Degrees of Freedom

3

“I suppose this conversation was inevitable, but I’m pretty certain that when we went our separate ways, we had an unspoken agreement that we’d never talk to each other ever again.” Even though Petrovitch was transmitting voice-only, there was no point in denying who he was.

“That,” said Dalton, “had always been my intention, too. Forget St. Petersburg, forget Boris, forget you. Then suddenly a year ago, you became public enemy number one. It was kind of hard to ignore you. Walmart were selling caricature masks of you for Halloween.”

“Yeah, well. What happens in St. Petersburg, stays in St. Petersburg.” Petrovitch took a long look at Dalton, the office behind him, and the view from the window in what must have been an achingly tall tower of glass and steel. “You seem to have bounced back.”

“What do I call you?”

“A lot of people ask me that. I tell them the same thing: Petrovitch.”

“Doctor Petrovitch?”

“If they’re being kind. You were always Dalton when I remembered you. Just call me Petrovitch and have done with it. Speaking of which, you shouldn’t really be calling me anything. I’m the Antichrist, the devil incarnate and the villain in a thousand badly written and factually incorrect stories. You could be arrested for even talking to me.”

Dalton stroked his fantastically smooth, tanned, moisturized chin. He leaned over and opened a slim cardboard file. The first sheet of paper had the picture of a man, a little younger than Petrovitch, with a shock of black hair falling over his left eye. “Know who that is?”

He did. “That’s Anarchy. Wannabe-überhacker. Hit the NSA three months ago with a modified trojan, caused all sorts of problems, some of which they’re still sorting out. Yeah, he’s several steps ahead of the usual script-kiddies, but he got caught.”

“He’s a client of my firm. He assured me that this line is entirely private.”

“There’s no such thing as private anymore, Dalton. Not in this brave new world. Information wants to be free.”

“Private enough, then. Enough to take the risk in contacting you.”

“And why would you want to do that? You seem to have been doing fine without me.” As Petrovitch talked, he was searching the public and not-so-public records for an indication as to just how fine. “There you go: partner in the business, equity share, big corner office, married, a son and daughter, and another on the way—congratulations—house in the Hamptons. Kind of expensive, but you married money. Your wife’s father is a hardcore Reconstructionist, a senator, no less. You have done well. Too well to want to blow it all on saying hello to me.”

Dalton seemed to be having trouble breathing. “Whoa. Marie’s pregnant?”

“She went to a specialist yesterday. The day before, she bought three different off-the-shelf testing kits. It looks likely.” Petrovitch coughed. “Sorry if I ruined the surprise.”

“I’ll have to pretend I don’t know.” Dalton had his fist closed over his chest. “Are you just yanking my chain?”

“Not this time, tovarisch. She’s probably just waiting for the right time to tell you. Sure you don’t want to hang up on me?”

“I made my decision a while back. I… I’m a coward, Petrovitch. You know that better than most. I went to pieces, and it was only because you kept your head that I’m here today. Everything I have now, I owe it to you. I want—five years too late—to thank you.”

“Dalton, I raped your bank accounts. I took pretty much everything you had at the time. I beggared you. Or have you forgotten? Maybe you’ve forgotten too about all the other people that Boris kidnapped and I didn’t help? Or the ones where something went wrong—when the ransom wasn’t paid or there was a trace on the account—what about them? The ones he killed. The ones where he put his hands around their neck and crushed their larynx so that they’d suffocate, nice and slow. Every time that happened, I just turned the page on whichever textbook I was reading, and was glad it wasn’t me.”

“Petrovitch, I’ve been in denial ever since I got back from St. Petersburg. Some mornings I woke up and I even wondered if it had even happened to me at all. Then your face was all over the news and I found I couldn’t suppress the memories any longer. But who can I talk to? This man, this Russian kid who saved me, is the same one who’s an enemy of the state. Maybe if I’d have come clean a year ago, things would have been fine. I couldn’t, because I was a coward then, and I’m a coward now.”

“You’re not a coward, Dalton. You didn’t ask to be kidnapped. None of Boris’ victims did. And I wasn’t some yebani angel, sent from above to help you. You were the opportunity I needed to bail out, and it could just as easily have been someone else.”

“You don’t understand, Petrovitch…”

“Then explain it better, man!”

