The Petrovitch Trilogy

by Simon Morden

  “She is impulsive. Naïve and impulsive. I do my best to protect her without damaging her further.” Oshicora looked pensive, before restoring his mask of equanimity. “May I explain?”

  “Only if you don’t have to kill me later. Otherwise, I’d rather not know.”

  “I do not wish you dead, Petrovitch-san. Many years ago, I met an English teacher in Tokyo. English, in both senses: she was English, back when there was an England to come from, and she taught English. She was charming, exotic, very different from the Japanese girls I knew. We became close. We married. We did all the things that married people do.”

  “I get the picture,” said Petrovitch, looking away embarrassed.

  “Quite. We had children, and it suddenly became difficult for us. I was Japanese, my wife was incurably English, but our children were neither. We loved them, but…” Oshicora’s fingers curled into a fist. He forced them to relax. “It is difficult to say these things without sounding like a racist. While Japan stood, these things did not matter. Our culture, our language, our existence was secure. With it gone, everything is in doubt. It would be very easy for us to lose our identity within a few generations.”

  Here was this man, this pitiless crime lord well on his way to owning half of the Metrozone by racketeering, theft and murder, talking honestly and openly about his family. From the joy of not being shot like the traitorous dog he was, Petrovitch was now grimacing as his gut contracted into a small, shriveled knot.

  “I said children,” sighed Oshicora. “Sonja was all I had left after Japan fell. My wife, my two boys were lost. They disappeared, and although I have scoured the face of the planet for them, I cannot find them. All my hopes and dreams now rest in my daughter. For these reasons, she will marry a Japanese man of pure blood. And not, I regret to say, a radiation-damaged Slav.”

  Petrovitch swallowed hard against his dry throat. “I don’t want to marry your daughter, Oshicora-san.”

  “I am afraid our problem runs deeper than that. The attraction between me and my wife was partly because of our differences. It seems to be a case of like father, like daughter.” He raised his eyebrows.

  “Chyort!”

  “Her infatuation will be short-lived, but I would appreciate your cooperation in not prolonging it. Do we have an understanding, Petrovitch-san?”

  “Yeah. Absolutely. I’d cut off my little finger if I thought it would make you believe me more.” The thought terrified him, but he’d do it.

  Oshicora shook his head slightly. “That will not be necessary. Thank you for your discretion in this, and earlier matters. I have a policy of only employing nikkeijin within my organization. Sorenson was an exception, and I had other reasons for that which you know about. You, Petrovitch-san, would have proved very useful, above your already great service to me. Sadly, it is not to be. Still, come the revolution, you will be spared.”

  Petrovitch blinked slowly, then caught the slight upturn on Oshicora’s mouth. “Very funny. In Russia, the revolution has you.”

  “Have we concluded our talk, Petrovitch-san? Are we parting on good terms?”

  “I believe so.”

  Oshicora stood up and bowed. “Again, I am in your debt.”

  “No, no you’re not.” Petrovitch got to his feet, and realized just how weak he was; physically and emotionally drained.

  “You would have made a good son-in-law, I think.”

  “And a lousy husband.”

  On his way to the door, Oshicora said off-handedly: “I would have offered you money to stay away from my daughter. A great deal of money.”

  “And I would have turned it down,” said Petrovitch. “It’s more honorable this way.”

  “A good word for a virtue that is in short supply. Sayonara, Petrovitch-san.”

  When he’d gone, when Petrovitch had waited for five minutes and Hijo hadn’t leaped into the room to behead him with a katana, he fell across his desk, limp and useless.

  He’d gotten away with it. Again. He’d ridden his luck so hard, so far, that surely it had to be spent by now.

  Coffee. He boiled up some more water, and shoveled granules into the dregs of the previous brew. Then he sat back down and couldn’t quite believe he was still alive.

  There was work to do, though: he had to have something to show Pif when she came back in, even though he knew from experience that when she chose to sleep, she could be out for the best part of a day. In the current circumstances, with everything that was at stake, he guessed she’d catnap. A couple of hours and she’d return, running on adrenaline, caffeine and sugar. Much like himself.

