Engineering Infinity (8 page)

“Oh,” said Gennady. “A fire?”

“Pull over. Pull over!” Ambrose
braced his hands against the Tata’s low ceiling. Gennady shot him a look, but
did as he’d asked.

“Shit. They’ve found me.”

“Who? Those are police cars. I’ve
been with you every minute since we got here, there’s no way you could have
gotten into any trouble.” Gennady shook his head. “No, if it’s anything to do
with us, it’s probably Kyzdygoi’s people sending us a message.”

“Yeah? Then who are those suits
with the cops?”

Gennady thought about it. He
could simply walk up to one of the cops and ask, but figured Ambrose would
probably have a coronary if he did that.

“Well... there is one thing we
can try. But it’ll cost a lot.”

“How much?”

Gennady eyed him. “All right, all
right,” said Ambrose. “What do we do?”

“You just watch.” Gennady put on
his glasses and stepped out of the car. As he did, he put through a call to
London, where it was still early morning. “Hello? Lisaveta? It’s Gennady. Hi!
How are you?”

He’d brought a binocular
attachment for the glasses, which he sometimes used for reading serial numbers
on pipes or barrels from a distance. He clipped this on and began scanning the
small knot of men who were standing around outside the hotel’s front doors.

“Listen, Lisa, can I ask you to
do something for me? I have some faces I need scanned... Not even remotely
legal, I’m sure... No, I’m not in trouble! Would I be on the phone to you if I
were in trouble? Just - okay. I’m good for it. Here come the images.”

He relayed the feed from his
glasses to Lisa in her flat in London.

“Who’re you talking to?” asked
Ambrose.

“Old friend. She got me out of
Chernobyl intact when I had a little problem with a dragon - Lisa? Got it? Great.
Call me back when you’ve done the analysis.”

He pocketed the glasses and
climbed back in the car. “Lisa has Interpol connections, and she’s a fantastic
hacker. She’ll run facial recognition and hopefully tell us who those people
are.”

Ambrose cringed back in his seat.
“So what do we do in the meantime?”

“We have lunch. How ‘bout that
French restaurant we passed? The one with the little Eiffel Tower?”

Despite the clear curbs
everywhere, Gennady parked the car at the shopping mall and walked the three blocks
to the La France. He didn’t tell Ambrose why, but the American would figure it
out: the Tata was traceable through its GPS. Luckily La France was open and
they settled in for some decent crêpes. Gennady had a nice view of a line of
trees west of the town boundary. Occasionally a car drove past.

Lisa pinged him as they were
settling up. “Gennady? I got some hits for you.”

“Really?” He hadn’t expected her
to turn up anything. Gennady’s working assumption was that Ambrose was just
being paranoid.

“Nothing off the cops; they must
be local,” she said. “But one guy - the old man - well, it’s daft.”

He sighed in disappointment, and
Ambrose shot him a look. “Go ahead.”

“His name is Alexei Egorov. He’s
premier of a virtual nation called the Soviet Union Online. They started from
this project to digitize all the existing paper records of the Soviet era. Once
those were online, Egorov and his people started some deep data-mining to
construct a virtual Soviet, and then they started inviting the last die-hard
Stalinists - or their kids - to join. It’s a virtual country composed of bitter
old men who’re nostalgic for the purges. Daft.”

“Thanks, Lisa. I’ll wire you the
fee.”

He glowered at Ambrose. “Tell me
about Soviet Union.”

“I’m not supposed to -”

“Oh, come on. Who said that?
Whoever they are, they’re on the far side of the planet right now, and they can’t
help you. They put you with me, but I can’t help you either if I don’t know
what’s going on.”

Ambrose’s lips thinned to a white
line. He leaned forward. “It’s big,” he said.

“Can’t be bigger than my
metastables. Tell me: what did you see on Mars?”

Ambrose hesitated. Then he
blurted, “A pyramid.”

Silence.

“Really, a pyramid,” Ambrose
insisted. “Big sucker, grey, I think most of it was buried in the permafrost.
It was the only thing sticking up for miles. This was on the Northern plains,
where there’s ice just under the surface. The whole area around it... well, it
was like a frozen splash, if you know what I mean. Almost a crater.”

