Evensong

by Love, John

  “I already have. You can download it and study it over-night. And tomorrow, I’ll take you through the Archbishop’s engagements from now to the end of the summit.”

  “She has one this afternoon which she may not have mentioned.”

  “Going into town with you to collect a book?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll have some people follow you, but only at a discreet distance. You understand that you’ll be her primary protection?”

  “Yes.”

  “And please, get her back here before four. She has several meetings.”

  “OK. And the briefing tomorrow?”

  “We’ll cover the detailed security arrangements for the Archbishop—how they operate now and how they’ll be ramped up for the summit. I’ll give you backgrounds and credentials for all my people. And I’ll put it all on an implant bead, so you can…”

  “Study it overnight. Thank you.”

  A short silence grew between them. Anwar noticed—for the first time, despite his enhancements and training—the signs of strain on Gaetano’s face: sleeplessness around the eyes, tenseness in the jaw. Signs of the inevitable and mounting pressure of the approaching summit and the threats to Olivia.

  Gaetano, as if he sensed what Anwar was thinking, said, “You know, this is only about a tenth of what the summit involves. She has departments dealing with the PR and political aspects. And the legal. And the financial. Especially the financial. There are daily accounts for every item of expenditure connected to the summit. This meeting will be costed down to the last minute, and she’ll see the costing tonight. She doesn’t give any obvious appearance of micromanagement, in facts he professes a huge dislike of it. But she misses nothing.”

  Like Rafiq, Anwar thought. When Arden and I deal with him, it’s like we’re the only thing he has in front of him. But there’s legal, and financial, and political, and PR, and intelligence, and the conventional military, and the Agencies Rafiq and Olivia del Sarto. Different characters, but similar styles of working.

  Anwar said none of this out loud, so Gaetano continued. “And what about you? I thought you people didn’t like body-guard work, because...”

  “That’s how I felt at first.” He remembered what he’d thought, back at his home in northern Malaysia, after watching her Room For God lecture. Frozen hope. My life has been arid, hers is real. “But I feel differently now.”

  4

  For two hours Gaetano took him through the security arrangements for the summit. The initial wary courtesy between them had developed into something slightly less guarded. Gaetano went through the briefing in the order he’d outlined and, as promised, gave him the implant bead. Anwar acknowledged politely and promised his detailed comments the following morning. Already he knew there would not be many; Gaetano’s arrangements were characteristically thorough.

  They walked out of the New Grand and across the Garden. It was a bright pleasant day for late September, like yesterday when he’d arrived. The domes and spires and latticeworks of the Cathedral complex were lustrous in the sunlight. The Garden showed blues and reds from hydrangeas, gradations of yellow and gold from witch hazel and broom. The trees and shrubs were swaying in the wind from the ocean.

  Ahead was the Conference Centre. Anwar noticed some people wheeling luggage trunks.

  “Contractors, from Patel. They’re doing building work on the room where the signing will take place,” Gaetano explained.“The UN wanted a replica of the Press Suite in New York. Nineteen-sixties décor and furniture.”

  “They don’t look much like contractors.”

  “She insisted they shouldn’t. They have to use containers that resemble luggage and are small enough to go in the luggage section of a maglev. She wouldn’t allow anything to be dropped by VSTOL or by sea to the end of the Pier. It all has to go through Gateway Station to Cathedral Station, then up and along here, no matter how many journeys it takes. It means their equipment is disassembled in the vehicles parked on Marine Parade, and reassembled on site in the Conference Centre. It’s taken weeks. And when they travel up here and back, they must wear normal civilian clothes, and change on site. And the site must be closed and soundproofed.”

  “She’s very particular about appearances,” Anwar said.

  “She is, but it’s also about security. Shall we go in?”

