As he drew closer Yuxia got his attention through the windshield and waved him over toward the passenger’s seat. She unlocked the door. He opened it and climbed in, a bit tentatively, since it might be considered improper for a strange man to enter a vehicle with a solitary female.
“Close the door please, I need to talk to you for a moment,” Yuxia said.
He closed the door, giving her a weird look, as if Yuxia might be running the world’s most complicated and opaque scam. Which perhaps she was. For the time being, though, she was not allowing him to see her handcuffed wrist.
The carter had pulled up close along the driver’s side of the van. “Go over there please and wait,” Yuxia said, nodding at the front of the building. “I will pay you for your trouble once my problem is solved.”
The carter, somewhat suspicious and somewhat reluctant, withdrew a couple of meters.
Yuxia turned to the locksmith and gave him a big smile. “Surprise!” she exclaimed, and displayed the handcuff.
She was afraid that the poor man might have a heart attack. Yuxia had her left hand on the lock button, ready to lock him in the van if he tried to bolt. He probably would have done exactly that if she had been a man, but because she was a young woman he apparently felt that the decent thing was to hear her out.
“A bad man did this to me,” she said, “and so, as you can see, it is probably a matter for the police. I will call them once I am free. But right now I really need to get this thing off my wrist. Can you help me, please?”
He hesitated.
“It’s hurting me very badly,” she whined. Talking this way was not her style, but she had seen other women do it with effect.
The locksmith cursed under his breath and unzipped his bag.
LIKE ANY RUSSIAN, Sokolov enjoyed a game of chess. At some level he was never not playing it! Every morning he woke up and looked at the tiles on the ceiling of the office that was his bedroom and reviewed the positions of all the pieces and thought about all the moves that they might make today, what countermoves he would have to make to maximize his chances of survival.
He had heard somewhere, though, that, mathematically speaking, the game of Go was more difficult than chess, in the sense that the tree of possible moves and countermoves was much vaster: far too vast even for a supercomputer to work through all the possibilities. Computer chess programs had been written that could challenge a Kasparov, but no computer program could give a high-level Go player a game that was even moderately challenging. Supposedly you couldn’t even think about Go as a logical series of specific moves and countermoves; you had to think visually, recognizing patterns and developing intuitions.
As of thirty seconds ago—when Zula had done whatever the hell she had done—this had changed from a game of chess into a game of Go.
It might be that Zula had made the decision to give Ivanov what he wanted, sell out the Troll, and hope for Ivanov’s mercy. If that were the case, then a few seconds from now they would be invading an apartment full of terrified Chinese hackers and something regrettable was going to happen. Why, oh why, had Ivanov come in from the van? Why was he following them up the stairs? If he’d simply stayed down in the van, Sokolov might have been able to finesse the situation, perhaps emerge from the building with one hacker in tow while letting the others escape. Perhaps Ivanov would have been satisfied with scaring the hell out of that one hacker, roughing him up a little bit. After which Sokolov would have had to divine the boss’s intentions regarding Zula. He’d already made up his mind that he would, if necessary, physically intervene to protect her. Even if it meant killing Ivanov.
On the other hand, it might be that Zula had sent them on a wild goose chase. That they were about to break into a vacant apartment. In which case all hell was going to break loose when Ivanov realized that Zula had fucked him and that the hackers who had fucked him
So he didn’t. He gave it up and accepted the fact that he would have to work intuitively, like a Go player. Even though he had never played Go in his life.
For now he had to operate on the assumption that Zula had given them correct information and that Apartment 505 would contain something like ten young male hackers, mostly asleep. They would not be armed in any significant way. He had gone over this with his squad the night before and reminded them of it this morning before leaving the safe house: their tactical approach must be to flood the apartment in the first five seconds after breaching the door. Every one of those hackers had to be found and divested of his phone and his computer before he could send out distress calls. The landlines had to be found and cut. The entire apartment had to be explored. It might be one single space or it might be a warren of smaller rooms. Some of those back rooms might have means of escape: ways out onto fire escapes or balconies. The plan, then, was to pile through the door the moment it was knocked down and leave one man to secure the center while the other six scattered as far and as deep into the apartment’s recesses as they could go. Once they had found and secured the periphery they would work their way back into the center, driving the hackers before them. Everyone would end up in the same place, and then a conversation could begin.
All the men knew that plan, were equipped for it, were ready for it. From the stairs they trooped out into the fifth-floor corridor, which conveniently for them was empty at the moment. Sokolov was leading the way, but as they passed 503 he looked over his shoulder and made room for Kautsky, the biggest man in the squad, the door breaker. Kautsky was armed with a combination sledge-hammer/ax/crowbar that could make short work of any door. The ones in this building looked particularly flimsy, so Sokolov had no worries about getting through rapidly. Kautsky would be their man in the middle, the first one through, who would hold the center and block the exit while the others flooded in behind him and flowed to the edges. Ivanov had no scripted part in this plan, since he was supposed to be waiting down in the van, but Sokolov hoped that he would have the good sense to stay well to the rear, in the hallway, long enough for things to get under control. Then he could come in and wreak whatever revenge it was that he had been dreaming of.
Kautsky planted himself in front of 505 and wound up with the hammer, then looked back at Sokolov, awaiting his cue. Sokolov looked back toward Ivanov. He needn’t have worried. Climbing stairs was not Ivanov’s strong point, and he was only just now emerging from the stairway, breathing heavily, still a good twenty meters away from them. Before Ivanov could catch up with them and fuck up the entire operation, Sokolov gave Kautsky a nod, and the hammer fell.
AS THE LOCKSMITH worked on the manacle around Yuxia’s wrist, she chewed the nail of her free thumb and scanned the street and the front of the building.
In a minute, she’d be free to get out of the van. The easiest thing then would be simply to disappear into the crowd on the street and hope that the PSB did not somehow follow her. A dubious gamble, considering that a PSB officer had been standing half a block away looking suspiciously at the van for the last couple of minutes.
But the van belonged to the family enterprise in Yongding. If she abandoned it here, it would be traced to her immediately.
She could go into that building and try to figure out what was going on. That was what a plucky heroine would do in a movie, but it didn’t seem like a very wise idea in real life.
Or she could summon the PSB herself. But funny things sometimes happened when the PSB got involved. It wasn’t always about punishing the wrongdoers and helping the victims. Everyone knew that there were all sorts of connections between criminal groups and the government. Yuxia knew very little about these Russians. Less than an hour had passed since they’d put the cuff on her wrist and she hadn’t had time yet to sift through her memories of them and piece together a theory as to what they were really up to. But they had to be either spies or gangsters. If they were the latter, they might have connections with local gangsters, and if that were the case, there was no telling what bad things might happen to Yuxia if she ratted them out to the PSB and some mole within the PSB ratted her out in turn.
She had to get the van out of here.
The manacle came off her wrist.
“Thank you, sir. Now can you start the engine?” she asked. “I don’t have the keys.”
The locksmith’s eyes jumped down to the ignition switch on the steering column, then back up to hers. He said nothing, but she could see in his face that he could do it. Just as plain, though, was that he really didn’t want
