Evensong (17 page)

“My employers are still perfecting body enhancements. You’ll see when your people do the usual autopsy on me, as they’ve probably already done on Richard. They don’t do enhancements as clever as yours. Not yet.”

“What…”

“But they’re unbelievably challenging. They do other things much better.”

He tripped the poison. Anwar looked away.

Back in his suite, Anwar called Arden Bierce. He gave her another verbatim report of another interrogation, and made arrangements for another body to be taken at night by another VSTOL from Brighton to Kuala Lumpur. Then he asked her about Carne’s autopsy.

“Yes,” she said, “it revealed some physical enhancements. But they’re crude; just bits of metal and circuitry and servo-mechanisms. Nothing organic. Hines will probably be the same. Your enhancements are far more sophisticated.”

Anwar nodded, remembering.
They do other things much better.

That was the housekeeping part of their conversation, and was concluded satisfactorily. The rest of it was more difficult.

“And Proskar...” he began.

“No,” said Arden Bierce yet again, “he isn’t Marek. I know, he’s Croatian, he’s the right build, he’s the right age, and...”

“He’s got those hands.”

“Anwar,
he isn’t.”

Anwar looked away. Proskar had done nothing remotely questionable, and Gaetano had listed him as one of those to be trusted. But all that would be true if he really was Marek.
Better kill him anyway?
Fortunately, Anwar managed to dismiss that thought without showing on his face the surprise it caused him.
Where did that come from? What’s this mission doing to me?

ArdenBierceclearedherthroat.“Anwar...Rafiqwantsyou back at Kuala Lumpur.”

“I told you before, I’m not leaving.”

“I remember what you told me before.”

“I don’t know what made me say those things, Arden...”

“Neither do I.”

“...but I won’t leave. I mean it. I will not give up on this mission!”

“He’s not taking you off the mission.You have my word, and his. He wants to talk face to face about who’s behind this.”

“Face to face?”

“Imagine,” she went on, “I’ve just stepped out of a VSTOL on your lawn, carrying one of his letters. You’ll be back in Brighton by tomorrow morning.”

“Did you get that car I ordered?” “How can you think of that now?”

“Because I’ll need it now. It is where I wanted, isn’t it?”

“
Yes.
In the underground lockup garage in Regency Square. I made all the arrangements, just like you said. I can’t believe what it cost.”

“I’m good for it. If Rafiq wants to see me I’ll drive to the airfield. You can send a VSTOL there.”

“Why not just...”

“
No.
Not the one you send for Hines’ body. Send me one of my own. You have plenty.”

“It’ll be at the airfield on the Downs in ninety minutes. And Anwar: I’ll be with Rafiq when you arrive. You won’t be alone.”

Anwar left his suite and walked up to the floor above.
Her
floor. Proskar was lounging on a sofa—stone white, the colour of those at Fallingwater, but more angular—just outside the door leading to her section of the floor. Anwar nodded politely, and Proskar, politely but awkwardly. Anwar did not go in, however. He walked past her door to Gaetano’s office.

“Rafiq’s ordered me back to Kuala Lumpur,” he said. He’d deliberately phrased it like that so he could assess Gaetano’s reaction, and he was gratified to see an initial approval replaced immediately by concern, both of them genuine.

“Rafiq’s standing you down? Why?”

Anwar assessed his body language: facial muscles, voice inflexions, hand movements, moisture on skin. Gaetano’s initial approval stemmed from his first reluctance to have Anwar there at all, but the concern which replaced it came from his decision to work properly with Anwar.
All the things which are right in him are often wrong in her when I look for them.

“No, he’s not standing me down. I understand he has some new information about who’s trying to kill her, and he wants to talk it through face to face.”

“Face to face?”

“Yes, he prefers face to face meetings. If he’s got something of substance.”

Gaetano’s relief was as genuine as his earlier reactions. “It’s about time we had something of substance. Both of us.”

“I’ll be back by tomorrow morning.”

“Then you must be getting one of Rafiq’s VSTOLs.”

“Yes. Not the one that’s coming for Hines. A car,” he said carefully,“is taking me to the airfield on the Downs, where the VSTOL will pick me up.” Something told him not to say what car, or where. He might need it later, if everything went wrong and he had to get her away.

