Degrees of Freedom

6

Petrovitch stepped slowly over, forcing his eyes to adjust to the low light levels, and flicking between the near infrared and visible parts of the spectrum. He moved slowly so he could composite the images together and make certain that he wasn’t blundering into a laser net or onto a pressure pad.

The air was cold, dry, like a tomb. There was no hint of decay, just a vague smell of age. He had to be the first living person in there for a very long time: he ran a quick search for the history of Regent’s Park, and found that the first domiks had been deposited on the green grass late in twenty-oh-two. Armageddon had been declared officially over with the death of van Hooren in twenty-oh-nine. Eighteen years then, minimum.

And this one had been here all that time, right in the heart of the Metrozone. Petrovitch stood in front of the Armageddonist’s heavy wooden chair and stared into his desiccated face.

“All this. All this was your fault, you govnosos. Everything.”

The Armageddonist’s skin was drawn tight over his teeth and he seemed to be grinning. Petrovitch had the urge to drive his fist through his dead staring eye-sockets, then tear off his arms all the better to beat him with the ragged ends.

Armageddon had changed the world. That was their intention, of course, but despite them bombing their way across Europe, west to east, God had not returned to judge either the quick or the dead.

The survivors had been left with a continent covered with hot-spots, millions of refugees washing across newly fortified borders, collapsed economies and radioactive rain.

It had left Petrovitch with a weak heart that had blighted a childhood which had ended abruptly when his father had canced out. He had as much reason as the next man to hate the Armageddonists.

Like every other person affected, he’d dreamed about what he’d say to one if he had the chance. Now, now he could: if he wanted, he could vent two decades of incoherent rage and frustration on the very object of his anger. No matter that it would fall on deaf ears.

He look a step back. He’d thought the Armageddonist’s hands were locked rigid on the arms of the chair, but that was only true for the right. The left was curled around a lever, like the heavy switching gear on his perpetual motion machine. He hunkered down for a closer look.

A dead man’s handle. Except the man holding it was dead, and it hadn’t worked. Yet.

Not moving his feet, he scanned the inside of the domik. He needed a heavy weight or something to jam in the mechanism. It might be that the switch was never going to fall, but one possible alternative was that the slightest vibration might set it off. The wires that joined it both to the heavy metal cylinder and to the box under the chair would mean the Armageddonist would have the last, albeit brief, laugh.

There was welding gear by the domik’s doors. Too unwieldy. The rest of the container was pretty much bare, save the table with its unstable load.

“Maddy?”

“Sam?”

“I’m going to need some wire. Stiff wire, like coat-hanger wire, or six-mil-squared copper cable.” He could tie off the switch. That would hold until he could make a better job of it. “Sometime soon, okay?”

Still without moving his feet, he crouched down and peered through the Armageddonist’s legs. By leaning over to both sides, he could see more of the object, and he mentally constructed a wire-frame model of it, to better see what it was.

A car battery.

He knew that it was simply inconceivable that one might hold its charge for two decades. There was staining on the floor around it, but that could have come from above rather than from a ruptured cell. By rights, he should just unscrew the terminals and kick the thing across the floor. It was as dead as the Armageddonist.

Petrovitch scratched at the bridge of his nose. Maybe he’d just wait for the wire. He straightened up again and peered at the bomb.

The Armageddonists mostly used old Soviet-era weapons, but this wasn’t one of them. It had the distinct look of a home-made device, of the sort that were relatively simple to make, and could be set off just by being dropped at the wrong angle. Low yield, but more than enough to lay waste to everything for kilometers around.

There was tapping from behind him.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got your wire.”

“Throw it to me. Toward my feet, not my head. I don’t want it to go anywhere near the body.”

Madeleine occluded the outside. “How can you see… oh.”

“Just throw the wire,” said Petrovitch. “I’ve a list of stuff I need to make the bomb safe.”

“Don’t you think you should be leaving that to someone else?”

“No. No, I don’t. I’m not leaving it to someone else because that someone else is going to take a day to get here, insist on an exclusion zone of thirty k that’ll take a week to enforce across the river, cause irreparable harm to the Freezone, then do precisely what I’m going to do now and expect to be treated like a yebani hero for the rest of his life.”

The short coil of wire skittered tinnily across the floor and nudged his heels.

