Evensong

by Love, John

  But not in her apartment. If anything came for her, he wanted to be alone with it.

  He stayed awake all night, and nothing happened and nothing came. It was about 8:00 a.m. Two hours to the signing. He made a quick check-in call to Gaetano,confirmed Olivia was still asleep, and put in a call to Arden Bierce. Maybe my last one to her, a voice inside him said. Don’t be morbid, another voice replied. Or self-indulgent, a third one added.

  “Still nothing,” he told Arden. “They didn’t move for her throughout the summit. They didn’t move during the night. It must come today. They want it live and public, and everyone will have gone tomorrow.”

  “What about your Detail? The one she wouldn’t tell you?”

  “I’ve left it. No time, not any more.”

  “There’s something I should tell you...” She was going to tell him about Rafiq and herself, but stopped as she realised how wrong it would be at this time.

  “Something you should tell me?”

  “Not tell you, ask you.” She was floundering, uncharacteristically.

  “Ask me what?”

  She cast around desperately. “Something,” she blurted, “about what Carne said to you. No,” her voice shook as she realised this was what she’d been looking for, “about the way he said it.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “I know, but your account covered everything as if I was. Why do you think we give you all eidetic memories? It was the way he said it! Dammit, Anwar. I’ll call you later.”

  When she flicked her wristcom shut, she was shaking. This was pivotal. There really was something, and she’d only thought of it when she’d been trying to avoid telling him about Rafiq and he’d been pressing her and now she had to chase it down and would there be time? He only had about two hours until the signing, and if they were still going to move for her then this—whatever it was—might be something he needed to know. She had to chase it down.

  Anwar went into Olivia’s bedroom. She was still sleeping. The act of watching her sleeping, and the act of waking her, which he’d do in a moment, could in different contexts both be acts of intimacy. But not in this context. Her face was small and sharp-featured against the bulk of her pillow. Far from ugly, but not beautiful like Arden’s, either. It didn’t matter now. Her face carried too many associations for him to bother about its aesthetics.

  You’ve shown me more double meanings, he thought, more things under the surface, in the last three weeks than I’ve seen in the rest of my life. I don’t know if love exists, but I’ve listed all the pros and cons about you and I think it must Nothing else seems to fit.

  She moved slightly, but didn’t wake.

  And now it’s academic. We both mistimed. Whatever happens today, whether I protect you or not, the mission will finish and we won’t see each other again.

  He reached down and shook her shoulder to wake her. “Time,” he said.

  12

  Anwar and Olivia left the New Grand at 8:55 a.m. on October 20. Gaetano was with them. They walked through piazzas and gardens to the Conference Centre. Anwar wore his light grey linen blend suit and dark grey woven-silk shirt from his first day at Brighton. Olivia, coincidentally, wore the dark red velvet dress she’d worn when she first greeted him. It had to be coincidental, because they no longer dressed or undressed in each other’s presence.

  Anwar also wore his Yusuf Khan badge, though it was probably too near the end to worry about details of identity.

  Anwar and Olivia said nothing to each other while they walked. There wasn’t much to say, not now. The weather was like yesterday: cold, but sharp and clear, with pale sunlight. The sea was calm. Not so much placid, perhaps, as unconcerned. Gulls swooped and soared gracefully around the Pier. There was something wistful and sad in their calls, redolent of savage lonely shores; but also, if you listened a little differently, something like a cruel cackling laughter.

  For the walk, Anwar briefly ramped up his senses to check where everyone was. It seemed like there was just the three of them, but Anwar saw (and heard, and smelt—that was one of the irritations of sense-heightening) Gaetano’s people all around, covering them discreetly. Must be most of his staff today, he thought. Proskar and others he recognised, but he didn’t see Bayard; he hadn’t seen him for a few days.

  “You won’t see him here,” Gaetano said, when Anwar asked. “I wasn’t sure of him.”

