Equations of Life

by Simon Morden

  She hesitated, breaking step, as if she’d never seen such a sight before. Petrovitch tried to slow down, found that it wasn’t possible. He was carried on, and she looked through him as he passed in front of her. He had the memory of her slanting eyes glazed with indecision.

  Then, abruptly, stupidly, he was moving backward. For a moment, he couldn’t understand why, because crowds like the one he was in had their own momentum: they went, and you went with them.

  A slab of chest pushed him aside as if he were no more than a swinging door. An arm reached out, and a hand tightened around the woman’s shoulder, engulfing it in thick, pink fingers.

  The man who owned the chest and the hand lifted her off her feet and started for the curb, wading through the crowd like it was thigh-deep water. And somehow, Petrovitch was caught up in the bow wave. He struggled this way and that and always found himself inexorably propelled toward a waiting car, its rear door open and its interior dark.

  He knew what this was. He knew intimately. He knew because he’d seen this from the other side.

  She was being kidnapped. She wore the mask of mute incomprehension, the one that would transform into blind rage at any moment.

  He waited, and waited, and her reaction still didn’t come.

  They were at the car, and there were figures inside: two in the front, another in the rear, and they were staring at him, wondering who the hell this kid was, either too inept or too stupid to get out of the way.

  The steroid-pumped man wanted him gone: Petrovitch was blocking his path. He raised his free hand to swat at him, a blow that would send him flying and leave him insensible and bleeding.

  Petrovitch ducked instinctively, and the hand brushed the top of his head. As he looked up, he caught sight of the one vulnerable point amidst all the muscle. Still, he should have run, stepped back, crouched down. It wasn’t his fight.

  But he couldn’t help but ball a fist, point a knuckle, and drive it as hard as he could at the man’s exposed Adam’s apple.

  The woman landed next to him, her hands steadying herself against the filth-covered pavement.

  He had one more chance. He could turn his back, make good his escape, disappear into the crowd. She could work her own salvation out from here.

  Petrovitch reached out a hand, and hers slapped into it, palm against gritty palm.

  They were off, not back toward the glittering towers of Green Park. That way was blocked by too many people and the rising man gagging and clutching at his throat. He dragged her out into the road, round the back of the car, back down the street against the flow of traffic—because that car would never be able to turn around. He pulled her behind him like a streamer, his own legs skipping like hers to turn their bodies sideways to avoid the wing-mirrors that rushed at their midriffs. Horns blared, collision warnings squealed, drivers beat on their windows and mouthed obscenities.

  Behind them, the lights changed. The traffic stiffened to a halt, and Petrovitch vaulted over a bonnet to the faded white lines that marked the center of the road. The vehicles coming the other way were like a wall of glass, reflecting their fear off every smooth surface.

  He stopped for the first time since… since he’d gotten involved in someone else’s madness, and wondered what the chyort he thought he was doing. He looked down his arm at the woman still attached to the other end, trying—like he was—to make herself as thin as possible.

  Two men from the car were moving purposefully down the line of stopped traffic. Not running, but striding in that way that meant nothing but trouble. The lights changed and the one lane that was still free to proceed jerked into life. The men in dark suits stumbled and shouted, and Petrovitch saw his chance: the cars in front were slowing. He ran to match their speed, then weaved between bumpers until he made the other pavement.

  She was still there. She wasn’t going to let go.

  Neither were the men. One, fed up with barking his shins and negotiating his vast muscles through the narrowest of gaps, pulled a flat-black automatic out and sighted down his arm. A red dot flickered across Petrovitch’s chest like a fly trying to land, and a shot banged out, amplified by the facades of the buildings.

  A man, a black man with a phone clipped to his ear and in the middle of a conversation, spun violently round and vanished backward into the crowd.

  Petrovitch blinked once, tightened his grip and fled. He was aware of the sounds around him: there were shouts, cries, and screams, varying in pitch and intensity, and there was the methodical crack of a pistol. Every time he heard it, he expected to feel bright pain, and every time it was someone close by who spasmed and sank to the ground. Not him, not yet.

