They flew for a while in silence. The security consultants smoked: a behavior that Zula had never seen aboard an airplane.
“So if we are to find the Troll, perhaps we should conceive of a plan?” Csongor offered.
The security consultants looked at him curiously, but then their attention began to drift away, and they began to make wry comments and crack jokes in Russian. Every so often Sokolov would tell them to shut up and they would be quiet for a while. Or perhaps Sokolov was ruling out certain topics of conversation. Zula preferred not to speculate on what those topics might be.
“Well, for starters, do you know anything at all about Xiamen?” Zula asked.
“I had the opportunity to do a little googling,” Csongor said.
“We didn’t,” Peter said.
“It is a curious place,” Csongor said. “Maybe a little like Hungary.”
“What does that mean?”
“Too many neighbors.”
“I had never heard of it until yesterday,” Zula said.
“It’s the place with the terra-cotta warriors, right?” Peter said.
“You are thinking of Xi’an,” Csongor said, with a rueful smile indicating that he had made the same error. “That is inland. Xiamen is on the coast. A little bit up from Hong Kong. Directly across a, what do you call it, a narrow bit of water—”
“Strait,” Zula said.
“Yes, from Taiwan. So. Xiamen is the place where the Spanish silver used to come into China. Spanish brought it on galleons from Mexico to Manila, and from there, Chinese merchants brought it up to Xiamen, and then up the Nine Dragons River to the interior. But the Dutch found out about this, and so the place became infested with Dutch pirates who would hide behind all the little islands and come out and steal the silver. When they weren’t doing that, they would rob the Chinese people. Then Zheng Chenggong came and chased them away. This was an amazing man. His mother was Japanese. His father was a Chinese pirate. He was born in Japan. But he was raised by Muslim ex-slaves, freed by his father; so some people think he was secretly a Muslim. Anyway, he chased the Dutch out of Taiwan and made it part of China again. He’s a hero to both the mainland Chinese and to the Taiwanese. There is a huge statue of him in Xiamen.”
“And this relates to our problem how?” Peter asked, making an elaborate show of patience.
Csongor gave Peter an appraising look. “Like I said, I only had Internet access for a few minutes. Long enough to download some old books. Then they cut me off. So I have been reading the books on the plane.”
“So all your information is from old books,” Peter said.
“Yes. But there is a point, which is that the links between Xiamen and Taiwan are very old and complicated. Right in the harbor of Xiamen are two islands that actually belong to Taiwan! They are less than ten kilometers from Xiamen, but they are part of a different country and during the Cold War the Red Army used to shell them all the time with artillery.”
“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
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 cafes 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 cafe.”
“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 cafe 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.
