Evensong (33 page)

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.

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.”