Degrees of Freedom

16

Valentina already had the car halfway toward them when they got outside. Lucy was in the passenger seat, still holding the phone in front of her in a two-handed grip.

The wheels smoked as they locked and slid sideways, and the car came to rest right in front of Petrovitch. Tabletop was in and across the back seat seemingly before the door was open, leaving Petrovitch to clamber in.

His feet had just about left the ground when Valentina stamped on the accelerator. Tabletop grabbed him and stopped him from falling out, and the door swung shut on its own.

The van had gone, although there was a drifting cloud of blue diesel by the gates. The remnants of the Jihad were still running, even though the shooting had stopped. Some seemed to be going in circles, while others ran straight up to the high fence that surrounded the school grounds, heedless of the razorwire they would encounter once they were at the top. Others had gone for the gate, and they were in the way.

Valentina swerved left, right, further right, then hard left again, all the time leaning on the horn. She managed not to hit a single person until they reached the choke point of the exit.

She braked hard, throwing everyone forward—except Lucy, who’d managed her seat belt—and the windshield was obscured by a back. The glass creaked, but the car was going slow enough that it didn’t give. So Valentina kept on going, not being able to see until she hauled the steering wheel hard right and the body spilled off.

“Tina.”

“What?”

Petrovitch looked out the back window at the still rolling form, then deliberately turned away. “I know, I know. Someone is going to pay for this.”

“Where is van?” Valentina was going south, as fast as she could.

“Yeah. Hang on.” He interrogated the phone network and found a moving cluster of signals on the road parallel to them. He called up a map. “They’re on Hendon Way, heading toward the center. We can get in front of them. Right here, then left onto the A5.”

When he panned out to get a bigger picture, he saw that Oshicora communications were making a hotspot that was coming north. He drew vectors and didn’t like what he saw.

Everyone was moving quicker than the van. He’d get to it around about Swiss Cottage. But Oshicora security were going to run into it almost at the same time. The van was old, and he couldn’t hijack it. Neither could he stop the nikkeijin’s cars. It was as if the outcome was already inevitable.

“If you can go faster without killing us, then do it.”

He hacked the Oshicora comms, and listened in briefly: long enough for it to become clear they knew where they were heading. Everything was wrong.

“Okay, listen up. As it stands, we’re on a collision course with Sonja’s corps, who seem to know exactly where the van is and where it’s going. I don’t like that. It goes beyond educated guesswork and smacks of some secret knowledge that makes me very uncomfortable.”

Tabletop counted the bullets left in her magazine. “You think she’s in on this?”

“She certainly knows more than she’s telling me. Lucy, pass me the Jihad phone.”

She didn’t respond straightaway, and Petrovitch had to lean over and take it himself.

“That man,” said Lucy, “we just…”

“Yeah. No one’s saying it doesn’t suck, or that we shouldn’t have stopped for him, or we shouldn’t have run him over in the first place. Or that a little piece of us doesn’t die every time we commit yet another atrocity. I’m not even going to suggest that what we’re doing is more important than some bat-shit crazy Jihadi’s life.” He pressed buttons and accessed the phone’s call history. “We’re all going to do stuff today that isn’t likely to be pretty, noble or generous. But I’d rather have you all alive come nightfall, if that’s all right.”

He turned his full attention to the phone, running the numbers through a search program: he’d called it last, and the number before it was different to the number before that. And so on. Each one was a random, throwaway account, like he used. He was going to get nothing from it.

He looked at the map in his head. They were scant minutes away from intercepting the van, but so were Oshicora security. His eye twitched, then his thumb stabbed down on the power button. The phone winked off, and there was an immediate response from the comms he was monitoring.

“Proof enough that something’s going on: they had tabs on the prophet.” Petrovitch threw it on the seat between him and Tabletop. “Time to hit the kill switch.”

Which he did. If he’d had more time, more processing power—if he’d had Michael on his side—he would have faked the entire Oshicora operation and sent them haring off after some virtual contact heading out toward the East End. He could have made it look like nothing was wrong for either the controllers or the foot-soldiers.

Instead, he was forced to use the blunt instrument of crashing the whole network: just a couple of lines of code inserted in the right place, and hidden programs got to work. Within seconds, everything was offline and locked tight.

It blinded him, too. He was now a small island of electronic consciousness in a sea of dead pixels. He really missed his rat now.

Valentina’s satnav had crashed, but he had no way of guiding them to their target anyway, save what he could remember. Petrovitch just hoped that he’d sowed enough confusion to give them the time they needed.

“Left into Belsize Road.”

