Evensong (8 page)

Anwar looked round. All prostrate, but neatly so. No groans or blood or writhing, except for Gaetano. All inert.

“Are you alright?” Olivia asked.

He opened his mouth to answer, but she was looking past him. At Gaetano.

“Not yet,” Gaetano said, between coughs, “but I will be. Thank you, Archbishop.”

Anwar turned to her. “Are
you
alright?”

She glared at him, but nodded.

“You were frightened when they surrounded you.”

“No I wasn’t.”

“Yes you were, but not of them. You were frightened I wouldn’t be good enough.”

“You aren’t,” she sneered. “You mistimed, I saw it. I needed the best, and Rafiq sent me
you
. A fucking autistic retard!”

“My knife wound is healing quite nicely, thank you.”

“Our appointment tonight,” she said, “is for nine o’clock. Don’t mistime
that.
”

She flounced off, back up the wide staircase, almost tripping over her long skirt. Fury came off in waves from her small retreating figure. Anwar assumed she was going back to the Boardroom. She did, after all, have an organisation to run.

A couple of minutes passed. The eight were still inert. Gaetano was kneeling and coughing.

“Try to get up now,” Anwar told him. “But take it slowly. I know the kick was genuine, and I know you weren’t wearing protection.”

“Couldn’t. You’d have spotted it.”

“Yes. You really are suffering for your art.”

“We still have unfinished business.” His breathing was growing less laboured. “I didn’t want you here,
she
did. Because she thinks that her own security won’t stop whatever’s threatening her.”

“Like it didn’t stop me...And I didn’t want to be here either.”

“And yet, here you are, taking my men apart like they were nothing...My deputies, Luc Bayard and Arban Proskar.” Gaetano waved his hand to indicate the two men, still unconscious, who’d approached them first.

Anwar glanced down at them. Bayard: like Levin, large build and smile and not entirely unfriendly mockery. But a Meatslab, not another Levin. And Proskar: stocky, dark-haired,fortyish. Unimpressive physically except for his hands, broad and long-fingered, like the hands of a concert pianist.

Gaetano watched Anwar studying them, and said, “What, you thought your trick in the Boardroom would be enough?”

“No, of course not. I recognised your two deputies from my briefing. Also at least four of the others.”

“Yes, Rafiq’s briefings. Always thorough. But
she
wouldn’t know that. So,” he added, “I gave you another opportunity to impress her.”

“She didn’t seem impressed…And it could have been real, not staged. Rafiq’s briefings aid some of her security staff can’t be trusted; maybe helping whoever’s threatening her. I just followed his briefing. You appreciate,” he added, in a tone not calculated to make Gaetano feel any better, “that I could hardly have done anything else.”

They left the Cathedral through the now-open doors and walked across the Garden to the New Grand Hotel, a large pearlescent building which, from the outside, matched the size and style of the Cathedral.

Gaetano, who was now beginning to walk less painfully, took his leave of Anwar in the hotel’s large lobby. Like the >Cathedral,and like most interiors on the New West Pier,there was a discreet smell of citrus.

“I’ll come for you at nine.”

The reception staff showed him to his suite, where his luggage waited. It was a large and well-appointed suite, with a view over the domes and spires of the Cathedral complex. The sun was setting. He walked out on to the balcony and watched it.

When he’d first entered the New West Pier, everything was sleek and serene and silver and white. Then the mask fell away and he glimpsed the soul of the New Anglicans. Joining them was like joining a pack of wild animals.
Fucking autistic retard,
she’d called him—their own Archbishop, in her own Cathedral, right in front of the altar. He thought
What are they? Are they still a Church? Or a corporation? Or a political movement? Have the last two identities consumed the first?
They had the wealth and slickness of a religious cult, but their teachings weren’t so silly. The wealth and slickness of a major business corporation, but they practiced social responsibility. The wealth and slickness of a crime syndicate, but they stood for things rather more worthwhile.

He mentally shrugged.
Containers and contents. Surface and substance.
In the next few days he’d learn more about what was really inside them. For now, he knew for certain that everything about them, their very organisation and culture, was different to any other Church. They were to other Churches what Rafiq’s UNEX was to the old UN.

