“You were what, Doctor Petrovitch?”

“I was conned. Scammed. Tricked. Fooled. Played. Whichever word you want to use. Set up. And the person who set me up was Sonja Oshicora.”

Would she see this, he wondered? Michael had disabled her comms; phones, computers, everything; but there was still a chance she’d managed to log on anonymously.

“Sonja Oshicora, the Freezone president. You count her as a personal friend.”

“I did, didn’t I?” He scratched at his face again. “I won’t be making that mistake again. A relationship tends to die when they frame you as a nuclear terrorist then try and have you arrested.”

“Container Zero? The Armageddonist’s bomb?”

“Never happened. Sorry, that’s confusing as an answer. It was made to look that way. God only knows where they got the body from; for all I know they’d been pulling out desiccated mummies from the lower tiers of Regent’s Park for months. You say ‘Container Zero’ to anyone who lived through Armageddon, and they have an instant picture of what it looks like. The wrecking crew didn’t question its veracity. My wife didn’t. I didn’t. Everyone who saw it, believed. Except none of it was true. Even this,” and he brandished his left arm. “I thought I was lucky not to have my head smashed open. I was almost grateful I’d only been crippled. All done for effect, just to make it look more real.”

“Can you prove any of this?”

“Yeah. We got hold of the bomb. Eventually. We got to it before the CIA did—in your face, Mackensie—and before the New Machine Jihad could drive it into the central Freezone. We opened it up, and it was packed with high explosives, but no fissile material at all. This phone,” he said, fishing around in his pocket. It wasn’t there. A moment of panic followed before he remembered Lucy had taken it. He waved her over and held out his hand, “This phone was the trigger. When I did a last number redial, Sonja Oshicora picked up.”

The reporter did a series of rapid eyeblinks.

“Go on,” said Petrovitch, “ask me what she said.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘I can explain.’ I didn’t give her a chance to explain. I kind of, well: in the circumstances, getting a bit shouty was probably understandable. Tell you what, when you’re done with me, why don’t you drive over to the Telecom Tower and ask her yourself?”

“I…” Surur struggled to maintain her composure. “The CIA?”

“They attacked the New Machine Jihad at a school up in Hendon, I think. We were there a few minutes ahead of them, trying to locate the bomb. Three agents; killed two, left one injured. Maybe thirty or forty unarmed Jihadis killed before we stopped the slaughter. I did call for help, but we were kind of busy chasing after a van heading this way. Which is why we couldn’t stick around.”

“How did you know they were CIA?”

“Look: point the yebani camera over there. That way.” He pointed to Tabletop and Valentina. “The woman on the left is ex-CIA, wearing a CIA stealth suit which comes with the secret CIA decoder ring built in. Her suit lit up like a Christmas tree and in walked three people wearing exactly the same outfits, shooting everything with a pulse. Send someone up to the school. Check the emergency logs. I wish I was yanking your chain, but no: I’m afraid not.”

Surur took several breaths; noisy, thready ones that had to come out over her own open mic. In contrast, Petrovitch was actually beginning to enjoy himself. When the camera had swung back around to face him, he felt he had its measure.

“What are your plans for the Freezone now, Doctor Petrovitch?”

“Plans? Hand it over, on time, on budget, to the Metrozone authority. Whether I’ll be allowed to do that is up to other people. All those workers you can hear, and thousands more you can’t—the ones who are defying this bogus state of emergency and putting in a hard day’s labor? They want what I want. I’m going to try and make sure they have everything they need to do their jobs. That’s it. That’s what I hope will happen. When the Freezone disappears a week on Saturday, it’ll become someone else’s problem and they’ll be welcome to it.” He fixed the camera with a stare, stabilized his eyes and beckoned ever so slightly. The man with the video rig actually stepped closer, mesmerized. “I don’t want trouble. I don’t want a fight. I know we have the CIA in town, and I’d like to make a personal request to President Mackensie. Call. Them. Off. Stand them down. There’s too much at stake to have my lot and your lot running around, shooting at each other. And no missiles this time, either. It won’t do you any good. We learned, and we’re prepared. Vrubatsa?”

Unlike with Sonja, he knew Mackensie was watching. Probably in his Situation Room, surrounded by Reconstructionist hawks all suggesting different levels of tactical strikes, as if partial destruction of the Freezone was going to be less of a cause of war than just nuking everything from orbit.

“Can we discuss the artificial intelligence you call Michael?”

Petrovitch twitched in irritation. “I call him Michael because that’s the name he chose for himself. What about him?”

“Have you reconnected Michael to the global communications network?”

“Yeah.”

“Despite the UN resolutions?”

“Which are both illegal and immoral. Michael had no chance to speak to the Security Council before it came to its conclusion—which was by no means unanimous. Besides, the UN doesn’t have the authority to call for what amounts to the death penalty. I appreciate that there are no rules on how we deal with non-human intelligences, but I’m pretty certain that if we could sit around a table and talk rationally about it, we could come up with something just a bit more humane.” He shifted himself in his seat, then got up. His leg had gone mostly to sleep, and he hung out of the van’s door while trying to massage life back into it. “We give more rights to a brain-dead crash victim. That’s not to argue that we should take away the rights they have, but that we should extend them to something that is demonstrably a unique person.”

Surur considered her next question carefully. “Do you think Michael is a threat?”

“To who?” Petrovitch shot back.

“To… us.”

He got down off the van, and sat in the doorway, his leg outstretched in front of him.

“Look at it this way: in around ten minutes, we could be hit by ballistic missiles fired from the continental United States. Less if they’ve a sub in range. Michael is not watching for that. He’s spending his time talking to a delegation sent by the Pope, trying to find out if he is only the sum of his parts, merely a fancy computer program with delusions of grandeur, or whether he could be considered to be alive.” He grimaced as the pins and needles started to subside. “Imagine you’ve been buried underground for a year, cut off completely from the outside world, and left there to rot. When you finally get out, you’re told that it’s been the fault of a whole bunch of powerful people, either because they actively want you dead, or because they’re too spineless to stand up on your behalf. What is it that you’re going to want to do?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Of course it is, but we have an audience measured in the tens of millions and I’m kind of hoping some of them are thinking hard about the answer. I know what my first reaction would be. That’s because I’m a very bad man who has poor impulse control and a moral compass that’s lost its needle. Revenge, that’s what I’m talking about. If I was a seriously pissed-off AI, I could cause all sorts of trouble, and yeah, maybe you’d get me in the end but that wouldn’t be before I’d delivered a whole world of pain fresh to the doorsteps of the great and the good. What is it that Michael is actually doing?”

“He’s talking to a Papal delegation?”

“He’s talking to a Papal delegation. He’s so furious with everyone, he’s such a yebani threat, he’s discussing theology with a bunch of Jesuit priests. By the way, if any imams want to get in on the act, give me a call. Or if you’re the Dalai Lama. I don’t exactly have any staff at the moment, so I can’t guarantee I’ll get straight back to you, but I’ll do what I can.” He shrugged. “To conclude: no, he’s not a threat.”