“I’m trying to. In court, I’m this silver-tongued magician. Opposing counsel are actually afraid of me. Me? Can you believe that?”

“Okay. You feel like you owe me something. I want nothing from you. I took what I needed at the time. I can even pay it back, though that’s as likely to get you into trouble as anything else.”

“The money means nothing to me.”

“You weren’t impressed at the time.”

“You made me reassess all my priorities. Everything I have dates from the moment I stepped back onto U.S. soil. My family, my career. I earned more money in the twelve months after I came back than you took from me.”

“It was enough. Enough to get me away, enough to hide me. I was, if not happy, fulfilled. And I hadn’t had to kill anyone to be that way. It was a good deal, Dalton. Both of us got something we wanted out of it. It was fair. Okay, your thanks is welcome, but why drag this up now, unless you’ve suddenly developed a death wish? What are you going to tell your wife when she asks you how work was?” Petrovitch’s eyelid twitched. “She doesn’t know any of this, does she? When you said, who could you tell, what you meant was, you haven’t told her anything.”

Dalton made a little gesture of defeat with his shoulders.

“I’ve been married for just over a year,” said Petrovitch, “and even I know that not telling your wife stuff is bad.” He went off on his own reverie for a moment, before snapping his concentration back to the American. “Doesn’t mean I follow my own advice, though.”

“Every time you come on the news—and that’s a lot—she starts up on this tirade of abuse. About how you’re like Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao all rolled into one. That you’re coming for us while we sleep, because freaks like you don’t need sleep; about how you’re plotting to take away our country and our values and our children. She’s smart, and loving, and kind. She runs charity fundraisers for good causes. She’s leader of the women’s circle at church. She’s a good person, Petrovitch, a godly person, the mother of my children.”

“All three of them.”

“That. And every time she starts, I want to shake her and shake her until she stops because you’re the reason I’m there at all.”

Petrovitch tilted his head to one side. “You could just stop watching the news with her.”

“I have to tell her. I have to tell her tonight.”

“That’s up to you, Dalton. I wouldn’t. I’d bury it so deep it’d take a geological age to bring it to the surface again. You have a good life: don’t throw it away. Look—what she believes might be true. I tricked Boris into letting you go, and in doing so, I betrayed the trust of a man who’d shown me nothing but kindness. The money he gave me kept me and my mother and my sister fed. It allowed me to study. When I fucked Boris over, I did it for cold, hard cash, and I still haven’t dared to find out what happened to the rest of my family. You can keep on fooling yourself about my motives for saving you, but I know what went through my mind that night.”

Dalton leaned back in his chair and looked around his office, at all the accoutrements of his position and his power. “I’m a lawyer, right? I do corporate law. The guys I work with, both clients and partners, play hardball with each other to get even the slightest advantage. They don’t give anything away, either. Sure, we’re all brothers in the Reconstruction: we all stay sober and clean, we don’t swear or hire hookers, we all smile and gladhand each other and ask about each other’s wives. Maybe some of them actually believe it.” He put his tongue in his cheek and rolled it around, the bulge visible from the outside. “The thing is, what they’re doing to each other is all the more savage and brutal because they have the outward appearance of being decent, dependable men—while the truth is, every last one of those robbers would have left me to rot in that St. Petersburg basement.”

Petrovitch tried to voice his objections, but didn’t get any further than a stuttered “I…”

“You had all my money, hundreds of thousands of dollars of it. You could have cut and run. Instead, you came back for me. You scammed Boris and if he’d known any of it, if he’d suspected a single thing, he would have killed the pair of us in an eyeblink. You risked your life to save mine.” Dalton jabbed his finger at the camera. “I know your secret, Petrovitch. I know that you are a good person and you will always be that way.”

“Yeah, well.” Petrovitch blew out a stream of air. “Don’t spread it around. I’ve a reputation to keep.”

“I want to help you. I want to do for you what you did for me.”

“I’m not lying on a filthy mattress in a kidnapper’s freezing-cold basement getting trashed on cheap vodka just to stay warm.”

“Your colleague Doctor Ekanobi is. Apart from the vodka part.”