  I could get here, Anwar thought, through all the detectors. In a luggage trunk. I could dislocate my joints to bend into it. I’d go to near-death. A timed hibernation. No body-heat detectors would find me: surface temperature would be the same as my immediate surroundings. No heartbeat or breath detectors would find me: pulse and breathing would be almost nonexistent, and random. No scanners or imagers or DNA detectors would find me: my body would echo the texture and shape of its immediate surroundings.

  Enough of that for now. I’ll add it to my overnight comments.

  “Shall we go in?” Gaetano repeated.

  The Main Hall, on the ground floor of the Conference Centre, was an interior space as large as that of the Cathedral. Anwar was transfixed. He’d expected a vast white and silver interior, with clean swooping lines, and that was exactly what it was. But the sheer scale was deeply impressive. And its style couldn’t have been more different from the UN General Assembly Hall in New York. As with the Cathedral, and the rest of the New West Pier complex,the inside contradicted the outside.

  The Main Hall was where the scheduled sessions of the summit would be held. There were adjoining smaller rooms for spin-off sessions, coffee shops and bars, translators’ booths. Actually, the Conference Centre was bigger inside thantheCathedral,becausetherewasnofullupperfloor,only a mezzanine: a balcony running round the entire circumference, with doors leading off. These opened into further anterooms for breakout sessions, and included the large room being refurbished for the signing ceremony. The contractors could be neither seen nor heard.

  Anwar stood for a moment, memorising the lines of sight and tying them in with Gaetano’s briefing.

  “Let’s go back to the New Grand. She’ll be waiting. And please make sure she gets back by four. She cancelled several meetings to do this.”

  “She cancelled meetings?” Anwar asked in surprise. “Just to go into Brighton with me and collect a book?”

  “I hope you don’t misinterpret what’s passed between you.”

  “No. I know about her appetites. Everybody does. And,” he added, “don’t misinterpret my accepting this mission. It’s because of what she stands for, not her personally.”

  5

  Olivia was waiting in the reception of the New Grand.

  Gaetano had suggested she didn’t wear her normal clothes. Not really a disguise, he’d said, just dress differently so your identity isn’t so obvious. She did, and it totally altered her.

  She wore flat loafers instead of her customary heels, so she appeared even smaller than usual. She had on very little makeup. She wore a sweater and jeans—though the jeans were black and expensively cut—and her famously-coiffed blonde hair, which normally she wore so it softened the slight sharpness of her features, was pulled back off her face and tied in a ponytail.

  Anwar thought she looked too natural. He preferred her in her structured and tailored and madeup mode: her Formal Normal look, as he’d privately taken to describing it. Also, she made him feel overdressed. He was wearing another of his expensive linen-blend suits, with a contrasting shirt of dark woven silk.

  They took the maglev from Cathedral to Gateway—nobody appeared to give them a second glance—and walked out of the Pier onto Marine Parade, from where they descended the steps to the seafront.

  “Do you know,” she asked suddenly as they walked along the shore, “how many Churches and religious centres there are within walking distance of where we are now?”

  “Unaccountably, Rafiq’s briefing didn’t include that.”

  “Loads of them,” she went on, as though she hadn’t heard him. “There’s St. Paul’s, West Street—Old Angli
can. St.Mary’s, Preston Park—Catholic. The Middle Street Synagogue. The Buddhist Centre in North Laine. The Quakers’ hall in Meeting House Lane. The Al Quds mosque in Seven Dials.” She turned and looked up at him, straight-faced. “I like to know where they all are. If they go fundamentalist, I can tell them I know where they live.”

  “If you add all of them together and multiply them by ten, they still wouldn’t be a tenth of what your Church done—” he looked back at the New West Pier “—over there.”

  “Yes,” she said simply, and unhelpfully. She knew where he was going, but she wasn’t going to help him get there.

  “The money for this…”

  “I told you. Originally the founders. But now the Church has moved beyond needing their money. It has plenty of its own. And they don’t like it.”