He continued to watch the sunset, and listen to the sea and the noises from the Brighton shoreline, two miles away; and the cries of the gulls, riding the air currents above the skyline of the Cathedral complex. He reflected on what had happened. He’d fought differently, with less caution, and it had worked. Twenty-two seconds wasn’t bad. And then there was Gaetano. And Bayard, and Proskar and the others. And something else, which made all the rest seem commonplace.

“Christ!” he whispered. “I’ve just fucked an Archbishop!”

Many unusual things arrived daily at Fallingwater, but the object which arrived one morning in late September, two days after Chulo Asika had agreed to find Levin, was particularly unusual. It was a handwritten letter, ink on paper, addressed to Rafiq. Postage was a niche product, used mostly to make a fashion statement or as irony, and this letter had actually been sent through the post. There was an envelope, with a handwritten address, and even a postage stamp and post-mark. Opatija, Croatia. REDGOD: Recorded Express Delivery Guaranteed One Day.

Rafiq was told of its arrival, but it was exhaustively analysed before he even saw it. Unsurprisingly it revealed no DNA, fingerprints or other residual traces, other than those belonging to postal staff. The paper on which it was written was expensive, but not exclusively so. Obtainable at better-class stationery retailers worldwide. So was the envelope, whose weave matched that of the paper; it was self-sealing and bore no trace of saliva at the seal. Whoever had written and sent it had touched neither envelope nor paper with an ungloved hand. The person who had signed the Recorded Delivery forms at the post office in Opatija had paid cash and given a false name and address. He left no traces on the forms he signed. Staff remembered a stockily built male, fortyish, with no unusual features. The post office’s CCTV wasn’t working.

The ink, like the paper, was of superior but not exclusive quality. The nib of the pen used to write it was italic, and electron scans revealed traces of its metals: a high quality but not unusual mixture. The handwriting was regular and neat, and found no exact matches on any database, though it was not so unusual as to find no approximate matches. In fact there were thousands, all inconclusive. One of the closer matches, ironically,was Rafiq’s own handwriting. One of the others was Anwar’s.

When the letter was finally set before Rafiq, he had already been told what it said:

The villa north of Opatija is no longer empty.

At about the time Anwar Abbas met Olivia del Sarto for the first time, Arden Bierce was making another journey in another silvered VSTOL. This journey was less leisurely. The VSTOL took one hour from the lawn in front of Fallingwater to the grounds of the villa north of Opatija, where it hovered while a door rippled open and she got out. It waited for her.

The whole area was cordoned, drenched with arclights, and full of Croatian police and UN Embassy people from Zagreb. She was waved through the front door and into the reception. It was empty. Just the polished wood floor (which reminded her of Fallingwater) and the remains of Chulo Asika.

It looked like he’d been hit by a maglev bullet train. Something made of stuff like stainless steel and carbon fibre and monofilament. Something streamlined and frictionless, and so enormous and fast that it wrecked him without leaving any trace of itself. Without noticing him, if noticing was something it did. Every major bone in his body was broken, and hadn’t had time, before he died, to set or regenerate. The note placed on his chest read
One character no longer in search of an author.
Neat italic handwriting, like Rafiq’s. And, like the letter he’d received, they’d analyse it but it would reveal nothing.

Whoever did this to him could have done so much more, but more would have been less. They could have torn him apart, left him in separate places around the room. They could have stuffed his penis and testicles in his mouth, torn off his fingers and poked them in to his eyes. She’d been a field officer in UN Intelligence before her promotion to Rafiq’s staff, and she’d seen such things before, usually done to civilian corpses by fundamentalist militias. But not here. This wasn’t gratuitous or vicious, just clean, functional annihilation.

Neck broken, back broken, arms broken. Arden Bierce felt instinctively what the forensics would later verify: whoever did this to Asika left no traces of any kind on his body. No blood, DNA, saliva, fibre, fingerprints, flesh particles.
Look under his fingernails,
she was going to tell the forensic analysts, and stopped herself just in time. They’d have done that already, and all the other things which she was in no state to think of now.