  He looked at what he’d done that morning, and wondered if he’d made a mistake copying out the original equations of state. Pif would beat him with the stupid stick if he had, so he wheeled himself around to her desk, nudging the other chair aside.

  He checked every symbol with exaggerated care, finally coming to the conclusion that his errors were entirely of his own devising.

  Then he spotted it, stuck to the desktop under Pif’s papers, in plain sight to anyone who looked. A bug, the same size and shape as the one he’d found in his shoe. Just like the one Marchenkho’s hired killers had used to find him.

  “Sooksin,” he breathed.

  It wasn’t Marchenkho. The one Sorenson had picked up had been Chain’s. And this one, slipped under Pif’s working-out when he’d fiddled with it, was Chain’s. Which probably meant that the first one had been his, too. He’d been tricked.

  Then the awful realization struck him. Not that Harry Chain had let him believe that Marchenkho had bugged him, but that he was still bugged.

  No, not that either. Why would Chain make an attempt to plant another device on Pif’s desk? Because the first one had gone wrong. He took off his jacket and pulled it inside out, searching every seam, folding back the collar, examining every pocket. Then his T-shirt.

  Then his trousers, again turned street-side in, and his socks, damn it. Even the waistband of his pants, though he was sure he’d have noticed Chain rummaging around in there while he was still wearing them.

  His boots. He took each one off and felt around inside them, then by chance and out of desperation, turned them over. It was there, on the right boot, tucked in the angle between heel and arch. The glue hadn’t adhered properly to the dirty underside, and half the tab was flapping around, folded back on itself. The plastic cover had worn through, and some of the circuitry had been severed.

  Where had he gone? Walked the short distance up past the palace to Green Park. Straight from Chain’s office to Oshicora’s. It had to have malfunctioned before then, otherwise he’d have been overheard organizing a half-million-euro counter-hit with Oshicora. That Chain had missed that was down to pure, unadulterated luck.

  Petrovitch was at the end of the line. It was time to get off and change trains, right now.

  14

  On Monday morning, everything had been fine. By Tuesday lunchtime, he was teetering on the brink of disaster, and might even be over the edge of the abyss.

  The thought he struggled with was that he’d walked right into Oshicora’s private park and met with the man himself without getting the once-over for weapons or wires. Or maybe he had, and the security was so discreet that he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps the inside of each and every lift was a screen.

  Sorenson hadn’t been pushed against a wall and shot—not yet. It was a good but confusing omen, adding another element of doubt to a critical choice: whether to ditch his current identity and sleeve up with a new one. He’d done it once before, to get out of St. Petersburg in one piece. He’d prepared for this moment for years. He always told himself that he’d do it if it looked like someone was close to discovering who he really was. It should have been as automatic as a reflex.

  Petrovitch was twelve months away from becoming Dr. Petrovitch. Petrovitch had just written down a way to combine two fundamental forces of nature. Petrovitch was about to get a free ride to glory on the coattails of a future Nobel P
rize winner. None of that would matter one iota if Petrovitch got locked up for twenty years.

  The drumming of his fingers on the desk was the only outward sign that he was in an agony of indecision. He’d always assumed that it’d be his past catching up with him. Instead, he’d collided catastrophically with the future. Every time he returned to the question of whether any of this was worth imprisonment or worse, he looked down at his morning’s calculations.

  There was no point in prevaricating. He knew if he stayed, Chain would get him, and if not Chain, Oshicora, and if not Oshicora, someone else. It was time to say goodbye to Samuil Petrovitch.

  He grabbed his bag and headed for the door. Then he reversed himself and grabbed the piece of paper from his desk. He dropped it on Pif’s, and scrawled a big question mark at the bottom of the page. She’d know what he meant, even if she never saw him again.

  Now he was ready.

  He took the wheezing lift down to the ground floor and out onto Exhibition Road, from where he took the travelator to the Underground. He wouldn’t normally go by tube at this time of day; if it was crowded in the early morning, by lunchtime it was unspeakable.

