The Curve of The Earth sp-4

by Simon Morden

  “I can’t do this.”

  “I’m sorry. You don’t have a choice. Or you do,” amended Petrovitch, “but you won’t take it.”

  He almost felt sorry for him. There was Lucy to think about, though, and his reservoir of compassion was never particularly full at the best of times. And the circumstances weren’t exactly ideal right now.

  “Shit,” said Newcomen.

  “Forty bucks.” Petrovitch jerked his head towards the next room. “They’re still listening. I wonder what would happen if we walked in next door? Would they fight us? Or would they watch while we trashed their equipment? Why are they even there? Who authorised this level of surveillance? What do they hope to get from it?” He scratched at the bridge of his nose. The scar there felt hard and strange today, and he remembered how it felt for the knife to cut him open and ruin his eyes.

  Newcomen’s shoulders sagged. “I should get dressed.”

  “Yeah. Trust me, the only one who should get to see your junk, as you so quaintly put it, is Christine.”

  There was silence between them: nothing to stop the sound of the traffic below, the hum of the aircon, the distant rumble of jets powering up.

  “It’s going to be okay, Newcomen.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Because you can trust me.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Good point, well made.” Petrovitch shrugged. “My daughter’s still missing, and this isn’t finding her. I reckon we can make it back to your room without getting rolled. Go.”

  He was right, and while Newcomen put his clothes on, Petrovitch stared out of the window at central Seattle. They were in the area hit by the 2012 tsunami, and all the buildings were less than twenty years old, supposedly built with new technology to resist earthquakes, save power, use natural light as much as possible. He didn’t rate them.

  “Did Edward Logan cheat on his taxes?”

  “I have absolutely no idea at all,” said Petrovitch. The traffic was building up on University Street, far too early. It was still dark, and the Sun wouldn’t be up for another three quarters of an hour. “I thought it was highly likely, given a quick perusal of his public filings over time and trying to match them to his holdings. So I just went for it.”

  “You bluffed him?”

  “He could have defended himself. He could have denied it. He did neither. I have such a bad-ass hacker rep. Go me. Yay.” Petrovitch could see Newcomen’s reflection in the glass. It was safe to turn around. “Maybe I will take him down after all.”

  Newcomen was half in his jacket. “Don’t.”

  “Even though you know you’re never going to marry Christine?”

  “Especially because of that.”

  “How did it go last night? Everything okay?”

  Newcomen sat on the edge of the bed to lace his shoes. “We had a good time — no, an excellent time. I’ll remember yesterday for the rest of my life, however long that might be. I was gallant to the end. And you? You were good. Moral, even.” He looked over his shoulder at Petrovitch, and held his gaze.

  “Except I’m a complete bastard really, aren’t I?”

  The other man nodded sadly.

  “When you flew to the Metrozone, did you care about what had happened to Lucy? Did you care about finding her?”

  “No. All I cared about was the idea I’d been chosen for something special. That it would impress Christine. That it would impress her father. That my career was taking off, higher clearance, more money, me telling people what to do rather than the other way round. I didn’t care about Lucy at all. I thought you were a stupid, careless parent for letting her go, and she was as good as dead, so why bother?” Newcomen went back to his lacing. “So I imagine I’m just as big a bastard as you are.”

  “Sixty bucks,” murmured Petrovitch. “Does stack up, doesn’t it?”

  Newcomen stood up and started to throw things into his open case. After a while, he slowed down, and eventually stopped.

  “I’m not going to need any of this, am I? Not where we’re going.”

  “No, not really. I’ve ordered a whole stack of cold-weather gear that’ll be waiting for us when we go north. Stuff that genuinely works, not the tourist kit.” Petrovitch stood up and looked into Newcomen’s case with him. “You never really needed much of it anyway. A toothbrush. That’s about it, really.”

  “I could just leave it here. Someone will make good use of it.” Newcomen reached in and pulled out the hefty brick that was the sat phone. “Should really return this, though.”

