Evensong

1

In seven years Levin had carried out fifteen missions for Rafiq. None of them compared, even remotely, to this. It was why he’d been preoccupied when he met Anwar. If only I could have told him…It was heaven’s gate. It would take him to Croatia to locate Parvin Marek, the only person ever to evade The Dead.

“I don’t aim to destroy society,” Marek once wrote, after one of his atrocities, “but to demonstrate that it has already destroyed itself.”

Rafiq had given him a detailed briefing, but Levin already knew most of it. The case had always affected him deeply, particularly its later events.

Ten years ago Parvin Marek led a terrorist movement called Black Dawn. It wasn’t a mass movement, and had no interest in becoming one. It wasn’t religious, or even conventionally political. It was nihilist. It had no goals or aims, only methods; its slogan, sprayed over derelict buildings, was

“Justify Nothing.” The group consisted of Marek and seven others, who operated as one-person cells. They rarely met or even talked to each other, and had long ago cut all ties to family and friends. The Croatian authorities knew who they were but not where, which made them almost unstoppable.

Marek himself was quiet and withdrawn, an absence of all qualities except action. He didn’t shout, threaten, exhort, or inspire. He only did. What drove him was the Marxist dialectic seen through the dead eyes of nihilism. Society was an illusion, a mere theatre: religion, culture, values, art, politics, all merely a mask for economic forces. Destroy the economic forces? Impractical. But destroy the mask, and the economic forces will be uncovered and die.

Black Dawn attacked random civilian targets: stores, airports, stations, even schools and hospitals. They took no hostages because they had no demands. They were unique, not because of the numbers they killed, but the nature of their killing. Religious fundamentalists killed more people; but they had reasons, however insane, and would say so. Black Dawn had none, and said nothing.

The culmination came in 2050 when Marek bombed the UN Embassy in Zagreb, killing twenty Embassy staff and seven passersby. Before leaving, Marek went back and shot dead two people lying on the pavement who, he noticed, were still alive. Later he issued a statement saying that the bomb had been designed to explode outwards as well as inwards, to kill passersby as well as Embassy staff. Justify Nothing, his statement concluded.

The Croatian authorities formally requested UN assistance. They had never been able to locate Marek and the other seven, but UN Intelligence did. Two Consultants (not Levin or Anwar; this was before their time) accepted amission from Rafiq. In one night they took the seven, alive, and gave them to the authorities. Marek,remarkably,evaded them, but Black Dawn was broken.

It still wasn’t enough.

The Dead hardly ever did bodyguard duties: that was the province of, in Anwar’s words, “mere Special Forces.” So, six months later, three mere Special Forces bodyguards were on duty when Rafiq’s wife and two children, a boy of seven and a girl of five, were shot dead by Marek. The family had just arrived at a marquee on the lawn in front of Fallingwater for the boy’s birthday party; Rafiq was on his way to join them. After shooting them, and the bodyguards, Marek turned back: the boy, he noticed, was still alive. Marek shot him again, twice in the head. From his wristcom he detonated a couple of bombs nearby. He didn’t know, or care, if they’d killed or injured anyone. They were a diversion, allowing him to walk— not run—away. Again he proved untraceable; this time, not for six months but ten years.

After it happened Rafiq became isolated and solitary, though no less effective. His only public statement was, “Marek has killed more people than just my family. For all of them, this is unfinished business.”

The family wing at Fallingwater was closed and sealed.

And now, ten years later, the UN had a possible lead. “Not a direct lead to Marek,” Rafiq had told Levin, when

he summoned him to Fallingwater a day earlier, “but to someone who might be prepared to sell him: Slovan Soldo, a distant relative. Soldo lives in Opatija, a seaside resort on the northern coast of Croatia. He’s facing arrest on rape charges, and probably looking for a deal.”

“How good is the lead?” Levin asked, trying to mask his elation.

“It’s from UN Intelligence. It’s good, but it’s tenuous, and we don’t want it compromised. Whoever we send to follow it can have no surveillance or backup.”

So, Levin thought, this mission satisfies the compact. It’s impossible for anyone except a Consultant, and it’s specifically for Rafiq. More so than any other mission.

I was right to choose him, Rafiq thought. He really wants it.

“I’m formally offering you this mission. I want you to contact Soldo, and locate Marek. But if you accept,” he added,

“you’ll need to move within a day. Soldo won’t wait around. Will you do it?”

“Yes.” Levin had enough good taste—but only just enough—not to show Rafiq his genuine delight. If he’d punched the air, as he originally wanted, he’d probably have knocked it unconscious.

Marek would now be in his early to middle forties. What little information there was showed him to be a dark-haired man of average height and stocky build, running slightly to fat.

Softly spoken, like Anwar. Physically unremarkable, except for his hands. They were broad, almost spadelike, giving a large lateral spread. But the fingers were long and slender, like a concert pianist’s. Ideal for the manipulation of devices.

Levin’s imagination was racing. He’d seen possible Mareks all through the flight, and was seeing more of them now he’d landed. Every third or fourth adult male Croatian seemed to be stocky and fortyish with unusual hands. The Croatian national basketball team had been on his flight. Most of them were in their twenties and nearly seven feet tall, but Levin still caught himself double-checking them for hidden resemblances to Marek.

