Degrees of Freedom

23

Petrovitch was pushed out of the second tunnel by Madeleine, and he was back in the underground car park, shrouded by blue plastic. He looped his good hand through the center of the reel of cable and started spooling it out, passing it awkwardly to himself through the gates made by the scaffolding poles.

“Would it be easier if I did that?” Madeleine splashed through the standing water and held the sheeting aside for him.

“Probably,” said Petrovitch, “but then I’d feel completely and utterly yebani useless, so I’m going to do it anyway.”

Rather than turning toward the rusting door set into the concrete wall, he started up the slope to where daylight flooded in, stark and bright after the darkness. The white cable trailed behind him through the mud like a worm. As before, he felt a shiver of fear as he looked at how much cable he had left, and how far he had to walk. He’d measured everything a dozen times, and even now wondered if he’d made a mistake.

The reel grew lighter as he got closer to the outside.

“Are you…?” asked Tabletop.

“Past’ zabej. I’m not going to run out.”

The marks on the plastic reel were turning faster, and the length left was shortening all the time. But he was at the barriers, weaving around them, and blue sky was only a few more steps away. He had hoped that Lucy and Valentina would be there already, waiting for him with some slim piece of technology he could hook up to, but the only thing in evidence was the Al Jazeera news van parked lengthways across the access ramp to the carpark.

“What the huy are this lot doing here?” he blurted. He had ten meters of cable left to play with. He’d calculated it right, but his sense of satisfaction shriveled at the thought of journalists getting in the way.

“I’ll get rid of them,” said Madeleine, and broke into a run.

Tabletop stood next to Petrovitch and finally relieved him of the almost-empty drum. “What exactly did you tell Lucy and Tina to do?”

“Ah, vsyo govno, krome mochee.”

His worst fears were confirmed when Madeleine banged on the side of the van with her fist, and the door slid open to reveal Lucy sitting inside, a set of headphones slung around her neck.

“At least that satellite dish should be big enough even for you.” Tabletop indicated the top of the van.

“What would really make my day the full pizdets would be if Tina hadn’t ordered the journos off at gunpoint and had instead asked them along for the ride.”

“You mean like those two?”

A man in an open-necked check shirt appeared from around the back, and a woman in a purple kurta. The man looked unshaven and harassed, a high-definition giro-stabilized camera harnessed to his torso, and enough good sense to keep the lens pointed at the ground. She looked glossy and bright in a way Petrovitch never felt. She strode out to meet him, full of confidence and entitlement.

“Yebat’-kopat’.”

Madeleine glared at Lucy, who shrugged, and called out to the reporter with weary familiarity. “Surur. What the hell is going on?”

The woman stopped advancing on Petrovitch at the sound of Madeleine’s voice and visibly stiffened. “I might ask you the same question, Mrs. Petrovitch. In fact, I’m surprised to see you here at all, in this company.”

“We’re full of surprises today. In fact, I think I’m all surprised out, so unless you can explain to me what you’re doing here—and really quickly—I’m going to start breaking things.” Madeleine towered over the other woman in a way that made the cameraman break out in a sweat.

The driver’s door slammed, and Valentina strolled around the high hood, slinging her AK nonchalantly over her shoulder.

“Does that clear everything up, Mrs. Petrovitch? Your husband’s attack dog told me she was taking my studio, and she didn’t care if I came with it or not. I am the accredited press, and I will be objecting to this treatment most strongly.”

“Duly noted,” said Petrovitch. “Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met, though I’ve seen you often enough putting difficult questions to my wife.”

The reporter looked at Petrovitch, and for the first time looked through the aura of barely contained fury and frustration at the shattered man behind.

“Yasmina Surur, Al Jazeera. I assume you know something about the interruption in the communications network.” She held out her hand.

Petrovitch looked at his own. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said, wiping his palm against his trouser leg. On the spur of the moment, he decided that if it wasn’t going to come clean, he may as well. “Okay, as of an hour ago, everything changed, Miss Surur. So if you want to complain to anyone, complain to us. Le Freezone, c’est moi.”

She switched her gaze from Petrovitch to Madeleine to Tabletop, then round at Valentina and Lucy behind her. They were all familiar sights to her, but it wasn’t just Petrovitch she was looking at in a new light.

