by Love, John
“Because it might explain what I say next. I like your company too. I’d like us to meet, socially. Have dinner or go to the theatre or something. It’s time I had a companion.”
“Are you saying you’d like an attachment?”
“Well...yes. But to start, just your company.”
“I didn’t see that coming.”
“I hadn’t planned to ask you. I mean, I had, but I’d been putting it off. And now Marek’s definitely dead, maybe I can move on.”
She didn’t reply.
“So, can we just start seeing each other?”
She paused. “I’d like to park it for a while.”
“Why?”
“Well, first there’s Anwar.”
“Anwar won’t...”
“Won’t survive the summit?”
“I was going to say won’t even notice, because of Olivia, but yes, I’m afraid he won’t survive. And neither will Olivia. They’ve got maybe nine days together.”
“If they’re together,” she said.
“Yes, it seems he never stops calling you about that. First she’d like a relationship, then not. Then he’d like one, then not. They’ve both got their heads up their asses.” He found himself fighting a temptation to add Up their own, not each other’s. He had little time for either of them. He’d never taken to Olivia, for some reason. And Anwar’s obsessions, private dark imaginings, and anal-retentive interior world were starting to get tiresome. They reminded Rafiq of what he’d once become, ten years ago. Abbas. It should be Abyss.
She was silent. Thinking that their relationship, if it happened and if that was the right word for it, might be as ambiguous as Anwar and Olivia’s.
Rafiq might almost have heard her thoughts. “It doesn’t have to be a full-blown attachment, if that makes you uneasy. And it doesn’t have to be physical, though I’d like it if it was. It’s been a long time...Now I know for certain Marek’s dead, it’s time to move on. My family died ten years ago. I’d like to find someone.”
“I understand.”
“You said first there’s Anwar. Was there anything else?”
With Rafiq, she knew, you had to examine your words minutely, because he’d be examining them minutely too. And your inflections and body language. In that way he was like a Consultant, but he did it naturally. Like her empathy, it was a gift he’d always had.
“Was there anything else?” he repeated.
“I’m taller than you,” she said, straightfaced. “And you smoke.”
“Most people are taller than me. My wife was. And I didn’t smoke while she was alive.”
She was silent again.
“So what do you think?”
“It can’t start until after the summit. Anwar needs my full attention. Also...”
“Yes?”
“Are you holding something back about Anwar’s mission?”
“I always hold things back. But about his mission, no.” He looked directly into her eyes when he said it; but he was good at doing that. The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you can fake anything. Still, she believed him, on balance. Her empathy against his labyrinthine cunning, and on balance she believed him.
“There’s something about his mission that’s worrying me,” she said. “I can’t quite find it yet.”
“Like Anwar and his Detail. Remember him going on about it when he came here?”
“He goes on about it to me, too. Almost as much as he goes on about her. I don’t think that my Detail is the same as his, but it’s there somewhere. I will find it.”
For once, he was silent.
“And,” she added, “there’s something else.”
“Another Detail?”
“Maybe. When I said park it, I meant only that. I didn’t mean abandon it or forget it.” She looked directly into his eyes. “I’ll help Anwar through this, if I can. But when it’s over, you and I have unfinished business. Laurens.”
3
The opening ceremony began at exactly 10:00 a.m. It was large-scale and well attended. In addition to the delegates there were august non-participants and well-wishers like the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, the Mayor of Brighton, and the Old Anglicans’ Archbishops of Canterbury and Rochester. And their entourages, including a security complement for each. It was a huge arrangement of inter-locking and interfacing mechanisms that Gaetano somehow contrived to keep moving. Anwar hadn’t seen him or spoken to him much during the last few days.
There was also a large media presence, not only in the Conference Centre but also at Gateway, to cover the VIPs as they arrived. Paths were cleared for them, but the Pier was not closed to the public. Tourists and sightseers still milled around as usual, as did the people who worked in the Pier’s business district. One maglev was set aside for the summit participants, and paths were cordoned off where they disembarked for the delegates to walk through the Garden, or the squares and piazzas of the business district, on their way to the Conference Centre.
All the major UN members were present. Countries not directly involved in water rights disputes sent ministers or senior civil servants. Those directly involved—sometimes to the extent of being at war with each other—sent heads of state.
The delegates and other participants were seated in the main auditorium, facing the stage on which the top table was set. The people who would usually occupy the top table during the proceedings were Zaitsev and five others. Zaitsev would be chairing the summit. The others were the members of the committee responsible for drafting the Agenda—a mixture of retired diplomats, senior civil servants and UN officials. For the opening ceremony they were joined by Olivia.
She again gave a short, non-political opening address. “Welcome. We’re proud to be your hosts, and we hope you’ll find the arrangements work well and assist your deliberations. We wish you every success. It would be nice to look back on this summit and think that we helped to make it productive.”
Zaitsev gave a rather more fulsome opening address. Anwar recognized many of the phrases from Rafiq’s briefing; Zaitsev must have picked them up in conversation with Rafiq. He used them without attribution, of course.
