This new street crossed a canal before connecting to an arterial road. I threw the cell phone into the water and walked northwards, away from the fire and smoke, as the howling sirens behind me grew in both number and ferocity. I felt certain of success. They might have talked their way past the police, but with the house on fire too, a thorough search by the authorities seemed inevitable; and Jesse, unlike me, was not a wanted man.
When a black cab loomed out of the night I hailed it, and returned to the Net cafe from which my venture had begun. I stank of sweat and gasoline, but neither I nor its proprietor cared. Back in that same semi-private booth I called up Argus once more, and watched London’s police and fire brigade free Jesse and take his captors into handcuffed custody.
I had rarely been so physically miserable, and things had never been so desperate, but it was one of the great moments of my life. I had done something extraordinary, all by myself.
Chapter 65
I emerged from that Internet cafe into the gloomy Earl’s Court morning, and for a moment stood dazed beside a classic red British phone box straight out of Dr. Who, adjusting to the light and the traffic. Early-morning commuters were already making their way to their cubicles. For the first time in my life I envied them.
I had to work out how to contact Jesse, now that all our email accounts had been compromised. First, though, I needed food and caffeine. I was starved, exhausted, and jet-lagged. So much had happened since landing in the UK that it was hard to believe only 24 hours had passed.
Somewhere a telephone rang. In my confused state it took me a good few seconds to realize that it was inside the phone box beside me. The empty phone box beside me.
I started, then walked away quickly, as if it might be demonically possessed. Another phone box, belonging to a different company, stood only twenty paces away. As I passed, it too began to ring.
I stopped and looked around wildly, feeling like a hunted animal. But nobody on the street seemed to be paying me the least attention.
After a long moment I opened the door, entered the box, and answered the ringing phone.
“Mr. Kowalski, I presume?” asked a low British voice.
“Who is this?” I demanded.
“A friend of your favourite court jester.”
“How did you find me?”
“The same way you found him. Which should worry you greatly, because if I can track you, they can too.”
Cold dread began to seep into the pit of my stomach.
“But don’t panic just yet,” the voice reassured me, “they’re not as fast as me. Listen carefully. A red car will stop beside you in about five minutes time. Just before it does, I will crash the entire Argus system. It will take another five minutes to come back up, during which we can disappear you.”
“To where?”
“To safety,” the man said with some exasperation in his voice, “what did you think?”
“I don’t -” I didn’t know what to think. “Who are you?”
“LoTek.”
I inhaled sharply. Suddenly this conversation made a lot more sense. “Oh.”
“Five minutes.” He hung up.
It happened just as he had described. The dreadlocked Rastafarian behind the wheel of the red car with tinted windows drove me to another, identical vehicle, piloted by a woman in a business suit. Neither spoke a word to me. I supposed that was good security. She in turn took me to the parking garage beneath a five-star Meridien hotel.
There Jesse was waiting for me.
“Dude,” he greeted me, and tried to bear-hug me.
I quailed away. “Ow.”
“Oh. Sorry. Come on, let’s get you to the suite.”
I looked at him. He had a black eye but looked otherwise unscathed. Then I looked around the cavernous parking garage. There seemed to be cameras everywhere.
“Don’t worry,” he said, sotto voce. “We own the eyes around here.”
Entering the Meridien was like crossing a dimensional barrier into a different and far better world. Even the elevator was ostentatiously luxurious. It took us directly to the hotel’s enormous penthouse, expensively decorated in black and silver. The transition from homeless fugitive to resident of a luxury hotel suite with a stunning view of central London was so abrupt and profound that I felt dizzy with vertigo, had to sit down hard on the nearest overstuffed suede couch. I was both starving and utterly exhausted.
“Figured we might as well spend what we’ve got,” Jesse mused. “Life is short. As we have both just been viscerally reminded.”
“They’ll be looking for us.”
“We’re off the grid, for now. Temporary invisibility. Enjoy it while you can. Want some breakfast? The room service here is out of this world.”
“Yes, please,” I said, heartfelt. “And a nap. But first, you don’t know what’s going on.”
“So enlighten me.”
I told him about Sophie’s theory: that Russia had used Ortega to smuggle twelve thousand drones into America – the number still seemed unreal – for an attack that would cripple the entire United States.
“Holy fuck,” he said, as awed and horrified as I had been. “Holy fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Well.” He laughed harshly. “At least she didn’t fuck me over for something trivial. What a fucking relief.” It took me a second to realize he meant Anya. “Explains Sophie, too.”
“What about Sophie?”
“According to a Grassfirer on that Afghanistan airbase where they took her, she’s been arrested and imprisoned.”
“Arrested,” I repeated dully. Of course.
“Makes sense. She’s a wild card the Russians didn’t want loose, so they leaked that she was behind all the Axon sales. Now she looks like the evil genius behind Ortega, which is just close enough to the truth to be seriously fucking uncomfortable. I bet she’s finally telling them everything, and I bet they don’t believe a word, and won’t until it’s too late.”
“Dmitri said they had moles inside the US government,” I remembered. “Highly placed, pulling strings. Fuck. Shit.”
“Yeah.” Jesse shook his head, and his mask cracked for a second, and I realized that like me he was running on fumes. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Twelve thousand drones already in place, and no way to stop them. First a decapitation strike, then a fucking disembowelment. With that much pinpoint firepower they can bring the whole country to its knees. Christ Almighty.”
“She said we had options,” I remembered. “Even after I told her Anya had the override code. Sophie said she thought she’d found their drone factory, somewhere in Dubai, and we still had options. One last hole card. But we had to move fast.”
Hope flickered in his eyes. “Options like what?”
“She didn’t say. Probably because they picked that particular moment to beat down her door.”
“Shit. We are so fucked. Everyone is so fucked.”
“Yeah.”
“The G8 starts in three days, and if they nail them they’ll probably hit America right after, when they’re already in maximum disarray. If we can’t stop them, at least we have to warn people. Trouble is, we don’t actually have any fucking proof, and neither of us exactly counts as a reliable source, and if we pop our heads up the Russians will come cut them off. So how do we cry wolf in such a way that we’ll be believed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. Jesus. Fucking World War Three.” He sat down heavily across from me. “Listen, thanks for getting me out of there. I bet I wouldn’t have enjoyed my visit to the scenic Lubyanka.”
“Yeah.”
“They didn’t interrogate me or anything. They didn’t need to.” I had never heard his voice so hollow. “Anya knows everything already.”