by Simon Morden
He felt compelled to keep himself informed, especially at a time like this. It was a truism that the one connecting fact that linked together everything he was doing could appear half a world away. He wasn’t the only one watching, reading, collating and sifting, but he was a link in the chain: too much information was being generated for any one man to know, but he wanted to try.
Nothing from China yet. The US press was silent on his whereabouts, and the FBI’s Most Wanted list didn’t feature either him or Newcomen. Amsterdam spot prices for crude were up: he dug a little further and found a supply problem. The Alaskan pipeline hadn’t restarted pumping yet. Maybe another week, while the technicians and mechanics replaced circuits and reprogrammed computers.
So there was something to look into. Hardly anyone worried about the price of crude oil any more, since most people didn’t burn it in their cars. But as a chemical precursor, it was vital. He passed a message back to the data miners and stuck a priority flag on it.
He looked down: his stomach was as full as his head.
“Okay. I’ll go and turn the turbines over, and you see to the washing-up.”
Newcomen was halfway through his food and slowing. “Where’s the dishwasher?”
“I’m looking at him.” Petrovitch wiped his mouth on his sleeve, to Newcomen’s obvious disgust. “Plenty of hot water in the tank. Leave it to air-dry, and I’ll see you back at the plane.”
“It was dark last night…”
“It’s dark now. Use your link. Michael knows where you are, where I am, and has maps of the bits between.” He pushed himself away from the table, and carried his plate to the sink, making a show of rinsing it off and placing it in the bottom of the bowl. “Don’t be long. But don’t make a half-arsed job of it either. We leave stuff as we find it.”
“Unless it’s breaking windows and walls with people’s heads.”
“Yeah. There are exceptions to the rule.” He leaned back against the work surface. “When others cause the mess, I let them clean up after themselves.”
Newcomen kept on chewing. “I thought you were going to start the engines.”
“I have already. I’ll just get my bag and I’ll go.” He levered himself upright. “Don’t bother locking the door. Just make sure it’s shut.”
Petrovitch went to delve under his bed for the carpet bag. He looked around to see if he’d left anything: just the sleeping bag, and he didn’t need that again.
Ready, except for the five minutes it took him to dress for the outside.
The cold snap was stretching itself, but was due to break tomorrow. Warm, wet air from the Pacific was pushing up the coast. It meant rain in Seattle, but if anything was left when it reached them, it’d be snow.
He could hear Newcomen in the kitchen, banging plates and rattling the pans, muttering all the while under his breath. With a little enhancement, he could tell what he was saying — not at all what a good little Reconstructionista ought to be vocalising, whether or not they were thinking it.
“Oh, Christine. I don’t know who’s had the narrower escape: you or Farm Boy.”
[It is highly likely that Christine Logan’s trust fund, once invested, would have paid for domestic help. It is also probable that while Joseph Newcomen’s mother would have made him do chores when he was younger, he has not washed up after a meal for several years. Christine, never.] Michael stopped, then started again. [A meat question: if competence in a wide range of skills is desirable, why do people not take every opportunity to display those skills? Especially if those people were desiring a mate — appearing both knowledgeable and competent across a diverse set of normal human tasks would surely increase that person’s chances of attracting a life partner.]
Petrovitch pulled the front door closed behind him and set off across the snowy ground.
“You mean, like I do?”
[You fit the pattern of competency I have outlined, yes.]
“Because being able to do or fix something can be seen as a commercial transaction. We’re used to that: poor people often see it as drudge work, rich people as beneath them. Working with your hands is something you either get paid to do, or pay others to do for you. There’s also learned helplessness and deliberate incompetence, too, but they’re passive-aggressive strategies and anyone who uses them needs a kick up the zhopu.”
Away from the front of the house, it was properly dark. He turned his eyes on and blinked away the visual world.
“But you’re going somewhere with this, right?”
[Joseph Newcomen managed to attract a rich, beautiful woman without displaying any of the characteristics you believe to be important. How, then, did he achieve this feat?]
“Yeah. Some things are just mysteries.”
[Or it could be that your theory does not cover the totality of their relationship.]
“People don’t behave rationally when they believe they’re in love.”
[I have more than sufficient evidence of that. Neither am I immune, Sasha. But your opinion is that Joseph Newcomen and Christine Logan would have been an ill-matched pair: I challenge that view. They share a culture, political leanings, religion and life goals. They would have been happy.]
Petrovitch ducked under a tree branch laden with snow. “He’s changing. He’s putting up a lot of resistance, but his faith in Reconstruction is in tatters. He wouldn’t go back now, even if he could.”
[And I maintain that even if it required massive cognitive dissonance on his part, he would return to his relationship with Christine Logan should circumstances permit. Sasha, you cannot look on transforming Joseph Newcomen’s world view as a priority.]
“I don’t,” he said.
[You are beginning to. It was noted that his assistance would be vital, but not his conversion.]
“Conversion? He already has religion.”
[You are attempting something equally fundamental. It is distracting you from your main task. I would not be your friend if I did not point this out to you. You are with Joseph Newcomen every waking moment, and it is natural for you, since he is both a citizen of the United States of America and an adherent of Reconstructionist philosophy, to seek to influence him.]
“Did Maddy put you up to this?”
[Madeleine Petrovitch shares my concerns, but they are my concerns nevertheless. Joseph Newcomen is not the man who ordered the infiltration of the Metrozone. He is not the man who planned the Outie invasion. He is not the man who ordered my destruction and yours. Convincing him that Reconstruction is a self-contradictory and self-destructive quasi-fascistic nationalist movement that ought to be rejected is not going to change the policies of the United States government. And since he is not the man who is responsible for Lucy’s disappearance, it will not bring her back either.]
“I know this, okay? I really do.”
[Then remember that he is neither your enemy nor your friend. He is a victim for whom you may rightly have compassion, but he is still a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence. Unless you intend to suggest he becomes part of the Freezone collective, by converting him you will be denying him any possibility of reintegrating into his society after this affair is over. They even have a word for it.]
“Feral.” Petrovitch stamped through the snow to the frostrimed outline of the plane. His and Newcomen’s were the only footprints to approach it — human footprints at least. A moose had wandered past, leaving only a pile of scat and its tracks. “Off the grid.”
[And unlike the collective’s laissez-faire attitude to our own remainers, the ferals are despised and live as an actively persecuted underclass throughout the United States. Would you have Joseph Newcomen live like that, assuming he lives?]
The turbines were turning over, blasting hot exhaust out across the clearing and causing an early spring thaw to the trees directly in their path. He sent the command to open the door, and it popped free. Inside, the lights flickered on.
Petrovitch knocked the snow off his boots and stepped up an
d in.
“Yeah, okay. I’ll take your advice. If I start banging on again, let me know.” He dropped his bag on one of the cabin seats and started to warm up both the cockpit and the instruments. He had enough fuel to get to Deadhorse, maybe with a teaspoon or so spare, and everything else working more-or-less fine. Nothing was going to drop off just yet.
He wondered if he actually needed Newcomen at all; whether the kindest thing would be to abandon him here, where there was civilisation and some way of getting back — because he was certain he was flying straight into a trap. He just didn’t know who the trap was intended for.
But he’d already offered him an out, and the agent had refused. That meant something. Or other.
“Yeah, Michael. Is there any possibility that Newcomen is a plant? That he’s the best agent they have, trained in all sorts of black-ops stuff, and has been reprogrammed like Tabletop was so he doesn’t remember any of it — until the critical moment when he knifes me in the back.”
[We have done a thorough background check on Joseph Newcomen. As far as we can tell, his life can be completely accounted for and verified by external sources.]
“And you’re absolutely certain the guy who’s walking towards me right now is the same one who broke his arm in a football game, and that Joseph Newcomen isn’t holding up a bridge somewhere.”
[We have a confidence of almost one hundred per cent on that being the case.]
Petrovitch looked out of the windscreen at the figure dragging its feet through the snow.
“You know what? I’m regretting this more and more.” He got out of his seat and went to get his polar bear gun from his bag. Then he decided that the rest of the bag ought to be in easy reach too.
He was sitting back in the pilot’s seat when the plane rocked and Newcomen appeared.
“Is everything, uh, ready?”
“Yeah.” Petrovitch told the ladder to retract and the door to close. “We’re ready now.”
24
There were several roads that led out of Fairbanks. Route Eleven headed north towards the Arctic Ocean and Prudhoe Bay. Sometimes it made seemingly random turns, swinging to the left or right to navigate a hidden obstacle or difficult terrain, but what it did do was follow the pipeline wherever it went. The two were never far apart, and in winter, when snow and ice covered the landscape, it was often the only indication of where the road was: somewhere parallel to the fat grey tube held clear of the ground on pylons.
The pipeline ended where Petrovitch’s search started, six hundred kilometres away on the shore of a mostly frozen sea, inhabited only by oil men and natives — some of whom were also oil men.
He was flying low, out of necessity, out of habit, bare metres above the trees where there was forest, and the folds in the ground where there wasn’t, following the road north because that was the way Jason Fyfe would have gone. Cross-country wasn’t an option in anything but a tracked vehicle: the RV that Fyfe had borrowed had fat balloon tyres with studs for gripping the frozen surface of the snow, but if it had left the hard substrate of the road surface, it would have foundered.
He knew — Michael had told him — that most of the oil companies moved their personnel by plane, and most of their equipment by landship around the coast to avoid the mountain range between south and north.
That was what had made the trucks heading towards Deadhorse stand out so. Anonymous, white, big. Taking the road was the quicker option, and a series of massive transport planes dropping in on a runway at the edge of the world would have been simply blatant.
Even if the Freezone hadn’t been watching for it, someone else — the Chinese, perhaps — would have seen them from space.
Something was going on, and it infuriated him that he didn’t know what. Yet. He would, eventually. And he’d find Lucy, too, and bring her home.