“Thirty years ago, this summit would have been about fossil fuels—oil, gas, maybe coal and shale. Thirty years ago, fossil fuels were limited. They still are. But now we have alternative energy sources, and we’ve made them commercially viable: wind, sun, tides, high-atmosphere turbulence, nuclear fusion, hydrogen cells, even continental drift. So we’ve come to Brighton, to this magnificent venue, not to talk about energy sources, but about something much more basic. Something ever-present, but ever-scarce where it’s most needed: water.”
Zaitsev’s voice was more suited to oratory than conversation. In conversation it sounded harsh and rasping. In oratory it was deep and modulated, slightly tremulous with manly but restrained emotion at the important bits. A better actor than Rafiq.
“Some of the UN member states represented here have been at war over water rights. Some still are. It’s inconceivable to me that we could be on the way to making energy shortages a thing of the past, while water shortages are still a thing of the present. It’s inconceivable to me that people are dying over a substance which is more abundant in the world than fossil fuels ever were. With your help and goodwill, we’ll leave here nearer to a solution than when we arrived.”
Anwar found himself joining in the applause, and grudgingly admitted that Zaitsev was good. Cleverer than he looked. But the ultimate success of this summit would be decided not by what was said here, but by what was done later by Rafiq.
Rafiq couldn’t have matched Zaitsev’s oratory, but he would never need to. As clever as Zaitsev might be, Rafiq was cleverer still, distancing himself by professing to deal only with executive matters, not policy. He used Zaitsev, or whoever else was Secretary-General at the time, as a human shield. The media would often try to draw him out on matters of policy, but without success. Political matters, he would intone virtuously, and monotonous
ly, are not the province of the unelected executive arm.
I first got that briefing, Anwar thought, about two weeks ago. It seems longer than that. He was annoyed at his readiness to join in the applause. All Zaitsev had done was to retail, in a slightly better voice, content he’d picked up from Rafiq.
Anwar would have liked to do an immersion hologram, like the ones he did in his teens, with them all naked. Especially Zaitsev. Somewhere in the deep interior darkness of Zaitsev’s capacious trousers, a pair of large buttocks lurked like a couple of conjoined cave bears. Oh for an immersion hologram, he thought, to bring them walloping and wobbling into the daylight.
4
She hadn’t seen it coming, but when it was out in the open she knew it was right. Rafiq was right for her, and she for him. They had a new life waiting.
Rafiq had gone off to meetings, leaving Arden in the parkland in front of Fallingwater. What they had spoken of was pivotal. Whatever would take place between them was on hold until after the summit, but then it would resume. She’d make sure of it. And then the detail would kick in.
Her life would change. She’d have to leave the UN, and hand over to someone else; it would be unprofessional to continue working with Rafiq if they became more than colleagues. As she knew they would.
A move to another part of UNEX, or even the wider UN, wouldn’t work. She’d have to find a new career, which wouldn’t be difficult with her CV, but at this point she couldn’t imagine herself anywhere else. And she couldn’t imagine leaving before her own part in this was finished. She wouldn’t need to leave immediately after the summit concluded. However it turned out, there would be time to finish her work before the media got wind that she and Rafiq were an item.
Which meant she had a bit longer than Anwar to find what worried her about his mission. No, that’s stupid. So stupid she almost laughed out loud. She had to find it in nine days or less, because Anwar had to be told what it was before they made their move.
They. Them. She couldn’t bring herself to call them The Cell; it sounded theatrical, though it was probably accurate. Anwar was right about that: they could only operate on such a scale, over such a long time, if they operated as a cell. Like Black Dawn, but with apparently limitless resources. And an inbuilt sense of timing. They knew exactly when to emerge and when to go back.
Except this time. Maybe Anwar’s rather gauche sojourn in the Signing Room had made them change their timing. Otherwise they wouldn’t have revealed what happened to Marek. She felt they’d been planning to play that card during the summit, as a final massive misdirection before they moved for Olivia, and something had made them play it early.
They stayed enigmatic, wrapped in the stuff of conspiracy theories. It magnified their threat. They’d even invented the concept of Conspiracy Theory, made it an urban myth—like Rafiq did, on a smaller scale, with his Tournament rumours. Made it the province of cranks. Marginalised it. And amplified it at the same time.
They only emerged once or twice in a lifetime, to give history a nudge. Other than that, they existed, but didn’t do. They weren’t part of anybody’s landscape, or anybody’s living memory. They were part of the long slow circling of history. Individuals lived and died and were replaced, but goals remained. Individuals were traceable and vulnerable; goals, if part of a long game, weren’t.
Like Anwar, they came out of their comfort zone, struck, and went back. But they followed different ends and used different means. In a world pervaded by electronic comms, they simply used handwriting and bits of paper, and made themselves untraceable. Laurens does the same, of course, she thought, but he does it for reasons of style. He has a singular sense of style.
And they used Special Forces, but only for low-grade wet work. They didn’t have the UN’s techniques of physical and neurological enhancement, so they couldn’t make them into rivals of The Dead. Not the ones she and Anwar had questioned, certainly.
