by Love, John
“I know where Brighton is, Mr. Rafiq,” Anwar said. “I go to bookfairs there.”
“Yes, I’d forgotten.” He hadn’t. He wanted to give Anwar a minor point now, to help the dynamics later. “So. The New Anglicans’ offer is tempting. Their Cathedral complex, with conference centre and hotels, is large and well-equipped.And, most important for security, it’s at the end of a two-mile-long ocean pier. But there’s a price.”
Rafiq paused, not for dramatic effect but because what he said next could lead to something unprecedented, a Consultant refusing a mission.
“Olivia del Sarto has asked for a Consultant to attend her during the nine days of the summit, starting October 15.
Apparently she’s always wanted one of The Dead—” he spoke the phrase with distaste “—as her personal bodyguard.”
Olivia del Sarto, thought Anwar, still somehow masking his feelings. Archbishop of the New Anglicans. And Archbitch: brilliant and offensive, with her hidden political and financial backers and her sexual appetites and her foul ginger cat. The sexual appetites and the cat were familiar parts of her media persona. She consistently refused to tone down the former, or to have the latter castrated. He’d seen her, again and again, on the news channels. This is wrong. One of us, as a fashion accessory for her?
“She’s asked you for something you shouldn’t give. We only do things for you. For the Controller-General.”
Rafiq said nothing, just waited for Anwar to continue. He knew when to pause and when to press. So did Anwar, but with Anwar it came from enhancement and training. With Rafiq it came naturally.
“It’s the heart of the compact. Any mission you offer us must be impossible for anyone else. And only for you. This doesn’t qualify on either count.”
Again Rafiq waited.
Anwar stood up suddenly, shockingly fast, and glared down at Rafiq. “Occasionally, very occasionally, if there was exceptional risk, we’d do bodyguard duties for you or the
Secretary-General. This is different! You want me to nurse that—that person, because you’ve done a deal with her for a conference venue?”
With Anwar still towering above him Rafiq thought, I’m alone with one of The Dead, and I’ve seriously annoyed him. Be careful with this one, he’s obsessive. Likes everything just so. >But still he said nothing.
“You negotiated with her? You let her have one of us, as a fashion accessory?”
Still Rafiq said nothing.
Anwar added, “And she must have security people of her own.”
Got him. Rafiq smiled. “She has. Mere Special Forces, as you would say, but they’re good. I doubt whether you’ll either add to her safety, or uncover anything her people may have missed. Also, she’s not a participant in the summit, only the host. The national leaders and UN officials are more likely to be targets, and they too will have their own security.”
“Including you?”
“I won’t be there. This is political, not executive, so the Secretary-General will go.” Rafiq rarely referred to the Secretary-General by name; he had already outlasted three of them.
Something’s threatening her, Anwar thought suddenly. Something beyond the abilities of her own security people, so she wants one of us. And whatever it is, it’s specific to the summit, because she only wants me for the nine days.
“You’ve just assigned Miles Levin. Are our missions connected?”
“You know I can’t answer that.” Rafiq knew that they genuinely weren’t connected, but even if he’d said so he doubted that Anwar would believe him. Anwar had a tendency to look for pockets of darkness in everything.
In fact, Anwar had only asked about Levin to buy some time while he tried to think it through. She isn’t asking this as a whim, and Rafiq doesn’t grant whims. He must owe her. Or the New Anglicans, or their political and financial network.And for a lot more than just a conference venue. Do I cite the compact and refuse? Or find out what it is?
“Why did you ask me to do this?”
“I really don’t know. I just had an instinct that you would be the right one.”
Pause.
“I need Offer and Acceptance. Will you do it?”
“Yes.” As he spoke, Anwar heard a succession of doors closing, and others opening, all the way to England.
TWO: SEPTEMBER 2060
1
In seven years Levin had carried out fifteen missions for Rafiq. None of them compared, even remotely, to this. It was why he’d been preoccupied when he met Anwar. If only I could have told him…It was heaven’s gate. It would take him to Croatia to locate Parvin Marek, the only person ever to evade The Dead.
