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.
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
“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
“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 cafe 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
“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.
“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
“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.”