This was just getting more and more
disappointing. “And why is Soviet Union Online after you?”

“Because the pyramid had Russian
writing on it. Just four letters, in red: CCCP.”

The next silence went on for a
while, and was punctuated only by the sound of other diners grumbling about
local carbon prices.

“I leaked some photos before
Google came after me with their non-disclosure agreements,” Ambrose explained. “I
guess the Soviets have internet search-bots constantly searching for certain
things, and they picked up on my posts before Google was able to take them
down. I got a couple of threatening phone calls from men with thick Slavic
accents. Then they tried to kidnap me.”

“No!”

Ambrose grimaced. “Well, they
weren’t very good at it. It was four guys, all of them must have been in their
eighties, they tried to bundle me into a black van. I ran away and they just
stood there yelling curses at me in Russian. One of them threw his cane at me.”
He rubbed his ankle.

“And you took them seriously?”

“I did when the FBI showed up and
told me I had to pack up and go with them. That’s when I ran to the U.N. I didn’t
believe that ‘witness protection’ crap the Feds tried to feed me. The U.N.
people told me that the Soviets’ data mining is actually really good. They keep
turning up embarrassing and incriminating information about what people and
governments got up to back in the days of the Cold War. They use what they know
to influence people.”

“That’s bizarre.” He thought
about it. “Think they bought off the police here?”

“Or somebody. They want to know about
the pyramid. But only Google, and the Feds, and I know where it is. And NASA’s
already patched that part of the Mars panoramas with fake data.”

Disappointment had turned to a
deep sense of surprise. For Gennady, being surprised usually meant that something
awful was about to happen; so he said, “We need to get you out of town.”

Ambrose brightened. “I have an
idea. Let’s go back to SNOPB. I looked up these Minus Three people; they’re
eco-radicals, but at least they don’t seem to be lunatics.”

“Hmmph. You just think Kyzdygoi’s
‘hot.’“

Ambrose grinned and shrugged.

“Okay. But we’re not driving,
because the car can be tracked.
You
walk there. It’s
only a few kilometres. I’ll deal with the authorities and these ‘Soviets,’ and
once I’ve sent them on their way we’ll meet up. You’ve got my number.”

Ambrose had evidently never taken
a walk in the country before. After Gennady convinced him he would survive it,
they parted outside La France, and Gennady watched him walk away, sneakers
flapping. He shook his head and strolled back to the Tata.

Five men were waiting for him.
Two were policemen, and three wore business attire. One of these was an old,
bald man in a faded olive-green suit. He wore augmented reality glasses, and
there was a discrete red pin on his lapel in the shape of the old Soviet flag.

Gennady made a show of pushing
his own glasses back on his nose and walked forward, hand out. As the cops
started to reach for their tasers, Gennady said, “Mr Egorov! Gennady Malianov,
IAEA. You’ll forgive me if I record and upload this conversation to
headquarters?” He tapped the frame of his glasses and turned to the other
suits. “I didn’t catch your names?”

The suits frowned, the policemen
hesitated; Egorov, however, put out his hand and Gennady shook it firmly. He
could feel the old man’s bones shift in his grip, but Egorov didn’t grimace.
Instead he said, “Where’s your companion?”

“You mean that American? No idea.
We shared a hotel room because it was cheaper, but then we parted ways this
morning.”

Egorov took his hand back, and
pressed his bruised knuckles against his hip. “You’ve no idea where he is?”

“None.”

“What’re
you
doing here?” asked one of the cops.

“Inspecting SNOPB,” he said.
Gennady didn’t have to fake his confidence here; he felt well armoured by his
affiliation to Frankl’s people. “My credentials are online, if there’s some
sort of issue here?”

“No issue,” muttered Egorov. He
turned away, and as he did a discrete icon lit up in the corner of Gennady’s
heads-up display. Egorov had sent him a text message.

He hadn’t been massaging his hand
on his flank; he’d been texting through his pants. Gennady had left the server
in his glasses open, so it would have been easy for Egorov to ping it and find
his address.

In among all the other odd
occurrences of the past couple of days, this one didn’t stand out. But as
Gennady watched Egorov and his policemen retreat, he realized that his
assumption that Egorov had been in charge might be wrong. Who were those other
two suits?

