The Curve of The Earth (3 page)

“It’s him they sent,” said Petrovitch.

Tabletop turned her back on them and walked to her pillar. “So why him?”

“She’s got a point, Newcomen. Why you?”

The agent didn’t respond, so Petrovitch kicked him, not gently, to get his attention away from Tabletop.

“Why’d they choose you? Plenty of other people they could have picked. You’ve no experience of Alaska, no experience of missing persons, you’re pretty junior, never had any real responsibility before. In fact, could they have picked anyone less
suited for this?” Petrovitch pursed his lips. “Yeah. That’ll be it, then.”

“Is insult,” said Valentina, whose accent came to the fore when she was angry. “Americans do not care, do not see why we should care. Bastards all.” If she’d had her favourite Kalashnikov, she would probably have shot Newcomen where he stood. As it was, she put her hands on her hips and looked sour.

“I,” said Newcomen, beginning to bluster, “was chosen. Selected. I’m good at my job.”

“You have not done job long enough to find out if good, bad, or merely competent.” Valentina sneered at him. “We ask for help, and we get you.”

“Dr Petrovitch, can’t you control…”

Madeleine’s timely hand on Valentina’s shoulder cooled the temperature just long enough for Petrovitch to steer Newcomen away and down the concourse.

“Yeah, look. I know how it is in the USA, but over here? Men don’t control everything, and especially we don’t control women. I know that’s what you’re used to. You’ve lived your whole life thinking it. But if you want to survive more than five minutes in the Metrozone, then you have to realise a woman will not defer to you just because you’ve a pair of
yatzja
.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “If that’s too much conditioning to break, treat them all as honorary men.
Chyort
, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

Newcomen’s luggage dogged their footsteps slavishly, but the agent still glanced around.

Petrovitch realised he wasn’t checking where his spare pants were. He was stealing another look at Tabletop.

“Where are we going?” asked Newcomen.

“I said I’d look in on a friend. Couple of friends, really. We can do one on the way to the other.”

“Just you and me?”

“Why? My company not good enough?” Petrovitch kept his eyes on the exit, but hacked the security system and windowed an image of the three Freezone women back at the gate. They stood close together but ignored each other, full attention focused on him and the American.

“I thought…” said Newcomen. “I thought we’d be straight back on a plane. What with your daughter missing.”

“Plane tomorrow.” The rotating doors swallowed him up, spat him out on the roadside. Newcomen more-or-less successfully negotiated the same route and joined him.

“I don’t understand,” said Newcomen. “I’m your escort. You were waiting for me, and now we’re out here.”

Petrovitch ignored both him and the few taxis waiting for a fare, and walked between them to the open road. A car pulled out of the February mist and drew up alongside.

“In you get.”

Newcomen opened the back door with a sigh and heaved his luggage on to the seat, then slid across next to it. He’d opened his mouth to greet the driver when he realised there was no one else with him.

Petrovitch walked around the front of the car and dropped behind the steering wheel, which was on the other side to the one he was used to.

“Close the door. And stop drooling like an idiot. I’m likely to make assumptions.”

“But.” Newcomen pointed back down the road.

“All the cool kids can do it. Now shut the
yebani
door and we can get going.”

Newcomen eventually leaned out and pulled the door shut. Petrovitch frowned at him in the rear-view mirror as they pulled away. Petrovitch’s hands were firmly in his lap.

“How do you do that?” blurted Newcomen.

“I am the New Machine Jihad,” said Petrovitch with a lupine grin. “They made cars smart enough to drive themselves, and eventually they did. Well, I let them, and they like me, so they tend to do what I ask them to do. I know there are laws against this sort of thing, but I have diplomatic immunity pretty much everywhere I go, so I tend to ignore a lot of small stuff. And the big stuff. You’ll have to get used to that.”

“I thought the Jihad was that computer.”

“The computer has a name. Michael. Remind me to introduce you sometime. But no, the Jihad was originally its evil twin.” Petrovitch twisted in his seat to see Newcomen hunched up on the back seat, his knees almost up around his ears. European cars were usually smaller than their steroidal American counterparts. “You could have sat in the front.”

