The Curve of the Earth

5




Petrovitch sat on a chair at the end of the bed, hunched over in the shadows thrown by the drawn curtains. Metrozone sounds leaked in, despite the triple glazing, and outside in the corridor a man and a woman laughed on their way to breakfast.

Newcomen stirred, buried his head deeper into his soft white pillow, then opened his eyes. He gasped and sat up, clutching at his bare, almost hairless chest.

“It wasn’t a dream,” said Petrovitch.

There was a small strip of canned skin, just left of Newcomen’s sternum, no longer or wider than his thumb. The colour matching was good enough, and in time there wouldn’t even be a scar.

“What have you done to me? Where am I? How did I get here?” He pulled the duvet up to his chin. It made a poor shield against Petrovitch’s forensic gaze.

“You’re in your hotel room, I carried you in, and we have to be at the airport in a few hours.” Petrovitch levered himself upright and pulled the curtains back to reveal the north bank of the Thames. “As for the rest of it? Michael’s been busy calculating the odds of not just getting Lucy back, but even getting me back. Frankly, they weren’t looking good, so we’ve shortened them. A little. What we’ve done is really shitty, especially since it seems you’re not actually that important in the whole scheme of things, but we have to work with what we’ve got.”

He went to the wardrobe where he’d hung up Newcomen’s suit, more or less neatly, and laid it across the bottom of the bed. There was a freshly ironed shirt, and the phone tie too, and he’d previously found spare socks and boxers in the ridiculously sized suitcase.

“You need to get up, get washed and dressed, then meet me in the restaurant downstairs. Unless you want me to call room service.”

“I have a bomb? In here?” Newcomen’s fingers searched where the wound should have been.

“Okay, yes. May as well fill you in on the details. We’ve inserted an explosive capsule into the muscle surrounding your left ventricle. It is very small, very difficult to find even if someone’s looking for it, and we’ve made it as radio-transparent as we can so it doesn’t trip any sort of scanner. Despite its size, it’s more than capable of making a hole big enough that you’ll bleed out in five seconds. Ten tops, but your blood pressure will fall like a stone and you’ll probably be unconscious for most of that.”

While Newcomen digested this, Petrovitch buffed a pair of brown leather shoes with his sleeve.

“What,” said the American, “what if I don’t co-operate?”

“What sort of dumb-arse question is that? I had hoped that despite all your shortcomings, you were at least smart.” Petrovitch put the shoes on the floor as a pair, toes pointing out. “This is the deal: if I die, you die. If I’m about to die, you die. If my diplomatic status is revoked and I’m imprisoned, you die. If I discover that you and your Federal colleagues have been giving me the runaround, withholding information and generally pissing me off, guess what? You die. If you try to take the bomb out, you die. If you tell anyone about the bomb, you die. Simply put, if you don’t do your damnedest to get my daughter back, you die.”

“She’s not even your…” started Newcomen, then caught himself.

“She’s mine. She’s all of the Freezone’s, too, but she is mine. Now get up: I expect you to be downstairs in ten minutes.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” It wasn’t so much a rebellion from Newcomen as a flash of petulance.

“I’m not going to go around making you my suka because I can. I will, however, kick your sorry arse every time you act like a peesa. Just grow a pair, will you?” He tapped his non-existent wristwatch. “Ten.”

Petrovitch walked out and down the corridor that seemed both too narrow and too low-ceilinged to be sensible. He could reach up and touch the recessed lights. There were lifts, but he ignored them and took the stairwell instead, bouncing down the steps two and three at a time.

His heart responded to the exercise by spinning up. He was tingling by the time he reached the bottom, seven floors later.

He parked himself in the restaurant by a window seat and watched the waves lap dangerously close to the top of the flood defences. By the time Newcomen arrived, looking damp and grim, he was on his second cup of coffee and pleasantly wired.

“Sit,” he said, and pushed the opposite chair away from the table with a foot. He continued to stare out of the window while a waitress brought Newcomen his own coffee.

Both men ignored the self-service buffet for the moment.

“You’ve ruined my life,” said Newcomen.

“Yeah: as I’ve already explained, your life was ruined long before we first met, but not by me. Surprisingly enough, I want you to live. I want you to help me find Lucy. Your bosses want exactly the opposite. They don’t want me to find Lucy, and they don’t care if you live or die. Whatever’s happened up there on the North Slope is much more important than your frankly insignificant existence.” Petrovitch nodded outside. “You’ve been sold down a river which looks a lot like that one. Big, cold, and supremely indifferent.”

