Evensong (28 page)

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
.

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.

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.

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.

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.