by Simon Morden
“Maybe you should’ve let me see it before you started screwing about.” The lights cycled to red without them moving. “Can this get any worse?”
The first raindrop left a dusty circle on the windscreen. It was there long enough to ball and run down the glass to the bottom before the clouds opened and rain drummed against the roof.
“Clearly it can,” said Petrovitch. The car in front edged forward half a length, and Chain claimed the space as his own.
The rain continued to blatter down, hard enough to make it seem like there was boiling water rising from the ground. The pedestrians either took shelter where they could, or hunched their shoulders and accepted the indignity.
Chain put his wipers on, smearing the grit and grease in two arcs. “I can remember when rain—any rain—meant danger. Everyone would listen to the weather forecasts and sirens would sound in the streets.”
“Yeah, pretty much the same,” said Petrovitch. “Except we didn’t have satellites or sirens. We just got wet and took iodine pills when we could.”
“This isn’t meant to be a game of ‘my life was worse than yours,’ you know. And your country never got bombed.”
“All we had to put up with was your fall-out; nuclear and economic. You had food relief; we didn’t. You had rebuilding projects; we didn’t. You had someone to blame; trivial, really, but we didn’t. Everyone looked after poor Europe, and we were left swinging in the wind.”
“Surprising,” said Chain, gazing out at the traffic lights as they went from amber to green, “how much damage a handful of madmen can do. Why aren’t we going anywhere?”
“You want to get out and walk? Or do you want to shut up?”
Chain sighed and scrubbed at his cheeks with his hands. They sat in silence, watching the rain fall.
“You heard from Sorenson?” asked Chain.
“Not since I warned him he might have carried your bug into the heart of Oshicora’s operations.”
Chain pulled a face. “Did I tell you about his father?”
“What about his father?”
“His old man was political—Reconstruction to the core—assassinated six, seven years ago. Case is still open. All the fingers pointed at Junior, but no one could pin it on him. Apparently, sniping’s not his style. Explosives are, though.” Chain leaned forward and set the wipers to double-time. Despite the deluge, people were getting out of their cars and walking toward the front of the queue. “What? What are they doing?”
Petrovitch reached behind him for his blanket. “There’s only one way to find out.” He pulled the material over his head again and opened the car door. The rain poured in, and within seconds he was soaked.
Chain turned up his collar and joined him—making sure to lock the car behind him. The crowd was uncharacteristically quiet; hushed enough to hear the soft roar of the rain, the scrape of boots on tarmac.
As they walked forward through the stalled lines of vehicles, they could see a line forming across the junction, deepening as more people joined it. Chain used his badge and his elbows to work his way to the front, and Petrovitch tucked in behind.
When they got there, they found the cross-wise street devoid of traffic: on the other side of the junction was a similar mass of onlookers. The lights were red in every direction.
“That’s not right,” said Chain.
Petrovitch tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. “Neither is that.”
A solid phalanx of cars was crawling down Gloucester Place in the direction of the river. Every lane was taken up, four abreast, rolling slowly in a perfect line. Chain was about to step out and demand an explanation when Petrovitch touched his shoulder again.
“Don’t.”
There were people in the cars. From the frantic banging on the inside of the windows and the rattle of door handles, they didn’t seem too pleased to be there. Some of the drivers were screaming into their phones, and some of them were just screaming. They pulled at their steering wheels, dragged at the handbrakes, all to no avail.
They drove inexorably on.
The front of the procession drew level with them. Chain tried the door from the outside. It was locked, but neither could the wild-haired woman inside get it open.
“What are you doing?” he yelled at her.
“Help me,” she mouthed.
“Chain?”
“Not now, Petrovitch.” He pulled his gun and reversed it in his hand.
“This is important! All these cars, all of them: they’re new.”
“What?” Chain kept pace with the car and readied himself. He shooed the woman away from the passenger door and imitated what he was going to do.
“They’re all this year’s or last year’s models; top of the range.”
“You’re not making any sense.” The rain had penetrated everywhere; everything was wet, clinging, dripping.
“They’re all automatic. They drive themselves, Chain.”
Chain brought the butt of his gun down against the window. It bounced off with the same force, and he let out a strangled cry of pain.
“That’ll be toughened glass, then,” said Petrovitch. “Let’s try this instead.”
He stepped around the front of the car and took his bug-detecting wand from around his neck. He ran it up one side of the bonnet, then the other. At the top, on the driver’s side, he got a signal.
He reached into his waistband and dragged out his snub-nosed little pistol. He pointed it down at the metalwork and pumped the trigger, once, twice, three times. Three sharp whipcracks; three holes.
The car stalled. The doors unlocked with a clunk. On hearing the sound, the driver threw herself at the passenger door, and Chain hauled her out.
The rest of the cars carried on. The car behind nudged the back of the disabled one, and started to shove it forward. Petrovitch skipped out of the way and stood in the torrent in the gutter as the grind of metal and the faint pattering of desperate hands on glass made its stately way down the street.
Thirty cars in all, no traffic in front, none behind. The crowd began to murmur and disperse, the show over.
