Equations of Life

7

Petrovitch was drinking coffee, brewed in a chipped mug in the Raj Singh back office, when Chain knocked politely on the door and let himself in.

“Ready to go, Petrovitch?” He nodded at the Sikh. “Sran? Keeping it legal?”

“As ever, Inspector Chain.” Sran winked.

“One day, Sran.”

“And until that day, Inspector, we’ll keep trading.”

“Of course you will. Leave the coffee, Petrovitch. I’ve better in my office.” Chain looked around at all the notes pinned to the office walls, testing names, numbers, addresses for a tickle of memory.

Sran wanted Chain out quickly: he leaned forward and took the mug from Petrovitch’s hands. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

Petrovitch threw his bag over his shoulder, and Sran ushered them out: he shooed them all the way to the bottom of the basement steps that led up to street level to make sure the policeman didn’t have time to see clearly what some of the shop’s customers were doing.

The door was shut firmly behind them.

“You know him, then?” said Petrovitch, his ears adjusting to the blare of noise falling on him from above.

“I know everyone,” said Chain, checking inside his jacket. He patted his shoulder holster, and unfastened a tab. “Let’s make this unremarkable, shall we?”

“I thought you’d talked to whoever it was you needed to talk to.”

“I did. You’re not the only one with a price on your head.” Chain led him up the steps, then elbowed his way into the pedestrian stream. Petrovitch was almost standing on the man’s heels so as not to lose him.

They made it to the crossing and, on the next green light, shuffled across the road to a building that sat squat and lonely, surrounded on all sides by streets. Armed police—not paycops, but the real thing—guarded the entrance. They were tall and wide in their armor and utterly anonymous behind their targeting visors. One of them watched Petrovitch as he trailed after Chain, and Petrovitch saw his reflection in the curved faceplate.

He wasn’t looking anywhere near as angelic as he had first thing that morning.

He also had to sign in at the desk. The man behind the bullet-proof glass was brisk and businesslike, but Petrovitch still felt a frisson of fear as the optical scanner was pressed against his eye socket.

His identity passed muster, and he was issued with a tag similar to the one he’d worn in the hospital.

“It’s an offense not to keep this on while you’re in the building,” said the man as he watched Petrovitch clip it around his wrist. “Offense as in five years and a ten-thousand-euro fine.”

“Is that all?” said Petrovitch.

“We can choose to shoot you.” His gaze left Petrovitch and slid onto Chain. “He’s all yours.”

“You’re a humorless bastard, George. Give the kid a break.” Chain took Petrovitch by the arm and pulled him away toward the lifts. “Nothing else in that bag I need to know about, is there?”

“Apart from the hole where someone tried to cut me a new zhopu, no.”

While they waited, Chain inspected the damage. “What did they use?”

“A clear plastic knife. Behind the screen, too.”

“Perspex. Covert weapon of choice at the moment.” The lift doors shuddered apart. “Get in, and we can have our little chat.”

Petrovitch and Chain rode the lift to the seventh floor and walked along the corridor until they reached a door marked “DI H. Chain SCD6.” Petrovitch hadn’t seen another soul the entire time. The place was a ghost ship, adrift in the heart of the Metrozone.

Despite his disquiet, he dropped gratefully into a leather chair opposite Chain’s desk, and watched without comment as the detective busied himself with the domestic chore of making proper coffee.

“I like you,” said Chain, once the water had started gargling noisily through the machine. “So I’ll tell you how the conversation with Marchenkho went.”

“Marchenkho? The organitskaya boss?”

“I’ve got him on speed dial. Now Marchenkho might be a vodka-soused old villain who models himself on Stalin, but we go back a long way, so he takes my calls. I tell him that two of his lieutenants are in the mortuary, having been scraped off the steps of a church, and guess what?”

“He already knows?”

“He already knows.” Chain went to the window and peered past the vertical blinds at the face of the glass monolith being erected opposite. “But he’s not apologizing. Marchenkho apologizes a lot, especially when he doesn’t mean it, so I guess he’s livid that his carefully planned, once-in-a-lifetime chance at taking Oshicora’s daughter hasn’t worked out.”