They were driving past what was left of the Paradise Housing Project. The blocks had been demolished, the ground stripped clean, and something new was rising up, a vast, self-contained town of its own, half-finished and ragged.

“Close?” asked Valentina.

“I don’t know. Not anymore.”

She took the most direct route across the roundabout: the wrong way, and stayed on the right side of the road as she exited. The car rocked first one way, then the other, and somehow stayed upright.

“Yobany stos.” Petrovitch braced himself against the door and the roof.

“How are we going to stop the van?” Tabletop slapped her magazine back in. “Do we aim for the tires or the driver?”

“If it comes to it, we’re going to ram them. Right?”

“Da.” Valentina braked hard, pulled the wheel left and accelerated out of the corner. An alpine-style bar appeared, sandwiched between two roads and facing another: she stopped the car at the junction, the squeal of rubber making the air taste foul.

Tabletop and Petrovitch bundled out. The Freezone was never quiet. There was always building going on, demolition work and pile-driving audible from one side of the city to the other. No one was at work today, and the wind whipped around the high buildings on either side of them, whistling and buffeting as it stirred the street furniture.

It carried on it the sound of a laboring engine.

“Lucy, out now.” Petrovitch opened her door and leaned across her to unplug her seat belt.

“Okay, okay. I can do it myself.” She batted his hand away, and stepped shivering onto the tarmac.

He reached back in for Valentina’s Kalashnikov. “If we screw up, you know what to do?”

Valentina nodded, looked pointedly at the bend in the road ahead. The echoing of grinding gears bounced toward them.

“I won’t miss,” he assured her, then strode out into the road. “Tabletop? Watch my back.”

He lifted the rifle’s butt to his shoulder and took careful aim. Crosshairs that weren’t on the gun appeared in his vision, and he let the barrel swing around. He took a practice shot—checking for accuracy, windage, range—and shattered the top lens on a distant traffic light.

He glanced around at Lucy. “When I stop the van, the people in it are going to get cross. I don’t know if they have guns, but if they do, they might start shooting at us. Then I’ll have to kill them.”

“Tell me again why we’re doing this?”

The van growled into view, and he took aim.

“Because we can only redeem ourselves in the eyes of the world by showing them there was no bomb in the first place.” The tires were an impossibly small target face on. He focused on the front grille and pulled the trigger. He fired three rounds, and hot shell cases smoked into the cold air.

A plume of white steam flashed into the air before being dragged apart by the moving van. The cloud turned dark as oil mixed with the water, and the windshield was painted black. The van swerved, left, right, left, and into the metal railings separating the two carriageways. It careened off, shedding its wing mirror and a shower of paint.

The engine died, and the van rolled across the road, losing speed all the time. It had enough momentum to rise up onto the pavement and into a lamp-post. The lamp-post bent, buckled, and gracefully leaned over until it rested across the van’s hood and roof. Oil started to puddle underneath.

Petrovitch gave a satisfied grunt and started forward, keeping the rifle ready.

“If you’re coming,” he said, “now’s as good a time as any.”

He closed the distance, and a Jihadi spilled out of the van on the far side. Just as he was about to shout an order, a voice behind him squeaked. “Hands where I can see them. Now.”

Lucy edged as far as the driver’s door, holding her automatic out in front of her. The driver put her hands up—slowly—as did the man next to her. Lucy reached out and gripped the handle, pulling it toward her.

“Out. On the ground.”

They complied meekly while she grinned with pure nervous energy.

Petrovitch stalked around the back. The first Jihadi had got to the rear doors, and was just opening them up when Petrovitch pressed the barrel of the AK in his ear.

“Step back and lie down.”

“You can’t stop us,” said the Jihadi.

“Pretty certain I don’t have to. You think you’ve got a nuclear bomb in the back of this van, right?”

“We control the lightning.”

“You haven’t really thought this through, have you? Or didn’t you listen to your mother when she told you what a nuclear explosion does to sensitive electronic equipment? What it might do to Michael?”

From down the road, there was gunfire, the long, drawn-out sound of a car skidding and driving through a shop window, shouting and running.

“Out of time.” Petrovitch reversed the rifle against the Jihadi’s head, and kicked him out of the way before he fell. He wrenched one of the back doors open, letting the light flood in.

When the woman—the Outie-looking one from earlier—saw that it wasn’t one of her fellow acolytes, she pressed the switch in her lap.

Despite his absolute conviction that he was right, and that the bomb was a fake, Petrovitch still flinched. Not that it would have deflected the blast wave of superheated gas one iota, but the big metal cylinder still looked very much like the real thing.

