They paused there for a moment.
“They are called stairs,” said Qian Yuxia.
YESTERDAY IT HAD seemed as though they were harvesting an impressively large number of IP addresses and latitude/longitude pairs. When Csongor had actually produced a map of these, though, and overlaid it on an image of Xiamen, it had looked discouraging: their data somehow managed to be sparse and clumpy at the same time. A few trends had been evident, though, and had given them reason to believe that the IP address still written in fading ink on Sokolov’s hand was assigned to an access point, not way out in the suburbs, not near the university, and not even in one of the more far-flung parts of the island, but within a kilometer or two of the safe house.
They could probably see the Troll’s building from their window. Which was a little bit like saying that you could see Earth from the moon. But it was a kind of progress.
The general plan for today, then, was to visit all the Internet cafés they could find that lay in the general zone of interest, and try to get some finer-grained data.
While making this plan in the presence, and under the close supervision, of Ivanov, they had all spoken confidently of Internet cafés, as if it were a subject on which they were knowledgeable. And why not? They were hackers; they were from Seattle; Peter’s loft was all of about a mile from the world headquarters of Starbucks, an organization that had shotgunned the planet with coffee bars featuring Wi-Fi.
They had, in other words, been assuming three things of Chinese Internet cafés: (1) that they were all over the place, (2) that they were easy to find, and (3) that they served coffee; that is, that they were literally cafés, as in small cozy places where customers could curl up with a laptop to check their email.
The pathetic naïveté and Seattle-centrism of these assumptions had already begun to infiltrate Zula’s awareness but clobbered her in the teeth as she followed Qian Yuxia to the top of the stairs. The helpful strangers who had been giving them useless directions always seemed to be saying that the Internet café was “upstairs of” or “in the back of” such-and-such a business, and this had given Zula the idea that they were talking about tiny backroom enterprises.
Now she understood that these business had to be upstairs of, or in the back of, other enterprises because they were so enormous. This one occupied an entire floor of the building. Brand-new PCs with flat-panel screens were packed in together as tightly as the laws of thermodynamics would allow, and essentially all of them were in use. There were at least a hundred people in here, all wearing headphones and therefore weirdly silent.
“Holy Jesus,” Csongor said.
“What?” asked Yuxia.
“It is ten times as big as the biggest one we have ever seen,” Zula explained.
“This is only half of it,” said Yuxia, nodding toward another stair that led up to an additional story. “How many you want?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How many of you want to use computer?”
“One,” said Zula, “unless—?” She looked at Sokolov, who had been staring at more decorative swag posted on the wall. It was one of a series of promotional posters that Corporation 9592’s marketing department had produced shortly after the launch of the game, when they were making a ferocious effort to steal customers away from World of Warcraft. They were fake travel posters, rendered in photorealistic detail. This particular one showed a Dwinn perched on a boulder at the edge of a pristine mountain lake, fishing rod in hand, battling it out with a toothy, prehistoric-looking beast that could be seen breaching from the surface in the middle distance with a lure hooked through its lip. The real purpose of the poster had been to show off the incredible realism of Pluto’s landform-generating software, which was on spectacular display in the mountain slopes on the far side of the lake. But the riggers and animators, not to be outdone, had lavished a lot of time and energy on getting the Dwinn’s posture exactly right: leaning back against the tension on the line, one foot planted, the other just coming up off the ground. It was as good, for Zula, as seeing a snapshot of home and hit her hard; she’d not been ready for it here.
Conveniently, Sokolov chose this of all moments to wax talkative. He slowly turned his head to gaze at Zula, then Yuxia. “Maybe I google fishing equipment store.”
Zula was still contending with a sizable knot in her throat, and Yuxia had no idea what to make of Sokolov.
“Fishing,” Sokolov repeated, nodding at the poster and pantomiming a cast and a reel-in. “My boss wants to go fishing. But we did not bring matériel.”
“When?” Yuxia asked.
Sokolov shrugged. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next day. Depends. But today I could be getting equipment. Need to google store.”
“That’s not going to work,” Yuxia said, “if you can’t read Chinese.”
“Need help then. Need to buy special hats. Little iceboxes. Case for rod.” He shrugged. “Usual.”
Yuxia turned away and approached the front counter of the wangba, which was a pretty sizable installation in its own right, spanning about twenty feet and sporting two tills. The wall behind it was filled with a couple of glass-fronted refrigerator cases, jammed with beverages, and some shelves stocked with instant dried noodle bowls, sealed with disks of foil and printed all over in eye-grabbing colors. Behind the counter were three people: two employees, both men in their twenties, and one Public Security Bureau officer in his light blue shirt, necktie, and dark slacks. The latter was seated with his back to them and was paying attention to a pair of flat-panel screens subdivided into four panes each. Zula assumed that these were showing security camera footage, but on a second look she saw that each one of them was showing a half-size image of a computer screen. Some of those were displaying windowed user interfaces, such as a person might use to surf the web or check Facebook, but most were running video games. Each pane changed every few seconds.
She looked at Csongor, who had become fixated on the same thing. He turned to look at her. Their eyes met and they both laughed.
“What is funny?” Sokolov asked.
