Equations of Life

16

An old, stooped woman, head wrapped in a blanket, knocked on the side of Chain’s car. Chain raised his eyebrows and waved her away. Her tapping became more insistent.

“It’s me, you blind old kozel. Open up.” Petrovitch moved the blanket aside far enough to reveal his ice-blue eyes.

Chain sighed and sprung the locks. Petrovitch heaved the car door open and slipped inside, bundling the blanket into the backseat. He pulled the door shut again, and looked around.

“Guns?”

“I have one. I’m the police, remember: we don’t go handing out weapons to members of the public.”

“Funny how they seem to get hold of them anyway.” He reached behind him and pulled out a pistol from his waistband. It was tiny; Petrovitch could conceal it in the palm of his hand.

“I’m disappointed,” said Chain. He turned the engine over and waited for it to catch.

“Yeah. My yelda’s much bigger.” He made the gun disappear again. “How about the armor?”

“That I can let you have. You will have to sign for it, though, and according to the form, account for any damage it might suffer while in your care.” Chain cocked an ear at the rattle coming from under the bonnet, then decided it was no worse than usual. He pulled out into the traffic without warning.

When the sound of horns had died down, Petrovitch put his feet up on the dash and leaned back against the headrest. “Nice car.”

“You’d better not be wasting my time. I will charge you if you are.”

“Yeah. Course you will. Don’t worry, it’ll be worth it.”

“So: are you going to tell me where we’re going, or should I just drive around for a while?”

“My lab. You know the way.” Petrovitch took his glasses off and held them up to the early morning light. They weren’t quite as filthy as Chain’s car. “While we’re on that subject: if you ever, ever try and plant one of your stupid little bugs on me again, I’ll cut you like I’m butchering a svinya and turn your guts into sausage. You got that?”

Chain tutted. “Wrong side of the bed, was it?”

“Any bed would have been nice. The only reason I’m talking to you is because I can use you. The moment that becomes unnecessary is the moment I dump you like govno.”

“Your turn of phrase is as poetic as ever.” The car jerked to a halt. The lights strung across the road were green, but they were going nowhere. “What the hell is the matter with the traffic now?”

Chain reached forward and fetched his satnav a couple of hefty blows with his hand. The screen flickered but refused to indicate an alternative route.

“You could always put on your blue light,” said Petrovitch.

“Ha. Ha. It’s been like this since midnight. Random, local gridlock, coming and going. Disappearing in one area only to appear in another.”

Petrovitch scratched his ear. “Has it got worse in the last thirty minutes or so?”

Chain looked across at his passenger. “Why would it?”

“Possibly because there’s a massive bot-net trying to take down the Oshicora servers. If that was the case, there’d be a lot of extra load flowing around the Metrozone. It might interfere with the traffic management. Just saying.” Petrovitch stared studiously out of the window.

Chain shook his head. “Are you going to tell me what all this is about?”

“No. You’ll have to see it for yourself.”

“Maybe you should’ve let me see it before you started screwing about.” The lights cycled to red without them moving. “Can this get any worse?”

The first raindrop left a dusty circle on the windscreen. It was there long enough to ball and run down the glass to the bottom before the clouds opened and rain drummed against the roof.

“Clearly it can,” said Petrovitch. The car in front edged forward half a length, and Chain claimed the space as his own.

The rain continued to blatter down, hard enough to make it seem like there was boiling water rising from the ground. The pedestrians either took shelter where they could, or hunched their shoulders and accepted the indignity.

Chain put his wipers on, smearing the grit and grease in two arcs. “I can remember when rain—any rain—meant danger. Everyone would listen to the weather forecasts and sirens would sound in the streets.”

“Yeah, pretty much the same,” said Petrovitch. “Except we didn’t have satellites or sirens. We just got wet and took iodine pills when we could.”

“This isn’t meant to be a game of ‘my life was worse than yours,’ you know. And your country never got bombed.”

“All we had to put up with was your fall-out; nuclear and economic. You had food relief; we didn’t. You had rebuilding projects; we didn’t. You had someone to blame; trivial, really, but we didn’t. Everyone looked after poor Europe, and we were left swinging in the wind.”

“Surprising,” said Chain, gazing out at the traffic lights as they went from amber to green, “how much damage a handful of madmen can do. Why aren’t we going anywhere?”

“You want to get out and walk? Or do you want to shut up?”

Chain sighed and scrubbed at his cheeks with his hands. They sat in silence, watching the rain fall.

“You heard from Sorenson?” asked Chain.

“Not since I warned him he might have carried your bug into the heart of Oshicora’s operations.”

Chain pulled a face. “Did I tell you about his father?”

“What about his father?”

“His old man was political—Reconstruction to the core—assassinated six, seven years ago. Case is still open. All the fingers pointed at Junior, but no one could pin it on him. Apparently, sniping’s not his style. Explosives are, though.” Chain leaned forward and set the wipers to double-time. Despite the deluge, people were getting out of their cars and walking toward the front of the queue. “What? What are they doing?”

Petrovitch reached behind him for his blanket. “There’s only one way to find out.” He pulled the material over his head again and opened the car door. The rain poured in, and within seconds he was soaked.

Chain turned up his collar and joined him—making sure to lock the car behind him. The crowd was uncharacteristically quiet; hushed enough to hear the soft roar of the rain, the scrape of boots on tarmac.

As they walked forward through the stalled lines of vehicles, they could see a line forming across the junction, deepening as more people joined it. Chain used his badge and his elbows to work his way to the front, and Petrovitch tucked in behind.

