The Curve of The Earth (18 page)

“What’s going on?”

“Hang on.” Petrovitch held up his hand and addressed Michael. “So what do we have?”

[Access codes to FBI funds and assets within the state of Alaska, along with contact details of personnel. Chiefly, though, we have been given the encrypted v-log of Assistant Director Leopold Buchannan, detailing his personal thoughts over the
last week. His words are occasionally banal, but sometimes enlightening. One entry in particular is most revealing, and the committee wishes to share this information with Joseph Newcomen as well as you, since it most directly affects him.]

“Right,” said Petrovitch to Newcomen. “Buchannan gave us his diary. You still got that screen I gave you?”

Newcomen patted his pockets, then searched through them, eventually coming up with the flat sheet of plastic. “I’ve got it.”

“But you’ll have no sound.” Petrovitch thought about matters for a moment, then delved back in his bag. “So let’s do this properly.”

He came back out with a sealed plastic bag containing three pieces of equipment: an earpiece, a screen-reader, and a slim, curved rectangle in white. He tore the plastic with his teeth and sorted out the components on his lap.

“This is a Freezone thing, and you’re the first person not in the collective to ever be offered one.” He glanced up at Newcomen’s sceptical expression. “It’s not because you’re special or anything. This is a purely practical decision. Now pull your shirt up.”

“Like I’m not cold enough already.”

“Stop being a baby and do it.” Petrovitch lifted up the white rectangle and pulled a sheet of backing material off one side. “Turn around a bit.”

Newcomen did as he was told, and felt faintly ridiculous. Petrovitch positioned the device over the left kidney region and got Newcomen to breathe in. Then he slapped the rectangle against cold white skin and held it there.

“Breathe out.”

Newcomen did so, and Petrovitch took his hands away. The thing was stuck on.

“Fine. Tuck yourself back in. You’ll notice it’s there to start with, then not at all. When it warms up, it’ll get to work. You’ll need this too.” Petrovitch turned Newcomen’s palm upwards and pressed the earpiece on him. “Choose an ear and shove it in.”

Newcomen tentatively offered the grey capsule to his right ear, but it kept on falling out.

Petrovitch took it from him and rammed it home. Tiny clamps bit into Newcomen’s ear canal and held it firm.

“Ow.” He shook his head to try and dislodge the thing, but it wasn’t coming out. “It hurts.”

“You really are a
balvan
, aren’t you?” Petrovitch gestured to Newcomen, who bent over, proffering his ear. “Tap the end twice with your fingernail. Like this.”

The clamps pulled back and the device dropped out into his hand.

“I suppose I have to put it back now.”

“If you want to know what Buchannan said, yes.”

Reluctantly, Newcomen did as he was told. He winced when the clamps deployed, but at least he kept his mouth shut. He frowned after a moment, listening to a voice only he could hear.

Michael was talking to him, running him through the protocols that he needed to know about being connected through the Freezone. He didn’t have full access to the power of the system, but for someone unused to the always-on, augmented reality it provided, even partial exposure could be surreal.

Newcomen spoke to confirm his name, date of birth, and address. He seemed bewildered by the experience: there was something strapped to his side, another thing planted in his ear, but combined, they formed a presence that was both distant and immediate at the same time.

And the Freezone had been raising kids with this technology for almost a decade now, a whole generation coming through who’d known nothing else but their own personal mentor, guardian, friend being no more than a breath away.

“It says – he says – for you to give me the screen.”

Petrovitch held it out and Newcomen took it. The plastic bloomed into life, fuzzy moving images blurred by being shot on a cheap camera flickering inside its translucent surface.

“It’s Buchannan.”

“I know. I can see it too.”

Newcomen pointed to his screen. “But you’re not…”

“I’m a
yebani
cyborg.” Petrovitch reached up and tapped his skull. “It’s happening in here.”

It was, too. The Assistant Director was sitting on a park bench, swaddled up against the cold. Snow was drifting down around him, settling on his shoulders and melting on the lenses of his glasses. There was a lot of shake: he was videoing himself at arm’s length.

“My name,” said Buchannan, “is Assistant Director Leo Buchannan, FBI. The time is,” and he glanced at his wrist, “ten forty a.m. on Friday February tenth, twenty thirty-four. I have just been approached by two men who declined to identify themselves but who knew the correct access codes for both the FBI building and my office. I shall call them Ben and Jerry, for want of anything better to call them.”

Buchannan looked around him before continuing. “I have been asked to obstruct a federal investigation for the good of national security. A foreigner called Lucy Petrovitch is missing in northern Alaska. For reasons that are on a need-to-know basis – and I’m told I don’t need to know – Miss Petrovitch must not be found, and no search for her should be made. I have to
keep up the appearance of looking for her without actually doing so.

“To this end, I have been told to assign an agent to the case who is totally unsuited for the task. Agent Joseph Newcomen will escort the girl’s father wherever he goes, but since this is not his area of expertise, any help he might render will be incidental rather than directed. I am also to withdraw any other agents from the investigation.

“I am very angry about the position I have been put in, and angrier about placing Agent Newcomen at risk from Samuil Petrovitch, who is known to display psychopathic tendencies and is a violent American-hating recidivist. However, my hands appear to be tied, and my orders come with the very highest clearance.

“This is the most distasteful episode in my professional life to date. I am making this recording and keeping it with my personal papers in case of internal investigation or audit.”

The media stream finished.

Petrovitch cleared his vision. Newcomen seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.

“Why don’t we go back to the plane,” he said, “and see if it comes with a drinks cabinet?”

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.