Degrees of Freedom

19

Once they were all back together again, there was a long awkward silence. Lucy was squashed in between Tabletop on one side and Madeleine on the other. Valentina tapped the dash with her keys, while Petrovitch was busy trying to work out just what the hell he’d told everyone he’d do.

It meant rewinding the file and cringing like a stray dog in a street fight. He realized he’d backed himself into a corner, and there was only one way to make good his promises.

All the while, the silence stretched on. The crowd were dispersing, and were already visibly thinned.

“I think I owe you all an apology,” said Madeleine. She shifted, leathers creaking. “Sorry.”

If anyone was in a forgiving mood, they hid it well.

“Do you know,” said Valentina, “how much trouble we are in?” Novosibirsk on mid-winter’s day would have been warmer.

“I have some idea.”

Tabletop leaned forward, while Lucy shrank in her seat. “My ex-colleagues from the CIA turned up. There were more of them than we expected. Then we discovered that the supposed nuclear bomb was packed with plastic, to be triggered by a mobile phone that Sonja Oshicora’s personal security detail was actively tracking. Sam’s activated a virus that has shut the city down. And apparently we’re now responsible for the Freezone having seized it in a popular uprising.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Enough,” muttered Petrovitch.

“She has ruined everything!” Valentina slammed her hands on the steering wheel. “You had plans, da? I know you had plans even if I did not know what they were. I trusted you—still trust you to get us out of this, this mess. But best chances we had have gone. Because of her.”

“I said, enough.” He dragged at his arm, and wondered if he could plug himself directly into the power socket set underneath the air-con. “Battle plans never survive contact with the enemy. We can change them; we were always going to have to change them. That’s not the problem.”

“No, problem sits behind you.” Even furious, Valentina had no color to her face. It was her eyes that burned with bright fire. “She has betrayed you.”

“Stop it now. I appreciate that we’ve all been living on adrenaline for the last few hours, but it’s nothing a massive fry-up and some mugs of coffee wouldn’t cure. Before anyone else says something they might regret, please take a moment to think about everything that’s happened, and more importantly, why.”

“I know why. Your wife cannot keep her mouth shut.”

“Yebani v’rot. If Maddy is guilty of anything, it’s trusting a millennia-old tradition of confidentiality between priest and penitent. I’m pissed off, too, but I’m trying to direct my anger in the right direction.”

“Can I?” said Lucy in a very quiet voice. She struggled with her elbows to gain some extra space, and sat forward. “Sam, do you remember when we first met?”

“I broke into your house. You were hiding in the bath.”

“That’s not what I mean. The play. The school play I was supposed to be doing.”

“To be fair, I had my hands full that day.” He twisted in his seat to see her better as she leaned over his shoulder. “Refresh my memory.”

“Romeo and Juliet. You know,” and she quoted in a rush: “ ‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I’ll no longer be a Capulet.’ ”

“Yeah, I know it. It’s better in the original Russian. So what?”

She pointed at him. “Romeo.” Then at Madeleine. “Juliet.”

Everybody else took a breath before starting their objections, and all stopped on the first syllable before grinding to a halt as their mental gears stalled.

“It’s like, you know: two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Verona, where we lay our scene. From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. But what if Juliet hadn’t killed herself, and they’d lived together like a normal couple? Her family would have hated it. And his. The idea that they would have kissed and made up is stupid. They would have worked together to split them up, then gone back to stabbing each other in the street.”

Petrovitch frowned. “Is this actually relevant? Because I’ve accidentally just organized a coup, and I could probably do with paying some attention to that.”

“This is the whole reason for everything!” Lucy knew she wasn’t explaining herself well, and she grunted with annoyance. “Montagues and Capulets. You two have separated over Michael. But neither of you wants to make it permanent because you actually do love each other. So you need a push. Sonja Oshicora wants you, right?”

“As uncomfortable as it makes me to admit it, yeah.” He didn’t feel able to meet anyone’s eye at that moment.

“That means she needs Madeleine out of the way. How’s she going to do that? She can’t just kill her, because that won’t work. She needs you to hate her.” Lucy directed her forensic gaze at Madeleine. “This priest of yours: he wants you to go back to the Church. Is he going to get you to do that by killing Sam? Is he even going to try and kill Sam, knowing how well protected he is? No. What he can do is make you hate him.” She threw up her hands. “How come this is so obvious to me, but not to you bunch of emotionally retarded grown-ups? They’re working together. Sonja and the priest.”

Petrovitch sat back around and stared straight ahead. “Oh, you have to be yebani joking. This whole thing has been contrived to…” His face set hard. “Sic sukam sim.”

“Sam?” said Madeleine, bewildered.

“I am not a piece of meat. I will not be owned by anyone. And I will absolutely not be the peshka in anyone’s game.” His heart was spinning fast, too fast: the tips of his fingers were tingling and his head felt like it was going to pop like an over-inflated balloon. He took several deep breaths and deliberately braked the turbine in his chest. Too hard. He felt fuzzy, almost fainting. It was almost as it was before he’d had the implant. “Chyort.”

“Get him out of the car. He’s crashing.”

There was a sudden scramble around him, and he was dragged out and laid on the ground. He saw sky and cloud, and felt road and rubble. He was cold, colder than he’d ever been, like he’d been frozen and all these people leaning over him were defrosting his body with nothing more than good wishes and concerned looks.

“No CPR! It doesn’t work like that.”

“How does it work then?”

“It’s not like there’s a panel I can pop open.”

His T-shirt was pulled up, and the surgical tape that held the slim computer to his body was ripped free.

“I don’t even know if I can access it. It’s not the rat.”

“Give it to me. You’re panicking and we don’t have the time.”

“Can you find anything?”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t—wait: Sorenson. Search for Sorenson.”

