Evensong

by Love, John

  She again remembered the note. One character no longer in search of an author.

  “They know so much about us. You think this might be Zaitsev? Or some other part of the old UN in New York?”

  Rafiq almost laughed. “No, they don’t have the imagination. Maybe there sources, but not the imagination. No, this is an attack on the whole UN, mine and Zaitsev’s. And it comes from outside.”

  After she’d gone, Rafiq thought,Only part of that is right, and I’m not sure which part. For once, maybe I don’t know everything.

  4

  The interruption was Gaetano, carrying a large folder.

  “Sorry, Archbishop, but you asked to see this as soon as it was ready.”

  She turned to Anwar. “It’s our year-end financial statement. I need to check it now.”

  “Should I leave?”

  “No, this is just the first draft, it won’t take long.”

  Gaetano stood silently by her side as she studied the documents. She took only a couple of minutes to absorb them (something which, like Rafiq, she did without enhancements).

  She glanced up at Gaetano. “See what they’ve tried to do?”

  “Yes. Notes 19 and 36 on the non-recurring and below-the-line items. I told them you’d never agree.”

  “So why did they do it?”

  “To hide the real cost of some of the Room For God projects. They think that if the media find out what a Church is spending on campaigns against Creationism and blasphemy laws…”

  “Why do they keep doing that? Thinking? Why is it that my head of security knows more about proper financial reporting than my Finance Director and his three Deputies? We had this last year, when they…”

  “When they tried to hide the cost of commissioning independent research into the Bible conclaves. I reminded them of that.”

  “Alright, Gaetano, remind them of this: those items are our core business. I will not have them hidden. I want them where they belong, in the main Income and Expenditure accounts. I’m throwing out their draft. And remind them not to try this again.”

  “You could also,” Gaetano suggested drily, “tell me to remind them about their appraisals.”

  “Yes, they’re due in four weeks, aren’t they? If I’m alive by then…Just checking you’re still awake,” she told Anwar, as both he and Gaetano looked at her sharply.

  This is like her Room For God broadcast, Anwar thought. Everyday she fights real battles. More than I’ve done in seven years.

  “As the Archbishop,” she explained to Anwar, after Gaetano left, “I’m a mix of Chairman and Chief Executive. Like,” she looked sideways at him, “the UN Secretary-General and Controller-General rolled together into one.”

  Anwar thought of Yuri Zaitsev, the jowly and heavyset Secretary-General, and Rafiq. The idea of them rolling together into one was not something he could easily imagine.

  “Back to who’s threatening you. Why not fundamentalists? Your Batoth’Daa?”

  This time, she laughed in his face. “Never! They don’t have the imagination, or the intellect. Their religion sucks it out of them. Makes them turn unanswerable questions into unquestionable answers…That’s not original. Someone else said it, I can’t remember who.”

  “It was an Art Gecko slogan.”

  “What? Oh, of course. You and your old books.”

  “It wasn’t a book…” he began, then left it. She’d already forgotten, and was busy pouring herself some wine.

  “No thanks,” he said as she started to pour a glass for him.

  “I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “Oh, your name…Are you a Muslim?” “No. Worse.”

  “Atheist?”

  “Worse still. Agnostic.”

  “A lapsed atheist. Do you also bet each way at Brighton Racecourse?”

  “I like to think it’s rational,” he said, rather pompously.

  She scented blood and went for him. “Having blind faith in reason is not the same as being rational.”

  “You’re a walking dictionary of one-liners.”

  “One-liners are useful for religious leaders. Martin Luther had ninety-five of them. His Ninety-Five Theses were good. But if he’d nailed the Ninety-Five Faeces to the Church door at Wittenburg…”

  Anwar laughed out loud, something he rarely did. But she didn’t notice. She was already busy clearing the table.

  Later they stood at the window looking out at the lights of Brighton’s shoreline and seafront. They were naked. They hadn’t been naked while on the table. Fully clothed, like the first time, she’d said. It’s better when you act like it’s spontaneous.

  Normally Anwar preferred the feel of a woman’s naked body against his. But he was getting to like it her way. Disarranging her clothes was like unwrapping a gift. Seeing what was inside. And, if he still had to satisfy his obsession not to make tidy things untidy, he found he could disarrange her clothes carefully and slowly. She didn’t seem to mind.

  She’d taken him into herself even more greedily than last time. I’m almost wiping her kidneys, he thought incredulously, amid the swelter. They went again and again. Her greed, for food and for sex. It’s unbelievable. Where does she put all that food? And all that sperm?

  They kept stealing looks at each other. Naked, she was exactly as he’d imagined when he’d seen her for the first time: lithe, slender, and toned. He wasn’t quite as she’d imagined. His musculature was impressive and defined, but somehow not entirely right. On Brighton beach, a few people might have looked twice at him.

  It was modelled on the musculature of big cats. All cats had a higher ratio of muscle to body-weight than other mammals, and so did Anwar. He wasn’t a cyborg or robot, but a living thing, with enhancements replicating other living things, in specific areas where they were better than human.

