Reamde

The office in which Sokolov was sleeping had a whiteboard mounted to its wall, and he longed to stand up and begin drawing a diagram of the situation. It would be a complicated diagram. Fortunately, no markers were available; drawing diagrams probably was not a smart idea. He had to carry everything in his head. He lay there, smelling the coffee and staring up at the ceiling tiles. There were nine of them, a three-by-three grid, making up most of the office’s ceiling. He assigned himself the one in the middle. The rest of the grid looked something like this:

Ivanov

Ivanov’s Chinese contacts

The Troll

Sokolov’s employer

Sokolov

The Squad

Csongor

Peter

Zula

This grid didn’t come into existence without some iterations, some failed attempts. Wallace, for example, and the local talent Ivanov had called up in Seattle. Zula’s uncle. None of these was worth thinking about right now.

So he went through the grid evaluating each part of it in turn.

IVANOV:

Sokolov badly wanted to get connected to Vikipediya and learn about strokes. Also about certain medications he had seen among Ivanov’s personal effects, whose names he had memorized. He knew that Internet usage in China was monitored by the PSB, the Public Security Bureau, and wondered whether the mere act of accessing Vikipediya as opposed to Wikipedia would cause a red thumbtack, or its modern, digital equivalent, to be stuck into a map at the local PSB headquarters as a way of saying Russians here. How many Russians were in Xiamen legitimately, that is, with visas? Probably not all that many, and so if the red thumbtack appeared in an unexpected part of town, it could lead to trouble. Pavel Pavlovich, one of his platoon-mates in Afghanistan, had taken mortar shrapnel in the forehead, going into his brain, and had seemingly recovered; but afterward his personality was different: he seemed a little crazy, unable to control certain impulses, and after a regrettable incident involving a rocket-propelled grenade, they had sent him home. Sokolov was developing a theory that Ivanov suffered from high blood pressure—a theory that could easily be confirmed if he could look up the names of those medications—and that it had been worse than usual recently because of the trouble he had gotten into with the obshchak. When he had received the phone call from Csongor, alerting him to the inconsistency in Wallace’s story, his already high blood pressure had spiked and—according to this theory—he had suffered a little stroke that had damaged him in the same way as the shrapnel had done poor Pavel Pavlovich. On the flight from Toronto to Seattle, Ivanov had slept most of the way, and Sokolov, looking at him, had thought he seemed sunken, damaged, exhausted. But when he was awake, he was a demon.

IVANOV’S CHINESE CONTACTS:

Probably no longer relevant, but they deserved a ceiling tile all their own because they were mysterious. Had they simply arranged for Ivanov to drive those two vans through security and then forgotten about him, moving on to other corrupt activities? Or were they now actively paying attention to Ivanov and his crew, worrying about Ivanov? Because if these faceless, nameless Chinese were worried about Ivanov, then they would soon have plenty to worry about; and if they became sufficiently worried, there might be some effort to liquidate Ivanov and everyone with him. Since Sokolov knew nothing of how Ivanov had managed all this, there seemed little he could do about it other than make certain that their activities remained innocuous for as long as possible. The very strangeness of their errand would be enormously helpful in that regard. Speaking of which…

THE TROLL:

Nothing to worry about in and of himself, since he was almost certainly just a lone teenager working out of his bedroom, and so this ceiling tile was more a placeholder for Troll-related issues and questions; for example, what the hell would they do when they actually found him? Perhaps even more worrisome: What would they do if they couldn’t find him?

SOKOLOV’S EMPLOYER: