Degrees of Freedom

by Simon Morden

  She sat down next to him, in the seat recently vacated by Valentina. “Are you sure about the bomb? Not being a real bomb, I mean.”

  “There is a scenario I might not have considered.” He pursed his lips, then smiled when he saw her expression change. “Still a fake bomb. But what if the Jihad don’t know that? What if they’ve been set up just like we have? You see, I know the prophet—when I say know, I mean he tried to kill me once—and despite him being a weapons-grade certifiable ebanashka, he’s not a liar. He wouldn’t be involved in this if he knew there was no bomb.”

  “Who’s done this to us? Who’s gone to so much trouble when… you know?” Lucy leaned in and tried to rest her head on his shoulder. She ended up getting an earful of metal strut, and shifted uncomfortably.

  “Yeah. They could have killed us in half a dozen different ways, and hey, some have tried. Madeleine’s always been on top of any assassination attempt, no matter how ill-formed or ill-thought out. Yet she seems to have missed this completely.” Petrovitch swigged at his coffee, made on a machine which still had the traces of the manufacturer’s oil in its pipework. “Don’t sweat it. Just because they’re good doesn’t mean we’re not better.”

  They sat for a while, him swirling the gritty dregs of his coffee in tight circles at the bottom of his mug, she curled up in the seat next to him, knees drawn up in her arms and her chin resting on her knees: a young girl’s posture.

  “You still got that gun Tina gave you?” he asked.

  Lucy nodded.

  “She show you how to shoot straight?”

  She shook her head.

  “We can’t fire off live rounds in here in case someone overhears. But we can go through the basics. Give it here.”

  She reached into her pocket and held out the automatic.

  “Okay. First lesson.” He reached over with his right hand and turned the barrel away from his face. “Never point it at anyone you’re not prepared to shoot. Never shoot anyone you’re not prepared to kill.”

  She looked at the gun, and placed it butt first in his hand.

  “Good girl.”

  He showed her how to make the gun safe, to eject a round still in the chamber, how to unload, and reload. He got her to stand and assume a two-handed grip, leaning forward against the inevitable recoil. He checked her dominant eye, and told her that she may as well throw the yebani thing at her attacker if she was going to shake as much as that. He also said that if he ever caught her holding the gun sideways, gangster-style, he’d tear up her adoption certificate.

  After she’d done everything often enough that he was confident she wouldn’t put a round through her own foot, he asked her if she was ready.

  “Ready? For what?”

  Petrovitch started to unplug his battery packs from their chargers. “I’ve found the original upload of the New Machine Jihad video. The copy on ENN was clean, but the one on the Ukrainian server still has all its exif metadata attached.”

  She flicked the safety on the gun with studied care. “The…”

  “It’s a bit on the front of the file you don’t get to see, but it tells you when the file was made, what the original resolution was, the camera model. Stuff like that. On GPS-enabled capture devices, it even records where it was taken, so you don’t have the arguments where you swear blind it was Beijing and your girlfriend says it was Shanghai.”

  “Okay.” Lucy pocketed her automatic and waited for the payoff.

  “Come on. You’re smarter than that.”

  She screwed her eyes up and muttered. “GPS, GPS, GPS.” Then they opened wide. “You know where the Jihad are.”

  “Were. Chances are they’re still there, but they might have shifted.” Petrovitch had gathered up all his wires and closed the flap on his bag on them.

  She was suddenly agitated, eager to go and do something: activity against idleness. “You should have said as soon as you knew! Why did you waste… oh.”

  “I don’t want to get you killed. But leaving you behind isn’t going to work, either.” He looked around the waiting room. Apart from the used mug and the crinkled plastic where they’d sat, it was just as they’d found it.

  15

  Valentina drove them toward Cricklewood, aiming at the coordinates that Petrovitch had supplied.

  “We have plan, da?”

  He equivocated, then finally admitted the truth. “Not really. A lot of it depends on whether the Jihad thinks we’re on the same side as each other. I didn’t exactly leave the prophet on good terms.”