  Anwar reduced his senses to normal for the rest of their walk. He never liked heightening them for too long; people might infer, from his behaviour, what he was.

  They entered the Conference Centre. The main auditorium, and the wide staircase up to the mezzanine, and the mezzanine itself, were already crowded with people not able to get into the Signing Room: junior delegates, support staff, broadcasters from minor channels. The big screen in the main auditorium would show a live feed of the signing.

  They walked along the mezzanine, Olivia trailing her hand along the balcony rail. They went through the pale wood double doors and entered the Signing Room at 9:01 a.m. The signing was scheduled for 10:00, but already the room was starting to fill.

  Once through the double doors they came immediately, on their left, to the panelled area mocked up to look like a UN Press Suite. The rest of the room, which was about sixty feet long by fifty wide, stretched away to the right, and still had the original curving walls of white and silver.

  In the panelled area to the left was the top table. It held Zaitsev and three others, the senior politicians who’d drafted the Statement yesterday. Olivia, in deference to her position as host, also had a place there. She took it, leaving Anwar and Gaetano in the main body of the room. Anwar stayed in the middle, near to the top table, and Gaetano moved to the wall. Other security people—Gaetano’s, and those of the delegates — had already taken up positions.

  Olivia sat quietly at the top table, next to Zaitsev. Her expression was unreadable. Anwar made brief eye contact with Zaitsev (A to Z, he thought irrelevantly) but neither of them said anything.

  The Signing Room was large, but not large enough for all the summit delegates. Only the delegation heads—usually political leaders or senior ministers, with their security people—were allowed in; many of them were now standing in the main area of the room. At exactly 10:00a.m., Zaitsev would formally read out a communiqué incorporating the Statement of Intent. The heads of delegations would then come up and sign in the alphabetical order of their countries’ names.

  Anwar saw Zaitsev’s array of Meatslabs: the one who’d threatened to tear off his penis, the one who couldn’t operate the button on Zaitsev’s pen, and some others. The one who’d threatened to tear off his penis sauntered up to him.

  “Hello, Yusuf. Glad I let you keep your prick? I understand it’s her property these days. Good fuck, is she?”

  Anwar smiled but didn’t answer.

  To him, and he suspected most of those present, the panelling didn’t look any different. It covered the walls in the direction where it faced the cameras, which were massed at the other end of the room with mikes and lighting and reporters.

  Every time he’d been in this room he noticed the same thing: the jarring division between the newly-built replica panelling and the original curving white and silver walls. He’d always thought it looked ridiculous. He couldn’t imagine two interior styles which so completely contradicted each other. Levin would have mocked both of them unmercifully.

  It wouldn’t show on the broadcasts, though. The cameras were angled so that the panelled area would fill their entire picture. 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 panelling was meant to look like a conventional rectangular space. The contractors had done it carefully and very well the first time, and equally well the second time after Anwar ordered it ripped out. But it still seemed a lot of trouble. Just for a theatre set.

  Anwar tried to stare through it. He’d been there while it was actually being fitted,
and armed guards had been there ever since, so he knew nothing was behind it. Yet he still ramped up his senses in the hope that he might see or smell or hear something there. He didn’t, though he saw and smelt and heard rather more than he wanted of the other people crowding the room.

  They wore a mixture of modern clothes and traditional robes and he saw the microscopic texture and weave of the fabrics, the tiny dust motes in their interstices. And smelt them, though they’d all been painstakingly laundered and pressed for the occasion. Their colours were different when seen microscopically, because colours didn’t really exist, they were only selective light filters.

  And the textures of their faces, in unforgiving close-up: minute tips of embedded stubble despite careful shaving, or traceries of cracks in makeup carefully applied for the occasion. Hair smelling stale despite careful shampooing. Body odours, bad breath, sweat, and subcutaneous grease despite careful morning toiletries. Snatches of conversation, normally indistinguishable in the background murmur, now each one a separate and distinct thread, some benign and some embarrassing. Sexual liaisons were a regular feature of most summits and conferences, and of ten had more far-reaching results than the formal business itself.

