Evensong

1

By October 14, all the delegates had arrived. The New Anglicans had, as expected, attended efficiently to all their needs: dietary, religious, administrative, communications, PR, transport. And security. The huge and complicated security network of which Gaetano was the central part had, like some old brass mechanism, juddered into motion, got up to optimum speed, and was now moving smoothly.

The eve-of-summit reception began in the Conference Centre at 9:00 p.m. on October 14. There was a brief opening address by Olivia. She was smart enough not to over-egg it, or to slip in commercials for the New Anglicans. Her remarks amounted to no more than Welcome, glad you could come, we’re just the hosts but we wish you well, enjoy tonight’s gathering.

She wore her usual long velvet dress. This one was dark green. Anwar found it arousing, but he preferred her in dark red, or purple, or dark blue. Green, he thought, doesn’t suit her quite as well. He still caught himself having thoughts like that.

The security regime he’d agreed on with Gaetano was fully operational. It had been so since he last spoke to her in the Garden, a conversation whose aftertaste wouldn’t leave him. At any time she had at least three of Gaetano’s staff with her, chosen by Anwar at random each day from Gaetano’s “trusted” list. Anwar was also around her for at least twelve hours a day—at services, meetings, press conferences, wherever she went. He hardly let her out of his sight. Only when he slept was he not in her immediate vicinity; and even then he primed himself, catlike, to sleep for the minimum time.

And his parameters had narrowed. Not Who, or Why, or even How, but just Where and When. Who and Why no longer concerned him. He’d got all he’d ever get out of her. Only Where and When mattered now. In a society adept at retro replicas and concealed motives and manufactured identities, Who and Why were the most complicated of the five questions. He didn’t have time for them, not anymore.

Anwar moved carefully among and through the delegates, always in Olivia’s vicinity without being obviously so. He stayed alone, but kept moving with an expression on his face as though he’d just left one conversation and was on his way to join another. He listened carefully to the smalltalk around him but didn’t participate. The way he felt, he’d probably insult or offend anyone who spoke to him.

Something was in his blood and wouldn’t let him alone. Her, obviously, but he didn’t let it affect his watchfulness. Or his obsessiveness.

Yuri Zaitsev was due to join the reception at 10:00, but he didn’t arrive until 11:30. He’d been delayed by the debate in the UN General Assembly on Rafiq’s running of UNESCO, and the vote of no confidence in Rafiq that he, Zaitsev, had initiated. Rafiq’s UNESCO policy was carried by a large majority, and the no-confidence vote was defeated by an even larger one. It didn’t put Zaitsev in an ideal frame of mind. He thought he’d covered enough angles on the voting, but Rafiq had covered more, and covered them better. In such things, Yuri Zaitsev wasn’t even remotely in the same league as Rafiq.

Zaitsev was furious and mortified, but did his best to conceal it and to make an impressive entrance. He acknowledged the many courtesies, sincere and ironic, which came his way and set about working the room. The reception would go on a little later than intended, but not so late that it would affect the summit.

It was now one minute past midnight on October 15.

A large open area in the Conference Centre, between seating and stage, had been cleared by the removal of the first few rows of seating. Drinks and food were served by circulating waiters, and from tables set up on the stage. The various adjoining rooms on the ground floor of the auditorium (for use during the summit as breakout spaces, subsidiary meeting rooms, and coffee lounges) also had their own food and drink. The huge white and silver auditorium, the walls and ceiling a combination of swooping organic shapes, looked like a replica of the New West Pier seen from inside.

The mezzanine running round the upper levels of the auditorium was now a minstrels’ gallery. A string quartet played there, softly and discreetly. The rooms leading off the mezzanine (including the Signing Room) were closed but would be open when the summit began, making more areas for breakout meetings and informal discussions—except for the Signing Room, which would stay shut until the signing ceremony (if any) at the end of the summit. It was still guarded inside: there were never less than three security people in there at any time. Their stay in the room was less conspicuous, less noisy, and more hygienic than Anwar’s had been.

Some delegates had gone upstairs to listen more closely to the music, and were leaning over the handrail of the mezzanine balcony, looking down on the main reception. Considering the size of the space and the numbers present, it was fairly quiet. Conversations were animated but not loud. And everywhere, as always, there was the discreet scent of citrus. After a while, Anwar thought as he continued circulating, you got to think that citrus was what white and silver smelt like. Or that white and silver were the colour of citrus.

The Conference Centre didn’t look anything like it would look at 10:00 the following morning, when the opening speeches would be made and the summit would commence. The reception should have ended at midnight, but in view of Zaitsev’s late arrival it would go on for an hour or so. The New Anglicans had foreseen the delay and prepared for it; their staff would reinstate the front rows of seating, check computers and audio-visual, set up catering and put the whole auditorium into full conference mode before 10:00 a.m.

Extra staff had been recruited to deal with administration, catering, transport, and communications. All of them were checked by Gaetano’s people, and double-checked by UN intelligence—a condition of Rafiq’s, which (unlike some of his other conditions, when the venue was negotiated) met with no opposition from Olivia.

Anwar continued listening to the smalltalk. He heard a few people repeat the old stories about Olivia having driven a ferociously hard bargain when negotiating for the venue, and Rafiq having hated negotiating with her. Strange, when they should be allies. Arden had said that. So had he, Anwar, to Rafiq. “I know what she’s like. But what she stands for is your concern. If it isn’t, it ought to be.”

Also, and more interestingly, he heard references to the New Anglicans, to their rapid growth and most un-Church like style, and to their extraordinary New West Pier and Cathedral and Conference Centre. Some delegates hadn’t been to Brighton before, and were learning from those who had about its various eccentricities.

Olivia was working the room, discreetly putting over, to a few selected individuals, the commercials for the New Anglicans which she’d been careful to keep out of her welcome speech. Zaitsev and the other VIP participants were also working the room, but from their particular standpoints of what they wanted from the summit: re-establishing contacts, opening new channels, beginning threads they’d pursue later. The VIPs’ and senior delegates’ security people—Meatslabs of varying proficiency—stood around and, for the benefit of anyone watching them, looked watchful. Gaetano and his people covered the space much less obviously and much more intelligently. Several of them were joining in the small talk. Anwar liked the way they worked.

Anwar continued circulating. He had an electronic ID badge,as did everybody present. His one said he was a middle-ranking member of Gaetano’s staff. Ironically, the surname was Khan—Yusuf Khan,an IT specialist and a man of roughly similar appearance and build, in case anyone cared to check.

Although he tended always to plan for the worst outcome, Anwar didn’t expect anything to kick off at the reception. The reception wasn’t public, and wasn’t being broadcast live. The opening ceremony tomorrow would be, and he’d be covering all vectors and lines of sight which, by now, he knew intimately.

He knew Gaetano would be increasingly occupied with the summit, and since the Garden they’d hardly spoken. Their agreed security regime meant he’d become increasingly occupied with Olivia, though they too had hardly spoken. They both knew they’d moved into the final phase, where he was simply her bodyguard and nothing more.

He hadn’t come to terms with her rejection, or his own feelings. But he couldn’t decide if either, or both, or neither, were real. He parked it. If she’d been a desk or a chair, or Rafiq himself, the logistics of protecting her would be just the same, and he’d attend to them just as obsessively.

“Mr. Khan?”

Anwar didn’t jump at the mention of his original name, or even when he turned round and found himself facing Zaitsev.

“Mr....Yusuf Khan, is it?”

Anwar had never actually met Zaitsev before, and had only seen him from a distance at various functions. He was unprepossessing: jowly and flat-faced, heavily built almost to the point of obesity, though the drape of his expensive suit concealed some of it. Close up, his skin was pock-marked and stubbled. He was one of those people, Anwar thought, who always looked unshaven no matter how much they shaved.

Zaitsev knew about Anwar, or thought he did. Not indetail, or by name, but he suspected Rafiq had sent a Consultant. He’d seen Consultants before—not much, but often enough to suspect Anwar was one. He drew him aside to a more private corner.

“It’s an honour to meet you, Mr. Secretary-General,” Anwar lied.

“You’re one of Rafiq’s creatures, aren’t you?”

“I’m what my badge says I am, Mr. Secretary-General.”

“You look like one of Rafiq’s creatures. Are you here to protect my life?”

“I don’t know Mr. Rafiq personally,” said Anwar, truthfully. “But your life is of no concern to me.”

“That’s discourteous. You should show more respect for my office. Unlike your owner, I’m democratically elected.”

“Yes, this evening you must have a heightened appreciation of the value of voting.”

Seeing Zaitsev’s expression, two of his retinue of Meats labs moved closer. They were quite impressive. They would have dwarfed even Levin.

Olivia moved in quickly and extricated him. “Come on, Mr. Khan, you mustn’t monopolise the Secretary-General’s time...”

Anwar did almost jump then, to hear her using his original name.

The music continued, as did the low murmur of conversation. The string quartet played baroque chamber music. In deference to the delegates it should perhaps have been traditional African or Asian music, but no cultural offence was intended or taken. Chamber music was appropriate for the reception.It didn’t intrude on the ambience. More traditional regional music would be played during the next few days at the summit’s various social events.

Later, as the reception was drawing comfortably to a close, one of Zaitsev’s Meatslabs came up to Anwar.

“I don’t know what that was about, but you irritated the Secretary-General. Don’t do it again. Or I’ll tear off your penis, dip it in relish, and make you eat it.”

“What kind of relish?”

Anwar watched the chest swelling and nostrils dilating. The chest filled most of his immediate field of vision. He thought, If he slugs me, I’ll just have to take it. I mustn’t disable him, not here in front of everyone, that would be stupid. But the Meatslab’s mood subsided and he stalked off. Sometimes Anwar could encourage people to do that, by particular tricks of eye contact and body language that sent out strong warning signs. He’d tried to avoid doing it here, to stay consistent with his temporary identity. Or maybe I didn’t avoid it, and that’s why he left so quickly. Or maybe...

Midnight had come and gone. It was now October 15, the first day of the summit.

He and Olivia had only nine days left together. Maybe less than nine days. Maybe a lot less. Things were coming to a climax, but also coming to an end.

2

October 15 was moving round the earth. When it reached Brighton, it had already been in Kuala Lumpur for seven hours.

Rafiq, surrounded by unseen security, walked through the park in front of Fallingwater. He was smoking, which occasionally he did at the start of a particularly significant day. He rarely smoked more than once a day, but Arden Bierce still faintly disapproved; yet she still carried a lighter in case he forgot his.

She came up to him.

“What are you doing, smoking a cigarette?”

“By the rules of linguistics, that question’s unanswerable.”

She felt like rolling her eyes. Then she thought of all that had happened in the last few hours, particularly the news about Marek. She couldn’t imagine the effect it must have had on him.

She tried to change to a subject he might find a bit more congenial. “The Secretary-General turned up late for the eve-of-summit reception in Brighton. Late, and in a bad mood. You really did a job on him.”

“Yes, I think he’s back in his cage for a while. But he’s not as stupid as he looks.”

“Or as clever as he thinks.”

Rafiq smiled an acknowledgement. “Still, you shouldn’t have had to tell me twice about Marek’s autopsy, or the press releases, or contacting the families. I should have been on top of those things, but when I heard his body was found…”

“It’s understandable.”

“No it isn’t. In this job, the first rule is that nothing ever lets up. Do you remember the day my family was killed?”

“Of course I do.”

“There was a General Assembly debate that evening; one of Zaitsev’s predecessors, attacking my restructuring of one of the agencies. I don’t even remember which one. But the debate wasn’t postponed. Just like yesterday’s wasn’t.”

“Yes. But you won both of them. You outlasted the man who initiated that debate, and you’ll outlast the man who initiated this one.”

It was exactly the right thing to say, at exactly the right time. She always did that. She was a settled person, comfortable with herself, and she made Rafiq feel comfortable.

“When I eventually retire, which won’t be yet, you’ll be one of the contenders to take over. But not one of the leading contenders. Do you know why?”

“Tell me.”

“You’re not ruthless or ambitious enough. But what you are is good with people. They like your company.”

“Why are you telling me this, Mr. Rafiq?”

“Because it might explain what I say next. I like your company too. I’d like us to meet, socially. Have dinner or go to the theatre or something. It’s time I had a companion.”

“Are you saying you’d like an attachment?”

“Well...yes. But to start, just your company.”

“I didn’t see that coming.”

“I hadn’t planned to ask you. I mean, I had, but I’d been putting it off. And now Marek’s definitely dead, maybe I can move on.”

She didn’t reply.

“So, can we just start seeing each other?”

She paused. “I’d like to park it for a while.”

“Why?”

“Well, first there’s Anwar.”

“Anwar won’t...”

“Won’t survive the summit?”

“I was going to say won’t even notice, because of Olivia, but yes, I’m afraid he won’t survive. And neither will Olivia. They’ve got maybe nine days together.”

“If they’re together,” she said.

“Yes, it seems he never stops calling you about that. First she’d like a relationship, then not. Then he’d like one, then not. They’ve both got their heads up their asses.” He found himself fighting a temptation to add Up their own, not each other’s. He had little time for either of them. He’d never taken to Olivia, for some reason. And Anwar’s obsessions, private dark imaginings, and anal-retentive interior world were starting to get tiresome. They reminded Rafiq of what he’d once become, ten years ago. Abbas. It should be Abyss.

She was silent. Thinking that their relationship, if it happened and if that was the right word for it, might be as ambiguous as Anwar and Olivia’s.

Rafiq might almost have heard her thoughts. “It doesn’t have to be a full-blown attachment, if that makes you uneasy. And it doesn’t have to be physical, though I’d like it if it was. It’s been a long time...Now I know for certain Marek’s dead, it’s time to move on. My family died ten years ago. I’d like to find someone.”

“I understand.”

“You said first there’s Anwar. Was there anything else?”

With Rafiq, she knew, you had to examine your words minutely, because he’d be examining them minutely too. And your inflections and body language. In that way he was like a Consultant, but he did it naturally. Like her empathy, it was a gift he’d always had.

“Was there anything else?” he repeated.

“I’m taller than you,” she said, straightfaced. “And you smoke.”

“Most people are taller than me. My wife was. And I didn’t smoke while she was alive.”

She was silent again.

“So what do you think?”

“It can’t start until after the summit. Anwar needs my full attention. Also...”

“Yes?”

“Are you holding something back about Anwar’s mission?”

