by Love, John
“Please,” he said, “I don’t have time.”
He had done most of this without taking his eyes off her. Many of her staff had gasped as he did it, but she remained silent.
She studied him, his thin face and hook nose and dark eyes. For he shall deliver thee from the snare of the hunter. He shall defend thee under his wings.
He looked back at her. Into your trousers like a rat up a drainpipe, his eidetic memory helpfully reminded him.
“Leave us,” she said to her staff, hoarsely. “Give us this room.”
They left, with an alacrity which suggested this was not an unusual occurrence. After a moment’s pause, Gaetano followed them out.
It happened on the Boardoom table, noisily and untidily. There was no foreplay, just an abrupt transition from the vertical to the horizontal. He fumbled with her long voluminous skirt, she with his jacket and trousers, and each of them with each other’s underwear. They scattered the table settings. Normally he disliked making tidy things untidy, whether table settings or female clothing, but not now.
The ginger cat retreated to a corner of the room, and became absorbed in licking its private parts.
Because it was simple physical lust and nothing more, it came and went easily. There was little to be said afterwards. They sat on opposite sides of the long Boardroom table. It was a few minutes before either of them spoke.
“We’ll dine tonight,” she said, smoothing down her skirt, “and I’ll brief you. Gaetano will take you to your suite, and he’ll come for you at nine.”
“And you?”
She smiled. Her lips were dark red, like her dress. “I have an organisation to run.”
He turned to go.
“Wait,” she added. “I’ll walk back with you.”
Outside the door, Gaetano was waiting.
“Quarterstaff,” Anwar murmured. “Good choice.”
Gaetano smiled but did not answer.
They walked back along the silver and white corridor, down the wide staircase, and into the silver and white Cathedral.
Anwar felt something wrong in the air. Too much stillness. All the Cathedral doors were closed.
It was almost deserted. Just eight people, two together and the others singly. The two stood facing them, in the large open space before the altar. The other six were sitting in pews, >apparently at random. Anwar was already calculating distances, probable routes of approach. Vectors. Lines of sight. Estimating, from their posture and the drape of their clothes, what weapons they carried.
The two facing them approached Gaetano. Strangely, they hadn’t even glanced at Anwar or Olivia, and didn’t now. One of them was built like Levin. The other was smaller, stocky and dark-haired. With unusual hands.
The larger man went to speak to Gaetano. He made eye contact, smiled, and opened his mouth to begin a sound like “Erm...” on a rising note, as if about to air some routine matter. Then he delivered a huge kick to the testicles. Gaetano was lifted bodily, and landed doubled up and vomiting. The second man made for Olivia with a knife which came, as Anwar expected, from a forearm sheath. A specialist’s knife, with a blade combining points and tines and serrations. Anwar decided to take the blow himself.
The knife was aimed at his heart, and he turned at the last moment to take it in his side. But his timing was fractionally off, making the knife penetrate deeper than he’d expected. He felt a surge of anger—how many times must I mistime?—but he killed it. Geared it down to something colder, something he could use.
Olivia had seen Anwar’s mistiming and was shouting obscenities, mostly at Anwar. Quite unreasonably, he felt. But she’s genuinely afraid. And she’s not supposed to be afraid of anything.
He’d taken the knife-blow without apparently noticing. The blood it should have drawn was already clotting. He’d willed it to. The knifeman was starting another attack, but Anwar didn’t care. He moved liquidly, almost accidentally. Then a shuto strike to the collarbone, this time intentional. He felt the molecules in his hand aligning to hardness, felt the collarbone give. He pulled back before his hand could actually penetrate and shear it.
While the knifeman dropped unconscious, he was turning to the second man, the one built like Levin, and struck him. This time only a light fingertip to a pressure point on the temple, to put him out for a few seconds. Anwar very much wanted him for later.
“Gaetano!” Olivia screamed. But he wasn’t listening. He was still doubled up and vomiting. The kick had hit him like an express train. “Gaetano!”
“Shut up,” Anwar told her, softly and precisely.
The six men sitting in the pews had looked convincingly shocked while all this was happening, but that was then. Now they were suddenly encircling Anwar and Olivia.
“Don’t,” he told them.
“Why, what will you do, surround us?”
“Yes.” The word hung in the air behind him. He was already moving.
He really did surround them. He orbited the tight circle they’d made around her, attacking it from outside, silently and with frightening speed and from every angle and with every striking surface, so they couldn’t face her but had to face outwards. And it still wasn’t enough for them.
He fought them the way he should have fought in the last Tournament. Taking the initiative. They tried their best moves on him but he flicked them away, unnoticing. To him, their moves were slowed to near-torpor, and their martial arts yells to a hoglike bass. As usual, he fought in silence. That, and his speed, terrified them. They were good, better than his last six Tournament opponents, but still Meatslabs. He flickered in and out of them in a glissade, bestowing Compliments and Gratuities—all watered-down versions, enough to immobilise but not to injure or kill.
He was shockingly fast, and frighteningly silent. He thought, This is everything I am, it’s what makes me extraordinary. But even now, when I’m doing it better than I did in the Tournament, it doesn’t mean much. My opponents are always outmatched, and half of the Consultants will always outmatch me. When will Everything I Am mean something?
It was never going to be a bloodbath. His abilities were too considerable, and too precise, for that. But it was almost an anticlimax. His inbuilt timer told him he’d finished them in twenty-two seconds.
He could have just stayed by her side and defeated them. Waited for them to attack, and countered. Instead, for once, he’d done it differently. Why? Because of her? He had enough time, now, to ask himself this and reflect on the answer. No. Because they weren’t the real thing. They weren’t the threat which had made her persuade Rafiq to give her a Consultant. They weren’t good enough.
He turned back to the Levin lookalike, who’d floored Gaetano and was now getting to his feet, smiling mockingly. Anwar indulged himself a little, and gave him a Verb. It was an openhand strike to the throat, fingers and thumb unusually splayed, the molecules hardening them into five striking surfaces. One of his favourite moves. A full-strength version would decapitate, but Anwar used only a powered-down version (an Adverb?) which didn’t penetrate flesh. He did it because the man looked like the real Levin, even down to the smile (I’m Miles ahead of you, Anwar) and it was the closest Anwar would get to wiping the smile off Levin’s face. The man fell, unconscious before he could cry out.
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 se
nt 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. Butshe 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!”
FOUR: SEPTEMBER 2060
1
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 be
fore, 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.