  She didn’t know that, but she knew the Dead were somehow made. His muscles didn’t bulge unnaturally like those of a bodybuilder, but they rippled. Everywhere. She’d felt them moving, under his skin and under the touch of her greedy grabbing hands. They were living tissue. Not mechanical or metallic or electronic.

  But still not entirely right. As if he’d been taken apart and somehow put back together according to slightly different principles. Which was, she realised, probably the case: millions must have been put into him. Tens of millions. She thought, Can he protect me from what they’ll send?

  As in the Boardroom, there was an easy silence between them: fitting for the simple slaking of simple lust. Literally in and out, he thought, with no baggage. Tidy and self- contained. Even better than the best prostitutes. And he could afford the best.

  They looked out at the i-360 Tower on the seafront two miles away, at the bright lights of its main structure and the illuminated observation pod, a large ring-doughnut going up and down the Tower’s shaft.

  “I know an architect,” said Anwar, “a good friend of mine, who would have seriously considered redesigning that doughnut as a hand.”

  She looked at him in puzzlement for a moment, then burst out laughing. But by the time he’d decided to join her (he normally preferred to smile quietly rather than laugh out loud) she’d already stopped and was thinking about something else.

  FIVE: SEPTEMBER 2060

  1

  The following day, promptly a t9:00a.m., Anwar started work. It was an easy commute. Gaetano’s apartment and offices were on the same floor as Olivia’s. She had left three hours earlier on Church business.

  Gaetano’s office, like every interior he had seen—though he hadn’t seen hers, yet—was nacreous white and silver. It was tidy and sparse, as Anwar had expected.

  “You’re early,” Gaetano said.

  “No. It’s exactly nine, as we arranged.”

  “I meant for your stay here. September isn’t over yet and the summit isn’t for two weeks. A young woman named Arden Bierce called us last week and said you wanted to come here early. A very nice young woman.”

  “Yes, people like Arden. She has a wa
y about her.”

  “Well, it made her suspicious.”

  “The Archbishop? Why?”

  “It was different from what she got Rafiq to agree...She really does feel threatened. You may not think she acts or sounds like it, but she does.”

  “Last night she was supposed to give me a briefing about who’s threatening her, but she changed her mind halfway through. Apparently I’m now getting it from you.”

  “She was in a strange mood last night...What did she tell you?”

  “Only that the people threatening her are the people who really run the Church’s original founders: the ones who aren’t named, even in conspiracy theories, and they don’t like her having moved the Church beyond their control. Is there any truth in that? Do you believe it?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then why didn’t she say more? If she wants me to protect her, why didn’t she say exactly who she wants protection from? Do you know who they are? Where they are? Why they’re threatening her?”

  “I can tell you some of that, but sometimes she’s less than honest with me, too, and I don’t know why. Sometimes she tries to conceal how frightened she is by talking about them lightly, or ambiguously. But I believe she’s genuinely frightened. I can tell you the rest of what she was going to say last night, and I’ll add some ideas of my own that might help you, although my own enquiries haven’t uncovered much.”

  “Alright. But if I don’t think it’s enough, I’ll walk away.” No you won’t, he thought, not from this. Not now.

  “She doesn’t know their individual names and locations,” Gaetano continued, as if he hadn’t heard Anwar. “They aren’t even members of the Bilderbergers or the Atlanticists and the rest. They just work through them indirectly, when it suits them. They have larger agendas. Maybe Zaitsev’s one of them. Or the presidents of some UN members. Or you, or me, playing a double or triple game. And they stay...”

  “Stay dormant for years, then come out once or twice in every generation to give history a nudge. I know, she told me. But why are they suddenly a threat? And why at the summit? How does she know?”

  “She’s been dealing with them since she became Archbishop five years ago. She must sense their long-term plans. And they don’t attend our Boards or Assemblies. They communicate only with her, by messages given to Board members. Handwritten messages in sealed envelopes, passed through a network of couriers and proxies which soon disappears if you try to trace it back. I’ve tried.”

  “The UN will have to check all this, I don’t have the resources, and personally I don’t buy it,” Anwar said. “A conspiracy inside bodies which are themselves the subject of conspiracy theories. A shadowy cell that manipulates the manipulators. Handwritten notes. I don’t buy it.” But privately he was just beginning to. It fitted some of the observed data, and it felt right. “I really don’t buy it,” he repeated, as if the repetition would drive the uncertainty out of his voice. It didn’t. “And this is what she was going to tell me last night?”

  “Part of it. But you need to hear the rest.”

  2

  I shouldn’t really have come here this morning, Richard Carne thought. But they didn’t tell me not to, so they must have suspected I might. And I’m glad I did. It’s quite striking. Really singular.

  It had been an easy journey from London, and only a short detour from where he was headed, to reach Brighton. And an easy journey of ninety seconds from Gateway to Cathedral, in a sleek white-and-silver maglev, to see the Conference Centre at the end of the New West Pier.

  Those who employed him were unknown to him. He only dealt with them indirectly, through several layers of proxies and cutouts, but even the little he’d seen of what they could do was deeply impressive. They’d be doing more things between now and the summit, but the summit—here, in two weeks— was where it would really kick off. And what would happen at this Conference Centre would be only a small part of it.

