Evensong (3 page)

“How good is the lead?” Levin asked, trying to mask his elation.

“It’s from UN Intelligence. It’s good, but it’s tenuous, and we don’t want it compromised. Whoever we send to follow it can have no surveillance or backup.”

So,
Levin thought,
this mission satisfies the compact. It’s impossible for anyone except a Consultant, and it’s specifically for Rafiq. More so than any other mission.

I was right to choose him,
Rafiq thought.
He really wants it.

“I’m formally offering you this mission. I want you to contact Soldo, and locate Marek. But if you accept,” he added,

“you’ll need to move within a day. Soldo won’t wait around. Will you do it?”

“Yes.” Levin had enough good taste—but only just enough—not to show Rafiq his genuine delight. If he’d punched the air, as he originally wanted, he’d probably have knocked it unconscious.

Marek would now be in his early to middle forties. What little information there was showed him to be a dark-haired man of average height and stocky build, running slightly to fat.

Softly spoken, like Anwar. Physically unremarkable, except for his hands. They were broad, almost spadelike, giving a large lateral spread. But the fingers were long and slender, like a concert pianist’s. Ideal for the manipulation of devices.

Levin’s imagination was racing. He’d seen possible Mareks all through the flight, and was seeing more of them now he’d landed. Every third or fourth adult male Croatian seemed to be stocky and fortyish with unusual hands. The Croatian national basketball team had been on his flight. Most of them were in their twenties and nearly seven feet tall, but Levin still caught himself double-checking them for hidden resemblances to Marek.

Levin carried no luggage, not even a briefcase. He was alone and unarmed. He had travelled by scheduled flight to Rijeka, where he was to be met and driven to a villa near Opatija.

Rijeka Airport, Zracna Luca Rijeka, was nondescript when it was built and had not improved with age. Its minor buildings and outbuildings were like architectural acne. It did have a new terminal, built on a part of the runway that was no longer needed since the advent of blended-wing VSTOL airliners, but it wasn’t much better than the 1960s building it replaced. It was flyblown and fluorescent, and smelled of stewed coffee and styrofoam. Levin walked quickly through it and out to the main entrance. A car eventually pulled up alongside him. It wasn’t battery-driven, like most of those around it, but a newer hydrogen fuel cell model. The window opened.

“I’m here to meet Slovan Soldo,” Levin said, in Croatian. “I know,” said the driver. “Get in, please.” He was dark-haired, stocky, fortyish.
This mission,
Levin thought.
Mareks everywhere. Mareks, Mareks everywhere, and none of them are real. Anwar would have said,
Nor any one is real,
to follow Coleridges’s original wording. But Anwar’s got his head up his ass.

They took the main road out of Rijeka, a journey of about thirty miles and twenty-five minutes. By the time they reached the town centre of Opatija it was still only late afternoon, a good time of day to see the town. In the nineteenth century, when Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hapsburgs had used Opatija as a holiday resort. Levin, whose other identity in the real world was founding partner of a large architectural practice, studied the ornate and elegant Hapsburg buildings. He thought of the long slow circlings of history: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Hapsburgs had been targets for nihilist groups like Black Dawn. They continued for a few minutes along the palm-lined main boulevard until they reached the gates of the Villa

Angiolina Park. From there they turned left and up into the foothills of Mount Ucka, the national park to the north of

Opatija. Roadside buildings fell away as they climbed higher, and were replaced by dense laurel woods and cypresses. The smell of their leaves and resin hung in the air. It was still only late afternoon.

The villa stood in a clearing in the laurel woods. It was surrounded by cypresses, dark verticals to the villa’s white horizontal, and it looked large and expensive. Levin thought,
Does Slovan Soldo own
this?
Rape pays well here.

The car stopped, and the driver—they had not exchanged a word since Rijeka—stayed put. Levin got out, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. It opened, apparently automatically, into a large reception room. He walked in, immediately killing his shock and smiling a greeting at those inside.
Never look surprised
was one of his maxims. As if they shared it, those inside smiled back.