“I always hold things back. But about his mission, no.” He looked directly into her eyes when he said it; but he was good at doing that. The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you can fake anything. Still, she believed him, on balance. Her empathy against his labyrinthine cunning, and on balance she believed him.

“There’s something about his mission that’s worrying me,” she said. “I can’t quite find it yet.”

“Like Anwar and his Detail. Remember him going on about it when he came here?”

“He goes on about it to me, too. Almost as much as he goes on about her. I don’t think that my Detail is the same as his, but it’s there somewhere. I will find it.”

For once, he was silent.

“And,” she added, “there’s something else.”

“Another Detail?”

“Maybe. When I said park it, I meant only that. I didn’t mean abandon it or forget it.” She looked directly into his eyes. “I’ll help Anwar through this, if I can. But when it’s over, you and I have unfinished business. Laurens.”

3

The opening ceremony began at exactly 10:00 a.m. It was large-scale and well attended. In addition to the delegates there were august non-participants and well-wishers like the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, the Mayor of Brighton, and the Old Anglicans’ Archbishops of Canterbury and Rochester. And their entourages, including a security complement for each. It was a huge arrangement of inter-locking and interfacing mechanisms that Gaetano somehow contrived to keep moving. Anwar hadn’t seen him or spoken to him much during the last few days.

There was also a large media presence, not only in the Conference Centre but also at Gateway, to cover the VIPs as they arrived. Paths were cleared for them, but the Pier was not closed to the public. Tourists and sightseers still milled around as usual, as did the people who worked in the Pier’s business district. One maglev was set aside for the summit participants, and paths were cordoned off where they disembarked for the delegates to walk through the Garden, or the squares and piazzas of the business district, on their way to the Conference Centre.

All the major UN members were present. Countries not directly involved in water rights disputes sent ministers or senior civil servants. Those directly involved—sometimes to the extent of being at war with each other—sent heads of state.

The delegates and other participants were seated in the main auditorium, facing the stage on which the top table was set. The people who would usually occupy the top table during the proceedings were Zaitsev and five others. Zaitsev would be chairing the summit. The others were the members of the committee responsible for drafting the Agenda—a mixture of retired diplomats, senior civil servants and UN officials. For the opening ceremony they were joined by Olivia.

She again gave a short, non-political opening address. “Welcome. We’re proud to be your hosts, and we hope you’ll find the arrangements work well and assist your deliberations. We wish you every success. It would be nice to look back on this summit and think that we helped to make it productive.”

Zaitsev gave a rather more fulsome opening address. Anwar recognized many of the phrases from Rafiq’s briefing; Zaitsev must have picked them up in conversation with Rafiq. He used them without attribution, of course.

“Thirty years ago, this summit would have been about fossil fuels—oil, gas, maybe coal and shale. Thirty years ago, fossil fuels were limited. They still are. But now we have alternative energy sources, and we’ve made them commercially viable: wind, sun, tides, high-atmosphere turbulence, nuclear fusion, hydrogen cells, even continental drift. So we’ve come to Brighton, to this magnificent venue, not to talk about energy sources, but about something much more basic. Something ever-present, but ever-scarce where it’s most needed: water.”

Zaitsev’s voice was more suited to oratory than conversation. In conversation it sounded harsh and rasping. In oratory it was deep and modulated, slightly tremulous with manly but restrained emotion at the important bits. A better actor than Rafiq.

“Some of the UN member states represented here have been at war over water rights. Some still are. It’s inconceivable to me that we could be on the way to making energy shortages a thing of the past, while water shortages are still a thing of the present. It’s inconceivable to me that people are dying over a substance which is more abundant in the world than fossil fuels ever were. With your help and goodwill, we’ll leave here nearer to a solution than when we arrived.”

Anwar found himself joining in the applause, and grudgingly admitted that Zaitsev was good. Cleverer than he looked. But the ultimate success of this summit would be decided not by what was said here, but by what was done later by Rafiq.

Rafiq couldn’t have matched Zaitsev’s oratory, but he would never need to. As clever as Zaitsev might be, Rafiq was cleverer still, distancing himself by professing to deal only with executive matters, not policy. He used Zaitsev, or whoever else was Secretary-General at the time, as a human shield. The media would often try to draw him out on matters of policy, but without success. Political matters, he would intone virtuously, and monotonously, are not the province of the unelected executive arm.

I first got that briefing, Anwar thought, about two weeks ago. It seems longer than that. He was annoyed at his readiness to join in the applause. All Zaitsev had done was to retail, in a slightly better voice, content he’d picked up from Rafiq.

Anwar would have liked to do an immersion hologram, like the ones he did in his teens, with them all naked. Especially Zaitsev. Somewhere in the deep interior darkness of Zaitsev’s capacious trousers, a pair of large buttocks lurked like a couple of conjoined cave bears. Oh for an immersion hologram, he thought, to bring them walloping and wobbling into the daylight.

4

She hadn’t seen it coming, but when it was out in the open she knew it was right. Rafiq was right for her, and she for him. They had a new life waiting.

Rafiq had gone off to meetings, leaving Arden in the parkland in front of Fallingwater. What they had spoken of was pivotal. Whatever would take place between them was on hold until after the summit, but then it would resume. She’d make sure of it. And then the detail would kick in.

Her life would change. She’d have to leave the UN, and hand over to someone else; it would be unprofessional to continue working with Rafiq if they became more than colleagues. As she knew they would.

A move to another part of UNEX, or even the wider UN, wouldn’t work. She’d have to find a new career, which wouldn’t be difficult with her CV, but at this point she couldn’t imagine herself anywhere else. And she couldn’t imagine leaving before her own part in this was finished. She wouldn’t need to leave immediately after the summit concluded. However it turned out, there would be time to finish her work before the media got wind that she and Rafiq were an item.

Which meant she had a bit longer than Anwar to find what worried her about his mission. No, that’s stupid. So stupid she almost laughed out loud. She had to find it in nine days or less, because Anwar had to be told what it was before they made their move.

They. Them. She couldn’t bring herself to call them The Cell; it sounded theatrical, though it was probably accurate. Anwar was right about that: they could only operate on such a scale, over such a long time, if they operated as a cell. Like Black Dawn, but with apparently limitless resources. And an inbuilt sense of timing. They knew exactly when to emerge and when to go back.

Except this time. Maybe Anwar’s rather gauche sojourn in the Signing Room had made them change their timing. Otherwise they wouldn’t have revealed what happened to Marek. She felt they’d been planning to play that card during the summit, as a final massive misdirection before they moved for Olivia, and something had made them play it early.

They stayed enigmatic, wrapped in the stuff of conspiracy theories. It magnified their threat. They’d even invented the concept of Conspiracy Theory, made it an urban myth—like Rafiq did, on a smaller scale, with his Tournament rumours. Made it the province of cranks. Marginalised it. And amplified it at the same time.

They only emerged once or twice in a lifetime, to give history a nudge. Other than that, they existed, but didn’t do. They weren’t part of anybody’s landscape, or anybody’s living memory. They were part of the long slow circling of history. Individuals lived and died and were replaced, but goals remained. Individuals were traceable and vulnerable; goals, if part of a long game, weren’t.

Like Anwar, they came out of their comfort zone, struck, and went back. But they followed different ends and used different means. In a world pervaded by electronic comms, they simply used handwriting and bits of paper, and made themselves untraceable. Laurens does the same, of course, she thought, but he does it for reasons of style. He has a singular sense of style.

And they used Special Forces, but only for low-grade wet work. They didn’t have the UN’s techniques of physical and neurological enhancement, so they couldn’t make them into rivals of The Dead. Not the ones she and Anwar had questioned, certainly.

But they had something that had killed Levin and Asika.

And that summarised all that she knew about them. The last point might yield something, but hadn’t so far, and otherwise there wasn’t much more she could usefully learn. So she parked it, and considered other routes: what they did, and who they employed to do it.

Nine days or less.

5

Anwar recalled what Rafiq once told him. The more established major members—the Americans and Chinese and Europeans—liked to think of the UN as a corporation, with themselves as shareholders. “They’re wrong,” he said. “My part, the unelected part, is like a corporation. But Zaitsev’s part, the political part, isn’t. It’s just a microcosm of the world, with all the world’s history and hatreds and differences. Those things don’t go away just because you put them into a General Assembly.” Or into a summit, like this one.

The most powerful UN members were currently America, China, Europe, Brazil, Indonesia, and India. Russia and

Japan were now less important, politically and economically: Japanese manufacturing and electronics had been overtaken by China and India, and Russian natural resources were worth less now that new energy sources were becoming viable. Russia still remained a Security Council member, but the new energy geopolitics might eventually change even that. Middle Eastern countries were less important for the same reason.

After the opening ceremony, the real business commenced and fault lines already began to appear. Olivia stayed to listen, and so, therefore, did Anwar. He sat a few rows back from her, absorbing lines of sight and possible angles of attack. He sensed from voice inflections and body language that things weren’t going well, but he didn’t listen closely to the words: only enough to know that the early objections were not about detailed Agenda items, but about the Agenda’s very existence.

Other honorary guests and worthies who came for the ceremony gradually left, not wishing to be associated with the process of real business and real disagreements. But, to their credit, the two Archbishops from the Old Anglicans did stay on for an hour or so. They adjourned with Olivia afterwards for a private meeting in one of the adjoining rooms leading off from the main auditorium. Anwar waited discreetly at a distance, covering the door and listening to the discord between the delegates.

Gaetano’s briefing to Anwar was as thorough as one of Rafiq’s. It included the latest version of the Agenda. Anwar had studied it carefully. It set out to define policies and codes of conduct—not diverting or damming rivers to deny water downstream, reforestation to ensure rainwater didn’t run off uselessly, no dumping of untreated waste, desalination technology, and much more. It aimed to identify and define what it termed Guiding Principles which, when agreed, could be applied to the several current disputes, and even wars, between some of the members present.

The Agenda was a document that had been negotiated almost as fiercely as water rights themselves. And, only a few hours into the first day, it was unravelling.

6

Parvin Marek had been theirs. Their instrument.

He was a freak of nature. Normal family, ordinary upbringing, average accomplishments. Averagely gregarious. No special talents or failings. Not bullied or sexually abused. Then, in his twenties, a dark light switched on inside him. It made him brilliant and monstrous. Nihilism was his religion.

Arden had no detailed proof that he’d been one of theirs at the time of Black Dawn, but all her instincts suggested it. His particular role had probably been to destabilise Balkan politics, or to provide misdirection while they destabilised politics in more important areas. He was notable only because his agenda and philosophy were unlike anyone else’s. That would have been his value to them. He didn’t kill as many people as other terrorists, particularly the religiously-motivated ones, but he killed them more unexpectedly.

And he went back. At the UN Embassy in Zagreb, with passers-by. At Fallingwater, with Rafiq’s family. He went back, shot them in the head to make sure they were dead. How could you survive that, Laurens, and still come back here?

But that was as far as that particular route took her. Interesting historically, but Marek was dead.

She considered their other instruments.

Richard Carne was one of their minor functionaries. One of many. He’d been in London to address the Johnsonian Society. Only a short trip from there to Brighton. He wouldn’t have been privy to his employers’ detailed plans for Olivia, but possibly he’d heard something—enough to make him want to take a stroll round the famous New West Pier. Maybe he just wanted to see the Cathedral and Conference Centre where it would happen. He wasn’t doing detailed planning; those he worked for would have done that long ago. Maybe this was just idle curiosity, and genuine coincidence.

Or was it? Maybe they’d sent Carne deliberately. Or maybe they’d known he’d go to Brighton anyway. Either way, they’d known Anwar would want to question him personally, and they’d known Carne would defeat Anwar in the questioning. Not just defeat him, but leave him reeling.

She’d studied exhaustively what Carne had told Anwar. Hines had told him similar things. So had the five like Carne and Hines who she’d questioned. But, even though she hadn’t been present, there was something about Carne’s questioning to which she needed to return. Park it for now. It might surface when I stop looking for it.

At the end of the first day, Anwar was with Olivia in her bedroom. He slept there now, and would do until the summit was over. The day before the summit began, he had decided to go to full close-protection mode.

“I’ll take the sofa,” he told her. “Don’t worry about these chocolate wrappers, I’ll move them.”

She didn’t answer.

“And the bits of paper. And the discarded clothes.”

Fuck you the ginger cat meaowed from somewhere underneath the sofa.

“You know, I always imagined you more with a Siamese cat.”

“Why?” she asked, reluctantly. She’d have preferred to avoid conversations with him about anything except security matters.

“A better fashion accessory. Similar shape and similar eye colour.”

She said nothing, which was what she should have done the first time.

Fuck you the ginger cat meaowed again.

Zaitsev’s suite, like Anwar’s, was on the floor below. Zaitsev’s security people were there constantly, in shifts. Anwar’s temporary identity would have made it plausible for him to be visiting her bedroom; her reputation for coming on to any male within reach of her pheromones was well known. But Anwar, after the brush with Zaitsev and his minders at the reception, preferred not to be seen there.

He didn’t like her bedroom. The untidiness. And the dark voluptuous colours, which he liked on her dresses, but which were overpowering and intrusive as decor. He’d come to like the customary silver and white, and this was the only interior on the New West Pier—at least the only New Anglican interior―that didn’t have those colours.

He watched her sleeping. As usual, when she’d finished with sex or when (as he now knew) she had nobody else in bed with her, she fell asleep quickly and slept soundly. Her appetite for sleep, like her appetites for food and sex, came on suddenly and overwhelmingly, to the exclusion of everything else.

She isn’t real, he thought bitterly. Her appetites. Her mood swings. Her initial failure to notice him. Then she did. Then she wanted an involvement but maybe didn’t, then she didn’t but maybe did.

He wasn’t real either. His motives changed in response to hers, always the opposite and (like hers) maybe secretly containing the reverse of the opposite. Containers and contents. But his motives, he could explain. They were the products of his obsessiveness and self-absorption, which in turn were the products of his occupation. How could he explain hers? He couldn’t. She wasn’t real.

7

The summit droned on. It was the second day, October 16. The proceedings should have belonged in an atmosphere of dark wood and dust motes, not in this huge white-and-silver space with curving pearlescent walls and cool citrus air and perfect acoustics. It really was a very good venue. It got cooler and fresher and more pleasant as the proceedings got more contentious.

Olivia stayed to the first coffee break, then discreetly left. So did Anwar. She went across the Garden, into the Cathedral, and up to the Boardroom where she attended a series of routine meetings. So did Anwar.

