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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 something else. This time it took him only a few seconds. Then he was gone, leaving the handcuff dangling from the steering wheel and half of his tools on the floor of the van. He didn’t bother to shut the passenger door.

Yuxia reached over, pulled the door shut, then settled herself in the driver’s seat again and put the vehicle into gear.

Then she took one last look back at the apartment building. What about Zula and her two hacker boys? The one who was bad for her, and the one who was good for her?

CSONGOR WAS A bit slower than Peter when it came to picking his handcuff. Zula noticed that he was sticking his tongue out as he worked. Somehow, from that, she concluded it was best to remain absolutely still and not distract him.

She, however, was growingly distracted by a sound that was echoing down the stairwell and getting louder every second. It was a human voice, repeating the same utterance, again and again, as if the speaker were an actor trying to memorize an elusive snatch of dialog. At the beginning she could only make out a few of the more percussive consonants, but as the speaker got closer, one flight at a time, she was able to piece the sounds together into words.

He was saying: “You FUCKINK bitch! You FUCKINK bitch! You FUCKINK bitch!..”

It was Ivanov and he was saying this in a tone, more of astonishment than of anger, as if the degree of fucking-bitchness exhibited today by Zula went far beyond all known historic precedents, to the point where Ivanov himself almost could not credit the testimony of his own senses. As he proceeded, his astonishment only mounted, and when he said “FUCKINK” his voice would flutter, for a moment, up into a falsetto before collapsing back into “bitch.”

In spite of all her efforts not to, she glanced at Csongor to see how he was doing. He reacted immediately, which told her that he could hear it too and that he understood its significance.

Then the chant was interrupted with a sudden “YOU!”

Ivanov was only two, perhaps three flights above them. His footfalls had stopped.

He had to be talking to Peter; but Peter made no response that Zula could hear.

“All by yourself?” Ivanov asked. He had to repeat the question and insist that Peter supply an answer. Finally Zula was able to make out some sort of faint response, kind of a yelping sound, from Peter.

“And where is your lovely girlfriend then?”

The conversation, if that was the right word for it, was nothing more than a series of utterances from Ivanov:

“Ah, brave Peter goes ahead to scout for danger? Zula waits behind, ready to follow? Shall we go and have conversation with Zula? No? Vwy not? Perhaps story is lie? Yes? Is lie? Zula is in cellar for other reason? Maybe because she is CHAINED TO PIPE!? Because BRAVE BOYFRIEND left her behind? TO DIE? While BRAVE BOYFRIEND ran away LIKE FUCKINK RAT?”