“Leave it with me. I’ll tell her as part of my official role as Freezone Cassandra.”

“But you have broken the Armageddonist.”

“That, my friend, is the least of our problems.” He hauled at the car door. “Don’t tidy up. He doesn’t deserve it.”

He clambered in, and the others joined him: Valentina and Tabletop in the front, Lucy beside him.

“Sam? What happened?”

“We’ve been set up. Set up from the very start.”

“Explain,” said Valentina.

“I haven’t got the energy. Find me a power source. Or vodka. Both, preferably.”

She twisted around in her seat, and pointedly pulled out the keys from the ignition. She looked at him until he looked away, out of the window at the bright lights and black shadows of Regent’s Park.

“Fine. I’ll tell you as we go.”

Satisfied, she started the engine, and reversed expertly between the remaining domiks until she reached the main road.

“At some point, probably while the domiks above were being recovered, someone cut down through into Container Zero. They made a hole more than large enough to take the bomb out, so I’m guessing that’s what they did. It had gone long before the regular work crews got anywhere close to it.”

The only sound was the rumbling of the tires on the resurfaced road.

Lucy pulled at her hair. “I don’t get it. If someone took the bomb, why would they bring it back? Why would they then steal it again?”

“There’s a whole lot of things I don’t get. But I’ll bet you a billion that the bomb I saw was a fake. No idea if it was identical, or even similar, but good enough that it fooled everyone into thinking it was the real thing. Even me.” Petrovitch grimaced. “Why the huy would the original thieves do that?”

Tabletop put her feet up on the dashboard. “What did you expect to see when you knew you were being taken to Container Zero? I know what I’d want to find, and I didn’t grow up with the legend.”

“There’d have to be the Last Armageddonist, and he’d have to be dead. And he had to have a bomb, ready to go off. Anything else would be too disappointing.” He spent some more battery power gripping the seat in front of him and hauling himself forward. “But that’s exactly what we would have found if we’d got there first.”

“Is it? Perhaps you’d have found absolutely nothing.” Her ghostly reflection in the windshield shrugged at the face leaning over her shoulder. “You said we were set up. You just haven’t taken the scenario to its logical conclusion.”

“Huy tebe’v zhopu zamesto ukropu.” Petrovitch let himself fall back. “None of it was real? And they still broke my yebani arm? I am seriously pissed now.”

“But why would someone want to steal a nuclear bomb they knew wasn’t real?” Lucy withered under Petrovitch’s baleful glare. “Oh, okay. We weren’t supposed to have figured this out, were we?”

“Of course, now that we have, they’re going to try and kill us.”

Valentina took one hand off the steering wheel and reached under Tabletop’s legs to the glove compartment. She produced an automatic handgun, and passed it butt-first to the back seat. Petrovitch wearily took it and laid it in his lap.

“There is another under your seat, Fiona.”

Tabletop curled her legs away and spent a moment feeling for cold, hard gunmetal taped to the upholstery.

Then Valentina reached into her jacket and pulled out a third gun, small and flat, warm from her body. “Lucy? Tomorrow I teach you how not to kill yourself with this, da? For now, be careful who you point it at.”

She took it as if it was a scorpion, and Petrovitch relieved her of it long enough to check the safety switch.

“Some dad I’m turning out to be.” Petrovitch punched the window glass, not quite hard enough to shatter it into a thousand crystal fragments, but enough to hurt himself. “Polniy pizdets.”

10

He slowly became aware of another presence in the shadows. They hadn’t tried to shoot him, smother him or stab him, so he assumed they were benign; also, to get to him, they would have had to pass through a room containing Valentina, and he’d never caught her asleep yet.

Cables trailed into the bed and under the covers, and he’d installed alarms that would wake him if his nocturnal turnings accidentally unplugged him. Power was still trickling into his battery packs, so he wondered what had disturbed him. It wasn’t time to get up. He had another hour and fifty-three minutes of electronically induced coma programmed in.

He could smell her. That was it: Madeleine’s own scent had broken through to his consciousness.

“How long have you been there?”

“Five, ten minutes. I’ve been riding round and round for hours, and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

“That’s me. The last resort.” Petrovitch rolled onto his side, his left arm falling hard onto the mattress in front of him.

“Sam, don’t. I’m not in the mood.”

“Yeah, well. Neither am I.” He opened his eyes and used some software to boost his vision. Madeleine was sitting with her back against the wall, her legs out in front of her and almost touching the bed with her heels. She had a gun in her hand, one he recognized from both today and much longer ago. “Thought you’d lost that.”

“Wong sent it to me. Someone tried to sell it to him, and he recognized it. Told them he’d turn them in to the Metrozone authorities if they didn’t hand it over.” She flicked the magazine from the Vatican special into her hand and started counting the bullets.

“I miss him. No one can fry food to death quite like he does. I kept hoping he’d come across the river, but maybe business was too good where he was. Or he was avoiding us.”

“The second one, I think. Can’t blame him, either. His place was pretty much wrecked by the missile that hit Clapham A.”

“If it’s any consolation, you didn’t lose a nuclear bomb today.”

She rammed the magazine back home. “I don’t need your sympathy.”

“There wasn’t a bomb. It was a fake. The whole Container Zero thing was a one-act play, starring us. If we hadn’t been so completely taken in, we might have noticed the scenery wobbling.”

She was silent for a while. “Certain?”

“As sure as we can be.”

“We?”

“The usual suspects.”

“What did Sonja say when you told her?”

“Ah.” He pushed himself up against the headboard. “I decided telling her would be a bad idea. So she doesn’t know.”

Madeleine sighed. “You just can’t stop keeping secrets, can you?”

“I tried very hard to give them up, but no. Though I do have my reasons.”

“Just like before?”

“You mean, I don’t want my friends being hunted down like dogs and killed? Yeah. Pretty much.” Petrovitch pulled the duvet up to his chin, exposing his skinny white ankles to the winter air. “Reasonable to assume that whoever set us up is willing to silence us if we don’t play along. Of course, that includes you now, too.”

She holstered her automatic at her waist and drew her knees up to hug them. “So why won’t you tell Sonja? Don’t you think she needs to know that when she gets a list of demands in the morning, backed by the threat of a nuclear weapon, she can pretty much laugh in their faces and tell everyone it’s business as usual?”

Petrovitch wiggled his toes. “You’re kind of missing the big point, Maddy.”

“Too tired for games, Sam.” She rested her head against the wall, tipping it up so her neck shone pale in the glimmering light. “Tell me.”

“What if she already knows?”

Her head snapped around. “What? Are you mad? She’s not going to do that to you.”

“We’ll see what morning brings.” He stretched. “I may as well get up.”

“Sam! You can’t honestly think that about Sonja. She,” and she struggled to say the words, “she loves you.”