  “He tried to kill Sam,” said Lucy from the back seat.

  “It was a misunderstanding. I’m sure we can talk it over like civilized men.”

  “If you can get close enough to him,” said Valentina.

  “Well, that’s not actually necessary.” Petrovitch twisted in his seat. Tabletop was playing with Valentina’s plastic explosive, making little creatures out of the putty and sticking them on the door. “I know it’s stable, but yobany stos, woman!”

  She smiled and presented him with a shape that could have been either a dog or a horse.

  “We might need that later.” He stared at the animal before attaching it to the dashboard. “Anyway. Back to the Jihad: the prophet expects the AI to speak to him through his mobile phone. A quick scan of the area tells me that there are a stack of phones active in the cell where the GPS signal came from. I can fake the Jihad better than whoever’s faking it already. All I have to do is ring round till I find the right one, and the prophet will be expecting us.”

  Valentina turned left onto the North Circular. She didn’t bother to indicate, just hauled the wheel around and waited for all four tires to regain contact with the tarmac before accelerating away. “So, we just walk up to door and knock?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And then…”

  “It’s up to them. You know how good my negotiation skills are.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “And you propose we leave talking to you?”

  Petrovitch shrugged apologetically. “I did say I didn’t have much of a plan.”

  The empty road lent itself to speed, and Valentina took full advantage. She only braked to avoid a traffic island and a roundabout. “Is here?”

  “Pretty much.”

  She knew when stealth was required, too. She turned off the engine and they rolled silently down the access road toward a pair of high metal gates.

  “It’s a school,” said Lucy.

  The gates were half-open. A big white-and-rust van sat sideways across the parking bays outside the main entrance, sitting in a sea of broken glass and shell cases. There were broken windows all up the front of the foyer. Bodies had been bagged and tagged here: spray-painted numbers were fading in the winter sun.

  “Not marked for repair, then.”

  They came to a halt in the furthest reaches of the car park, well away from the building.

  Valentina cranked the handbrake. “Are you sure about this?”

  “No surprises. Everything out in the open. There are more of them than us, and we don’t know if they’re armed.” Petrovitch popped the door open and felt the cold air bite at his ankles. “We’ll be fine.”

  They walked, four abreast, across the empty space to the entrance.

  “First floor. They’re watching us,” said Tabletop, conversationally. “So, these New Machine Jihad people. Crazy?”

  “Mad as a bag of spanners. The Jihad is their god, who they believe wants to usher in an age of plenty and ease under its benign all-seeing eye. Less stupid than some belief systems I can think of: this one is at least credible.” He pursed his lips. “If it wasn’t for the fact that their god was insane and I killed it.”

  Petrovitch considered holding one of the doors open for the others. In the end, he just stepped through the broken pane and crunched a little way into the darkened foyer.

  “Yeah. I’m here,” he called, and waited for someone from the Jihad to turn up. The others joined him. Valentina unslung
her AK and cradled it across her body.

  Just when his patience was wearing thin and he’d almost ground a piece of glass through the heel of his boot, a figure appeared in the distance, just visible through the small glass window in the double doors.

  She—it looked like a she from the way they walked—appeared to be in no hurry. Petrovitch gave a nod in the direction of the doors and Tabletop and Valentina turned their attention to the other exits. Lucy started to reach into her pocket.

  “It’s fine. Relax. No one’s shooting at us yet.” Petrovitch gave her what he hoped would be a reassuring smile, but knew it would come out more like a grimace.

  The woman stood there, hands holding either side of the doors open. She was dressed in a filthy boilersuit and her hair was gray: her resemblance to an Outie was so close that Valentina’s reaction was predictable and automatic. Petrovitch felt the need to stand between the muzzle of her rifle and their guide.

  “You seek an audience with the Prophet of the New Machine Jihad?” she asked.

  “Since I’m the first-born herald of the machine age, I’m pretty confident he’ll see me.”