  Since this was going to be one of the last times he’d have to endure it, he suffered the crush gladly. Where next? Somewhere cold, somewhere clean—Canada, Scandinavia, New Zealand’s southern island.

  If he’d had his rat, he’d be booking plane tickets under a different name, storing data before wiping it clean away, using the unparalleled power of his machine to hack the Metrozone Authority’s database and activate a sleeper personality he’d stored on there years ago.

  If he’d had his rat, he could have done it now, all in the space of a single journey to the airport: Petrovitch would vanish, and another man would arrive luggageless at the airport to fly away to a new life. Even his failing heart could be spirited away. He didn’t need a Metrozone hospital for that. Any big city would do.

  If, if, if.

  It was why he’d bought the rat, to cover this very event. But he didn’t have it anymore. Plan B, then.

  He’d have to disappear the old-fashioned way, and that gave him time to make one last appearance as Petrovitch.

  He eventually emerged from the tube, breathless and bruised, at Edgware Road: not the Bell Street exit, because it was cordoned off and sealed, but the Harrow Road one, south of the Marylebone Road.

  St. Joseph’s was opposite, the bullet-scarred doors open. He sat on the steps and waited. As he listened to the service going on inside, he could hear, over the growl of the traffic, distant but distinct pops of gunfire from Paradise. The natives were restless. A black speck against the gray sky, a police drone flew in lazy circles high above the towers, and it was likely that it was the flier that the militia were aiming for.

  He watched their target practice until his name was shouted out behind him.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He looked over his shoulder. Father John was shaking the hand of an elderly parishioner; when he released his grip, the hand went on shaking. Parkinson’s, vCJD, something like that.

  “I’m saying sorry, Father.” Petrovitch stood up and dusted his backside down.

  “And what are you sorry for?” Half a dozen people, all of them bowed and gray-haired, trooped by, walked slowly down the steps and vanished into the crowd that streamed past.

  “You mean, apart from your church getting shot up? I’ve met the bosses of both sides: neither of them seemed too bothered about carrying on a gun-battle on holy ground. I guess you could call them yourself if you want, see if you have any luck in screwing them for some compensation.”

  “Blood money, Petrovitch.” Father John wiped one sweaty palm across the other. “You do understand the concept, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” said Petrovitch with a snort. “Yeah, I do.”

  “You said, apart from.” A shadow fell across the priest from behind Petrovitch. “Why are you really here?”

  He looked up at Sister Madeleine, and his heart did that thing that might have been a software glitch. “I lied to you,” said Petrovitch. “Or rather, I didn’t tell you the truth.”

  The sister frowned down at him, trying to remember. “Which bit?”

  “All of it. But that’s not important right now. Ask me again. Ask me again why I did what I did, and I’ll tell you.”

  She glanced over at Father John, covered in confusion. “He’s the priest. If you want to confess…”

  “No,” said Petrovitch. “I’m not confessing. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done.”

  “Then what the hell are you talking about?”

  Her choice of language startled him, he who used the most obscene insults imaginable. He pushed his glasses back up his nose to buy him some time. “I just wanted you to know that sometimes the people you hate most can change for the better.”

  “I don’t hate you,” she said, equally startled. “Why would I hate you? I…”

  “You will do. Go on: ask me,” he dared her.

  “Excuse me,” said the father, but Petrovitch and Madeleine were staring so intensely at each other that his presence was forgotten.

  “Why did you help her?”

  “Because I used to be part of a gang that kidnapped people for ransom, and I didn’t want to see it happen ever again.”

  Sister Madeleine’s eyes were wide open. “You?”

  “Thanks. I was hoping that it wouldn’t be too hard to believe.” He adjusted his bag. “Forget about me. You won’t see me again.”

  He started off down the steps, quicker than he ought. She called after him.

  “Petrovitch, where are you going?”

  He almost stopped. His feet dragged on the pavement. Then he picked up speed again and vanished into the crowd.

  Vast, anonymous and brooding, the Regent’s Park domiks grew closer as he walked down the Marylebone Road. Petrovitch put a determined smile on his face. Even without the rat, the plan he had was pretty damn good.

