“I don’t even know if I can access it. It’s not the rat.”

“Give it to me. You’re panicking and we don’t have the time.”

“Can you find anything?”

“What’s it called?”

“I don’t—wait: Sorenson. Search for Sorenson.”

“Spelt right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Just stop pointing at the screen. No. No. No again. Wait.”

“That slider. Put it halfway.”

“There?”

And the blood surged back through his body. His heart wasn’t designed to go from a standing start, but it did well enough. As his blood pressure returned to something approaching normal, Petrovitch grimaced and gurned.

“I didn’t know I could do that,” he said eventually.

“You turned your own heart off.”

He blinked and tried to find the speaker: Madeleine. “Looks that way. I’m going to have to script up some sort of safety net for that.”

She pushed the others aside and raised him into a sitting position. “Never do that again.”

“What? It’s not like I haven’t died before.” He took a breath of fresh, cold air and found it didn’t hurt.

Madeleine cuffed his head lightly. “And I was there for most of them, which is why I don’t want to go back to that.” She chewed at her lip. “You believe her, don’t you?”

“Lucy? You know how much of a fan I am of Occam’s Razor.”

“Sam, what are we going to do?” She pulled at her plait and dragged it over her shoulder. “I can’t believe how stupid I’ve been.”

“It’s been staring us in the face since the very start. But I was looking for one person who knew everything, and the reason I could never work out who was because there was two of them.” He tried to flex his left arm. His fingers would move, but the rest of it had set solid. He couldn’t overcome the resistance offered by the motors. “As to what we’re going to do…”

Petrovitch dragged himself upright and restuck the computer to his side. He set his face in the direction of the Post Office Tower, but his view was obscured by Madeleine, who moved in front of him. She put the flat of her hand against his chest.

“No.” Her voice was firm.

“Out of the yebani way. I’m going to rip her a new zhopu with this,” and he brandished his broken arm, “then I’m going to see how well she flies.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I’m pretty sure I can. I’m pretty sure that no one’s going to stop me from doing it either.” He looked up into his wife’s face. “She won’t lift a finger to save herself, because she loves me.”

“Do you really think that? Do you really believe she’s not going to fight to keep what she has?”

“She has nothing left.” Petrovitch gestured to the rubble pile. “She’s lost the Freezone, she’s lost me, she’s lost the nikkeijin, the organization around her is falling apart, she’s got no home, no purpose, no inheritance and no legacy.”

“Then maybe,” said Madeleine, “you should just leave her alone for the moment. Not that we both don’t have a reckoning with her at some point…”

“And with the priest.”

“And with John. He’s lost everything too. His very identity as a priest, even. But if Sonja’s lost the Freezone, who’s there to catch it if it falls?”

Still he tried to go through her, to get at Sonja. “I saved her. And for what? So she could do this to me?”

Madeleine pushed him hard enough to rock him back on his heels. “You just told these people to go to work. They don’t have electricity or computers, thanks to you. That means you haven’t got the time to spare on this self-indulgent crap, because like them, you have work to do.”

“Don’t you want to get at her? At Father fucking John?”

She lowered her voice to barely a whisper. “Oh yes. But they can wait. Look at their plans—what have they come to? Nothing. We have a city to run, we have another CIA hit-squad to find. We have a thousand and one people to talk to, to assure them that we’re not going to drop the ball.”

Petrovitch fumed. “I know what you’re saying makes more sense. But I still prefer my version.”

“I prefer your version. It’s just a shame we don’t have the luxury of doing what we want. You always said the Freezone was a good idea because it was your idea: are you going to throw it away because you want to act out your revenge fantasies?”

“It’s so very tempting.” He stopped his attempts to bull his way past her. “Yobany stos, all right. Have it your way.”

Valentina looked pointedly at her watch, and Petrovitch scowled.

“Like you’re a yebani metronome. You might not show it, but you’re just as pissed as I am.”

She conceded the point. “So what do we do? And in what order do we do it?”

“I need this arm back. That’s not going to happen until I get the power back on. I would also like something to eat and drink because it’s been a very long time since any of us have done either. That’s not going to happen until I get the power back. These good people need to do some work, and guess what?” Petrovitch wandered away across the road, staring down every so often. His lips moved silently as he counted.

“Sam, what are you doing?” called Lucy.

Petrovitch eventually pointed to a black metal cover set into the tarmac. “We need to get this one up.”

She turned to Tabletop, standing beside her. “What’s he doing?”

“I have no idea.”

“I do,” said Madeleine, cupping her hands around her mouth. “I thought the idea was to persuade everyone we hadn’t lost the plot.”

He shouted back. “You want power? This is how we get it. In every way.”

While Valentina went to fetch the tire iron from the trunk of the car, the other three went over to where Petrovitch was standing.

Madeleine crouched down next to the manhole. “You realize the Yanks are going to want to nuke us if we do this. We’ve dodged a pretend atomic bomb only to walk into the path of a real one.”

“You asked me if I had a plan for when I got him out. I did then, and I still do.” He took a step back and allowed Valentina to dig the edge of the iron between the cover and the lip of the hole. “I’ve let the Americans dictate what happens to Michael for too long. No more.”

As the cover broke free of the collected muck that held it down, Madeleine dug her fingers under it and dragged it scraping to one side. There was a brick-lined black hole, and a ladder thick with rust descending into it.

“We are going to get Michael, da?” Valentina threw the tire iron aside.

“Yeah, we are.” Petrovitch flipped his feet into the hole and adjusted his useless arm down to fit close by his side. He toed the first rung, testing his weight on it. “We’re going to need the cee-four.”

Tabletop looked at the distance between them and the tower. “Okay. But let me go first. We’ve come too far to let any more surprises get in the way.” She pulled the hood of her stealth suit over her head and covered her eyes with the integral goggles.

Petrovitch moved to one side, and she used partly him, partly the road, to lower herself into the void. She swarmed down the ladder and, within moments, was out of sight.

“Right,” he said to those remaining. “Down the rabbit hole.”

20

Away from the small circle of light, the darkness was like a wall. Petrovitch switched to infrared, and watched while Madeleine descended.

“Still not that sweet,” she said, and raised her arms to guide Lucy’s feet onto the corroded metal rungs for the last few steps. “You’re there.”

“What is this place?”

Petrovitch was about to answer, when Madeleine cut in, sounding casual: “It’s a river. An underground river running through the heart of London.”

“Then why can I smell, you know…” Lucy looked around her, then at her feet.

“Because it doubles as a sewer.”

“Eww.”

Valentina swung herself over the hole in the road and held out her AK. Madeleine took it and passed it to Petrovitch, who could actually see where he was pointing it.