Evensong (16 page)

Jones paused. “Alright. The first name on our reserve list is the Chronic Disease Research Foundation.”

It took less time than expected—the CEO was an acquaintance of Rani Desai—and was completed well inside the hour. Rani Desai obtained the charity’s acceptance, made the electronic transfer, and sent Jones’ wristcom the page showing the transaction.

“Good,” said Jones. “Ten down, one to go. And Number Eleven is good news: it’s non-financial, so you’re done with paying. It finished at ten million, not eleven. But this one may take all of an hour.” He paused for effect, and glanced at Michael Taber. “You must get Olivia del Sarto to cancel the New Anglicans’ hosting of the UN Resources Summit at Brighton.”

There was a long silence, both from his wristcom and in the Cathedral.

“Go on,” he told her. “Do it.” Rani Desai broke the connection.

The silence persisted in the Cathedral. Some of the congregation had relaxed again after the outburst over the Quakers and had even been starting to talk among themselves and with the kidnappers. Now all that ended.

Taber smiled bleakly. “This was always about Number Eleven, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Jones made a show of checking his gun, and wouldn’t look at Taber. “We took the Cathedral last night because it was easier in darkness, and then we had to spin it out until now, so Number Eleven would get morning coverage. We were going too quickly, until the Quakers helped us. That’s another reason I chose them, though I wish they’d taken the money. Still, we got ten million for some other good causes.”

“Yes, but now it gets serious.”

“I told you. This is the last day of my life.”

Gaetano and Anwar burst into the Boardroom.

The news had erupted around her. She had cancelled her meetings before they’d begun and was already at the wall of screens, dealing with Rani Desai and the media and kidnappers and her own staff. Dealing with several screens simultaneously, like Rafiq would have done. Like Anwar could also have done, but he had enhancements. Olivia and Rafiq didn’t.

The motives were obvious. The New Anglicans’ original founders were probably employing the kidnappers. They wanted Olivia to give up her high political profile, of which the UN summit was the latest example. Originally they wanted the Church made rich and powerful, but she’d done it on her terms, not theirs. Originally they wanted the Church to run like a business or political organization, and she’d done that too; but on her terms, not theirs. So they wanted her dead, and until they could arrange that, they wanted her quiet.

Except that Anwar didn’t believe any of it, either now or when she’d first told him, over the dinner which should have been a briefing but wasn’t. There was more. Not necessarily something larger, but something more specific and detailed: perhaps only a single fact, but one which would overturn all the others. And she wasn’t telling him.

And this pantomime at Rochester: too obviously staged and too obviously contrived. She might submit and lose face, or refuse to submit and cause the hostages to die. Either way it would be a PR problem, but not an insurmountable one; the New Anglicans’ popularity, and their formidable PR machine, would see to that. But whatever she did, summit or no summit, they’d still kill her.

It was in Anwar’s nature to look for pockets of darkness, and he’d found them. A whole billiard table of them.

Since Olivia was occupied—she hadn’t even glanced round when he and Gaetano entered, and was busy dealing simultaneously with three screens and her wristcom, as well as her staff—Anwar took the opportunity to tell Gaetano all this. “So,” he concluded, “Rochester is all an act. It isn’t real. They never expected her to give in.”

“It looks real enough to me,” said Gaetano. “You heard their eleventh demand.”

“She’ll refuse. And when she does, they won’t move again until the summit. This was just a try-on. If she really did stop the summit it would be less convenient for them, because she’d have to be killed later. Their preferred option is to kill her at the summit.”
Publicly, in a way that gives history a nudge.

One of Olivia’s screens had a CCTV replay of the kidnappers stepping into the Cathedral last night and announcing themselves. Anwar studied them. Assessed their height, size, movement.
Not the real thing. Two weeks before the summit is too early. And those five are not good enough. A grade or two below Meatslabs, nothing special.
Except that he sensed they were carrying something inside them. He wished he could go there and see them face to face. He’d know what it was.

Rani Desai had gone quickly to Rochester by VSTOL, and had taken charge of negotiations and operational matters. By about number three on Jones’ list she was speaking to him not from London but from an operations vehicle in the Cathedral precincts.

