Reamde

SOKOLOV AWOKE TO a perfectly silent office. And yet lodged in his short-term memory was the sound of an elevator door opening.

He willed himself not to go back to sleep and soon heard faint voices.

Feeling in the dark, he verified that his pistol and flashlight were where he had left them, next to his head. He drew one knee, then the other up to his chest so that he could tie his shoes. Whoever they were, the visitors were moving cautiously, reconnoitering, discussing. It was not a break-the-door-down-and-barge-in type of visit.

They would have been stopped by the glass doors. Sokolov had sealed them with the cable lock. They would be trying to find a way around those doors, debating whether to just break the glass. The noise would be stupendous, but it was the middle of the night, and the building was mostly vacant.

Not knowing how many there were or what their intentions might be, Sokolov decided to retreat and lurk. He stood up and got one foot into the loop of Ethernet cable he had tied earlier, then put his weight on it and straightened the leg, thrusting his head and shoulders up through the vacancy in the ceiling.

He let the gun, the clip, and the flashlight rest for the time being on top of an adjoining tile. Then he reached up and got a grip on the heavy steel. Once that was done, it was easy to raise his knees up and go completely upside down, hanging by his hands while endeavoring to thrust his lower legs through the triangular openings in the truss. That accomplished, he was able to hang by his knees, head down, hands free.

He pulled up the cable loop after him and let it rest off to one side atop the ceiling grid.

From the direction of the entrance came a couple of exploratory thumps, followed by a tremendous crash and a long decrescendo of high-pitched clattering as glass fragments sprayed all over the floor of the lobby. He listened for a few moments, just to get some sense of how many there were and how they were moving. Then he picked up the loose ceiling tile from where he had laid it and set it into its position.

As he was doing so, something caught his eye on the table below: his phone, and a scrap of paper. They’d been in the back pocket of his suit trousers. Normally he wore pants with zip pockets and kept them zipped. That way, he never had to worry about things falling out of them when he was something other than upright and vertical, and this in turn left him free to make use of all of his hard-earned diving and rolling skills.

But Jeremy Jeong’s business suit had turned that training into bad habits.

There was nothing to be done about it; he could hear the intruders making their way into the office. He carefully fitted the missing tile back into its place. Then he picked up his flashlight and put it into his mouth, leaving it turned off for the time being. He picked up the Makarov and chambered a round with a slow careful movement of the slide, muffling the sound as best he could with his hand. The spare clip was a bit of a problem, since he was still hanging upside down and none of his pockets could be relied upon. He left it where it was for now, but practiced laying his hand on it in the dark until he could touch it on the first try.

And then he could do nothing, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, except listen. And even the listening was not especially good, since he was separated from what he was listening to by a deck of ceiling tiles that had been designed specifically to muffle sound. And the intruders, at least for the first little while, were trying to move stealthily; they had no idea whether anyone was in this office or what sort of reception they should expect, and so they had to clear the place. Clear it, in the sense of a military or police unit going through every room of a house to make sure that no attackers were hiding anywhere. From what little Sokolov could infer based on sounds, they seemed to know what they were doing; they were not just walking around like idiots, clumped together, poking their heads into offices, but rather leapfrogging each other from doorway to doorway and communicating in single-word utterances, or perhaps through sign language. They had, in other words, been through some sort of training. And they had to be armed; it would not make sense for them to do what they were doing unless they had guns and had them out and ready to fire.

But finally there came a point when they began to converse in normal voices. Sokolov heard the faint metallic clicks of guns being put back in safe conditions.

The intruders—Sokolov guessed four or five of them—were not speaking Chinese. Having heard a lot of Central Asian languages, he guessed it was one of those, but he couldn’t understand a word of it. One time he heard a man speak roughly in Chinese and heard a meek Chinese voice answering back. They must have a hostage.