There was a lot to concentrate on: the act of flying, the minute course corrections even when the road was straight, the slew of other data flooding in, his own thoughts, the gun burning heavy and hard against his chest. They flew on, and the trees petered out. Nothing now but rock and ice until the sea — not a featureless landscape, but muted; its vastness muffled and softened by the deep drifts of snow.
He almost missed the figure raising his hand to the plane as it roared overhead in the half-light, dragging a snowstorm in its wake.
“Did you…?” asked Newcomen, twisting around in his seat, as if he could see behind him through the opaque fuselage of the plane.
“Barely.” Petrovitch pulled back on the throttle and executed a long looping turn that took them wide over the tundra. As they turned, they could see the man again as a dark shape against the white ice. A snowmobile stood a little way off, and behind that, a towed sled.
The man had his arms outstretched, angled up. He held them there, turning to face the plane as it came back around.
“What does he want?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Petrovitch. “And that’s talk to him.”
He lined up with the road and lessened the power to the gravity pods. They sank towards the ground and started to drift laterally. He gave the control surfaces a nudge: the plane turned, and he came to a halt with the nose diagonally to the direction of travel.
The man lowered his arms. Petrovitch could just make out button-bright eyes hiding beneath the fur-rimmed hood, and the outline of a rifle slung across his back.
“Muffle up. It’s even colder outside than it was in Fairbanks.” Petrovitch slid from his seat and made his way back to the cabin. He cracked the door open, dislodging a thin layer of ice that had formed there.
The ladder extended reluctantly, and he jumped the last step down on to the iron-hard surface. His coat steamed with stored moisture, and a white crust formed on its skin. Newcomen followed him into the freezing air, shuddering at its touch.
“Hey,” said Petrovitch, when he was close enough. “We almost missed you.” He could feel the hairs in his nostrils bristle and grow hard.
The man pulled his collar down to expose his sallow, tanned face. “Hey. Where’re you from?”
Petrovitch looked around, flicking from visible light to infrared and back. The skidoo was just about warmer than its surroundings, meaning it had been there a while without having been parked overnight.
“Out of Fairbanks,” he said. “You?”
“Allakaket.”
The man was an Inuk, then. Petrovitch could cobble together some Inupiaq, but he wasn’t confident he’d be at all intelligible. He stuck to English.
“Hunting?”
“Got me some wolf.” He nodded over at the sled, and the lumpy tarpaulin covering its contents. “I heard you coming from the south. A vehicle’s come off the road: I was going to report it next place I came to, but seeing as you’re here…”
Petrovitch’s eyes narrowed. “RV?”
“Big one. It’s in a river just over there. I wouldn’t have seen it, but I went over its rear fender.”
“Plates?” asked Newcomen.
The Inuk turned his attention to the tall American, dressed in traditional clothing but on a vastly different scale. His face sneered for a second in a way it hadn’t when talking to Petrovitch.
“Alaskan. I wasn’t going to dig it out any further than that: it’s nose down on the ice, and the snow’s covering it all.”
“We’ll have a look,” said Petrovitch. There was a shovel strapped to the side of the skidoo, and he pointed to it. “Okay if we take that?”
“No reason why not.” He freed it, deftly manipulating the clips despite his thick mittens, and led the way below the underside of the plane to a spot that looked almost exactly like every other, except for the small mound of freshly turned snow.
Petrovitch walked towards it, off the road surface, and started to wade. His feet sank in to his knees, and there was much further to go if he wanted. He bent his head to the hole, and could see the yellow and blue of the registration plate, almost flat to the ground. Par
t of the rear bumper and some of the black paintwork framed it.
He read the number. “Yeah, this isn’t good.”
Newcomen scrambled over and peered down. “Fyfe?”
“The number matches. Only one way to find out. Ask our friend for the shovel.”
As Newcomen straightened to speak to the Inuk, Petrovitch undid his parka and pulled off his mitten. He dipped his hand inside, and came out with his gun. He flicked the safety to off.
The man’s eyes widened, and he thought about going for his rifle.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t,” said Petrovitch. “You’re a hunter: a crack shot, patient and careful. I’m a complete bastard who doesn’t need an excuse to put a bullet in your head. And these are explosive bullets. You’ll be lucky if you’re left with anything above your belly button.”
Newcomen twisted around. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to work out why he’s lying to us. I’d rather do that without him having a rifle over his shoulder.” His aim didn’t waver.
“And how do you know he’s lying?”
“Because there aren’t any snowmobile tracks anywhere near this wreck. He no more ran over it than I used to wear a minidress and go by the name of Brenda. Which means we’re being set up.”
Maybe the man thought Petrovitch was distracted for a moment. His hand strayed towards the strap of his rifle.
Petrovitch shook his head. “Whatever they’re paying you isn’t enough. Newcomen, go and get his gun before he has an attack of the heroics.”
Taking care not to come between Petrovitch and the man, Newcomen waded back to the road and circled the Inuk until he was behind him. He lifted the rifle up and over the man’s head. The shovel lay at the man’s feet, and he went to kick that away too.