Evensong

“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.