“This isn’t sounding good,” said Petrovitch, slumping further down.

“I mention that I’d talked to some of the witnesses. That I can link all the innocent bystanders gunned down by those two idiot slabs of Ukrainian pork directly to him.” Chain ambled back to the coffee pot, which hadn’t finished, and opened up a packet of nicotine patches lying on the table. “He doesn’t like that.”

“Does that mean the hired help screwed up?”

“It does indeed.” He peeled a patch off its backing strip, and pulled up his sleeve. He pressed it into place above his wrist, revealing that there was another just further up under his shirt cuff. “You catch on quick, Petrovitch. Tell me what happens next.”

Petrovitch frowned. “You traded me,” he said after a moment.

“Pretty much. I wouldn’t be able to stick anything on Marchenkho, but I might take out one or two of his upper management and they’d be watching their backs for months. So he’s called off the attack dogs on you in exchange for some peace and quiet.” Chain got fed up from waiting, and grabbed the coffee pot. As he poured the black liquid into two mugs, spatters of steam hissed on the hot plate. “Want to know how much you were worth?”

“Not particularly.”

“Two fifty.”

“Thousand?” Petrovitch sat bolt upright. “Huy na ny!”

“Enough for a new heart, even. Marchenkho was really very cross with you.” Chain pushed the coffee along the desk at Petrovitch, and sat awkwardly on one corner. “I hope you don’t take milk, because I haven’t got any. Or sugar. Anyway, putting out a contract takes no time at all. Information like that moves fast, and it reaches all the right people—or wrong people—very quickly. Rescinding that same contract takes longer. News that no one wants to hear crawls along. Sometimes it doesn’t get to everyone who needs to know until it’s too late.”

“Too late. As in me.”

“You’ve got an uncomfortable week ahead, Petrovitch.” Chain slurped at his coffee. “Bugger. Hot.”

While Chain dabbed at his scalded lip, Petrovitch pushed his glasses up his nose and made a little ticking noise with his tongue. “How did they get on to me so fast? I mean, I went from the church, to the hospital, to the church, to the university, and suddenly I’m a target.”

“Two unpalatable options, each equally likely. First, that your face has been lifted from a CCTV file, run through facial recognition software, and your government file rifled for information on where you live, where you work, everything official about you.”

“A krisha.”

“As you say, a bent copper. More likely, you’ve been bugged. At the hospital, I would guess.”

Petrovitch looked down. Now even his own clothes were betraying him. “So for all I know, they’re lining up outside to have a go at me.”

“They’d have to know roughly where you are first.” Chain went behind his desk and pulled out a magic wand from his top drawer. “Abracadabra.”

He waved the wand mystically over Petrovitch, top to toe, and gradually zeroed in on his right boot.

“I’m not taking it off for you,” said Chain, looking up from the floor.

Petrovitch unlaced the boot and pulled it off his foot. Chain wrinkled his nose.

“Sorry,” said Petrovitch.

“I’m guessing girls don’t feature much in your life.” Chain ran the wand around the boot, then inside. He plunged his hand in after it, and after a few moments of pulling faces, retrieved a sticky label. “There.”

Petrovitch took the wand from the detective and inspected it. A line of lights ran up one side, the bottom four already lit. When he brought it close to the label stuck to the end of Chain’s fingers, all the lights flickered on.

He peeled the label off Chain, and as he held it up to the window, he could see shadows of circuitry inside. “What do I do with it?”

“Tear it in half. But if they have access to the CCTV network, they can still track you with cameras, and they know where you live. Anywhere you can hole up safe for a few days?” Chain dragged his coffee closer, and warily tried to drink it.

“I’m a physicist, not a spy.”

“A holiday in Russia?”

“Yeah. That really isn’t a good idea.”

Chain raised his eyebrows. “How so?”

“It just isn’t. Okay?” Petrovitch stared up at the detective, who eventually shrugged and muttered something under his breath.