  Before he could put it into operation, though, he had to make sure he was free of any other little surprises that Harry Chain might have adhered to him. He needed a back-street electronics chop shop that would take his money without asking questions. Fortunately, in the shadow of the huge domik pile, such establishments were two a cent.

  He negotiated the purchase of a sweeper, and got the shopkeeper to throw in a battery and a demonstration of how the lipstick-sized device worked. He paid for it with the last of the money on his card, unwrapped the tiny black wand there and then, and swept himself in front of the counter.

  He was clean, from the white-blond hairs on his head to the worn soles of his feet.

  The sweeper went on a lanyard around his neck and under his shirt. He shouldered his bag, and crossed the road. There were cameras at the junction, looking down at the crowds that swarmed back and forth. He looked up and fixed one with a knowing stare. The next time he passed that way, the computers that could isolate and recognize a face would put a different name to his.

  He kept on walking until the pyramid of domiks showed its entrance, shaped like an ancient megalith: a tunnel constructed of upright containers with others braced on top to create a space that was as high as a cathedral, the main street that pierced the core of Regent’s Park. Sodium lights hung from above and burned orange, illuminating the hawkers, the whores and the hustlers who bought and sold everything and anything.

  It was like the Nevskiy Prospekt during the darkest days of Armageddon. Winter, freezing Arctic winds howling down from Siberia, the bass rumble of generators and babble of voices, flashes of light and color, the whisper of rumors—they have bread, that stall sells poisoned vodka, those fish are radioactive—the stench of struggle. The good old days when he ran wild through the unlit streets, stealing books and candles.

  He kept on through the market bustle until he got to the Inner Circle, a distribution road in the very heart of the pile. Some people, driven by madness or guilt, would walk the Circle until th
ey dropped. There were others who would wait for them and then strip the corpses, and others still wouldn’t wait even that long.

  Regent’s Park was like that.

  Petrovitch found Staircase Eight and started climbing. He kept climbing until the stair-dwellers dwindled to nothing and the corridors were empty. There was one last bulkhead light, then nothing but blackness. He reached into his bag for a tiny key ring torch.

  The blue light was no more than a bubble, but it was enough to see by. He walked on until he was blocked by a door equipped with a mechanical combination lock. He held the torch in his teeth and slid the lock cover aside.

  The keypad was numbered zero to nine in a circle, and the code was entirely crackable by someone who knew what they were doing. What else could hide Petrovitch’s treasure but the Golden Ratio?

  He pressed each button in turn, listening for the click of the mechanism: one six one eight zero three three nine eight eight seven four. There was the most subtle of noises, almost a sigh, and he leaned heavily on the handle beneath the lock. The bolts behind the door lifted clear of the frame and he swung inward.

  The air was warm and stale, but dry; a pharaoh’s tomb.

  Inside, he leaned on the door and felt it grate shut. The bolts dropped back into place with an echoing bang. Petrovitch held up his single spark of light: the container was empty, save for a trunk in the far corner. Everything was just as he’d left it.

  He stepped up on the trunk’s lid, and felt above him. High up, on the wall, was a bolt. He pulled at it, working it from side to side until it slid across. There was another one, stiffer, but eventually it gave up and moved.

  He hit between them with the flat of his hand, and forgot to turn his head or close his eyes. Light burst in, blinding him, flooding the domik, chasing out every shadow.

  Petrovitch sat down on the trunk, took off his glasses and dabbed at his streaming face with his sleeves. He turned the torch off, then climbed back up to stand on tiptoe and look out.

  He was in the highest level of containers, right at the very top, and he could see a swathe of the Metrozone, from southwest to northwest, hazy and indistinct at the ground, but the towers were clear and confusingly seemed closer. Oshicora’s Tower was out of sight, to the south, but if he screwed his eyes up tight and wished, he could just about make out the subtle slope of the land that lay crushed beneath the weight of buildings; the Thames valley that stretched out beyond the M25 cordon, into the uninhabited wilds of the Outzone.