Levin carried no luggage, not even a briefcase. He was alone and unarmed. He had travelled by scheduled flight to Rijeka, where he was to be met and driven to a villa near Opatija.

Rijeka Airport, Zracna Luca Rijeka, was nondescript when it was built and had not improved with age. Its minor buildings and outbuildings were like architectural acne. It did have a new terminal, built on a part of the runway that was no longer needed since the advent of blended-wing VSTOL airliners, but it wasn’t much better than the 1960s building it replaced. It was flyblown and fluorescent, and smelled of stewed coffee and styrofoam. Levin walked quickly through it and out to the main entrance. A car eventually pulled up alongside him. It wasn’t battery-driven, like most of those around it, but a newer hydrogen fuel cell model. The window opened.

“I’m here to meet Slovan Soldo,” Levin said, in Croatian. “I know,” said the driver. “Get in, please.” He was dark-haired, stocky, fortyish. This mission, Levin thought. Mareks everywhere. Mareks, Mareks everywhere, and none of them are real. Anwar would have said, Nor any one is real, to follow Coleridges’s original wording. But Anwar’s got his head up his ass.

They took the main road out of Rijeka, a journey of about thirty miles and twenty-five minutes. By the time they reached the town centre of Opatija it was still only late afternoon, a good time of day to see the town. In the nineteenth century, when Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hapsburgs had used Opatija as a holiday resort. Levin, whose other identity in the real world was founding partner of a large architectural practice, studied the ornate and elegant Hapsburg buildings. He thought of the long slow circlings of history: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Hapsburgs had been targets for nihilist groups like Black Dawn. They continued for a few minutes along the palm-lined main boulevard until they reached the gates of the Villa

Angiolina Park. From there they turned left and up into the foothills of Mount Ucka, the national park to the north of

Opatija. Roadside buildings fell away as they climbed higher, and were replaced by dense laurel woods and cypresses. The smell of their leaves and resin hung in the air. It was still only late afternoon.

The villa stood in a clearing in the laurel woods. It was surrounded by cypresses, dark verticals to the villa’s white horizontal, and it looked large and expensive. Levin thought, Does Slovan Soldo own this? Rape pays well here.

The car stopped, and the driver—they had not exchanged a word since Rijeka—stayed put. Levin got out, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. It opened, apparently automatically, into a large reception room. He walked in, immediately killing his shock and smiling a greeting at those inside. Never look surprised was one of his maxims. As if they shared it, those inside smiled back.

2

Anwar was back at his house in northern Malaysia. He’d activated an immersion hologram in his living room, making it a dark and dripping alley. It was an expensively detailed hologram: smells of wet pavement and urine, sounds of running water and rodent scurryings. It suited his mood.

Do I have to guard her cat as well?

Arden Bierce had given him the usual crystal bead containing Rafiq’s detailed briefing. He could have played it at

Fallingwater, but preferred to take it back home. He pulled up a chair—in reality it was a black and silver Bauhaus original, but in the hologram it was a damp stained mattress—and settled down. He pressed the bead into his wrist implant, and watched the headup display resolve on the inner surface of his retina, a simple full-face shot of Rafiq.

“Thirty years ago,” Rafiq said, “this summit would have been about fossil fuels—oil,gas, maybe coal and shale. But alternative energy sources are now commercially viable: wind, sun, tides, high-atmosphere turbulence, nuclear fusion, hydrogen cells, even continental drift.”(Yes, Anwar thought, and I know how much you’ve made the UN invest in them. You always play long.) “This summit is about something much more basic, ever-present but ever-scarce where it’s most needed: water. It will be difficult. Some of the member states going to Brighton have been, or still are, at war over water rights.”

A tramp was pissing copiously against the wall of the alley.

It steamed and frothed on the mouldering brickwork. All the tramps who came and went in this hologram were different,

Anwar noted approvingly. It never quite repeated itself.

He liked immersion holograms. He had once turned his family living room (and later, his school gym) into the UN

Security Council Chamber, complete with all the then members, except that he made them naked. He enjoyed imagining what they were like under their clothes. He gave them liver spots, varicose veins, pimples on buttocks, local accretions of fat. And he made them carry on debating exactly as if they’d been clothed. In his hologram they were debating water rights—then, as now, a big issue.

He switched his attention back to the inner surface of his retina. Rafiq had been listing some more details of the summit, its proceedings and participants, then turned to the subject of its location.

“Brighton Cathedral…your friend Levin would like this. It’s a full-size replica of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, one of

Europe’s most eccentric buildings. The New Anglicans’ parish churches are all new designs, commissioned from contemporary architects—Levin’s partnership designed two of them— but they decided that their Cathedral should echo the style of

Brighton’s greatest symbol.

“The original was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince Regent, but the New Anglicans have built theirs at the end of a two-mile-long ocean pier. The Cathedral is surrounded by other buildings, architecturally matching, to house conference facilities, hotels, function suites, and media centres.

There are also commercial offices, studios,shops,restaurants.

The ocean pier has maglevs running up and down its length; and, of course, it’s easy to defend. The New Anglicans make a lot of money from it. It’s a world-class commercial centre.” Transcripts of Rafiq’s speeches showed that he spoke exactly as a good writer would write. They were like passages from William Hazlitt. Measured sentences of meticulous construction. Grammar like precision engineering.

