Evensong (2 page)

Their training, and the physical and neurological enhancements which made them unique, were uniquely expensive.

Anwar Abbas was a Consultant: one of The Dead.

Dusk fell quickly and was short-lived, turning abruptly to darkness in the few minutes’ duration of the flight. Anwar got only a glimpse of the lights of the UN complex before the silvered plane dropped vertically and landed—or, rather, hovered politely one inch above the ground while they stepped out through the door that had rippled open for them. What enabled it to hover was something to do with room-temperature semiconductors, the Holy Grail of frictionless motion: not fully achieved yet, but getting closer.

The plane slid noiselessly up into the night. For the second time, Anwar found himself following Arden Bierce across a lawn. This lawn was part of the park which formed the centre of the UN complex.

Ringing the park were some tall buildings, each a different shape and colour: ziggurats, pyramids, cones, ovoids. Each stood in its own smaller piece of manicured parkland, and was festooned with greenery hanging from walls and windows and balconies. The overall effect was pleasing, without the pomp of the old UN buildings in New York and Geneva; more like the commercial district of any reasonably prosperous city. Kuala Lumpur, a few miles south, was similar but larger-scale.

The central parkland had lawns and woods, landscaped low hills and a river, over which was cantilevered the Controller-General’s house, Fallingwater. It was based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s design, scaled up, but still house-sized.

The security around this building, of all the buildings in the complex, appeared to be nonexistent, the way Rafiq had personally designed it to appear. They simply walked up to the front door and rang the doorbell. The door opened into a large reception area.

“I’ll go and tell him you’re here,” said Arden Bierce as she went through an adjoining door, usually known as
the
door because it led to Rafiq’s inner office.

Anwar looked around him. He knew Fallingwater well, and found it calming. The interior of the house was larger than Wright’s original, but furnished and decorated in the same style: comfortable and understated, a mix of regular and organic shapes, of autumn browns and ochres and earth tones. Large areas of the floor were open expanses of polished wood, with seating areas formed by clusters of plain stone-white sofas and armchairs. Several people were there, talking quietly. They were all members of Rafiq’s personal staff, like Arden Bierce, but only a few of them looked up as he entered.

The rest paid him no attention.

Except for Miles Levin. He and Anwar had known each other for years, and they exchanged their usual greeting.

“Muslim filth.”

“Jewish scum.”

Their Muslim and Jewish origins, if any, were no longer important. They had taken their present names, along with their present identities, when they became Consultants.

Which they had done at the same time, seven years ago. Levin was six feet five, nearly three inches taller than

Anwar, and more powerfully built. He looked generally younger and stronger, and was—for a Consultant—louder and more outgoing. Anwar was thin-faced, with a hook nose. Levin’s face was broader and more open. Both were dark-haired and wore their hair long.

“Waiting to see him?” Anwar asked.

“I’ve seen him. Offer and Acceptance. I was just leaving.”

Normally they’d have had a lot to talk about, but not this time. They couldn’t discuss missions, that simply wasn’t done; and also, Anwar noted a strangeness in Levin’s manner, a kind of preoccupation. So he just nodded briefly at him,and

Levin turned to go.

“Take care,” something prompted Anwar to whisper.

Levin heard. “You too.” He did not look back.

“Scum.”

“Filth.” The door closed softly behind him.

Another door—
the
door—opened. Arden Bierce came out.

“He’ll see you now.”

Laurens Rafiq was of Dutch and Moroccan parentage. He was a small, neat man, quiet-spoken like Anwar. He was not the UN’s first Controller-General, but was by far its most effective. Even the enemies he had made during his ascendancy conceded that.

“Thank you for coming so promptly, Mr. Abbas.” Rafiq motioned to a chair, and Anwar sat down. “I want to offer you a mission. May I describe it?”

“Please.”

“First,I should tell you this. It involves bodyguard duties.” Anwar spoke carefully, to mask his surprise. “We don’t

usually do that, Mr. Rafiq. Even for you.”

“This isn’t for me, it’s for someone else.”