The meetings in the Boardroom were beginning to drag, and Anwar made a decision.

Olivia was surrounded by colleagues and her normal guard of three trusted people in addition to Anwar. Proskar—who,at last, Anwar had learnt could also be trusted—had entered, not as a guard but as a participant in the meeting.

Anwar made eye contact, mouthed, “Thirty minutes,” and raised an eyebrow. She nodded.

He went back to the Conference Centre. The summit didn’t sound like it was going any better than when he’d last been there, but he wasn’t presently concerned with the summit. He managed to sidle through the main auditorium relatively unnoticed and mounted the staircase to the mezzanine. He walked along it, trailing his arm along the balcony rail, until he came to the Signing Room doors, which he opened and entered.

There were three of Gaetano’s staff, a woman and two men. They were heavily armed. They were sufficiently awake to train their weapons quickly and easily on the opening doors, though they’d probably been hours doing absolutely nothing. The Signing Room was pristine and undisturbed. The fake wall panelling looked as out of place, against the original curving silver and white walls, as it always did. But nothing had happened; no disturbances, no intrusions.

Their conversation with Anwar was lively and polite. Such monotonous duties, even in shifts, might have made them casual or resentful or careless, but they were none of these things. Anwar had never seen any traditional Meatslab tendencies among Gaetano’s people. They were never sloppy.

It was the second day of the summit. Anwar had visited the Signing Room on the first day, and planned to visit it on the third and fourth and beyond, at least once a day. It meant he’d be leaving her for a few minutes, but he’d have to do it. The Signing Room had a special resonance for him. Although, the way the summit was going, it might not be needed.

Six thousand miles and seven hours away, Arden Bierce was about to call Anwar and ask for another eidetic account of his questioning of Carne. She didn’t. Not because he wouldn’t be able to do it, but because she wouldn’t learn any more. There was nothing he’d left out the first time. It wasn’t a matter of finding something he’d overlooked. Anwar remembered everything and overlooked nothing: that was how he’d been made. This was about interpreting what he’d remembered, and that was her territory, and she’d have to go over it again and again. Until then, she couldn’t go to Anwar. Not during the summit.

She tutted irritably; not something she did often. Keep looking for it, she told herself, until it finds you.

8

The summit moved on to its third day, October 17. Olivia only attended the morning session for a few minutes, and so, consequently, did Anwar.

It was descending into chaos. The breakout sessions for mediation weren’t working. Members were adopting extreme >positions. Nobody was prepared to take a decisive first step until everybody else was. The usual standoff, which he’d heard Olivia describe contemptuously as, “I won’t put anything right until you put everything else right.” It struck a chord with him. It was the same attitude he’d often heard Rafiq describe in equally contemptuous terms. They both stood for its opposite: making some things better while you can.

The detail of it was something Anwar would normally have found absorbing, but he blanked it out. He’d also have found the delegates absorbing, but he blanked them out too. Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans. All at a strange economic and political cusp which in time would make America and Europe irrelevant. Maybe even China and India.

But the delegates weren’t within his compass. They weren’t what he was looking for. Or guarding her from. If they were, Gaetano would have found out and would have told him. He had to trust Gaetano to watch the known people, all checked and double-checked, and Gaetano had to trust him to look for the others, either unknown, or known but with something inside them that hadn’t been seen before.

There were hundreds of faces and names, each with a profile detailing individual history, background, and minutiae of behaviour. He carried them all in his memory. Nothing, so far. He was used to analysing microscopic deviations from normality, and hadn’t seen any yet. It was beginning to worry him. Days were piling up, with no sign of any move against her. He had the abilities (maybe) to stop it when it came, but not the temperament to wait when it didn’t come. He didn’t like things so open-ended.

He was pleased when she left and returned to the Boardroom, allowing him to follow her out discreetly.

Back in the Boardroom she took a succession of internal meetings on the Outreach Foundation. This time Anwar, who’d parked himself in one of the adjoining rooms—the one where he’d questioned Carne—did listen. He found it absorbing. It proceeded smoothly and efficiently, closing point after point, steadily building a whole corporate edifice. The senior New Anglican officials impressed Anwar almost as much as Olivia herself. Even her Finance Director, whose unwise attempt to slip something past her he still remembered, was smart and well-prepared. They all were.

He’d long ago ceased wondering whether the New Anglicans were a Church, a corporation, a political movement, a gangland syndicate, or a mix of all four. Today the answer was obvious. Today, they were in full corporate mode. It contrasted starkly to the summit, just across the Garden.

The Outreach Foundation was rapidly taking on life and shape. And all because I made that remark to her in Brighton.

Olivia visited the auditorium briefly on the afternoon of October 17, and Anwar managed to check the Signing Room, where he found everything in order. The summit was anything but in order. The impasse had gone on all morning and threatened to go on all afternoon.

Zaitsev tried desperately to bring it back on line. The reception for that evening was moved to the following day, and replaced with an all-night session. It broke up at 4:00a.m. without any significant progress. Two members were on the verge of walkin gout, and Zaitsev managed—just—to persuade them to stay. But he was looking and sounding ragged, and the atmosphere was foul.

October 18, day four of the summit, was no better. After the failed all-night session, the atmosphere hadn’t improved. It was in stark contrast to what was going on all around the Conference Centre.

The New West Pier had been deliberately kept open to the public and to normal business. There were sightseers in the Garden, worshippers in the Cathedral, people coming and going in the business quarter, coffees and meals being served in restaurants in the piazzas. And everywhere there were media. The contrast between the summit and the rest of the New West Pier, where there was business as usual, was not lost on them. After the bright opening ceremony, the Troubled Summit phrase began to resurface.

Zaitsev was clearly floundering and the media, like their oceanic counterparts, detected him thrashing around and zeroed in. Some of them, perhaps rather spitefully, recalled the collapse of his attempt to get a vote of no confidence in Rafiq at the General Assembly, and compared it to the imminent collapse of the summit. Zaitsev, they were saying, was the new slang for Collapse.

But if most of the negative media comment was centred on Zaitsev, Olivia wasn’t immune either. Although there was praise for the New Anglicans’ venue and facilities and organisation, there was renewed speculation about her position. Especially after her puzzling and ambiguous Evensong sermon.

Anwar looked around the auditorium. The usual three people were covering her, but the angles and distances weren’t ideal for him to leave her while he checked the Signing Room. So he suggested she should go with him.

“I must check with Gaetano,” she said. “He told me not to go there until the Signing.”

“He’s busy. And,” Anwar added drily, “I think he’d give you special dispensation this time.”

A couple of days ago he would have worried about being seen so much around her, but it didn’t matter now. Zaitsev’s security had already noticed and had raised it with Gaetano, whose explanation—ironically—was No, he isn’t security, he’s just her current sexual partner. They’d probably check, but it didn’t matter. The end time was approaching.

They entered the Signing Room. She greeted the three security people there—two women and a man this time—and looked around her.

“I really don’t like the two styles together,” she said.

“Neither do I.”

“It’s spotless now. It was full of dust and muck for five days, they told me. And you were here all that time.”

He glanced at her.

“Can we,” she said, “move over to the far end?” (It was the end where he’d kept his bucket, but he didn’t tell her.)

“Of course. Why?”

“There’s something I need to say to you privately. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

He felt a stirring, which died abruptly at what she said next.

“If I really felt anything for you, I’d let you go now and give you a chance to survive. In fact, I do feel something—guilt at dragging you into this. So, you can go if you want.”

“You’re speaking to the gallery. You know I won’t go.” He added, “All the things you fight for are things I believe in. I should be proud to protect you, but I’m not. Not particularly. That may be you or me, or both of us, I don’t know.”

She said nothing.

“But I won’t walk away.”

On the evening of October 18, the social function postponed from the previous night took place. Like the eve-of-summit reception, it was held in the Conference Centre. This time, however, the media were allowed in.

The music was a compilation of old African recordings: mostly Congolese Rumba, with artists like Awilo Longomba and Koffi Olomide. The style was Big Band, with jazz and Cuban influences: trumpets, saxophones, drums (Western and African), keyboards, and guitars. Joyous, affirming music, upbeat and foot-tapping and infectious.

But it was out of place with the mood of the evening. The summit was collapsing.

Tucked into the middle of the compilation was a song called Ebale Ya Zaire, written by Simaro Lutumba. There was the same big band lineup, but this time it alternated with a solo voice and a single guitar. The singer was Sam Mangwana. His voice was distinctive and wistful. Anwar spoke several languages fluently, but had only a working knowledge of Lingala—enough, however, to identify the words.

The deep river changes its course with the seasons...

Anwar almost laughed out loud. Someone with a sense of irony had put this compilation together. Water rights disputes often arose because one state dammed or diverted a river, stopping water from reaching states downriver. They would claim that they weren’t deliberately diverting the river, that it changed course naturally with the changing seasons. And more irony—this song wasn’t about just any river, but the deepest in the world, and one of the largest: the River Zaire.

And, later in the song, two other lines:

The one you reject, is the one who ends up loving you the most.

The one you run away from, chases after you the most...

Love. It probably didn’t exist, but if it did, it came and went with a deliberate perversity of timing. Like a lighthouse beam switching on and off. On when ships weren’t in danger of being wrecked, off when they were.

Anwar didn’t laugh at that.

Olivia was there, circulating. A few people came on to her. She wasn’t interested. One of them, a tall grey-haired man in elegant robes, was more persistent than the others. When she didn’t respond, he made small talk for a few minutes and then took his leave courteously.

“Who was that?” Anwar asked her.

“The Foreign Minister of the United Federation of Congo and Kinshasa.”

United Federation of Congo and Kinshasa. In Lingala it made perfect sense, but in French, the old colonial language, the initials were unfortunate.

“You should introduce him to the President of Vietnam. The Heart of Darkness meets Apocalypse Now.”

“I don’t understand...Oh, your old books again.”

9

Arden was working late at Fallingwater. The rest of Rafiq’s staff had gone. Rafiq came out of his inner office and walked over to her.

“You’re working too late to be effective,” he told her.“Give it a rest.”

“I can’t. I have until October 23, maybe less, to find whatever it is. I have to find it. It might be something Anwar needs.”

By unspoken agreement neither of them had mentioned, or would mention, what took place between them until after the summit. Rafiq paused before he spoke next.

“You have a lot less than that. The summit will finish early.”

“Yes. The Troubled Summit. It’s already collapsing.” “No, it’ll finish early because it will succeed.Unexpectedly.

There will be a breakthrough.”

She glanced up at him sharply. “What are you up to, Laurens?”

“What I’m usually up to. What I get paid for. You’ve got maybe three or four days. Arden.”

Olivia attended the summit’s morning session on its fifth day, October 19. Anwar was there too, at a discreet distance. The proceedings were only a few minutes old and the previous days’ hostilities were already being fully resumed. The atmosphere was rancid.

Then something strange happened.

Olivia and Anwar were sitting in the auditorium, with the main body of delegates and participants. Zaitsev as usual was at the top table on the stage, chairing the morning’s proceedings along with the members of the committee who had drafted the now increasingly beleaguered Agenda. Zaitsev’s security people were placed at strategic points—all the obvious ones Anwar would think of looking for—around the stage and auditorium. Suddenly one of them strode quickly onto the stage and towards Zaitsev. He wasn’t the one with whom Anwar had exchanged words at the reception. This one was bigger.

For a moment Anwar had a surreal feeling that Zaitsev was about to be assassinated by one of his own people. But the Meatslab walked rapidly over, went to whisper something in Zaitsev’s ear, thought better of it in view of the mikes and cameras trained on the stage from all angles, and used hand gestures—more like semaphore, given his size—to ask to borrow his pen. Zaitsev passed it to him, but he couldn’t make it open. Patiently, Zaitsev indicated the button on the side of the pen’s barrel, and did sign language with his thumb to demonstrate how to open it. Then he had to ask Zaitsev for some paper, and the dumb show was in danger of repeating itself until one of the others at the top table passed him a notebook. He scribbled something and handed it to Zaitsev. Zaitsev stared at it for what seemed like a long time, then got up and announced he had to leave for a few minutes. He got one of the others on the top table to chair the proceedings while he was away, and then walked rapidly off the stage and out of the auditorium.

He returned an hour later. He looked shockingly different. Either devastated or exultant, but obviously consumed by something that wasn’t consuming him when he left. He waved away requests for him to resume the Chair, and sat silent and rigid while the fractious proceedings continued to get more fractious. He was actually trembling.

What was that about? Anwar asked himself. Even he couldn’t read Zaitsev’s body language or voice inflections reliably. One of the very few occasions when he couldn’t. But he knew one person who might know.

“It was a call from Rafiq,” Gaetano told him. Olivia had left the summit, with Anwar in tow, to attend another Outreach meeting in the Boardroom. Anwar had got her to stop in the piazza in front of the Conference Centre so he could call Gaetano.

“And,” Gaetano continued, “I understand it was followed by a flurry of calls between Rafiq’s staff and Zaitsev’s. They’re still going on now. And no,” he said, anticipating Anwar’s next question, “ I don’t know the substance of the calls, any more than you do. But something is changing. Very quickly.”

“Gaetano,” Olivia said, into Anwar’s wristcom, “tell them to put the Outreach meeting on hold. I’m going back to the summit.”

Zaitsev sat for a few minutes, still visibly trembling. Eventually he told the acting Chairman (a retired UN diplomat) that he was ready to resume the Chair.

The auditorium was silent.

“The Agenda...” Zaitsev began, then stopped. His voice was high-pitched and feverish. He cleared his throat, and began again. “The Agenda of this summit was agreed after hours of preparatory negotiation. It contains,” he was now reading from the Preamble, “detailed proposals, painstakingly computer-modelled and costed, to establish Guiding Principles and codes of conduct to address all water resources disputes—damming, diverting, forestation, and other matters—plus detailed schedules for individual discussions between those most affected, coming back to collective discussions when the individual discussions have borne fruit...”

There was more, and he read it all. It was a typical UN document: logical, rational, with infinite possibilities for subsequent spin, and leaving enough room to cobble something together for the signing. He read it slowly and magisterially, to the annoyance of the delegates who, having argued about it for five days, already knew it quite well enough.

“So: the Agenda.” Theatrically, he held it up between thumb and forefinger, and brandished it.

“And you know what we’re going to do with it? Tear it up.”

He proceeded to do so, scattering pieces on the stage.

“Tear it up. Throw it away. All of it. I have something better.”

