Equations of Life

22

Chain frowned as guns and people spilled out onto the pavement. He turned to Petrovitch with an expression like a cross tortoise. “You don’t think you’re going to get away with this, do you?” he said.

“As has been pointed out,” said Petrovitch, “today is the only day we’ll get away with this.” He swirled his coattails and admitted that it did look pretty cool. “Do you think you can stop us?”

“I came to try.”

“Yeah,” grinned Petrovitch, “you and whose army?”

“Oh very droll. I appreciate you’re resourceful but it won’t save you.” Chain fished around in his pockets and found his own gun. “I should arrest you right now.”

Petrovitch reached behind him for the Norinco. “Maybe you should, but you can stand to wait until later.”

“I suppose I could,” admitted Chain with a shrug. “Perhaps it’s time I cut you some slack.”

Marchenkho stood beside Petrovitch and slapped him hard on the back. “All friends now? This is good.”

“About all this,” said Chain, “I don’t have the manpower to rescue Sonja Oshicora: you know that, don’t you?”

“We do,” said Petrovitch.

“So, let’s get on with it.” Chain patted his pockets for his police card. He flipped it open and tucked it facing outward from his top pocket. “Has one of you got a plan?”

Marchenkho looked at Chain, then at Petrovitch. “Of course,” he growled. “What sort of half-assed organization do you think I run?”

Petrovitch shrugged. “I had the idea that I was just going to walk up to the front desk and start the revolution from there. If it goes pizdets, we do it the old-fashioned way: straight down the middle, lots of smoke.”

“And you have some reason to believe that might work?” Chain looked up and down the height of the Oshicora Tower.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m doing the talking, though.” Petrovitch flicked the Norinco’s safety to off.

“Wait, wait,” said Marchenkho, waving his large hands. “This will not do. My people cannot see me stay behind while you walk to the tower. It’s no good. Grigori, walkie-talkie.”

Grigori placed the fist-sized device in Marchenkho’s upturned palm.

“You come when called, da?” He waited for Grigori to nod. “No hanging around like some krisha who takes my money and does nothing for it.”

“Now can we go?” said Petrovitch. “It’s not getting any earlier.”

He strode off across the plaza. The fountains that should have played with the early morning light were still, just pools of trembling water. Aware of the other two men behind him, he kept his gaze on the tower.

There were no guards on the door, and there should have been, no matter what time of day it was. He anticipated being challenged, each and every step he took closer. Or was it going to be a sniper on a neighboring rooftop instead?

“I never thought I’d say this,” said Chain, trotting up beside him, “but it’s too quiet.”

“What have you heard, Chain? What’s going on? And don’t say this is all my fault.”

“I don’t believe that anymore. I do know that the Metrozone Authority is shutting everything off in stages and starting again from the ground up. We have a couple of hours, tops. After that, everything will be live again.”

“It’s going to take longer than that to get it all working. Everything’s connected, Chain. There just has to be one wrong thing somewhere and it gets everywhere.” Petrovitch glanced behind him, past the striding bulk of Marchenkho. Figures were spreading out across the concourse, ducking down behind the abstract granite shapes and crouching behind the lips of pools. “Why is there no one out front?”

“One of two reasons. One of which is that they’re not expecting us.”

“The other being that they are. Marchenkho, how tight is your organitskaya?”

“We are all comrades together. We all have as much to gain or lose as the next man. Da?” The Ukrainian’s olive-green greatcoat flapped as he walked, flashing the presence of his shoulder holster. “Since the last purge, we have stayed secure.”

“That doesn’t fill me with confidence.” Petrovitch pressed his glasses hard up on his nose. “Can you see anyone inside?”

The reception area was in darkness, but they were close enough to make out vague shapes moving against the glass doors; a hand, a face.

“I’ve seen this before. So have you, Petrovitch.” Chain started to jog toward the tower.

“What does he mean?” asked Marchenkho, holding Petrovitch’s arm.

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

They caught up with the detective as the tower darkened the sky. It became all too clear that there were people trapped inside; some of the glass panels had starred through attempts to break them, and the reflections of the three men distorted as the doors were shaken. But there seemed to be no way out.

“Hivno!” grunted Marchenkho and put his hand on his gun. “Some answers, now.”

“If it’s computer controlled, it’s gone wrong.”

Chain pressed his police card to the glass. “Back off,” he shouted. “I’m going to try and shoot my way in.”

“That won’t work,” said Petrovitch. “But if you insist, let me take cover before the ricochet drills a neat hole in my skull.”

Those inside crushed themselves tighter to be near to Chain. He couldn’t shoot even if he wanted to. “Got a better idea?”

“I do,” said Marchenkho. He spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Grigori? We need Tina and her box of tricks.”

Meanwhile, Petrovitch was shoving Chain out of the way. “Not like that. Like this.” He got level with the staring eyes of one frantic sarariman and said haltingly: “Shinkansen ha mata hashirou.”

“What?” said Chain. “What did you say?”

“Zatknis!” Petrovitch pushed him away again, raised his voice and repeated. “Shinkansen ha mata hashirou.”

The man inside blinked for the first time. He turned away, his face losing definition behind the smoked glass. Then he came back and nodded, mouthing “hai.”

Valentina slid a steel briefcase onto the floor next to him. She clicked the catches with her long fingers and opened the lid.

“Nice,” said Petrovitch, inspecting the contents.

“Do your job. Get them away from the doors.” She busied herself with a lump of plastic explosive, forming it into a disc in her hands.