She had Special Forces in position around the Cathedral, but she wouldn’t send them in unless negotiations failed. And, before number eleven was announced, negotiations had been going well, even despite the Quakers. Now all that was changed.

On her own set of screens, Rani Desai was watching. Body heat scanners picked out the congregation and the kidnappers. There were three figures standing separately at the front of the Nave by the altar (one of them Taber?), and others moving among the congregation and choir. She didn’t know how many there were. She guessed five or six, maybe more; five, said her analysts, who had studied the body language of all those in the Nave, as revealed by the scanners, and had noted that five of them carried themselves differently.

Other scanners confirmed the location of the explosive devices. Sometimes you could deep-scan them, disable them remotely with motive beams, but their casings were impenetrable and they had beam-scramblers. They really were military ordnance.

Yet more scanners got snatches of conversation from the hostages. Before number eleven their relations with the kidnappers had not been particularly unfriendly, but now conversation had all but ceased. Would Jones kill them all if the Archbishop didn’t acquiesce? Or was he, as she suspected, out of his depth? The conclusion was still the same for Rani Desai: go in only if gunshots were heard.

There was a continuing commotion outside the Cathedral: helicopters and VSTOLs, operations vehicles gunning their engines, figures striding back and forth across College Yard and Boley Hill, under the spreading trees. Jones and the others watched them calmly.

“What are those trees?” Jones asked Taber.

“Magnolias. And the big one’s a Catalpa—American Indian Bean Tree. It’s more than two hundred years old...I met her once, you know. Olivia del Sarto. She came here as our guest, at an Evensong service like tonight’s, five years ago when she became Archbishop. She won’t give in.”

“You know her?”

“No, I just met her that one time. But that was enough. She won’t give in.”

“Then, as you said, things will get serious.”

Rani Desai said, “Archbishop, their leader wants to speak to you.”

“Is this being broadcast?”

“No, it’s a secure link. Only him and you.”

“Put him on.”

Jones appeared on one of the screens in the Boardroom. Now that number eleven was known, he was in no mood to waste time. “You know what we want.”

“Yes. And you can’t have it.”

“Unless you comply,” he said, “we’ll execute them.”

“I won’t comply, and you won’t execute them.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we’ll execute them.”

“No,” Olivia replied, “you won’t. Not execute. You’ll murder them. And I won’t comply. The summit will save more lives than you can take. So, murder or slaughter or kill or whatever, but don’t call it Execute. Don’t give yourself a fake judicial authority. You’ll murder them. So No, I’ll decline your invitation. And Fuck You.”

She cut the connection, and the screen died, then relit with Rani Desai.She was dark-hairedand well-groomed, a slightly older and plumper version of Arden Bierce.

“That wasn’t smart,” she hissed at Olivia.

“Look, I know you’ve been trying to handle this all night, but—”

“No, I meant it wasn’t
smart.
The summit isn’t yours to proceed with or call off. It’s the Government’s.”

“And the UN’s.”

“Yes, and the UN’s. But—”

“If the kidnappers were serious about getting the summit called off, they wouldn’t go to minor players like you and me, or even to your Government, they’d go to Rafiq. He’s the real authority. He could switch venues if he wanted. It wouldn’t be ideal,” she glanced at Anwar as she said this, “not at short notice, but Rafiq could do it. Except, of course, that he never would. They know the summit’s never going to be called off, and you know they aren’t going to murder anyone if the summit proceeds. At least,” another glance at Anwar, “not anyone in Rochester Cathedral. It’s all a performance.” She killed the screen, and swiveled to face Anwar. “So what’s your problem?”

“Most of it will keep for later...But you’re right, this is a UN matter. Rafiq would send in someone like me, it’s exactly that kind of mission. But the Government would have to ask him.”

“What, and have one of The Dead running around Rochester Cathedral? I don’t think so.” She smiled at him; it was like a rat baring its teeth. “The thing about Governments asking Rafiq for help is that he usually succeeds, and then they owe him, and his prices are high.” When Anwar didn’t press the point—she’d expected he wouldn’t—she went on. “This drip-feed leading up to the last demand. They wanted it to break now, when the whole country’s woken up. But why didn’t they demand more money?”

“You know why,” said Anwar, with a trace of impatience. “To get it to proceed amicably through the night. To get to where we are now. So you mustn’t—”

“I have no intention of complying. You heard me.”

