He had learned that certain women were drawn to big men, and he had not been above taking advantage of this from time to time. He had had only one serious girlfriend, a year ago. Yesterday, he had decided that Zula was the woman for him.
He had not exactly lost consciousness when Ivanov had pistol-whipped him across the jaw, but become, as it were, extremely distracted and somewhat disconnected from control of his body during the moments that the other gunman had made his surprising intervention. He had felt, and profoundly appreciated, the feel of Zula’s hand on his cheek as she broke his fall, but he was a little fuzzy as to what else had happened, largely because his head had been aimed in the wrong direction and he’d been unable to move it.
Now he was not the least bit fuzzy. He knew that he was in the cellar of a building that was in the process of collapsing. That the immensely strong stairway core was holding up well and creating a pocket of relatively safe breathing space around it. And that he was trapped in that pocket with the semidecapitated corpse of Ivanov and a Kalashnikov assault rifle. And while on one level the situation was, obviously, ridiculously chaotic and dangerous, the Hungarian in him said, I was wondering when I was going to end up like this.
From time to time he had wondered how his grandfather had died, since no one had a clue where, or even in what year, it had happened. Maybe he had been in the cellar of some building in Stalingrad, just like this.
During moments when the building was not actively in a state of avalanche, he would call out “Hello! Hello!” as loud as he could manage.
It was almost totally dark. Groping around, Csongor felt buttery leather coated with filthy grit: Ivanov’s man-purse, which had fallen to the floor and was lying right next to him. Csongor pulled it to him and opened it up, in case it contained a flashlight or anything else that might be useful. His hands told him that it was almost completely full of Chinese money. There were two extraordinarily dense rectangles of cold metaclass="underline" full ammunition clips, he realized, for a pistol that was no longer in evidence. Next to them a black box, shaped at one end like a pair of yawning jaws, with small metal pegs as fangs. Csongor picked it up and his finger fell naturally onto a button that was obviously a trigger. He pulled it and a purple lightning bolt leaped between the fangs and danced and twisted about crazily until he let go of the thing. Stupid! If there were a gas leak in this place, the spark would have set it off.
But there had been no explosion; there was no gas leak.
It was some kind of a nonlethal weapon: a stun gun. Maybe Ivanov had brought it for torturing the Troll. Csongor pulled its trigger again and used the dancing light of the arc for illumination. As he had expected, the bag was filled with Chinese money. But stuffed in around the edges were Ziploc bags containing important stuff: passports and phones.
He heard movement from not far away.
“Help!” he cried.
The movement stopped.
“Hello?” Csongor called.
“Hello,” said a voice in the dark. “Come this way, please.”
“I’m coming,” Csongor said. He dropped the stun gun into the bag and zipped it shut. Then he began crawling toward the voice, dragging the bag behind him.
“AIRPORT!” SHOUTED MR. Jones. Then a look of remorse came over his face, Zula guessed, because he had realized how out of control he was. “Airport,” he repeated, much more calmly and distinctly.
Because Mr. Jones’s right hand was cuffed to Zula’s left, they had perforce arranged themselves so that Zula was on the right side of the rear seat and Mr. Jones was on the left, directly behind the driver, who had torqued himself all the way around to stare in paralytic dismay at Mr. Jones.
“Air … port,” Jones said for a third time, in a tone of just-barely-contained fury, accompanied with a little tossing movement of the pistol in his left hand. The driver finally turned around and shifted into gear. The taxi moved about three inches and then stopped to avoid hitting a staggering, dust-covered refugee. But at least it was moving; the taxi driver had something to think about besides the strange pair in his backseat. A few moments later, he claimed a full arm’s length of pavement. And from there, it only got easier. As if the crowd, having conceded the taxi’s right to move one meter, could no longer begrudge it the next ten, or the next hundred.
SOKOLOV WATCHED THE slow dissolution of the taxi into the crowd with professional admiration. He was a highly trained and experienced warrior, operating completely on his own, free to hide in this building for a while or emerge at a time of his choosing. Even so, he had rated his chances of escaping from this situation at essentially zero. And yet this Muslim Negro, the victim of a surprise raid, handcuffed to an unwilling hostage, and squarely in Sokolov’s rifle sights, had apparently managed to make good his escape simply by taking advantage of an opportunity that had presented itself at random. Of course, the distraction posed by the explosion and collapse of the building had helped him enormously, but it was admirable nonetheless. From long experience in places like Afghanistan and Chechnya, Sokolov recognized, in the black jihadist’s movements, a sort of cultural or attitudinal advantage that such people always enjoyed in situations like this: they were complete fatalists who believed that God was on their side. Russians, on the other hand, were fatalists of a somewhat different kind, believing, or at least strongly suspecting, that they were fucked no matter what, and that they had better just make the best of it anyway, but not seeing in this the hand of God at work or the hope of some future glory in a martyr’s heaven.
And so what moved him onward and down the office building’s stairway was not any sort of foolish hope that he could actually be saved, but competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic.
CSONGOR RECOGNIZED HIS savior as one of the hackers: Manu, as they had been referring to him. “Manu” showed Csongor how to make his way out of the cellar to the back door on the alley. Csongor then followed him down the alley to the side street and down that to its intersection with the bigger street that ran along the building’s front. This got them far enough away from obvious danger that “Manu” felt comfortable turning around to look curiously at Csongor.
“Thank you,” Csongor said.
“I am Marlon,” said the other.
“I am Csongor.” They shook hands in a curiously stiff, formal way.
“What happened?” Marlon wanted to know.
Csongor, not fully trusting their ability to communicate in English, shrugged to indicate he hadn’t the faintest idea.
Not far away, someone had been honking a car horn. First it had been a series of long blasts, and now it was a long string of random taps, culminating in “shave and a haircut, two bits.” The neighborhood afforded many distractions at this time, but finally Csongor turned to look and noticed the van sitting there about ten meters away. Projecting below the open driver’s-side door was a pair of blue boots. Yuxia’s head poked up in the vacant window frame, to see if she had gotten their attention yet.