10

After the uproar died down, the summit got into the particulars of what Zaitsev had for them. Then the uproar began again, but this time in a different tone.

When the summit broke for lunch at midday on October 19, Olivia returned with Anwar to her bedroom. They’d said nothing to each other since leaving the Conference Centre, and didn’t now. They didn’t know where to begin.

She switched on the newscasts.

“...this morning’s developments at Brighton. UN Secretary-General Zaitsev left the summit abruptly, and returned an hour later. Whatever happened in that hour inspired him to take the summit down a new and quite unexpected road. Some say it could make history. This commentator would still counsel a degree of caution, as some consequential details remain to be settled. But it is, without doubt, an extraordinary development. The summit looked to be on the point of collapse. Now it looks to be on the point of achieving something far beyond the Agenda, which Zaitsev rather theatrically tore up, live on stage, before outlining his new initiative.”

“Seems to have taken everyone by surprise,” she said.

“Including Zaitsev.”

“What?”

“Switch to one of the science channels. See what they say.”

She did. There was a studio discussion going on between two people, probably environmental journalists drafted to cover the developments.

“...so this is a risk, but an intelligently calculated risk,” one of them was saying. He had the complexion and facial mobility of a waxwork, and wore a brown suit whose cut made Anwar wince almost as much as its colour. “Zaitsev will be getting the UN to invest money and technology in this venture. But the money and technology both come originally from UNEX. Ironic, no?”

“Absolutely. I wonder if Rafiq would still have released the technology if Zaitsev had won that no-confidence vote a few days ago?” The answering speaker looked like a TV evangelist: bouffant hair, smooth complexion, perfect teeth, expansive smile.

“I think,” said Brown Suit, “that our colleagues in the news channels would say that Rafiq knew exactly how that vote was going to go. But what about this UNEX technology?”

“Ah,” said the TV evangelist, “that’s even more interesting. There are the energy sources, of course. Rafiq’s been committing UNEX for years to making new energy sources viable.Not just those Zaitsev mentioned in his opening address: wind, tides, fusion. That’s old hat.” The evangelist sat forward, eyes greedy. “It’s those wonderful aircraft that UNEX has, the VSTOLs. Those beautiful silver planes that are so much better than everyone else’s. They use superconductors. That’s the future, right there, and Rafiq is going to let us see inside his magic shop!”

The voices droned on. Anwar got up and walked out onto Olivia’s balcony. After checking she was still within his line of sight, he turned and looked out, back towards the seafront. He could see and hear celebrations: fireworks, horns sounding, and the i-360 Tower shining its night illuminations, still bright even at midday. News travelled fast. Nothing had been signed yet, of course, but there was plenty to celebrate. A UN summit, for the first time, was about to embark on something genuinely radical and different, and it would be good for Brighton.

“It would be nice to look back on this summit,” she’d said, “and think that we helped to make it productive.”

He stayed out on her balcony for a while longer. The weather was chilly and the sea was gunmetal blue, but there was some sharp pale sunlight of the kind you sometimes get in October. He would have continued to stay there, but she called to him from inside.

“Come and listen to this.”

She’d switched back to one of the main news channels. Zaitsev was being interviewed by a well-known current-affairs journalist. She looked like a politician’s mistress: young enough to be jailbait, pneumatic enough to be a scaled-up Barbie. Amanda Mapplethorpe, said the badge that had carried her smiling through several layers of security.

“Yes, we made good progress this morning,” Zaitsev was telling her. To say he looked pleased would have been an understatement. He looked as though he could hardly contain himself, though he kept his words and voice carefully statesmanlike. “I hope we can agree on the broad principles this afternoon and then move on to draft a Statement of Intent. We should have it ready for signing sometime tomorrow.”

Anwar and Olivia exchanged glances, but said nothing.

Tomorrow, Anwar thought. So when will they make their move? Although he knew it wouldn’t have any practical value, he closed the glass doors to her balcony and pulled the curtains. They continued watching the interview.

“So, Mr. Secretary-General,” asked Barbie, “are you satisfied the technology is reliable?”

“Oh yes, it’s all part of the UN’s long-term development programme.”

“Then why hasn’t it been made available before?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said, ‘It’s inconceivable to me that we could be on the way to making energy shortages a thing of the past, while water shortages are still a thing of the present.’” She did a passable imitation of Zaitsev’s diction and style. “So why hasn’t it been made available before?”

Zaitsev smiled indulgently. “It’s a fair point, and you’re right to raise it. The same question was asked this morning at the summit. And answered. The technology we’ll make available didn’t suddenly spring fully-formed from nowhere. The UN has been developing it carefully over years.”

“Don’t you mean UNEX?” Barbie asked, politely.

Anwar wondered if anyone without enhanced vision would have noticed the there-and-gone-again tightening on Zaitsev’s face. “Yes, UNEX. That’s where the developmental and operational work is done. And the political climate hasn’t been receptive in the past. Now, though, it’s very different. Everything has come together.”

Barbie looked skeptical, but said nothing. Zaitsev went on smoothly.

“We’ve broken the mold. We have the technology ready, and a business model to put it to work. Neither of them were available before. The technology, you’ve heard about. But the business model is the real story.”

He paused for effect, and perhaps to permit himself a long up-and-down look at Barbie, before continuing.

“The technology will be licensed free of charge to UN members involved in water rights disputes or suffering water shortages—if they sign up to the Agenda codes on damming and diversion, reforestation and replanting. But the Agenda codes, which once seemed essential, are now only a subset. We’re starting a project which will eventually render them unnecessary.”

“Licensing free of charge? Sounds like you’re giving a lot away.”

“Not giving, Amanda: investing.” Zaitsev modulated his voice to match perfectly the gravitas of his words, but Anwar heard what was underneath the voice. Publicly Zaitsev was the hero, and he was loving it; but he was doing Rafiq’s bidding. Rafiq’s call that morning must have left him eviscerated.

“We’re investing,” Zaitsev went on, “in a project that will deal a decisive blow to these water shortages. We’re going to create water grids. Like individual countries have electricity grids, but these won’t only span individual countries. They’ll cover entire sub-continents. They’ll need massive pipelines and pumps, and massive amounts of energy. They’ll source and distribute fresh water from streams and rivers and lakes and underground aquifers. They’ll take years to build and plan, but they’ll employ thousands and they’ll change the face of the planet! And they’ll always be associated with what we did here, this morning…”

Anwar blanked out the rest.

It seemed like a gamble for Rafiq, but Anwar knew it wasn’t. A calculated risk, maybe, but not a gamble. Rafiq would already be investing in the next generation of technology. Perhaps even the one after that. He’d never give away anything he couldn’t afford to give. He always plays long.

Anwar laughed softly to himself.

“What’s amusing you?” Olivia asked.

“This whole breakthrough,” he said. “Good news, of course, but everyone’s so surprised. It took everyone unawares. Especially Zaitsev, who’s now announcing it to a startled world like he already knew all about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“At ten this morning, he knew no more about it than you or me. He knew no more about it than your cat. But you know who did know about it, don’t you?”

“Rafiq.”

Anwar nodded, and again laughed softly to himself.

The summit had started a process that would move the

UN closer to what Rafiq always wanted it to be: a power in itself, a State among an association of States. A State with its own assets and resources and property, capable of entering into treaties with others, individually or collectively. The UN, through UNEX, would act like a State of similar power to any one of the five or six major members. It could even, at strategic times, give them a nudge.

Anwar thought, Rafiq, you clever bastard. All this and you’ve said nothing. You didn’t even need to come here.

On the face of it, Zaitsev would get the immediate credit. But below the face of it, in those dark labyrinths where real politics was done, the real players would know who was the prime mover. Rafiq’s power would grow considerably behind the scenes, which was exactly where he wanted it to grow.

11

The main auditorium of the Conference Centre seemed unchanged on the surface: the same clean citrus air, the same swooping white and silver interior. But after the lunchtime feeding frenzy of the media, and the individual closed-door discussions where members at war with each other had examined the new initiatives from all angles and found they were still viable, there was a subsurface buzz. A feeling of euphoria and anticipation which Zaitsev, although taking care to look and sound statesmanlike, did nothing to dispel. He said nothing openly to claim credit, of course, but it was there in his posture and the timbre of his voice and his whole demeanour. He sat at the top table on the stage, still with a slight trembling, which he had probably cultivated to hint at his restrained but deeply felt emotion at making history. He spoke with a slight hoarseness which he had also probably cultivated, to hint at long and intense behind-the-scenes negotiations to bring this breakthrough to the world. A better actor than Rafiq.

“We’ve been fortunate,” he pronounced, “to have worked together on what promises to be a new way forward. What we’ll sign will necessarily be an outline only. A Statement of Intent. It will describe the big picture, but a different big picture. It will need networks of treaties, commercial agreements, and contracts to be negotiated as a result, but this will set the overall direction. This is genuinely different.

“It’s a better-than-expected outcome. A breakthrough. The Statement of Intent will be substantive, not cobbled together. The signing will take place earlier than we all expected. All the meetings and negotiations under the old Agenda are out of the window. The Statement of Intent can, we think, given the goodwill we’ve all shown so far, be drawn up relatively quickly. That will be our goal this afternoon: to finalise it, and get it formally signed and adopted tomorrow. Then, all the treaties, commercial agreements, and contracts needed to implement it can follow. Perhaps,” he added, as though it had only just occurred to him, “if the Archbishop agrees, some of them can be done in this marvellous venue which will now have such good associations for us.”

Olivia nodded graciously as some delegates turned towards her, and returned their smiles and words of thanks. But she was scared, and Anwar saw it. She might have less time to live. They exchanged a glance which, to anyone around them but not to themselves, was unreadable.

They walked back together through the Garden, through the lobby of the New Grand, and up to her apartments without exchanging a word. Only when they got into the main living room did they speak.

“Our last night in each other’s company.” She made it a statement, not a question, and was careful with the words. Not “together,” but “in each other’s company.”

“Yes,” Anwar agreed. “Our last night, whatever happens.”

It was their own private statement of intent.

While they sat together in her apartment, the drafting in the summit went on. It was going well, as they verified from time to time by listening to news channels or the live feed from the Conference Centre.

The media circus, which was already huge, got bigger. Some of the worthies who had attended the opening ceremony and left early when problems appeared, were wheeled out by news channels to make statesmanlike pronouncements. Other heads of state, who hadn’t initially gone to the summit but were now quick to be associated with it, were similarly wheeled out. Anwar knew a similar frenzy would be roiling in state intelligence and science agencies the world over, as everyone would be hungry to get access to Rafiq’s toys.

Anwar switched back to the live feed and listened to Zaitsev as he luxuriated. The Statement of Intent had been successfully drafted, as expected, and would be formally signed tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. in the Signing Room.

Without actually saying so, Zaitsev was using the outcome to erase his humiliation over the voting in the General Assembly. At one point someone rather mischievously suggested just that. “A fair question,” he said graciously, “but no.”

An accurate question. “A chance to erase your humiliation” would be exactly how Rafiq sold it to him, Anwar thought. Of course, Zaitsev wasn’t stupid enough to buy something that wouldn’t work, and Rafiq wouldn’t sell him something that wouldn’t work. Rafiq had made sure over the years to do all that research on the technology and all that work on the business model, so that when a time came that was right, all of it would work. He always played long. You really are a clever bastard. It’s always the same when you put these intricate plans together. You get what you want, and you make something better.

Olivia, who’d also been listening, asked, “Did Rafiq really foresee all this?”

Anwar hardly thought it worth an answer, and she didn’t press for one.

Outside it was getting darker. The sky was now the same gunmetal colour as the sea. Celebrations continued along the Brighton seafront, as at midday, but now the horns and music and beach party noises carried more sharply over the evening air, and the lights were brighter in the gathering dark. From Zaitsev’s suite on the floor below—Anwar’s floor, where his suite stood empty—came sounds of celebration.

Also, he could now hear waves. And seagulls. The noises from the sea had been something he’d previously blanked out, but now he was ramping up his senses for the coming night.

He waited until Olivia was asleep. As usual, when she had nobody in bed with her, she fell asleep quickly and slept soundly. When he was satisfied she was deeply asleep, he went out into the main living room of her suite. He left her bedroom door open.

He called Gaetano. “I won’t be able to check the Signing Room tonight. Have you checked it?”

“Yes. It’s secure. I’ll check it again, last thing tonight.”

“Thanks. Talking of last things...”

“Yes?”

“This is their endgame. Between now and the signing, they must move for her. So put your people outside her suite in the positions we discussed. I’ll be in here with her, and I won’t be sleeping. Come for us with your people at 9:00 tomorrow, in the formation we agreed, and escort us to the Conference Centre. If nothing happens there, put them in the agreed positions in the Signing Room and along the mezzanine. And be there yourself. I’ll take it from there.”

They had to move before the signing. He would stay awake all night. Not a problem: he could blank out his sleep requirement for a short period, say a day or two. And right now, he couldn’t see further ahead than a day or two.

He left the doors to her balcony open, and the lights off. Now that the endgame had been reached, it became simpler: just throw people at it. He knew Gaetano would have people on other balconies. On the roof. On adjoining roofs. On the corridors, this one and the ones below.

But not in her apartment. If anything came for her, he wanted to be alone with it.

He stayed awake all night, and nothing happened and nothing came. It was about 8:00 a.m. Two hours to the signing. He made a quick check-in call to Gaetano,confirmed Olivia was still asleep, and put in a call to Arden Bierce. Maybe my last one to her, a voice inside him said. Don’t be morbid, another voice replied. Or self-indulgent, a third one added.

“Still nothing,” he told Arden. “They didn’t move for her throughout the summit. They didn’t move during the night. It must come today. They want it live and public, and everyone will have gone tomorrow.”

“What about your Detail? The one she wouldn’t tell you?”

“I’ve left it. No time, not any more.”

“There’s something I should tell you...” She was going to tell him about Rafiq and herself, but stopped as she realised how wrong it would be at this time.

“Something you should tell me?”

“Not tell you, ask you.” She was floundering, uncharacteristically.

“Ask me what?”

She cast around desperately. “Something,” she blurted, “about what Carne said to you. No,” her voice shook as she realised this was what she’d been looking for, “about the way he said it.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I know, but your account covered everything as if I was. Why do you think we give you all eidetic memories? It was the way he said it! Dammit, Anwar. I’ll call you later.”