His surprise turned to anger.
For someone else?
Playing for time, and trying to compose himself, Anwar gazed round

Rafiq’s office. Like the original Fallingwater, and the reception outside, it was spacious and understated and restful. But it didn’t relax him.
This is wrong,
he thought
. Special Forces, mere Special Forces, do bodyguard duties. Not us. Asking a Consultant to do that is like…

“It must be like asking Shakespeare to write greeting card verses,” Rafiq said. “I know how you feel.

“But there’s a UN resources summit next month. Several member states attending have been, or still are, at war with each other over water rights. A volatile subject, and security will be a concern. Also, the usual venues might offend political sensibilities. So the New Anglicans have offered us the conference centre attached to their Cathedral in Brighton, on the south coast of England.”

“I know where Brighton is, Mr. Rafiq,” Anwar said. “I go to bookfairs there.”

“Yes, I’d forgotten.” He hadn’t. He wanted to give Anwar a minor point now, to help the dynamics later. “So. The New Anglicans’ offer is tempting. Their Cathedral complex, with conference centre and hotels, is large and well-equipped.And, most important for security, it’s at the end of a two-mile-long ocean pier. But there’s a price.”

Rafiq paused, not for dramatic effect but because what he said next could lead to something unprecedented, a Consultant refusing a mission.

“Olivia del Sarto has asked for a Consultant to attend her during the nine days of the summit, starting October 15.

Apparently she’s always wanted one of The Dead—” he spoke the phrase with distaste “—as her personal bodyguard.”

Olivia del Sarto,
thought Anwar, still somehow masking his feelings.
Archbishop of the New Anglicans. And Archbitch: brilliant and offensive, with her hidden political and financial backers and her sexual appetites and her foul ginger cat.
The sexual appetites and the cat were familiar parts of her media persona. She consistently refused to tone down the former, or to have the latter castrated. He’d seen her, again and again, on the news channels.
This is wrong. One of
us,
as a fashion accessory for
her?

“She’s asked you for something you shouldn’t give. We only do things for
you.
For the Controller-General.”

Rafiq said nothing, just waited for Anwar to continue. He knew when to pause and when to press. So did Anwar, but with Anwar it came from enhancement and training. With Rafiq it came naturally.

“It’s the heart of the compact. Any mission you offer us must be impossible for anyone else. And only for
you.
This doesn’t qualify on either count.”

Again Rafiq waited.

Anwar stood up suddenly, shockingly fast, and glared down at Rafiq. “Occasionally,
very
occasionally, if there was exceptional risk, we’d do bodyguard duties for you or the

Secretary-General. This is different! You want me to nurse that—that person, because you’ve done a deal with her for a conference venue?”

With Anwar still towering above him Rafiq thought,
I’m alone with one of The Dead, and I’ve seriously annoyed him. Be careful with this one, he’s obsessive. Likes everything just so.
>But still he said nothing.

“You negotiated with her? You let her have one of
us
, as a fashion accessory?”

Still Rafiq said nothing.

Anwar added, “And she must have security people of her own.”

Got him.
Rafiq smiled. “She has. Mere Special Forces, as you would say, but they’re good. I doubt whether you’ll either add to her safety, or uncover anything her people may have missed. Also, she’s not a participant in the summit, only the host. The national leaders and UN officials are more likely to be targets, and they too will have their own security.”

“Including you?”

“I won’t be there. This is political, not executive, so the Secretary-General will go.” Rafiq rarely referred to the Secretary-General by name; he had already outlasted three of them.

Something’s threatening her,
Anwar thought suddenly.
Something beyond the abilities of her own security people, so she wants one of us. And whatever it is, it’s specific to the summit, because she only wants me for the nine days.

“You’ve just assigned Miles Levin. Are our missions connected?”

“You know I can’t answer that.” Rafiq knew that they genuinely weren’t connected, but even if he’d said so he doubted that Anwar would believe him. Anwar had a tendency to look for pockets of darkness in everything.

In fact, Anwar had only asked about Levin to buy some time while he tried to think it through.
She isn’t asking this as a whim, and Rafiq doesn’t grant whims. He must owe her. Or the New Anglicans, or their political and financial network.And for a lot more than just a conference venue. Do I cite the compact and refuse? Or find out what it is?