  This was how The Dead could step outside the world and perceive it as nobody else could: by ramping up their senses, for surveillance or combat. Sights and sounds and smells crowded Anwar. Each one was separate and distinct, and each one was already matched, in his memory, to a name and a face and a profile and an identity. More information than he wanted or needed. He powered down his senses, and saw and heard and smelt what everyone else did. The cool pleasant citrus air returned to his nostrils and the individual conversations sank into the background murmur.

  It was now only a few minutes before 10:00, and the Signing Room was full. Delegates crowded into the main part, standing. Occasionally, spotting a photo opportunity, Zaitsev would smile or wave at someone, glancing to camera as he did so.

  The media were at the back of the room, the other end from the panelled theatre set. Quite close, Anwar remembered, to where he’d put his bucket during his stay there. Cameras, mikes, lights were all angled towards the top table and the illusion of rectangular panelling behind it.

  At one minute to 10:00 the top table party nodded to each other, and the room fell silent. Zaitsev took a deep breath and, exactly as 10:00 came around, smiled and began.

  “Welcome,” he said. “It’s an unexpected path that has brought us here. A few days ago the path we’d chosen seemed impassable. Then we took another, and we’ve arrived at a place none of us would have thought possible.”

  Humility, not triumphalism. A mere messenger, carrying something of greater import than his mere self. But Anwar noted the careful modulation of the voice, and the slight contrivance of the near-rhyming of Impassable and Possible.Still a good actor.

  He continued, “You all know what happened yesterday: the new direction we took, and the Statement of Intent to confirm that new direction and our unanimous commitment to it. If you’ll permit me” (who’s going to forbid you? Anwar thought) “I’ll read out the summit’s official communiqué.”

  He cleared his throat; looked around the room portentously; and began.

  “The following communiqué on the United Nations summit on Water Rights was issued today,October 20,2060.

  “The United Nations summit on Water Rights was convened by the Secretary-General and was held at the Conference Centre, New West Pier, Brighton from October 15 to October 19, 2060. Delegates unanimously agreed that the previously published Agenda should be set aside, and the following Statement of Intent was adopted by all those present:

  “Brighton, October 20, 2060. We the undersigned—”

  An explosion of dust and fragments, a tearing and rending of structural members, and the wall burst open. Not the wood-panel theatre-set wall whose construction Anwar had witnessed, but the original pearlescent white wall at the other end of the room.

  Arden at last knew what she was looking for. But she hadn’t found it yet, and there wasn’t time. It was buried somewhere in Anwar’s questioning of Carne: not the transcript, that was just words on a screen, but the recording of his verbal report. It was probably some chance remark, maybe even an aside, which had slipped past her unnoticed. Anwar’s memory enabled him to reproduce not only the words, but the way Carne had spoken them.

  She’d been playing it back for nearly two hours, since he last called her. Nothing. She played it back again, and there it was.

  Carne’s voice was copied exactly by Anwar: not just every word, but the inflection of every word. It was almost mimicry. That’s what she should have listened for. Not the words, but one word. And how Carne had said it.

  “They annihilated Levin. Then Rafiq sent Asika, and they annihilated him too.” They annihilated Levin (strong emphasis on the second syllable) then they annihilated Asika (no emphasis). As if it meant something different, something less than they’d done to Levin. Consistent with “there wasn’t enough left of Levin...”

  Annihilate: Destroy completely. Reduce to nonexistence. Nullify or render void. Eradicate, erase, exterminate; extinguish, kill, obliterate.

  “...what our employers did to Asika. And what they did to Levin, which was worse. And Levin’s face, when he realised he couldn’t defend himself. There wasn’t enough left of him to make into an exhibit, like the one they’d made of Asika.”

  The one they’d made in that villa in Opatija.

  What was done to Asika was merely physical. What was done to Levin was spiritual. Deeper, more absolute.