  “Doesn’t work any more. Nuked that, too.”

  Newcomen threw it back in on top of his clothes and dropped the lid.

  “Your office is what, a couple of blocks away? Why don’t we go and have a talk with your Assistant Director while we’re here?” Petrovitch turned from the window. “I do need breakfast first, though. Mrs Logan made me an omelette, which she didn’t need to, but that wasn’t really enough to keep the wolf from the door.”

  Newcomen grabbed the free pen and scribbled on the top sheet of the pad of paper that was next to it.

  Help yourself, he wrote, and laid the note on top of his case. He stared at it, the little square of white against the grey of the plastic.

  “Is this what it comes down to?” He chewed at his lip.

  “Yeah. Pretty much.” Petrovitch jammed his hands in his pockets. “Welcome to my world.”

  15

  They walked in together, side by side, no thought that Petrovitch really ought to be a step ahead where he could be seen, guided, stopped if he got out of line.

  There were agents and support staff in the foyer, doing whatever it was they were supposed to do: talking about the game, discussing a case or arranging to meet up, going home, clocking on. There were plenty of them, too: no shortage of manpower. Certainly no shortage of people to break off their conversations and watch Petrovitch pause briefly before he walked through the security screen.

  The absence of alarms was deafening.

  The two uniformed guards on duty pointed to the X-ray machine.

  “You’ll have to put your bag through,” said the Moustache.

  “I disagree,” said Petrovitch. “Neither do I have to submit to any search, physical or electromagnetic, whichever frequency you choose, including visible light.”

  “Then the bag stays here. Since we don’t allow unaccompanied luggage in the building, you’ll have to stay too.”

  “Don’t tell me, you’ve been reading Joseph Heller. Agent Newcomen knows all about Heller’s satirical work, Catch-22, because he studied American literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Right, Agent?”

  “Uh, Petrovitch, this isn’t helping.”

  “Oh come on. All the time is learning time. We can’t go in because of me, but we have to go in, because of me.”

  The senior man rested his hand on his colleague’s shoulder. It was just like customs at JFK. A word from a higher authority, and the rules could be not just bent, but stamped on and broken into little pieces.

  “You can carry on,” said the guard. The corners of his mouth turned down.

  “Of course we can,” said Petrovitch cheerily. “There was never any doubt of that.”

  The pair of them made their way to the front desk.

  “Just keep walking,” said Newcomen, leaning in. “Don’t let them intimidate you.”

  “Yeah, you really don’t know me at all, do you?”

  “Well enough to know a lot of you is just hot air.” He reached into his pocket for his badge, and flipped it open.

  Petrovitch squinted at it, then moved Newcomen’s arm for a better look.

  “Pfft.”

  “What?”

  “I thought I looked like govno on my ID.” He rummaged around in half a dozen pockets before he found his visa.

  “Just let me do this, okay?” Newcomen eyeballed a receptionist. “I need my pass, and one for my guest.”

  She was so dazzled,
she automatically started to reach into a drawer. Her supervisor, an older woman with formidable hair, interrupted with a touch on her arm.

  “I’ll deal with these gentlemen, Lenora.”

  “Oof. And you thought it was cold outside,” said Petrovitch. He rested his carpet bag, now inexpertly repaired with ragged strips of wide silver tape, on the desk. The woman gave it a hard stare, as if she could make it disappear by willpower alone.

  “Agent Newcomen. This is yours.” She gave him a lanyard attached to a holographic card. “And this, Dr Petrovitch, is yours. You have to wear it visibly at all times, and return it to me when you leave. Do you understand?”

  She dangled a visitor’s pass towards him, with its bright red text face out.

  “Well,” said Petrovitch, and Newcomen kicked him.

  “Yes. He understands, and I’ll make sure he complies.” He took the tag and hung it over Petrovitch’s head. “Isn’t that right, Doctor?”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll behave.”