  “Then come. All of you.”

  She swept before them, leaving them to taste her trail of iron and earth. Down a long corridor—noticeboards either side, between the classrooms, with pupils’ work still framed behind the plastic—to a vast, echoing sports hall lit only by the roof-level sky lights.

  The murmuring of the—worshippers? Acolytes?—drifted away as they entered. Petrovitch walked between where they were sat, on the cold hard floor marked with colored lines and black scuffs, picking his way to the front where there was an empty chair.

  Not empty: a small black phone, propped up against the back.

  Just to make things interesting, Petrovitch made it light up as he approached. He could hear the collective straining as the Jihad’s followers all leaned forward.

  But he couldn’t see the bomb. Now that he was looking, he could tell there was other activity in and around the building, the signals being partially obscured by the ferroconcrete walls. The woman who’d met them at the entrance carried on walking, leaving them in a loose, uncomfortable knot by the chair. The couple of hundred Jihadis turned their attention from the phone to the newcomers.

  “Say nothing. I wouldn’t even smile.”

  “Sam,” said Tabletop.

  “That’s…”

  “My suit’s comms have gone active,” she said. Her hand was already on her waist, reaching for her gun.

  Petrovitch felt in his bag for his own. “Chyort. Looks like we’re not the only ones to read the exif data.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Lucy.

  “The CIA. Close by. What are they saying?”

  “They’ve changed codes. All I know is that, for the first time in eleven months, I’ve got a signal.”

  “And if I had Michael, I’d crack those codes, locate the transmitters and get the jump on them.” He looked up again at the high windows, then at the doors in each of the four corners of the hall, checking for the outside wall. “Those two lead outside. Bear that in mind for when we have to run.”

  “Behold the turncoat! Look upon the traitor who was the Chosen Son of the new age!”

  “Ah, pizdets.” Petrovitch’s shoulders slumped. He turned to see the prophet advancing toward him, a tatty curtain serving as a robe. Underneath, the man was quite underdressed: a pair of baggy shorts, nothing more. “Yeah, look. I had prepared a long speech full of fancy words to convince you of my good intentions and break to you the fact you’ve been duped a little more gently than I’m going to. But that was before our American friends decided to put in an appearance.”

  The prophet gave no indication he’d listened to a single word. “You opposed the New Machine Jihad before. Have you come to repent and seek absolution for your heinous crimes?” He shook one of his bony fists in Petrovitch’s direction, and as he walked, revealed that he was leaning on a huge, drop-forged spanner, a full meter long.

  “Zatknis’ na hui, you kon’ pedal’nii. Any second now, the CIA are going to come piling in here to fry your arses, and the only way I can stop them is to show them you haven’t got a real nuclear bomb squirreled away somewhere.”

  “The power of the lightning will turn aside the unbelievers’ swords,” said the prophet, his oil mark glistening on his forehead. “It has been foretold.”

  “And whoever is at the other end of this phone,” shouted Petrovitch square in the prophet’s face and snatching up the device from the chair, “is no more the New Machine Jihad than the yebani Pope is. You’ve been had, all of you. There is no bomb. There is no Jihad. And Michael is not the Jihad come back to life.”

  “Sam…”

  “Not,” he started to say, and wanted to add “now.” But it was Tabletop speaking and she was drawing her gun. “What?”

  “It’s suddenly gone quiet.”

  “Yebani v’rot.” Petrovitch still had the phone. He said to Lucy, “Catch,” before back-handing the prophet with his left arm.

  An arc of bright red blood hung in the air for a moment, before both it and the prophet came splashing down.

  “Far door. Go.” There was a string of flesh still attached to a strut, and somewhere deep inside, there was the realization that it wasn’t just the other guy who was hurting.

  There was movement. The Jihad were rising as one, but there was more: discs like hockey pucks were skittering across the floor. Black-clad faceless forms crouched coiled in the doorway, poised and ready.