“If I promise to do everything you ask, will you deactivate the bomb?”

“No, you’ll have to dig it out yourself. Though I will free you of your obligations when we’re done.”

Newcomen raised his eyebrows along with his hopes. “No matter what the outcome is?” He didn’t say, if Lucy turns up dead, and Petrovitch was grateful.

“No matter what. I’m not spiteful. I have as many revenge fantasies as the next guy, but mostly I’m a peaceable man who just want to be left alone.”

“Are you going to ask me to do anything illegal?”

“Probably. At some point, there’ll come a time when it becomes obvious – even to you – that our search is being blocked. You’ll do what I think necessary, however distasteful it might be.” Petrovitch shrugged. “Better a black mark against your name than a black line through it.”

Newcomen clattered a teaspoon against the side of his cup. “Am I allowed—”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say!.”

“Yeah, I do. You can’t tell anyone, not even your fiancée.”

“I haven’t even mentioned her yet.”

Images flashed into Petrovitch’s vision of a slender but vital blonde-haired, green-eyed young women with a ready smile and a quick temper.

“You’ve got no secrets left, Newcomen. Not from me. Christine Logan, only child of Edward Logan, CEO of Logan Realties. Twenty-four, and pretty in a spliced, cheerleadery sort of way. Wedding date is set for this September twenty-second, at St Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral.” He regarded the man across the table. “To be honest, I’m surprised you even met, let alone were allowed to date her.”

Newcomen puffed up. “What do you mean by that?”

“She’s virtually Reconstruction royalty, and you’re a low-ranking FBI agent.” A thought occurred to Petrovitch, but he kept it to himself. “Good luck with that: you’re going to need it.”

“She loves me.”

“I’m not questioning that. It’s whether she’ll still love you after this.”

“Of course she will. That’s a terrible thing to say. Though,” Newcomen grimaced, “if I get fired, how am I supposed to support her?”

“Maybe Teddy’ll give you a job. Maybe he won’t. Look,” said Petrovitch, “I’m not unsympathetic. I didn’t have to worry about the in-laws, unless you count Maddy’s mother joining the Outies and trying to kill her. I did have to worry about Sonja, but that was later.” He drifted off in a reverie of his own, then snapped back. “If it’ll mean a little more co-operation on your part and a little less coercion on mine, I’ll hold off the black-ops stuff until absolutely necessary. Fair?”

“Fair?”

“Well, not fair. But it’s the only concession you’re going to get out of me, so take it or leave it. Now,” Petrovitch twisted in his seat, “breakfast is calling me. What I’m going to do is fill up on fried food, and maybe a big stack of pancakes, then I’m taking us to the airport.”

“You’re not even a resident here. I hope you’ve paid the supplement.” Newcomen flapped his napkin open and rested it on his place setting.

“I did try. They wouldn’t let me.”

“They wouldn’t let you?”

“No. Look around the place. Tell me what you see.” Petrovitch stood up and surveyed the scene.

“I…” Newcomen knew he was being tested, but couldn’t work out the question. “There aren’t that many guests. A hotel like this in America would be busy.”

“Anything else?”

“There’s not such a wide choice of food?”

“Yeah. Your eyes are sliding right past the waiters and waitresses, the cooks and the receptionists. Ten years since I last saved this city, and I still can’t pay for a meal.” Petrovitch headed for the food counter, weaving through the other diners.

He was already loading his plate with bacon when Newcomen came up beside him. “So what you’re saying is, no one questioned you when you walked in here last night with me slung over one shoulder. And no one ever would.”

“They even found me a wheelchair to put you in. There’s no record of me ever being here. If you asked them direct, to a man and woman they’d deny they saw me, spoke to me, gave me any help at all. I’m like a ghost in the machine. You know, I love hotel breakfast mushrooms. They get to cook in their own juices in a way you can’t manage on your own with just a frying pan.” He helped himself to a large spoonful, and then a few more. “That’s the way it is, Newcomen. The Metrozone is still home.”

“How very tribal of you.” Newcomen’s plate carried a couple of pieces of brown toast, nothing more.