  It was impossible to judge how far ahead he was. The closeness of the structures, the intensity of the crowded pavement, the noise that was washing back and forth: all he knew was that he was ahead, a meter or ten or fifty, enough that whoever was trying to kill him couldn’t target him long enough to make sure.

  And he was sure they were trying to kill him. They wouldn’t risk this, risk everything, shooting random strangers in a central Metrozone street, if whoever’s hand he held wasn’t worth keeping alive. They could have killed her half a dozen times on the way from the Green Park building to the curb. They hadn’t, and yet they kept on firing in an attempt to make him let go.

  He was tempted. Even as he saw a side-street, less dense with traffic, actual visible corroded tarmac on the road, he thought about jinking left, loosening his grip, vanishing into the nearest alley and lying low until it was all over.

  They’d grab her around the waist, lift her up to deny her the ground, maybe inject something through her pale-cast skin to knock the fight or flight from her, bundle her away, and it wouldn’t be his problem anymore.

  He turned left anyway, aiming for the center markings on the road, but he kept hold of her. He didn’t leave her behind.

  Now there was space for them to run freely, side by side. He had the chance to steal a glance at her, to check that she hadn’t been hurt by a stray bullet, and he caught her doing the same for him. Neither of them had a hole torn in their clothing, nor a spreading dark stain.

  Petrovitch flashed her a grin of pure nervous energy. She looked at him as if he was mad.

  There hadn’t been the sound of a gunshot for ten whole seconds. Two in quick succession shattered a windscreen and burned past his ear so close he could feel its passage. They were still coming. Obviously. Crowd density was dropping fast—the word of an incident was out, and those plugged into news feeds and navigation ’ware were steering a course around them. Good in that Petrovitch could run. Bad in that he couldn’t hide.

  Still no police. Not even the wail of a siren. Then again, Petrovitch had grown up on the lawless prospects of St. Petersburg. He knew to rely only on himself.

  A right turn this time, and then another left. A wider street, busier, or should have been: automatic steel shutters were beginning to close over always-open foyers, and even the nose-to-tail of the rush hour was down to three sets of tail-lights scurrying for cover.

  They were becoming exposed, isolated. People were pressed in doorways, cowering, covering their heads, or peering over the rims of basement wells. There were faces at windows and toughened glass portals, safe and watching the spectacle of two young idiots try and outrun a couple of pumped-up killers who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  Petrovitch looked up. Regent Street was ahead, the lines of cars stalled, unable, like him, to escape. He didn’t even break step. Over the bonnet of one, the roof of another, one, two, three, and jump down on the other side. A single shot crazed a first-floor pane of smoked glass. Then left again, up the road toward the covered arcade of Oxford Street.

  The mall barriers were closing. Paycops in fluorescent vests were willing them to close faster, and Oxford Circus tube was being denied them in the same way: thick metal armor rolling down over the entrances to the underground.

  He had to swerve left again, turning parallel to the main
street, use the back roads to get to the far end. As he got to the corner, he looked down the empty pavement. He glimpsed the two men—the same two men who had started the chase—running purposefully. They moved like athletes, for all their size. They looked like they could keep going all day.

  From the first twinges in his chest and flickering darkness behind his eyes, Petrovitch knew that he couldn’t. The woman didn’t seem to be in much better shape: mouth-breathing, sweat-drenched, letting out little grunts of pain at each footfall. This was going to finish badly even if it didn’t finish earlier.

  He put his head down and kept on going because he had to. She was going to be the death of him, and he didn’t even know her name. An empty space opened up in front of them: Hyde Park, all mute shadows and shades of gray. The stink rose from the site like a solid wall. A shrouded Marble Arch, always being cleaned but never quite finished, lay hidden behind wind-torn sheets of polythene and a skeleton of scaffolding. The traffic on all the roads was gridlock-solid, with barely room to squeeze between. The tube was sealed.

