“Don’t.”

There were people in the cars. From the frantic banging on the inside of the windows and the rattle of door handles, they didn’t seem too pleased to be there. Some of the drivers were screaming into their phones, and some of them were just screaming. They pulled at their steering wheels, dragged at the handbrakes, all to no avail.

They drove inexorably on.

The front of the procession drew level with them. Chain tried the door from the outside. It was locked, but neither could the wild-haired woman inside get it open.

“What are you doing?” he yelled at her.

“Help me,” she mouthed.

“Chain?”

“Not now, Petrovitch.” He pulled his gun and reversed it in his hand.

“This is important! All these cars, all of them: they’re new.”

“What?” Chain kept pace with the car and readied himself. He shooed the woman away from the passenger door and imitated what he was going to do.

“They’re all this year’s or last year’s models; top of the range.”

“You’re not making any sense.” The rain had penetrated everywhere; everything was wet, clinging, dripping.

“They’re all automatic. They drive themselves, Chain.”

Chain brought the butt of his gun down against the window. It bounced off with the same force, and he let out a strangled cry of pain.

“That’ll be toughened glass, then,” said Petrovitch. “Let’s try this instead.”

He stepped around the front of the car and took his bug-detecting wand from around his neck. He ran it up one side of the bonnet, then the other. At the top, on the driver’s side, he got a signal.

He reached into his waistband and dragged out his snub-nosed little pistol. He pointed it down at the metalwork and pumped the trigger, once, twice, three times. Three sharp whipcracks; three holes.

The car stalled. The doors unlocked with a clunk. On hearing the sound, the driver threw herself at the passenger door, and Chain hauled her out.

The rest of the cars carried on. The car behind nudged the back of the disabled one, and started to shove it forward. Petrovitch skipped out of the way and stood in the torrent in the gutter as the grind of metal and the faint pattering of desperate hands on glass made its stately way down the street.

Thirty cars in all, no traffic in front, none behind. The crowd began to murmur and disperse, the show over.

Chain was struggling with his bruised gun-hand and the woman. She gasped and mouthed, and no words would come out. All the while, she grabbed at parts of his jacket to be reassured that he was real.

“Petrovitch? What did you do?”

“I killed it.” Petrovitch worked the slide and ejected the chambered shell into his hand. He tucked his gun away again.

“Explain. Excuse me, miss. Will you stop pawing at me?” He finally got his good arm up and held her away.

“I blew its brains out. Even your car’s not so old that it hasn’t got electronics under the bonnet.” Petrovitch took his glasses off and shook them free of water. “That’s what you’re going to have to do to each and every one of them.”

“Me?”

“You and your cop friends. Unless you’re happy for this to carry on?”

The broken car beached itself against a lamp-post further up the street. The obstacle it made caused ripples in the neat lines of cars, so that the advancing front was no longer perfectly straight.

Chain looked at the woman, who had started to wander away in a daze. She walked slowly and erratically toward her car, and when she was within range, she started to kick viciously at it with her heels.

“Is this your fault?” asked Chain.

“No more than it is the Oshicora Corporation’s. Which is to say, I don’t know.” He put his glasses back on, fat raindrops clinging to the lenses. “But I don’t see how it can be.”

“I’m going to have to call this in. I’m going to have to get help.” Chain flexed his fingers to check they all still worked. “Don’t think you’re off the hook.”

“Meet me at the lab. And I still want that body armor.”

“In exchange for that pathetic pea-shooter you call a gun.”

“Potselui mou zhopy, Chain. I seem to be the only one around here who knows what he’s doing.” Petrovitch’s blanket had fallen in the road. He wrung it out the best he could, adding to the flood at his feet. Then he held it over him and shook his head rapidly to try and clear his glasses.

“When did I stop being Inspector Chain?”

“When I caught you out, zjulik.” He watched Chain’s face fall. “Go on, go. The terrifying truth is that people’s lives might depend on you getting your srachishche moving.”

The rain continued to fall as they stared each other down. The lights changed; red, amber, green. Almost at once, horns started to sound, and those slow in clearing the crossing walked a little faster.

Chain looked down the road past Petrovitch at the block of cars gliding serenely as one again. He bared his teeth in a feral snarl and turned away, back to his own vehicle.

Petrovitch crossed to the other side, and on. He found that he was wet, cold, hungry, he couldn’t go home, he could barely risk going to the lab without police protection, and he had the chill metal touch of gun against his waist.

He realized that he needed to be dry and warm and well-fed, or he’d end up stumbling and slouching to his death. He looked up with his water-spattered eyes at the street names and recognized where he was.

It was only a short walk, but he was shivering by the time he arrived. He could feel his heart large and fragile under his scrawny ribs as he took the steps up to the big wooden doors, still marked with bullets.

The door was closed. He took hold of the black iron hoop and banged it down. The sound echoed away inside. He did it again, then again, then hunched up on the narrow slice of dry stone provided by the doorway.

A bolt slid back, and the door opened to make a sliver of darkness.

He could see her narrowed eye regarding him from her great height.

“Sanctuary,” he said.

17

Sister Madeleine took him in. She guided him around the plastic buckets dotted along the length of the nave that attempted to catch the copious drips from the roof, stopped to genuflect to the altar, then steered him into the vestry.

Father John wasn’t there.

“Meeting with the bishop,” she said. She took his blanket away, and then wondered what to do with the sodden lump. She threw it out into the church.

“Doesn’t that mean you should be with him?”

“There’ll be more Joans there than priests. He’ll be perfectly safe.” She stared at Petrovitch. “You realize that sanctuary was abolished in the seventeenth century.”

He shivered uncontrollably under her gaze and wrapped his arms around himself. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I thought you had a plan for everything,” she said, then added quietly: “You also said I’d never see you again.”

She took a step forward, and for the briefest of moments he thought she was going to enfold him in her own robes. The look of utter panic on both their faces forced them apart.

She whirled around on the pretense of searching for something. “Doesn’t take a genius to pack a raincoat.”

“I had planned to be at the airport. Then something happened, and I found I needed to hang around after all.”

She found an old two-bar electric fire and dragged it to the center of the room, frayed flex trailing behind it. “Needed to, or wanted to?” She crouched low down by the skirting board and forced the yellowed plug into a wall socket. The wires on the fire fizzed sparks and started to glow red.

“I can still go. Walk out, never come back.”

She straightened up, faced him down. “Why don’t you then? Why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?”