When she flicked her wristcom shut, she was shaking. This was pivotal. There really was something, and she’d only thought of it when she’d been trying to avoid telling him about Rafiq and he’d been pressing her and now she had to chase it down and would there be time? He only had about two hours until the signing, and if they were still going to move for her then this—whatever it was—might be something he needed to know. She had to chase it down.

Anwar went into Olivia’s bedroom. She was still sleeping. The act of watching her sleeping, and the act of waking her, which he’d do in a moment, could in different contexts both be acts of intimacy. But not in this context. Her face was small and sharp-featured against the bulk of her pillow. Far from ugly, but not beautiful like Arden’s, either. It didn’t matter now. Her face carried too many associations for him to bother about its aesthetics.

You’ve shown me more double meanings, he thought, more things under the surface, in the last three weeks than I’ve seen in the rest of my life. I don’t know if love exists, but I’ve listed all the pros and cons about you and I think it must Nothing else seems to fit.

She moved slightly, but didn’t wake.

And now it’s academic. We both mistimed. Whatever happens today, whether I protect you or not, the mission will finish and we won’t see each other again.

He reached down and shook her shoulder to wake her. “Time,” he said.

12

Anwar and Olivia left the New Grand at 8:55 a.m. on October 20. Gaetano was with them. They walked through piazzas and gardens to the Conference Centre. Anwar wore his light grey linen blend suit and dark grey woven-silk shirt from his first day at Brighton. Olivia, coincidentally, wore the dark red velvet dress she’d worn when she first greeted him. It had to be coincidental, because they no longer dressed or undressed in each other’s presence.

Anwar also wore his Yusuf Khan badge, though it was probably too near the end to worry about details of identity.

Anwar and Olivia said nothing to each other while they walked. There wasn’t much to say, not now. The weather was like yesterday: cold, but sharp and clear, with pale sunlight. The sea was calm. Not so much placid, perhaps, as unconcerned. Gulls swooped and soared gracefully around the Pier. There was something wistful and sad in their calls, redolent of savage lonely shores; but also, if you listened a little differently, something like a cruel cackling laughter.

For the walk, Anwar briefly ramped up his senses to check where everyone was. It seemed like there was just the three of them, but Anwar saw (and heard, and smelt—that was one of the irritations of sense-heightening) Gaetano’s people all around, covering them discreetly. Must be most of his staff today, he thought. Proskar and others he recognised, but he didn’t see Bayard; he hadn’t seen him for a few days.

“You won’t see him here,” Gaetano said, when Anwar asked. “I wasn’t sure of him.”

Anwar reduced his senses to normal for the rest of their walk. He never liked heightening them for too long; people might infer, from his behaviour, what he was.

They entered the Conference Centre. The main auditorium, and the wide staircase up to the mezzanine, and the mezzanine itself, were already crowded with people not able to get into the Signing Room: junior delegates, support staff, broadcasters from minor channels. The big screen in the main auditorium would show a live feed of the signing.

They walked along the mezzanine, Olivia trailing her hand along the balcony rail. They went through the pale wood double doors and entered the Signing Room at 9:01 a.m. The signing was scheduled for 10:00, but already the room was starting to fill.

Once through the double doors they came immediately, on their left, to the panelled area mocked up to look like a UN Press Suite. The rest of the room, which was about sixty feet long by fifty wide, stretched away to the right, and still had the original curving walls of white and silver.

In the panelled area to the left was the top table. It held Zaitsev and three others, the senior politicians who’d drafted the Statement yesterday. Olivia, in deference to her position as host, also had a place there. She took it, leaving Anwar and Gaetano in the main body of the room. Anwar stayed in the middle, near to the top table, and Gaetano moved to the wall. Other security people—Gaetano’s, and those of the delegates — had already taken up positions.

Olivia sat quietly at the top table, next to Zaitsev. Her expression was unreadable. Anwar made brief eye contact with Zaitsev (A to Z, he thought irrelevantly) but neither of them said anything.

The Signing Room was large, but not large enough for all the summit delegates. Only the delegation heads—usually political leaders or senior ministers, with their security people—were allowed in; many of them were now standing in the main area of the room. At exactly 10:00a.m., Zaitsev would formally read out a communiqué incorporating the Statement of Intent. The heads of delegations would then come up and sign in the alphabetical order of their countries’ names.

Anwar saw Zaitsev’s array of Meatslabs: the one who’d threatened to tear off his penis, the one who couldn’t operate the button on Zaitsev’s pen, and some others. The one who’d threatened to tear off his penis sauntered up to him.

“Hello, Yusuf. Glad I let you keep your prick? I understand it’s her property these days. Good fuck, is she?”

Anwar smiled but didn’t answer.

To him, and he suspected most of those present, the panelling didn’t look any different. It covered the walls in the direction where it faced the cameras, which were massed at the other end of the room with mikes and lighting and reporters.

Every time he’d been in this room he noticed the same thing: the jarring division between the newly-built replica panelling and the original curving white and silver walls. He’d always thought it looked ridiculous. He couldn’t imagine two interior styles which so completely contradicted each other. Levin would have mocked both of them unmercifully.

It wouldn’t show on the broadcasts, though. The cameras were angled so that the panelled area would fill their entire picture. The wood panelling stood three to four feet proud of the original walls, as the room’s natural shape was curved and organic and the panelling was meant to look like a conventional rectangular space. The contractors had done it carefully and very well the first time, and equally well the second time after Anwar ordered it ripped out. But it still seemed a lot of trouble. Just for a theatre set.

Anwar tried to stare through it. He’d been there while it was actually being fitted, and armed guards had been there ever since, so he knew nothing was behind it. Yet he still ramped up his senses in the hope that he might see or smell or hear something there. He didn’t, though he saw and smelt and heard rather more than he wanted of the other people crowding the room.

They wore a mixture of modern clothes and traditional robes and he saw the microscopic texture and weave of the fabrics, the tiny dust motes in their interstices. And smelt them, though they’d all been painstakingly laundered and pressed for the occasion. Their colours were different when seen microscopically, because colours didn’t really exist, they were only selective light filters.

And the textures of their faces, in unforgiving close-up: minute tips of embedded stubble despite careful shaving, or traceries of cracks in makeup carefully applied for the occasion. Hair smelling stale despite careful shampooing. Body odours, bad breath, sweat, and subcutaneous grease despite careful morning toiletries. Snatches of conversation, normally indistinguishable in the background murmur, now each one a separate and distinct thread, some benign and some embarrassing. Sexual liaisons were a regular feature of most summits and conferences, and of ten had more far-reaching results than the formal business itself.

This was how The Dead could step outside the world and perceive it as nobody else could: by ramping up their senses, for surveillance or combat. Sights and sounds and smells crowded Anwar. Each one was separate and distinct, and each one was already matched, in his memory, to a name and a face and a profile and an identity. More information than he wanted or needed. He powered down his senses, and saw and heard and smelt what everyone else did. The cool pleasant citrus air returned to his nostrils and the individual conversations sank into the background murmur.

It was now only a few minutes before 10:00, and the Signing Room was full. Delegates crowded into the main part, standing. Occasionally, spotting a photo opportunity, Zaitsev would smile or wave at someone, glancing to camera as he did so.

The media were at the back of the room, the other end from the panelled theatre set. Quite close, Anwar remembered, to where he’d put his bucket during his stay there. Cameras, mikes, lights were all angled towards the top table and the illusion of rectangular panelling behind it.

At one minute to 10:00 the top table party nodded to each other, and the room fell silent. Zaitsev took a deep breath and, exactly as 10:00 came around, smiled and began.

“Welcome,” he said. “It’s an unexpected path that has brought us here. A few days ago the path we’d chosen seemed impassable. Then we took another, and we’ve arrived at a place none of us would have thought possible.”

Humility, not triumphalism. A mere messenger, carrying something of greater import than his mere self. But Anwar noted the careful modulation of the voice, and the slight contrivance of the near-rhyming of Impassable and Possible.Still a good actor.

He continued, “You all know what happened yesterday: the new direction we took, and the Statement of Intent to confirm that new direction and our unanimous commitment to it. If you’ll permit me” (who’s going to forbid you? Anwar thought) “I’ll read out the summit’s official communiqué.”

He cleared his throat; looked around the room portentously; and began.

“The following communiqué on the United Nations summit on Water Rights was issued today,October 20,2060.

“The United Nations summit on Water Rights was convened by the Secretary-General and was held at the Conference Centre, New West Pier, Brighton from October 15 to October 19, 2060. Delegates unanimously agreed that the previously published Agenda should be set aside, and the following Statement of Intent was adopted by all those present:

“Brighton, October 20, 2060. We the undersigned—”

An explosion of dust and fragments, a tearing and rending of structural members, and the wall burst open. Not the wood-panel theatre-set wall whose construction Anwar had witnessed, but the original pearlescent white wall at the other end of the room.

Arden at last knew what she was looking for. But she hadn’t found it yet, and there wasn’t time. It was buried somewhere in Anwar’s questioning of Carne: not the transcript, that was just words on a screen, but the recording of his verbal report. It was probably some chance remark, maybe even an aside, which had slipped past her unnoticed. Anwar’s memory enabled him to reproduce not only the words, but the way Carne had spoken them.

She’d been playing it back for nearly two hours, since he last called her. Nothing. She played it back again, and there it was.

Carne’s voice was copied exactly by Anwar: not just every word, but the inflection of every word. It was almost mimicry. That’s what she should have listened for. Not the words, but one word. And how Carne had said it.

“They annihilated Levin. Then Rafiq sent Asika, and they annihilated him too.” They annihilated Levin (strong emphasis on the second syllable) then they annihilated Asika (no emphasis). As if it meant something different, something less than they’d done to Levin. Consistent with “there wasn’t enough left of Levin...”

Annihilate: Destroy completely. Reduce to nonexistence. Nullify or render void. Eradicate, erase, exterminate; extinguish, kill, obliterate.

“...what our employers did to Asika. And what they did to Levin, which was worse. And Levin’s face, when he realised he couldn’t defend himself. There wasn’t enough left of him to make into an exhibit, like the one they’d made of Asika.”

The one they’d made in that villa in Opatija.

What was done to Asika was merely physical. What was done to Levin was spiritual. Deeper, more absolute.

“Fuck.” She occasionally swore mildly, but she’d never spoken that word before. It felt strange, forming her lips over the f and her palate and tongue over the ck.

At last she’d found it. Hiding in plain sight, and she hadn’t seen; or in plain hearing, and she hadn’t heard. She’d only found it when she’d lied to Anwar to avoid telling him about Rafiq and herself, and now there was no time.

She flicked open her wristcom.

Anwar moved to the centre of the suddenly-emptying Signing Room, to stand between her and what had burst out of the far wall.

It was Levin. Except it wasn’t, anymore.

Levin would have greeted him with Muslim Filth. Levin would have had some clever one-liners to which Anwar would have thought up rejoinders too late. Levin wouldn’t have had a face like an unmoving theatrical mask, or eyes like dead, brilliant jewels.

Ridiculously, his wristcom buzzed. He cancelled it.

Levin wore a shirt and trousers of silver-grey, and thin gloves of the same material. Maybe woven monofilament. Or maybe a similar composition to Rafiq’s VSTOLs, which always seemed quietly indestructible.

They both ramped up their senses, and went to full combat mode. This time Anwar ignored the microscopic weave of fabrics or the particle-level building-blocks of colours or the body odours beneath perfumes, and funnelled everything towards Levin.

A kind of relativity: time and thought moved normally for them, but for everyone around them they were a flicker.

The Patel contractors hadn’t only built the fake woodpanelled wall, they’d built a replica of the original pearlescent wall. A perfect, seamless replica. At the other end of the room. Levin was already there when Anwar ordered the old panelling ripped out. Already there, in the wall three feet away, when I was crapping in my bucket.

Broadcasters, camera crews and delegates were crowded at the far end. When Levin burst out he didn’t just scatter them, he killed them. He was so fast that nobody got in a shot, except Gaetano. He hit Levin once in the throat, normally a killing shot, but Levin didn’t notice.

With his senses ramped up for combat, Anwar saw all this in what for him was normal time. Relativity: everyone else in the room, except Levin, was wallowing in treacle-time. Screaming in deep bass notes. Thinking at geological speed. Or dead.

Two of Zaitsev’s guards were moving in strange animated slow motion to cover him. The other three, moving with equal strangeness, went to face Levin in the centre of the room but he killed them without breaking step as he hurtled— flickered—towards Olivia at the top table. Everyone assumed the target was Zaitsev, who was now pushed under the table and covered by his two remaining guards. Olivia was standing behind the table, her mouth open in an O that seemed too big for her face.

Anwar moved—slowly in his time, a blur in theirs—to the centre of the room to stand between them.

He faced Levin, and saw what they’d done to him.

He knew it instinctively, not in detail. They’d taken his identity, and left him as a thing. He’d always been bigger, younger, stronger, faster, more skilful, than Anwar. Now he was more so, and a monster. A killing machine. Maybe what had once powered his mind was now redirected into his body. Details later. No time.

Remembering Gaetano’s throat shot, he aimed his best Verb at Levin’s throat. Levin didn’t notice, and broke Anwar’s collarbone. In full combat mode Anwar’s resetting processes worked faster, but would still be too slow. He hit Levin with two more Verbs, and Levin broke three of Anwar’s ribs and re-broke his collarbone. Then his left upper arm.

Simple maths: a few seconds, and he’d be strewn like Chulo Asika over the floor of that villa in Croatia. Levin could break 90 percent of his major bones before 10 percent of them could reset. Anwar kept hitting at the throat. Nothing else was exposed, or vulnerable. No time for elegant moves from his training, he’d be killed.

“They annihilated Levin,” Anwar’s memory helpfully replayed,“then Rafiq sent Asika, and they annihilated him too.”

Yes, Asika. I’m being broken up like Chulo. Levin wasn’t going to kill him with one blow, though he could probably have done so, but to annihilate him piece by piece.

“Jewish scum,” he whispered, hoping ridiculously that Levin might remember and hesitate, but there was no reply. Levin couldn’t speak anymore. Or, Anwar guessed, even form thoughts that might become speech. Everything was gone. A container was all that remained.

Normal time for him and Levin, heightened time for everyone else, which meant they blurred and flickered. Anwar kept landing Verbs, and Levin kept not noticing, and Anwar kept getting parts of himself broken, and broken again before they’d had time to reset. He blanked out the physical pain, that was easy, but he couldn’t blank out the spiritual shock.