“I don’t aim to destroy society,” Marek once wrote, after one of his atrocities, “but to demonstrate that it has already destroyed itself.”
Rafiq had given him a detailed briefing, but Levin already knew most of it. The case had always affected him deeply, particularly its later events.
Ten years ago Parvin Marek led a terrorist movement called Black Dawn. It wasn’t a mass movement, and had no interest in becoming one. It wasn’t religious, or even conventionally political. It was nihilist. It had no goals or aims, only methods; its slogan, sprayed over derelict buildings, was
“Justify Nothing.” The group consisted of Marek and seven others, who operated as one-person cells. They rarely met or even talked to each other, and had long ago cut all ties to family and friends. The Croatian authorities knew who they were but not where, which made them almost unstoppable.
Marek himself was quiet and withdrawn, an absence of all qualities except action. He didn’t shout, threaten, exhort, or inspire. He only did. What drove him was the Marxist dialectic seen through the dead eyes of nihilism. Society was an illusion, a mere theatre: religion, culture, values, art, politics, all merely a mask for economic forces. Destroy the economic forces? Impractical. But destroy the mask, and the economic forces will be uncovered and die.
Black Dawn attacked random civilian targets: stores, airports, stations, even schools and hospitals. They took no hostages because they had no demands. They were unique, not because of the numbers they killed, but the nature of their killing. Religious fundamentalists killed more people; but they had reasons, however insane, and would say so. Black Dawn had none, and said nothing.
The culmination came in 2050 when Marek bombed the UN Embassy in Zagreb, killing twenty Embassy staff and seven passersby. Before leaving, Marek went back and shot dead two people lying on the pavement who, he noticed, were still alive. Later he issued a statement saying that the bomb had been designed to explode outwards as well as inwards, to kill passersby as well as Embassy staff. Justify Nothing, his statement concluded.
The Croatian authorities formally requested UN assistance. They had never been able to locate Marek and the other seven, but UN Intelligence did. Two Consultants (not Levin or Anwar; this was before their time) accepted amission from Rafiq. In one night they took the seven, alive, and gave them to the authorities. Marek,remarkably,evaded them, but Black Dawn was broken.
It still wasn’t enough.
The Dead hardly ever did bodyguard duties: that was the province of, in Anwar’s words, “mere Special Forces.” So, six months later, three mere Special Forces bodyguards were on duty when Rafiq’s wife and two children, a boy of seven and a girl of five, were shot dead by Marek. The family had just arrived at a marquee on the lawn in front of Fallingwater for the boy’s birthday party; Rafiq was on his way to join them. After shooting them, and the bodyguards, Marek turned back: the boy, he noticed, was still alive. Marek shot him again, twice in the head. From his wristcom he detonated a couple of bombs nearby. He didn’t know, or care, if they’d killed or injured anyone. They were a diversion, allowing him to walk— not run—away. Again he proved untraceable; this time, not for six months but ten years.
After it happened Rafiq became isolated and solitary, though no less effective. His only public statement was, “Marek has killed more people than just my family. For all of the
m, this is unfinished business.”
The family wing at Fallingwater was closed and sealed.
And now, ten years later, the UN had a possible lead. “Not a direct lead to Marek,” Rafiq had told Levin, when
he summoned him to Fallingwater a day earlier, “but to someone who might be prepared to sell him: Slovan Soldo, a distant relative. Soldo lives in Opatija, a seaside resort on the northern coast of Croatia. He’s facing arrest on rape charges, and probably looking for a deal.”
“How good is the lead?” Levin asked, trying to mask his elation.
“It’s from UN Intelligence. It’s good, but it’s tenuous, and we don’t want it compromised. Whoever we send to follow it can have no surveillance or backup.”
