Reamde

apartment building in Xiamen to Igor’s house in Tukwila, and to probe for inconsistencies in the story—to the extent that Igor even had the intellectual equipment for such an undertaking. Perhaps the pizza stalling maneuver was solely to keep Sokolov in the house long enough for Igor to ask a series of such questions. Or perhaps a carload of men was on its way to the house right now to fetch Sokolov and subject him to a more rigorous examination. In either case, it wouldn’t look good for Sokolov to bolt out of the house, spurning the pizza, as much as announcing that he had something to hide.

He had, of course, been surveying the place for exits and had noticed that, for such a small structure, it was actually rather difficult to get out of. There seemed to be a lot of property crime in the neighborhood, and it was obvious enough that Igor and Vlad were not above dealing in stolen goods, and possibly in drugs as well, so they had been assiduous about putting bars or steel mesh over their windows. The only exits were the doors.

“What the hell,” Sokolov said. “I think I will have a beer. It’s okay, I can get it myself.” For Igor had already sunk back into the depths of his black leather sofa and was not the sort to get up again quickly. Sokolov went back into the kitchen and confirmed his memory that it led to a sort of back porch with an exit to the yard behind the house. He stepped into the porch and examined the door, a flimsy thing that had been beefed up with more steel mesh and a number of extra bolts. He opened all of these and confirmed that he could now yank the door open with a single quick gesture.

Then back to the living room with his beer. He had been a little worried that Igor would be suspicious at the amount of time he had taken to fetch a beverage, but his host was deeply absorbed with the progress of the video game. Sokolov dragged a chair into a position where he could look out the front window of the house and straight down the length of the cul-de-sac.

There followed about forty-five minutes of desultory conversation. Occasionally Igor would ask him a question about what had happened in Xiamen and Sokolov would relate a bit of the story, but sooner or later they always drifted back into video-game watching.

A small car came up the street, but it was just the pizza delivery. “I’ll get more beer,” Sokolov said, and went into the kitchen. He found a large pot in the cabinet next to the stove, put it in the sink, and began running hot water into it. Then he went to the fridge and got more beers and ferried them out to the living room. Igor was on his feet, undoing the front door locks, greeting the pizza delivery boy. Sokolov set the beers down on the coffee table. Then he went back into the kitchen and took the pot, now containing several liters of warm water, and placed it on the range and turned the burner on high. When the water was boiling, it might serve as a sort of weapon or at least a distraction.

They ate pizza and drank beer. Vlad had paused his video game. This was not running on a console, such as an Xbox; it ran on a personal computer. Not a boring beige box such as you would see in an office. A PC made specifically for young male game players with a tech fetish, all tricked out with multicolored LEDs and complex molded shapes recalling the hull of an alien spacecraft. When Sokolov had first seen this thing, just after walking into Igor’s house a couple of hours ago, his mind had snagged on it for a moment, then moved on. Ever since, something about it had been nagging at him. But he’d had other things to think about.

Now, finally, it came to him. He remembered where he had seen this thing before.

This was Peter’s computer.

They must have come back to Peter’s place at some point while Sokolov had been embroiled in China and stolen whatever looked good to them.

It must have been very soon after they had gone to Xiamen, because once Peter and Zula had been reported missing, the cops would have gone there, turned it into a crime scene, made it a very hazardous place to carry out a burglary.

Which meant that the cops must have gone there after Vlad and Igor had ransacked it.

Which meant that, instead of finding the carefully cleaned-up, evidence-free scene that Sokolov had arranged, they would have found evidence of said ransacking.

“You are making me nervous, with this look on your face!” Igor complained.

Sokolov glanced up to see that Igor was, in fact, looking a little edgy.

Sokolov cleared his throat. “You went back to that place,” he said, “and took some things.”

Here, Sokolov would not have been surprised to see Igor dart a guilty look at the fancy PC, which was sitting on the floor so close that he could have set his beer on top of it. But instead Igor threw a nervous look into the corner of the room behind Sokolov. By dint of a supreme effort of will, Sokolov resisted the temptation to turn around and look at whatever it was. Some loot from the apartment, obviously, that Igor considered more valuable or that in some sense loomed larger in his imagination than the PC.

What would a man like Peter have in his place that could be that interesting to Igor? It was easy to understand the attraction of the PC. All young men liked to play video games. What else? Peter didn’t do drugs.

Then Sokolov remembered Igor standing at the top of Peter’s stairs, examining a gun safe. Assuring Sokolov that it was locked.

“I won’t deny it,” Igor said, with a shrug to say it was really nothing, and a nervous laugh that argued to the contrary.

“Ivanov didn’t pay you well enough?”

“Nothing’s enough for a job like that one. Shit, I just thought it was going to be security. Bodyguard shit at the worst. Then it turned into—”

Sokolov nodded. “Of course, I can sympathize. I was as surprised as you were. I am just asking. It is important for me to know the facts. That’s all. When did you go back to the place?”

“Two days later, maybe,” said Igor, and glanced over to Vlad for confirmation. “We staked it out the night before. Made sure there were no cops, no surveillance. Found a way in. Nice and quiet.” Another glance into the corner.

“How did you get the safe open?” Sokolov asked, just guessing. “Quietly?”

“Plasma torch,” Vlad blurted out. Igor threw him a killing look, but Vlad didn’t even understand that he had stepped into a trap that Sokolov had put out for him.

“Weren’t you worried that it would damage the gun?”

“He kept it in a metal case,” Vlad said, and nodded into the same corner. This gave Sokolov an excuse, finally, to turn around and look. Resting on the top of a bookshelf at about head level was a long case of burnished aluminum, just the sort of thing a gun fancier would use to carry around an especially prized rifle. One end of it was marred with flecks and streaks of darker stuff: molten metal that had sprayed onto it and congealed.

Sokolov turned back around. “This torch didn’t set off the smoke alarms?”

Igor said, “We went around, found them all, pulled their batteries.”

“When you were going all over the place looking for those smoke alarms,” Sokolov went on, “you might have seen some security cameras.”

“Two of them,” Igor said. “We cut the wires, of course.”

Sokolov, who knew that there were actually three cameras, bit down hard until the urge to scream had passed. “Of course. But up until the moment you cut those wires, you were visible to the cameras.”

“Vlad’s good at computers,” Igor volunteered.

Vlad nodded, as if to confirm the validity of Igor’s assessment. “Obviously we had cut the Internet the first time we went there,” he said, “so we knew that the cameras couldn’t send data outside of the building.”

“What about inside the building, though?”

“Vlad traced the wires,” Igor said.

“I traced the wires,” Vlad confirmed, “to the server in his workshop. That’s where the video files from the camera were being stored. We used the plasma torch to completely destroy the hard drives in that server.”

“Did you also trace the wires to the wireless router under the stairs?”

“Of course,” Vlad said.

“Did you know that this router had a hard drive built into it? Used to back up all files on the network?”

Silence.

Vlad the computer expert was turning red. Igor noticed this and held out a hand to steady him. “It has been, what, two weeks,” Igor said. “Nothing has happened. The police know nothing of these things. They will never think