He waited for Egorov’s party to
drive away, then got in the Tata and opened the email.

It said,
Mt
tnght Pavin Inn, 7, rstrnt wshrm. Cm aln.

Gennady puzzled over those last
two words for a while. Then he got it. “Come alone!”
Ah.
He should have known.

Shaking his head, he pulled out
of the lot and headed back to the hotel to check out. After loading his bag,
and Ambrose’s, into the Tata, he hit the road back to SNOPB. Nobody followed
him, but that meant nothing since they could track him through the car’s
transponder if they wanted. It hardly mattered; he was supposed to be
inspecting the old anthrax factory, so where else would he be going?

Ambrose’d had enough time to get
to SNOPB by now, but Gennady kept one eye on the fields next to the road just
in case. He saw nobody, and fully expected to find the American waiting outside
Building 242 as he pulled up.

As he stepped out of the Tata he
nearly twisted his ankle in a deep rut. There were fresh tire tracks and
shattered bits of old asphalt all over the place. He was sure he hadn’t seen
them this morning.

“Hello?” He walked down the ramp
into the sudden dark of the bunker. Did he have the right building? It was
completely dark here.

Wires drooled from overhead
conduits; hydroponic trays lay jumbled in the corner, and strange-smelling
liquids were pooled on the floor. Minus Three had pulled out, and in a hurry.

He cursed, but suppressed an urge
to run back to the car. He had no idea where they’d gone, and they had a
head-start on him. The main question was, had they left before or after Ambrose
showed up?

The answer lay in the yellow
grass near where Minus Three’s vehicles had been parked that morning. Gennady
knelt and picked up a familiar pair of augmented reality glasses. Ambrose would
not have left these behind willingly.

Gennady swore, and now he did run
to the Tata.

The restaurant at the Pavin Inn
was made up to look like the interiors of a row of yurts. This gave diners some
privacy, as most of them had private little chambers under wood-ribbed
ceilings; it also broke up the eye-lines to the place’s front door, making it
easy for Gennady to slip past the two men in suits who’d been with Egorov in
the parking lot. He entered the men’s washroom to find Egorov pacing in front
of the urinal trough.

“What’s this all about?” demanded
Gennady - but Egorov made a shushing motion and grabbed a trash can. As he
upended it under the bathroom’s narrow window, he said, “First you must get me
out of here.”

“What? Why?”

Egorov tried to climb onto the
upended can, but his knees failed him, and finally Gennady relented and went to
help him. As he boosted the old comrade, Egorov said, “I am a prisoner of these
people! They work for the
Americans.”
He practically
spat the word. He perched precariously on the can and began tugging at the
latch to the window. “They have seized our database! All the Soviet records...
including what we know about the
Tsarina
.”

Gennady coughed. Then he said, “I’ll
bring the car around.”

He helped Egorov through the
window and, after making sure no one was looking, left through the hotel’s
front door. Egorov’s unmistakable silhouette was limping into the parking lot.
Gennady followed him and, unlocking the Tata, said, “I’ve disabled the GPS
tracking in this car. It’s a rental; I’m going to drop it off in Semey, six
hundred kilometres from here. Are you sure you’re up to a drive like that?”

The old man’s eyes glinted under
yellow street light. “Never thought I’d get a chance to see the steppes again.
Let’s go!”

Gennady felt a ridiculous surge
of adrenalin as they bumped out of the parking lot. Only two other cars were on
the road, and endless blackness swallowed the landscape beyond the edge of
town. It was a simple matter to swing onto the highway and leave Stepnogorsk
behind - but it felt like a car chase.

“Ha ha!” Egorov craned his neck
to look back at the dwindling town lights. “Semey, eh? You’re going to
Semipalatinsk, aren’t you?”

“To look at the
Tsarina
site, yes. Whose side does that put me on?”

“Sides?” Egorov crossed his arms
and glared out the windshield. “I don’t know about sides.”

“It was an honest question.”

“I believe you. But I don’t
know.
Except for
them,”
he
added, jabbing a thumb back at the town. “I know they’re bad guys.”

“Why? And why are they interested
in Ambrose?”

“Same reason we are. Because of
what he saw.”