“Right. I want a head torch, wire cutters, a full box spanner set—including the little fiddly ones in the shape of a star, screwdrivers of all varieties, pliers big and small, a multimeter and a geiger-counter. Most of that you can find in the art college basement, and I know you know where that is. The geiger-counter: you’ll probably have to go to a medical physics department at a hospital. Got all that?” Valentina would have a lot of it, but she was at the other side of the Freezone, hunting the CIA.

“You’re enjoying this a little too much.”

He stooped to retrieve the wire and felt its gauge. It was a little thin, but it’d do.

“I seem to live in a world where you trust me with an atomic bomb, but not with your heart. I guess I have to take pleasure where I can find it.”

She hesitated at the opening. “I’ll get you your things.”

“Thanks. Do you want to tell Sonja about this, or shall I?”

“It’s my job to tell her,” she said.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“You can do it. Somehow I think it’d be better coming from you.”

“See you soon. If you can’t find anything straightaway, call me so I can decide if I can do without it.”

The shadow left the end of the container, and before he called the Chair of the Freezone, he decided to tackle the dead man’s switch.

It was a simple task, but he had to do it right. He wound the free end of the wire around the nearest chairleg and pulled it tight so that he knew it wouldn’t slip. Then he unwound more of the coil to stretch around the switch itself.

Dead, brittle fingers were wrapped around the handle, which should have flung itself back the moment conscious pressure had ceased. Something had prevented that. Petrovitch ramped up the gain on his eyes, hoping to see what that was.

The secret was at the elbow. The Armageddonist had wedged his arm against the back of the chair to relieve the strain on his muscles. Maybe he’d had a cramp. Maybe he just hadn’t been ready. And some time after he’d completely negated the purpose of the bomb switch, he’d died.

“Mudak. Can’t even get the end of the world right.”

He looped the wire around the switch and the emaciated hand, and took up the slack, then gave it three more winds before slowly drawing everything together. As the wire tightened, it bit into the dry, bloodless hand, cutting the parchment-colored skin.

Petrovitch watched dispassionately, only concerned with whether the underlying bones would break. He decided that they weren’t going to, and he finished off the wire with bending it back down to the chair and fixing it to the same leg. He gave it an experimental kick. The wire held.

Next thing.

She was sitting at her desk, unaware that she was being observed. Her eyes were flickering across the screen in front of her, reading a set of accounts. Every time she came across an entry that she might later query, she frowned a little, eyebrows knitting together.

He coughed to attract her attention. “Madam President?”

“Sam?” Sonja sat back, now trying to focus on the tiny camera clipped to her screen. “Why are you calling me that? Where are you?”

“Regent’s Park. We’ve got a problem. An official Freezone the-govno’s-hit-the-fan problem.” He regarded the bomb. “And I’m officially telling you about it.”

“Okay.” Her face sharpened. “Tell me.”

“I’m standing in Container Zero. It contains the body of the Last Armageddonist and the Last Armageddonist’s home-made nuclear device.”

If she was surprised or shocked, she didn’t show it. She showed nothing at all. “Is the area secure?”

“No, but I don’t want people down here mob-handed. It’s a sure way of drawing attention to the fact we have a situation.”

“Sam, the situation is happening whether we like it or not, and I’m sending you a squad of my guards. They’ll be discreet.”

“Maddy won’t like that.”

“She there with you?”

“Not at the moment. I sent her to assemble a bomb disposal kit.”

A beat, then her voice dropped an octave. “Sam…”

“What? Sonja, this thing is live. I don’t know what’ll set it off, but I know I can make sure it won’t go critical.”

“It’s been sitting there for years. Another day won’t make a difference.”

Petrovitch closed his hand around his forehead and scraped his fingers back through his hair. “Yes. Yes, it will. For one thing, we’ve opened the container. There was a dead man’s switch that failed to work—I’ve made that temporarily safe—but there could be light-sensitive triggers, trickle-charging cells, old-fashioned mechanical booby traps. If this blows, we’ve wasted the year we’ve spent rebuilding and the next ten trying to decontaminate the Metrozone.”

“We need an expert.”

“Yobany stos, you sound just like her! Listen: this is a jerry-built gun-type assembly. It’s not something you buy off the shelf. The people who made this are dead, Sonja, and no one can pick their brains. The design is simple and stupid and inefficient and unstable. It relies on nothing more sophisticated than bringing two subcritical masses together. That could happen if you so much as drop it. If you want to leave something like that sitting in the middle of the Freezone, then hey, you’re the boss. You get to carry the can.”