When they got there, they found the cross-wise street devoid of traffic: on the other side of the junction was a similar mass of onlookers. The lights were red in every direction.

“That’s not right,” said Chain.

Petrovitch tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. “Neither is that.”

A solid phalanx of cars was crawling down Gloucester Place in the direction of the river. Every lane was taken up, four abreast, rolling slowly in a perfect line. Chain was about to step out and demand an explanation when Petrovitch touched his shoulder again.

“Don’t.”

There were people in the cars. From the frantic banging on the inside of the windows and the rattle of door handles, they didn’t seem too pleased to be there. Some of the drivers were screaming into their phones, and some of them were just screaming. They pulled at their steering wheels, dragged at the handbrakes, all to no avail.

They drove inexorably on.

The front of the procession drew level with them. Chain tried the door from the outside. It was locked, but neither could the wild-haired woman inside get it open.

“What are you doing?” he yelled at her.

“Help me,” she mouthed.

“Chain?”

“Not now, Petrovitch.” He pulled his gun and reversed it in his hand.

“This is important! All these cars, all of them: they’re new.”

“What?” Chain kept pace with the car and readied himself. He shooed the woman away from the passenger door and imitated what he was going to do.

“They’re all this year’s or last year’s models; top of the range.”

“You’re not making any sense.” The rain had penetrated everywhere; everything was wet, clinging, dripping.

“They’re all automatic. They drive themselves, Chain.”

Chain brought the butt of his gun down against the window. It bounced off with the same force, and he let out a strangled cry of pain.

“That’ll be toughened glass, then,” said Petrovitch. “Let’s try this instead.”

He stepped around the front of the car and took his bug-detecting wand from around his neck. He ran it up one side of the bonnet, then the other. At the top, on the driver’s side, he got a signal.

He reached into his waistband and dragged out his snub-nosed little pistol. He pointed it down at the metalwork and pumped the trigger, once, twice, three times. Three sharp whipcracks; three holes.

The car stalled. The doors unlocked with a clunk. On hearing the sound, the driver threw herself at the passenger door, and Chain hauled her out.

The rest of the cars carried on. The car behind nudged the back of the disabled one, and started to shove it forward. Petrovitch skipped out of the way and stood in the torrent in the gutter as the grind of metal and the faint pattering of desperate hands on glass made its stately way down the street.

Thirty cars in all, no traffic in front, none behind. The crowd began to murmur and disperse, the show over.

Chain was struggling with his bruised gun-hand and the woman. She gasped and mouthed, and no words would come out. All the while, she grabbed at parts of his jacket to be reassured that he was real.

“Petrovitch? What did you do?”

“I killed it.” Petrovitch worked the slide and ejected the chambered shell into his hand. He tucked his gun away again.

“Explain. Excuse me, miss. Will you stop pawing at me?” He finally got his good arm up and held her away.

“I blew its brains out. Even your car’s not so old that it hasn’t got electronics under the bonnet.” Petrovitch took his glasses off and shook them free of water. “That’s what you’re going to have to do to each and every one of them.”

“Me?”

“You and your cop friends. Unless you’re happy for this to carry on?”

The broken car beached itself against a lamp-post further up the street. The obstacle it made caused ripples in the neat lines of cars, so that the advancing front was no longer perfectly straight.

Chain looked at the woman, who had started to wander away in a daze. She walked slowly and erratically toward her car, and when she was within range, she started to kick viciously at it with her heels.

“Is this your fault?” asked Chain.

“No more than it is the Oshicora Corporation’s. Which is to say, I don’t know.” He put his glasses back on, fat raindrops clinging to the lenses. “But I don’t see how it can be.”

“I’m going to have to call this in. I’m going to have to get help.” Chain flexed his fingers to check they all still worked. “Don’t think you’re off the hook.”

“Meet me at the lab. And I still want that body armor.”

“In exchange for that pathetic pea-shooter you call a gun.”

“Potselui mou zhopy, Chain. I seem to be the only one around here who knows what he’s doing.” Petrovitch’s blanket had fallen in the road. He wrung it out the best he could, adding to the flood at his feet. Then he held it over him and shook his head rapidly to try and clear his glasses.

“When did I stop being Inspector Chain?”

“When I caught you out, zjulik.” He watched Chain’s face fall. “Go on, go. The terrifying truth is that people’s lives might depend on you getting your srachishche moving.”

The rain continued to fall as they stared each other down. The lights changed; red, amber, green. Almost at once, horns started to sound, and those slow in clearing the crossing walked a little faster.

Chain looked down the road past Petrovitch at the block of cars gliding serenely as one again. He bared his teeth in a feral snarl and turned away, back to his own vehicle.

Petrovitch crossed to the other side, and on. He found that he was wet, cold, hungry, he couldn’t go home, he could barely risk going to the lab without police protection, and he had the chill metal touch of gun against his waist.

He realized that he needed to be dry and warm and well-fed, or he’d end up stumbling and slouching to his death. He looked up with his water-spattered eyes at the street names and recognized where he was.

It was only a short walk, but he was shivering by the time he arrived. He could feel his heart large and fragile under his scrawny ribs as he took the steps up to the big wooden doors, still marked with bullets.

The door was closed. He took hold of the black iron hoop and banged it down. The sound echoed away inside. He did it again, then again, then hunched up on the narrow slice of dry stone provided by the doorway.

A bolt slid back, and the door opened to make a sliver of darkness.

He could see her narrowed eye regarding him from her great height.

“Sanctuary,” he said.