“We had one of your CIA agents in custody, and I’d hoped for an exchange, but Sonja said she was forced to just hand her back. We got nothing in return.” Petrovitch pursed his lips. “No one has seen Pif for ten months. Homeland Security have her… somewhere. Even I can’t find out where. You know, all your really confidential stuff is done on hand-written notes now. You use typewriters. You courier it in briefcases wired to incinerate their contents if they’re tampered with. I have nothing, Dalton. I can’t even suggest where to start looking for her.”

“Why don’t you let me deal with that?”

“If the Nobel committee can’t find her, what makes you think you can?”

“Because I’m flying to California tomorrow with a writ of habeas corpus in my pocket. I’m going to serve it in the State Supreme Court, and I expect them to rule on it in a couple of days. Wherever she is, whoever has her, will have to bring her to court and argue their case in front of a judge.”

“Far be it from me to point out some flaws in your plan, but are you a complete mudak? Apart from the fact all they’re going to do is laugh in your face when you wave your little piece of paper at them, you’re going to end up dead on the court steps. If someone doesn’t shoot you first, a rent-a-mob will beat your brains out with their fists.”

“They won’t laugh at me, Petrovitch. The justices take their responsibilities very seriously indeed. They have to act. They have no choice. Habeas corpus applies equally in all courts. It applies to every branch of the judiciary and the executive. It applies to everyone, citizen or not. They have to produce her person and give their reason, in law, why they can continue to hold her. There are no exceptions to this rule, and believe me, I’ve done my homework.”

“So why the chyort has no one done this before?”

“Because you have no friends over here. No one’s going to stand up for you, or her. I know you tried to ginger up some interest, but you’re fighting against Reconstruction. We all know what waits for us if we step out of line.”

“What I don’t get is why you’re willing to risk that. Dalton, we were done. We had a deal and we carried it to a mutually beneficial conclusion. It’s over. You don’t owe me anything, anymore than I owe you.”

“I’ve read everything about you. I know what you’ve done, what you had to go through to do it. I know about the Sorensons and the CIA. I know about this… thing you call Michael and where it came from. I know about the Long Night. I know what you are. I know you. You don’t get me because you’re not me. You don’t know anything about me, about the thousand little compromises I make every waking hour just to fit in with this vast, cold monolith called Reconstruction. If you knew me, you’d curse me and call me a coward, because that’s what I’ve been like every day for five years.” Dalton looked above the camera. There must have been a clock on the wall behind it. “I was only supposed to be on for five minutes. Six max. No matter how careful I’m being, they can still trace this call.”

“I can deal with that,” said Petrovitch. “You know they’re going to crucify you. You’re going to lose everything. Your wife is going to leave you and take your kids with her. Her daddy’s going to ruin you. And you’ll be so fired, I’ll be able to see the detonation from orbit.”

“I know.”

“And you’re still going to go through with this?”

“Yes. Flight’s booked. My case is packed. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m supposed to be the king of the futile gesture, and here I am, trumped by some stupid Yankee lawyer. I can only say this one more time: Dalton, don’t do it.”

“The time when you could tell me what to do is long past, Petrovitch. I don’t think I’ll have to call you again to let you know how I’m doing. I think that’s going to be pretty obvious.”

“Just… when all this is over, and you need somewhere to hide: I can do that for you, too.”

“Thank you.” There was a tone, and a woman’s voice announced that his next appointment was outside. “I won’t keep him a minute, Adele.” Dalton muted the intercom. “Not that it’s going to matter. All my clients will drop me like a scalding-hot stone when they find out.”

“You’d better go.” Petrovitch blinked. He’d walked all the way to Limehouse. A truck was rattling slowly up behind him, its back full of blue-overalled nikkeijin: an Oshicora work crew. He raised his hand to the driver, who brought the vehicle slowly to a halt.

“Goodbye, Petrovitch.”

“Goodbye, Dalton. And good luck.” Petrovitch caught the outstretched arm of one of the workers and clambered up over the tailgate. The men and women shuffled aside to make room for him, and he sat down, back against the low metal side.

“Petrovitch-san,” said the foreman, “you are crying.” He proffered his own packet of paper tissues, of which there was one left.

“It’s dust. And these yebani eyes.” Petrovitch tapped the white of his left eye with his ragged fingernail so that it made a distinct hollow tock. “It always happens when it’s cold.”