“So: our hosts, the New Anglicans...” Anwar touched his wrist implant and paused the briefing. At his gesture the hologram died and his living room reappeared. He walked around the black and grey and silver Bauhaus interior, playing the last Tournament on a wallscreen. It hadn’t gone well, and he wanted another look at it.

It had taken place two weeks ago, in a large dojo in the UN complex near Kuala Lumpur. It was a six-monthly event, Rafiq’s idea. Sometimes Consultants needed actual combat between missions, to supplement their standard exercises.

It was open to all comers, inside or outside the UN: Special

Forces, mercenaries, martial artists, and anyone else who could satisfy the exacting criteria. The kind of opponents they would most likely encounter on actual missions.

Each Consultant was assigned six opponents by lottery, and had to face them simultaneously and unarmed.

Opponents were allowed any weapons except firearms, and could kill or injure, or try to. The Consultant couldn’t; he or she could only disable.

Tournament fees were large, with bonuses for every member of a group who killed or injured a Consultant. Stories circulated from time to time about injuries inflicted and bonuses paid—all untrue, but Rafiq found them useful urban myths. Reality was different. It was proven, in real missions, that a Consultant had a near-100 percent chance of defeating six proficient opponents, even if one or more had a gun.

Tournaments, however, remained oversubscribed.

Anwar fast-forwarded to the replay of his own combat. He was addressing his six opponents. His voice sounded strange because of the effect on his face of the Idmask, a nanobot injection which altered the configuration and proportions of his features. The alteration lasted only two hours, enough to mask him during a Tournament, and was random and different each time.

“You must genuinely try to kill or injure me. If I think you haven’t,” he kept his face straight, partly out of a liking for deadpan remarks and partly an effect of the Idmask, “Rafiq will do something worse than I ever could. Sue you for material non performance of contract.”

A couple of them smiled briefly, then it began.

A lot was written, some of it pretentious, about martial arts being a mirror for life. Anwar’s fighting style, however, exactly mirrored his life. It was cautious, measured, contained. He liked counterattack. He liked to come out of safety, strike, and return to safety—a pattern which characterized all his missions, and all his relationships such as they were. His maxim was to do nothing risky or unexpected—at least, by Consultancy standards, though to ordinary opponents he was frightening, inhumanly fast, and strong. Like most of The Dead, when he fought he stayed silent.

Original martial arts moves were transformed by The Dead into moves that were impossible for anyone without enhancements. Over the years The Dead had given these moves new names, often ironic or obscure, sometimes obscene. Like The Penumbra for Shadowless Kick, The Circumnavigator for Roundhouse Kick, The Flying Fuck for Heart Kite. And others, for which no previous equivalent move existed: The Verb, The Compliment, The Gratuity, The Abseiling Pope.

Unusually, the six opponents Anwar had drawn were all armed: a katana, a quarterstaff (Anwar’s own favourite weapon), various knives, even a flail. He circled among them.

His first instinct was to analyse them, to assess what they were; and it was wrong. His first instinct should have been to attack and disable them, because whatever they were, he outmatched them.

To any observer, he was a blur while they moved normally. To himself, seen through his own ramped-up senses, he moved normally while they were stationary or wading through treacle, expressions of shock at what he could do forming like geological processes on their faces, exclamations at his speed and strength oozing out of their mouths in low bass notes. But he’d only been starting cautiously, waiting to assess and counterattack.

Use speed first, his enhancement maxims told him. With speed, everything else is possible. The other “S” categories— strength, stamina, even skill—are secondary. But he didn’t follow the maxims. His speed was actually quite good, approaching that of the highest-performing Consultants, but his instinct was always to step back and take stock; it was why his rating was merely average. Still, it was enough to leave his opponents aghast.

He dodged the katana and knife-blades and quarterstaff by hundredths of an inch, which his retinal headups could measure and display if he wanted while he was still in motion. He didn’t want; he’d assessed their weapons skills to his satisfaction. The other weapon, the flail, was hardly worth his attention: fearsome to look at and dangerous if it connected, but slow and clumsy and telegraphed.

His private nickname for such opponents was Meatslabs, and it was always like this when he fought them. He could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste their inadequacy. And their shock, when he decided to let the one with the flail land a blow.Theflailwasasix-footclusterofsegmentedblackmetal whips, glistening like a tangle of liquorice. He let it land without apparently noticing. A good tactic: it set them wondering what he must be made of, inside. But it wouldn’t have impressed Levin or the others.

He tried some cautious counterattacks. His hands and feet, fingertips and toes (he fought barefoot) flickered out at nerve clusters and pressure points. Not yet to touch, but to see how well they defended. Quietly, carefully, he was assembling a kinetic dossier on each of them.

But he still couldn’t take full advantage. Something went wrong. One of his opponents, the one with the quarterstaff, suffered a broken collarbone: Anwar had mistimed a fingertip touch to a nerve-centre, and had to turn it at the last moment into a shuto strike to avoid killing him. The other five were on Anwar immediately, fired up by what he had done, and he wasted seconds adjusting to the new dynamic—slowing down to assess it, rather than using it to his own advantage. Then his speed reasserted itself, and he did to them what he’d failed to do to their colleague with the quarterstaff: landed precise fingertip touches to nerve centres and pressure points, enough to disable and immobilise, but no more. He finished them in thirty-six seconds.

