by Love, John
She said nothing.
“He’s not good enough,” he said, unwittingly echoing Olivia. “I should have sent someone better. Why did I pick him for this mission anyway?”
Still she said nothing.
“I really don’t care about her, Arden. Better if they don’t kill her, but if they do it isn’t the end of the world.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Of course not. It would be sensational, and public, and would throw everything into chaos. But I’d back myself to be better than them in picking my way through the wreckage.”
“Do you think,” she asked him, “the Secretary-General will go to war with you over UNESCO?”
“He’ll try, but a no-confidence vote will fail. I have the voting covered.” He paused, and added, “I’m proud of UNEX. It works. It delivers on schedule and on budget. But it’s unelected; it could turn into a monster. That’s what he’ll argue in the General Assembly. He’ll lose, but he does have a point.”
“Maybe it works because it’s unelected.”
“Maybe...Arden, about Anwar. I gave him at least three openings to mention Marek and he missed them all. He knew, from you, that Marek’s the common factor in Levin’s and Asika’s deaths, but he didn’t mention it.”
“He’s only a Consultant. He’s not good at the Before and After.”
“He was a waste of time. He gave me nothing. I thought I’d shaken him when I started acting like I was in trouble, but it didn’t work. Wasn’t my acting convincing enough?”
“Yes,” Arden said. “It convinced me.”
He glanced at her sharply, but did not reply.
It was in his nature to think ahead, in long cycles. When the time came, he wanted his successor to be a member of his personal staff, rather than an outsider. Arden Bierce was a possible contender, but not the leading one. She wasn’t ruthless enough, though she had other qualities: intelligence, interpersonal skills, motivation. And something else, her empathy.
“And it wasn’t all acting,” she added. “If it was, he’d have spotted it. He’s still a Consultant.”
Rafiq was well aware of her empathy, her instinct for what made people tick. She wasn’t like him—subtle, labyrinthine, always holding something back—but her empathy was a quality even he couldn’t match, either genuinely or by faking.
Maybe she could do his job with the aid of that empathy, but she wouldn’t do it like him. She couldn’t manipulate people, or cheat them, or ruin or sacrifice them. No, people like Zaitsev and Olivia would eat her alive. And yet...
2
Something was in Anwar’s blood. He didn’t let it surface during the flight back from Kuala Lumpur, which he spent reclining in a contour chair in the VSTOL’s lounge, watching the play of shapes and colours moving just under the silvered surfaces of the walls. He didn’t let it surface when the VSTOL arrived without event and ahead of time at the small private airfield on the Downs—a measly collection of buildings, made to look even more so by the presence of the VSTOL and, when he released it from its lockup, the Cobra. There were only a few people there, most of them under contract to the UN; they nodded politely but avoided conversation.
He didn’t let it surface as he drove slowly from the airfield, south towards Brighton, and stopped at the edge of Devil’s Dyke. Lucifer’s Lesbian. He knew he’d be driving the Cobra past this vaginal gash in the landscape at least once more after today. How fast, and whether alone or pursued, would depend on how the mission ended.
Kuala Lumpur was seven hours ahead of Brighton. He’d left Fallingwater at 10:10 p.m. and landed back at the airfield at4:30p.m. Brighton time, 11:30p.m. in Kuala Lumpur. It was now nearly 5:00 p.m. on October 1: not yet wintry, but grey and chilly. It had rained earlier in the day, and the air was still damp. Back in Kuala Lumpur, October 1 would just be tipping over in to October 2. He sat in the Cobra, gazed down a long the length of Devil’s Dyke, and let what was in him surface.
Uncertainty. The meeting with Rafiq was unsatisfactory and unsettling, and compounded the uncertainty which was dogging him. He wanted to hit back at it, but was uncertain how to. He wanted to find these unnamed enemies, and he wanted them all to have just one throat, so he could give it a Verb.
He thought about what Arden had almost offered him. She was intelligent and beautiful and had an instinctive rapport that made people feel comfortable around her. Within the bounds of her job she even showed something like sensitivity. But he couldn’t have taken her offer, because she was a colleague. And, more importantly, because he couldn’t have known where it would lead. Whether it would entail baggage.