  Newcomen led them to the lifts, where Petrovitch had the novelty of waiting. Making sure there was a car ready for them would have been a little too obvious. Even as he tapped his toe, he could see out of the corner of his eye one of the security guys passing a variety of objects through the screen to see if it was still working.

  The lift door opened, and two men were inside, talking animatedly. They stepped out together, and suddenly noticed who was standing in their way.

  “Newcomen.”

  “Baxter. Gowan.”

  “How was, er, how was Europe?” said Baxter. Maybe it was something about deliberately engineering for tall, muscular, blond-haired men, but the Bureau had more than its fair share of them.

  “Big,” said Newcomen, and showed no sign of moving. “Noisy. Where were you last night?”

  “I’m a suspect in one of your cases?” Baxter pressed his palm to his chest in mock surprise.

  “You know exactly what I mean. The pair of you should have been at the Hilton with him,” and he pointed at Petrovitch with a rigid, trembling finger, “last night.”

  “Him?” said Gowan. “This the cyborg?”

  He leaned in for a closer look, checking Petrovitch’s face for an access hatch or a data port. Petrovitch considered his options, the chief of which, and the one he personally favoured, was bringing his forehead smartly into contact with the bridge of Gowan’s nose. Instead, he made his eyes glow a charnel red, and blinked slowly.

  Gowan recoiled.

  Petrovitch looked up at Gowan and his partner. They were so far down the food chain as to be the equivalent of krill. Even Newcomen was more important. They certainly weren’t worth having an international incident over.

  “Real people have work to do,” said Petrovitch, “so why don’t you two just fuck off? That would be brilliant.”

  Baxter stiffened. “That’s…”

  “And we’re keeping the Assistant Director waiting,” said Newcomen. “I’ll be happy to tell him why we’re late.”

  He held his hand up and turned it vertically so he could slice his way between the men, pushing first one then the other aside to make a gap big enough for him to fit through. He walked between them into the lift car and put his foot against the door to prevent it from closing.

  Petrovitch joined him, and faced outwards. He extended his middle finger in the direction of travel and kept it there as the doors shushed shut.

  “They have no idea what’s going on, do they?” said Petrovitch.

  “None. None at all. To be fair, neither do we.”

  “Let’s hope your Buchannan can be a bit more forthcoming, then. I want some answers.” He tapped his visitor’s pass so that it bounced against his chest. “Is there anything you don’t bug?”

  Newcomen glanced down. “Doesn’t look that way. Can you deal with it?”

  “Sure.”

  They travelled up to executive country, where the important people were. The staff they met in the corridor moved aside for them. Perhaps they could smell the frustration and anger. Perhaps they didn’t want to touch the eldritch foreigner, and perhaps they knew that Newcomen was a dead man walking, and there was no reason to catch that infection.

  They passed a kitchen area. Someone was inside, making coffee, and Petrovitch heard the sound of the clinking spoon.

  “Hang on a second.” He stuck his head around the corner and spied the microwave. “Yeah, that’ll do.”

  The woman in the pencil skirt busied herself with putting cups on a tray, and only turned around when she heard the beep of the cooker’s timer.

  “What? What are you doing?”

  Petrovitch looked up from peering at his FBI tag going around on the revolving plate inside.

  “Just, you know. Fixing stuff.” He gave it thirty seconds and sprung the door. The tag was warm, and had a couple of burn marks where the electronics inside had arced. He dropped the lanyard over his head again.

  Newcomen, propping up the door frame, shrugged uselessly, before standing aside for Petrovitch, who marched past and carried on down the corridor like he hadn’t just destroyed federal property.

  They reached the door marked with Buchannan’s nameplate. Newcomen knocked, and a breezy voice told them to enter.

  In days past, Buchannan would have been half invisible through air hazy blue with cigarette smoke, while the two of them were invited to sit in the slanting light coming through the nearly closed blinds on the window. They would have all worn hats — a trilby, a fedora: something dangerous — and they’d have talked over glasses of whiskey poured from a bottle hidden in the back of a filing cabinet. There’d have been trench coats hanging from the bentwood stand by the frosted-glass door, and the shadows of people walking by would have made them drop their voices and speak in short, clipped sentences.