Anwar was back at his house in northern Malaysia. He’d activated an immersion hologram in his living room, making it a dark and dripping alley. It was an expensively detailed hologram: smells of wet pavement and urine, sounds of running water and rodent scurryings. It suited his mood.

Do I have to guard her cat as well?

Arden Bierce had given him the usual crystal bead containing Rafiq’s detailed briefing. He could have played it at

Fallingwater, but preferred to take it back home. He pulled up a chair—in reality it was a black and silver Bauhaus original, but in the hologram it was a damp stained mattress—and settled down. He pressed the bead into his wrist implant, and watched the headup display resolve on the inner surface of his retina, a simple full-face shot of Rafiq.

“Thirty years ago,” Rafiq said, “this summit would have been about fossil fuels—oil,gas, maybe coal and shale. But alternative energy sources are now commercially viable: wind, sun, tides, high-atmosphere turbulence, nuclear fusion, hydrogen cells, even continental drift.”(
Yes,
Anwar thought,
and I know how much you’ve made the UN invest in them. You always play long.)
“This summit is about something much more basic, ever-present but ever-scarce where it’s most needed: water. It will be difficult. Some of the member states going to Brighton have been, or still are, at war over water rights.”

A tramp was pissing copiously against the wall of the alley.

It steamed and frothed on the mouldering brickwork. All the tramps who came and went in this hologram were different,

Anwar noted approvingly. It never quite repeated itself.

He liked immersion holograms. He had once turned his family living room (and later, his school gym) into the UN

Security Council Chamber, complete with all the then members, except that he made them naked. He enjoyed imagining what they were like under their clothes. He gave them liver spots, varicose veins, pimples on buttocks, local accretions of fat. And he made them carry on debating exactly as if they’d been clothed. In his hologram they were debating water rights—then, as now, a big issue.

He switched his attention back to the inner surface of his retina. Rafiq had been listing some more details of the summit, its proceedings and participants, then turned to the subject of its location.

“Brighton Cathedral…your friend Levin would like this. It’s a full-size replica of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, one of

Europe’s most eccentric buildings. The New Anglicans’ parish churches are all new designs, commissioned from contemporary architects—Levin’s partnership designed two of them— but they decided that their Cathedral should echo the style of

Brighton’s greatest symbol.

“The original was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince Regent, but the New Anglicans have built theirs at the end of a two-mile-long ocean pier. The Cathedral is surrounded by other buildings, architecturally matching, to house conference facilities, hotels, function suites, and media centres.

There are also commercial offices, studios,shops,restaurants.

The ocean pier has maglevs running up and down its length; and, of course, it’s easy to defend. The New Anglicans make a lot of money from it. It’s a world-class commercial centre.” Transcripts of Rafiq’s speeches showed that he spoke exactly as a good writer would write. They were like passages from William Hazlitt. Measured sentences of meticulous construction. Grammar like precision engineering.

“So: our hosts, the New Anglicans...” Anwar touched his wrist implant and paused the briefing. At his gesture the hologram died and his living room reappeared. He walked around the black and grey and silver Bauhaus interior, playing the last Tournament on a wallscreen. It hadn’t gone well, and he wanted another look at it.

It had taken place two weeks ago, in a large dojo in the UN complex near Kuala Lumpur. It was a six-monthly event, Rafiq’s idea. Sometimes Consultants needed actual combat between missions, to supplement their standard exercises.

It was open to all comers, inside or outside the UN: Special

Forces, mercenaries, martial artists, and anyone else who could satisfy the exacting criteria. The kind of opponents they would most likely encounter on actual missions.

Each Consultant was assigned six opponents by lottery, and had to face them simultaneously and unarmed.

Opponents were allowed any weapons except firearms, and could kill or injure, or try to. The Consultant couldn’t; he or she could only disable.

Tournament fees were large, with bonuses for every member of a group who killed or injured a Consultant. Stories circulated from time to time about injuries inflicted and bonuses paid—all untrue, but Rafiq found them useful urban myths. Reality was different. It was proven, in real missions, that a Consultant had a near-100 percent chance of defeating six proficient opponents, even if one or more had a gun.

Tournaments, however, remained oversubscribed.

