All of which was unusual and picturesque but probably did not bear directly on the mission. Sokolov turned his attention to the picket line of buildings like this one that stood along the inland side of the big avenue. There were a few other modern blue-glass skyscrapers, and some construction sites where new ones were being erected. But at least half of the frontage was claimed by buildings of older vintage, sporting the logos of hotels and Western food chains. Directly below them was a building of perhaps a dozen stories with a huge KFC sign on its top. Its entryway was choked by taxis, which made Sokolov think that it must be a hotel, probably catering not to Westerners but to Chinese business travelers. It fronted on a traffic exchange. In the center was a raised circle in the middle with traffic lights on it, but other than that, this was just a hectare or so of pavement that—as was obvious from Sokolov’s point of view—had, over and over again, been slit open and trenched and cabled and repaved. It supported a steady flow of taxis, buses, motor scooters, the occasional Lexus or Mercedes. On the opposite side of the exchange was a curving building with a panoramic billboard, colorful photos of fashion models and liquor bottles, offices fronting on the intersection, their nature unguessable by Sokolov since they didn’t have any English in their signs. The architects of these buildings had lavished a huge amount of attention on rooftop antenna masts, which were far more massive and squat and wide-stanced than was really called for by pure engineering considerations. They must have been trained in the Soviet Union and been steeped in the mid-twentieth-century statist mind-set that a building without a radio transmitter was like a battleship without guns. It was a technology and a reason largely forgotten now but preserved in the architecture in the same way as church steeples. What really mattered to the mission at hand was not radio transmitters. It was that zany web of patched pavement cuts splattered all over the streets below, where Internet had been laid down.