Csongor turned to him. “This guy is looking over everyone’s shoulder,” he said. “Making sure they don’t look at porn, or whatever.”
Sokolov got it but didn’t see the humor.
Qian Yuxia had in the meantime stomped up to the counter and addressed one of the employees in the style of a drill sergeant greeting a trainee who had showed up drunk and disheveled. The employee, for his part, began and ended the conversation by looking her carefully up and down, which confirmed in Zula’s mind that Yuxia was a bit of an unusual customer, and yet not wholly unprecedented. The PSB officer turned away from his screens long enough to examine the three Westerners, then glanced at Yuxia, then turned back to the screens. Apparently being a Westerner wasn’t such a big deal if you had a Chinese minder to lead you around; it was the unaccompanied and clueless Westerners who drew all the attention.
Some kind of transaction took place. Yuxia summoned Sokolov forward with a snap of the fingers and compelled him to produce money, which disappeared into the till. The employee handed over two strips of paper with alphanumeric strings printed on them: user IDs and passwords.
They proceeded into the main floor of the wangba, which reminded Zula of the part of a casino where the slot machines are lined up, except without the noise: densely packed humans in a dark, low-ceilinged room, sitting on identical chairs and focused on machines. And indeed the slot machine comparison was not a bad one in that most of these people were playing video games. A few of them were playing World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, and Aoba Jianghu, which was the all-Chinese game that Nolan Xu had created prior to cofounding Corporation 9592 and that lived on in the wangba world as an oldie but goodie, frequently imitated, always pirated (its copy protection scheme had been annihilated twenty-two hours after its release), never equaled. But the clear majority of them were playing T’Rain, which meant that most of them were here for business and not pleasure. Zula had enough
experience with the game by this point that she could identify, at a glance, most of the landscapes and situations that passed beneath her eye as she followed Yuxia down an aisle toward the stairway. Taking in a longer view of the wangba, she saw just a few heads that had popped up, gopher style, above the low half walls that separated one row of workstations from the next. Some of these were young men slurping noodles from bowls and watching their friends play games, but she also saw another PSB officer making his rounds.
The next floor up was a repeat of the first, with more terminals vacant. A third PSB officer was stationed here, sitting on a chair at the top of the stairs, drinking tea from a big glass thermos and bored out of his mind. Csongor sat down at one terminal and Sokolov sat at the next. Csongor pretended to check his email while Yuxia helped Sokolov search for fishing gear providers in downtown Xiamen.
Once Csongor was logged on to a computer it took him only a few moments to establish its IP address and a few moments more to snoop around the local network getting an idea of what IP addresses might be assigned to neighboring machines. So “checking his email” took only a few seconds, and then he was logged off and ready to go. He walked toward Zula, breaking stride as soon as he got within about a meter of her, and then turned sideways. For he had not approached her to talk, or for any reason other than to be in her presence. This had become his habit. Zula had grown accustomed to it. She felt better when he was there, just on the edge of her personal space. It appeared that he felt better there too.
Sokolov had taken some phone pictures of fishermen traipsing out of a ferry terminal yesterday afternoon and showed them to Yuxia, zooming in on their heads and urging her to get a load of their hats. They were the most retarded-looking hats Zula had ever seen, and she didn’t believe for a moment that Sokolov wanted to go fishing. He had some other plan in mind and had realized on the spur of the moment that Yuxia could help him with it.
The somewhat comforting feeling she got from Csongor’s proximity was now wrecked by a sort of icicle-through-the-heart sensation as she realized that Yuxia was about to get tangled up in this. And that was at least partly Zula’s fault.
Yuxia and Sokolov finished their business and logged off. “We go to buy hats,” Sokolov announced, and then he stood to one side, as was his habit, waiting for the ladies to go first.
YUXIA WAS GOING to make finding wangbas a million times easier, but there was a price to be paid, which was that they could not simply go straight from one to the next while maintaining the pretext that they were only doing it so that Csongor could check his email. No one needed to check his email that frequently; and if he did, it would be easier to just hang out in one wangba rather than flitting from one to the next.
Sokolov’s plan—whatever the hell it was—concerning the fishing equipment helped to solve this problem. For they devoted about forty-five minutes now to walking to a store where it was possible to buy the goofy-looking cloth hats favored by septuagenarian Chinese anglers. During the walk, Zula got to know Yuxia a little better. In fact, she pestered Yuxia with questions, because she was a little bit nervous that Yuxia might start asking her questions that, given the circumstances, would be difficult to answer. The script that they were working from was flimsy and would not stand up to scrutiny from the lively mind of Qian Yuxia.
She learned that Yuxia lived in a town up in Yongding that was something of a tourist attraction because of its tulou: huge round fortresslike buildings of rammed earth, constructed centuries ago by the Hakka people. Most of the tourists were Chinese who came up in buses from Xiamen. But the place did attract some Western travelers, mostly backpacker types, and so during the tourist season she worked for a hotel that catered to such people. She hung around at the bus station and wandered about the main tourist game trails, and when she saw Westerners who looked lost, she greeted them, talked to them, and steered them to the hotel. She drove them around the region in a van so that they could see some of the off-the-beaten-track tulous. That, and watching movies, and reading books left at the hotel by the backpackers, was how she had learned her English. During the off-season she drove the van to the distant outskirts of Xiamen and made arrangements to park it somewhere, then rode the bus into Xiamen, stayed at a hostel, and plied her trade as an itinerant tea merchant. Mostly this was a matter of wholesaling tea to established retail shops, but she was not above approaching end users directly, as she’d done yesterday with Zula.
