The Curve of the Earth

18




It did.

There were full bottles of bourbon and vodka and rum, with mixers, all crammed into a little cupboard in the bulkhead. Petrovitch unwound the cap on the vodka, grabbed two glasses and splashed generous portions in each.

He banged the bottle down on the table between the seats and gripped his glass.

“Na pobedy!”

“Uh, that.” They both drank deep, but only Newcomen tried to spit his out again. Most of it had evaporated before it left his mouth. He tried to speak, but his vocal cords refused to work.

Petrovitch eyed the bottle and considered another finger or two. Or three.

“Maybe not.” He resisted the urge to hurl the glass, and tossed it into the seat next to him. “No one likes to hear themselves called useless. Least of all by their boss. But do you get it now? Me sticking my fingers in your chest isn’t what sealed your fate. You were shafted before you were even offered the job.”

“What do I do now?” croaked Newcomen.

“Nothing’s changed. Lucy’s still missing, and we’re going to find her.”

“You heard what Buchannan said. They think she’s dead.”

“He didn’t say that. He said that she mustn’t be found.”

“But…”

“I remember a time not so long ago when I told you that if you said that again, I’d kill you.” Petrovitch bared his teeth. “She is alive. Do you understand? You’ve been pretty much wrong about everything so far, so I’m not going to listen to you. You don’t know. You can’t know.”

“These Ben and Jerry characters: they told Buchannan he had to stop looking for her.”

“Yeah. What’s a better way of doing that than leaning on the head of the Seattle field office? Let me think.” Petrovitch pondered for a moment, then delivered his verdict. “How about by turning up with the body? That they haven’t is how I know she’s still alive, and she’s waiting for me to come and get her.”

“What if there’s no body left? What if they’ve disintegrated her or irradiated her or burnt her to a crisp?” Newcomen gagged. Petrovitch had him by the throat again. “Someone has to tell you these things.”

“Just one more word.”

“I’ve nothing left to lose, Petrovitch. You’re absolutely right on that. They’ve taken my career, my girl, my country, and they’ve left me with nothing. Those were my life, everything I lived for. The reason for getting up in the morning. All that was important to me has gone. This is it now. Just me. Do whatever the hell you want.”

Petrovitch let go, and forced himself back. They stared at each other.

“I just want Lucy to come home.”

“I know you do. I know you want it more than anything else in the world, and that if I was a father, I’d feel the exact same way. And,” Newcomen paused to scrub at his chin and look out of the cabin window at the freezing cold forest, “I’m sorry that my government has decided that it’s okay to bury a twentyfour-year-old woman without a trace. I think I need to make that up to you.”

“You’ll come north with me?”

“I’ll come north. I need to know what happened to her almost as much as you do.”

“Okay.” Petrovitch smiled ruefully. “I was going to offer you the option to bail. I could take you to Vancouver. You could claim asylum there – you wouldn’t be the first American to make that journey by a long stretch. We have an understanding with the Canadians, so I’m pretty certain it would be fine.”

“That’s not going to be necessary.” Newcomen pulled a face. “If there’s a later? Perhaps.”

“I thought, when we started all this, that it wouldn’t be this bad. That they were just being obstructive because of her surname. Seriously, what the huy is going on? What have they done that requires all this sneaking around?” He gave in, and snagged the vodka bottle once more. He poured himself a small measure and, after offering it to Newcomen, screwed the lid back on and put it away. “It’s like they’ve put a massive neon sign over the North Slope and told us, ‘Look away. Nothing to see here.’ It doesn’t make any sense.”

Petrovitch tilted his wrist and drank.

“That doesn’t sound like a stupid idea,” said Newcomen. “Not any more.”

“No. No, it doesn’t. Which theory of history do you subscribe to?”

“Sorry?”

“Cock-up or conspiracy?”

“Most events aren’t planned.” Newcomen laced his fingers together and leaned forward on to his knees. “Some junior guy at the front, no specific orders to do one thing or another, uses his initiative. War breaks out and people write books about all the careful preparation that went on months, years beforehand. It’s rarely as neat as that.”

“So. If all they’re doing is reacting to events as fast as they can, we need to work out the order in which they happened. For that, we need evidence.”

“We can get evidence. I’m still an FBI agent.” He looked up at Petrovitch. “For the moment.”

