Саймон Морден - Degrees of Freedom

Dalton stroked his fantastically smooth, tanned, moisturized chin. He leaned over and opened a slim cardboard file. The first sheet of paper had the picture of a man, a little younger than Petrovitch, with a shock of black hair falling over his left eye. “Know who that is?”

He did. “That’s Anarchy. Wannabe-überhacker. Hit the NSA three months ago with a modified trojan, caused all sorts of problems, some of which they’re still sorting out. Yeah, he’s several steps ahead of the usual script-kiddies, but he got caught.”

“He’s a client of my firm. He assured me that this line is entirely private.”

“There’s no such thing as private anymore, Dalton. Not in this brave new world. Information wants to be free.”

“Private enough, then. Enough to take the risk in contacting you.”

“And why would you want to do that? You seem to have been doing fine without me.” As Petrovitch talked, he was searching the public and not-so-public records for an indication as to just how fine. “There you go: partner in the business, equity share, big corner office, married, a son and daughter, and another on the way—congratulations—house in the Hamptons. Kind of expensive, but you married money. Your wife’s father is a hardcore Reconstructionist, a senator, no less. You have done well. Too well to want to blow it all on saying hello to me.”

Dalton seemed to be having trouble breathing. “Whoa. Marie’s pregnant?”

“She went to a specialist yesterday. The day before, she bought three different off-the-shelf testing kits. It looks likely.” Petrovitch coughed. “Sorry if I ruined the surprise.”

“I’ll have to pretend I don’t know.” Dalton had his fist closed over his chest. “Are you just yanking my chain?”

“Not this time, tovarisch. She’s probably just waiting for the right time to tell you. Sure you don’t want to hang up on me?”

“I made my decision a while back. I… I’m a coward, Petrovitch. You know that better than most. I went to pieces, and it was only because you kept your head that I’m here today. Everything I have now, I owe it to you. I want—five years too late—to thank you.”

“Dalton, I raped your bank accounts. I took pretty much everything you had at the time. I beggared you. Or have you forgotten? Maybe you’ve forgotten too about all the other people that Boris kidnapped and I didn’t help? Or the ones where something went wrong—when the ransom wasn’t paid or there was a trace on the account—what about them? The ones he killed. The ones where he put his hands around their neck and crushed their larynx so that they’d suffocate, nice and slow. Every time that happened, I just turned the page on whichever textbook I was reading, and was glad it wasn’t me.”

“Petrovitch, I’ve been in denial ever since I got back from St. Petersburg. Some mornings I woke up and I even wondered if it had even happened to me at all. Then your face was all over the news and I found I couldn’t suppress the memories any longer. But who can I talk to? This man, this Russian kid who saved me, is the same one who’s an enemy of the state. Maybe if I’d have come clean a year ago, things would have been fine. I couldn’t, because I was a coward then, and I’m a coward now.”

“You’re not a coward, Dalton. You didn’t ask to be kidnapped. None of Boris’ victims did. And I wasn’t some yebani angel, sent from above to help you. You were the opportunity I needed to bail out, and it could just as easily have been someone else.”

“You don’t understand, Petrovitch…”

“Then explain it better, man!”

“I’m trying to. In court, I’m this silver-tongued magician. Opposing counsel are actually afraid of me. Me? Can you believe that?”

“Okay. You feel like you owe me something. I want nothing from you. I took what I needed at the time. I can even pay it back, though that’s as likely to get you into trouble as anything else.”

“The money means nothing to me.”

“You weren’t impressed at the time.”

“You made me reassess all my priorities. Everything I have dates from the moment I stepped back onto U.S. soil. My family, my career. I earned more money in the twelve months after I came back than you took from me.”

“It was enough. Enough to get me away, enough to hide me. I was, if not happy, fulfilled. And I hadn’t had to kill anyone to be that way. It was a good deal, Dalton. Both of us got something we wanted out of it. It was fair. Okay, your thanks is welcome, but why drag this up now, unless you’ve suddenly developed a death wish? What are you going to tell your wife when she asks you how work was?” Petrovitch’s eyelid twitched. “She doesn’t know any of this, does she? When you said, who could you tell, what you meant was, you haven’t told her anything.”

Dalton made a little gesture of defeat with his shoulders.

“I’ve been married for just over a year,” said Petrovitch, “and even I know that not telling your wife stuff is bad.” He went off on his own reverie for a moment, before snapping his concentration back to the American. “Doesn’t mean I follow my own advice, though.”

“Every time you come on the news—and that’s a lot—she starts up on this tirade of abuse. About how you’re like Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao all rolled into one. That you’re coming for us while we sleep, because freaks like you don’t need sleep; about how you’re plotting to take away our country and our values and our children. She’s smart, and loving, and kind. She runs charity fundraisers for good causes. She’s leader of the women’s circle at church. She’s a good person, Petrovitch, a godly person, the mother of my children.”

“All three of them.”

“That. And every time she starts, I want to shake her and shake her until she stops because you’re the reason I’m there at all.”

Petrovitch tilted his head to one side. “You could just stop watching the news with her.”

“I have to tell her. I have to tell her tonight.”

“That’s up to you, Dalton. I wouldn’t. I’d bury it so deep it’d take a geological age to bring it to the surface again. You have a good life: don’t throw it away. Look—what she believes might be true. I tricked Boris into letting you go, and in doing so, I betrayed the trust of a man who’d shown me nothing but kindness. The money he gave me kept me and my mother and my sister fed. It allowed me to study. When I fucked Boris over, I did it for cold, hard cash, and I still haven’t dared to find out what happened to the rest of my family. You can keep on fooling yourself about my motives for saving you, but I know what went through my mind that night.”

Dalton leaned back in his chair and looked around his office, at all the accoutrements of his position and his power. “I’m a lawyer, right? I do corporate law. The guys I work with, both clients and partners, play hardball with each other to get even the slightest advantage. They don’t give anything away, either. Sure, we’re all brothers in the Reconstruction: we all stay sober and clean, we don’t swear or hire hookers, we all smile and gladhand each other and ask about each other’s wives. Maybe some of them actually believe it.” He put his tongue in his cheek and rolled it around, the bulge visible from the outside. “The thing is, what they’re doing to each other is all the more savage and brutal because they have the outward appearance of being decent, dependable men—while the truth is, every last one of those robbers would have left me to rot in that St. Petersburg basement.”

Petrovitch tried to voice his objections, but didn’t get any further than a stuttered “I…”

“You had all my money, hundreds of thousands of dollars of it. You could have cut and run. Instead, you came back for me. You scammed Boris and if he’d known any of it, if he’d suspected a single thing, he would have killed the pair of us in an eyeblink. You risked your life to save mine.” Dalton jabbed his finger at the camera. “I know your secret, Petrovitch. I know that you are a good person and you will always be that way.”