Olivia was different: less obviously attractive, and sex with her was sudden and sodden, impersonal and opportunistic, erupting between periods when she barely noticed him. But it carried no baggage, and it was simple and tidy afterwards. Literally in/out, like his missions used to be. Before this one.
He thought about his family, and what it would be like to walk once more along Ridge Boulevard, past the big brownstone house where he’d grown up. His family was still living there. They believed him dead, but didn’t know he’d become one of The Dead. Even if they knew, they wouldn’t have recognised him.
Kuala Lumpur had been his home for years, and he’d been in Brighton for only a couple of days; but going back to meet RafiqmadehimfeellikeKualaLumpur,notBrighton,wasthe interruption. He’d expected Rafiq would manipulate him the way he usually did, and felt uneasy when Rafiq didn’t. In fact Rafiq seemed almost to be struggling, a thought which troubled Anwar; another part of his comfort zone peeling away.
This won’t be decided by Rafiq in Fallingwater, but by me in Brighton. Whatever they’re sending to kill her, I’m all she’s got. That meant that if Rafiq wasn’t acting, if he really was struggling, Anwar needed help elsewhere. There was only one place.
Gaetano was competent, but had his limits; among other things, he was obsessive—a quality Anwar recognised and shared. Most Consultants were obsessive to varying degrees, although two of the best weren’t: Levin (flamboyant, confident) and Asika (settled, comfortable with himself). But that was academic now. Being dead trumped being obsessive.
I’m only a Consultant, he thought, unwittingly echoing Arden Bierce. I only do missions, I don’t do the Before and After. But Gaetano did, and was very good at it. Among the New Anglicans he was the only possible ally, at least until the summit. Maybe I should take a leap now, tell him everything Rafiq said. Or most of it. But I won’t tell him about this car. And working with Gaetano was still only a partial answer. It didn’t address the uncertainty.
Or the other matter, the whatever-it-was that she hadn’t told him, the possibly small and specific thing which might overturn everything else. Had she told Gaetano? Had Gaetano kept it from him? He tried to park it all for a few minutes, so he could sit in the Cobra and breathe in the smell of its leather and oiled metal surfaces, and the smell of the damp earth and grass outside. Maybe, if he stopped consciously trying to solve it, a solution would come unbidden.
Devil’s Dyke was hardly the Grand Canyon, but still impressive: a mile long, three hundred feet deep, the largest dry valley in Britain. Clumps of trees and bushes dotted its slopes. The remains of an old Victorian funicular railway ran up the steep sides of its northern end, and there were other traces of its history as a tourist attraction: rotting concrete pylons which had once supported an Edwardian cablecar.
A few cars went past as he sat there, some of them slowing to look at the Cobra. Light was fading. He heard the buzzing of insects, the calls of rooks and starlings flying inland to roost before night set in, and the songs of finches and linnets in the trees. He’d read somewhere that birds weren’t singing when daylight dimmed, they were screaming: screaming because they didn’t know the dark would ever end. Chaos seethed under every serene surface: the grassy slopes where small chitinous things ate or were eaten, the silver and white interiors of the New Anglicans, even the impeccable quiet control of Rafiq. He thought of the figure in Munc
h’s The Scream, clamping its hands to its head under a red streaky bacon-rasher sky while all the world screamed its underlying chaos.
Chaos was normally anathema to him; he liked comfort zones, places where everything was just so. But now he had the germ of an idea, and it involved the deliberate creation of chaos. A particular kind of chaos that came from doing something unexpected and which would give him, at last, the initiative.
He considered it from all angles, and it seemed viable. It was almost worthy of Olivia: she did it all the time, leaving uproar and mess behind her, on her way to somewhere else. With her, doing the unexpected was natural. With him it would be acting, but he could still do it. He’d already done it once, on a smaller scale, when he’d changed his usual fighting style against Gaetano’s people in the Cathedral.