“Look,” said Chain, “let me explain something to you. I can’t stop you from being killed. I don’t have the resources. I can make it difficult for them, but not impossible. I might even be able to catch your murderer, but I’m sure that’s not going to be of much comfort to you. You’re going to have to help yourself. Any good at that?”

Petrovitch nodded slowly. “Yeah. Not bad.”

“Good. So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet. Chain, what is it with you and the Oshicoras?”

The detective slid off his desk and paced the floor. When he spoke, it was with messianic zeal. “I was here. Here for everything. Armageddon: the shock of the first explosions—Dublin, Belfast, Sellafield, the emptying of the countryside, the radioactive rain, the streets choked with refugees, kids—so many kids without their parents—everywhere. We could have lost control in so many different ways, torn apart from the inside, swamped from the outside, or just one of those fucking heretics with their holy nuclear bombs getting across the M25: but we didn’t. We kept it together. We took everybody in. Housed them. Fed them. Found something for them to do.”

Petrovitch sighed, and Chain made a rumbling cough.

“Am I boring you?” he asked.

“Just get on with it, Inspector.”

“What we did was a miracle. Then Oshicora turned up, eight years ago, unseen amongst all the other refugees that were washing around the world. Marchenkho’s organitskaya and every other criminal gang in the Metrozone has been losing ground to Oshicora’s yakuza ever since.”

“He’s not yakuza,” said Petrovitch. “His men have got too many fingers.”

“Neo-yakuza, then. Corporate samurai, whatever you want to call them. They prey on us, suck us dry—virus and host. And if the infection was in just one place, it wouldn’t matter, but Oshicora runs his organization like a franchise, each outlet selling his specific brand of criminality to the masses. They’re turning up everywhere, and what we’ve worked for, what I’ve worked for, will have been for nothing. This city brought to its knees by a…” Words finally failed him. He threw up his hands and dropped heavily into his seat.

Petrovitch scratched his chin and pushed his glasses up his nose. “All that must make him very rich.”

“Most people don’t get it. They don’t understand why the police just can’t do something about it. I’m guessing that you get it perfectly.”

“Better than you could possibly imagine.” His coffee at a drinkable temperature, Petrovitch gulped at it until it was gone. “Thanks for the lecture, but I think I should be going.”

His abruptness startled Chain. “You said you had nowhere to go.”

“That’s because I hadn’t. Now I do.” He was halfway to the door, when he realized he’d forgotten what he’d originally come for. “You still have something of mine.”

“Ah, yes: your Remote Access Terminal. Half-gigabyte bandwidth, two-fifty-six-bit encryption, satellite connectivity and a touch interface. Chinese kit, top of the range, does pretty much everything. Just how does a kid like you afford something like that? More to the point, what would you need one for?”

“You’re the detective. You figure it out.” Petrovitch’s jaw jutted out. “Just get it for me, okay?”

Chain patted his pockets, and ended up using the hardwired desk phone. He said a few words, listened to the response, and a faint smile raised the corners of his mouth.

He put the phone down. “Hard luck.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m afraid not. Someone’s swiped it from the evidence room. I’ll be making inquiries, don’t worry. You’ll get it back, eventually.” Chain looked almost happy. “So where are you going, Petrovitch?”

“Do you honestly think I’d tell you? You can’t even keep evidence locked up. What good would you be with a secret?” Petrovitch wrestled with the unfamiliar door handle. “Just leave me alone.”

“You know my number. Call me when you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?” He finally got the door open.

“Ready for when you tell me why you saved Sonja Oshicora.”

“Potselui mou zhopy, Chain.”

Petrovitch fumed all the way down to the ground floor. He still had the sticky bug on the end of his fingers. He made a face at it, then carefully pasted it on the inside of his police-issue wrist tag. When he passed the front desk, he ripped the tag off and slapped it face-up on the counter in a carefully calculated act of rage.

Outside, he looked at the buildings around him and headed north. Toward Green Park.