Nothing happened, and the Outie looked at the switch. It was a standard light switch, without the plastic paten on the back. She rocked the switch backward and forward in quick succession, and still no fireball.

“Get out of the yebani van, you mudak.”

And still she clicked away, shaking it in case there was a loose connection, until Petrovitch lunged forward. He reached in, grabbed her arm, and pulled with all his might. He still held the rifle in his right, so he’d used his left.

She flew, this woman who would have blown them all up leaving a crater a hundred meters across and flattening every building between East Finchley and the Thames. She hit the road with her flailing hands and her face, and rolled like a rag doll until she stopped. She had come out with the switch, which lay a little further on, the bare ends of copper wires torn from their terminals coiling and then lying still.

He climbed up and into the van. The bomb sat on a strip of brown carpet on the floor, and he knelt next to it, resting his hand on the casing. He frowned, and peered briefly at the fastenings before deciding he’d still need a tool kit to open it up. Valentina should have what he needed, but first he had to arrange a truce.

Petrovitch jumped down and stepped out from behind the van. Lucy, standing over her captives, risked a moment’s inattention. “Did I do it right?”

“You’re standing a little close, and you’ve clearly watched too many cop shows. But yeah. You did it right.” He looked down. “Let them go. Make sure they leave.”

“Sure?”

“They might be little deluded shits who would have happily started another Armageddon, but we don’t have the man- or woman-power to hold them, and we’ve got better things to do. Chase them off.” He hoisted his rifle high and let off a volley of rounds, then started to walk in plain sight to where the Oshicora cars had formed a barricade across the street.

Valentina and Tabletop had held off the Oshicora guards long enough. Every time one of them popped up, they made them hide again. As he passed Valentina crouched behind the hood of her own car, he threw the AK to her.

She caught it and gave him a questioning look.

“It’ll be fine,” he said, and walked on to stand in the no-man’s-land between the two sides. He could feel a dozen sights drawing across his body, so he stopped and cupped his right hand to his mouth. He tried to match it with his left, but it wouldn’t quite go.

“Konichiwa,” he called. “I’ve got the bomb, so I don’t really need a gun anymore. However, if one of you would like to come with me, I’ll let you have it after I’ve shown you something.”

There was some muttering, and from behind them, another Oshicora vehicle approached, late to the party. It nosed up to the cordon, and both driver’s and passenger’s doors opened. Petrovitch recognized the passenger, even without the benefit of the Freezone’s database.

“Iguro. Glad you could make it.”

“Petrovitch-san. The communications blackout is your work?” He weaved between the parked cars and toward where Petrovitch stood.

“Yeah. Something wasn’t quite right, and I thought it safer if everyone could just step back and think about what they were doing.” He scraped his fingers through his hair. “It’s been a hell of a morning, Iguro, and I don’t think it’s over yet.”

“I must still arrest you. It is my duty.”

“About that. What were the charges again? That I was conspiring with the New Machine Jihad to threaten the Freezone Authority with an atomic bomb?”

“Yes,” said Iguro, “exactly that.” He had loops of plastic wrist restraints in his belt, and he fingered them.

“Despite the fact that I’ve consistently maintained that there is no bomb and I’ve just stopped the Jihad from driving whatever-it-is into the center of the city.”

Iguro considered matters before concluding: “That is for others to judge. My part is arresting you, and your friends.”

“We’ve got a stalemate, then. You can’t call for back-up, and I’ve got the bomb. Why don’t we sort this out like civilized human beings?”

“What do you propose?”

“Well,” said Petrovitch. “The bomb’s in the back of that van. I’d very much like to open it up and find out why a device that was supposedly sealed twenty years ago has a mobile phone signal still coming from it, but I can’t do that with us all shooting at each other. Don’t get me wrong, we can go back to shooting if you want…”

“That would not be desirable, Petrovitch-san.” Iguro pulled at his jacket and looked uncomfortable. “I have already received a reprimand from Miss Sonja for allowing you access to Container Zero. I must not fail her a second time.”

Petrovitch put his arm over Iguro’s shoulders and started to walk him back toward Valentina’s position. “If you still want to arrest me afterward, I promise I’ll come quietly. Deal?”

“I suppose it is fair.” He waved to his men to stand down, and only on passing Valentina did he realize by how many they had outnumbered Petrovitch. He looked sour.

“What?”

“I had expected more of you,” said Iguro. “Where are the Jihad?”

“Balvan. If you’d been listening…” Petrovitch shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s get this yebanat open, then maybe things will become clearer.”