Reamde

to. He knew that something was profoundly wrong about this situation and he wanted out of here.

“No,” he said, and he began putting his tools back in his bag.

She glanced out the windshield to see the PSB cop looking her way, ignoring an angry woman who was haranguing him while gesturing irritably at the van.

Yuxia waved at him in the windshield and beckoned him over.

The locksmith was closing up his bag now. “I am doing this one for free,” he said. “I am getting out of here now and I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want to hear from you again.”

The van’s power windows did not function with the engine off, so Yuxia half opened the door, forcing the cop to step around it. “Good morning, Officer!” she said brightly, which had the effect of freezing the locksmith. She pushed the door a little farther open, turning toward the cop, and blocking his view of the handcuff dangling from the steering wheel while giving him a nice big smile to look at. But he was not much taken with the smile. He looked her up and down, paying special attention to the blue boots.

“Move this van!” he said.

“I lost my keys,” she said.

“How could you lose your keys!?”

Everything about this cop was reminding Yuxia of another reason why she didn’t want any dealings with the PSB. She was a Big-Footed Woman from the mountains and they were Han lowlanders and that did not make for easy dealings.

“The keys fell out of my hand and went down there,” she answered, pointing at a sewer grate a few meters up the street. “The locksmith is starting the engine for me. As soon as he’s finished, I’ll be on my way.”

The cop stepped toward her, wanting to look inside the van. Yuxia scooted back on the seat and leaned against the steering wheel, concealing the handcuff but giving the cop a clear view of the locksmith’s face and his bag of tools. The cop nodded. This was his beat; he recognized the face of every merchant in the neighborhood, including this one.

“What are you waiting for!?” the cop demanded. “This vehicle is blocking traffic! Stop sitting around flirting with this girl! Get the engine started and get it out of here or we’ll have it towed!”

The locksmith made some calculation of his own as to whether he should cry for help and turn this into a full-fledged PSB investigation. Yuxia had no way of knowing what elements went into that calculation.

“Yes, Officer!” the locksmith replied. “It should only be a couple of minutes!”

“Very well.” The cop stepped back from the van and sauntered out in front of the vehicle to direct traffic and keep an eye on things. Yuxia closed the door.

THE DOOR GAVE after two blows, and Kautsky blew through it. The rest of the squad, poised like sprinters at the starting line, rushed through after him, diverting around him like water flowing around a derelict tank in an Afghan river.

Sokolov had spoken to them of the need to sever the loop: the loop of observing, thinking, deciding, and acting. In normal circumstances the loop was a good thing but not now; they had to act without thinking for a few moments, and only then could they observe and think and decide. Sokolov, never one to ask his men to do something he wouldn’t do himself, followed the rule pretty faithfully even though some part of his brain was already telling him that something was wrong, something didn’t make sense. The apartment was indeed a warren of smaller rooms, which was bad for them, but not unexpected, nothing they couldn’t cope with. But he wasn’t seeing computers and he wasn’t seeing young Chinese men. He was seeing sleeping bags and mattresses on the floor, rather closely spaced, with men sleeping on them. Lots of men. Some looked Chinese but some didn’t. A migrant laborer squat? They were hairy and somewhat older than he’d been expecting. Stuff was piled all over the place: burners, thermometers, pots and pans, jars of ingredients he couldn’t identify just now, big rectangular cans of the type used to hold industrial solvents. God, there were a lot of people living here! Sokolov’s squad was certainly outnumbered, perhaps by as much as two to one. Not that it mattered since the Russians were all strapped with multiple semiautomatic weapons and, in Kautsky’s case, an autoloading shotgun. Whereas China was not one of those places where ordinary people had weapons.

Which only made him more surprised and disoriented when, after that first five seconds had passed, and the loop had started running again, Sokolov noticed that the apartment was full of Kalashnikov assault rifles. These, and their banana-shaped ammunition magazines, were simply all over the place.

You couldn’t look at everything at once, and so Sokolov ended up looking at one noteworthy thing in particular. He was in a relatively large room, cut almost in half by a long table consisting of planks set up on oil drums. His mind had first pegged the table as a kitchen counter, since it looked as though things were being mixed up there in bowls, but on second thought, the stuff they were mixing up was not food. It was a concoction he had seen and smelled before. Hell, he’d even made it before. It was fuel oil and ammonium nitrate. Everyone’s favorite cheap simple high explosive. Standing on the opposite side of the table was a rather tall man, a Negro with a beard, wearing the T-shirt and jeans he had apparently just been sleeping in. But now he was up on his feet and looking around brightly. Behind him, an inconveniently placed window had been sealed off by covering it with a cheaply printed poster of Osama bin Laden.

There was a silence throughout the apartment as all the Russians’ loops started running again and as the occupants, who had mostly been sleeping, came awake to discover the Russians among them.

Sokolov must have had an astonished look on his face because the tall Negro was looking at him with a certain degree of amusement. The Negro’s hands and arms were largely concealed by the clutter of explosives- making stuff on the table, but they went into motion now, and Sokolov heard the very familiar snick- chunk of a Kalashnikov being charged; this being the last thing that one generally did preparatory to pulling the trigger.

Two very loud booms sounded from another room: Kautsky opening up with his semiautomatic shotgun.

Swinging the rifle upward, the Negro spoke in a calm, quiet, and matter-of-fact tone: “Allahu akbar.”

“I JUST CAN’T fucking believe it,” Peter muttered, as he worked the bobby pin in the manacle. “I can’t believe what you did.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, really.”

“Well, I can’t believe what everyone else is doing,” Zula said. “As far as I’m concerned I’m the only one here being reasonable.”

“You think it’s reasonable to fuck with a guy like Ivanov?”

“What kind of a guy is Ivanov anyway?” Zula asked. “What do we really know about him?”

“He’s a pretty tough guy,” Csongor put in. Zula glared at him, and he looked somewhat apologetic for having taken Peter’s side.

“Do you know that of your own knowledge, or just by reputation?” Zula asked.

Csongor didn’t answer.

“Did you not see what happened to Wallace in my building?” Peter demanded.

“That’s a good way of putting it. I did not see what happened to Wallace. I saw Wallace go into a room. I saw a long bundle being carried out. Obviously we were meant to think it was Wallace’s dead body. I’ll bet it was fake.”

“Fake!?”

“Yeah. They took him in there and said, ‘Listen, Wallace, we need to scare the crap out of these two Americans, so play along. Shut up and go limp for a minute and we’ll roll you up in a piece of plastic and carry you out and make it look like we just killed you.’ He’s probably sitting in his flat in Vancouver right now playing T’Rain.”

“I doubt it,” Csongor said.

“I suppose that is theoretically possible,” Peter said, “but I think it is insane and irresponsible of you to bet our lives on it.”

“None of this is real,” Zula said. “It is all gangster theater.”