“...And Levin’s face,” his memory replayed, “when he realised he couldn’t defend himself. There wasn’t enough left of him to...”

Spiritual. Worse than physical obliteration, it was spiritual. They’d taken everything he was. His identity. His soul. And remade him as a thing. It would burn out and die soon through operating at such a heightened level, but that didn’t matter. Olivia would die sooner. And they could always steal another Consultant and make another thing. They seemed to be good at it.

Another Verb. He was good at Verbs. Open hand to the throat, fingers locally hardened, perfectly executed. It didn’t work. Wasn’t noticed. More Verbs, and more, and each one brought damage to him without him doing any of his own. His right forearm was broken, and his left upper arm was still resetting, too slowly. He ignored both, and willed them to keep functioning, because for the first time in his life, he had someone to fight for.

It didn’t matter what he felt for her, or didn’t feel, or whether any feelings were real or could have a future. Just to be fighting to protect someone, not to abduct someone or sabotage something, felt strange. And this time he was fighting a real opponent, one that out classed him, and he was fighting not to disable but to kill. That felt strange too. She did it all the time, faced real danger and bared her teeth at it, but he’d never had to.

He looked back at her, but she was focused on Levin, and there was the strangest expression on her face. Almost of recognition, or understanding. She hadn’t moved from the table. Levin was now closer to her, and the only reason he hadn’t already reached her was that he’d paused to destroy Anwar piece by piece.

More Verbs. He had nothing else to try. Nothing else was vulnerable. Levin didn’t seem to notice. But all those Verbs, more than he’d landed in his previous missions put together, and Gaetano’s throat shot, had to have some effect sometime.

Then Levin executed a classically elegant move, the only one either of them had done. It was a mighty swivelling roundhouse kick—a Circumnavigator, Consultants rather preciously renamed it—which didn’t only break bones, but did something worse. It hit under Anwar’s heart and ruptured his major cardiac muscles. He went flying through the doors of the Signing Room and out onto the mezzanine. He could feel the start of cardiogenic shock, and again the sound of water rushing in his ears which he’d once read—where did I read that?—was the sound you heard when you started to die.

Somehow he managed to get up. He stood shakily on the mezzanine, looking back through the pale wood double doors into the room where Levin was moving—slowly for him, a blur to everyone else—for Olivia.

Gaetano and others were getting off shots. Levin didn’t notice. Whoever made him probably didn’t care about gunshots: they’d made Levin into a thing that had only one job to do and could then expire. When you had trillions, you could afford to make things and throw them away.

“Shoot for the neck! Shoot for the throat!” Anwar shouted, but he was shouting out of heightened time to people still floundering in treacle time, and they didn’t hear. Relativity, not of light, but sound. Most of them missed, anyway. Levin was too fast.

Olivia still stood at the table. Levin could have turned to her and finished her, but instead came out on to the mezzanine to finish Anwar. She was his prime target, but he had time and advantage, and to finish his secondary target would take only moments. Even at heightened time.

Anwar willed his heart not to go into shock, not yet, because he’d decided to gamble. Whoever did this to Levin probably knew about Anwar by now, about his mediocre ratings and cautiousness. But that was then. Brighton had changed him. And I have someone to fight for.

He was standing on the mezzanine, his back to the balcony, when Levin came for him.

Anwar gambled: a tomoe nage. If he mistimed he’d die, but he was dying anyway.

Levin hurtled towards him. Anwar took Levin’s neck in his hands, placed a foot in his stomach—so much of what he was using was broken and hadn’t reset properly—and rolled backwards. Not a classically-executed stomach throw, but not mistimed either, with Anwar holding onto Levin’s neck as Levin flew over him. Over the edge of the mezzanine, smashing the balcony railing.

Anwar landed on his back with his hands still locked around Levin’s neck. He didn’t let go. Levin hung over the edge of the mezzanine, dangling by the neck from Anwar’s outstretched arms, with bits of smashed balcony crashing to the auditorium below. He kept trying to break Anwar’s forearms, or break Anwar’s hands and fingers, but they were already broken and Anwar wouldn’t let go. He felt the neck snap—there was a rightness about it, like when you were hammering a post into the ground and there was a moment when it settled—and he still wouldn’t let go. He felt Levin’s legs and arms and body dancing, like someone on the end of a noose.

Even after the snap, Levin continued trying to smash Anwar’s forearms or break his fingers, then subsided. Anwar kept holding onto him. Levin’s feces and urine poured down into the auditorium, brown and yellow against white and silver. He’d been still for a long time, but Anwar held on to him for longer. Then he let go, and Levin dropped to the floor of the main auditorium below.

Most of the cameras had been smashed and most of the broadcasters killed, but not all. It was still going out, live and worldwide.

Anwar said, “Goodbye, old friend.”

Heightened time ended with Anwar’s stomach throw. Everyone still alive saw Levin die in normal time, but only another Consultant could have seen the rest of it. To everyone else it was a few seconds’ blur. The rubble and dust from where Levin had burst out of the far wall was still settling, even after Levin died. Some of those he’d killed as he burst out and hurtled towards Olivia were still falling.

This strange relativity was why Anwar felt like he’d been laying on his back, with his broken arms still lolling over the edge of the mezzanine, for whole minutes after Levin had gone. Then, as his senses powered down, he realised that people were no longer moving at the speed of continental drift but were actually moving quickly, in fact very quickly, to gather round him.

Olivia was one of the first. She knelt down to say something to him, but then Gaetano ran up and embraced her. She pushed him away and pointed down at Levin’s body in the auditorium. Anwar heard her calmly telling Gaetano, “Go back and kill it. Make sure it’s dead. Shoot it, in the head.” Then he became unconscious.

13

Even before Anwar had finished killing Levin, Rafiq had dispatched a VSTOL to Brighton. Arden Bierce was in it, among others.

At 11:00 a.m. on October 20 Anwar was taken to the hospital on the New West Pier. They put him in the room where, coincidentally, he’d questioned Taylor Hines a few days ago, and where Hines had died. The hospital was small, but very well-equipped and well-staffed; even more so, while the summit was on.

He hadn’t regained consciousness. He was so quiet and still in the hospital bed that he might not have been there. Sometimes, coming and going in his room, they talked about him as if he wasn’t.

“Why aren’t you doing anything?” Olivia demanded of the hospital’s Director.

“UNEX asked us not to. They’re sending a medical team and they want to attend to him in private.”

“But surely...”

“Archbishop, they expressly asked us not to look at him.”

“Why?”

“Because they don’t want anyone to know what Consultants are like inside. And in view of what he did for you...”

“Yes, yes, alright. But I’m not leaving this room.”

“You can tell them.”

“I’m telling you. Last time I looked, you were still Director of this hospital. ”

She sat by Anwar’s bedside, her body language giving every indication that she was not to be moved or trifled with. He woke once, briefly, and sank back without seeming to see or recognise her.

By 12:20 p.m., a VSTOL had landed on the pad at the end of the New West Pier. The UNEX medical team disembarked and strode into Anwar’s hospital room. Olivia didn’t move. The UNEX doctors shother irritated glances, but said nothing and started unpacking their equipment.

Arden walked in behind the doctors. It was the first time she and Olivia had met or spoken directly.

“Archbishop, the doctors will need you to leave when they finish these preliminaries and start the main treatment.”

“Why?”

“They’ll be doing deepscan procedures. Projecting holograms of Anwar’s internal structure. They can’t risk anyone seeing it. I’m sorry.” When Olivia said nothing, Arden added, “Depending on what they find, it should take about three hours. After that, you’re welcome to return.”

“You’re on my ground here. You don’t tell me when to come or go.”

“Consultants don’t get medical treatment in front of outsiders. There are no exceptions. Don’t you want him treated here, as quickly as possible?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. If he survived that, in the Signing Room...”

“Archbishop, they will not treat him in front of you. If you won’t leave they’ll just take him back to Kuala Lumpur and treat him there, or inflight.” She paused, and knew instinctively what to say. Don’t persist with No, offer something Olivia couldn’t get unless she said Yes. “Don’t make them take him away. Let them treat him here. Then you can say goodbye to him properly.”

They made eye contact, and Olivia nodded. On her way out, she said, “Please let me know when the treatment is finished. I want to come back straightaway.”

“Of course.”

They worked on him. They’d done this before. They were entirely dispassionate, like technicians.

Within a few minutes they’d completed the preliminaries and started the deepscanning. A life-sized hologram of his entire structure, his bones and muscles and internal organs, was projected onto the air at the foot of his bed. They studied it at different depths and from different angles. It stood there like his soul, recently gone from his body. The doctors gave it their full attention and ignored his real body.

They projected local magnifications from the hologram of those major bones that had been broken by Levin: ribs, clavicle, radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, metacarpals, phalanges. And his sternum, which together with his upper ribs had been shattered by Levin’s mighty kick on the way to its main target, his heart.

The texture of the bones, in such high close-up, was granular and fibrous, particularly at the open edges where they’d sheared. The breaks, on images so big they looked like pieces of furniture, were spectacular. But they were resetting and regenerating as expected, and surgery wouldn’t be needed on them; just time.

The magnifications of bones retracted back into the hologram, and it turned itself inside out and projected another magnification, this time so enlarged it filled most of the room. It was Anwar’s heart, where they expected to find more serious damage; they’d magnified it so much it almost made the room into an immersion hologram whose workmanship Anwar, if he’d been conscious, would have admired.

It wasn’t a human heart. It was denser and heavier and had much larger muscles, formed in a much more intricate pattern over its surface. But it was organic: no mechanical or electronic components.

They studied the damage done by Levin’s mighty Circumnavigator kick, and decided it needed closer examination. They ramped up the magnification, as Anwar might have ramped up his senses, and the perspective changed. The image enlarged until it assumed the dimensions of the room’s floor and walls and ceiling. The doctors walked through it and around it, conversing quietly.

The muscles were torn by the pressure waves of the kick, as the doctors expected, but they needed to know the extent of the damage. The transverse dark and light striations on the muscles, normally regular, were turned almost into graffiti by the concussion. The surface of Anwar’s heart was damaged structurally like the white and silver wall Levin had burst out of, but this damage was done by Levin bursting in, not out. Eventually they concluded that it wouldn’t heal as quickly as the bones; regeneration of all that torn muscle tissue would be much slower and more complicated. It might take all of another day.

This was how they made Consultants. A few seconds more in the Signing Room and Anwar would have died like Asika. But a few seconds after Levin had died Anwar’s molecular defences, always first to the scene of any trauma, had begun working. By the time the doctors reached him, resetting and regeneration and healing were proceeding as expected.

The UNEX doctors concluded their deepscan, and Anwar’s hologram disappeared. They’d been told en route that a Consultant had been seriously injured, so they’d come prepared for extensive surgery, and they were lazily relieved that it wouldn’t be necessary. They formally handed him back to the hospital with instructions about mild sedation and food and drink intake. They departed at 2:45 p.m. on October 20, taking Levin’s body with them in the VSTOL.

Arden had decided to stay for the two to three days it would take for Anwar to reach something like full recovery. She called Olivia, and left the room as she entered.

After a couple of hours Anwar started to slip in and out of unconsciousness, and each time he woke he’d see Olivia there. Standing guard ridiculously in his hospital room like (he remembered) he’d stood guard ridiculously in the Signing Room. Every time he woke she was there. Maybe she’d brought a bucket.

Many of the broadcasters in the Signing Room died, but not all of them. Enough survived to make sure the events were seen worldwide and live. The news channels treated it as a failed attempt on Zaitsev’s life.

Mass killing at UN summit in Brighton.

Battle of The Dead.

Nineteen killed in attempted assassination of UN Secretary-General Zaitsev.

Nineteen killed, but very few injured. Anyone not near to Levin when he burst out of the wall lived. The others, if he touched them, died.

With so much coverage, as low-motion analysis of Anwar’s combat with Levin was inevitable. Rafiq knew better than to try to suppress it, though he refused to make any public comment on it. It was broadcast extensively and analysed by an assortment of retired military people. There were headlines like Who were they? and Battle of The Dead and Do we need things like this? Rafiq knew that inquiries would be inevitable, and was fighting on several fronts to ensure they stayed private.

Zaitsev managed to hold things together politically. His remark about “this marvellous venue that will now have such good associations for us” was expected to come back and bite him, but it didn’t. His tone was restrained, dignified, and exactly right. He kept to a simple message, not descending into hasty speculation about who was responsible or why they’d done it. And certainly not about whether the target was anyone other than him.

“This was a summit on water rights. Vitally important, yes, but not an explosive subject like political or ethnic or religious persecution. Not something for which any of the participants would expect to be killed. Just water rights. Civil engineering ideas. Ways to make water so readily available that people don’t have to fight over it, or die for the lack of it. A groundbreaking and imaginative business model. And a political and financial model to match. The summit succeeded, better than any of us expected. Let’s hold to that, and work as we agreed to implement it. Anything less would be a discourtesy to those who died, and to their families and colleagues.”

Even to Anwar, who heard snatches of this during a brief waking spell, it didn’t sound like all of it was acting. Some, maybe, but not all. And yet, all that Zaitsev would get from it would be to survive a summit most people didn’t expect him to survive. Rafiq, who wasn’t even there, would get a massive increase in UNEX’s future status and would get to make some things better in the process. What a piece of work! Anwar thought, and went back to sleep.

He woke on the morning of October 21 feeling pretty good. His night’s sleep had been dreamless and relaxing. He’d expected it to be more troubled.

Olivia was sitting at his bedside. He managed to close his eyes before she noticed he’d opened them, and to pretend sleep for a few minutes until Arden came in.

“Archbishop, please take a rest. You’ve been here all night. I’ll sit with him for a while. I’ll call you if there’s any change.”

“Thank you,” Olivia said, and actually smiled. Even she felt comfortable around Arden. Most people did.

Anwar, as the door closed behind Olivia and without opening his eyes, said, “What did they do to him?”

“Anwar, I’m so...”

His eyes snapped open. “I know. But tell me what they did to him!”

“You probably guessed some of it. They...”

“Wait. This was your Detail, right?”

“Yes. I called you too late...When they abducted him, we think they didn’t have the time or the ability to reverse-engineer his enhancements, so they rewired him to take away his personal identity. To make him use his abilities only in response to their orders. And everything was channelled into his physical abilities. Everything else, personality and memories and judgement and constraints, they wiped out.”

“Like taking his soul.”

“Yes. They turned him loose on Asika, then put him into the wall and made him go to near death to conserve energy while he waited. Then they turned him on full blast to kill her and you.”