“Doctor Petrovitch, can I have an interview?”

“Yeah. If you must. There’s a couple of things we have to do first, so I’d appreciate it if you just got the huy out of our way while we do it. If you want to film, go ahead, but don’t talk to us, and you’re not broadcasting anything until I say so. Vrubatsa?”

She’d heard him often enough to know what he meant. She nodded and urged her colleague to start recording.

Petrovitch turned his back on the pair and beckoned Valentina over.

“Yobany stos, woman. This is such a bad idea I don’t know where to begin.”

“Hmm. You ask for fast, for big bandwidth, and here is fast and bandwidth bigger than Moon.” She narrowed her eyes. “You are in charge now. You need to stamp authority on Freezone. Your people need to see you, world needs to see you. Make good impression, make right impression, da?”

“Yeah. In Russia, impression makes you.” He groaned. “Right, let’s make the best of this. Tabletop, get that cable plugged in and find me a satellite. Lucy, stop mucking around and… just stop twirling on that yebani seat. No, I need to make sure that Mickey and Minnie out there don’t try and pull a fast one on me: monitor everything that goes to that dish. If they start to send a second too early, kill the feed. Tina? Really, what the huy were you thinking? Make sure no one else films us. If the CIA get wind of what we’re doing before we’re finished, we’re really finished.”

“And what do I do?” asked Madeleine, upset at being left until last.

“You get to do the most important job of all. Go and tell His Excellency I’m ready to deal. He and his bunch of sky pilots get uninterrupted access to Michael for the next hour or two—but I want a definitive decision on his animus, or whatever the huy they want to call it, after that. No weasel words, no recommendations pending on the Holy Father’s prayerful deliberations. They go public with whatever they decide by, what, three o’clock. Final offer, no negotiation.” He scratched the bridge of his nose. “And if they even think about ratting me out, tell them I have enough cee-four to put them all in orbit and every reason to want to do so.”

She put her hands on her hips and he knew she was going to argue with him. So he pre-empted it, jabbing his finger up in her face.

“This—this is your idea. You want to make sure that Michael isn’t plotting humanity’s downfall? Who better to find out than a bunch of Jesuits trained to do nothing but pick holes in the most carefully crafted story. I’m not going to try to influence them one way or another: you’re going to have to leave them to it too. Okay?”

“Why are you doing this?” Madeleine kicked her heel against the road and stood her ground. “You think he might be rogue?”

“No. No, I don’t. But because I love you and I know you have my best interests at heart, I’m agreeing to something that I don’t want to do, only because you want me to do it. I kind of figured that was what we promised when we made all those vows in front of that lying shit of a priest.”

She stared down at him. “Sam…”

“Yeah, I know. The first fuck in a year and I fold like a pack of cards.”

Then she hit him, as gently as she could manage, cuffing him around the ear before dragging him into her embrace and lifting him off the ground.

“Chyort, put me down while I’ve still got some ribs in one piece.”

She did. “You’re impossible.”

“No. Just highly improbable, but no one ever said it was easy being married to a statistical outlier.” He straightened the metalwork surrounding his arm. “Go. Tell them we go live in a matter of minutes.”

Tabletop called from inside the van. “Sam, we’ve got him.”

Petrovitch glanced back around, and watched Madeleine’s leather-clad body running up Park Lane.

“Sam?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m listening.”

“Sam!”

He finally turned his attention to Lucy’s console, where a familiar face was peering out at them, then to the series of empty power sockets screwed to the bulkhead next to her. “If you can find the right adaptor, I’ll have some of that.”

“Your courier bag’s still in the car,” said Lucy, sliding the headphones from her neck and onto her chair.

“Thank you.” He took her place and pressed one of the cans against his ear.

[I have linked with a satellite], said Michael, [and am beginning to access the Freezone network.]

“Good work.” Petrovitch maneuvered the lip mic to somewhere approaching close. “Bring it all back online, then we can pick and choose which bits to shut back down.”

[The virus you activated: not bad, for a human.] The face on the screen lowered, as if bowing.

“I had help. Even though the poor kid ended up in the slammer, he still thinks it was worth it.” He took the courier bag from a breathless Lucy, and pulled out a nest of wires. “Huy, I don’t know.”

[We have power, even though the virus is trying to re-migrate back into the nodes I have cleared. Holding it at bay is requiring considerable resources.]