And maybe it wouldn’t entirely be acting. Maybe this is what I really am, inside. He’d never had a mission like this. Look at what it’s making me do. He’d always studied the differences between outside and inside in other people, never in himself.
Time. He fired up the Cobra’s motors and turbine, and drove swiftly back through the gloom and traffic thrombosis, to Brighton and the summit, Gaetano and Olivia.
He put the Cobra back behind the bars of its cage in the underground lockup. He strode across Regency Square, across Marine Parade, and past the huge Patel vehicles still parked outside the entrance to the New West Pier. He strode through the security checks—as far as they could tell, he was still unarmed and still had an identity—and into the concourse at Gateway, where he took a maglev to Cathedral. He strode through the Garden, through the reception of the New Grand, and into Gaetano’s office.
He gave Gaetano an exact, word-for-word account of the meeting with Rafiq, omitting only the references to the number and names of Consultants, and the conversation with Arden as he boarded the VSTOL. He spoke quickly and precisely, and with an unexpected energy. In less than half a day he’d travelled 13,000 miles to and from a difficult meeting, but he didn’t look or feel tired. He felt fresher now than he’d felt at Kuala Lumpur, because his idea still looked viable.
“So,” he finished, “Rafiq was a waste of time. He gave me nothing. For the first time since I’ve known him, I think he was struggling.”
Gaetano had listened calmly to Anwar’s account of the meeting, even when it touched on some of Rafiq’s stranger remarks. He listened no less calmly to Anwar’s assessment of Rafiq. After a moment he said quietly, “We’re struggling too, unless we work together. You know I’ve already made that decision.”
“So have I, now. That’s why I came here and told you all this. I think we’re all she’s got.”
“And you still think there’s something she hasn’t told you. You said to Rafiq that it was something specific, but it could overturn everything.”
Good, he thought, you zeroed in on that. “Gaetano—” It was the first time Anwar had used his name. Somehow it conferred a new and different identity. “—I need to be sure of this. The briefing you gave me: you left nothing out?”
“Nothing.”
“Not even some detail she mentioned which didn’t seem worth repeating?”
“I said, Nothing.”
Anwar needed only the briefest of scans to ensure Gaetano wasn’t acting. “Then I know what to do next. We must go to the Conference Centre. I want to see the Signing Room. I want you to bring at least ten of your people, ones you can trust, and I want them armed. I want Proskar and Bayard kept away. And I want the Patel contractors there too, the ones who’ve been working there. And I want her kept away, by force if necessary. And I want...”
3
Anwar and Gaetano walked swiftly through the Conference Centre. One by one, they were joined by the people Gaetano had urgently summoned—his security staff, the Patel contractors, the Patel site manager. Their varying states of dress reflected the urgency of the summons: drop everything, Gaetano had told them, and come here now.
The ragtag procession, increasing in size as it went, made its way through the huge main interior space of the Conference Centre with its clean swooping lines, white and silver walls, and citrus air. The Conference Centre was even bigger inside than the Cathedral, because there was no full upper floor, only a mezzanine: a balcony running round the entire circumference, with doors leading off. Anwar, Gaetano, and the others made their way up the wide staircase to the mezzanine, and through a set of pale wood double doors which opened into the large room set aside for the signing ceremony.
Anwar stood there silently for a few moments, waiting for stragglers to arrive; it was the first time he’d seen the Signing Room, and he studied it carefully.
The room was about fifty feet wide by sixty feet long. One end was effectively a stage-set for the signing ceremony. There were expanses of wood panelling: exact matches of the 1960s-style teak and mahogany panelling from the UNHQ Press Suites in New York. They covered the walls in the direction where they would be facing the cameras, which would all be massed at the other end of the room. The rebuilt area had been calculated exactly from the camera angles and lines of sight. The rest of the room was unchanged. There was an abrupt division between the newly-built replica panelling and the original curving white and silver walls. It was curious, seeing two such different styles in one space. Levin wouldn’t have liked it.
The wood panelling stood three to four feet proud of the original walls, as the room’s natural shape was curved and organic and the UN wanted to give the impression, where the panelling had been fitted, of a conventional rectangular space. The contractors had done it carefully and very well, Anwar concluded, with no detail missed. It was immaculate andvery convincing.
