by Simon Morden
“Wait,” she said, manipulating the end of the cable. “Do not hurry me.”
The shelves, pregnant with box files, slid by. The bright rectangle was a window, covered by drawn curtains: light leaked in nevertheless and gave definition to the rest of the room.
“What was that?” Petrovitch got down on his hands and knees next to Valentina, and tried to gain a sense of the layout. “Middle of the floor.”
She pulled the cable back and redirected it. There was something—angular, thin, constructed. “Table?” She tilted her head. “Music stand?”
“Too… big.”
Grigori was growing impatient. “If you won’t open the door, I will.”
“You had chance,” said Valentina. “You did not take it. So let me do my job.” She switched to infrared, and the screen changed to reflect the new data. The floor and wall were blue, cold. But the object in the middle of the room was colder still, a skeletal pyramid glowing in intense purple except for the white-hot spot at its chest-height apex.
“It’s a tripod. A camera?” Petrovitch dabbed a greasy finger on the plastic surface of the screen. “That’s strange, though. Some sort of heat source.”
“It is infrared light.” She froze the image and slid the cable out from under the door. “It could be part of Chain’s alarm system. Did you ever come here before?”
“No. I just assumed he lived in his office.” Petrovitch squinted. “What is that thing?”
Grigori sighed and rubbed his open hand with his fingers. “He’s dead, he has no neighbors left, and you’re worried about an alarm that no one will hear. Give me the key.”
Petrovitch looked at Valentina.
“If it was up to me,” she said, “I would say no. But we seem to find ourselves in democracy.”
“So give me the key,” said Grigori.
“You don’t have to prove how big your peesa is.” Petrovitch brought the keys out again, and Grigori snatched at them. “You want to open the door, not knowing what’s behind it?”
“You’re going soft on me, Petrovitch. It’ll be that wife of yours.” He held the key to the sensor, and the lock made a solid clunking noise. “Pizda.”
Valentina strode two quick paces toward Petrovitch, put her thin arms around him and kept moving, pushing him away and against the dividing wall. Grigori pushed the door open to be greeted by the high-pitched whine of servos.
There was a series of lightning flashes from inside, accompanied by the fast-repeated roar of gunfire. Grigori danced like he was standing on a scalding hot plate, and the plasterwork behind him was patterned with holes.
Then he fell backward, strings cut, body ruined.
Valentina kept Petrovitch’s back pressed against the wall. “Do not move. Do not go to him. There is nothing you can do.”
The firing stopped, and a wisp of smoke curled around the door frame.
“Chyort.” Petrovitch didn’t quite know where to put his hands. He flapped for a moment, then gripped Valentina around the waist to ease their two bodies apart.
He didn’t step into the open doorway, but got down on his belly and crawled. The opposite wall was cratered, punched through in places to the room beyond. The gun inside was clearly more than capable of hitting him through the brickwork, if only it could see him.
There was no doubt that Grigori was dead. His thumb had caught the loop of the keyring, but his arm was thrown up behind his head, and still in full view of whatever lay in wait. As were the top of the stairs, too.
More propellant fumes drifted out, sharp and hot.
Valentina stood behind Petrovitch, adjusting her jacket.
“Idiot,” she said. “It is not like he had spare life that he could afford to throw this one away.”
Petrovitch backed away and sat up. “Sentry gun? What the huy was Chain doing with one of those?”
“Protecting his information? He would have had a way of deactivating it, though. Did MEA give you anything else besides keys?”
“No. Just them.” He’d broken out into a cold sweat. It could have been him. If Valentina hadn’t stopped him the first time, if he’d accepted Grigori’s dare, he would have walked straight into the line of fire. “First chance I get, I’m going to kick Chain’s corpse in the yajtza.”
“Do I have to point out that we have more immediate problem?”
“No.” Petrovitch pushed his glasses up his face, and eyed the distant stairs. “What’s the reaction time on that thing? Can we move faster than it can track us?”
