It took a moment for the second agent in line to realize the ghost to her right didn’t look quite the same as before. She turned her head, and her gun arm followed.

Before she could complete the move, she was hit. Petrovitch took the momentary opportunity of a clean shot between two reeling Jihadis, threading a bullet between moving chest and back and burying it in her temple. Tabletop stopped her own action and retargeted on the third.

The last agent had just shot a man trying to drag an injured friend away. Brave, but it got him killed, and his friend too. There was nothing personal about it. No relish, or malice. But he was too distracted to see Valentina crouched over her AK when the previous body fell away.

The burst of fire took his legs. The ballistic mesh held, but the impact pulped his bones. He landed face first and, rather than helping him, the needles that stabbed out of their pouches and into his skin to release life-sustaining chemicals made him feel flayed.

Petrovitch trod on his hand and kicked the gun away. Tabletop put her foot in the small of his back and aimed for the nape of his neck.

“I thought,” said Petrovitch over the top of him, “there were only supposed to be one or two left of your cell.”

“One. And the field controller who I never met.”

“So how did we end up with three?”

“Langley must have inserted more agents.”

“Vsyo govno, krome mochee.” Petrovitch got down on his hands and knees to look the agent in the eye. “Hey, Yankee. Surprised to see us? Your foot seems to be on backward, by the way. Must smart a bit.”

The man concentrated on breathing.

“A message for your president: I’m going to bury him for this, and everything else he’s done. Vrubratsa?” He patted the man’s head. “Okay, we’re done.” He scrambled up and started for the open door. “Lucy’s waiting for us outside. We need to find the bomb, or someone who’ll tell us where it is.”

“You’re going to leave him here?” Tabletop adjusted the grip on her pistol.

“Unless you’ve the stomach for shooting a defenseless cripple in the back, yeah. I kind of hoped you’d grown out of that, but if you want to, he’s all yours. Don’t take all day about it though, because I’ve called for paramedics.”

Petrovitch quickly collected the fallen agents’ guns, and put them in his bag, while Tabletop decided whether to execute the man she was standing over. Valentina offered her no help to make a decision one way or the other. She simply slung her rifle over her shoulder and jogged toward the doors that led outside.

“Yes, no?” called Petrovitch. He was by the prone prophet, wondering if there was any chance of him waking up this side of Paschal.

Valentina leaned back into the hall, panting. “Van. Bomb. In van. Van going.”

“Chyort. Tabletop?”

She let out a cry of anger, disgust, self-loathing and hatred that carried on long after the echo had died away. She didn’t shoot, though. She didn’t even look back.

And Petrovitch was briefly and unreasonably proud of her.

16

Valentina already had the car halfway toward them when they got outside. Lucy was in the passenger seat, still holding the phone in front of her in a two-handed grip.

The wheels smoked as they locked and slid sideways, and the car came to rest right in front of Petrovitch. Tabletop was in and across the back seat seemingly before the door was open, leaving Petrovitch to clamber in.

His feet had just about left the ground when Valentina stamped on the accelerator. Tabletop grabbed him and stopped him from falling out, and the door swung shut on its own.

The van had gone, although there was a drifting cloud of blue diesel by the gates. The remnants of the Jihad were still running, even though the shooting had stopped. Some seemed to be going in circles, while others ran straight up to the high fence that surrounded the school grounds, heedless of the razorwire they would encounter once they were at the top. Others had gone for the gate, and they were in the way.

Valentina swerved left, right, further right, then hard left again, all the time leaning on the horn. She managed not to hit a single person until they reached the choke point of the exit.

She braked hard, throwing everyone forward—except Lucy, who’d managed her seat belt—and the windshield was obscured by a back. The glass creaked, but the car was going slow enough that it didn’t give. So Valentina kept on going, not being able to see until she hauled the steering wheel hard right and the body spilled off.

“Tina.”

“What?”

Petrovitch looked out the back window at the still rolling form, then deliberately turned away. “I know, I know. Someone is going to pay for this.”

“Where is van?” Valentina was going south, as fast as she could.

“Yeah. Hang on.” He interrogated the phone network and found a moving cluster of signals on the road parallel to them. He called up a map. “They’re on Hendon Way, heading toward the center. We can get in front of them. Right here, then left onto the A5.”

When he panned out to get a bigger picture, he saw that Oshicora communications were making a hotspot that was coming north. He drew vectors and didn’t like what he saw.

Everyone was moving quicker than the van. He’d get to it around about Swiss Cottage. But Oshicora security were going to run into it almost at the same time. The van was old, and he couldn’t hijack it. Neither could he stop the nikkeijin’s cars. It was as if the outcome was already inevitable.

“If you can go faster without killing us, then do it.”

He hacked the Oshicora comms, and listened in briefly: long enough for it to become clear they knew where they were heading. Everything was wrong.

“Okay, listen up. As it stands, we’re on a collision course with Sonja’s corps, who seem to know exactly where the van is and where it’s going. I don’t like that. It goes beyond educated guesswork and smacks of some secret knowledge that makes me very uncomfortable.”

Tabletop counted the bullets left in her magazine. “You think she’s in on this?”

“She certainly knows more than she’s telling me. Lucy, pass me the Jihad phone.”

She didn’t respond straightaway, and Petrovitch had to lean over and take it himself.

“That man,” said Lucy, “we just…”

“Yeah. No one’s saying it doesn’t suck, or that we shouldn’t have stopped for him, or we shouldn’t have run him over in the first place. Or that a little piece of us doesn’t die every time we commit yet another atrocity. I’m not even going to suggest that what we’re doing is more important than some bat-shit crazy Jihadi’s life.” He pressed buttons and accessed the phone’s call history. “We’re all going to do stuff today that isn’t likely to be pretty, noble or generous. But I’d rather have you all alive come nightfall, if that’s all right.”

He turned his full attention to the phone, running the numbers through a search program: he’d called it last, and the number before it was different to the number before that. And so on. Each one was a random, throwaway account, like he used. He was going to get nothing from it.

He looked at the map in his head. They were scant minutes away from intercepting the van, but so were Oshicora security. His eye twitched, then his thumb stabbed down on the power button. The phone winked off, and there was an immediate response from the comms he was monitoring.

“Proof enough that something’s going on: they had tabs on the prophet.” Petrovitch threw it on the seat between him and Tabletop. “Time to hit the kill switch.”

Which he did. If he’d had more time, more processing power—if he’d had Michael on his side—he would have faked the entire Oshicora operation and sent them haring off after some virtual contact heading out toward the East End. He could have made it look like nothing was wrong for either the controllers or the foot-soldiers.