There were nineteen Consultants. Fourteen took part in this Tournament. The other five were on, or recovering from,active missions. Of the fourteen, only Anwar suffered the indignity of injuring rather than disabling an opponent. It was a notable Tournament. The previous record was twenty seconds, broken first by Miles Levin (nineteen seconds) and then by Chulo Asika (seventeen). Asika’s display even outshone Levin’s. Asika, in the real world, designed and built theatre sets.

Anwar’s time was tenth out of fourteen. Even without his mistake, it would probably have been no better than seventh. Levin came up to him afterwards and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m Miles ahead of you, Anwar,” he said, as usual.

Levin was full of such remarks. Anwar privately nicknamed them Levin’s Levities. He often thought of good rejoinders, but only when it was too late. At Fallingwater, for instance, he could have said, “Don’t look so preoccupied. You don’t have the attention span.” He thought, How can two people so dissimilar develop a friendship? He smiled, as he knew Levin would do every time he asked himself the same question. The question contained the answer.

But he couldn’t distance himself from the mistake. He’d been replaying it obsessively for days. It mortified him.

3

The door opened, apparently automatically, into a large reception room. Levin walked in, immediately killing his shock and smiling a greeting at those inside.

His shock was caused by the room: a replica of the reception at Fallingwater. They know what I am. He parked the thought, and concentrated on the eight men waiting in the reception. They hadn’t surprised him at all.

Their suits were immaculate, almost as expensive as his. He could tell, by the drape of the jackets and trousers, where guns and knives and other weapons were variously stowed in shoulder and ankle holsters, forearm and wrist implants. He could tell by details of stance and mannerism where they had served: SAS, Green Berets, Spetsnaz, and so on. At least three of them looked vaguely like Marek. Not their build, just their faces.

Eight. Normally this would not have been outside his competence—any one of The Dead would be certain of taking six such people, and almost certain of taking eight. But they had an ease about them. They knew, as well as he did, that he could defeat them. But their ease suggested they had something else.

Among his enhancements was a sensitivity to changes in ambient air pressure, replicating that of seabirds and spiders.

It worked, but it didn’t help him.

He felt a shift in the air behind him, and realised that the eight were a diversion for the ninth man, who shot him quickly with a tranquiliser gun, then disappeared. He caught a glimpse of him: stocky, dark-haired. About mid-forties? Running to fat? No, he was seeing Mareks everywhere, and it didn’t matter because something else was happening which was impossible: the tranquiliser was actually working. It was a new compound, and slid easily past his molecular defences, which were designed to be infallible. He felt it taking hold of his motor functions. His molecular defences gathered and regrouped, then collapsed utterly.

Does Rafiq know about these people? was his closing thought as he crumpled to the ground. He has to. Rafiq knows everything.

4

Anwar settled back into his black and silver chair and pressed his wrist implant. Rafiq’s face reappeared on the inner surface of his retina.

“…our hosts, the New Anglicans. When an environment changes, omnivores, not specialists, adapt best. The New Anglicans are omnivores, feeding over a broad spectrum, from religious near-fundamentalists to secular near-atheists.

They’ve taken spectacular advantage of a changing political, spiritual, cultural, and economic environment.

“The New Anglican Church was founded in 2025 as a counterweight to fundamentalist Islam, although by the time it appeared the need for it was already disappearing; main-stream Islam had effectively disowned fundamentalism. The New Anglicans flourished, however, because of their omnivorous robustness: their creeds and teachings could sound like all things to all people.

“Also, they were exceptionally well-run, with gifted and charismatic leaders. And still are. The current leader and Archbishop (unlike the Old Anglicans, they have only one Archbishop) is Olivia del Sarto.”

There was some more about her, much of which he already knew from the news channels: her abilities and background, her organisational skills, her likely allies and enemies. And her spectacular success in her five years as Archbishop, causing upheavals in religious fundamentalism. Anwar, because of his own intense dislike of fundamentalism, knew this part particularly well.

Fundamentalists would never completely go away. The

Islamists were marginalised but still powerful, and (because marginalised) harder to trace. Fundamentalist Christian sects were well-entrenched political lobbies, with good networks. So were the fundamentalist single-issue movements, like those against abortion or birth control, or those in favour of

Creationism or faith-based education. Frighteningly, some of them were setting aside their historical differences to make common cause against what they perceived as a more serious threat from the New Anglicans—a scabrous courtship between extremists, like earlier courtships between Nazis and

Communists. Olivia del Sarto called it the Batoth’Daa: the Back to the Dark Ages Alliance. Like one of my private nick-names, Anwar thought approvingly. It put them on the back foot, always having to deny it.

“So,” Rafiq’s briefing continued, “Olivia del Sarto reinvented the New Anglicans as a centre of rationalism, confident and assertive because they didn’t have the baggage of older churches like the Catholics or Old Anglicans. They could choose which doctrines to discard, which to keep. They became more like a political movement crossed with a socially-aware business corporation.”

Anwar paused the briefing as a thought returned to him, one that wouldn’t go away. It was related to the Tournament.

He’d carried out thirteen missions for Rafiq in seven years, and had killed only once, and then almost by accident: a bodyguard with an unsuspected heart condition, sent into massive shock by Anwar’s blurring speed. Speed was the key.