“Spelt right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Just stop pointing at the screen. No. No. No again. Wait.”

“That slider. Put it halfway.”

“There?”

And the blood surged back through his body. His heart wasn’t designed to go from a standing start, but it did well enough. As his blood pressure returned to something approaching normal, Petrovitch grimaced and gurned.

“I didn’t know I could do that,” he said eventually.

“You turned your own heart off.”

He blinked and tried to find the speaker: Madeleine. “Looks that way. I’m going to have to script up some sort of safety net for that.”

She pushed the others aside and raised him into a sitting position. “Never do that again.”

“What? It’s not like I haven’t died before.” He took a breath of fresh, cold air and found it didn’t hurt.

Madeleine cuffed his head lightly. “And I was there for most of them, which is why I don’t want to go back to that.” She chewed at her lip. “You believe her, don’t you?”

“Lucy? You know how much of a fan I am of Occam’s Razor.”

“Sam, what are we going to do?” She pulled at her plait and dragged it over her shoulder. “I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been.”

“It’s been staring us in the face since the very start. But I was looking for one person who knew everything, and the reason I could never work out who was because there was two of them.” He tried to flex his left arm. His fingers would move, but the rest of it had set solid. He couldn’t overcome the resistance offered by the motors. “As to what we’re going to do…”

Petrovitch dragged himself upright and restuck the computer to his side. He set his face in the direction of the Post Office Tower, but his view was obscured by Madeleine, who moved in front of him. She put the flat of her hand against his chest.

“No.” Her voice was firm.

“Out of the yebani way. I’m going to rip her a new zhopu with this,” and he brandished his broken arm, “then I’m going to see how well she flies.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I’m pretty sure I can. I’m pretty sure that no one’s going to stop me from doing it either.” He looked up into his wife’s face. “She won’t lift a finger to save herself, because she loves me.”

“Do you really think that? Do you really believe she’s not going to fight to keep what she has?”

“She has nothing left.” Petrovitch gestured to the rubble pile. “She’s lost the Freezone, she’s lost me, she’s lost the nikkeijin, the organization around her is falling apart, she’s got no home, no purpose, no inheritance and no legacy.”

“Then maybe,” said Madeleine, “you should just leave her alone for the moment. Not that we both don’t have a reckoning with her at some point…”

“And with the priest.”

“And with John. He’s lost everything too. His very identity as a priest, even. But if Sonja’s lost the Freezone, who’s there to catch it if it falls?”

Still he tried to go through her, to get at Sonja. “I saved her. And for what? So she could do this to me?”

Madeleine pushed him hard enough to rock him back on his heels. “You just told these people to go to work. They don’t have electricity or computers, thanks to you. That means you haven’t got the time to spare on this self-indulgent crap, because like them, you have work to do.”

“Don’t you want to get at her? At Father fucking John?”

She lowered her voice to barely a whisper. “Oh yes. But they can wait. Look at their plans—what have they come to? Nothing. We have a city to run, we have another CIA hit-squad to find. We have a thousand and one people to talk to, to assure them that we’re not going to drop the ball.”

Petrovitch fumed. “I know what you’re saying makes more sense. But I still prefer my version.”

“I prefer your version. It’s just a shame we don’t have the luxury of doing what we want. You always said the Freezone was a good idea because it was your idea: are you going to throw it away because you want to act out your revenge fantasies?”

“It’s so very tempting.” He stopped his attempts to bull his way past her. “Yobany stos, all right. Have it your way.”

Valentina looked pointedly at her watch, and Petrovitch scowled.

“Like you’re a yebani metronome. You might not show it, but you’re just as pissed as I am.”

She conceded the point. “So what do we do? And in what order do we do it?”

“I need this arm back. That’s not going to happen until I get the power back on. I would also like something to eat and drink because it’s been a very long time since any of us have done either. That’s not going to happen until I get the power back. These good people need to do some work, and guess what?” Petrovitch wandered away across the road, staring down every so often. His lips moved silently as he counted.

“Sam, what are you doing?” called Lucy.

Petrovitch eventually pointed to a black metal cover set into the tarmac. “We need to get this one up.”

She turned to Tabletop, standing beside her. “What’s he doing?”

“I have no idea.”

“I do,” said Madeleine, cupping her hands around her mouth. “I thought the idea was to persuade everyone we hadn’t lost the plot.”

He shouted back. “You want power? This is how we get it. In every way.”

While Valentina went to fetch the tire iron from the trunk of the car, the other three went over to where Petrovitch was standing.

Madeleine crouched down next to the manhole. “You realize the Yanks are going to want to nuke us if we do this. We’ve dodged a pretend atomic bomb only to walk into the path of a real one.”

“You asked me if I had a plan for when I got him out. I did then, and I still do.” He took a step back and allowed Valentina to dig the edge of the iron between the cover and the lip of the hole. “I’ve let the Americans dictate what happens to Michael for too long. No more.”

As the cover broke free of the collected muck that held it down, Madeleine dug her fingers under it and dragged it scraping to one side. There was a brick-lined black hole, and a ladder thick with rust descending into it.

“We are going to get Michael, da?” Valentina threw the tire iron aside.

“Yeah, we are.” Petrovitch flipped his feet into the hole and adjusted his useless arm down to fit close by his side. He toed the first rung, testing his weight on it. “We’re going to need the cee-four.”

Tabletop looked at the distance between them and the tower. “Okay. But let me go first. We’ve come too far to let any more surprises get in the way.” She pulled the hood of her stealth suit over her head and covered her eyes with the integral goggles.

Petrovitch moved to one side, and she used partly him, partly the road, to lower herself into the void. She swarmed down the ladder and, within moments, was out of sight.

“Right,” he said to those remaining. “Down the rabbit hole.”