walking slowly and calmly into the office building and getting into the stairway where no one could see her, she ascended the steps two at a time and got into her office as soon as she could. Resisting the temptation to gawk out the window, she pulled on the headphones that she used to monitor the sounds in Abdallah Jones’s apartment.
Everything sounded routine: some snoring, a few sleepy men getting up and making tea, listening to an Arabic podcast. The very normality of this calmed her down quite a bit and made her feel a fool for having become so excited. She blotted perspiration from her forehead, sat down, set her purse on the desk, woke up her computer, and checked her email.
A huge thud came through on the headphones, followed by a great deal of excited talking.
Then some loud pops, clipped by the electronics so that they just came through as dropouts in the stream of noise.
Then the sound went dead entirely. She pulled off the headphones and realized that she could hear more pops
She was startled by crashing and splintering noises from inside the office, just to her right. Pulling her head back inside, she noticed that half of her windows were now shards on the floor. There was dust in the air and craters in the wall opposite the windows. Her mind, slowly catching up, told her that she had just heard a long burst of automatic weapons fire and that a good bit of it had come directly across the street and sprayed the office.
She dropped to hands and knees, reached up, and hit the kill switch on the laser device.
MI6 had sent in a hit squad. They were doing it now. But they had forgotten to advise her.
Or perhaps they had just decided that she was expendable.
SOKOLOV HAD SEEN many strange things already this morning, and yet still he was taken aback when he swung out of the shattered window and scanned the front of the building to find it cluttered with young Chinese men crawling around on it like spiders.
Then he remembered that, sixty seconds earlier, his greatest concern in the world had been what to do about a cabal of Chinese hackers. These must be them.
He understood and approved of the decision that the hackers had made to avoid the building’s stairwells and escape via its exterior surface. It would have been easy enough to follow their lead down to the street, and in a sense this was the obvious decision to make, since they knew the terrain much better than he did. Often, in unfamiliar territory, it was wisest to pattern one’s movements after the locals’.
On the other hand, there was this thick bundle of wires running from a point on the building’s facade not far from where Sokolov was now, across the street to an office building under construction. The wires, in aggregate, must be a lot heavier than Sokolov, and so would probably support his weight. He favored the idea of using them as an escape route, for two reasons. First of all, simply getting down to the street might not help him that much, since, unlike the hackers, he could not blend in. He would be noticed and arrested very quickly. But if he could get into the other building he would have some chance of hiding somewhere, long enough, at least, to devise a plan.
Second, the apartment he had just left was full of high explosives and was on fire.
Now, compared to the typical layman, Sokolov was not especially worried about the proximity of ANFO and open flames. Like most high explosives, the stuff was difficult to set off. Fire alone would not suffice. Some sort of primer was needed: a detonator, such as a blasting cap. So it was quite possible that the entire building could burn to the ground without any sort of explosion taking place.
And yet this was a simplistic reading of the situation. There was a lot of other stuff in that apartment besides ANFO. During the few, frenzied moments he had spent there, Sokolov had not been able to make a systematic inventory. But if they were planning to use the ANFO, as seemed likely, then they must have some blasting caps in the place; and if they were planning to use it soon, then it was likely that they had already assembled some complete explosive devices in which the detonators had been mated with the ANFO. And anyway, in that devil’s kitchen he had just left behind, there was no telling what other stuff they might have mixed up: the terrorists had recipes for other explosives besides ANFO that were much less stable. And so there was a strong argument for getting away from the building as fast as he could. The wire bundle offered him that.
The main argument against it was that the terrorists could easily shoot at him as he was suspended in the air above the street right outside their windows.
But he could hand-over-hand his way along a stretched wire about as fast as most men could run. And the few terrorists who were still alive must be rather preoccupied. So that made the decision easy. He clambered over a series of window grates and other stuff to the wire bundle, reached out with one hand, grabbed, and slowly transferred his weight. The bundle didn’t rip loose from the wall. Good. He let go of the apartment building altogether, swung out into space, reached, and made another grab. Then another. Then another.
Then felt himself descending and saw the bundle receding into the sky.
This wasn’t like crossing a stretched steel cable in a military training camp. The bundle was a skein of perhaps two dozen separate wires, as gaily colored as a maypole. Some of the wires were electrical, some telephone, some data, some not clearly identifiable. He couldn’t get his hand around the whole bundle, and so every time he swung forward he had to thrust his fingertips like a blade into the heart of the thing and get a grip on whatever presented itself. This had worked the first few times, but on his last grab he had aimed wrong, missed the bundle, and snatched one single wire, a blue Ethernet cable that spiraled around all the other wires, and now his weight was pulling all the slack out of that one wire and peeling it loose from the bundle. He reached up with his free hand, whipped it around the taut blue line, and pulled himself up enough to get that first hand free, then repeated, ascending the wire but not gaining altitude since the blue wire was still giving up slack. He was only an arm’s length below the bundle but couldn’t quite reach it. Finally the wire stopped giving way and held fast and he kicked up with his legs, making himself upside down for a moment, and got both legs wrapped around the whole bundle. The rifle, and a CamelBak water pouch that he was wearing on his back, fell to the ends of their straps and dangled. He allowed himself a few seconds to catch his breath before he began shinnying along the bundle as rapidly as he could manage. This was much slower than the hand-over-hand technique and made him feel like an incompetent civilian, but he could not risk doing it the other way. In any case, he was not too worried about being shot at since the apartment was now completely engulfed in flames. Solvent cans burst open and vomited storms of combustible vapor from windows.
YUXIA WAS BEMUSED by the length of time it took the locksmith to work on the van’s ignition. Her family’s hotel in the mountains of Fujian was well stocked with DVDs of Western action movies, which could be had for next to nothing in Xiamen. From watching these, Yuxia had learned that any vehicle in the world could be started in a few seconds just by striking at the steering column until wires fell out and then touching the wires together until a spark was observed. And yet this locksmith turned it into an elaborate procedure that centered around picking the lock itself. It was quite obvious from the look on his face that he was extremely disturbed by all the gunfire taking place above, and that this was not making him get the job done any faster.
Yuxia was, of course, rather disturbed herself. She had reacted somewhat impulsively in handcuffing the poor locksmith to the steering wheel. At the time, only a few shots had been fired, and she had assumed that this would be the last of it, and that he would have the engine hot-wired in a few moments anyway. He was overreacting—using this as a pretext to abandon Yuxia, and, by extension, Zula and Csongor and Peter. But since then it had developed into what sounded like a full-scale war, and pieces of debris kept clattering down onto the van’s roof. Every time it happened the locksmith was startled and seemed to lose his place in the lock-picking project. It dragged on for what seemed like a year, and Yuxia began to lose her nerve, as she felt both terrified to be in this predicament and guilty over what she had done to the locksmith. Nothing prevented her from exiting the van and running away. And yet every time she thought about it seriously, something big would slam down onto the van’s roof and remind her that it was a good thing to have steel over her head. And life really would be much easier for her if she could get this van out of here.
So preoccupied did she become with such thoughts that she was startled when she heard the van’s engine come to life. The dashboard lights came on and the tachometer needle rose off its pin.
The locksmith let out a curse, threw down the tools he’d been working with, and attacked the manacle with