Chain was struggling with his bruised gun-hand and the woman. She gasped and mouthed, and no words would come out. All the while, she grabbed at parts of his jacket to be reassured that he was real.
“Petrovitch? What did you do?”
“I killed it.” Petrovitch worked the slide and ejected the chambered shell into his hand. He tucked his gun away again.
“Explain. Excuse me, miss. Will you stop pawing at me?” He finally got his good arm up and held her away.
“I blew its brains out. Even your car’s not so old that it hasn’t got electronics under the bonnet.” Petrovitch took his glasses off and shook them free of water. “That’s what you’re going to have to do to each and every one of them.”
“Me?”
“You and your cop friends. Unless you’re happy for this to carry on?”
The broken car beached itself against a lamp-post further up the street. The obstacle it made caused ripples in the neat lines of cars, so that the advancing front was no longer perfectly straight.
Chain looked at the woman, who had started to wander away in a daze. She walked slowly and erratically toward her car, and when she was within range, she started to kick viciously at it with her heels.
“Is this your fault?” asked Chain.
“No more than it is the Oshicora Corporation’s. Which is to say, I don’t know.” He put his glasses back on, fat raindrops clinging to the lenses. “But I don’t see how it can be.”
“I’m going to have to call this in. I’m going to have to get help.” Chain flexed his fingers to check they all still worked. “Don’t think you’re off the hook.”
“Meet me at the lab. And I still want that body armor.”
“In exchange for that pathetic pea-shooter you call a gun.”
“Potselui mou zhopy, Chain. I seem to be the only one around here who knows what he’s doing.” Petrovitch�
��s blanket had fallen in the road. He wrung it out the best he could, adding to the flood at his feet. Then he held it over him and shook his head rapidly to try and clear his glasses.
“When did I stop being Inspector Chain?”
“When I caught you out, zjulik.” He watched Chain’s face fall. “Go on, go. The terrifying truth is that people’s lives might depend on you getting your srachishche moving.”
The rain continued to fall as they stared each other down. The lights changed; red, amber, green. Almost at once, horns started to sound, and those slow in clearing the crossing walked a little faster.
Chain looked down the road past Petrovitch at the block of cars gliding serenely as one again. He bared his teeth in a feral snarl and turned away, back to his own vehicle.
Petrovitch crossed to the other side, and on. He found that he was wet, cold, hungry, he couldn’t go home, he could barely risk going to the lab without police protection, and he had the chill metal touch of gun against his waist.
He realized that he needed to be dry and warm and well-fed, or he’d end up stumbling and slouching to his death. He looked up with his water-spattered eyes at the street names and recognized where he was.
It was only a short walk, but he was shivering by the time he arrived. He could feel his heart large and fragile under his scrawny ribs as he took the steps up to the big wooden doors, still marked with bullets.
The door was closed. He took hold of the black iron hoop and banged it down. The sound echoed away inside. He did it again, then again, then hunched up on the narrow slice of dry stone provided by the doorway.
A bolt slid back, and the door opened to make a sliver of darkness.
He could see her narrowed eye regarding him from her great height.
“Sanctuary,” he said.
17
Sister Madeleine took him in. She guided him around the plastic buckets dotted along the length of the nave that attempted to catch the copious drips from the roof, stopped to genuflect to the altar, then steered him into the vestry.
Father John wasn’t there.
“Meeting with the bishop,” she said. She took his blanket away, and then wondered what to do with the sodden lump. She threw it out into the church.
“Doesn’t that mean you should be with him?”
“There’ll be more Joans there than priests. He’ll be perfectly safe.” She stared at Petrovitch. “You realize that sanctuary was abolished in the seventeenth century.”
He shivered uncontrollably under her gaze and wrapped his arms around himself. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I thought you had a plan for everything,” she said, then added quietly: “You also said I’d never see you again.”
She took a step forward, and for the briefest of moments he thought she was going to enfold him in her own robes. The look of utter panic on both their faces forced them apart.
She whirled around on the pretense of searching for something. “Doesn’t take a genius to pack a raincoat.”
“I had planned to be at the airport. Then something happened, and I found I needed to hang around after all.”
She found an old two-bar electric fire and dragged it to the center of the room, frayed flex trailing behind it. “Needed to, or wanted to?” She crouched low down by the skirting board and forced the yellowed plug into a wall socket. The wires on the fire fizzed sparks and started to glow red.
“I can still go. Walk out, never come back.”
She straightened up, faced him down. “Why don’t you then? Why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?”
“Because I made a promise I have to keep. I made a vow: you know what that’s like, don’t you? A vow so terrible, so final, that it turns you from a human being into an expendable weapon. I’ve burned my bridges, cast my dice, crossed the Rubicon. Whatever metaphor you choose, that’s it.”
She took several deep breaths. “So what is it that you’re going to do? Die of pneumonia at someone?”
“Yeah. Thanks for that. It’d be nice if somebody took me seriously some time soon.” He peeled off his jacket and dumped it on the threadbare carpet, then tried to bend down to unlace his boots. His canvas trousers had become so stiff, and his fingers so weak, that he couldn’t make any impact on the rain-shrunk knots.