“Why did you ask
me
to do this?”

“I really don’t know. I just had an instinct that you would be the right one.”

Pause.

“I need Offer and Acceptance. Will you do it?”

“Yes.” As he spoke, Anwar heard a succession of doors closing, and others opening, all the way to England.

In seven years Levin had carried out fifteen missions for Rafiq. None of them compared, even remotely, to this. It was why he’d been preoccupied when he met Anwar.
If only I could have told him…
It was heaven’s gate. It would take him to Croatia to locate Parvin Marek, the only person ever to evade The Dead.

“I don’t aim to destroy society,” Marek once wrote, after one of his atrocities, “but to demonstrate that it has already destroyed itself.”

Rafiq had given him a detailed briefing, but Levin already knew most of it. The case had always affected him deeply, particularly its later events.

Ten years ago Parvin Marek led a terrorist movement called Black Dawn. It wasn’t a mass movement, and had no interest in becoming one. It wasn’t religious, or even conventionally political. It was nihilist. It had no goals or aims, only methods; its slogan, sprayed over derelict buildings, was

“Justify Nothing.” The group consisted of Marek and seven others, who operated as one-person cells. They rarely met or even talked to each other, and had long ago cut all ties to family and friends. The Croatian authorities knew who they were but not where, which made them almost unstoppable.

Marek himself was quiet and withdrawn, an absence of all qualities except action. He didn’t shout, threaten, exhort, or inspire. He only
did.
What drove him was the Marxist dialectic seen through the dead eyes of nihilism. Society was an illusion, a mere theatre: religion, culture, values, art, politics, all merely a mask for economic forces. Destroy the economic forces? Impractical. But destroy the mask, and the economic forces will be uncovered and die.

Black Dawn attacked random civilian targets: stores, airports, stations, even schools and hospitals. They took no hostages because they had no demands. They were unique, not because of the numbers they killed, but the nature of their killing. Religious fundamentalists killed more people; but they had reasons, however insane, and would say so. Black Dawn had none, and said nothing.

The culmination came in 2050 when Marek bombed the UN Embassy in Zagreb, killing twenty Embassy staff and seven passersby. Before leaving, Marek went back and shot dead two people lying on the pavement who, he noticed, were still alive. Later he issued a statement saying that the bomb had been designed to explode outwards as well as inwards, to kill passersby as well as Embassy staff. Justify Nothing, his statement concluded.

The Croatian authorities formally requested UN assistance. They had never been able to locate Marek and the other seven, but UN Intelligence did. Two Consultants (not Levin or Anwar; this was before their time) accepted amission from Rafiq. In one night they took the seven, alive, and gave them to the authorities. Marek,remarkably,evaded them, but Black Dawn was broken.

It still wasn’t enough.

The Dead hardly ever did bodyguard duties: that was the province of, in Anwar’s words, “mere Special Forces.” So, six months later, three mere Special Forces bodyguards were on duty when Rafiq’s wife and two children, a boy of seven and a girl of five, were shot dead by Marek. The family had just arrived at a marquee on the lawn in front of Fallingwater for the boy’s birthday party; Rafiq was on his way to join them. After shooting them, and the bodyguards, Marek turned back: the boy, he noticed, was still alive. Marek shot him again, twice in the head. From his wristcom he detonated a couple of bombs nearby. He didn’t know, or care, if they’d killed or injured anyone. They were a diversion, allowing him to walk— not run—away. Again he proved untraceable; this time, not for six months but ten years.

After it happened Rafiq became isolated and solitary, though no less effective. His only public statement was, “Marek has killed more people than just my family. For all of them, this is unfinished business.”

The family wing at Fallingwater was closed and sealed.

And now, ten years later, the UN had a possible lead. “Not a direct lead to Marek,” Rafiq had told Levin, when

he summoned him to Fallingwater a day earlier, “but to someone who might be prepared to sell him: Slovan Soldo, a distant relative. Soldo lives in Opatija, a seaside resort on the northern coast of Croatia. He’s facing arrest on rape charges, and probably looking for a deal.”