Anwar took the maglev and walked out of Gateway alone, across Marine Parade and into Regency Square. Obvious symbolism, but it was now October. Everything seemed a little colder and greyer.

Regency Square had a small Green at its centre, with eighteenth-century town houses overlooking it. They were quite grand houses, three or four stories, with black wrought-iron balconies and railings. Some had external spiral staircases.

There was an underground car park on the Green, with private lock-up garages. He went down into it and saw the car he had ordered. It was in one of the private lockups, behind bars like a beast in a cage.

It was a replica Shelby Cobra. Not with the original 427 cubic inch petrol engine, of course, but four computer-synchronised electric motors, one for each wheel, charged by a jet turbine. Twelve hundred bhp (three hundred per motor) and four wheel drive. Its paint was simple matt black, not one of the fashionable kinetic or pseudoliving surfaces; that would have been wrong for a Cobra.

But otherwise, it was thoroughly modern. The jet turbine was variable-cycle for optimum power and fuel efficiency. It took air through the car’s front grille, mixed it with biomass-derived jatropha oil fuel, and used the resulting controlled explosion as a constant charge to the four electric motors. It didn’t need storage batteries. The body was ultra lightweight ceramics and plastics, so there was a huge power-to-weight ratio. It would easily out-accelerate and out corner the original Shelby Cobra which raced at le Mans in the early 1960s—and most current cars too.

Modern high-performance cars were stunningly beautiful, almost unearthly, and filled with similar technology to that of the Cobra, but the Cobra was different. Although its shape was designed over a century ago, it had a quality of timelessness. It was simultaneously ugly and beautiful. Squat, muscular, and brutish, with a low crouching stance and hugely flared wheel-arches. The shape of the grille, like a snarling mouth, made it look like it was saying Fuck You to the world. A genuine original, like the ginger cat.

These days, replicas were a strong subculture choice. Some people, like Anwar, preferred them to their modern rivals, for many different lifestyle reasons. For Anwar, it was the tension between outside and inside: old on the surface, brilliant and cutting-edge underneath.

He inserted a finger in the orifice concealed in its flank. After checking his DNA it unlocked for him. Arden Bierce had dealt with its programming and specification and delivery with her usual precision. He sat in it and allowed himself a moment to take it in. Considering what it had cost, the interior was quite spartan. Almost industrial, with lots of exposed oiled metal. Two things were very close to his heart, and he knew it was impossible they could ever come together, unless there really were infinite alternate universes: Doctor Johnson and the Shelby Cobra. He tried to imagine the former, riding as a fractious and querulous passenger in the latter.

The car didn’t have the wet-throated roar of the 1960s V8 original. When he told it to start and it recognized his voice (another piece of Arden Bierce’s attention to detail) the four electric motors merely hummed. Microseconds later the jet turbine fired up, but that too was almost silent: a soft, throbbing whine.

The drive from here to the airfield would take a matter of minutes: a few miles of countryside, past the spectacular gash in the Downs known as Devil’s Dyke. (He’d noticed it on the drive from the airfield to Brighton when he’d first arrived, and following his habit of bestowing private nicknames, he’d called it Lucifer’s Lesbian.) At the airfield they’d lock the car away somewhere securely (Arden Bierce again) and the VSTOL would probably already be waiting, hovering politely a couple of inches above the ground.

But it wouldn’t have arrived just yet. It was about 6,500 miles from Kuala Lumpur to Brighton: a flight of less than ninety minutes, including acceleration and landing, and it was nearly an hour ago that Arden Bierce had told him she’d send it. So he sat back in the Cobra smelling the leather and oil and metal of its interior, listening to the thrumming of 2060s technology inside its 1960s body.

Time,
he thought, a few minutes later. He drove the Cobra—it fitted him as well, and felt as right, as one of his expensive tailored suits—out of the underground car park, out of Regency Square, and out of Brighton; towards the airfield, and Kuala Lumpur, and Rafiq.

“This is still your mission,” Rafiq told Anwar. “My concern is the summit, not her. And no, I’m not sending others, it’d make us look weak and she isn’t important enough. So when we’re through here, you should go back to her. You’re all she’s got.”