  They walked along the seafront. The mast-rigging of the small boats drawn up on the beach thrummed in the wind. They walked past the arches Anwar had walked past yesterday, and past some arcades with games. There was one where things popped up and you had to knock them down with a rubber mallet, only for others to pop up, also to be knocked down. She watched it for a while.

  “Remind you of fundamentalists?”

  “Yes,” she hissed, “and they’re filth! Scum! I hate their beliefs more than I love mine.”

  “I only meant,” he said mildly, “how they pop up somewhere else if you...”

  “Theocrats, creationists, racists, homophobes, all of them! The death of dialogue. ‘If you don’t agree with me, you’re better off dead.’ Knock them down in one place, they pop up somewhere else.”

  “I don’t like their beliefs either, though it may not matter to you. But they’re not all filth. Or scum.” The words had a strange echo for him, of the greeting he would sometimes exchange with Levin. “Some of them just want certainty.”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Don’t hate them so much. It makes you ugly.”

  “If I didn’t hate them so much, I wouldn’t be who I am! And what business is it of yours if something makes me ugly?”

  “You’re right, it isn’t. But if you hated them less and understood them more, maybe even more people would support you. Including some of them.”

  She looked up at him sharply. “I didn’t expect that. I thought you were just a Consultant.”

  They climbed a stairway up the embankment to road level, just before the old Palace Pier. They walked across Marine Parade and into East Street, which led upwards, away from these a front. It was busy and crowded, a mix of shops and restaurants, mostly upmarket. There was the usual doppler effect of approaching and receding conversations, and the usual mix of smells: things being cooked, substances being smoked. Still nobody appeared to give them a second glance.

  He spotted Gaetano’s people. He liked how they worked: discreetly, keeping a distance, constantly changing their patterns. She didn’t seem to see them, but he knew she’d assume they were there somewhere.

  Ahead they could now see the original Royal Pavilion in Pavilion Gardens with the Indian Gate. The New Anglicans, careful as always, had made sure the original Royal Pavilion and the New West Pier were never in direct sight of each other.

  Leading off East Street on the left was the Lanes district, with small esoteric shops selling bespoke interiors, designer clothes, antiques and curios and books. It was an area of narrow alleyways, sometimes called twittens and catcreeps. The walls were patchworks of old brick, flint, cobblestone, and stucco. The Lanes had been the original fishing village of Brighthelmstone.

  Anwar took them to Ramsden’s Bookshop, in Meeting House Lane. The proprietor nodded, apparently casually, but somehow giving the impression that he remembered Anwar from his last visit, two years ago. It was a small musty shop, but carried a good stock of Shakespeares, including the one Anwar had reserved online for collection: a replica of the 1609 Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. So much, these days, was a replica, but this was a very good one.It wasn’t cheap. Even replicas could be valuable in their own right.

  They continued along Meeting House Lane.

  “There,” she said. “Frobisher’s Tea Rooms. Come on, I’m buying.”

  Where Ramsden’s had been genuinely old and musty, Frobisher’s was a modern copy of age and mustiness. None of the darkwood wall panelling or furniture had ever been part of, or even near, a real tree.

  It was more utilitarian than its outside appearance suggested, or than Anwar guessed she was used to. It was crowded, and she joined the queue at the counter.

  “Self-service for the self-serving,” she muttered. She got a pot of English breakfast tea for both of them, and a selection of cakes for herself.

  “Fifty-five euros forty.” The cashier pronounced it with a rising note of accomplishment on forty, as if it was the culmination of a trick he’d done. She’d forgotten she was buying, and took the tray to a table. Anwar paid and joined her.

  “So you got your book.”

  “Yes, it’s a nice edition.”

  “A replica?”

  “Partly. It reproduces the typesetting and font of the original, but puts each sonnet on a separate page.”

  “May I look?”

  “Of course.” He slid the book across the table to her.

  “Sonnet 116 is my favourite. Especially the first four lines.” He watched her turn to it, and said the words to himself as he watched her reading them.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments. Love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove.

