Degrees of Freedom

18

Petrovitch rode with Iguro, the cars becoming a slow-moving convoy back down to the center of the city. They skirted Regent’s Park and stopped on Marylebone Road.

“What are you going to do?” asked Petrovitch.

“I must report back to Miss Sonja,” said Iguro. He left the motor running, but put the gear into neutral. “She must learn of all that has occurred since we lost contact—something which is entirely your fault.”

“Sue me. I was being tracked through the prophet’s phone, and I get pissed off when people track me. And I rather assumed those same people were trying to kill me, too.” The power in his arm batteries was getting worryingly low, but he had to move it now and again, just to relieve the pressure of bits of metal sticking into his side. “Tell her what you like.”

“There is no more than a week before the Freezone is handed back to the authorities. This delay will cost Miss Sonja greatly.”

“If that’s all she’s worried about, I’ll cover the penalties myself.”

“You?” Iguro had a strange laugh, more like he was gasping for breath.

“Yeah. I’m a very rich man. Didn’t you know?”

From baring his teeth in mirth, his lips became thin lines. “How is that possible?”

“One of those things where you use the capitalist system against itself. I borrowed some money, and used it as leverage to short-sell oil on the spot market. When I say oil, I mean a lot of it, of course. Crude was trading at around a hundred and eighty U.S. dollars two days ago: I promised to sell twenty-five million barrels to whoever wanted it at one seventy, close of play yesterday. I sold the lot in seconds.”

“But where would you find that amount of oil?”

“Look, the oil doesn’t actually exist. It could have been sugar, cocoa, aluminium or pork bellies—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I bet everything on the price of oil dropping below one seventy. I could pretend to buy it, and then pretend to sell it to the traders who’d snapped up my futures because they thought I was mad.” Petrovitch shrugged. “I barely understand it myself. It’s a stupid way of doing business. But because I actually bought the oil as it dipped below fifty dollars, I made one hundred and twenty dollars a barrel. After brokers’ fees, I made a shade under three billion dollars—about five and a half billion euros.”

Iguro reached forward and turned the engine off, and sat in silence, digesting the news.

“How did you know that would happen?”

“I knew because I was about to offer the world cheap energy forever. Oil’s still going to be useful, but we’re not going to be burning it in engines. Not that that got in the way of a market stampede to the bottom. By the time sanity had been restored, I’d done the deal.”

“You could buy whatever you want. Anything. Anything at all.” He was awestruck.

Petrovitch wedged his knees against the dashboard. “The stuff I want most I can’t buy. This is just seed money: there’s hard work to be done if I want to make real things grow. You know, stuff that actually lasts. But like I said, I think Sonja’s got other things on her mind than her contractual obligations.”

“You wish me to deliver a message to her?”

“If you could.”

Tabletop tapped on the window, and Petrovitch cracked the door open.

“Problem?” she asked.

“Not really. Just explaining something to Iguro.” He opened the door wider and slipped out. “I think he might finally get it this time.”

“Petrovitch-san. The message?” Iguro leaned over from the driver’s seat to see him better.

“Yeah, that.” He scratched at his nose. “How about ‘I know what you’ve done and the moment I get to prove it is the moment you start running’? That’s a bit melodramatic, though, and she’s never been one for running. I could always go for the menacing ‘I know where you live,’ but she knows I know, so what would be the point? Just tell her the CIA tried to steal the nuclear bomb from the New Machine Jihad. That should give her some indication how deep in the shit she’s swimming.”

He slammed the door, obscuring Iguro’s open mouth.

Tabletop watched the car spin its wheels in an effort to get away from them. “Do you think she’s going to kill him?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have fancied being one of the techs who put the bomb together though. If any of them are still alive, I’ll be very surprised. It’s not like we lack building sites.” Petrovitch looked at the silent cranes that dominated the skyline. “Why did she do it?”

“You still don’t know for sure that she did, Sam.”

“Yeah, I do. It’s just time to stop making excuses for her.”

“So where does the priest fit in?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, if Tina’s right, and part of his plan is that he makes sure me and Maddy split up permanently… what does he hope happens next?”

“Sam, get in the car.”