“You’re still listed as active. Buchannan might suspect you’ve gone feral, but I don’t think, given his confession, he’s going to be telling anyone soon. And what they’ll be counting on is your loyalty: in a crunch, they know which way you’ll turn.”

“Do they?”

“They think they do. I wouldn’t count on them being wrong, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“That your sudden change of heart is conditional, depending on the stakes. If it’s just a few security officers going off the reservation, you’ll stick with it. If it means destroying everything you’ve ever known? No way. Somewhere in the middle is where you draw the line, but you have no idea where that line is. What’s more, it’ll keep shifting.” Petrovitch shrugged. “I can live with the uncertainty, not because I have insurance that if you turn against me, it’ll be the last thing you ever do, but because I’m more comfortable with moral ambiguity than I am with laser-like certainty.”

He stood up and stretched, pressing his hands against the low roof of the cabin.

“It’s a long way, and it’s not getting any shorter by us waiting,” he announced, and shuffled back to the cockpit.

Newcomen followed, and slumped into the co-pilot’s seat. The display lit up, and lights started winking into life. The engines started to turn, breaking the naturalistic calm with their crude modernity.

“Last chance to get off the Futility Express,” said Petrovitch.

“I’ll stick around. See what happens. As long as you hold off on choking me to death.”

“I’ll do my best. I’m a man of sudden impulses.” He returned his gaze to the forest outside. “We’ll take off hard. The wind’s getting up, and I don’t want to ram a tree.”

Newcomen took the hint and buckled up.

Petrovitch overlaid his vision with all the head-up displays he’d need. What was more important was that he could feel the aircraft. There was pent-up energy in the batteries; there was fuel sloshing in the tanks. The jets were warming up, and the antigravity pods on their streamlined outriggers were waiting to fulfil their destiny. The skin of the fuselage was his skin, the throttle his legs: he could taste its well-being with his tongue.

All he had to do was jump and run.

He poised: the aircraft came level, hovered for a moment, then rose straight up to treetop height. The engines flared, and steady pressure pushed his meat body back into his seat. Outside of it, he was leaning forward, angling his flight up and over the rise of the island, spilling down the other side. He could spread his arms wide and the whole sky was his.

It was his drug, his joy and his peace.

He aimed north-north-east, heading deeper into Canada and avoiding the finger of land that was Alaska on the Pacific coast. Let the Americans play their games: he had some surprises of his own ready and waiting in the high Arctic.

Trees and snow, rock and ice: pretty much all there was, all the way to the seasonally frozen pole. That, and a few scattered townships that were mostly no more than a collection of huts and an airstrip. These days, now a plane didn’t need a runway for anything more than to stop itself from sinking into the melting permafrost, even those were falling into disuse. All these communities needed was a concrete slab and a tank of methanol.

Which suited Petrovitch just fine. The plane he was flying was modern, fast, and drank like a fish, the airborne equivalent of a Ferrari. He was more used to clunky cargo carriers, slow and steady, and parsimonious with the fuel. His range was little more than nine hundred k, and he had to go a lot further than that.

He hit the first stop dead on. With satellites to guide him and a map in his head, there was no guesswork. One moment there was nothing to see but white-capped trees; the next there were grey roofs laid out in a grid pattern and streams of woodsmoke rising into the sky.

He circled once, taking a good look at all the aerials, dishes and wires strung from chimneys and eaves, then sat the plane down on the pad in a blizzard of loose snow.

Petrovitch blinked, and he was back in the cockpit. Newcomen was beside him, eyes closed and head back, snoring slightly. They’d been flying for an hour and a half.

“Hey, Newcomen. Wake up.”

The man started violently: the only thing to stop him falling to the floor was the fact that he was strapped in.

“What? What’s wrong?” He gripped the arms of his seat. “Why’ve we landed?”

“Because I don’t want to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. And if you thought parts of Iowa were empty, we’re flying over places that have probably never known a human footprint.” Petrovitch unbuckled and headed for the door. “I need to find someone to take payment for the fuel and help me hook up the hoses.”

“I can do that last thing.”

“Sure you can.” He started to open the cabin door, and the cold didn’t so much steal in as conduct a full-frontal assault with tanks. “It’s minus twenty outside: combined with the wind chill, it gives a figure of minus twenty-eight, which is more than enough to freeze flesh to metal. Which you’d know if you’d asked your link.”