Anwar said, “They should just have kept him as Levin. I’d never have beaten him then....Do you know exactly how they rewired him?”

“No, because Gaetano emptied a gun into his head. But we’ll find it eventually. His body’s gone to Kuala Lumpur for autopsy.”

“We’re shipping so many bodies from here to Kuala Lumpur we should start an airline. Maybe call it Air Abbas.”

“How about Dead Air?”

Anwar laughed, for the first time in days. He felt some residual pain in his sternum and upper ribs.

“The Patel people. They’re the real surprise.”

“Yes,” she said, “and we’re tracking them. There were nine in the original party. They were helped by Olivia’s insistence that they should work away from public view. She didn’t want her Conference Centre looking like they had the builders in.”

“Gaetano checked them, and so did you. How did they beat the checks?”

“We’ll know that when we find them. Maybe techniques like those they used on Levin. Also, the misdirection of sending people like Carne and Hines didn’t help, and—” she paused “—neither did your obsession with Proskar.”

Anwar smiled bleakly. Not to mention my obsession with Olivia. The Detail. Not the one Arden found, but the one I’m still looking for. Unfinished business. “The best plans are always simple. Hiding in plain sight. They made a replica of the original wall at the other end of the room, and put Levin behind it, while they were shut in there building the panelled wall. The panelling was such a major piece of work, especially when I made them tear it down and remake it, that nobody would think they’d built another fake wall elsewhere. I didn’t.” Usually I look for pockets of darkness, but I missed that one. “And I’d already told Gaetano how I’d be able to stay undetected if they got me in there.”

He remembered his conversation with Gaetano. Quite detailed and precise, given that they hadn’t then known or trusted each other very much. I’d go to near-death. Hibernation. No body-heat detectors would find me: surface temperature would be the same as my immediate surroundings. No heartbeat or breath detectors would find me: pulse and breathing would be almost nonexistent, and random. No scanners or imagers or DNA detectors would find me: my body would echo the texture and shape of its immediate surroundings.

And then, an electronic signal to activate. From the next room or the next continent. A single pulse. Two targets, Olivia primary, Anwar secondary (because Anwar, though out-classed, was still the only one there who might be able to do something). Simple: two faces, kill both.

“Yes,” Arden said, as though she’d heard what Anwar had been thinking. “Their primary objective was to kill Olivia publicly. But also, as a bonus, to kill a Consultant publicly, the way they had Levin kill Asika privately. Not quickly, but piece by piece, limb by limb. To send a message, live and worldwide: total functional annihilation. Of a Consultant, by a Consultant.”

“Who are they, Arden?”

“Laurens is already fighting back. He knows more about them.”

“Laurens?” In two syllables she’d told him what she’d tried to hide earlier. “You and Rafiq. I didn’t see that coming.”

“Neither did I. But it feels right.”

“Yes, I think it will work...what’s he found out?” He was assessing it like a chemical or mechanical process, the way he’d repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) tried to assess himself and Olivia.

“Thank you for your good wishes.” Her deadpan expression took any sarcasm out of the remark.

“Sorry. What’s he found out?”

“They miscalculated. About how you had changed, how you survived Levin, and how Laurens had engineered the summit outcome. And something else, that made them reveal Marek’s body earlier than they wanted.”

They don’t do bodies as well as we do. But they do other things better.

“Well, they’re his problem now. But I think they’re going to find they’ve never had an opponent like him before.”

He stayed there for most of October 21, alternating between waking and sleep. Still unexpectedly dreamless and deep sleep.

Arden was still there when he woke. It was late afternoon on October 21.

“I don’t think Rafiq expected me to survive. But he always does. He gets the girl, and he gets what he wanted from the summit. I still don’t know why he picked me for this. Do you?”

“No. He told me he didn’t know himself, and I think I believe him. But...”

Her voice trailed off, and he didn’t attempt to fill the silence that grew between them.

“Anwar,” she said suddenly, “I’m so sorry about Levin! About what they did to him!”

“I did my grieving for him at the right time. It wasn’t Levin I fought. He really did die days before.”

“When you faced him, how did you do it? Where did it come from?”

“You didn’t think I could do it?”

“Of course I didn’t! Remember what I do for a living, Anwar. If Chulo was killed, I couldn’t see how you could...”

“What do you think Chulo felt when Levin was breaking him piece by piece? Not fear, the training would cover that. Pain? The training should cover that too, but none of us has taken damage like that before. I expected pain, but I willed it to go away and I willed the broken parts to go on working.But only part of that was the training. Maybe it was because I had someone to fight for.”

“So did Chulo. His family.”

“His family weren’t there and they weren’t being directly threatened, and he knew their feelings for him. She was present and she was directly threatened, but her feelings, I don’t know. So I thought I had an answer to your question but I don’t. I don’t know where it came from.”

She didn’t reply. She usually knew when to say nothing.

“I’ve been doing sums, Arden. Addition and subtraction. Nineteen of us originally, then we started to say, ‘Eighteen, or is it Seventeen?’ Then gradually we started saying Seventeen. It wasn’t then, when we started saying it, but it is now.

“Before I came here I’d only killed one person, and that was accidentally. I’ve now killed four. One accidentally, two indirectly through botching up their questioning, and one directly and deliberately. I’ve never entered any combat before where I was wishing and intending to kill an opponent. I’ve never had to.”

She still didn’t reply.

“Go back to Fallingwater, Arden. I have unfinished business here.”

“Unfinished business?”

“We found your Detail, and it’s dealt with. For now. You still have to find how they got to Levin and how they remade him, but that’s for you.

“Now I need to find her Detail. I almost saw it for a moment, right after Levin died, but it’s gone. Would you believe that? For once, I can’t remember something!”

“You will.”

“I’ll see you back at Fallingwater. Please have one of those VSTOLs at the airfield, ready. I’ll drive out there in a day or two.”

The VSTOL that brought her, and took the doctors away, had returned and was already waiting for her on the Pier’s landing pad; hovering politely, as always, an inch or two above the surface. Arden Bierce left.

He lay there, doing nothing. He thought, she was here all night. Why? Because she hadn’t expected either of them would survive, and now they had, and she wanted to be sure he hadn’t seen The Detail? Or maybe just because she wanted to help him recover. Sometimes pick the simpler explanation.

He slipped into another unexpectedly dreamless and relaxing sleep. When he woke it was the evening of October 21.

He knew he was getting better because he started taking stock of his hospital room. Spotless, white and silver, like everywhere except her bedroom. The window looked out to sea, not back towards the Brighton foreshore or over the spires and domes of the Pier’s Cathedral complex. The sea was featureless, dark grey.

The hospital was located in part of a Pavilion-style building on the edge of the Pier and near its end, so emergency planes could land nearby. He saw gulls from his window. Their sheer numbers, and their messy opportunistic feeding, made them almost vermin. But they were beautiful when they flew, graceful and most un-verminlike as they slid down the air or soared on it. Their slender white shapes would have graced any New Anglican interior. Sometimes, maybe the surface and not the inside was what counted.

Gaetano visited. Anwar felt the same kind of relativity he’d felt in the Signing Room. They spoke to each other out of different frames of reference. They communicated only obliquely, across different universes. Remarks that were mundane or conventional or well-meant in Gaetano’s universe were charged with menace and double-meaning when they travelled across the room to Anwar’s.

“If anyone threatens her...Can never repay...Most important person in the world to me...She’ll always owe...”

And vice-versa, from Anwar’s universe to Gaetano’s.

“Not over yet...I owe her too...Still some details...Unfinished business.”

And, as the door closed behind Gaetano, Anwar kept thinking, You went back. You shot him in the head, to make sure he was dead.

On the night of October 21, the first dream came. He was alone in the room. Olivia, who seemed to have evolved a shift pattern, left a gap in her shift, and the dream slid in softly, visiting him when she wasn’t.

Maybe it was the accumulated trauma, hitting him at last. What should have been the final part of the dream, the part where he learned The Detail, came first and most easily. The Detail walked up to him, showed itself to him...and swirled coquettishly away.

The parts which should have come first, leading to the climax where the Detail appeared, now crept in. He recalled bits of his past life and waited patiently for them to go away because they were irrelevant. He recalled snatches of conversations with Arden and Gaetano, his five days in the Signing Room, his meetings with her, and waited patiently for them to go away because they were irrelevant. But they wouldn’t go until they repeated themselves.

Snatches of words. And his inner obsessions, the themes shaped by his solitude, slid between and through and over the words, leaving a silver surface slime that glistened on them and illuminated them. Containers and contents. Surface and substance. Outside and inside. Private names, immersion holograms, books. Theatre Masks. Identity Soul Body.Containers Contents.

Levin. Her almost-recognition/almost-understanding. But, “Go back and kill it. Make sure it’s dead. Shoot it, in the head.”

Gaetano went back. Anwar heard him empty his gun, shot after shot after shot.

Make sure it’s dead, shoot it in the head. Make sure it’s dead, shoot it in the head..

If they’d done that to Levin, they...

They don’t do bodies, but...

He saw The Detail again. Not Arden’s Detail, that was dealt with for now, but hers. It walked up to him again, then swirled coquettishly away. Again.

He woke in the early morning of October 22. He knew the dream had come because it had left him exhausted; but he couldn’t remember it.

Olivia was there, sitting at his bedside. Wants to know if I’ve seen it yet? Or wants to help me recover? He pretended to fall asleep to avoid talking to her, then pretence became reality. He woke a little later to find her touching his shoulder.

“Ihavetogoforafewhours”shesaid.“AppointmentsI’ve been putting off. I do have...”

“An organisation to run,” he completed for her. “That’s alright, I’ll see you later.”

She smiled briefly and left, and he promptly fell asleep again.

The dream returned. But this time, like Levin bursting out of the wall, it returned as a monster.

Random phrases he’d heard since coming to Brighton, dancing in front of his face. Then swirling coquettishly away.If the phrases had been her, they’d be suggestively moving their meanings under the surface of their words like she suggestively moved her bottom under her long voluminous skirt as she turned away from him. She’d been good at turning away.

He couldn’t take his attention off the words, just as he couldn’t take his gaze off her when she moved like that, pretending she didn’t notice him. Some of the words he remembered just as words. They floated to the surface, spoke themselves as they were spoken, and sank back. Offer and Acceptance. Muslim filth. Jewish scum.

And then they came back, with music. With his dream-memory of the Congolese big band music he’d heard a few days ago, distorted by the random subconscious tides of his dream into something less pleasant: minor key, not major, with blaring dissonant brass and singers’ voices, not melodious but harsh and mocking like seagulls’. The music massaged the words, stressing alternate syllables regularly and masturbating them until their rhythms and inflexions and cadences spilled out.

Offer and Acceptance, Offer and Acceptance,

Muslim filth, Jewish scum.

Offer and Acceptance, The Dead fight in silence,

Muslim filth, Jewish scum.

“I’m Miles ahead of you, Anwar.” Yes you were, even in reaching death. Hear that, Miles? I’ve got a good rejoinder at last!

“Goodbye, old friend.”

Go back and kill it. Make sure it’s dead.

Shoot it in the head, in the head, in the head.

Reith Lecture. Room For God. Small sharp-featured figure on his screen.

Her life’s amounted to something. Never backing down.

Her life’s amounted to something. Never backing down.

A small animal, baring its teeth, and never backing down.

Greed, for food and sex.

Where does she put that food, where does she put that sperm?

Better than the best prostitutes.

In and out, with no baggage. Sex and nothing more.

In and out, with no baggage. Sex and nothing more.

In and out, with no baggage. Better than a whore.

Old greeting Muslim filth Jewish scum.

Post-Levin, Velvet bag of shit Fucking autistic retard.

I needed the best, and Rafiq sent me you. A fucking autistic retard!

I needed the best, and Rafiq sent me you. A fucking autistic retard!

“Say that again, I’ll forget who I am.”

“When did you last remember who you are?”

“It does something a bit decisive, and thinks it’s turning into me.”

“It does something a bit decisive, and thinks it’s turning into me.”

“Something you haven’t told me. A final detail that over-turns everything else.”

The Detail. The Dead. The Detail.

Hate my opponents less, and understand them more.

Hate my opponents less, and understand them more.

Better than the most expensive whore.

The music paused. The words continued, sounding naked.

“I may not always be out here, in front of you, but God is always out there.”

“What did you make of that?”/“It sounded like Goodbye.”

She isn’t real. Appetites moodswings.Didn’t notice me then she did. Wanted involvement but maybe didn’t. Then she didn’t but maybe did. And me, the same but in reverse. Action and reaction. Not love. Not even companionship. Only action and reaction, making one of us the other’s opposite.

My feelings the opposite of hers, and (like hers)containing the opposite of that opposite. Containers and contents.

The music began again.

The one you run away from, chases after you the most...

Love came and went with deliberate perversity of timing. Deliberate. Like a lighthouse beam switching on and off. On when ships weren’t in danger of being wrecked, off when they were.

You mistimed.

Shot him dead, twice in the head.

Go back and kill it. Make sure it’s dead.

In Zagreb Marek went back. Shot dead two people who he noticed were still alive. At Fallingwater Marek went back. Shot dead a boy who he noticed was still alive.

Go back and kill it. Make sure it’s dead.

Shoot it in the head, in the head, in the head.

Gaetano went back. Anwar heard him, shot after shot after shot.

You’ve shown me double meanings and things under the surface.

You’ve shown me double meanings and things under the surface.

I don’t know if love exists but nothing else fits.

I’ve listed all the pros and cons and nothing else fits.

Sonnet 116 fits. The marriage of true minds. As usual, he got it right.

And now it’s academic: we both mistimed.

And now it’s academic: we both mistimed.

Today, whatever happens, the mission is finished.

The mission is finished, the mission is finished,

And we won’t see each other again.

The dream showed him October 20, when he’d reached down and touched her shoulder to wake her. “Time,” he said.

He woke, and cried out. He knew The Detail.

14

He woke to an empty room. She hadn’t returned yet. And he knew The Detail.

He cried out, his soul tearing like his heart muscles had torn, his heart breaking like his bones had broken. He knew The Detail, and it didn’t swirl away. He wanted it to, but it wouldn’t.

She thought it would die with her. She didn’t think either of us would survive.

It was mid-morning on October 22, the day before the summit was originally planned to end. He hadn’t completely recovered, but he was well enough to do what came next.