“Your room was bugged, by the way. I took care of it.”

“Bugged.”

“NSA surveillance. Pretty basic.”

“The NSA?” Newcomen was reduced to merely repeating the key points.

“I expected them to try. They expected me to take them out. It’s an opening gambit, just a warm-up before the main event.”

“Main event?”

“Yeah, they’re going to want to keep close tabs on us once we get to the States. Who we talk to, what we say, where we go, what we see. They’ll use all the tricks in the book, and then a few more on top.” Petrovitch shrugged again, nearly dislodging the triangles of fried bread he had balanced on his thumb. “It’ll be fine. I’ll feed them enough that they’ll think it’s working, while we get on with the important stuff.”

“We’re being surveilled by the NSA? I’m a Federal agent: they can’t do that.”

“They can if either they’ve cleared it with the Director, they’ve an executive order, or they just don’t care. I do notice that you don’t dismiss the idea out of hand and call me a liar, though. We might actually be able to work together.” Petrovitch looked down at his plate and decided he couldn’t physically fit anything else on it without inviting disaster. He headed back to his place, where with no ceremony at all, he proceeded to demolish his food, a layer at a time.

Newcomen scraped some butter across the dry surface of his toast and nibbled at it, while looking with increasing disgust at his tablemate.

“What?” said Petrovitch, struggling to keep one of his beloved mushrooms in his mouth.

“Your manners. They’re disgusting.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got a lot of hardware to power. As fun as it is for the fuel cells to start consuming my body fat, I’d rather they digested this stuff first.” He forced the errant fungus back in with a piece of crispy potato square. “Beats being plugged into the mains every night.”

Newcomen put his toast down and stared longingly at it for moment, before pushing it away.

“Your loss.” Petrovitch snagged the uneaten slice and chewed off one corner. “I appreciate you can’t see anything beyond this, that it feels like your world’s ended and everything you’ve spent the last few years working for is in ruins. That’s not necessarily the case. Assuming you don’t do something congenitally stupid, there will be an afterwards. I can’t tell you what it might look like, because a lot of that’s up to you. One thing I don’t want happening is you fainting on me every five minutes because you’re too depressed to eat. So get that yebani toast down you and show some backbone.”

They sat more or less ignoring each other. But Petrovitch was watching Newcomen’s every move, every slow grind of his jaw, every frown of his brows.

[His reaction is not what I predicted.]

“He’s corruptible. In a good way, I think. I can make him care: it’s just going to take a little longer, that’s all.”

[You will be on the continental USA later on today. If the State Department’s schedule is to be believed, you are expected in Seattle by nightfall, and Alaska the day after. Time – real time – is critically short if you are going to break this man’s Reconstructionist conditioning.]

“I’ve already planted the virus in his subconscious. Sooner or later it’s going to infect his whole mind. All I have to do is find the right trigger.”

[We need to identify points past which it will be necessary to kill him and for you to continue alone.]

“I think those points will become self-evident the deeper into this pizdets we dig.”

[Even so, if we list them now, I can remind you of them when we reach them. If we are trying to induce Stockholm syndrome in him, it is also true that you might feel reluctant to follow through your previous intentions.]

Petrovitch scratched at his chin. Newcomen was choking down his last piece of toast.

“I’m already there. Doesn’t mean I won’t do it, though. Not if Lucy’s depending on me.”

[She is.]

“I’m still a bastard, aren’t I? Still using people to get what I want.” He growled, and such was his frustration, he vocalised it.

Newcomen looked up sharply.

“Sorry. Not directed at you.” Petrovitch glanced at the clock in the corner of his vision. “We need to go.”

He screwed up his napkin on to his plate, swigged the last of his coffee, and started for the exit. Newcomen was left playing catch-up.

“I need to get my case, pack my things,” he puffed.

“Five minutes, then. When I said go, I meant it. You’re checked out and your bill’s been paid already, so there’s no need to hang around in the foyer.” They passed the lifts, and Petrovitch shooed him into the one specially held for him by the hotel’s computer. “Five minutes. Outside. Go.”

The doors shushed shut and the lift sent him upwards.

“What’s he doing?”

[Resting his head against the wall. You may have destroyed him, Sasha. Can you put him back together again?]

“We’re all about to find out.” Petrovitch summoned his car to the kerbside, and kept on walking through the foyer.