“Okay.” He took a deep breath. One thing at a time from now on, he promised himself, and turned to face the world. “This will only take a minute, and my daughter will have to stand in for me for questions if you really want to hang around afterward—but I don’t think you will.”

Lucy, standing with the press, blinked and her mouth opened to object. Petrovitch pointed at her and then placed his finger against his lips. “No interruptions. I’ve uploaded files to the major newswires, and you can grab them from there. One is Sonja Oshicora’s confession that ten months ago, she was strong-armed into cooperating with the CIA to neutralize me. The events of the last two days have been the outworking of that plot, which has failed with the suicide of Sonja. The second is of footage taken fifteen minutes ago by Al Jazeera’s cameraman, when both he and Yasmina Surur were killed by CIA agents intending to destroy the AI called Michael, and I suspect they’re carrying a nuclear demolition charge.”

All he could hear was the faint whirr of a motorized focus. Every sudden intake of breath was held, every heart skipped a beat. No one moved, not even to tremble.

“Michael is no longer in the vault under the Oshicora Tower—I made damn sure of that—and I’m appealing personally to President Mackensie to call off this futile attack before it goes any further. People are going to die and it’ll be for nothing.”

He paused. The turbine in his chest was spinning fast and his blood ran hot. He could feel the rage surge inside him.

“How dare they? How dare they come here, to the Metrozone, with a weapon like that. This is my city, my home, and I will not have it fucked up by a bunch of fuck-witted paranoid Reconstructionists acting like they’re in a fucking Western. The old order has failed. The new order is here. Long live the revolution.” He pulled his gun clear and ran as best he could through the middle of the press pack. “Lucy? You’re on. Madeleine? With me.”

He stumbled clear, and started issuing his orders. “Tabletop. Were you listening?”

“We’re already on our way.”

“Go straight to the tower. I don’t know if they’ve made it that far yet, so we might be able to trap them in the river. Take as many people as are willing to go with you, and please be careful. This is the end game, and they’re choosing to go out with a bang. I’ll send you my maps. Spread out along the line of the culvert, watch the manhole covers but don’t open any of them. Me and Madeleine are going to Park Lane: I’ll take the car.”

He limped as he went, his arm weighing him down, still festooned with three singularity bombs. He was much slower than Madeleine, who caught him up quickly.

“You have to get away,” she said.

“My Freezone, my responsibility.”

There was Valentina’s car. He reached out and started it up remotely, backing it around in a circle until it was pointing the right way along Euston Road. The wheels screeched, and he jumped in the driver’s seat. Madeleine launched herself in the back.

He didn’t touch the steering wheel, just plotted in a course and let the automatics take care of it.

“I can drive, you know,” said Madeleine. She folded the other half of the seat down so she could access the trunk. “I should have impounded her personal armory along with the rest.”

“Yeah. Tool up. We can’t afford to screw around.”

“Why can’t we just let them blow themselves up?” Her voice was muffled as she searched for heavy caliber weapons. “If it’s a nuke, it’s a small nuke. They’re setting it off underground.”

“I’m going to stop them because they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I don’t need another reason. Bomb, no bomb. It doesn’t matter. They’re wrong. I’m right.” Petrovitch braced himself as the car hurtled around a corner. “Doing nothing is unforgivable.”

They were almost there, barreling down Park Lane toward the Wellington Arch. He looked in the rearview mirror: Madeleine had found an assault shotgun and enough shells to fill it. She caught his glance.

“This is it, then.”

“Yeah. Looks that way. Yebani v’rot.” He banged his hand against the window, the door, his seat, the dashboard. “Why can’t the Yanks be smart like I am? Why can’t they work out that Michael’s gone?”

She slotted the last plastic shell into place and cranked one into the breach. “Even if one or all of those agents are having second thoughts about a suicide mission, they’re trained to follow orders. All the way to the end.”

The car screeched to a halt, delivering them next to the broadcast van. The body of Surur was behind the vehicle, a couple of meters shy of the back bumper. She’d been shot repeatedly, and was lying in a lake of congealed blood. The cameraman, still with his rig strapped to his body, was pole-axed near the side door.

There were holes in the van’s white bodywork—fortunate that they hadn’t hit anything vital in the cramped electronic interior, so that the prone camera had picked up five dark forms sweeping by, one carrying a green canvas bag that was obviously both far too heavy and too cylindrical for regular ordinance.

And there was the cable, lying on the ground, its plug torn off and disposed of.

Petrovitch scrambled out of the car and headed for the ramp down to the car park. “Michael? Anything?”

[If they are underground, the depth is sufficient to block signals. If they are above ground, they are maintaining radio silence.]

“Oh, they’re down there all right. And even if Mackensie wanted to order them back, he can’t.”

[Sasha. Please reconsider. The Americans will die by their own hand, destroying a redundant piece of equipment. Is not the best option simply to let them do this?]

“Of course it is. But there’s such a thing as justice, and I’m going to deliver it to them like an avenging angel.” The overhang of the concrete roof was above him. “See you on the other side, Michael. The Pope might have doubts about you, but I don’t.” He switched links, briefly. “Tabletop. Collapse the tunnel east of the tower. I have a sort of plan.”

He ran on, and he felt his feed fail. Madeleine overtook him, and slipped on a pair of night-vision goggles she’d found. “I’m going first.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I can just shove you out of the way and there’s nothing you can do about it.” She jogged ahead of him, scanning the shadows, gun butt pressed hard against her shoulder.

The plastic sheeting in front of the tunnel entrance flapped, and sent the pair of them sliding apart, left and right, slowly converging on the scaffolding it covered. Madeleine eased a piece aside with the barrel of the shotgun.

“Clear,” she said, and climbed inside. Petrovitch followed in a poor second place: she was already lying down in the tunnel, moving forward on her elbows. He watched her feet recede, then scooted down the shallow slope on his backside. And when he arrived, his feet splashing into the river, she was ahead, stalking forward.

He wasn’t going to be left behind, even though he was reeling from one side of the tunnel to the other. He was going to keep up even if it killed him.

As they advanced down the coal-black tunnel, made barely visible by their hardware, a distant booming noise rattled the brickwork, and a pop of air brushed by them.

Madeleine looked behind her at Petrovitch. He gave her the thumbs-up and pointed ahead. She trod silently on, her long legs allowing her to step on either side of the river.

Then she stopped, keeping perfectly still. Petrovitch slowly lowered himself to a crouch. There was a slight bend in the river, and around it were the first glimmerings of a heat glow.

Her shotgun already had a chambered shell. She already had it up at her shoulder and aimed. All she had to do was lean into the recoil and twitch the trigger.

The sound of the shot was brutally loud in such a confined space, and the figure ahead was just turning away from the sound of Valentina’s tunnel demolition when the solid slug tore through the layer of ballistic mesh and into the flesh and bone beneath.