Iguro warily sat next to him but unconsciously mirroring his body language. “Miss Sonja should still be told. She will lift the emergency, and exonerate you.”

“Like I said, I think she knew all along.” Petrovitch frowned. “I take it you’re not going to try and arrest me now, or anything embarrassing like that?”

“There seems little point. There is no bomb, so how could you have stolen something that does not exist?”

“And yet, there it is, in plain view. Tell me, Iguro: how did you know where the van was?”

“We were directed to it. By our controllers.”

“Of course you were. Now, how do you suppose they could differentiate between us and the van containing the bomb, given we were all going in the same direction at the same time, and there was no visual identification of which phone signals related to which vehicle?”

When Iguro didn’t answer, he continued his musing.

“You see my problem? Everything points to someone within the Oshicora organization knowing exactly where this fake bomb was, at all times. And I’m guessing that even though no one was ever supposed to see inside and learn the truth, whoever designed this whole charade knew I’d be chasing around after it—and on the off-chance that I managed to get my hands on it, they made it so that I couldn’t possibly blow myself up. I wonder who would go to all that trouble?” He leaned into Iguro, who was looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Why is everything pointing back to me? Who could possibly want to frame me for something so monstrous, and yet at the same time sabotage their plan because they couldn’t bear the thought of harming me?”

He kicked his heels for a moment longer, then jumped down from the back of the van. Tabletop and Lucy were almost there.

A thought struck him, and he turned back to Valentina. “Have you seen the time?”

She glanced at her big Soviet-style wristwatch. “What of it?”

“What do I normally do now?”

“You climb the Oshicora Tower.” She looked up from the bomb, eyebrows raised. “And people come to watch.”

“Yeah. They do.” Petrovitch kicked a stone in the road. “I wonder if anyone’s going to show?”

18

Petrovitch rode with Iguro, the cars becoming a slow-moving convoy back down to the center of the city. They skirted Regent’s Park and stopped on Marylebone Road.

“What are you going to do?” asked Petrovitch.

“I must report back to Miss Sonja,” said Iguro. He left the motor running, but put the gear into neutral. “She must learn of all that has occurred since we lost contact—something which is entirely your fault.”

“Sue me. I was being tracked through the prophet’s phone, and I get pissed off when people track me. And I rather assumed those same people were trying to kill me, too.” The power in his arm batteries was getting worryingly low, but he had to move it now and again, just to relieve the pressure of bits of metal sticking into his side. “Tell her what you like.”

“There is no more than a week before the Freezone is handed back to the authorities. This delay will cost Miss Sonja greatly.”

“If that’s all she’s worried about, I’ll cover the penalties myself.”

“You?” Iguro had a strange laugh, more like he was gasping for breath.

“Yeah. I’m a very rich man. Didn’t you know?”

From baring his teeth in mirth, his lips became thin lines. “How is that possible?”

“One of those things where you use the capitalist system against itself. I borrowed some money, and used it as leverage to short-sell oil on the spot market. When I say oil, I mean a lot of it, of course. Crude was trading at around a hundred and eighty U.S. dollars two days ago: I promised to sell twenty-five million barrels to whoever wanted it at one seventy, close of play yesterday. I sold the lot in seconds.”

“But where would you find that amount of oil?”

“Look, the oil doesn’t actually exist. It could have been sugar, cocoa, aluminium or pork bellies—it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I bet everything on the price of oil dropping below one seventy. I could pretend to buy it, and then pretend to sell it to the traders who’d snapped up my futures because they thought I was mad.” Petrovitch shrugged. “I barely understand it myself. It’s a stupid way of doing business. But because I actually bought the oil as it dipped below fifty dollars, I made one hundred and twenty dollars a barrel. After brokers’ fees, I made a shade under three billion dollars—about five and a half billion euros.”

Iguro reached forward and turned the engine off, and sat in silence, digesting the news.

“How did you know that would happen?”

“I knew because I was about to offer the world cheap energy forever. Oil’s still going to be useful, but we’re not going to be burning it in engines. Not that that got in the way of a market stampede to the bottom. By the time sanity had been restored, I’d done the deal.”

“You could buy whatever you want. Anything. Anything at all.” He was awestruck.

Petrovitch wedged his knees against the dashboard. “The stuff I want most I can’t buy. This is just seed money: there’s hard work to be done if I want to make real things grow. You know, stuff that actually lasts. But like I said, I think Sonja’s got other things on her mind than her contractual obligations.”

“You wish me to deliver a message to her?”

“If you could.”

Tabletop tapped on the window, and Petrovitch cracked the door open.

“Problem?” she asked.

“Not really. Just explaining something to Iguro.” He opened the door wider and slipped out. “I think he might finally get it this time.”

“Petrovitch-san. The message?” Iguro leaned over from the driver’s seat to see him better.

“Yeah, that.” He scratched at his nose. “How about ‘I know what you’ve done and the moment I get to prove it is the moment you start running’? That’s a bit melodramatic, though, and she’s never been one for running. I could always go for the menacing ‘I know where you live,’ but she knows I know, so what would be the point? Just tell her the CIA tried to steal the nuclear bomb from the New Machine Jihad. That should give her some indication how deep in the shit she’s swimming.”

He slammed the door, obscuring Iguro’s open mouth.

Tabletop watched the car spin its wheels in an effort to get away from them. “Do you think she’s going to kill him?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have fancied being one of the techs who put the bomb together though. If any of them are still alive, I’ll be very surprised. It’s not like we lack building sites.” Petrovitch looked at the silent cranes that dominated the skyline. “Why did she do it?”

“You still don’t know for sure that she did, Sam.”

“Yeah, I do. It’s just time to stop making excuses for her.”

“So where does the priest fit in?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, if Tina’s right, and part of his plan is that he makes sure me and Maddy split up permanently… what does he hope happens next?”

“Sam, get in the car.”

He did as he was told. The Oshicora cars went left toward the Post Office Tower, and theirs went right toward Hyde Park. He was ten minutes late for the show—except there’d be no performance today. No webcams, no streaming, no blog comment or news footage. Just him and whoever might break the curfew and turn up. It was almost like the first few weeks of his calculated act of defiance, before it became the media event he couldn’t stop doing.

Valentina drove past their hotel and the Wellington Monument, down Piccadilly. She eased her foot off the accelerator as the rubble of the Oshicora building came into view between the rising skyscrapers on either side of the plot.

It was swarming with people, each of them taking something from the mound and carrying it away. There wasn’t much space around for the debris to go: instead, spontaneous barricades were collecting on all the approach roads.