whether Sokolov and Ivanov were paying attention. They weren’t. He checked the PDA again and his faced clouded over. “Shit, I lost it. Signal’s really weak.”
Csongor had drawn closer, so Peter explained: “Zula and I did this before, up on the roof. Atheron is their WAP in the apartment. I can’t log on—they put a password on it—but I can see the signal. If we cut the power by pulling the fuse, it should go off the air.”
Csongor’s eyes flicked over to the fuse panel. “Each apartment has a unique fuse?”
“So it would seem,” Zula said. “Labeled in Chinese.”
“Can anyone here read Chinese numbers?”
“Sort of,” Zula said.
Ivanov came over and asked a question in Russian. His eyes jumped from Peter to the fuse panel to Zula as words poured out of Csongor. Peter added the caution that his PDA could not quite pick up Atheron from here in the cellar and so, with a lot more talking than really seemed necessary, the following arrangement was worked out. Most of the security consultants stayed in the cellar doing what they’d been doing the whole time anyway, which was tinkering with weapons and ammunition from the rod-and-reel cases and the coolers. Peter ascended partway up the stairs with the PDA, getting more centrally located in the building so that he could pick up a consistent signal from Atheron. Ivanov was sticking to Peter; he wanted to see this thing happen with his own eyes and so he would be looming over Peter’s shoulder through the entire experiment. Csongor remained at the base of the stairs where he could see and talk to Zula, who was stationed at the fuse panel, and Sokolov was in the stairwell somewhere between Csongor and Ivanov, so that he could exchange hand signals with both of them.
While all of this was being worked out, Zula prepared to bullshit her way through the project of reading, or pretending to be able to read, Chinese numerals.
The numbers actually mounted on the doors of the apartments were Arabic. But whatever electrician or custodian had labeled these fuses in the cellar had used the Chinese system.
Zero was a circle. One, two, and three were represented by the appropriate number of horizontal lines. Four could be remembered because it was a square with some extra stuff inside of it. Beyond that, however, the numerals were nonobvious. With a bit of help from Yuxia, she had been trying to learn them. In some contexts, where numbers were arranged in a predictable order, this was easy. Reading random numbers would have been impossible for her. The situation with this fuse box was somewhere between those extremes. At the top of the box she was seeing some labels that weren’t numbers at all—she guessed that they must say things like “cellar” or “laundry room.” Below that she began to see numbers that began with a single horizontal line, meaning 1, and after several of those she saw some with two horizontal lines, and after that a bunch with three lines, and so on. So it seemed that the fuses were laid out in a somewhat logical fashion according to floor and apartment number. But all of this was more in the nature of general trends than absolute rules; it was obvious that the building had been rewired several times and that available fuse sockets had been put to use willy-nilly. She had to carry out a kind of archaeological dig in her head to reconstruct how it had come to be this way. Toward the bottom of the panel she began to see the squarish character that meant four, and below that, the less obvious glyph that she was pretty sure meant five. So the fuse that would kill the Atheron signal was probably in the bottom half-dozen or so rows of the grid. But this was the part of the box that had been most heavily exploited by opportunistic rewirers in more recent decades and so there was a lot more noise and misdirection for her to sift through here.
“They are ready,” Csongor said. “You can begin pulling fuses.”
“Explain to them that the box is a mess, and it’s just going to take me a little bit longer to make sense of it.”
Csongor looked as if he really didn’t want to be the bearer of that message.
“If I just start pulling fuses indiscriminately,” Zula pointed out, “tenants are going to start coming down here to find out what’s wrong.”
Csongor went up the stairs and relayed that to Sokolov.
Zula was noticing that the newer circuits all had fuses in them but that several of the sockets for what she took to be fifth-floor apartments were vacant. She reckoned that empty sockets were probably a marker for vacant apartments. To discourage squatters and to prevent other tenants from pirating electricity, they would pull the fuse, thereby shutting off the power, to any unit that was not occupied. Scanning the whole panel, she saw that every floor had at least one or two vacant units but that they were most common on the fifth floor: not surprising since, in a building with no elevator, those were the least desirable apartments.
Her eye fell on a socket labeled with the character for 5, then 0, then the 5 character again; 505 was one of the two most likely candidates, the other being 405. But this socket didn’t have a fuse plugged into it.
She scanned up the panel until she found the sequence of characters that, she was fairly certain, represented 405. It had a fuse.
She reached out and unscrewed the fuse, then turned to Csongor and held the fuse up in the air. He gave a hand signal to Sokolov, who apparently relayed it up the steps.
But none of this was even necessary. Peter and Ivanov were already on their way down.
Zula screwed the fuse back in as they descended, restoring power to 405.
“Got it on the first try!” Peter announced, wiggling the PDA in the air in a triumphant style that Zula found a little chilling. “We found the Troll!”
“Zula,” said Ivanov, “nicely done.” As if she had removed a brain tumor. Then Ivanov drew up short, in a way that was almost funny. “Which apartment?” For he had realized that this information was still lacking. Only Zula knew the answer.
It had been a while since that many people had looked at her that raptly.
“It’s 505,” she said.
Sokolov spoke to Ivanov in Russian, raising some kind of objection. Or perhaps that was too strong a word. He was mentioning an interesting point.
Ivanov considered it and discussed it with Sokolov, but he had his eye on Zula the whole time.
“Sokolov worries,” explained Csongor, “that the procedure is imperfect. Some additional scouting is recommended. But Ivanov counters that if we are too obvious, we may give warning to the Troll who might escape.”
Ivanov nodded, though, as if he had taken Sokolov’s point. He then spoke in Russian to the security consultants.
Three of them put their hands to their belts, unsnapped little black pouches and pulled out handcuffs. One of them approached Zula. He snapped a cuff around a heavy steel conduit that ran out of the floor, carrying power cables up to the fusebox. He grabbed Zula’s left hand and whacked the other manacle down across her wrist. Meanwhile Csongor was being handcuffed to a cold water pipe in another part of the room. A third consultant cuffed Peter to the iron banister at the base of the stairs.
The other security consultants were on their feet, checking their gear and concealing their weapons. “We go to visit Troll in 505,” said Ivanov. “If you have spoken truthfully, then we achieve our goal and be on our way, everyone happy. If you have made little mistake, then we shall return to this room and have discussion of consequences. So. Is 505 the correct place? Or is it perhaps 405?”
“It’s 505,” Zula said.
“Very well,” said Ivanov, and issued orders. Sokolov, all the security consultants, and Ivanov began to ascend the stairs.
THE BIG FAT Russian had been trying to create feelings of terror in Qian Yuxia’s heart and had been partly successful, but as she sat there alone, handcuffed to the steering wheel, the terror receded quickly and she was left feeling disappointed and offended. When he had called her yesterday and asked her to go fetch the van and organize a fishing trip, she had been flattered to have been chosen, from all the people in Xiamen, to be given such a responsibility. She had been up half the night riding buses into the little town in the country where she had parked the van, driving it back into Xiamen, and making preparations. As a special gesture to demonstrate how much she appreciated this opportunity, she had showed up early this morning with cups of coffee and muffins from a Western-style bakery.
The worst part, though, was that the big man had sweet-talked her by telling big stories about how he would help her sell