Anwar picked up and echoed Rafiq’s unusually direct tone. “And if I’m killed and she’s killed, it’s only a below-average Consultant and an Archbishop and a UN summit; the first two aren’t crippling losses, and there will always be more summits. If their target was you or Secretary-General Zaitsev, it might be different. But neither of you are their targets. Not this time.”

“Yes, I know what Gaetano told you about this being part of something bigger. We’ll come to that. I said I’m not taking you off this mission, and I’m not. But frankly I wish you’d take yourself off it. Some of the others would do better.”

A word like
Frankly
isn’t one
you
use much, even when you’re faking
. “Then why didn’t you pick them? At least seven or eight of the other eighteen score higher than me.”

“Sixteen,” Arden Bierce corrected him.

Before Anwar could reply, Rafiq’s wristcom buzzed. “Excuse me,” he murmured.

The Cobra had taken Anwar north out of Brighton, past Devil’s Dyke, to the small airfield on the Downs where the VSTOL was waiting. The Cobra’s speed was merely tremendous, but the VSTOL’s was unearthly, covering 6,500 miles in well under ninety minutes with no apparent effort. It did something with ions that made air thinner in front than behind, pulling it into a frictionless vacuum perpetually dancing in front of it. And its power plant used low/medium-temperature superconductors, a technology which when perfected would be close to perpetual motion. Its design, and what powered it, were the product and property of UNEX. Rafiq had been investing in such things for years, to the unease of the UN’s major members.

Arden Bierce was waiting for him on the lawn in front of Fallingwater. He felt a huge relief on seeing her; it seemed like he’d been around Olivia for weeks, not just a couple of days. But from the moment he entered Rafiq’s office, Anwar had been struck by his change of manner. Such directness was almost unheard-of for Rafiq; coming from anyone else it would have seemed like a sign of strain.

Rafiq was still speaking into his wristcom. Anwar could have ramped up his senses to hear the other half of the conversation, but didn’t, out of courtesy. It wasn’t necessary anyway.

“No, Mr. Secretary-General, I won’t budge. UNESCO has enjoyed a comfort zone, on public money, for too long. What they do is important but they’ll do it on my terms, and in accordance with my performance goals.” Rafiq paused, listening to Zaitsev’s reply, then laughed; not his usual quiet laugh, but something louder and more unpleasant. “Vote of no confidence? Your predecessors tried that and failed. So will you.”

He flicked his wristcom shut and turned back to Anwar, switching attention instantly; there was no grimace or shrug or other unspoken comment on the last call.

Anwar, too, resumed instantly. “You said she isn’t important. That she’s not your concern.”

“I meant it, Anwar; she’s appalling. You wouldn’t believe how she negotiated with me for the venue.”

“Yes I would. I know what she’s like,” Anwar said. “But what she stands for
is
your concern. If it isn’t, it ought to be.”

“Alright, then I
didn’t
mean it. It was just said for effect. Don’t take it at face value.”

“I’d be ill-advised, now,” Anwar replied, “to take anything you say at face value.”

“You mean about your mission and Levin’s being connected? I genuinely didn’t know when I assigned you. I know now, but I didn’t then.”

Genuinely. Like
Frankly.
If you’re adding words like that to your vocabulary, and if you need to use them with people like me rather than the media, you’re in trouble.

Rafiq’s skill at working people close-up meant he usually got more from a face to face meeting than they did. And
he
had called for this meeting, immediately after studying Anwar’s reports; to review, he said, the identity of those who’d killed Asika and Levin and apparently threatened Olivia. But Anwar sensed that Rafiq wasn’t scanning him as closely as usual; and he’d made unguarded remarks, and used words loosely.

It was unthinkable that Rafiq, of all people, could be pre-occupied: Rafiq, whose reputation was that he’d never give whoever was in front of him anything less than his undivided attention, no matter what other things concerned him at the time.
Maybe UNESCO is more serious than he’s letting on. No, he has situations like that every day. It’s something else. Miles was preoccupied with something too, the last time I saw him alive, here at Fallingwater.

“They’re like you,” Rafiq said suddenly. “Like The Dead— they have their real identity, and their identity in the world. They come into the world and go back out of it. Like you, in and out. I could be one of them. Or Arden, or Zaitsev. Or Gaetano. Everyone you know, you could re-interpret all they’ve said and done as being one of them.”