  What they could do, he reflected, was quite diverting and singular. He was a relatively minor functionary, but he’d seen and heard enough. There was what they’d done to Asika. And what they’d done to Levin, which was worse. And Levin’s face, when he’d realised he couldn’t defend himself. Now, he thought, let’s have a look at that extraordinary Cathedral, and then a longer look at the equally extraordinary Conference Centre. That was where it would all really begin. The thing which would kill her was quite singular, quite diverting. It might already be here, in this beautiful silver and white building where the summit would begin on October 15.

  If not, it would be on its way.

  3

  “Half a percent of the world’s population,” Gaetano said, “owns 40 percent of the world’s wealth. Four million people. The ones threatening her are a few random and apparently unconnected individuals, out of four million.”

  “Individuals running the founders’ organisations?” “Yes, but indirectly, not as members. They operate through networks of proxies and subsidiaries, the way they operate their share holdings and finances. And they don’t have a secret underground HQ in Antarctica, or a hollowed-out mountain in the Himalayas. They have something much better: their corporations. When they want a task done, or an object made, they divide it down to its smallest components and farm it out to subsidiaries and sub-subsidiaries.” When Anwar stayed silent, Gaetano added, “Maybe Rafiq’s one of them.”

  “No. He’s rich, but not that rich. He has millions, but the people you’re talking about have billions. Or trillions.” But Anwar was thinking, Currency isn’t only money, it’s also power and knowledge, and there Rafiq must be in their league. This was beginning to worry him. His mind was racing, but he If this is real, it’s the worst combination of threats: a cell, like Black Dawn, but with trillions. I must talk to Arden.

  Gaetano waited politely for Anwar to digest this—he hadn’t been convinced by Anwar’s convincing poker face—before he continued. “I think they’re putting together something intricate and far-reaching, and her death is only a part of it. But... a handful of people, unconnected, not even members of the founders’ organisations. Out of four million. I don’t think you can easily locate or identify them.”

  “UN Intelligence can.”

  “Probably not in time.”

  “They’ve done nothing to invade our space yet.”

  “They will...And if you can’t locate them pre-emptively, all that’s left is the inferior option: just wait for them to move at the summit, and hope you can stop them.” When Anwar didn’t reply, Gaetano got up. “Think about it, while I go and make us some coffee. Vietnamese, yes?”

  “How did you...Oh, of course. Her people asked Rafiq’s people.” He watched Gaetano set the two glasses down. There was a layer of condensed milk at the bottom of each glass, on top of which the dark coffee floated without mixing. It looked like an upside-down Guinness.

  “So how did you come to work for her?”

  “Isn’t it in Rafiq’s briefing?”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “I’m a mercenary. It was interesting—far more than guarding politicians or business people or criminals—and it paid well.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m still a mercenary. It’s still more interesting than guarding politicians or business people or criminals, and it still pays well. I’m a permanent employee with a job description and a contract. But if I wasn’t, I’d still go out and die for her.” The last sentence was spoken without any change of voice.

  “She told me you’ll be providing a two-day briefing on the summit. Do you want to take me through it?”

  Yes, Gaetano did want. He would give Anwar a first look at the Conference Centre, where the summit would take place. Then he would detail the security arrangements for the summit, in the following order:

  One, descriptions of each delegate and his/her entourage, especially security.

  Two, liaison protocols with delegates’ security staff.

  Three,the currently-agreed version of the
summit Agenda, which would be subject to last-minute changes.

  Four,the arrangements on the first day of the summit:the delegates’ arrival, and the style and content of the opening ceremony. “Despite what she believes,” Gaetano said, “the threat could come on the first day, as well as the last. It’ll be just as public, and just as high-profile. She’ll be there as host, and she’ll make the welcoming speech, all about the love that dare not speak its name because its mouth is full.” Anwar looked up sharply. They locked eyes for a moment, then Anwar smiled faintly. Each of them thought, Maybe he hasn’t got his head as far up his ass as I’d feared.

  Five, the arrangements for each day: seating plans, meals, coffee breaks, break-out sessions, evening social events.

  Six, the disposition of security people, translators, support staff, catering staff.

  Seven, provisions for attack from sea and air.

  “… And that’s what I’ll take you through this morning.”

  “Do I need to know it in such detail?” Anwar asked. “I’m >here for her security only.”

  “She’s the host. As well as speaking at the opening and closing ceremonies, she’s expected to make appearances from time to time at the summit sessions. And when she does, you should know what’s all around her.”

  “Yes, that’s reasonable.” But you still haven’t mentioned the important part.

  “And,” Gaetano added, “you need to know it in detail because—this is the important part—she wants you to review all the arrangements and make any recommendations you see fit.”

  “And what do you think of that?”

  “Not much, initially. But if it protects her better...”

  “Good. Then let’s not talk in code. If I see something wrong with any of your arrangements, I’ll say so. If I think they’re good, or very good, or mediocre, or sloppy, I’ll say so. And can you put it all on an implant bead?”