  His vision started to grow jagged and discordant. It wasn’t the stinging perspiration that was trickling down his forehead and into his eyes; it was his eyes; the first signs of a faint. He was running out of time. He could hear a klaxon blare over the sound of his heartbeat in his ears, but couldn’t decipher what it meant.

  He was going down, and his pace faltered.

  She took over. She was surprisingly strong. She looked small and light and weak, but Petrovitch felt the tendons in his arm stretch as she pulled him along. Their positions reversed, he trailed uselessly, almost blind.

  He could tell enough to know that they were going the wrong way. They should have headed into the park, lost themselves in the labyrinthine shanties, and perhaps even the gunmen would have balked at going in after them: crossing Hyde Park was something that no one chose to do of their own free will.

  Instead, they ran through lane after lane of stalled, cringing cars and down a broad, deserted pavement.

  And the two men still pursued them. They were gaining on them, arms pumping, knees lifting and slamming down like pistons, driving them closer. Petrovitch was past caring. Any second now.

  When it didn’t happen, when the pain grew so intense that his whole being felt touched by fire, that was the moment he stumbled and fell, sprawling half in the gutter. She stopped, and started to drag him by his shoulders.

  Then there was someone else who scooped him up like a bundle of damp washing and carried him to a place that was cool and high.

  The device in his chest finally, finally decided it was going to work. He jerked like a fish, shuddered and twitched. Once wasn’t enough, not this time. It tripped again, sending enough current down implanted wires to shock his heart into remembering how to pump blood properly.

  He gasped, and blinked his eyes to clear them of splinters of light.

  Two men, two women, and him lying on bare wooden boards in between. Two guns on one side, one on the other, no clear idea of what was going on or where he was. He could see stone pillars, broken colored light, dark-stained wood. He could smell polish and prayers.

  A church, then; he was in a church.

  He tried to sit up, feeling every flicker of pain from his ribcage as a white-hot flame. He made it to his elbows before the effort grew too great. The only comfort he had was that the would-be kidnappers were aiming their Glocks at someone else for a change.

  He flopped his head over to see who they were trying to threaten now.

  She was a nun, fully robed, white veil framing her broad, serious face. A silver crucifix dangled around her neck, and a rosary and a holster hung at her waist. She had the biggest automatic pistol Petrovitch had ever seen clasped in her righteous right hand.

  3

  More frightening than the gun she was holding was her attitude of utter invulnerability. She stood like a soldier, right arm braced around the wrist by the left hand, sighting with her dominant eye, stance open and finger tickling the trigger.

  She knew with absolute certainty they would never dare shoot a nun.

  “Turn around, walk away,” she said. “You’ve lost this time.”

  Of course, she could only aim at one of them at a time, and she did so without mercy. The target of her intentions started to crumble.

  “We just want the girl,” said the man. “Just the girl.”

  “No,” said the nun. The girl in question took a step back behind the nun’s skirts and played with her necklace.

  “She can’t get both of us,” said the other man, and took an exploratory step forward.

  “I wouldn’t bet my life on it,” said the nun. “More to the point, you shouldn’t bet your life on it. I don’t carry this cannon around for show.”

  “If I can interrupt,” said Petrovitch from the floor. He swallowed around the knot of acid pain in his throat. “You don’t have time for this. You see that pendant in your target’s hand? It’s a panic button. I’m guessing she’s had her thumb jammed on it for the last few minutes, and the signal it’s giving off is stationary. Which means the cavalry are going to be no more than, what, thirty seconds away?”

  He would have said more, but his vision flashed white again, and he momentarily lost muscle control. The back of his head banged against the floorboards.

  He heard, “What the hell’s the matter with him?” and “What are we going to do?”

  They weren’t smart. They weren’t even up to the standards of Petrovitch’s old boss. He struggled to his elbows again, blinking at their stupidity. “Really. You’d better go now. Go.”