“I didn’t know.”

“There’s an awful lot you don’t know, Newcomen. I need to work out whether that’s deliberate, as Tina says, or just that you’re ignorant. I mean that in a good way.”

One thing that Newcomen hadn’t remembered was they were driving on the wrong side of the road. Another car passed them on the right, and he flinched.

Petrovitch settled back in his seat, a slight smile on his face, ready to enjoy the ride.

Petrovitch kicked the door open again when the car had come to a halt. It was parked, two wheels up on the kerb, next to an extravagant length of corroded iron railings. Just ahead of the bonnet was a set of ornate gates hung between two blackened stone pillars, each topped with a chipped obelisk.

“Out,” he said.

“What about my luggage?” said Newcomen. He’d seen enough on the journey from Heathrow to convince him it was only a matter of minutes before someone tried to mug him.

“What about it? You thought you’d be here for less than a few hours: what could you possibly have brought that justifies that size of crate?”

“Well,” said Newcomen, “there’s—”

“Yeah, I know about the Secret Squirrel stuff already. If you lose it, so much the better.” Petrovitch climbed out of the car and used his backside to push the door closed. He started towards the gates, raising one hand and beckoning the agent.

Newcomen caught him up, puffing slightly.

“Out of shape, Newcomen? What would Coach say?”

“Do you have to bring that up?”

“Don’t have to. But it used to be important to you. Sorry if it’s a sore point.”

Newcomen unconsciously rubbed his arm, midway between right elbow and shoulder. He looked around him for the first time.

“We’re in a graveyard.”

“Yeah, that’d account for all the, you know, gravestones.”

Some of them were old, pre-Armageddon, the ones closest to the entrance. Most were not: some dated back to the foundation of the Metrozone, and then as they walked along the cracked tarmac paths deeper into the cemetery, the death dates got more and more recent.

Even the designs of the memorials marked an evolution of sorts: varied and effusive early on, to more uniform, utilitarian later, until almost all variation had been weeded out and a simple narrow rectangular slab became the norm. Name, date of birth, and the day they died. That was all.

They were passing by row upon row marked with May 2024. Petrovitch’s eyelid twitched as he remembered.

Those ended, and after a few more serried ranks, a vast field of November dates, same year.

It took a while to get to walk by those.

Finally, Petrovitch headed down one of the rows, off the path, disturbing the ragged grasses that were growing unchecked between the upright stones. It looked more or less a random choice, but he knew exactly where he was going.

Six graves down, there was a black marker engraved in faded kanji, with the dates in Roman numerals. He stopped in front of it and worried at his lip for a few moments.

Newcomen watched from a respectful distance, hands clasped behind his back.

“You’re probably thinking this is the first normal thing you’ve seen me do,” said Petrovitch.

“I, uh, I wouldn’t want to intrude, sir.”

“Stop calling me sir. I’m not sure you mean it, and I really, really don’t like it.” He knelt down in the wet grass and pulled a long-bladed knife from inside his coat. He gripped a handful of green leaf blades and hacked at their base. “We’re going to have to come to some sort of working relationship, Newcomen. Like I said, I don’t know why they sent you, out of all the people they had available. Personally, I don’t think you were chosen for any other quality but your ignorance. The less you know, the less information I can tear from your still-living flesh. That makes you a victim in someone else’s game, but unfortunately for you, it won’t stop me from ruthlessly exploiting any and every advantage that’s presented to me. I’m going to apologise in advance for that.”

He worked his way across the grave plot, holding and cutting the grass.

“You said he was a friend,” said Newcomen, nodding at the stone.

“She. She was a friend. Body cremated, ashes interred right here, half a world away from where she was born. She was twenty-two when she died.” Petrovitch straightened up, his left hand stained green. “I brought you out here deliberately, to see this almost-anonymous grave, because I wanted to show you what your countrymen are capable of. Sure, we can drive by the site of the Metrozone’s very own Ground Zero, but I can make my point better out here.”

He dug into his pockets again and came up with a steel lighter
and a small flat candle in a foil container. He trod down the grass next to the headstone, and placed the candle in his bootprint.