Consultants had been injured, even killed, but never like this. By firearms usually. Not in combat, unless they were massively outnumbered. Chulo Asika had been wrecked on an industrial scale, but she didn’t think he’d been massively out-numbered.
This,
she thought with a certainty which horrified her,
was done by a single opponent.
Bysomethingwhichhad just gone through Asika on its way to somewhere else.

Neck broken, back broken, arms broken. She hoped, but doubted, that all this had been done to him after his death.
Is this what happened to Levin? Who are these people? Does Rafiq know about them? He has to. Rafiq knows everything.

If this was done by a single opponent, then she knew of only four or five people in the world who could have done it. Four or five out of eighteen. And they were all accounted for, except Levin. But Levin couldn’t have done
this
without leaving traces. Levin probably couldn’t have done this at all, not to Asika. But Levin was unaccounted for. Either this had happened to him too, or he’d turned.

No.
None of The Dead had ever turned. It was unthinkable. Their enhancements weren’t only physical but psychological. Even moral. Necessary when giving them such abilities. Then maybe there was another explanation. Maybe, whether or not Levin had turned, they had something else which did this to Asika. And probably to Levin too.

Something that kills Consultants. Something like Consultants, but better.

As chilling as this was, it also suggested an organisation, which in turn suggested lines of enquiry: how and where they did it, who they paid, how much it cost.
Who are these people?
She couldn’t imagine how they’d been unknown to Rafiq before now. But if there was an organisation, UN Intelligence would find it. She’d been whispering all this into her wristimplant as she picked her way around the villa. It would form her report to Rafiq, and she wouldn’t edit it, even the
Rafiq knows everything
remark. A bit stream-of-consciousness, maybe, but Rafiq trusted her first impressions.

Strange to say this about someone with his abilities, but Asika had always seemed to her like a gentle man. Quiet, courteous. His laughter was soft and reflective; never loud, and never aimed at a target. People felt comfortable around him. It wasn’t strange, of course. His abilities were exactly why he could be like that. To her knowledge he’d never killed or seriously injured anyone. In twenty-seven successful missions over nine years. He’d have retired soon.

No traces on his body. Maybe whoever did this wore frictionless material. Or was
made
of frictionless material. Or I’m over-imagining. Trying to draw conclusions, not from evidence but from the absence of evidence
. She parked it for later, when she’d be able to consider it more dispassionately.

Anwar’s mission will be simple, compared to this.
She liked Anwar. He’d never actually made a move for her, though he did sometimes flirt mildly. Asika was married and had never made any move. Levin had, occasionally. The last time was two years ago, at a retirement party, coincidentally for one of the two Consultants who’d broken Black Dawn. She’d reciprocated (Offer and Acceptance) and found herself over a table, where he took her lavishly and thunderously.

Table.
Tables, sofas, chairs.
She tried to look at the polished wood floor without looking at Asika’s body, to find the ghosting of furniture-shapes where the light hadn’t been able to touch the wood. She thought she saw ghostings in clusters, like the stone-white sofas and armchairs at Fallingwater, but in her present state she could be over-imagining.
Still, this place must have had furniture of some sort. Where did it go, and when?
Something else to be parked for now.

“One character no longer in search of an author.” If they knew Asika’s identity in the real world, how many other Consultants’ identities did they know? All of them, if Levin had turned and told them. And if Levin hadn’t turned and told them, if Levin was dead somewhere, how did they know Asika’s identity? Maybe Rafiq’s decision to let him run his business in person, rather than anonymously online, had backfired.She’d warned Rafiq at the time that it was ill-advised. Asika’s cover stories,involving absences to work on UNICEF projects,were painstaking and thorough; Rafiq had thought there were enough failsafes to conceal what he really did, but perhaps there weren’t.

She parked that too. Pointless going there now. She had her report to complete; and then, in two days, a more pressing duty.

She was the member of Rafiq’s personal staff with particular responsibility for the Consultancy, just as others had particular responsibilities for law, finance, and the UN Agencies. So, two days later, she went to Lagos for Chulo Asika’s funeral. She travelled by scheduled flight and took the identity of a middle-ranking UNESCO official who’d had dealings with his theatrical company.