Anwar fast-forwarded to the replay of his own combat. He was addressing his six opponents. His voice sounded strange because of the effect on his face of the Idmask, a nanobot injection which altered the configuration and proportions of his features. The alteration lasted only two hours, enough to mask him during a Tournament, and was random and different each time.

“You must genuinely try to kill or injure me. If I think you haven’t,” he kept his face straight, partly out of a liking for deadpan remarks and partly an effect of the Idmask, “Rafiq will do something worse than I ever could. Sue you for material non performance of contract.”

A couple of them smiled briefly, then it began.

A lot was written, some of it pretentious, about martial arts being a mirror for life. Anwar’s fighting style, however, exactly mirrored his life. It was cautious, measured, contained. He liked counterattack. He liked to come out of safety, strike, and return to safety—a pattern which characterized all his missions, and all his relationships such as they were. His maxim was to do nothing risky or unexpected—at least, by Consultancy standards, though to ordinary opponents he was frightening, inhumanly fast, and strong. Like most of The Dead, when he fought he stayed silent.

Original martial arts moves were transformed by The Dead into moves that were impossible for anyone without enhancements. Over the years The Dead had given these moves new names, often ironic or obscure, sometimes obscene. Like The Penumbra for Shadowless Kick, The Circumnavigator for Roundhouse Kick, The Flying Fuck for Heart Kite. And others, for which no previous equivalent move existed: The Verb, The Compliment, The Gratuity, The Abseiling Pope.

Unusually, the six opponents Anwar had drawn were all armed: a katana, a quarterstaff (Anwar’s own favourite weapon), various knives, even a flail. He circled among them.

His first instinct was to analyse them, to assess what they were; and it was wrong. His first instinct should have been to attack and disable them, because whatever they were, he outmatched them.

To any observer, he was a blur while they moved normally. To himself, seen through his own ramped-up senses, he moved normally while they were stationary or wading through treacle, expressions of shock at what he could do forming like geological processes on their faces, exclamations at his speed and strength oozing out of their mouths in low bass notes. But he’d only been starting cautiously, waiting to assess and counterattack.

Use speed first, his enhancement maxims told him. With speed, everything else is possible. The other “S” categories— strength, stamina, even skill—are secondary. But he didn’t follow the maxims. His speed was actually quite good, approaching that of the highest-performing Consultants, but his instinct was always to step back and take stock; it was why his rating was merely average. Still, it was enough to leave his opponents aghast.

He dodged the katana and knife-blades and quarterstaff by hundredths of an inch, which his retinal headups could measure and display if he wanted while he was still in motion. He didn’t want; he’d assessed their weapons skills to his satisfaction. The other weapon, the flail, was hardly worth his attention: fearsome to look at and dangerous if it connected, but slow and clumsy and telegraphed.

His private nickname for such opponents was Meatslabs, and it was always like this when he fought them. He could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste their inadequacy. And their shock, when he decided to let the one with the flail land a blow.Theflailwasasix-footclusterofsegmentedblackmetal whips, glistening like a tangle of liquorice. He let it land without apparently noticing. A good tactic: it set them wondering what he must be made of, inside. But it wouldn’t have impressed Levin or the others.

He tried some cautious counterattacks. His hands and feet, fingertips and toes (he fought barefoot) flickered out at nerve clusters and pressure points. Not yet to touch, but to see how well they defended. Quietly, carefully, he was assembling a kinetic dossier on each of them.

But he still couldn’t take full advantage. Something went wrong. One of his opponents, the one with the quarterstaff, suffered a broken collarbone: Anwar had mistimed a fingertip touch to a nerve-centre, and had to turn it at the last moment into a shuto strike to avoid killing him. The other five were on Anwar immediately, fired up by what he had done, and he wasted seconds adjusting to the new dynamic—slowing down to assess it, rather than using it to his own advantage. Then his speed reasserted itself, and he did to them what he’d failed to do to their colleague with the quarterstaff: landed precise fingertip touches to nerve centres and pressure points, enough to disable and immobilise, but no more. He finished them in thirty-six seconds.