The Curve of The Earth (16 page)

Petrovitch had best remember that. He took the leftmost seat and placed his bag on his lap. Newcomen waited for Buchannan to indicate he could sit, which he did with an open gesture at the chair to Petrovitch’s right.

“Dr Petrovitch? Welcome to America.”

“No thanks, I’ve had enough already.” He pressed the lock on his bag and unzipped it. “Do you mind if I check for bugs?”

“The whole building is regularly swept, Doctor.”

“But not by me.” He picked out a variety of devices and dumped the bag on the floor.

It was inevitable that he found five different radio transmitters within the confines of the four walls, and in trying to trace a sixth, he tabbed the motor on the window blinds to reveal a palm-sized mosquito drone hovering just outside, eight floors up.

Buchannan had the decency to look embarrassed. “Such matters seem to be out of my control, Dr Petrovitch.”

“Maybe we should go for a walk,” suggested Newcomen.

It wasn’t a bad idea, but Petrovitch had a better one. “Your boss isn’t going to tell us anything in private that he’s not going to in public. Firstly, he’s part of the machine; he’s not going offmessage for us, for you, or he would already have done so. Secondly, he knows I’m one big recording device, and he’s probably already seen footage of our little incident back at the hotel. Let’s save ourselves the biting cold and let him make his carefully rehearsed speech here, where at least it’s warm and there’s the possibility of a decent cup of coffee.”

“I guess so.”

They waited in silence for a secretary to bring them drinks. Buchannan, too old to have been gengineered, too squeamish to stand the smell of his own corneas cooking by going under a laser, wore small, round glasses. Like Petrovitch used to have. He took them off and polished them with a cloth handkerchief.

Newcomen fidgeted incessantly, playing with his fingers,
pulling faces, scratching. Petrovitch just sat and closed his eyes, feeling for the electronic equipment secreted around the room, for the operator of the drone, who was two floors down in a cupboard marked on the floor plan as janitorial supplies.

The delay meant that when the secretary and her tray arrived, he had a good idea of how to disable them all.

“Do you take milk, Doctor?” asked Buchannan.

Petrovitch shook his head. “Just sugar.”

“How much?”

“About four of those little sachets will be fine. Defenestrating spooks before breakfast always takes it out of me.”

“And Joseph?”

“Milk, please.”

“Can we stop being polite to each other? None of us really mean it.” Petrovitch watched while the Assistant Director ripped open the paper sachets and emptied their contents into a cup of black brew. “We’re all grown-ups.”

“Quite so, Doctor.” Buchannan stirred the coffee with a metal spoon and slid the saucer towards Petrovitch. “Why don’t you start?”

“Yeah, you don’t want me to start. But I’ll ask the first question: why are you going along with this charade? It must offend every instinct you have as a law-enforcement officer.”

“I would deny that there is a charade I’m going along with.”

“Meaning either there isn’t a charade, or you’re not going along with it? You look pretty well neck-deep in things from where I’m sitting.”

“That’s a matter of interpretation. Things look different depending where you stand.” Buchannan slipped on his glasses and blinked in the bright light.

“I was never much one for moral relativism.” Petrovitch got
a raised eyebrow from across the desk. “Well, if I’m being a shit, even for a good reason, I’ll always put my hand up to it: I don’t hide behind the national interest or the greater good. Call it what it is.”

“And what do you think it is, Dr Petrovitch?”

“Difficult to tell. Something has happened, but we can’t tell what. Pretty certain that Lucy saw it. Equally certain that she shouldn’t have done. After that? We might have a lead: one I don’t think I’ll share with you.”

“But you’ve already shared it with Joseph.” The Assistant Director steepled his fingers and stared across the desk at Newcomen.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you going to tell me what this new lead is?”

Newcomen chewed at his lip, and eventually looked down at the floor. “No, sir.”

“Interesting.”

Newcomen’s head came up again. “Why me, sir? You told me that I was the right man for this assignment. In a good way. I… is it true that Edward Logan pushed for me to get it so that he could split me and Christine up?”

“The whole idea is ridiculous, Joseph. Mr Logan is entirely separate from the Bureau, and has no influence over which cases get given to my agents.”

“Except,” said Petrovitch, “he’s very high up in Reconstruction.”