  As it was, Petrovitch missed the trappings. They would have reminded him of what was at stake, and made the whole proceedings less clinical and anodyne. At least the glass walls of the Assistant Director’s office could be dialled opaque. There were bookshelves, with real books; photographs of friends and family; mementoes gained from thirty-five years of faithful service. Buchannan’s first day as an FBI agent was the day before Armageddon. All his working life had been spent working against, and yet fearing, the actinic flash of a nuclear bomb.

  Petrovitch had best remember that. He took the leftmost seat and placed his bag on his lap. Newcomen waited for Buchannan to indicate he could sit, which he did with an open gesture at the chair to Petrovitch’s right.

  “Dr Petrovitch? Welcome to America.”

  “No thanks, I’ve had enough already.” He pressed the lock on his bag and unzipped it. “Do you mind if I check for bugs?”

  “The whole building is regularly swept, Doctor.”

  “But not by me.” He picked out a variety of devices and dumped the bag on the floor.

  It was inevitable that he found five different radio transmitters within the confines of the four walls, and in trying to trace a sixth, he tabbed the motor on the window blinds to reveal a palm-sized mosquito drone hovering just outside, eight floors up.

  Buchannan had the decency to look embarrassed. “Such matters seem to be out of my control, Dr Petrovitch.”

  “Maybe we should go for a walk,” suggested Newcomen.

  It wasn’t a bad idea, but Petrovitch had a better one. “Your boss isn’t going to tell us anything in private that he’s not going to in public. Firstly, he’s part of the machine; he’s not going offmessage for us, for you, or he would already have done so. Secondly, he knows I’m one big recording device, and he’s probably already seen footage of our little incident back at the hotel. Let’s save ourselves the biting cold and let him make his carefully rehearsed speech here, where at least it’s warm and there’s the possibility of a decent cup of coffee.”

  “I guess so.”

  They waited in silence for a secretary to bring them drinks. Buchannan, too old to have been gengineered, too squeamish to stand
the smell of his own corneas cooking by going under a laser, wore small, round glasses. Like Petrovitch used to have. He took them off and polished them with a cloth handkerchief.

  Newcomen fidgeted incessantly, playing with his fingers, pulling faces, scratching. Petrovitch just sat and closed his eyes, feeling for the electronic equipment secreted around the room, for the operator of the drone, who was two floors down in a cupboard marked on the floor plan as janitorial supplies.

  The delay meant that when the secretary and her tray arrived, he had a good idea of how to disable them all.

  “Do you take milk, Doctor?” asked Buchannan.

  Petrovitch shook his head. “Just sugar.”

  “How much?”

  “About four of those little sachets will be fine. Defenestrating spooks before breakfast always takes it out of me.”

  “And Joseph?”

  “Milk, please.”

  “Can we stop being polite to each other? None of us really mean it.” Petrovitch watched while the Assistant Director ripped open the paper sachets and emptied their contents into a cup of black brew. “We’re all grown-ups.”

  “Quite so, Doctor.” Buchannan stirred the coffee with a metal spoon and slid the saucer towards Petrovitch. “Why don’t you start?”

  “Yeah, you don’t want me to start. But I’ll ask the first question: why are you going along with this charade? It must offend every instinct you have as a law-enforcement officer.”

  “I would deny that there is a charade I’m going along with.”

  “Meaning either there isn’t a charade, or you’re not going along with it? You look pretty well neck-deep in things from where I’m sitting.”

  “That’s a matter of interpretation. Things look different depending where you stand.” Buchannan slipped on his glasses and blinked in the bright light.

  “I was never much one for moral relativism.” Petrovitch got a raised eyebrow from across the desk. “Well, if I’m being a shit, even for a good reason, I’ll always put my hand up to it: I don’t hide behind the national interest or the greater good. Call it what it is.”