Sister Madeleine got to her knees and bent low, worrying at the laces until she’d loosened first one, then the other. She looked up, face framed by her veil. “Can you manage now?”
“I’ll cope.”
“There are some choir robes in that cupboard. Put on as many as you want. It’s not like we have a choir to offend.” She pointed, then strode to the vestry door. “Look, Petrovitch…”
“Sam. It’s Sam.”
She leaned her head against the door frame. “We can be grown-ups about this, right?”
“Yes,” he said, less convincingly than he’d hoped.
“Give me a shout when you’re ready and I’ll make some coffee.”
“We can’t make a start on the communion wine, then?”
She frowned at him. He shrugged damply back.
“It’s in the safe,” she said. “I don’t have the keys.”
“Coffee will be fine,” said Petrovitch, laying his glasses on the desk and grasping the bottom of the death metal T-shirt.
Sister Madeleine saw the logo and the name, closed her eyes and shook her head. “All this in the house of God,” she muttered as she left. She made sure she closed the door behind her.
Petrovitch struggled out of the rest of his clothes, pausing only to examine the scars on his chest. One was long and curving, livid against his shock-white skin, and the others short, raised lines like knife wounds, which is what they were: the work of a single cut of the scalpel. The latest of these bristled with black thread.
Everything he wore had wicked in twice its weight in water. Where he’d dropped his jacket, the red carpet had turned dark. Not good. But there was another door at the rear of the room, and judging from the draft swirling in, it led outside. He bundled up his laundry and threw it there instead.
In one of the heavy cupboards that smelled of incense and age, he found a rail of vestments. The black ones were the priest’s; the gold ones he assumed were for special occasions. Then there were the bewildering array of white garments, some short, some long, some plain, some edged with lace. He had no idea what he was supposed to use.
In the end, he gave up, and took two of the shorter white robes and toweled himself off with them, then chose one of the longer ones to wear. When he finished fighting his way to the neck end, he found he looked like a marquee.
He managed to turn it to his advantage, though, by holding the hem of the robe over the fire and concentrating the meager output of warm, ozone-tainted air inside.
“I’m sort of ready,” he called.
She came back in, stooping through the doorway. When she saw him, she laughed.
“Yeah. Go on. Something to tell all your nun friends back at the convent.”
“Trust me, there’s not much humor in this vocation. Lots of funerals, if you like that sort of thing.” She cleared a space for the kettle and unplugged the fire.
“Hey!”
“If I put both on at the same time, the fuses will blow.”
“I can wire it so they don’t.”
“And will the church burn down afterward?”
“Not in this weather. Maybe later.”
“We’ll do it my way,” she said firmly. She turned the kettle on, and retrieved two mugs from the desk drawer.
Petrovitch realized he was still holding the hem of his robe out. He let it go.
She sat down in the chair and hunched forward, fingers together; almost at prayer. “Where were you going to go?”
Petrovitch took a while to answer. “Far away. Where no one had ever heard of me, seen me. Somewhere I could start again. Make a better job of it than I did this time around.”
“That your gun?” The sister looked o
ver to where it sat on the desk, moistening the cover of the book beneath it.
“Yeah.”
“Loaded?”
“Not much point in having one that isn’t.” Petrovitch went to pick it up, and she laid her hand across it.
“I should have checked you for weapons. Now I’m going to have to confess that before next mass.” She glanced up. “And accept a penance. You’re nothing but trouble.”
The kettle boiled, and she dutifully made instant coffee spooned from a battered tin.
“What about you?” asked Petrovitch. “You don’t seem, I don’t know, very holy.”
She plugged the fire back in. “Holiness is a work in progress. In the meantime, I can kick your bony ass through a wall, I can group twelve shots at fifty meters and I can take a bullet meant for my priest. The job description didn’t mention sainthood.”
“So what did it say?”
Her fingers tightened around her mug, and she blew steam on her face. “I was fifteen and I was going to end up killing someone. I was full of rage and hate, and I couldn’t control it. Someone offered me a chance; a chance to change what I was going to become. A new start, just like you.”
“Yeah. Not quite like me.”
The lights went out.
In the dying glow of the fire, Petrovitch snatched up his gun and pulled the slide. It was dark, a closed room without windows. He could hear the sister’s clothing rustle softly, then the solid mechanical sound of her own, considerably larger gun being cocked.
He listened intently. There was the rain, the creaking of timbers, the splash of water in over-full containers. There was traffic noise and the clatter of domestic alarms. He could see where the back door was by the slit of light under it. He took two slow steps and stood beside it, back to the wall, ready.
The only movement in the room was now hers. The chair relaxed with a sigh as she rose from it. The air stirred as she walked. She made no sound herself. Even her breathing was below a whisper.
She stopped, and everything was still.
The vestry door gave a very slight shudder, just enough for whoever it was to tell it wasn’t locked. Petrovitch crouched down and reached out with his free hand for his jacket. He found it, and pulled it slowly toward him. He felt in his pocket for his key-fob torch, which he gripped between his lips: his teeth rested against the on switch. He kept hold of the jacket.