Petrovitch forced a smile at the kitchen staff as he raced around, picking up his boots, socks, trousers, pants, T-shirt. He struggled into his trousers and put his warm, stiff boots on. Then he waved his goodbyes, still wearing the white coat and carrying what he hadn’t put on under his arm.

“Pif? Phone.” He threw it across the table at her. “Keep the gun.”

“Sam?”

“Back to the lab. I’ve just remembered I can be contacted.”

“The mail servers are down, though.” She put the phone in her bag and slung it over her shoulder.

“I still got in touch with you, didn’t I? Good old-fashioned copper wire.”

The pair headed for the doors, and Chain barred their way.

“You have to explain,” he said.

“If you weren’t such a kon pedal’nii, you’d have worked it out.” Petrovitch darted to one side, Pif the other.

She shouted back, “First eight primes,” just before the doors swung shut again.

“You told him!”

“Your tame nun wanted to know, too.”

“She is not my anything.”

“Oh, Sam. I saw the way you looked at her. And she at you.”

He stopped in the middle of the corridor, and she stopped too.

“Never,” he said, “speak about this again.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

They ran the rest of the way, except for the lift, which was filled with her panting and his soft groans.

When the lift door opened, they could both hear the landline ringing. The security guard caught the barest glimpse of their cards as they dashed by.

The phone was on Pif’s desk, warbling away in its turn-of-the-century monotone. Pif closed the door and leaned back against it, while Petrovitch stalked over and regarded the handset with suspicion.

“Just pick it up,” she said.

Petrovitch curled his fingers around the phone and lifted it to his head. The silence rang louder than the noise.

“Petrovitch,” he said, and waited.

“Shinkansen ha mata hashirou.”

He opened his mouth, then slowly closed it again. He motioned for a pen. “Can you repeat that for me?”

“Shinkansen ha mata hashirou,” said the voice in a perfectly measured tone. Exactly as before.

Petrovitch bit the pen lid off and scribbled what he thought he heard on the nearest piece of paper. “How do I contact you?” he asked, staring at his writing, trying to make sense of it.

He heard the burr of the dial tone, and the handset slipped from his fingers. It bounced on its coiled cord off the edge of the desk, then dangled there until Pif picked it up and put it back.

“Who was it?” she asked.

“This,” he said, “this word here. I recognize it. And the only time I’ve heard it before is from a man who’s supposed to be dead.”

20

They’d gone out onto the campus and hunted down a native Japanese speaker, pinning the startled student against a wall and shouting badly accented words at him until he confessed: the bullet train will run again.

“It could be a rallying cry,” said Pif.

“It’s not a very good one: not up there with Viva la revolucion! or For the motherland! What’s wrong with Banzai?”

“Because the Emperor is dead and Japan has gone forever?”

“Oshicora used these exact same words: the shinkansen will run again. It might have been something he told everyone. So now it’s being used by the Oshicora loyalists as a code word that they can recognize each other by. If that’s true, I can use that.” Petrovitch worried at the piece of paper he’d written on. It was crumpled and creased and dog-eared. “I need to make a call.”

“Is that code too? Code for please leave?”

“Yeah. But more for your benefit than mine.” Petrovitch wheeled his chair around his desk and across the floor. “I’m smart, right? Everyone says so.”

“Smart and wise are two different things, Sam.” She pushed the phone toward him.

“And so are safe and honorable.” He picked up the handset and listened. No Japanese this time. “If it was you, stuck in that tower, your mother long dead, your father freshly murdered, no way out: wouldn’t you want someone to help you?”

“Of course,” said Pif, “although you have to admit you’d want that someone to be… I don’t know.”

“Not me, you mean.”

“Not really.” She pressed her fingers into her forehead. “The only language you speak fluently is mathematics. So what’s the probability of you pulling this off? What’s the probability of you throwing your life away for nothing?”

“That’s why I’m about to swing the odds in my favor.” He closed his eyes, trying to see the number he’d displayed on Chain’s computer while he was supposed to be busy watching Sonja’s messages. “Yeah, that’s it.”

He dialed, and heard ringing.

Then someone picked up and said: “Da?”

“Comrade Marchenkho? It’s Petrovitch. Don’t put the phone down, because we need to talk.”

He lifted the earpiece slightly away from his head as Marchenkho vented his diseased spleen at him down the line.

“Oshicora’s dead,” said Petrovitch when he could get a word in.

“How do you know?”

“His daughter told me. You know of Hijo?”

“Da.”

“Killed his boss. Took control. Occupational hazard for you lot, I suppose. How’s Yuri? Not got an itchy trigger finger yet?”

Marchenkho rumbled. “He says to remind you that his name is Grigori. What is it that you want, Petrovitch?”

“Apart from giving you the glad tidings that your greatest rival has been eliminated? How many men do you have, Marchenkho?”

“Enough,” he said. “Women too.”

“Good, because I want to borrow them. And you too, if you want to come for the ride. We’re going to finish off the Oshicora Corporation once and for all.”

“And when do you propose this happens?”

“That depends. Tomorrow morning good for you?”

Afterward, he started sorting his desk, putting everything into neat piles by subject and looking through his old notebooks, seeing if there was anything else he needed to write.

“Convince me you’re coming back,” said Pif.

“Can’t. Dead man walking now.”

She sighed, and leafed through her own papers, and held up his earlier work. “This is going to be called the Petrovitch Solution, after the man who first discovered it. But I don’t want this to be the only thing the world remembers him for.”

“Most people don’t even manage this: having an equation named after you is immortality.”

“Sam…”

He sat back and stroked his nose. “How long have we known each other, Pif?”

“Two years. Roughly.”

“Those are two years that I stole from someone. I cheated them by living. And for the few years before that. Hang on.” Petrovitch found his bug-detecting wand and made a search of the room. He realized he should have done this before: Chain had had plenty of opportunity to plant one of his bugs earlier.

The lights on the wand flickered into the red as he moved it over his desk.

“Did Chain sit here?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so, while we were waiting for you.”

“Chyort.” He got down on his hands and knees and looked underneath the tabletop. A sticky square of electronics was adhered to the wood toward the back. He got an edge up with a nail, then peeled it off. He emerged with it stuck to his thumb. “What do I have to say to you, Detective Inspector Harry Chain? You collect all this information, you work out what’s going on, you plot and you plan. And yet nothing you do—that you say that you’re allowed to do—makes any difference. You’ve had all the chances you needed and you chose not to take them, any of them, you spineless shriveled little man. You are a pathetic waste of space and, unlike me, the world will forget you because you have never really lived. Goodbye.”