In the wardrobe in the hospital room were the clothes he’d worn on October 20: the grey linen blend suit and woven silk shirt and underwear and socks, all variously pressed and cleaned and washed and hung up or stored in drawers, neatly and tidily. His shoes, soft leather loafers, were polished and stowed in the wardrobe.

He showered and shaved, then dressed. He walked out of the room to the hospital reception desk. “I’m discharging myself,” he told the receptionist.

“Mr. Abbas! Are you...”

“I’m quite well, thank you. Please call the Director and thank him for his attention. If he needs to contact me I’ll be in my suite at the New Grand.”

“I’ll tell him. So will you be leaving us, Mr. Abbas?”

“The hospital, right now. The Pier, soon.”

He walked out of the hospital onto a small piazza at the edge of the Pier, overlooking the sea. It was the view he’d seen from his hospital room, looking out to sea rather than back towards the foreshore. The day was grey, cold and windy. The sea was the colour he remembered from the day he’d arrived at Brighton: pewter, like his shirt. He stood for a moment watching the gulls, and listening to their cries. Then he turned and strode away, through the Garden and past the Conference Centre and back towards the New Grand.

All of the paraphernalia of the summit had gone, cleared up as tidily as if it, and the summit, had never existed. The Pier was still busy, though: there were people who worked in the business quarter, tourists and casual visitors, and a group of New Anglican staff who greeted him politely. He recognised one of them as Yusuf Khan, the IT specialist whose identity he’d briefly borrowed, and two others as Olivia’s personal staff.

“Hello, Mr. Abbas. Are you well enough to be walking in this weather?”

“I’m fine, thanks. I’ve just left the hospital, and I’m going back to my suite to sort some things out.”

“So you’re leaving us?”

“Soon.”

The sheer ordinariness of the conversation made him realise all the things it didn’t contain, all the things he now knew but couldn’t say. He wanted to cry out, even more intensely than he’d cried out for Levin, but he stayed silent. That would come later, back in his suite. Until then, he had to keep it contained. Containers and Contents. Containers are hardware. Contents are software. Usually software would be more important than hardware. But if the contents of a container are liquid or gas or powder, the container will shape them.

Her contradictory signals towards him, her strange Evensong sermon, were all part of what was happening to her. How had she held it together so long?

Somehow he made it back to the New Grand without showing externally what he was feeling inside. He strode through the lobby, nodding politely to the reception staff. Then into the lift and along the corridor and into his suite, where he waited until he heard the expected knock on his door.

She was wearing the dark red dress.

“I heard from the hospital and from some of my staff that you’re leaving soon, so I wanted to...”

“Say goodbye? Yes, I did too.”

She walked past him into his suite and turned to face him.

“If you hadn’t come here,” he continued, “I’d have stopped off at your apartment on my way out.” He closed the door softly. “You knew I’d find it, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“You thought your Detail would die with you. You didn’t think either of us would survive.”

“I didn’t expect to live past tomorrow. And you, in the Signing Room! Where did you find...”

“Find the ability to win? I don’t know. Maybe it was having someone to fight for.”

“Do you know all of it?”

“I think so,” Anwar said. “Let’s try, and you can tell me if any of the details aren’t quite right...”

She smiled. “Always obsessive. Not just about The Detail, but about details.”

He clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Of course I am! It’ll be one of the last things we talk about. I want to get it right,it’s important...So. To begin with, they abducted you before you were Archbishop. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. They’re good at abducting people. They’re not good with bodies, but they’re good with minds. Look at what they did to Levin.”

“Was that his name?”

“You recognised what they did to him. I saw you, in the Signing Room. But with you, they did something more.”

She said nothing. Her dark violet eyes, which always seemed to see everything and which wouldn’t be stared down by anyone, did not leave his face.

“Shall I tell you?” he asked.

“Oh, for God’s sake! All this play acting, the show of annoyance and the lead-up questions, are because you know what it is but you’re afraid to actually say it!”

“Yes, I am. Now.”

“Then,” her voice became quieter, “I’ll say it. When they abducted Levin they wiped his identity and left him a monster. A killing machine.

“When they abducted me they wiped my identity and put another one inside me: Parvin Marek. Then they set me up to lead what was then their creation, the New Anglican Church. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t work out like that, for reasons I’ll tell you later because this is the last thing we’ll talk about. Is that what you were going to say but couldn’t?”

“Yes.”

“So when did you know?”

“I didn’t, until the Signing Room. Until after my friend Levin died. Because of what you told Gaetano. You remembered about going back.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“You went back. Marek would always go back. He’d go back to make sure, and he’d shoot someone who was wounded and helpless. A passerby outside the UN Embassy in Zagreb. Rafiq’s seven-year-old-son. No,” he said, as she started to speak, “this isn’t just for Rafiq. Rafiq said, ‘Marek killed far more people than just my family. For all of them, this is unfinished business.’ I can’t leave it unfinished.”

“Body and mind. Hardware and software. Container and contents. It seemed obvious to them, when they did it, that the mind was the most important. But it wasn’t, it was the container! I didn’t change into Marek. Marek changed into me.”

“You went back.”

“You don’t need to do this. Marek changed into me, and I wanted to love you.”

“Wanted?”

“Love’s more intimate than just intimacy. Friendship and companionship grow out of it, over the years. Nothing could grow out of what we did together, Anwar.”

“You were right, it does overturn everything.” He paused, and added, “How did they do it to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“I’d rather talk about that than what you just said. And yes,it does matter. It’s the last thing. I need to tell Rafiq. They must have other Marek identities stored somewhere.”

“Wouldn’t matter. They’d all seep...”

“I still need to know. Are they organic or electronic?” “Both. They converted his brain patterns to algorithms, billions of them, stored as electronic programs. Then they converted them again to something organic, like a virus.”

“Why?”

“To insert them into a living brain that had been wiped of its last identity and needed billions more protocols to reorder itself. It spread and grew, like they intended. Lots of empty space to spread and grow into. But they didn’t know it would seep.”

“Seep?”

“Souls aren’t the same as software, and bodies aren’t the same as hardware. You can’t just transcribe or transplant them like computer components. They interact. They seep into each other. One becomes stronger, and it isn’t the one you’d think.”

“So Marek isn’t gone. They’ve got his identity encoded in some electronic or bionic storage device somewhere.”

“Yes. And if they put it in someone else, the same thing will happen. That’s the thing about taking an identity. You put it in another body, and the other body eventually shapes it like a glass shapes the water inside it. It can look quite beautiful...Of course, that didn’t suit them. I was supposed to be their creature, run the Church for their ends.”

“Why did they want Marek?”

“The Church was their counter to religious fundamentalism. Marek was political and secular. And an organisational genius. He thought strategically and played long. All points of similarity to Rafiq, and Rafiq would be their next target.”

She paused. “I still have the name I had before, but I don’t remember what it felt like to be me before. I made the Church do what I wanted, not what they wanted. When they looked into my eyes and realized Marek wasn’t in control anymore, they decided to kill me.”

“But you went back.”

“Do you want to stop saying that, and think of something better?”

“All right. How about this? How much of you is still Marek?”

“The dying part.”

“Can you prove that?”

“Why, you want to complain that all this time you’ve been fucking a woman who’s also partly a forty-two-year-old man?”

“Not fucking. That was just the means. Loving was the end.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “the end. Do you know what it’s like, having a dying conjoined identity in your mind? Dying but not quite dead? All these years, I couldn’t quite kill it, but I kept it in a state of dying.”

“I can’t leave it unfinished. I can’t, Olivia.”

He wasn’t an Othello person, he was a Lear and Hamlet person. Lear and Hamlet ripped the soul out of him, Othello just made him uncomfortable. That scene where Othello towered over Desdemona before killing her and chanted, ridiculously, ‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul...’ as if chanting something monstrously wrong would somehow make it right. That was what he was doing now. Different words, but still just as wrong, and still just as inevitable. He had to do it. His feelings screamed its wrongness, but everything else inside him, everything he was, ridiculously chanted its rightness.

Time. He towered over her in cold perfection. Looked directly into her eyes. “I love you,” he said, and executed a perfect Verb. He turned away before she fell, in two separate impacts, and before her blood started pumping.

Outside the door of his suite he encountered the ginger cat. Its eyes were amber and wide, and for once it didn’t seem able to meow Fuck You. He had never been in combat with a cat before, but he found a pressure point easily enough, just behind its ear. It would be out for at least three hours. He went back to the suite, got a soft leather holdall from his wardrobe, put the cat inside, and took it with him. He didn’t know why he did it. From now on, he didn’t think he’d know why he did anything.

He took the maglev to Gateway, left the New West Pier, and walked across Marine Parade to the underground car park in Regency Square where the Cobra would be waiting.

15

He thought, The Two Of Her. Two people, one of them my beginning and the other my end. What have I done?

Scarcely aware of what he was doing, he’d taken the Cobra from its underground lockup. He was now driving it out of Brighton, perhaps for the last time. It was early afternoon on October 22, but damp and murky enough to be early evening. Traffic out of Bright on was heavy and slow and bad-tempered, labouring under a sky that was the same colour as the wet pavements.

The last words he said to her were I Love You. He’d never said that to anyone before, and he’d never say it again.

She was the love of his life, and the hate of his life. Bloodpoison.

Neither of them was perfect: sharp features and strange appetites and vicious combativeness on one side, hook nose and introspection and obsessiveness on the other, self- absorption on both. Once he’d thought they might make a couple, with their imperfections as complementary echoes, but she was right. “Friendship or companionship could never grow out of what we did together.”

Whereas with Rafiq and Arden, it would. Sweltering sex to begin with, then over the years it would settle into a measured pace. Maybe even children. He liked the idea of them having children.

He was passing the heavy Victorian wrought-iron boundaries of Brighton Station on his right. The traffic hadn’t got any quicker, and wouldn’t for some time, so he was able to peer in and see the white and silver maglevs inside. Like those on the Pier.

Everything comes back there eventually.

They put Marek in her, expecting that his soul would control her body. But her body controlled his soul, though at times only just. How had she held it together all this time? When would he ever again meet anyone even remotely like her? I won’t. I can’t ever come back from this. Mentally I’m finished, and Rafiq will know that. Rafiq knows everything.

He had to stop this relentless spot-picking. He needed to focus on unrelated things. Anything that would take his mind somewhere else. The Cobra, for instance. He’d always wanted a Cobra. It looked like no other car ever made, right on the cusp of ugliness and beauty. Its power wasn’t much in evidence in this foul traffic, but he’d open it up when he got further out of Brighton.

Thinking about the Cobra didn’t work, though. He felt as empty as if his own identity had been wiped, and there was nothing put into him to fill it.

And then he thought of something.

They put Marek’s identity into her mind after wiping her mind clear of hers, and hers came back and shoved Marek’s aside. Does that mean the soul, or the identity, resides in the body and not the brain? No, that couldn’t be. But maybe, however good they were at this, they weren’t good enough. You can never completely wipe a soul away. Some residual traces will always remain, and they’ll always grow back. Like grass will always grow back through concrete buildings, if the buildings are left empty for long enough. Makes you wonder where the soul really resides.

For a moment he felt comforted and even slightly optimistic at the thought. Then he remembered what he’d done, and realised he was whistling in the dark. No, it doesn’t make you wonder where the soul really resides. It might sound more poetic if the body’s microscopic building blocks, its cells or its atoms, have some residual memory of the original identity. But, more likely, they just weren’t as good at wiping identities as they thought they were.

And it leaves me no better than I was when I left the Pier. Consultants aren’t alone. Consultants who kill the only two people who ever meant anything to them, they’re alone.

By now he’d reached the Seven Dials district of Brighton, on the way out towards the Downs. The traffic was still heavy, but he expected it to thin out soon.

He was driving past the Al Quds Mosque, the new one built on the site of the old one, when he noticed a car following him. It was a Ferrari Octavian—low, wide, with an almost alien beauty, like one of Rafiq’s VSTOLs. He noticed the car because it had been expertly weaving its way through the traffic and was getting closer. It was about five cars behind him now.

Its colour was distinctive, too. It wasn’t the usual rather vulgar Ferrari orange-red, but a beautiful deep dark red. Like her dress. By now it was only three cars behind him, and he could make out Gaetano’s face behind the windshield. He’d never talked about cars with Gaetano before, but a Ferrari Octavian would seem about right for him. As fast as the Cobra. Maybe even faster. Certainly more conventionally beautiful.

Gradually, coming out of Seven Dials, the traffic thinned. The buildings lining either side of the road were less densely packed, and the road itself was faster and wider. Time. Anwar floored the accelerator, and the Cobra did what it had always been designed for, both in its original incarnation and in its replica form.

The car chase that followed was something whose irony wasn’t lost on Anwar, and probably wasn’t on Gaetano either: it was a repeat of the Cobra-Ferrari Wars at Le Mans in the 1960s, though this one lasted only a fraction of the time. The Ferrari was at least as fast as the Cobra, and Gaetano was a driver of almost equal ability to Anwar. He couldn’t quite catch Anwar, but Anwar couldn’t quite lose him either.

In this fashion, though only for a few short miles, the two cars hurtled out of Brighton in the direction of the Downs. Then Anwar thought, Why do I need to lose him?He slammed on the brakes, downshifted the gears, and did a handbrake turn, so the Cobra was facing the Ferrari as it came round a bend.

He’d stopped right on the edge of Devil’s Dyke. In the small car park overlooking its northern slopes. He smelt the damp earth and grass, the same smell from before. They both got out of their cars and walked slowly towards each other. I always knew I’d come back here before I left Brighton. I never thought it would be like this.

“I’m done here,” he said to Gaetano. “I’m going to the Downs to pick up a VSTOL back to Rafiq. You should go back too. We don’t need this.”

“I can’t,” Gaetano said. “Not now.” There was something wrong about his voice, something thick and choked. He made an odd, swift movement inside his jacket.

“Don’t go for the gun,” Anwar said. “Or the knife. I’d be quicker.”

“Then...”

“Not combat, either. I’d win. And it’d be an anticlimax after the Signing Room.”

“Why did you do it?” Gaetano’s eyes were red-rimmed. Anwar knew what she’d meant to him, but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine Gaetano actually shedding tears.

“I can’t tell you. And you wouldn’t believe me anyway. Go back now. This belongs to another time.”

“I’ll hunt you down,” Gaetano said quietly. “For the rest of my life, and yours. I’ll never stop. I will find you.”

“I know you will. But it won’t be me.”