Consultants had a 90 percent advantage in speed over most opponents. In the other three “S” categories their advantage was 30 to 60 percent, but speed was the key. It made everything else possible.

The details of their enhancement and training were overwhelming—musculature, bone structure, internal organs, neurological processes, sensory abilities, all transformed—but the outcome was simple. They were beyond black belt, or its equivalent, in all the main martial arts, armed or unarmed.

As a by-product, they were also beyond Olympic standard in most athletic and field disciplines.

And the thought which had made him pause: there are only eighteen others like me in the world, and nine or ten of them are better than me. It nagged him and picked at him and obsessed him. Even more so since the Tournament.

Ironically, the shuto strike which broke his opponent’s collarbone had been a good one, well-executed and with just the right weight. He remembered the feel of the collarbone shearing—not shattering, but shearing cleanly—under the edge of his hand. His hands and feet, and elbows and knees, and any other striking surfaces of his body, could— if he willed them to—become strengthened locally at the molecular level at the point of impact, acquiring the density of close-grain hardwood. Most of his abilities were powered by enhanced organic processes, not by metal or machinery or electronics.

So, a good shuto strike: if he’d got it wrong, it would have continued through his opponent’s body and out at the shoulder-blade. But it was the result of an earlier mistake. And it left him with a lousy Tournament time. Which in turn left him with a mission involving mere bodyguard duties.

Except that this time, there was something different.

He gestured, and another immersion hologram, one he’d programmed himself, replaced his living room: the reception at Fallingwater. The colours and textures always relaxed him, and he needed relaxing. There was something ominous about this mission…No, not now. Later.

5

When Levin woke the reception room was still there. So was the Fallingwater decor. It wasn’t a hologram, he decided. The textures and colours, the weave of the stone-white fabric covering the sofas, seemed too tangible. No quivering round the edges. A real replica. And—the architect part of him kicked in automatically—not of Frank Lloyd Wright’s original, but larger. Scaled up, like Rafiq’s house. And the eight who’d been waiting for him (eight, not nine; the other one had gone) were lounging among the groups of sofas like Rafiq’s staff had been lounging when he’d last been at the real Fallingwater. No, the real replica Fallingwater. So this wasn’t a hologram, but a genuine replica, of Rafiq’s original replica. His head hurt, not because of any violence done to him, but with the strain of following his own thoughts.

He remembered that Anwar liked this interior. He, Levin, didn’t particularly: he thought interiors should be one thing or the other, either grandiose or minimalist, and this was neither.

He was sitting in one of the impeccable Frank Lloyd Wright armchairs. He had no choice. His wrists and ankles were tied. Also his forearms. Also his thighs. Also his torso. And his neck. The fact of being restrained neither surprised nor disturbed him, but the fact that he’d been restrained with monofilament disturbed him very much. As did the fact that even if it hadn’t been monofilament—even if it had been something he could break or loosen, like industrial cable or steel hawsers—whoever had tied it had done so with an obvious knowledge of how he might try to break free. There were blocks and local strengthenings in all the right places.

This seemed an incongruous place for torture—a cellar, though rather obvious, was the usual preferred location—but the prospect of torture didn’t disturb him. He could shut out his pain receptors, even wind down to death if irreparably damaged.

One of the eight people lounging on the sofas turned to him.“We know you have in built defences against torture.You won’t need them. We have no plans to torture you.”

After which they continued conversing among themselves.

It wasn’t acting. They were genuinely behaving as if he wasn’t there. Two of them got up and walked past him, and he caught a snatch of their conversation.

“A hundred years from now, none of this will matter.” “No. A thousand maybe, but not a hundred.”

The ease of their manner, as before. Talking to each other as if he wasn’t there. These people can’t be involved with someone like Marek. The conversation of the two sitting closest to him gradually resolved itself above the murmur of the other conversations, none of which seemed to have anything to do with him.

“My talk at the Johnsonian Society. Are you still coming?” “Yes, I’m looking forward to it. What title did you finally decide?”

“‘Mask: The Nature Of Individual Identity In Postmodern Literature.’”

“Hmm.”

“Yes, I know. Pretentious. It needs something to liven it up, maybe a witty opening. Something like ‘What happened to the I in Identity?’”

“Hmm…How about this? A man invents time travel. He goes forward to a minute after his death, so he can have sex with his own corpse.”

“Why only a minute?”

“So he’d still be warm. You could leave that bit out if you want, but the rest of it addresses your theme about the self-referential nature of Identity.”

“Self-referential, yes. And the time-travel motif gives it a dimension of circularity.”

“Literally a dimension.”

One of the others detached himself from a group of two or three and strolled over to Levin.

“Sorry to cause you this discomfort, but we’ll release you when our colleagues get here. If you’d like anything to eat or drink, we’ll have to feed it to you. I know that’s a bit undignified…you may prefer to wait until our colleagues get here.”

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” Levin said.

“You’re right, I don’t. But our colleagues do. You’ll soon be meeting them.”

He’d never been in a situation like this before, never in fifteen missions. They’d done it so easily. When I get out of here, he told himself—it didn’t occur to him to say if rather than when—I can track at least two of them from their references to the Johnsonian Society. Anwar would be incandescent at this. Mere Special Forces, casually strolling into Doctor Johnson’s sacred territory of literary criticism?