“Yeah, it does that. It makes it very effective if you don’t quarantine the clean system from the infected. Just strip it out: we won’t need it again. There’ll be isolated machines that’ll come on later, and they’ll still carry the virus, but I’m figuring you can inoculate the live network against that.”

[It will take some time. As I said, not bad for a human.]

He had the first tickle from the palmtop strapped to his side: it had found a signal.

“Result.”

Between them, Lucy and Tabletop had disentangled the power adaptors from each other. One went in on his left, into his computer, and one on the right, into the batteries.

[We have control.] Michael seemed to turn away briefly before staring back out at Petrovitch. [We also have several problems that require urgent attention.]

“No shit, Sherlock.” He could move his left arm again, and he was happy. “Tell me what Sonja Oshicora’s mob are doing.”

[The picture is hard to establish. One moment.] Michael paused, listening, seeing, tracking. [They have mostly regrouped at the Telecom Tower. Now they are able to communicate with distant units, there may be coordinated action.]

“Some of those won’t be following Sonja’s orders anymore, and after I’ve had my say, all she’ll be left with is a hard core of Oshicora idealists.”

[Sasha, why did she turn on you? I had every indication that she would do almost anything for you, and you only had to ask. People are unreliable and inconstant.] Michael made himself blink. [Except for you.]

“Yeah, that’s me. Consistent to the point of predictable. And that’s exactly the exploit Sonja used. I’m going to talk to her now, and see what she has to say for herself.”

Petrovitch knew her mobile number. He could tell where the phone was by chasing it across the network until he’d pin-pointed the location, on the ground floor of the tower. She wasn’t alone: the area was thick with signals and other traffic, calls coming in and out at a furious rate. He could hear her, shouting orders with a voice that rang with rising panic. He could have interrupted her conversation at any time by hijacking the handset, but he noticed that she had another phone on her, live but dormant.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the phone that had been wired to the bomb. There’d been only one number in the call history. He took the headphones off and sat back in the chair, holding the phone to his ear.

Sonja stopped talking. The sound of muffled ringing came over the open connection. The call timed out when she didn’t answer, but he was absolutely certain he had her attention.

He dialed again. The call was picked up, and he could hear the sound of chaos in the background. Close up was the trembling of her breath.

“Hello, Sonja.”

“Sam. I can explain.”

“You don’t need to. The mere fact I’ve reached you on this number is pretty much all the explanation I can stomach at the moment. I trusted you, and you betrayed me. More than that, though. You abused your position of authority and used resources meant for building up the Freezone to bring it to its knees. So let’s forget what you tried to do to me and Maddy for a moment, and concentrate on that.” He took a deep breath, and adjusted his grip on the phone which was threatening to slip out from between his sweat-slicked fingers.

“Please…”

He lost it. He was standing, shouting down the phone, oblivious to everything else. “Past’ zabej, suka derganaya. Do you know what you’ve done? The whole of civilization is hanging by a yebani thread and you’re hacking at it with a pair of rusty scissors. So you just shut up and listen to me. You are relieved of your duties. You are under arrest. You will surrender all weapons and you will place your private army under the control of the interim Freezone authority, which just happens to be me. You will stay in your tower until someone comes to read you your rights and put you in front of a court. Which is a huy sight more mercy than the idiot followers of the New Machine Jihad ever got. You are now irrelevant to the running of the Freezone. No one will follow your orders. You have no right to act on behalf of or represent the Freezone in any matter. You are deposed, Madam ex-President.”

At that moment, the first pile-driver started off in Hyde Park, filling the air with its rhythmic thump. It sounded like victory.

“Hear that? That’s what we think of your state of emergency. The Freezone is back at work, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. The future’s coming through, Sonja, and you’re not on board.”

He stabbed his thumb down on the phone, and held the device in his hand, looking for somewhere to throw it. Cool fingers curled over his.

“Sam,” said Lucy, “evidence?”

“Do pizdy. If she was here, I’d shove it up her zhopu.” He let her take it, though, and picked up the headphones again. “Michael, shut Sonja down. Her whole operation. I’ll talk to them in a minute when I’ve calmed down.”

He closed his eyes.

[Done. What next?]

“Hanratty. I need to talk to Hanratty.”