Sonja pushed back from her desk. The Freezone authority had co-opted the old Post Office Tower. The views from the top were commanding, and Petrovitch could see tiny points of light through the windows behind her.

“Can it be moved?” she asked.

“Without disarming it? Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Would you move it?”

“Chyort. No.”

She stood up and looked out over the city, as she must have done from the Oshicora building. The difference was now she really did run it all. At least for the next two weeks.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t screw up.”

His mouth twisted into a grin. “Have I ever let you down?”

“No,” she conceded. “But you let Michael down. He’s been gone a year, and you still owe him.”

“I’m working on it.”

“I know: one brick at a time. I’ve been meaning to ask you: what happened this morning?”

“With the priest? The Pope wants to know if Michael has a soul.”

“Does he?”

“I told him it didn’t matter. I told him Michael was my friend and I was going to rescue him anyway.”

“Good for you, Sam. Keeping an eye on the oil prices?”

“Not particularly.”

“Down eighty dollars a barrel since lunchtime. OPEC are squealing.”

“Which is stupid. Oil’s too valuable to just burn it. They should be pleased.”

“So now I have the Saudi secret service to worry about, too. Thanks.” She sat back down, almost falling into the chair. “I miss these chats. We’ve been so busy, haven’t we?”

“Time’s coming—soon—when we won’t be.”

“You know that Madeleine’s not the only woman in the world, don’t you? If she doesn’t want you, there might be someone else who does.”

Petrovitch scratched at his nose, even though that wasn’t where the itch was. “You know me. You know I keep my promises.”

“I know.” She shrugged. “If only you were more corruptible.”

“Yeah.” He could hear the sound of an engine outside. “Better go. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

When he’d closed the connection, he frowned. It wasn’t a motorbike engine he was hearing. The noise ramped up suddenly, and a shower of sparks washed across the floor of the container from the welded-shut doors.

The edge of a cutting disc emerged through the steel and started to carve its way upward. The air vibrated and filled with smoke.

“Ahueyet!” Petrovitch reattached himself to Sonja’s computer. “If you’ve sent your crew already, send more. Now.” Then to Valentina: “What the huy are you doing in Enfield? I need you here!” And finally to Madeleine, and he had to wait for her to pick up: “Come.”

By which time the sparks were almost to the top of the door, and he could barely see through the acrid, metal-tasting fog. The smoke caught in the back of his throat and made him cough. It was irritating his eyelids, too, but he could ignore that.

The flickering sparks died away, and so did the roar of the cutter. The ends of two crowbars hammered through the opening, probing and twisting, and after a few seconds the doors screeched open, the howl of ancient hinges being forced reverberating across the remains of the domik pile.

The sudden outflow of air sucked much of the smoke with it. It billowed into the darkening sky, and half a dozen figures stepped into the container.

“Doctor Petrovitch, please stand aside. We have no wish to harm you.”

“The feeling isn’t mutual. If you go now, you might just live.” He had nothing to use as a weapon. They had the crowbars, the rotary saw, and several stout lengths of wood.

But they didn’t stop to argue with him: they knew he’d called for help, and knew they only had minutes. Four of them went to the bomb, two—the biggest—stepped between it and Petrovitch. All of them just seemed like regular people: they could have been scaffolders, fitters, plumbers, caterers, drivers.

“Hey, hey!” Petrovitch saw them put straps under the bomb, and tried to push past to reach it. “Don’t do that.”

And while he was distracted, one of the men took his legs out from under him, hitting him across the back of his knees with the crowbar. He didn’t fall, because the other one caught him in a headlock and reached around to the nape of his neck.

They knew exactly what they were doing. Petrovitch felt the cable in his head rotate and jerk out.

Then, and only then, did the pain hit him. Not just from being struck with a metal bar and half-choked, but from all the other injuries that he carried and hadn’t been healed.

They dropped him, and the man swung the crowbar again. He was aiming for Petrovitch’s skull, but struck his arm instead. A bone went crack.

“Nu vse, tebe pizda.” Petrovitch tried to work out where his feet were. He kicked out, then realized that wasn’t the smart thing to do. “Okay. Stop.”

“Sorry, Doctor Petrovitch. No time for that.” They’d cut the cables from the dead man’s switch and the battery. They had the bomb hanging free inside the straps. They were walking out of the container.

“I can’t let you take it.” He tried to stand, and put his hand down on the now vacant table. The jagged ends of the break further up his arm slipped past each other and threatened to puncture his skin.

And while he was gasping and gaping and gagging, they left.