Evensong

Rafiq was told of its arrival, but it was exhaustively analysed before he even saw it. Unsurprisingly it revealed no DNA, fingerprints or other residual traces, other than those belonging to postal staff. The paper on which it was written was expensive, but not exclusively so. Obtainable at better-class stationery retailers worldwide. So was the envelope, whose weave matched that of the paper; it was self-sealing and bore no trace of saliva at the seal. Whoever had written and sent it had touched neither envelope nor paper with an ungloved hand. The person who had signed the Recorded Delivery forms at the post office in Opatija had paid cash and given a false name and address. He left no traces on the forms he signed. Staff remembered a stockily built male, fortyish, with no unusual features. The post office’s CCTV wasn’t working.

The ink, like the paper, was of superior but not exclusive quality. The nib of the pen used to write it was italic, and electron scans revealed traces of its metals: a high quality but not unusual mixture. The handwriting was regular and neat, and found no exact matches on any database, though it was not so unusual as to find no approximate matches. In fact there were thousands, all inconclusive. One of the closer matches, ironically,was Rafiq’s own handwriting. One of the others was Anwar’s.

When the letter was finally set before Rafiq, he had already been told what it said:

The villa north of Opatija is no longer empty.

At about the time Anwar Abbas met Olivia del Sarto for the first time, Arden Bierce was making another journey in another silvered VSTOL. This journey was less leisurely. The VSTOL took one hour from the lawn in front of Fallingwater to the grounds of the villa north of Opatija, where it hovered while a door rippled open and she got out. It waited for her.

The whole area was cordoned, drenched with arclights, and full of Croatian police and UN Embassy people from Zagreb. She was waved through the front door and into the reception. It was empty. Just the polished wood floor (which reminded her of Fallingwater) and the remains of Chulo Asika.

It looked like he’d been hit by a maglev bullet train. Something made of stuff like stainless steel and carbon fibre and monofilament. Something streamlined and frictionless, and so enormous and fast that it wrecked him without leaving any trace of itself. Without noticing him, if noticing was something it did. Every major bone in his body was broken, and hadn’t had time, before he died, to set or regenerate. The note placed on his chest read One character no longer in search of an author. Neat italic handwriting, like Rafiq’s. And, like the letter he’d received, they’d analyse it but it would reveal nothing.

Whoever did this to him could have done so much more, but more would have been less. They could have torn him apart, left him in separate places around the room. They could have stuffed his penis and testicles in his mouth, torn off his fingers and poked them in to his eyes. She’d been a field officer in UN Intelligence before her promotion to Rafiq’s staff, and she’d seen such things before, usually done to civilian corpses by fundamentalist militias. But not here. This wasn’t gratuitous or vicious, just clean, functional annihilation.

Neck broken, back broken, arms broken. Arden Bierce felt instinctively what the forensics would later verify: whoever did this to Asika left no traces of any kind on his body. No blood, DNA, saliva, fibre, fingerprints, flesh particles. Look under his fingernails, she was going to tell the forensic analysts, and stopped herself just in time. They’d have done that already, and all the other things which she was in no state to think of now.

Consultants had been injured, even killed, but never like this. By firearms usually. Not in combat, unless they were massively outnumbered. Chulo Asika had been wrecked on an industrial scale, but she didn’t think he’d been massively out-numbered. This, she thought with a certainty which horrified her, was done by a single opponent. Bysomethingwhichhad just gone through Asika on its way to somewhere else.

Neck broken, back broken, arms broken. She hoped, but doubted, that all this had been done to him after his death. Is this what happened to Levin? Who are these people? Does Rafiq know about them? He has to. Rafiq knows everything.