  The discs exploded, concussions of noise and light: people fell, staggered, screamed. Not Petrovitch, who timed his blink perfectly, nor Tabletop, who’d been ready for tactics she’d been taught herself. Valentina shielded her eyes almost too late, but Lucy hadn’t been looking, still trying to juggle the thrown phone to safety.

  The bangs made her jump all over again. The phone spun and twisted in the air. She stretched out, and folded her fingers around it just as Valentina fell into her. They rolled together in a confused heap, arms and legs at all angles. At the end of one hand, a small black mobile phone.

  The first shots brought down those closest to the door. Petrovitch tagged each gun, ran the sound through an analyzer to tell him what they were using, and counted the bullets. There was no way he could return fire: even if he didn’t care about hitting the Jihad’s disciples, he didn’t have line-of-sight anymore.

  Neither did Tabletop, though she’d zoned completely. Her training had kicked in at a subconscious level and she was hunting her former colleagues, stalking forward into the mêlée of people, crouched and hidden.

  Petrovitch saw Valentina sprawling. He levered her up, she snatching her kalash as she rose, then he reached down for Lucy. He pointed to the outside door, and it was all he had to do. She ran, head up, looking where she was going. She was light on her feet and ruthless with her elbows.

  The agents at the door fanned out, firing relentlessly to thin the crowd. While part of Petrovitch’s mind was counting, another part realized that the CIA didn’t know they were there. They’d come for the bomb. The massacre was just what needed to happen first before they secured the area.

  Tabletop shot the first one from point-blank range, apparating in front of him. She knew him. Intimately. She didn’t spare him. She took careful aim at the middle of his face, where he had no armor and no chance. She spun away after pulling the trigger, stepping forward into the empty space already littered with bodies.

  It took a moment for the second agent in line to realize the ghost to her right didn’t look quite the same as before. She turned her head, and her gun arm followed.

  Before she could complete the move, she was hit. Petrovitch took the momentary opportunity of a clean shot between two reeling Jihadis, threading a bullet between moving chest and back and burying it in her temple. Tabletop stopped her own action and retargeted on the third.

  The last agent had just shot a man trying to drag an injured friend aw
ay. Brave, but it got him killed, and his friend too. There was nothing personal about it. No relish, or malice. But he was too distracted to see Valentina crouched over her AK when the previous body fell away.

  The burst of fire took his legs. The ballistic mesh held, but the impact pulped his bones. He landed face first and, rather than helping him, the needles that stabbed out of their pouches and into his skin to release life-sustaining chemicals made him feel flayed.

  Petrovitch trod on his hand and kicked the gun away. Tabletop put her foot in the small of his back and aimed for the nape of his neck.

  “I thought,” said Petrovitch over the top of him, “there were only supposed to be one or two left of your cell.”

  “One. And the field controller who I never met.”

  “So how did we end up with three?”

  “Langley must have inserted more agents.”

  “Vsyo govno, krome mochee.” Petrovitch got down on his hands and knees to look the agent in the eye. “Hey, Yankee. Surprised to see us? Your foot seems to be on backward, by the way. Must smart a bit.”

  The man concentrated on breathing.

  “A message for your president: I’m going to bury him for this, and everything else he’s done. Vrubratsa?” He patted the man’s head. “Okay, we’re done.” He scrambled up and started for the open door. “Lucy’s waiting for us outside. We need to find the bomb, or someone who’ll tell us where it is.”

  “You’re going to leave him here?” Tabletop adjusted the grip on her pistol.

  “Unless you’ve the stomach for shooting a defenseless cripple in the back, yeah. I kind of hoped you’d grown out of that, but if you want to, he’s all yours. Don’t take all day about it though, because I’ve called for paramedics.”

  Petrovitch quickly collected the fallen agents’ guns, and put them in his bag, while Tabletop decided whether to execute the man she was standing over. Valentina offered her no help to make a decision one way or the other. She simply slung her rifle over her shoulder and jogged toward the doors that led outside.