She threw Petrovitch a box of matches. “Try for yourself.”
He picked up the cardboard box off his lap and extracted one of the red-headed sticks. His fingers were trembling as he rasped the head against the rough strip.
The match flared into life. Petrovitch held it for a second to make sure the flame had caught, then flicked it into the air. The match arced away, and simply vanished as a bullet tore through it, turning the wood to dust.
“Okay,” he said. “Plan B.”
“Which is?”
“Give me a moment.” He looked around for some assets. The floor was bare boards, the windows were on the half-landings, up and down, even the door to the other flat was in plain view of the automatic weapon in Chain’s apartment.
There was Valentina’s open case, just the other side of the doorway.
“Yeah. We can do this.” He hunched his legs up and started to unlace his boots, slipping his fingers between the eyelets and dragging out longer and longer loops of lace until they were both free.
Valentina watched him tie the laces together to make a single length. “What else do you need?”
“A piece of bent metal, to make a hook.” He had all-sorts in his pockets, but nothing that would do.
She had a heavy combat knife, which he thought might do. He tied the lace to the center of the knife, just handle-side of the hilt, and judged his throw.
The knife fell into the case, but as he slowly tensioned the attaching cord, it turned and rolled out.
The servos aiming the gun squeaked, and Petrovitch gritted his teeth for the inevitable bang.
It didn’t come, and he pulled the knife back in.
He tried again, making absolutely sure that at no point did his hand go further than the wall. His aim was good, but there was nothing for the knife to catch on to.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said, readying himself for a third attempt.
“This might.”
She was holding her blouse shut with one hand, presenting him with her bra with the other.
“I… I don’t see.”
“Underwiring.”
He blinked, and took the white satin underwear from her. Its warmth made his face flush. She turned away to button up, and he used her knife to slice open the reinforced seam.
Petrovitch fashioned a hook from one end of the curved metal strip, and an eye from the other, using the back of the knife blade as an anvil. When he looked up again, she was dressed.
“Thanks,” he said.
“I assume you are helping me,” she said. When he offered her the remnants of her bra, she waved them away. “I will survive. Even if I must run.”
The backward-facing tine of the hook bit into the soft foam interior of the case on the first go. With a little gentle pressure, it cut through until it wedged against the metal outside.
Petrovitch pulled, very slowly.
“How much of your stuff is going to go boom if it ends up with a round or two through it?”
“Enough that you will not have to worry about your terrible injuries.”
“Yeah. Figures. Are you going to stand back?”
“It would not make difference,” she said. “Here is as good as anywhere.”
It took him five minutes to ease the case across the doorway. When he went too quickly, he knew, because the electric whine of motors told him so.
“Yobany stos.” He flexed his fingers, making them all crack except the replacement.
Valentina extracted the hook from her case and undid the knot in Petrovitch’s laces. She passed them back to him, and he started the laborious task of threading them back through the dozen eyelets in each boot.
“You want me to blow sentry up?” She started by selecting a small block of plastique.
“Are we talking about throwing a bomb in the room and just hoping? Can you take out the gun without setting the building on fire, bearing in mind that room’s full of paper?”
“No.”
“Then,” he said, pointing at the floor, “why don’t we go down? We can come back with the right hardware and not ruin Chain’s filing system.”
She stamped her heel against the wooden boards. “Is not a good material to work with. Splinters unpredictably.”
“Can you get most of the blast downward?”
She walked the floor, testing sites by doing little jumps. “Here,” she said, standing in the far corner. “Much more rigid, more likely to snap, not flex.” She came back for the plastique; which she rolled into a long thin worm.
It looked like marzipan. It smelled of oil.
“Will not be pretty.” She pressed the explosive into a gap in the floorboards, and a detonator into the protruding end. She trailed wires back to where Petrovitch was finishing tying the final bow of his laces. “I should have something to contain explosion, aim it where I need it to go. We are also very close.”
“As long as it gets us out of this mess.” He looked at Grigori’s ruined form. “You balvan! You mudak, you pidaras. You got yourself killed for nothing!”