But their ease. If he’d been free of the monofilaments, he could defeat them all. Not kill, just defeat. The Dead very rarely killed; with their abilities, they didn’t have to. But he wasn’t free of the monofilaments. And the tranquiliser, and the way they knew how to fasten the restraints. Who are these people? Does Rafiq know about them? He has to, Rafiq knows everything. In which case…No. Don’t go there.

6

Anwar pressed his wrist implant and Rafiq returned to the inside of his retina.

“The Church’s founders come straight out of urban mythology. The Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlanticists, and others who won’t identify themselves.

But the New Anglican Church has moved beyond them. It still takes their money, but it’s also very rich in its own right—because it’s well-led, commercially successful, and has a wide offer.

“Among the founders, Olivia del Sarto has friends and enemies. Her friends support her because she’s charismatic and gifted and has made the New Anglicans rich and powerful. Her enemies distrust her for the same reasons. Even her own personal staff and security staff, as you will find, are split along similar lines.”

So. A successful leader of a successful organisation apparently fears for her life, and this is a simple bodyguard mission?

In fact,it was. Rafiq could have said so, but chose to observe protocol. First, Anwar’s mission was genuinely unconnected to Levin’s. Second, Rafiq didn’t have some secret deal with the

New Anglicans, though he did want them in his debt because he judged he could use their connections: political, not financial. Anwar didn’t know any of this, and it was in his nature to look for complications; for pockets of darkness. So why did Rafiq choose me?

The Dead were not secret agents, just uniquely gifted functionaries.AfterUNIntelligence—therealsecretagents— had done their work, it all boiled down to a highly-guarded object which had to be stolen or sabotaged, or a highly-guarded individual who had to be abducted or disabled or subverted: specific in/out missions, impossible for anyone else. Bodyguard duties were different. They involved prolonged interaction with people and their staff, requiring new faces and identities—with the inconvenience of surgical and IT processes—afterwards. Also, bodyguard duties carried the taint of low status: Rafiq would tend to assign a lower-rated Consultant rather than tie up one of the top four or five. One like me. Who can’t dispose of six Meatslabs in under thirty-six seconds.

In the real world, Anwar was an antiquarian book dealer. He owned shops in London and New York. He was comfortably wealthy; his business was doing well, and his Consultancy pay was extremely high. He was a good antiquarian book dealer but a better Consultant. Levin, of course, was “Miles ahead”: an outstanding architect and an outstanding Consultant.

The Consultancy wasn’t interested in psychopaths or sociopaths. Its members had to be personable and well-adjusted (Anwar scored lower on that than Levin, but still passed) and had to have lives and identities in the outside world, however illusory they might be. Also, they had to be people with few connections so that their deaths could be faked, and new identities added, on databases worldwide. The UN had people who did this; people who moved easily through the electronic landscape.

All Consultants had genuine occupations outside: usually one-person businesses, operated anonymously online. The online world, at least the higher end of it, was virtually unhackable. Terminals, whether desktop or wristcom-sized, were peculiar to their operator. Their processors were not silicon chips but cloned neurons and synapses from the operator: keyed to his or her DNA, with security scanners reading lifesigns and doing further retinal and fingerprint scans. Anwar, Levin, and the others all did their book deals or architectural designs remotely worldwide with no personal interaction. Older silicon-chip computers still remained, but those who could afford the new type—wealthier individuals and businesses—did so. Even though engagement with the outside world was encouraged, Consultants’ contracts still stipulated they should not appear personally in a business capacity, even under an assumed name. Those working in Anwar’s bookshops, or in Levin’s studios, had never met or seen their ultimate employer.

Their personal contact with the real world outside was different. It was merely social, a network of shifting relationships of limited duration. They never stayed long in one place. They had different identities in different cities, and cover stories involving frequent travel. Their relationships formed and unravelled, grew and died.

Anwar turned his attention back to the inside of his retina. Rafiq was finishing up. “So, that’s the New Anglicans. To anticipate your question, and purely for completeness, a brief word about the Old Anglicans. They’re the original Church of England. They still have their great cathedrals, like Rochester and Canterbury, and their parish churches, but they’re in gentle decline. Even in the cathedrals, congregations are small and aging. But they’re generally a force for good, or at least not a force for harm. Some attitudes towards them may be dismissive, but very few people actually hate them.”

There were no closing salutations. Rafiq’s face was replaced by Further Material Follows. That would be a mass of supporting documents and images and recordings. Anwar decided he’d speed-read it later.

He touched his wrist, and the image on his retina disappeared. He gestured, and Fallingwater’s reception disappeared. He remained sitting in his living room. He actually felt more at home in the Fallingwater hologram, among the natural colours and shapes and textures. His Bauhaus interior, black and silver and grey, reflected his taste but didn’t feel like home.

7

Olivia del Sarto: a theatrical-sounding name, but quite genuine.

Anwar checked the UN databases, the most detailed in the world. He found nothing he didn’t already know, or which wasn’t already covered in the supporting documentation to Rafiq’s briefing, but he always liked to check for himself before a mission.

There had been one earlier attempt on her life, three years ago, as she was leaving the BBC after her famous Reith Lecture, popularly known as the “Room For God” broadcast. It was not significant, Anwar decided. It was a spur-of-the-moment affair, carried out by a handful of zealots, enraged at what she had said that night. Their rage was a neat way of proving her point, so neat she might almost have staged it herself. Her security people dealt with it efficiently, keeping her safe and not hurting anyone. Anwar liked the way they conducted themselves.

