Reamde

The drivers of the taxis that flocked and schooled in the plaza before the KFC-topped hotel were confounded by, and almost indignant at, the manner in which the three Westerners had seemingly teleported into existence in this normally unfrequented corner. It was clearly their habit to keep an eye on every place from which a possible customer could sortie. Westerners on foot, unnoticed and unpestered, were as much an affront to civic order as gushing fire hydrants and warbling car alarms. Sokolov had the feeling that the next time they came out of that fire exit, there would be at least one taxi waiting for them. It was not a good feeling.

He took pictures of the plaza and the hotel. Ostensibly. In truth, of course, what he was really doing was using the viewfinder of his phone to stare back at all the Chinese people who were staring at them.

Sokolov had never been a spy per se, but he had undergone a bit of training in basic spycraft as part of his transition into private commerce. Spies were supposed to have a strong intuitive sense of when they had been noticed, when someone else’s eyes were on them. Or at least that was the line of bullshit that the spycraft trainers liked to lay on their students. If true, then no Western spy could tolerate even a few seconds’ exposure to a Chinese street, since that internal sense would be setting off alarms continuously—and by no means false alarms. If they had dressed up in clown suits, strapped strobe lights to their foreheads, and sprinted out into traffic firing tommy guns into the air, they would not have drawn more immediate and intense scrutiny than they did simply by entering this public space as non-Chinese persons. Sokolov could only laugh. He had thought it might be otherwise, simply because Xiamen had such a long history of contact with the outside world.

Of course, it would be that way everywhere. They were not merely noticed. They were famous.

And, because he did everything in the backseat of a car with tinted windows, Ivanov did not understand these realities. Sokolov would never be able to explain to him the difficulty of doing anything discreetly in this city.

“Into hotel. Use Internet,” Sokolov said. Shrugging off propositions from taxi drivers, they trudged along the edge of the plaza to the hotel, leaving in their wake a hundred ordinary Chinese citizens who stopped in their tracks to stare at them as they went by. A fair proportion of these literally had their mouths hanging open. Sokolov, determinedly not meeting their eyes, looked at other things and counted eight security cameras that he could see.

Observed from various distances by at least six uniformed members of the security forces, operating in pairs, they trudged up the steps of the hotel. Two dozen taxi drivers, sitting in their vehicles outside, watched their every move through the hotel’s glass doors, in case they might change their minds and come back out.

As he’d expected, most of the hotel’s clientele were Chinese, and so their little party came in for further inspection as they stood around uncertainly in the lobby. He’d imagined that they might be able to sit down on some comfortable chairs and order tea and look at newspapers. But this was not that sort of lobby. Rather than make an ongoing spectacle of themselves, Sokolov led the others straight to the elevators and hit the button with the image of Colonel Sanders next to it. A minute later they were on the roof. But the restaurant wasn’t open yet.

“I got Wi-Fi,” said Csongor, looking at the screen of his PDA.

“Fine,” Sokolov said. “We leave.”

They took the elevator back down, walked out the front doors, and got into a taxi. “Hyatt,” Sokolov said. He knew there was a Hyatt because the pilots were lodged there. It was out near the airport.

“Okay, so we have one IP address at least,” Csongor said, during the drive.

Sokolov was taking phone pictures out the window, getting shots mostly of hotels. This five-minute adventure had told him that Western-style business hotels were the only places in Xiamen where they could do so much as draw breath without being the talk of the town for weeks afterward.

“Anywhere near the address space we’re interested in?” asked Zula.

“In fact, yes!” said Csongor. “They use the same ISP. Which isn’t saying much, of course.”

“It’s a start,” Zula said.

They went to the Hyatt and ordered breakfast.

In the vicinity of the airport, vast development projects were under way: a number of commercial real estate parks and one international conference center with a giant windowed sphere in front of it. Sokolov longed to hide himself in their anonymity and emptiness. But they were so disconnected from the city proper that he might as well have tried to hunt down the Troll from a shopping mall in Toronto.