“Yes. It’s better that you don’t, because then they’ll come for you at the summit. If you did comply, they’d still come for you, but we wouldn’t know where or when. And I don’t intend on living here indefinitely.”

She looked up at him sharply; one of the occasions when she actually seemed to notice him.

From one of the screens, showing the exterior of Rochester Cathedral, came the sound of gunfire.

“The Archbishop’s refused number eleven,” Jones told Taber, “as we expected. So we have our orders.” He put down his rifle and drew a sidearm. He spoke a few words in his wristcom to Rani Desai, snapped it shut, and smiled ruefully. “You’re a good man, Dean Taber,and a perceptive one. I wish I’d known you better.” When he and his four companions shot themselves, they made no formal leave-taking of each other. They’d probably done that before they even entered the Cathedral. It must always have seemed inevitable to them.

“Time for us to die,” Jones had told Rani Desai, in his final call to her. “You’ll hear our five gunshots. If you trust me, send in your people. The hostages are safe and the bombs are fake.”

Rani Desai ordered the Special Forces to go in the moment she heard the first shots. They found the hostages safe and unharmed, as Jones had promised, and the kidnappers all dead. Subsequent checks confirmed what Rani Desai had figured out. They were mercenaries—not in Richard Carne’s league, but like him they had no known current employers. They all had terminal illnesses.
That’s what they were carrying,
Anwar thought when it came out later.

Also as Jones had promised, the bombs at the Cathedral entrances and windows were fake: casings only, with nothing inside them. The sensors on the floor, walls and ceiling were all genuine and active, so their operation would be detected, but the explosive devices weren’t. They were just empty containers.

The congregation and choir and Dean Taber were all physically unhurt, but traumatized. Even at the end, after the announcement of number eleven, they couldn’t bring themselves to hate Jones and the others. They were grief-stricken, not at having been held hostage, but at having to watch five people who they didn’t hate and in some ways had grown to like, putting pistols to their heads.

As the wall of screens relit, Arban Proskar burst into the Boardroom. Burst awkwardly, because his left shoulder and collarbone were still heavily strapped. Anwar again noted the hands, broad and long-fingered.

He was breathless. “We’ve taken another one. Like Richard Carne. We think he was checking whether Carne was still here, after we put out the story that we were holding him. This one’s called Taylor Hines. Similar CV to Carne. He’s trussed up in a private room in the hospital. Says he wants to see you.”

“I’m a little busy,” Olivia snapped, as one of her staff pointed to a screen where Rani Desai’s image had reappeared.

“No,” Proskar was looking at Anwar, “you.”

Taylor Hines looked more formidable than Carne, though he’d let them take him easily. As if it didn’t matter. He was tall, dark-haired, and sinewy. Slim to the point of cadaverousness. His thin face, over whose bones the skin was almost shrinkwrapped, radiated the same ease and insouciance as Carne. Even manacled and chained in a hospital bed, he still looked like he was lounging.

“Another one like Richard Carne,” Anwar muttered to himself, but Hines heard.

“Yes, Richard was another one like me.”

Anwar noted
Was
.

“And,” Hines went on, “the answer is No. I won’t tell you who I’m working for, where they are, or how they’ll kill her.”

Physically, Taylor Hines wasn’t like Carne at all. There was no fleshiness, just sinew. He was all sinew. His shirt was tightly buttoned up to the top, as if to conceal his thin lizard-like throat. But even so, there was a gap between his throat and the shirt. A gap which, when he spoke, opened and closed like a second mouth.

“Especially not how they’ll kill her, though you wouldn’t believe it if I did...And don’t,” he drawled, “try that thing about disabling all my senses, one by one, and leaving the eyes till last. You don’t have time, and you wouldn’t do it anyway. Even Marek didn’t actually do it.”

How the hell did he know about that?
thought Anwar, without bothering to ask or show any reaction. Not that Hines was particularly looking for a reaction.

Anwar studied him. They both knew he’d be tripping a poison implant soon. His employers had sent him here to die, merely for tactical reasons: not to find out about Carne, but probably just to create another level of uncertainty. There was nothing of value he could learn. Not now. Hines really
was
one of the dead.