To illustrate the point, he pulled his sleeves down over his hands before he climbed down into the hard-packed snow. The door started to close again.

“It’s there to be used, Newcomen. Freezone people know that.”

Petrovitch stamped his way to the nearest hut. Nothing to mark it as anything different, but before he’d landed, he’d tagged a map of the town with all the information he needed. It was so instinctive, he didn’t really need to think about it any more: it was just there.

The door was stiff, and he had to kick it. Inside was yellow light and brown shelves.

“Hey,” said the grizzled proprietor, looking up from his screen reader. He watched Petrovitch knock the snow off his boots. He knew everyone for a hundred k in every direction, but not this guy. Then he took a second look.

“Hey,” said Petrovitch. “Great beard.”

“I’m…” He almost said honoured, then figured that wasn’t the thing to say. “What can I get you?”

“I’ve hired some fancy pimped-up executive jet that’s currently parked out on the pan. Good for outrunning the USAF, but not so hot for economic driving. So I guess it’s fill ’er up.”

“Sure.” He levered himself up, and reached for his long caribou-skin coat, his furry hat and massive gloves. “Anything else?”

Petrovitch looked around the shelves. “I don’t want to seem pushy, but does anyone do hot food here? I’ve been through all kinds of hell today and I’m still in a hurry, but I’m as much in need of refuelling as the plane.”

The shopkeeper narrowed his dark eyes. “I’ll make a call. Ten minutes good for you?”

“Yeah. That would be brilliant. There are two of us.”

Petrovitch kicked his heels and looked at the stock. There was pretty much everything anyone could possibly want and couldn’t kill or cut for themselves. The shelves kept on going back, and there was barely any room to walk between them.

He was admiring the wood axes when the door opened again, and the temperature inside dropped like a stone.

“Archie?”

“He’s out fuelling the plane,” called Petrovitch. He stepped out from between the shelves and saw a tiny Inuit woman with a foil-lined cardboard box.

“Then this will be for you.” She held out the box and he walked over to claim it.

“Bacon,” he said.

“And cheese.” She looked up at him from her wrinkled brown face. “Hope you find your daughter, Dr Petrovitch.”

“Thanks.”

“When you get to where you’re going, tell them Mary wants them to look after you.”

She left the same way she’d come in, with the minimum of fuss and no expectation of payment. Petrovitch put the box on the counter and patted his pockets, looking for his cards.

Shuffling through them, he found his Canadian dollars, checked the local meths prices, added ten per cent, then went back for the axe. It was a beautiful piece of work, easy to swing and effortlessly sharp. He added it to the bill and pressed it to the reader.

He gathered up the box and the axe haft, and stepped out into the cold again. The man – Archie, he had to assume – was swaddled up well against the weather, with barely any flesh visible. He raised his hand and unhooked the fuel hose as Petrovitch approached.

“You’re good for a few hundred more.”

“I’ve paid already. If it’s not enough, tell the Freezone.”

“We make most of the stuff ourselves in a digester. It’s not free, but it’s cheap.”

“You probably overcharged me then. Keep the change.” Petrovitch told the plane to open the door, then reached up to slide the box of food inside, and followed it with the axe. “I thought I might just need one.”

“You never know.” Archie took off his glove to shake hands. “Good luck.”

“Yeah. That and the axe, we’re sorted.” He climbed up, and shut out the night.

Newcomen was still in the cockpit, staring out through the windscreen. He looked around idly, and Petrovitch raised his eyebrows.

“That smells good,” said Newcomen.

“One of the old girls fixed us some food.” He pushed the box ahead of him and indicated that the man help himself. “The gun’s for bears.”

“Sorry?” Newcomen tried to speak around a plate-sized bread bun filled with rashers of bacon and melting squares of processed cheese.

“In my bag. I know you’ve been looking. The gun has explosive bullets and will reduce a polar bear to chunks of husky meat. It’s important where we’re going.”

Eventually Newcomen started chewing again. When he’d swallowed, he said: “You know it’s illegal to smuggle a gun into Canada.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why, unlike you, I have a permit for mine. Don’t worry,” said Petrovitch. “I won’t turn you in.”