Petrovitch mimed what the woman was intending to do, including the explosion that would follow. They didn’t understand until she started pressing detonators into the gray wads of plastique she’d stuck to where she hoped the opening mechanism was. Then they moved in a clump, all clutching at each other, as far as the banked reception desks.

“Ready,” she said, briefcase in one hand, roll of thin wire in the other. She trotted toward the first fountain, trailing cable behind her. Marchenkho, Chain and Petrovitch followed, and squatted down next to her behind the hard cover.

“You do remember you’re just supposed to blow the doors off, don’t you?” said Chain, and received a withering look in response.

“Amateurs,” muttered Valentina, and opened her briefcase again for the battery pack. She wired in the loose ends of cable and flipped the safety cover off the big red button. “Cover your ears,” she said.

She pressed the button, and the silence was broken by the sound of a single handclap, magnified out of all proportion. The air stiffened and relaxed, now tainted with a burnt chemical odor.

They peered over the parapet. At first, the doors were obscured by smoke; then, as it cleared, it seemed that the door, and its glass was still in place.

Slowly, gracefully, the frame fell outward and landed with a second concussion on the paving slabs. Still the glass didn’t break.

“Excellent, Tina,” said Marchenkho, and he stood up, pulling out his gun in one fluid motion. “Come on. You want to live forever?”

“Good point, well made,” said Petrovitch, and he held the Norinco high. They ran for the doors as those now freed streamed out, coughing from the fumes.

As they emerged, they scattered. They ran as if from the devil.

“Catch one,” called Petrovitch, and he watched as Marchenkho straight-armed a middle-aged man in the face. He’d barely hit the floor before he’d been hauled up to tiptoe by his tie. “Not quite what I meant, but yeah, okay.”

Blood was streaming down the man’s face from his nose, staining his crumpled shirt. He was almost incoherent with terror.

“Where’s Sonja Oshicora?” asked Petrovitch.

The man stared at him, at Marchenkho, at the building he’d just left at such speed. Japanese phrases dribbled from his lips, none of which Petrovitch could hope to understand.

“Sonja Oshicora. Where is she? Which floor is she on?”

Marchenkho drew his fist back for another strike, and finally the man seemed scared enough of being beaten to talk. “Miss Sonja gone.”

“Gone? Dead?”

“Not dead. Gone. In night.”

“Where did Hijo take her?”

The man focused on Petrovitch, and explained the best he could while being choked. “Not Hijo-san. Miss Sonja run away. Hijo-san look for Miss Sonja in city.”

Petrovitch pushed his glasses up. “She escaped? When?”

“In night. This night.”

“Pizdets. Put him down and let him go.”

Marchenkho dropped the man, who scrambled to his feet and ran as fast as he could away toward Piccadilly. “She is not there?”

“Apparently she didn’t need our help after all.” Petrovitch watched the suited man go, then turned back to the Oshicora Tower. “Doesn’t explain what’s going on in there, though.”

“Shall we see?” Marchenkho squared his shoulders and stepped through the doorway into the foyer. Chain was already picking his way through the objects that had been unsuccessfully used to try and batter a way out—chairs, tables, fire extinguishers, metal supports, earthenware pots with spilled soil and broken trunks.

“They panicked.” He kicked a broken tabletop aside. “Wouldn’t have happened with Oshicora still alive.”

“It probably wouldn’t have happened with Hijo still in the building, either.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I bet he’s taken all the men with guns out onto the street to look for Sonja, who’s escaped all on her own. I’m sorry, gentlemen. I seem to have wasted your time.”

Marchenkho holstered his gun and put his hands on his hips. “No, tovarisch. I would have paid good money to see this. My only regret is that I did not bring a bomb big enough to demolish the whole building.”

“I might have drawn the line at that,” said Chain. “So are we sure this place is empty? On a normal day, there would have been a thousand nikkeijin here.”

Petrovitch shrugged. “They might still be struggling to work from wherever they live. Imagine their surprise when they finally get here.” He cocked his head, and listened.

“I hear it too,” said Marchenkho.

“It’s the lifts.” Petrovitch held his gun out in front of him and moved stealthily around the reception area. The row of blank lift doors behind it hummed with movement.

“Why are there no lights, but these have power?” Chain drew his own pistol and watched the floor indicators above each door flicker and change.

Marchenkho squashed the talk button on his walkie-talkie. “Grigori. Squad to the foyer. Now.”

“The thing is, are those numbers going up or down?” Petrovitch’s question was answered by chimes, one after another, as every lift reached the ground floor. “And why are we standing here, waiting to find out?”

The doors opened simultaneously and, at first, none of them could comprehend what they were looking at: in each lift, there was an uneven mass of cloth and pale flesh, like a jumbled pile of shop mannequins. Then the pooled blood started to seep out across the threshold and onto the pale stone floor. The dark red stain flowed outward, merging, growing.

“I think it’s time for us to go,” said Petrovitch in a whisper.

Grigori skidded to a halt behind them, the barrel of his Kalashnikov searching for a target.

“A tactical change of plan,” said Marchenkho. “Retreat.”

Petrovitch waited for a few seconds before joining them, spending that time imagining the final moments of those trapped as they fell the full height of the lift shaft, the instant that tangled freefall became killing impact.

“Petrovitch! Move!” shouted Chain.

But he didn’t. He was busy realizing that every lift would have had to collect people from every floor, then taken them back to the top to drop them to their deaths. It was a deliberate act. Someone had murdered them all.

“Oi!”

“Yeah. Coming.” The lake of blood had reached his toes, and as he backed away, he left sticky footprints behind him in a trail, all the way outside.