  “Fuck.” She occasionally swore mildly, but she’d never spoken that word before. It felt strange, forming her lips over the f and her palate and tongue over the ck.

  At last she’d found it. Hiding in plain sight, and she hadn’t seen; or in plain hearing, and she hadn’t heard. She’d only found it when she’d lied to Anwar to avoid telling him about Rafiq and herself, and now there was no time.

  She flicked open her wristcom.

  Anwar moved to the centre of the suddenly-emptying Signing Room, to stand between her and what had burst out of the far wall.

  It was Levin. Except it wasn’t, anymore.

  Levin would have greeted him with Muslim Filth. Levin would have had some clever one-liners to which Anwar would have thought up rejoinders too late. Levin wouldn’t have had a face like an unmoving theatrical mask, or eyes like dead, brilliant jewels.

  Ridiculously, his wristcom buzzed. He cancelled it.

  Levin wore a shirt and trousers of silver-grey, and thin gloves of the same material. Maybe woven monofilament. Or maybe a similar composition to Rafiq’s VSTOLs, which always seemed quietly indestructible.

  They both ramped up their senses, and went to full combat mode. This time Anwar ignored the microscopic weave of fabrics or the particle-level building-blocks of colours or the body odours beneath perfumes, and funnelled everything towards Levin.

  A kind of relativity: time and thought moved normally for them, but for everyone around them they were a flicker.

  The Patel contractors hadn’t only built the fake woodpanelled wall, they’d built a replica of the original pearlescent wall. A perfect, seamless replica. At the other end of the room. Levin was already there when Anwar ordered the old panelling ripped out. Already there, in the wall three feet away, when I was crapping in my bucket.

  Broadcasters, camera crews and delegates were crowded at the far end. When Levin burst out he didn’t just scatter them, he killed them. He was so fast that nobody got in a shot, except Gaetano. He hit Levin once in the throat, normally a killing shot, but Levin didn’t notice.

  With his senses ramped up for combat, Anwar saw all this in what for him was normal time. Relativity: everyone else in the room, except Levin, was wallowing in treacle-time. Screaming in deep bass notes. Thinking at geological speed. Or dead.

  Two of Zaitsev’s guards were moving in strange animated slow motion to cover him. The other three, mov
ing with equal strangeness, went to face Levin in the centre of the room but he killed them without breaking step as he hurtled— flickered—towards Olivia at the top table. Everyone assumed the target was Zaitsev, who was now pushed under the table and covered by his two remaining guards. Olivia was standing behind the table, her mouth open in an O that seemed too big for her face.

  Anwar moved—slowly in his time, a blur in theirs—to the centre of the room to stand between them.

  He faced Levin, and saw what they’d done to him.

  He knew it instinctively, not in detail. They’d taken his identity, and left him as a thing. He’d always been bigger, younger, stronger, faster, more skilful, than Anwar. Now he was more so, and a monster. A killing machine. Maybe what had once powered his mind was now redirected into his body. Details later. No time.

  Remembering Gaetano’s throat shot, he aimed his best Verb at Levin’s throat. Levin didn’t notice, and broke Anwar’s collarbone. In full combat mode Anwar’s resetting processes worked faster, but would still be too slow. He hit Levin with two more Verbs, and Levin broke three of Anwar’s ribs and re-broke his collarbone. Then his left upper arm.

  Simple maths: a few seconds, and he’d be strewn like Chulo Asika over the floor of that villa in Croatia. Levin could break 90 percent of his major bones before 10 percent of them could reset. Anwar kept hitting at the throat. Nothing else was exposed, or vulnerable. No time for elegant moves from his training, he’d be killed.

  “They annihilated Levin,” Anwar’s memory helpfully replayed,“then Rafiq sent Asika, and they annihilated him too.”

  Yes, Asika. I’m being broken up like Chulo. Levin wasn’t going to kill him with one blow, though he could probably have done so, but to annihilate him piece by piece.