She came from a wealthy London family of fourth-generation Italian immigrants. Her mother was a noted food journalist and broadcaster, and her father owned several restaurants. From them she acquired her ease with all branches of the media, and her prodigious appetite for food. Her equally prodigious sexual appetites were acquired later. A previous partner once said that if you were a half-presentable male she hadn’t seen before, she’d be into your trousers like a rat up a drainpipe.

She didn’t share her family’s traditional Catholicism. She felt closer to the Old Anglicans, though she never joined them; she decided, reluctantly, that they weren’t going anywhere.

When she found the New Anglicans, it was as if they were made for each other.

Rafiq had included among his briefing documents a recording of her “Room For God” broadcast. Anwar already knew it well, but something told him he should watch it again before leaving for Brighton. He put it on the wallscreen in his living room, and settled back.

She was onstage in the main theatre in BBC Broadcasting House in London, a small slender figure in an immaculate long dress of dark velvet. She was on her own, facing an invited audience of three hundred, representing all the major faiths. There were ayatollahs and immams, Archbishops and

Bishops, European Orthodox priests, various questionable TV evangelists, and self-styled religious scholars; an impressive array of costumes and hairstyles and beards and dentistry, with only a small scattering of women and Old Anglicans.

Nearly all of them were hostile to her. It came off the screen in waves. This broadcast was three years old, and she had now taken the New Anglicans a long way down the road she’d described, but people still replayed it. It showed so much about her: the presentation, the preparation, the confrontation. She always had an instinct for aggression, even when massively outnumbered.

A distinguished BBC news presenter briefly introduced her to the audience. There was the barest scattering of applause.

“I’d like to thank the BBC for inviting me to give this year’s Reith Lecture. As you know from the extensive way it’s been trailed—”(especially by you, Anwar thought)“—I’ll be talking >about a set of projects which will define the future direction of the New Anglican Church. The Room For God projects. I know this audience will be familiar with them, but for the sake of the wider broadcast audience I’ll out line them briefly. Later I’ll describe them in more detail.

“The Room For God projects are part of the core business of the New Anglican Church. Whether you look through a telescope or a microscope, you see that science uncovers more and more about the universe. But the more it uncovers, the more that remains unknown—and the more room it creates for God. So the New Anglican Church will encourage, and finance, scientific research which other churches may find threatening. Medical research, too. We’ll support campaigns for birth control. We’ll attack bigotry wherever we find it. Religious bigotry. Homophobia. Subjugation of women. We’ll fund independent research into the behind-closed-doors conclaves in which the Bible was put together: what was included and what was left out, by whom and why. And we’ll finance campaigns against fundamentalism and Creationism, and in favour of secular education and secular politics. We’ll even fight the tax-exempt status of religious cults. We’ll shine our light everywhere! We’ll...”

She paused. There were mutterings in the audience. “Oh, come on! People should come to a Church—any Church, ours or yours—as grownups! They should come from choice, not from being spoonfed by some ghastly priest caste who won’t let them grow up!”

“Arrogant! You’re arrogant and self-regarding!” someone in the audience roared. “This is just a PR event for you. You take an inordinate pride, young woman, in parading your anger!”

“Pride and Anger,” she said. “Two of the Seven Deadly Sins. I use a mnemonic to remember them: SPAGLEG. Sloth, Pride, Anger, Greed, Lust, Envy, Gluttony.”

“Yes,” said another voice, “and you’ve shown two of them tonight, and all of them in your private life!” (Laughter, turning to applause.)

“Well,” she replied, leaning forward on the lectern, “four or five of them are not so bad, in moderation. For rational people. For people wanting self-respect instead of self-loathing, or aspiration instead of guilt, or just some physical comfort.” (Silence, turning to uproar.)

From there, the Reith Lecture ceased to be a lecture, and became a war: an audience against one person. All the protocols went out the window. Longboom mikes were swung out over the audience. Producers reordered schedules. This would be something unheard of in modern broadcasting: a major live event which erupted, in real time, before a worldwide audience of tens of millions. With any ordinary broadcast, corporate middle-managers might have killed the live feed and gone to a stock documentary on meerkats or modelmaking, but this was the Reith Lecture. Nobody dared kill it.

As if she sensed all this, she gathered up her sheaf of notes from the lectern and flung it, rather theatrically, to the floor. She glared down at them from the stage, awaiting their attacks.

“Even homosexuality,” said a voice from the audience. The longboom mike immediately swung over to him. “Anything offensive to normality and decency, you’ll be sniffing around it for its money. Even,” sneeringly, “the love that dare not speak its name.”

She smiled unpleasantly. “In Brighton they call it the love that dare not speak its name because its mouth is full.” (Indrawn breaths.) “Try a mouthful. It cures all afflictions. Even fundamentalism.”

Anwar was aghast at her aggression. And yet: just one of her, against all of them. She was like a small creature baring its teeth and refusing to back down. Ever. Against anyone.

“This is your new fascism! Anyone who disagrees with you, you call them afflicted! Brand them as fundamentalists! Turn them into hate figures!”

“I don’t hate fundamentalists. I just think that 99 percent of them give the other 1 percent a bad name.”

