Reamde

“So I’m getting the picture that Xiamen has got all kinds of links to Manila, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, it is a major port, et cetera,” Zula said. “Is this all just touristy background stuff or does it tell us anything regarding the Troll?”

Csongor shrugged. “Maybe not about the Troll but maybe about us. About our situation. I was trying to figure out how these guys were going to get us into the country. You need a visa to enter China. Did you know this?”

“No,” Zula said, and Peter shook his head.

“It’s not hard but it takes a little while, you have to do some paperwork, send in your passport. Obviously we do not have visas. So I was wondering, how are these guys even going to get us into the country?”

Zula and Peter were watching Csongor interestedly, waiting for the punch line.

“You ask why this is relevant to us. The answer, I think, is that if they were trying to get us into some place in the interior of the country they would have a more difficult time. But Xiamen is famous for smuggling and corruption. Something like ten percent of all foreign goods sold in China are smuggled in to the country. Traditionally a lot of that smuggling has happened through Xiamen. There was a huge smackdown there ten years ago—”

“Crackdown,” Peter and Zula said in unison.

“Yes. Many officials executed or sent to prison. But it is still the kind of place where a man like him”—Csongor, not wanting to utter the name, flicked his eyes toward the door of Ivanov’s compartment—“would be able to make connections with local officials who control the ports, the customs, et cetera, and get away with smuggling, shall we say, human cargo into the country.”

“Fine, so let’s suppose you’re right about all of that and he can get us in,” Peter said. “What do we do then?”

Csongor considered it for a few moments. Not just the technical problem of finding the Troll, but, perhaps, what he could get away with saying out loud. Ivanov could not hear them through the bulkhead, but the security consultants could, and at least one of them—Sokolov—spoke some English. As Csongor made these calculations his head remained still, and turned away from the Russians, but his eyes wandered about in a way that Zula found hugely expressive.

“The address that we are working with,” he began, referring, as Zula understood, to the dotted quad written on the palm of Sokolov’s hand.

“Is part of a huge block controlled by an ISP,” Peter said. “This we know.”

“What if we attempted to narrow it down geographically?” Csongor said.

“We can’t exactly break into the headquarters of the ISP and interrogate their sysadmins…” Peter said, following Csongor’s line of thought.

“But those sysadmins must have some scheme for allocating all those addresses to different parts of the city,” Csongor said. “It might not be perfect, but…”

“But it probably won’t be random,” Peter said. “We could at least get an idea.”

It was Zula’s turn to feel like kind of a dunderhead, but working in a tech company had taught her that it was better to just come out and ask the question than to play along and pretend you understood. “How are you going to get that information?” she asked.

“Pounding the pavement,” Peter said, and looked to Csongor for confirmation.

Zula could tell from the look on Csongor’s face that he was not familiar with the idiom. “Going out on the streets,” she said, “and doing what?”

“I’ve heard they have Internet cafés all over the place there,” Peter said, “and if that’s true, we should be able to go in, pay some money, log on to a computer, and check its IP address. We write it down and move on to the next Internet café.”

“Or we could wardrive,” Csongor said.

Zula was vaguely familiar with the term: driving around with a laptop, looking for and logging on to unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

“Hotel rooms,” Peter said, nodding.

“Or just lobbies, even.”

“We could then build a map giving us a picture of how the ISP has allocated its IP addresses around the city. And that should make it possible for us to zero in on a neighborhood where the Troll lives. Maybe, if we get lucky, an Internet café that the Troll uses.”

Zula thought about it. “What I like about it,” she said, “is that it is kind of systematic and gradual, and so it should prove to our host that we are working on the problem in a steady way and getting results.”

This—keeping Ivanov happy, keeping his paranoia in check—was an aspect of the problem that Peter and Csongor had evidently not been thinking about very hard, and they gaped at her. She shook off a wave of mild irritation. “In management-speak, there are metrics that we can use to set expectations and show progress toward a goal.”

They weren’t sure whether she was joking. She wasn’t sure herself.

Why was she annoyed with them?

Because they were actually trying to solve the technical problem of locating the Troll. Which might have been Ivanov’s problem, but it wasn’t theirs. Theirs was Ivanov.