Simon Morden - Theories of Flight

Valentina stood behind Petrovitch, adjusting her jacket.

“Idiot,” she said. “It is not like he had spare life that he could afford to throw this one away.”

Petrovitch backed away and sat up. “Sentry gun? What the huy was Chain doing with one of those?”

“Protecting his information? He would have had a way of deactivating it, though. Did MEA give you anything else besides keys?”

“No. Just them.” He’d broken out into a cold sweat. It could have been him. If Valentina hadn’t stopped him the first time, if he’d accepted Grigori’s dare, he would have walked straight into the line of fire. “First chance I get, I’m going to kick Chain’s corpse in the yajtza.”

“Do I have to point out that we have more immediate problem?”

“No.” Petrovitch pushed his glasses up his face, and eyed the distant stairs. “What’s the reaction time on that thing? Can we move faster than it can track us?”

She threw Petrovitch a box of matches. “Try for yourself.”

He picked up the cardboard box off his lap and extracted one of the red-headed sticks. His fingers were trembling as he rasped the head against the rough strip.

The match flared into life. Petrovitch held it for a second to make sure the flame had caught, then flicked it into the air. The match arced away, and simply vanished as a bullet tore through it, turning the wood to dust.

“Okay,” he said. “Plan B.”

“Which is?”

“Give me a moment.” He looked around for some assets. The floor was bare boards, the windows were on the half-landings, up and down, even the door to the other flat was in plain view of the automatic weapon in Chain’s apartment.

There was Valentina’s open case, just the other side of the doorway.

“Yeah. We can do this.” He hunched his legs up and started to unlace his boots, slipping his fingers between the eyelets and dragging out longer and longer loops of lace until they were both free.

Valentina watched him tie the laces together to make a single length. “What else do you need?”

“A piece of bent metal, to make a hook.” He had all-sorts in his pockets, but nothing that would do.

She had a heavy combat knife, which he thought might do. He tied the lace to the center of the knife, just handle-side of the hilt, and judged his throw.

The knife fell into the case, but as he slowly tensioned the attaching cord, it turned and rolled out.

The servos aiming the gun squeaked, and Petrovitch gritted his teeth for the inevitable bang.

It didn’t come, and he pulled the knife back in.

He tried again, making absolutely sure that at no point did his hand go further than the wall. His aim was good, but there was nothing for the knife to catch on to.

“This isn’t going to work,” he said, readying himself for a third attempt.

“This might.”

She was holding her blouse shut with one hand, presenting him with her bra with the other.

“I… I don’t see.”

“Underwiring.”

He blinked, and took the white satin underwear from her. Its warmth made his face flush. She turned away to button up, and he used her knife to slice open the reinforced seam.

Petrovitch fashioned a hook from one end of the curved metal strip, and an eye from the other, using the back of the knife blade as an anvil. When he looked up again, she was dressed.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I assume you are helping me,” she said. When he offered her the remnants of her bra, she waved them away. “I will survive. Even if I must run.”

The backward-facing tine of the hook bit into the soft foam interior of the case on the first go. With a little gentle pressure, it cut through until it wedged against the metal outside.

Petrovitch pulled, very slowly.

“How much of your stuff is going to go boom if it ends up with a round or two through it?”

“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.

P etrovitch 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.”