“He was showing off. To me. Perhaps he thought I would be impressed.” She retrieved a battery pack, then shut the case. “Do I look impressed?”
“No. You look pissed.” Petrovitch shrugged his trenchcoat off, and they both crouched down as small as they could make themselves, covering their backs with the tent of the coat.
“Put your hands over your ears,” she said in the darkness. She had earplugs. He did not. Under the coat, it was hot, her breath was hot, and everything was about to get even hotter.
Valentina touched the wires to the battery terminals.
12
Petrovitch was almost home when he called her, fumbling in his thigh pocket for his phone even as he dragged his feet down the last stretch of Clapham Road.
“Hey,” he said. He looked up at the sky smeared with pink clouds. “Where am I? About five minutes away. Meet me in Wong’s?”
He could tell she knew something was wrong, and he was grateful that she didn’t interrogate him there and then. She gave a simple acceptance to his offer, and rang off.
As he followed the bend round, the café came into view, its misted windows burning with white light, its neon sign flickering on and off in a pattern it made up as it went. All it needed was driving rain and it would have been the perfect noir setting, complete with washed-out hero.
He shouldered the sticky door. “Hey, Wong. Your sign’s on the blink.”
“Is that so? You fix it?” Wong slapped a damp tea towel over his shoulder and stepped toward the coffee maker.
Petrovitch shrugged. “If you like. It’s about the only thing I can fix with any certainty at the moment.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” said Wong. His eyes narrowed. “You filthy. You come in my shop and you filthy. All black and burned.”
“Yeah.” He dug his fists into his pockets. “You pouring that coffee or should I just leave like the bio-hazard I am?”
Wong reached up to a shelf for a mug. “Not a good day?”
“No. No, it wasn’t.” Petrovitch kicked the bottom of the counter. “Completely and irrevocably pizdets. I lost a friend.”
“Another?” Black coffee poured into the mug, filling the air with its sour aroma. “You running out of friends. Better find more, soon.”
“Wong, I’m not in the mood. I…” The door opened, and he turned, thinking—hoping—that it was Madeleine. In doing so, he showed his back to the shopkeeper, who could see the ruin that was his coat.
It wasn’t her. But it was a face he recognized.
They stared at each other, she plainly knowing who he was, too, and not in a good, seen-him-on-television, fan-girl way.
“Chyort,” he said. “Vsyo govno, krome mochee.”
“Sorry?” she said, her accent showing just from one word. She brushed a stray blonde hair from her face. “You’re called Petrovitch, right?”
“There seems little point in denying it. And you’re Charlotte Sorenson.”
“Do you know why I’m here?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be for the service.” Petrovitch glanced behind him to see Wong fuming. He banged Petrovitch’s coffee down and leaned his hands on the countertop, scowling.
“You knew my brother? Martin?” she said.
“Yeah, I knew him. Grab a coffee and you can tell me what you know. I can probably fill in some of the blanks for you.”
“Okay.” She looked up at the menu. Wong’s customers tended to ignore it, and it had mostly degraded into illegibility. “A… coffee, then.”
She was pretty in a corn-fed way. Long blonde hair framing wide, expressive features. She looked strong.
Wong poured another coffee and watched closely while she topped up her mug with milk.
“You friend of Petrovitch?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “It depends on how good a friend he was to my brother.”
Ignoring Petrovitch’s increasingly unsubtle signals to shut the huy up, Wong carried on. “Brother? American?”
“Duh,” she said, stirring her coffee with a spoon. She tapped the drips off and looked mildly surprised that the cutlery hadn’t melted.
“I remember him. Big man. Red face. Shouted. Shouted lots.”
She looked at Petrovitch, who had closed his eyes and was shaking his head.
“Why was he shouting?”
“Why don’t we sit down?” said Petrovitch.
By coincidence, the only table free was the one where he and Sorenson had sat, eaten breakfast, and argued, all those months ago.