He did as he was told. The Oshicora cars went left toward the Post Office Tower, and theirs went right toward Hyde Park. He was ten minutes late for the show—except there’d be no performance today. No webcams, no streaming, no blog comment or news footage. Just him and whoever might break the curfew and turn up. It was almost like the first few weeks of his calculated act of defiance, before it became the media event he couldn’t stop doing.

Valentina drove past their hotel and the Wellington Monument, down Piccadilly. She eased her foot off the accelerator as the rubble of the Oshicora building came into view between the rising skyscrapers on either side of the plot.

It was swarming with people, each of them taking something from the mound and carrying it away. There wasn’t much space around for the debris to go: instead, spontaneous barricades were collecting on all the approach roads.

The car stopped in front of a ragged line of concrete blocks that lay across both carriageways, and Petrovitch watched as the workers—mostly construction types in their usual laboring wear, but also office staff who had discarded their jackets or high heels or both, and overalled sanitation crews, and cooks and drivers and a good number of blue-covered Oshicora employees—carried more fragments of glass, metal and stone and placed them down.

“What are they doing?”

Lucy leaned in next to him. “I know you’re smart and everything, but really. What does it look like they’re doing?”

“No, I know what they’re doing. It should have been more like, they have to stop doing it. Now.” He got out and stared at the ant-hill of activity.

“And how are you going to get them to do that?” Lucy stood next to him and surveyed the scene.

“I’m going to talk to them,” said Petrovitch. He blinked. “Yeah, that’s scary.”

He took a deep breath and started forward. They parted for him, looking at him with reverence as he walked by. Then they carried on under the weight of their heavy loads.

Lucy stayed close, and when he got to the bottom of the rubble pile, he reached down to help her up. His arm seized completely.

“Ah, oblom.” He looked at the now-useless exoskeleton supporting his shattered bones.

“Do you want me get you some more batteries?”

“It doesn’t matter. Better off getting me a saw.” He used his right hand to force the hinges into an acceptable shape, before letting the arm fall uselessly by his side. “Come on.”

The further they climbed, the fewer people they met, until at last they were above the crowd. The geography of the pile had changed: more pieces of the fallen tower had been shifted in the time it had taken to reach their present height than had been thrown off by Petrovitch in all the preceding months.

Coming down the side street was a digger, spewing blue fumes into the air.

“Look at them,” said Petrovitch. “A couple of days, and we’d be there: all the way down to the basement. They’d work day and night: keep going until it was all gone.”

“Then why don’t you let them?” Lucy steadied herself using his shoulder. “They want to do it.”

“Because we’re being watched, whether we like it or not. Right up there, beyond the atmosphere, the American satellites will be looking down on us and there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m guessing Mackensie is in his war room right now, staring at the top of my head and wondering how many nukes it’ll take to bunker-bust Michael’s coffin.” He smiled sadly at her. “I can’t let that happen. These people, they think they’re doing the right thing, but every bit of rebar they drag out and pile up means it’s less likely that I can get Michael out, not more.”

“They’re just copying you,” she said. “What was that all about if you didn’t mean it to work?”

“I’ll tell you later. Right now, we have to attract several thousands of people’s attention and get them close enough that I can shout at them.”

They stood there, but that didn’t seem to work at all. So he drew his gun and was about to waste some bullets when Lucy placed two fingers in her mouth and let out an ear-splitting whistle.

“Yobany stos, girl. Some warning, okay?”

She grinned at him, even as the dying echo of her whistle bounced around the surrounding buildings.

The people closest to them stopped. They dropped what they were carrying, and started to gather. The ripple spread outward: the crowd in front of Petrovitch grew more dense. After five minutes, he had everyone, even the driver of the digger.

They were all looking at him, and he knew there was no way out of this. He cleared his throat noisily, scratched at his ear, and adjusted his left arm again.

“Hello,” he said.

Some of them even said hello back.

“You’re probably wondering why I asked you here today—but that’s not true: you’re here because you wanted to be here, despite everything that’s gone on today and the fact that you’re not supposed to be here at all. I’m touched. No, I’m moved. I didn’t know you thought that much…” He ground to a halt, and looked to Lucy for inspiration.