He continued to admire it (and, being who he was, also to record it) as the final latecomers arrived. They were all there now, the people he’d asked Gaetano to summon: ten of Gaetano’s staff, carrying sidearms and rapidfire rifles, which they held rather self-consciously; the nine Patel contractors who’d worked round the clock for the last three weeks in this room to create the painstaking illusion of a Press Suite; and nineteen more Patel contractors who’d worked on board the vehicles parked at Gateway, pre-assembling and disassembling panels and material so it could all be carried unnoticed to the Conference Centre, as Olivia had insisted. The final latecomer was the Patel site manager, a large beefy man who’d been dragged out of another meeting and who burst in dramatically, glaring. The Patel people shot glances at Anwar and Gaetano, and asked each other and Gaetano’s staff what this was about. Nobody knew, and the conversation gradually died to a murmur; then to silence.
“Tear it down,” Anwar said.
“What?” the site manager shouted.
“I want it pulled apart, all of it, and then I want it rebuilt while I’m watching.”
There was uproar. Anwar used it to turn to Gaetano. “Starting now,” he said above the noise around them, “I’ll stay here twenty-four-seven while they work on it. I want at least five of your people here, also twenty-four-seven and armed like now, until they finish work. After they finish work I want three of them here, round the clock, until the summit starts.”
He was hoping to find, buried in the walls, the entity or device they’d sent to kill her. But even if he didn’t, it would put him on the front foot. Give him the initiative. And it would ensure that even if it hadn’t already been buried there, it wouldn’t be buried there before the summit.
“Can we talk this over privately?” Gaetano whispered. “I understand the reasons but I’d like to discuss the scale, and I don’t want us to be overheard if we have differences.”
“No,” Anwar said. “I’m not leaving this room until the work is completed. Even if it takes days.” The uproar was continuing unabated. Anwar took Gaetano to one side and continued. “This isn’t negotiable. Whatever they’re sending for her, it’ll be concealed in these new walls. If it’s an advanced version of me, it could have got past security in the same way I could. If it’s some kind of mechanism, it could be d
isassembled, brought in piece by piece, and reassembled.”
The uproar intensified. The Patel contractors were now arguing furiously with Gaetano’s staff—quite unreasonably, since Gaetano’s staff had also only just been summoned there and were no wiser than anyone else.
The site manager finally pushed through the melee and located Anwar and Gaetano where they’d moved to one side. “It’s taken three weeks,” he shouted at Anwar, “THREE WEEKS, to do this work, and you want it torn down? We’ve got less than twelve days to do it again!”
“You’ve got a lot less than twelve days,” Anwar said. “I want it done in six.”
The site manager turned to Gaetano, whose face he at least recognised, in the hope that he might mediate. “We had to get exact replicas of the panelling from New York. Grain, texture, density, all had to be matched exactly. We can’t do that again, not in twelve days! Certainly not in six days!”
“Then bring in more people,” Anwar said, before Gaetano could reply. “Work them round the clock. Just throw people and money at it.”
“But...”
“And screw the texture and density and grain. As long as it’s teak and mahogany, that’ll do. Get it from ordinary timber merchants in Brighton.” Anwar left him red-faced and apoplectic, and turned back to Gaetano. “I want her orders cancelled. No disguising workers as tourists, or disguising material as luggage and bringing it here in small amounts. There isn’t time. Bring in workers and materials openly. Load everything on the maglevs. If it won’t fit on the maglevs, bring it to the Pier by sea or helicopter.”
“But...”
“Youmustconvinceher.She’snottocomeanywherenear this room until it’s rebuilt, and until I say so.”
“She’ll be...”
“I don’t care if she’ll be furious, tell her I’m quitting if she enters this room before I say so. I’m staying here for as long as it takes them to rebuild it. I’ll watch everything they do. I want food and drink brought in here, and I want you to bring it personally. And I want a bucket. And I want at least five of your people, armed, here all the time until the work is completed.