So, Levin thought, this mission satisfies the compact. It’s impossible for anyone except a Consultant, and it’s specifically for Rafiq. More so than any other mission.
I was right to choose him, Rafiq thought. He really wants it.
“I’m formally offering you this mission. I want you to contact Soldo, and locate Marek. But if you accept,” he added,
“you’ll need to move within a day. Soldo won’t wait around. Will you do it?”
“Yes.” Levin had enough good taste—but only just enough—not to show Rafiq his genuine delight. If he’d punched the air, as he originally wanted, he’d probably have knocked it unconscious.
Marek would now be in his early to middle forties. What little information there was showed him to be a dark-haired man of average height and stocky build, running slightly to fat.
Softly spoken, like Anwar. Physically unremarkable, except for his hands. They were broad, almost spadelike, giving a large lateral spread. But the fingers were long and slender, like a concert pianist’s. Ideal for the manipulation of devices.
Levin’s imagination was racing. He’d seen possible Mareks all through the flight, and was seeing more of them now he’d landed. Every third or fourth adult male Croatian seemed to be stocky and fortyish with unusual hands. The Croatian national basketball team had been on his flight. Most of them were in their twenties and nearly seven feet tall, but Levin still caught himself double-checking them for hidden resemblances to Marek.
Levin carried no luggage, not even a briefcase. He was alone and unarmed. He had travelled by scheduled flight to Rijeka, where he was to be met and driven to a villa near Opatija.
Rijeka Airport, Zracna Luca Rijeka, was nondescript when it was built and had not improved with age. Its minor buildings and outbuildings were like architectural acne. It did have a new terminal, built on a part of the runway that was no longer needed since the advent of blended-wing VSTOL airliners, but it wasn’t much better than the 1960s building it replaced. It was flyblown and fluorescent, and smelled of stewed coffee and styrofoam. Levin walked quickly through it and out to the main entrance. A car eventually pulled up alongside him. It wasn’t battery-driven, like most of those around it, but a newer hydrogen fuel cell model. The window opened.
“I’m here to meet Slovan Soldo,” Levin said, in Croatian. “I know,” said the driver. “Get in, please.” He was dark-haired, stocky, fortyish. This mission, Levin thought. Mareks everywhere. Mareks, Mareks everywhere, and none of them are real. Anwar would have said, Nor any one is real, to follow Coleridges’s original wording. But Anwar’s got his head up his ass.
They took the main road out of Rijeka, a journey of about thirty miles and twenty-five minutes. By the time they reached the town centre of Opatija it was still only late afternoon, a good time of day to see the town. In the nineteenth century, when Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hapsburgs had used Opatija as a holiday resort. Levin, whose other identity in the real world was founding partner of a large architectural practice, studied the ornate and elegant Hapsburg buildings. He thought of the long slow circlings of history: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Hapsburgs had been targets for nihilist groups like Black Dawn. They continued for a few minutes along the palm-lined main boulevard until they reached the gates of the Villa
Angiolina Park. From there they turned left and up into the foothills of Mount Ucka, the national park to the north of
Opatija. Roadside buildings fell away as they climbed higher, and were replaced by dense laurel woods and cypresses. The smell of their leaves and resin hung in the air. It was still only late afternoon.
The villa stood in a clearing in the laurel woods. It was surrounded by cypresses, dark verticals to the villa’s white horizontal, and it looked large and expensive. Levin thought, Does Slovan Soldo own this? Rape pays well here.
The car stopped, and the driver—they had not exchanged a word since Rijeka—stayed put. Levin got out, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. It opened, apparently automatically, into a large reception room. He walked in, immediately killing his shock and smiling a greeting at those inside. Never look surprised was one of his maxims. As if they shared it, those inside smiled back.
2
Anwar was back at his house in northern Malaysia. He’d activated an immersion hologram in his living room, making it a dark and dripping alley. It was an expensively detailed hologram: smells of wet pavement and urine, sounds of running water and rodent scurryings. It suited his mood.