“Go on. Tell them,” she urged.

So he did.

“I love you all.” He stopped, then started again when he realized that he actually felt that way. “You’re brilliant. Loads of you have seen your houses wrecked, your friends and your families run out of town, you’ve lost people you care about and your lives have been turned upside down. But you’re still here, still thinking about the future and how you can build it bigger and better and brighter. The Freezone is more than a job to you. It’s part of you and you want to make it work. And it will work, because you care enough to make a go of it.

“Problem is, we’ve been let down. You all know about Container Zero and the New Machine Jihad. You all know that I’ve been accused of threatening those in charge of the Freezone with a nuclear bomb unless they let Michael out. That’s enough to turn anyone against me: Samuil Petrovitch the Armageddonist. And you came anyway, not out of fear, but because you knew a different Sam Petrovitch, one who would die to save the city.

“Which is why I’m going to ask you to stop. You’re going to get us all killed if you carry on. This city’s stood for two thousand years: I want it to be here for another two thousand, and I want the rest of the land beyond the cordon to be opened up, and I want peace with the Outies, and I want your children and theirs to build on the ruins of all the old villages and towns and cities and live forever. That can only happen if the Freezone survives.

“So, what I want you to do is this: go to work. Go and tell your shift. Bang on doors and shout in the streets. It’s time to go to work. It’s perfectly safe. There is no bomb, and there never was. I want you to let me deal with the consequences of that. What I can’t do is your jobs. You know what you do best. You know your wiring, your plumbing, your plastering, your welding, your digging, whatever it is you do. Today is a work day, and people are sitting in their domiks, in their hostels, wondering what the huy is going on. Get them out. Get them working.

“I appreciate we’ve got little or no power at the moment, you can’t call anybody up, you can’t check computers for plans and figures. I’m going to have to fix that shortly. But you need to be ready for when the Freezone comes alive again, so we don’t miss a moment more than we have to.

“I’m guessing that to get here, you had to dodge patrols and sneak past road blocks. On your way back, don’t worry about them. You’ll be challenged—why you’re not obeying the curfew—but this is how you respond: we’ve got work to do. Don’t be put off. Don’t let yourself be persuaded otherwise. We’ve all got work to do. Let’s not waste any more time with this: I’m just prattling on now, and you’re going to get bored soon.”

Someone laughed, and Petrovitch was eternally grateful.

“Go on. We all know what it is we’re supposed to be doing. So let’s do it.”

He walked down, like Moses off the mountain, his left arm dragging his whole body to one side. The crowd, rather than moving out of his way, came closer still. It seemed that what they wanted to do first, before anything else, was to touch him. Those who couldn’t make their way through the press of bodies surrounding him started to applaud him.

He became separated from Lucy. He could feel her fingers slip away from him, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“Pizdets,” he muttered under his breath. “Utter pizdets.”

Then someone came to his rescue. She put her strong arm around him and shielded him as she eased him through the crowd—gently but firmly so as not to upset anyone, giving them time to reach out for him without allowing him to get crushed.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” said Madeleine. “Where’s your car?”

“West side of Piccadilly.”

She carefully changed direction. “What happened to your arm?”

“Ran out of watts. Can you see Lucy?”

Using her height, she quickly scanned the tops of the nearby heads. “I’ll go back for her. Let’s get you to safety first.”

Madeleine kept going, calm and relentless, up to the barricade, over it, and to the front passenger door of the car. She stood there, holding it open while he got in, and closed it slowly so that fingers didn’t get trapped.

Then she climbed up onto the hood to try and locate Lucy.

Valentina tutted. “Look: bodywork is dented.”

“You should worry. My bodywork is more than dented.” Petrovitch hauled his arm around so it laid on his lap, and looked up at Madeleine’s leather-clad legs. He was momentarily distracted, so that he didn’t answer Valentina straightaway.

Only when the view cleared and Madeleine started back through the crowd did he acknowledge her.

“Sorry. What was that?”

“I said, does this mean we are now in charge?”

“Yeah. No. I guess so. Looks like you’ve got your revolution after all.”