“Enough that you will not have to worry about your terrible injuries.”

“Yeah. Figures. Are you going to stand back?”

“It would not make difference,” she said. “Here is as good as anywhere.”

It took him five minutes to ease the case across the doorway. When he went too quickly, he knew, because the electric whine of motors told him so.

“Yobany stos.” He flexed his fingers, making them all crack except the replacement.

Valentina extracted the hook from her case and undid the knot in Petrovitch’s laces. She passed them back to him, and he started the laborious task of threading them back through the dozen eyelets in each boot.

“You want me to blow sentry up?” She started by selecting a small block of plastique.

“Are we talking about throwing a bomb in the room and just hoping? Can you take out the gun without setting the building on fire, bearing in mind that room’s full of paper?”

“No.”

“Then,” he said, pointing at the floor, “why don’t we go down? We can come back with the right hardware and not ruin Chain’s filing system.”

She stamped her heel against the wooden boards. “Is not a good material to work with. Splinters unpredictably.”

“Can you get most of the blast downward?”

She walked the floor, testing sites by doing little jumps. “Here,” she said, standing in the far corner. “Much more rigid, more likely to snap, not flex.” She came back for the plastique; which she rolled into a long thin worm.

It looked like marzipan. It smelled of oil.

“Will not be pretty.” She pressed the explosive into a gap in the floorboards, and a detonator into the protruding end. She trailed wires back to where Petrovitch was finishing tying the final bow of his laces. “I should have something to contain explosion, aim it where I need it to go. We are also very close.”

“As long as it gets us out of this mess.” He looked at Grigori’s ruined form. “You balvan! You mudak, you pidaras. You got yourself killed for nothing!”

“He was showing off. To me. Perhaps he thought I would be impressed.” She retrieved a battery pack, then shut the case. “Do I look impressed?”

“No. You look pissed.” Petrovitch shrugged his trenchcoat off, and they both crouched down as small as they could make themselves, covering their backs with the tent of the coat.

“Put your hands over your ears,” she said in the darkness. She had earplugs. He did not. Under the coat, it was hot, her breath was hot, and everything was about to get even hotter.

Valentina touched the wires to the battery terminals.

12

Petrovitch was almost home when he called her, fumbling in his thigh pocket for his phone even as he dragged his feet down the last stretch of Clapham Road.

“Hey,” he said. He looked up at the sky smeared with pink clouds. “Where am I? About five minutes away. Meet me in Wong’s?”

He could tell she knew something was wrong, and he was grateful that she didn’t interrogate him there and then. She gave a simple acceptance to his offer, and rang off.

As he followed the bend round, the café came into view, its misted windows burning with white light, its neon sign flickering on and off in a pattern it made up as it went. All it needed was driving rain and it would have been the perfect noir setting, complete with washed-out hero.

He shouldered the sticky door. “Hey, Wong. Your sign’s on the blink.”

“Is that so? You fix it?” Wong slapped a damp tea towel over his shoulder and stepped toward the coffee maker.

Petrovitch shrugged. “If you like. It’s about the only thing I can fix with any certainty at the moment.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” said Wong. His eyes narrowed. “You filthy. You come in my shop and you filthy. All black and burned.”

“Yeah.” He dug his fists into his pockets. “You pouring that coffee or should I just leave like the bio-hazard I am?”

Wong reached up to a shelf for a mug. “Not a good day?”

“No. No, it wasn’t.” Petrovitch kicked the bottom of the counter. “Completely and irrevocably pizdets. I lost a friend.”

“Another?” Black coffee poured into the mug, filling the air with its sour aroma. “You running out of friends. Better find more, soon.”

“Wong, I’m not in the mood. I…” The door opened, and he turned, thinking—hoping—that it was Madeleine. In doing so, he showed his back to the shopkeeper, who could see the ruin that was his coat.

It wasn’t her. But it was a face he recognized.

They stared at each other, she plainly knowing who he was, too, and not in a good, seen-him-on-television, fan-girl way.

“Chyort,” he said. “Vsyo govno, krome mochee.”

“Sorry?” she said, her accent showing just from one word. She brushed a stray blonde hair from her face. “You’re called Petrovitch, right?”

“There seems little point in denying it. And you’re Charlotte Sorenson.”

“Do you know why I’m here?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be for the service.” Petrovitch glanced behind him to see Wong fuming. He banged Petrovitch’s coffee down and leaned his hands on the countertop, scowling.

“You knew my brother? Martin?” she said.

“Yeah, I knew him. Grab a coffee and you can tell me what you know. I can probably fill in some of the blanks for you.”

“Okay.” She looked up at the menu. Wong’s customers tended to ignore it, and it had mostly degraded into illegibility. “A… coffee, then.”

She was pretty in a corn-fed way. Long blonde hair framing wide, expressive features. She looked strong.

Wong poured another coffee and watched closely while she topped up her mug with milk.

“You friend of Petrovitch?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “It depends on how good a friend he was to my brother.”

Ignoring Petrovitch’s increasingly unsubtle signals to shut the huy up, Wong carried on. “Brother? American?”

“Duh,” she said, stirring her coffee with a spoon. She tapped the drips off and looked mildly surprised that the cutlery hadn’t melted.

“I remember him. Big man. Red face. Shouted. Shouted lots.”

She looked at Petrovitch, who had closed his eyes and was shaking his head.

“Why was he shouting?”

“Why don’t we sit down?” said Petrovitch.

By coincidence, the only table free was the one where he and Sorenson had sat, eaten breakfast, and argued, all those months ago.

Petrovitch snagged his coffee and led the way, wondering why Madeleine was taking so long. He sat with his back to the wall, and watched while Sorenson took the seat that had once been occupied by her brother. Her gait was mechanical, but not in a lumbering jerky way: it was all oiled gears and precision. She walked like she meant it.

“I saw Sonja Oshicora yesterday,” she said, centering her mug. “She was very helpful.”

“Really?” He was too tired to spot her sarcasm. Instead, he drank coffee and prayed for the door to open.

“No. She smiled a lot, but told me nothing. That man—”

“Wong.”

“Wong, then—he said more now than Oshicora did in an hour.”

“Did he?” Petrovitch flipped off his glasses and rubbed his smoke-stung eyes. “Yeah. That’s Wong.”

“Marty worked for her father, right? That was what he told me.” She sat upright, perfectly poised. Despite the conversations that leaked across their table from their neighbors, she made no attempt to preserve their privacy by leaning forward or lowering her voice.

“What else did he say about that? Did he mention what it was he was working on?” He was going to look around and see who was eavesdropping, even if she wasn’t. He dragged his glasses back onto his face.

“Big project, he said. Told me it was going well. Nothing about the content.” She looked him in the eye. “What was it?”

“Cybernetic interface for a virtual world.” He heard the door open again, and this time Madeleine stooped through the opening.