“All the same, Doctor, there is no possible link…”

“That photograph there.” Petrovitch pointed at the bookshelf, then went to retrieve the photo frame. He inspected the buttons, and scrolled through the images until he found the one he was looking for. “Fund-raiser for the Party. Charity dinner, seats going for a thousand dollars a pop. I didn’t realise you could
afford that sort of thing, even on an AD’s salary. Unless you’re really enthusiastic about Reconstruction, of course.”

“I was given the tickets, so I could be there in my professional capacity.”

“You and your wife. Remind me who the keynote speaker was?”

Buchannan’s lips went tight, so Petrovitch reminded him.

“Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s a big deal, right? And as honorary treasurer of the Washington State Reconstruction Party, Logan would have been on the top table. But they know each other anyway, don’t they? Same Greek-letter fraternity at Yale? Logan grouses about his beautiful daughter being in danger of losing her virginity to some hick from Iowa. Two weeks later, this lands on his desk, and they need a fall guy in a hurry. Someone expendable.” Petrovitch shrugged. “The dots join up. Can’t prove it, but you were clearly told by someone to make Newcomen the patsy. I mean, why not someone from Anchorage? It’s their patch. Except none of them is going out with the daughter of a mean
sooksin
like Logan.”

He put the frame back on the shelf, and set it cycling through its stored scenes again.

Newcomen straightened up. “I think I deserve an answer, sir. I think we both do.”

Buchannan touched his teeth with the tip of his tongue. “I have no answer to give you, Joseph.”

“What about Dr Petrovitch?”

“I have no answer for him either. However regrettable that might be.”

Petrovitch narrowed his eyes. Every word had taken on a significance beyond itself: it was all code, all meaningful, if only he could decipher it.

“I think we’re done here,” he said, and grabbed his bag.

The power went off: lights, computers, everything died at once. Then the emergency lighting flickered.

“You have thirty seconds to say whatever it is you have to say to each other without anyone overhearing. I’ll be outside, and at the end of that thirty seconds, you’d better be standing outside too, Newcomen. Got that? Twenty-five seconds left.”

He stepped into the corridor and pulled at the lapels of his jacket, as if adjusting himself for the outside. Heads had appeared from other offices, wondering what was happening, and what the cause was.

If they saw Petrovitch standing alone, it wasn’t for long. Newcomen was there behind him, and then the power came back. The overhead fluorescents clicked and hummed, bathing everything in their cold blue light.

“Okay?” asked Petrovitch.

Newcomen was strapping on his wrist holster, the gun it usually held dangling from its tensioning cable below his arm.

“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice entirely neutral.

“Good,” said Petrovitch. “Why don’t we go somewhere quiet and talk about what we’re going to do next?”

Petrovitch leaned over the ferry’s railings while Newcomen huddled down inside his jacket, pitifully thin against the subarctic air.

“I have a thermal jacket at home,” said Newcomen. “It goes down to my ankles and has its own fuel cell.”

“I have the ability to ignore the cold. Though I do have to watch out for frostbite.” Petrovitch inspected his fingers, which were pleasantly pink, then looked out over the sea to the Seattle skyline.

The two men who’d followed them on foot down the quayside were just a fraction of a second too late to board the water taxi. Men like that didn’t carry ID with them, because they never wanted to be identified. But it also meant that Newcomen could flash his badge and jump the turnstile, and leave them behind.

“You realise this trip isn’t going to last very long.”

“Ten minutes across the bay is fine. Even if someone makes a call and gets us turned around, we’ve still got time to play with.”

“Why do we have to sit out on deck anyway? Won’t they be watching us?”

“Of course they will. They may even get some lip-readers in to try and see what we’re saying. All we have to do is turn our back on them. Besides, I’ve been cooped up for too long. Planes, hotels, offices. I spend a lot of my time outside now, just walking and talking, thinking and planning.”

“What do you mean, too long? It’s been, what? Two days?”

“I was never very patient. You should see me play chess.” Petrovitch faced Newcomen, the wind whipping at his spiky hair, Mount Ranier pale and uncertain behind him. “What else did Buchannan give you? Apart from your gun?”

“How did you know?”