But they had something that had killed Levin and Asika.
And that summarised all that she knew about them. The last point might yield something, but hadn’t so far, and otherwise there wasn’t much more she could usefully learn. So she parked it, and considered other routes: what they did, and who they employed to do it.
Nine days or less.
5
Anwar recalled what Rafiq once told him. The more established major members—the Americans and Chinese and Europeans—liked to think of the UN as a corporation, with themselves as shareholders. “They’re wrong,” he said. “My part, the unelected part, is like a corporation. But Zaitsev’s part, the political part, isn’t. It’s just a microcosm of the world, with all the world’s history and hatreds and differences. Those things don’t go away just because you put them into a General Assembly.” Or into a summit, like this one.
The most powerful UN members were currently America, China, Europe, Brazil, Indonesia, and India. Russia and
Japan were now less important, politically and economically: Japanese manufacturing and electronics had been overtaken by China and India, and Russian natural resources were worth less now that new energy sources were becoming viable. Russia still remained a Security Council member, but the new energy geopolitics might eventually change even that. Middle Eastern countries were less important for the same reason.
After the opening ceremony, the real business commenced and fault lines already began to appear. Olivia stayed to listen, and so, therefore, did Anwar. He sat a few rows back from her, absorbing lines of sight and possible angles of attack. He sensed from voice inflections and body language that things weren’t going well, but he didn’t listen closely to the words: only enough to know that the early objections were not about detailed Agenda items, but about the Agenda’s very existence.
Other honorary guests and worthies who came for the ceremony gradually left, not wishing to be associated with the process of real business and real disagreements. But, to their credit, the two Archbishops from the Old Anglicans did stay on for an hour or so. They adjourned with Olivia afterwards for a private meeting in one of the adjoining rooms leading off from the main auditorium. Anwar waited discreetly at a distance, covering the door and listening to the discord between the delegates.
Gaetano’s briefing to Anwar was as thorough as one of Rafiq’s. It included the latest version of the Agenda. Anwar had studied it carefully. It set out to define policies and codes of conduct—not diverting or damming rivers to deny water downstream, reforestation to ensure rainwater didn’t run off uselessly, no dumping of untreated waste, desalination technology, and much more. It aimed to identify and define what it termed Guiding Principles which, when agreed, could be applied to the several current disputes, and even wars, between some of the members present.
The Agenda was a document that had been negotiated almost as fiercely as water rights themselves. And, only a few hours into the first day, it was unravelling.
6
Parvin Marek had been theirs. Their instrument.
He was a freak of nature. Normal family, ordinary upbringing, average accomplishments. Averagely gregarious. No special talents or failings. Not bullied or sexually abused. Then, in his twenties, a dark light switched on inside him. It made him brilliant and monstrous. Nihilism was his religion.
Arden had no detailed proof that he’d been one of theirs at the time of Black Dawn, but all her instincts suggested it. His particular role had probably been to destabilise Balkan politics, or to provide misdirection while they destabilised politics in more important areas. He was notable only because his agenda and philosophy were unlike anyone else’s. That would have been his value to them. He didn’t kill as many people as other terrorists, particularly the religiously-motivated ones, but he killed them more unexpectedly.
And he went back. At the UN Embassy in Zagreb, with passers-by. At Fallingwater, with Rafiq’s family. He went back, shot them in the head to make sure they were dead. How could you survive that, Laurens, and still come back here?
But
that was as far as that particular route took her. Interesting historically, but Marek was dead.
She considered their other instruments.
Richard Carne was one of their minor functionaries. One of many. He’d been in London to address the Johnsonian Society. Only a short trip from there to Brighton. He wouldn’t have been privy to his employers’ detailed plans for Olivia, but possibly he’d heard something—enough to make him want to take a stroll round the famous New West Pier. Maybe he just wanted to see the Cathedral and Conference Centre where it would happen. He wasn’t doing detailed planning; those he worked for would have done that long ago. Maybe this was just idle curiosity, and genuine coincidence.
Or was it? Maybe they’d sent Carne deliberately. Or maybe they’d known he’d go to Brighton anyway. Either way, they’d known Anwar would want to question him personally, and they’d known Carne would defeat Anwar in the questioning. Not just defeat him, but leave him reeling.
She’d studied exhaustively what Carne had told Anwar. Hines had told him similar things. So had the five like Carne and Hines who she’d questioned. But, even though she hadn’t been present, there was something about Carne’s questioning to which she needed to return. Park it for now. It might surface when I stop looking for it.
At the end of the first day, Anwar was with Olivia in her bedroom. He slept there now, and would do until the summit was over. The day before the summit began, he had decided to go to full close-protection mode.
“I’ll take the sofa,” he told her. “Don’t worry about these chocolate wrappers, I’ll move them.”
She didn’t answer.
“And the bits of paper. And the discarded clothes.”
Fuck you the ginger cat meaowed from somewhere underneath the sofa.
“You know, I always imagined you more with a Siamese cat.”
“Why?” she asked, reluctantly. She’d have preferred to avoid conversations with him about anything except security matters.