“This is where Sonja Oshicora ended up. I don’t know if they’ve told you about her, or if you’ve bothered to look for yourself. It was a decade and another life ago for me. You were still in high school in Columbus and probably too busy being a jock to pay any attention to what was happening here. Maybe you remember the nuke and Mackensie resigning, but not necessarily the reasons why.”

Petrovitch bent down and flicked the lid of the lighter. He stroked the wheel with his thumb and fire flickered, yellow and trembling. Eventually, the candle wick caught, turned black, and glowed with its own fragile flame. He crouched down and watched the wax melt and turn clear.

“She was my friend. Accidentally so, but my friend all the same. She ran the Freezone – the first one, here – and this is where she died.”

“That’s, uh,” said Newcomen.

“Shut up and let me talk. I’m trying to warn you. You’ll probably think I’m the Antichrist by the time I’ve finished with you, the very embodiment of evil. The problem you have is that the worst acts against you have already happened, and I’ve had nothing to do with them whatsoever.” Petrovitch nodded at the gravestone. “I was at the sharp end of a CIA assassination squad, and Sonja tried to save me from them. But the way she chose to do that nearly broke me. She didn’t tell me about it, and she didn’t give me a choice. Her plan fell apart, and she ended up putting a bullet through her own brain. While I was watching.” He’d erased the recording long ago. Yet he could still see it with aching clarity. His name called, his head turned, the gunmetal-grey barrel slipped inside her pretty pink mouth.

Newcomen shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The bottoms of his suit trousers were wet, and were starting to cling. “I don’t understand what you’re saying, sir, Dr Petrovitch.”

“Of course you don’t. I don’t expect you to. You’re not going to believe that your own government, the people you work for, the people you look up to and think protect you, have not just determined that you’re completely expendable, but have deliberately and explicitly marked you for termination. You’re a dead man walking.” Petrovitch shrugged. “Sorry for that, but it wasn’t my choice.”

The candle flickered in the slight breeze, then burned brighter for a moment.

“They told me to expect this. The Assistant Director briefed me. Said you’d try and get inside my head. It won’t work.”

“I don’t give a shit what Buchannan said,” said Petrovitch mildly. “But you’ll remember this conversation. When the time comes and you realise I was right all along, you might suddenly discover that I’m your only hope for staying alive.”

“I’ll wait for you by the car,” said Newcomen. He walked away, a slowly dwindling figure in amongst the gravestones.

Petrovitch scratched at his chin. “I know we’re pretty much the same age, but
yobany stos
.”

[His upringing was not as cosmopolitan as yours.]

“Yeah.” He looked at Newcomen’s retreating back. “
Chyort
, I feel
yebani
ancient compared with vat-boy over there.”

[Not being irradiated in his mother’s womb might account for some of the differences between you. Not being in a womb at all for others. He was raised on an automatic farm, you in post-Armageddon St Petersburg. He was an athlete, whilst you had your failing heart. Apart from his one accident, I doubt he has ever felt pain.]

“What I meant…” Petrovitch rested his hand on top of Sonja’s grave marker. It was cold to the touch, the stone numbing his fingers. “I feel like I’m being dragged in again. Being forced to trace the old patterns that I thought I’d left behind. It didn’t end well the last time.”

[We are ten years wiser, Sasha. We have a whole decade of experience to consult. We are now many.]

“It’s not going to stop us making an utter
pizdets
of it, though.” He moved to trace the calligraphic strokes of Sonja’s name.

[It might. If nothing else, the Americans are now more scared of us than we are of them.]

“But they don’t learn, do they? They keep trying to slap us down, and we have to be quick every time. I’m afraid, Michael, that when it really matters, we’re going to be a fraction of a second too slow. Too slow for Lucy.”

[Then we must be ready for every eventuality, no matter how unlikely. I can calculate layer on layer of possibilities.]

“And still something might come out of nowhere and knock us off course.” Petrovitch stood up and put everything back in his pockets. “History’s not going to repeat itself, is it, Sonja? We’re too smart for that, right?”

She had no opinion to offer, one way or the other, so Petrovitch left her with the candle guttering in the fading daylight and made his way to the car, and the waiting Newcomen.