Do I have to guard her cat as well?
Arden Bierce had given him the usual crystal bead containing Rafiq’s detailed briefing. He could have played it at
Fallingwater, but preferred to take it back home. He pulled up a chair—in reality it was a black and silver Bauhaus original, but in the hologram it was a damp stained mattress—and settled down. He pressed the bead into his wrist implant, and watched the headup display resolve on the inner surface of his retina, a simple full-face shot of Rafiq.
“Thirty years ago,” Rafiq said, “this summit would have been about fossil fuels—oil,gas, maybe coal and shale. But alternative energy sources are now commercially viable: wind, sun, tides, high-atmosphere turbulence, nuclear fusion, hydrogen cells, even continental drift.”(Yes, Anwar thought, and I know how much you’ve made the UN invest in them. You always play long.) “This summit is about something much more basic, ever-present but ever-scarce where it’s most needed: water. It will be difficult. Some of the member states going to Brighton have been, or still are, at war over water rights.”
A tramp was pissing copiously against the wall of the alley.
It steamed and frothed on the mouldering brickwork. All the tramps who came and went in this hologram were different,
Anwar noted approvingly. It never quite repeated itself.
He liked immersion holograms. He had once turned his family living room (and later, his school gym) into the UN
Security Council Chamber, complete with all the then members, except that he made them naked. He enjoyed imagining what they were like under their clothes. He gave them liver spots, varicose veins, pimples on buttocks, local accretions of fat. And he made them carry on debating exactly as if they’d been clothed. In his hologram they were debating water rights—then, as now, a big issue.
He switched his attention back to the inner surface of his retina. Rafiq had been listing some more details of the summit, its proceedings and participants, then turned to the subject of its location.
“Brighton Cathedral…your friend Levin would like this. It’s a full-size replica of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, one of
Europe’s most eccentric buildings. The New Anglicans’ parish churches are all new designs, commissioned from contemporary architects—Levin’s partnership designed two of them— but they decided that their Cathedral should echo the style of
Brighton’s greatest symbol.
“The original was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince Regent, but the New Anglicans have built theirs at the end of a two-mile-long ocean pier. The Cathedral is surrounded by other buildings, architecturally matching, to house conference facilities, hotels, function suites, and media centres.
There are also
commercial offices, studios,shops,restaurants.
The ocean pier has maglevs running up and down its length; and, of course, it’s easy to defend. The New Anglicans make a lot of money from it. It’s a world-class commercial centre.” Transcripts of Rafiq’s speeches showed that he spoke exactly as a good writer would write. They were like passages from William Hazlitt. Measured sentences of meticulous construction. Grammar like precision engineering.
“So: our hosts, the New Anglicans...” Anwar touched his wrist implant and paused the briefing. At his gesture the hologram died and his living room reappeared. He walked around the black and grey and silver Bauhaus interior, playing the last Tournament on a wallscreen. It hadn’t gone well, and he wanted another look at it.
It had taken place two weeks ago, in a large dojo in the UN complex near Kuala Lumpur. It was a six-monthly event, Rafiq’s idea. Sometimes Consultants needed actual combat between missions, to supplement their standard exercises.
It was open to all comers, inside or outside the UN: Special
Forces, mercenaries, martial artists, and anyone else who could satisfy the exacting criteria. The kind of opponents they would most likely encounter on actual missions.
Each Consultant was assigned six opponents by lottery, and had to face them simultaneously and unarmed.
Opponents were allowed any weapons except firearms, and could kill or injure, or try to. The Consultant couldn’t; he or she could only disable.
Tournament fees were large, with bonuses for every member of a group who killed or injured a Consultant. Stories circulated from time to time about injuries inflicted and bonuses paid—all untrue, but Rafiq found them useful urban myths. Reality was different. It was proven, in real missions, that a Consultant had a near-100 percent chance of defeating six proficient opponents, even if one or more had a gun.