That got them as far as the hat shop, where Sokolov purchased an even dozen of the shapeless hats that he wanted. Then it was time for Csongor to “check his email” again. So they found another wangba and Csongor did that while Zula slurped noodles and Yuxia helped Sokolov find a store that traded in rod-and-reel cases.
Then they repeated the cycle: they set out on foot to a place where Sokolov was able to purchase some rod-and-reel cases, and then they found the nearest wangba so that Csongor could “check his email” yet again.
Zula asked Yuxia what a Hakka was and learned that they were the only Chinese who had refused to take up the practice of foot binding. So “Big-Footed Woman” was not just a throwaway line. Not only that, but they would buy the unwanted female children of their Cantonese-speaking neighbors and raise them. Yuxia was not the type to deploy terminology like “feminist” or “matriarchal,” but the picture was clear enough to Zula. She was able to draw comparisons to her early years being raised by Marxist-feminist teachers in caves in Eritrea, which provided a safe topic for time-consuming chitchat as they wandered about in the streets.
This third wangba was on the top story of a four-story commercial building that fronted on a side street, perhaps wide enough to carry a car going in each direction if uncomplicated by pedestrians, bicyclists, or carters. It was a bit smaller than the first two they’d visited and had a younger clientele and a somewhat seedier vibe about it. There was a single PSB officer stationed at the entrance, but he didn’t have the high-tech system for monitoring what was shown on the customers’ terminals. A few mirrors were planted about the place, theoretically making it possible for him to look over people’s shoulders, but in order for it to work, he would have to care and he would have to look up from his glossy magazine (in Chinese, but exclusively concerned with the personnel and doings of the National Basketball Association), neither of which obtained. This wangba was considerably louder, not with music or with game sound tracks but with conversation. As they perceived after they paid their way in, the hubbub all emanated from one corner, where a dozen or so teenagers had locked down a cluster of terminals and were playing a game together, looking over each other’s shoulders and calling out warnings, orders, encouragement, mockery, and wails of despair.
As usual, Csongor went to one terminal while Yuxia and Sokolov went to another. Zula drifted over toward the corner where the young men were all playing. As soon as their screens came into view she recognized that they were playing T’Rain. The style in which they were communicating told her that they must all be part of a raiding party going on an adventure together; their characters were all in the same place in the T’Rain world, probably conducting a dungeon raid or fighting it out with a rival gang, and so a warrior might be calling out to a priest that he needed to be healed or a mage might be requesting protection from a menacing beast while he cast his spells. It was a common enough play style.
She could tell that they were badass. This was confirmed when she got into position for a better look at their characters: massively powerful and expensively equipped.
The landscape in which they were fighting looked strikingly familiar.
It was the Torgai Foothills.
They were fighting near the ley line intersection with the trebuchets.
She became aware, suddenly, that she had been watching for a few minutes and that Sokolov was right next to her, close enough that she could sense his warmth. He’d read the look on her face, come over to see what had transfixed her.
Feeling suddenly conspicuous, she turned away and
walked back toward where Csongor was sitting. He was looking aghast at the screen of his terminal.
“What is going down?” Qian Yuxia wanted to know. “What is you guys’ problem?”
Sokolov turned to look at her. “Tomorrow we go fishing,” he announced. “Need iceboxes.”
HALF AN HOUR later Zula was chained to a sink in the women’s bathroom at the safe house.
When Sokolov had understood that the young men in the corner were in league with the Troll—that one of them might even be the Troll—when Csongor had beckoned him over and shown him an IP address on his screen that matched the one written on Sokolov’s hand—the Russian had acted with a combination of extreme dispatch and perfect calm that in other circumstances Zula would have admired. He had made a phone call. A few minutes later he had escorted Zula out to the street just as a taxi containing four security consultants had pulled up. One of these had remained in the taxi, and the others had stood around Zula in a manner that was not overtly threatening but that made it obvious she had no choice but to climb into the backseat. A few minutes later she and the security consultant were in the parking garage of the skyscraper, and a minute after that they were in the ladies’ room. The Russians, tired of escorting her to the bathroom and waiting in a stall, had somehow procured a length of chain about twenty feet long and padlocked one end of it to the U-bend of a drain trap beneath one of the sinks. The other end of the chain had a handcuff locked onto it, which ended up snapped around Zula’s ankle. Her luggage and her sleeping bag had already been deposited on the floor, along with a stack of rations, a modest heap of junk food, and a roll of paper towels. She had enough slack to reach the toilet, and she could get water from the sink. What more could a girl ask for?
This was the one time that she just went out of her mind crying. Fetal position, head banging on the floor. It was being chained that did it. She’d been through a lot of weird stuff, but no one had ever thought to chain her before.