“Because I’m a genius. And you’ve been touching your suit just here,” and he tapped where the internal pocket would be, “every couple of minutes since we left the Bureau, just to check you’ve still got it.”

Newcomen dug his frozen fingers into his jacket and held up a standard data card, its golden electrical contacts glittering in the low winter sun.

“What did he say was on it?”

“Everything I’d need.” Newcomen turned it around to show its ordinariness, then slipped it back inside.

“That’s magnificently ambiguous. Anything else?”

“No. Just that. And that he was really very sorry.” Newcomen shivered violently. “There’s only so much you can say in that short a time.”

“I’m sure I could have thought of something.” Petrovitch noticed that Newcomen’s nose had turned white. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry too. Though I haven’t changed my mind about
our arrangement. That’s the problem with being a bastard: you get used to it.”

“Would it make any difference if I just jumped into the bay?”

“Yeah. I don’t float so well. Fishing you out again might be a problem.”

Newcomen looked genuinely surprised. “You can kill me in a eyeblink. Why would it bother you?”

“Because I’m the patron saint of lost causes. I have the stigmata to prove it. And I reckon you’re getting interested, despite yourself. Part of you is still absolutely terrified about the prospect of going north with me, trailing around while I ask my stupid, useless questions, and wondering if today’s the day I snap and blow your heart out through your chest. Part of you is angry, because you know what I ought to do is wait for spring and see if Lucy’s body turns up, and all this running around is a monumental waste of time. But part of you is intrigued. Part of you wants to know. Part of you, the detective part, the bit that loves justice and honour: you want to find her, or at least find out what happened to her.”

Newcomen neither agreed nor disagreed. “It doesn’t make any difference.”

“It does to me.”

The ferry puttered on, and the dock in West Seattle was visible across the tops of the waves.

“So what do you say?” said Petrovitch. “We’ll be back ashore soon enough. There’ll be fresh tails waiting for us. We’ll get to the airport, and they’ll board the plane with us. We’ll be watched every single step of the way to Fairbanks and beyond. I’d like some time alone, not just to plot and plan, but to be invisible for a while. Fed up of living in this
yebani
goldfish bowl.”

“What is it you want to do? And how illegal is it?”

“How many laws do you think they’ve broken? Do you imagine they even care? They think laws and statutes are for little people, Newcomen. That bad smell under your nose is a laminated copy of your constitution being burnt to ashes. What I have in mind is barely worth bothering about.”

Newcomen shifted uncomfortably. Every time he moved, he exposed a new piece of skin to the cold, wet wind. “I promised to uphold the law. Just because someone else won’t doesn’t mean I was wrong.”

Petrovitch sat down beside him. “Do you realise just how much trouble you’re in?”

“I’ve a reasonably good idea.”

“You’ve no idea at all. You’ve been betrayed and abandoned by the people you swore your oath to. You’ll be effectively stateless: even if you survive whatever it is they have waiting for us, you’ll never be able to go back. You’ll be off the grid, a feral, living between the cracks of your society.”

“Respect for my badge and what it represents is about all I have left, Petrovitch.”

“You’re a sheep, Newcomen. A
yebani
sheep. I can’t stop you from being devoured by the wolves, and I was stupid to ever try.” He got up and rested his hands on the freezing railings. “Yeah, go on then. Throw yourself in the sea. Temperature it is, you’ll be in shock in seconds. Quick. Relatively painless too, unless you count the fleeting moment of regret at being a
mudak
. Leave the data card behind on your seat. I’ll need to take a look at that.”

The engine beneath them revved harder, making the deck shudder.

“You know I’m not going overboard,” said Newcomen. “I’m too scared.”

“Yeah, I know. This is just the last gasp of your ego before it collapses completely.” Petrovitch seized the handles of his battered carpet bag. The boat bumped up against the quay. “What will you do when I say jump?”

“I’ll ask how high.”

“You know, we might actually be able to pull this off. Be ready.”

There was a rattle of chains from the far side of the deck as the gantry was lowered. The few passengers emerging from below made their way to the exit, and trooped up the metal ramp.

Petrovitch and Newcomen were last off. Two men – different to the ones they’d shaken off downtown – were waiting for them in the terminal building. They watched them pass, then fell into step a few metres behind.