

THE MAN CALLING himself Mr. Jones was quite clearly making it up as he went along. Just as clearly, he was comfortable doing so. He did not appear to be aware that the cellar had an exit on the back alley and so, pulling Zula along with him, he went up one flight of stairs to the ground-floor landing. As they approached it he reached across his body with his free hand and clamped this over Zula’s eyes and did not let her see again until they were in a corridor. Zula knew why and didn’t fight it.

From there he made for the building’s main entrance in the front. After a couple of turns in narrow corridors, they reached a place where Zula could look straight down a hallway, across what she took to be the lobby, and out the front doors to the street. Parked squarely in front of those doors was the van. At first Zula could not see Yuxia in the driver’s-side window, but then she noticed movement and realized that Yuxia had leaned over to pull the passenger-side door closed. Then Yuxia sat up behind the wheel again, shifted the van into gear, and turned to look toward the building. Zula enjoyed a moment of hope that Yuxia might see into the corridor and catch Zula’s eye. But this would have been very difficult because the interior of the building would have seemed very dark to anyone looking at it from outside. And not only dark but crowded, since tenants, spooked by the gun battle, were getting out of the place as fast as they could.

They almost reached the lobby. Then Jones, apparently acting on a whim, dodged to his left into a door that he had noticed ajar. It was the apartment that fronted on the street and it seemed to have been abandoned in a hurry; no one was in here, but the television was still going and the smell of hot food was coming from the kitchen. Jones headed for the front window, approached it sidelong, yanked the shade down, then peeled the edge of it back an inch or two and sighted through the gap into the street.

“There’s our ride,” he remarked after a second or two, and Zula thought he might be talking about the van until she noted that he had pressed the side of his head against the wall and was looking some distance down the street.

Then there was a fantastic noise and the limp window shade slammed against the glass and then, an instant later, flailed out into the empty space beyond, since the entire window had been blown out of its frame. Zula cringed instinctively as the shock came up through her feet. But the shocks kept coming.

Jones did not seem in the least surprised.

“The building is collapsing from the top down,” he remarked. “Perhaps we should get out of it.”

“But Csongor!”

“If Csongor is the man in the cellar,” said Jones, “he picked the right place to ride this out.”

HAD THE CHINESE woman not spoken to him in Russian, Sokolov would not have given her a second thought. But now his curiosity had been piqued, and so he devoted a little more time to departing the destroyed office than he might have otherwise. The place had been utterly devastated, with most of the damage caused by a collapsed lath-and-plaster ceiling that Sokolov had to tromp over and wade through as he made his way to the door. Conspicuously located near the exit was a garbage bag tied in a knot, which the Russian-speaking Chinese woman had apparently meant to take with her until Sokolov had vaulted in and scared her to death. He found that it was surprisingly heavy and that it contained a number of discrete rectangular objects.

Turning back to survey the office, he was struck by the sheer number of wires and cables strung about the place. Most of them were not connected to anything; their plugs were splayed on the floor, covered with plaster but not with glass. The shattered glass formed the lowest layer of debris. The cords and plugs had been thrown down after the glass had broken and the ceiling had fallen down afterward. In the rush and confusion of the moment, Sokolov could not draw any definite conclusions from that, only make a note of it as a perplexing bit of data that he would have to make sense of later.

Raising his sights a little, he scanned the office as he was slowly backing out of it and noticed that some wires had been tacked and/or zip-tied to window frames or anything else that would hold them up. At least one of those wires led to what was quite obviously an antenna, and not the sort of antenna that one could buy in an electronics shop but something that said “military” to Sokolov.

His heel struck something heavy but yielding. He looked down and kicked some loose shards of plaster away to reveal a woman’s purse. The blast had knocked it off a table, and a few items had spilled from its open top when it struck the floor. Sokolov gathered those up and shoved them back into the purse and zipped it shut. Then he went to the door. He unknotted the garbage bag and saw that it contained a laptop and several electronic boxes, but nothing that was intrinsically useful to him right now. Besides, it was heavy.