Petrovitch snagged his coffee and led the way, wondering why Madeleine was taking so long. He sat with his back to the wall, and watched while Sorenson took the seat that had once been occupied by her brother. Her gait was mechanical, but not in a lumbering jerky way: it was all oiled gears and precision. She walked like she meant it.
“I saw Sonja Oshicora yesterday,” she said, centering her mug. “She was very helpful.”
“Really?” He was too tired to spot her sarcasm. Instead, he drank coffee and prayed for the door to open.
“No. She smiled a lot, but told me nothing. That man—”
“Wong.”
“Wong, then—he said more now than Oshicora did in an hour.”
“Did he?” Petrovitch flipped off his glasses and rubbed his smoke-stung eyes. “Yeah. That’s Wong.”
“Marty worked for her father, right? That was what he told me.” She sat upright, perfectly poised. Despite the conversations that leaked across their table from their neighbors, she made no attempt to preserve their privacy by leaning forward or lowering her voice.
“What else did he say about that? Did he mention what it was he was working on?” He was going to look around and see who was eavesdropping, even if she wasn’t. He dragged his glasses back onto his face.
“Big project, he said. Told me it was going well. Nothing about the content.” She looked him in the eye. “What was it?”
“Cybernetic interface for a virtual world.” He heard the door open again, and this time Madeleine stooped through the opening.
She was in her gray MEA fatigues and a surplus olive-green EDF jacket. She paused, frowning at everyone in the small eatery until she spotted Petrovitch. Her momentary pleasure at seeing her husband disappeared at seeing him with yet another blonde.
Wong handed her a coffee—Petrovitch was pretty certain she’d never had to pay for a single item yet—and folded h
is arms to watch. Madeleine stalked over and stood behind Sorenson, blocking out the light.
“Maddy, this is Charlotte Sorenson from the U.S. of A.” He scratched at his nose. “You may remember me telling you I killed her brother.”
The other diners had been listening, if only with half an ear. He had their undivided attention now. He looked at them, left and right.
“Idi nyuhai plavki,” he said to them, and then to his wife: “Why don’t you sit down while I tell her all about it?”
She squeezed in next to him, somehow managing to fold her impossibly long legs under the table. She licked her thumb and ran it across his cheek. It left a pale mark.
“What happened to you?”
“I lost Grigori. Pointless, useless, yebani death.”
“Sam,” she said, then to Sorenson: “Sorry. He’s not in a fit state for confessions. Come back in the morning.”
“No,” said Sorenson. Her lips barely moved, and the rest of her face, her whole body, was motionless. “I want to hear this.”
Madeleine slipped her arm around Petrovitch’s shoulders and pulled him into her. She stared defiantly at the other woman. “You don’t get to say what goes on.”
“Look,” said Petrovitch. He winced at the iron grip Madeleine had on him. “Now is as good a time as any. I’m in a public place and I have you here. What can she do but listen?”
“I don’t think you owe her anything,” said Madeleine.
“I… think I do. You have the certainty of faith. I just have what goes on in my own head. I see him sometimes. I see him with his hand round my throat. Sometimes I make him let go. And sometimes I don’t.” He scratched at his nose with his thumb. “You see, Miss Sorenson, I tried so very hard to save your brother. He wouldn’t take advice. Yeah, he knew better—didn’t want to do the easy thing of keeping his head down. He fucked up. He died.”
“You said you killed him.” She was perfectly still.
“Old Man Oshicora—Sonja’s father—was blackmailing him. It seems that your country frowns on those who get paid by extortionists, racketeers, traffickers, and murderers, even if they do have impeccable manners. Then there was this cop, who was also blackmailing him, using exactly the same levers, to get at Oshicora. Your brother had met me briefly, became fixated on the idea that I could help him. I tried. I told him to just keep on working, ignore Chain, do a good job and beg for mercy when he was done. Could he do it?” Petrovitch drank half his coffee and lined up his mug on the brown ring on the table. “The mudak couldn’t.”