  The surge of electricity through his heart took him down again. For the fourth time. It had never done that before. The sparks in his sight looked like angels against the vaulted roof space.

  “Chyort,” he whispered, then he noticed that no one had moved. He gathered what was left of his strength and hissed “Run!”

  They started to edge away, and their first tentative movements rapidly translated into full flight. They burst out into the daylight, and it was there, framed against the shadow, that they were scythed down.

  At the first shot, the nun flattened the girl with a sweep of her legs and threw herself on top of Petrovitch. Her veil covered his face, forming a seal over his mouth. He couldn’t breathe, but as she lay across his ribs with her full weight, there wasn’t much point in trying. She had even managed to pin his arms; he couldn’t so much as bat his hands against her. He struggled weakly and uselessly. He was powerless to save himself; of all the stupid ways to go, crushed by a nun.

  The roar of gunfire went on for longer than was ever necessary. Someone determinedly made a point while Petrovitch meekly suffocated.

  It became abruptly silent, and after a pause that was almost his undoing, the nun looked up. Her veil swung to one side, and he managed to drag in a wheezing gasp of air.

  He coughed, and filled his lungs again. The air tasted of dust, cordite and blood.

  “Stay down,” she said, not realizing that Petrovitch had no option but to obey. Figures made their way through the haze and picked their way over the ruined bodies of the two dead men.

  These men also had guns; long-barrelled assault rifles with smoke still curling from their muzzles. They carried them easily, like workmen who knew they’d completed the day’s task.

  “Miss Sonja?” said one, a pocket-sized man with a shaved head. He stepped out of the clearing air and looked sadly around him.

  “I’m here,” said the woman. She picked herself off the floor and shook out the hem of her skirt.

  “We should go,” said the man, “Your father is worried about you.” He brushed a chip of plaster off his suited shoulder while he too waited. The rest of his team materialized behind him. To a man—and they were all men—they were Japanese.

  “I’m ready.” She walked toward the doors, the security men surrounding her. She stopped at the entrance to the porch, and looked round at the only other people who had helped
her that morning. She screwed up her face, and came back. She leaned over them, and Petrovitch thought it an extraordinary thing that her hair had managed to fall into place with no effort at all.

  “Miss Sonja? The police will be here soon. It would be best to avoid them at the moment.”

  She held up her hand in a way that indicated that she was in charge now.

  “Is he going to be Okay?” she asked the nun.

  “I think,” she said, with a surprising amount of viciousness for someone in holy orders, “he needs an ambulance.”

  “I’ll have one called. Hijo?”

  “Yes, Miss Sonja. At once.”

  “I do have to go.” But then she knelt next to Petrovitch, her presence forcing the nun back on her haunches. “Who are you?”

  Petrovitch panted to give himself a voice. “If you’re yakuza, I don’t want you to know.”

  “Yakuza? What a ridiculous idea.”

  His gaze moved from her outrage to the nun’s skepticism, to the gun-toting suits glancing out of the door and eager to be away.

  “I’m not getting involved with you,” he said.

  “Involved? You saved my life.”

  “Stupid me. Now do me a favor and save mine: go.”

  She looked hurt; more upset at his slight than at nearly getting kidnapped. Sirens penetrated the thick stone walls, and she picked herself up from the floor. The man she called Hijo was trying to bury his agitation beneath the sheen of civility; he even had the temerity to take her gently at one elbow and guide her outside.

  The last rifle-toting gunman left the church, leaving Petrovitch, the nun, and two ruined corpses.

  “Do I get to find out who you are?” she asked. She released the slide on her automatic, discharging the shiny unspent bullet into her palm.

  “Petrovitch,” said Petrovitch.

  “Just Petrovitch?” She clicked on the safety and slid out the magazine to click the bullet back into the clip.

  “It’ll do.”

  “Sister Madeleine,” she said. “I’m a Joan.”