“Most of the people you brand with that—that offensive word, are legitimate religious scholars.”

“Scholars who know more and more about less and less. And religious scholars,” she hissed, “were put on Earth by God for me to offend them. Real scholars are scholars of a body of knowledge. You’re scholars of a body of unproven and unprovable belief. You belong in the Dark Ages. What conversations you must have in your own heads!” (More uproar.)

“You’re not an Archbishop, you’re an Archbusiness woman!”

“And,” someone else shouted, “an atheist!”

“I’m not an atheist. But I won’t buy what you’re selling. I want something better.”

“Something better? You want God in your own image?”

“I want us in God’s image. Does God want us ignorant and superstitious?”

“How dare you presume to say what God should want us to be!”

“It’s what your priests have been doing for generations, and claiming it’s God speaking through you. Our God’s outgrown that. Evolved, perhaps. And if your God hasn’t, then I and my Church have the right not to believe in him. Or her. Or it.”

“Do you even believe in the New Anglicans’ God?”

“Not just believe. Approve.”

There was more of this; a lot more. After it had finished, the New Anglicans’ ratings soared. The rest was history. In the following three years she implemented most of the Room For God projects, and the New Anglicans became the world’s fastest-growing major Church.

Anwar sat in his living room for some time after the recording finished, repeating it to himself while the shadows lengthened around him. He knew it word for word. And he knew that inside it was something he needed. Something which would help him understand her, and this mission. He couldn’t see it yet, but he would if he reflected on it carefully. That was how he liked to work: carefully, and reflectively.

He was born an American citizen. His pre-Consultancy name was Rashad Khan. His family were third-generation Pakistani immigrants, living in Bay Ridge, New York. His parents were both successful lawyers. He spent a comfortable childhood in a large nineteenth-century brownstone house on Ridge Boulevard. He had brothers and sisters with whom he exchanged normal affection. His family were not particularly religious, and neither was he.

His parents feared he might be mildly autistic. He wasn’t, but he had some of the outward signs: a certain social awkwardness, and a liking for routine, for having everything in its fixed place, tidy and orderly. And he liked to see inside things—how they worked, what they were really like under the surface.

He probably saw more of the UN Headquarters Building in New York then, when he lived not far from it, than he did when he became a Consultant. He’d often look at it from across the East River, or at closer quarters from East 42nd or East 48th Street. It was an archetypal mid-twentieth-century building: clean and bright and optimistic when built, but now tastes had changed and made it ugly. Levin, when they met several years later, would never tire of telling Anwar about

UNHQ’s ugliness, and what it signified. “Architecture,” he >would say, “was once described as frozen music. It is. But it’s also frozen hope.”

Frozen hope. Anwar considered himself, and considered her. He knew which one the phrase fitted. And that’s what this mission’s about.

He always preferred UNEX to the old UN. UNEX had a closeness of form and function: its outside accurately reflected its inside. It was an engineer’s construction, designed for results rather than idealism. The old UN was the opposite, a philosopher’s construction. Its membership was a microcosm of the entire world’s grudges and prejudices and conflicts. Its

Charters and Declarations were impossible even before the ink had dried on them. UNEX’s aims were less ambitious but more achievable. Something like Make Things Better, Or At Least Less Bad. It didn’t compress easily into a slogan like Marek’s Justify Nothing, but it meant as much to Anwar as, presumably, Marek’s meant to Marek.

So, despite the fact that the old UN was practically in his backyard, he joined UNEX. By that time Rafiq was Controller-General, and the difference between the two parts of the UN was becoming clear. He felt he’d chosen correctly. He had a hope, then, that UNEX really could make things better—a hope which had now become frozen in him. He’d carried on doing the specialised work for which he was frighteningly well qualified, but these days he did it automatically. Without pride. Without passion or mission or meaning.

As the shadows continued to lengthen around him, he knew he’d at last found what he’d been looking for. It concerned her. She’s always out there. Always at the sharp end, putting herself up to be judged, fighting her case. Often viciously, but always openly.

And it concerned him, too. He was her opposite: standing apart, coming out of his comfort zone to make simple in/out strikes (for which he was guaranteed success, against out-matched opponents), and then going back.

He’d taken the easier, stealthier way. Looking back on it now, it carried almost a flavor of cowardice. She had more risk, more genuine risk, in any seven days of her life than he’d known in his seven years with the Consultancy.

I’ve actually been like Marek, he thought. Marek’s comfort zone was the darkness of nihilism—he reached out of it to strike, then went back into it. I’m anonymous, like him. Marek and me at one extreme, Olivia del Sarto at the other. And Rafiq too, he’s like her—willing to try and do something, and be judged on it.

Most of her life has been like that broadcast. Mine’s been arid, hers is real. I got this bodyguard assignment because I’m less valuable than people like Levin or Asika. And that’s all. But he shook his head violently, partly to clear it and partly to deny the thought. No, he wasn’t inventing pockets of darkness. Every instinct told him there was something more to this mission. She didn’t just want a Consultant as a personal fashion accessory to parade at the summit. Something was genuinely threatening her. Something beyond even the abilities of her own security people. She wanted a Consultant because nothing else could protect her.

He would go to Brighton early. He would prepare and acclimatise. Her life is more valuable than mine. Hers has actually amounted to something.