  “Each phrase,” she said, “has at least three or four possible meanings. Is that what he intended?”

  “I think so.”

  “Didn’t he write the sonnets to a mysterious Dark Lady?”

  “Some of them, yes. But some might also have been written to a man.”

  “Oh.”

  Just then her wristcom buzzed. She flipped it open, listened briefly.

  “It’s Gaetano. He says they’ve detained a possible suspect on the Pier.”

  6

  In the Cathedral complex, a thief had been tempted by an obviously wealthy-looking tourist. But this wasn’t just any tourist.

  “The thief,” Gaetano said, “is a twelve-year-old boy,known to police. Dysfunctional parents. The social services put him in Care.”

  Care, Anwar thought. A dismal word, smug and liberal. The boy was doomed.

  “He does petty crime,” Gaetano continued. “Steals purses, wallets,briefcases, anything that looks valuable. Whizzes past on powered rollerblades, snatches and escapes. This man had just taken out his wallet, andt he kid flew past and took it.The man ran—ran—after him and caught him. Kept kicking him, even after he’d knocked him down. Broke his arm and collar-bone and three ribs.”

  “Where did this happen?” Anwar asked.

  “Just outside, in the Garden. We detained him—” (a simple phrase, Anwar thought, considering what he’d done) “—until you could speak to him. The boy’s in the Royal Sussex County Hospital.”

  Anwar, Gaetano, and Olivia were in the Boardroom. She was eating a cake that she’d managed to scoop up in their hasty departure from Frobisher’s. In between mouthfuls, she asked Gaetano, “Were you already watching this man when it happened?”

  “Yes. He’d been looking around the Conference Centre.”

  “Is that all? You don’t think they’ve already got architects’ plans and computer models?”

  “Probably. But this man had the look of a professional. We had a feeling about him.” Gaetano turned to Anwar. “I wish we’d got there before he caught the boy.”

  Anwar nodded. “How long can we detain him?” He saw Olivia glance at him, possibly because he’d said We, not You.

  “If we invoke the summit, which I’ve done, the local police will let us hold him for twenty-four hours. He’s in there.” Gaetano pointed to the
closed door of one of the Boardroom’s adjoining rooms.

  “Is he restrained?”

  “Of course. Except for his conversation.”

  “What do we know about him?”

  “We have his papers, and we checked his DNA, fingerprints, and retinas. His name is Richard Carne.”

  I used to have a name that sounded like that.

  “He’s ex-SAS. No currently known employer. Various jobs in the past, some legal and some not. Unpleasant habits. There’s this thing he does with bread.” Gaetano paused, and added, “And he’s a member of something called the Johnsonian Society. He was carrying the text of a talk he gave in London a couple of days ago.”

  Anwar stood up. “Thank you,” he said to Gaetano.“I think I’ll go and see him.”

  “And something else: we found two poison implants in his teeth. We’ve removed them. But…”

  “Yes,” Anwar said, “there’ll be others. And there isn’t time to locate them all. I must speak to him now.”

  “He’ll trip them and kill himself, if the interrogation goes wrong...Look, maybe I should do this, I’ve done it before.”

  “No, I’ll do it...Gaetano, does the Pier have a medical centre?”

  “No. It has a fully-equipped hospital.”

  “Could you please ask one of your people to go there and bring me up a medical trolley with a tray of surgical instruments?”

  There was an ease about Richard Carne. An air of insouciance.

  The restraints which held him in his chair were not mono-filament, just extruded kevlar, but they’d been expertly tied. He couldn’t move. But he still managed to give the impression of lounging.

  He had straw-coloured hair, brushed flamboyantly back. Slightly pouty lips. Pale blue eyes. A large man, with an obvious Special Forces kind of build. His clothes were expensive: a dark bluejacket, sand-coloured slacks and cream shirt, and jaunty two-tone shoes in blue and cream. Even matching blue and cream socks.