Evensong

Devil’s Dyke was hardly the Grand Canyon, but still impressive: a mile long, three hundred feet deep, the largest dry valley in Britain. Clumps of trees and bushes dotted its slopes. The remains of an old Victorian funicular railway ran up the steep sides of its northern end, and there were other traces of its history as a tourist attraction: rotting concrete pylons which had once supported an Edwardian cablecar.

A few cars went past as he sat there, some of them slowing to look at the Cobra. Light was fading. He heard the buzzing of insects, the calls of rooks and starlings flying inland to roost before night set in, and the songs of finches and linnets in the trees. He’d read somewhere that birds weren’t singing when daylight dimmed, they were screaming: screaming because they didn’t know the dark would ever end. Chaos seethed under every serene surface: the grassy slopes where small chitinous things ate or were eaten, the silver and white interiors of the New Anglicans, even the impeccable quiet control of Rafiq. He thought of the figure in Munch’s The Scream, clamping its hands to its head under a red streaky bacon-rasher sky while all the world screamed its underlying chaos.

Chaos was normally anathema to him; he liked comfort zones, places where everything was just so. But now he had the germ of an idea, and it involved the deliberate creation of chaos. A particular kind of chaos that came from doing something unexpected and which would give him, at last, the initiative.

He considered it from all angles, and it seemed viable. It was almost worthy of Olivia: she did it all the time, leaving uproar and mess behind her, on her way to somewhere else. With her, doing the unexpected was natural. With him it would be acting, but he could still do it. He’d already done it once, on a smaller scale, when he’d changed his usual fighting style against Gaetano’s people in the Cathedral.

And maybe it wouldn’t entirely be acting. Maybe this is what I really am, inside. He’d never had a mission like this. Look at what it’s making me do. He’d always studied the differences between outside and inside in other people, never in himself.

Time. He fired up the Cobra’s motors and turbine, and drove swiftly back through the gloom and traffic thrombosis, to Brighton and the summit, Gaetano and Olivia.

He put the Cobra back behind the bars of its cage in the underground lockup. He strode across Regency Square, across Marine Parade, and past the huge Patel vehicles still parked outside the entrance to the New West Pier. He strode through the security checks—as far as they could tell, he was still unarmed and still had an identity—and into the concourse at Gateway, where he took a maglev to Cathedral. He strode through the Garden, through the reception of the New Grand, and into Gaetano’s office.

He gave Gaetano an exact, word-for-word account of the meeting with Rafiq, omitting only the references to the number and names of Consultants, and the conversation with Arden as he boarded the VSTOL. He spoke quickly and precisely, and with an unexpected energy. In less than half a day he’d travelled 13,000 miles to and from a difficult meeting, but he didn’t look or feel tired. He felt fresher now than he’d felt at Kuala Lumpur, because his idea still looked viable.

“So,” he finished, “Rafiq was a waste of time. He gave me nothing. For the first time since I’ve known him, I think he was struggling.”

Gaetano had listened calmly to Anwar’s account of the meeting, even when it touched on some of Rafiq’s stranger remarks. He listened no less calmly to Anwar’s assessment of Rafiq. After a moment he said quietly, “We’re struggling too, unless we work together. You know I’ve already made that decision.”

“So have I, now. That’s why I came here and told you all this. I think we’re all she’s got.”

“And you still think there’s something she hasn’t told you. You said to Rafiq that it was something specific, but it could overturn everything.”

Good, he thought, you zeroed in on that. “Gaetano—” It was the first time Anwar had used his name. Somehow it conferred a new and different identity. “—I need to be sure of this. The briefing you gave me: you left nothing out?”

“Nothing.”

“Not even some detail she mentioned which didn’t seem worth repeating?”

“I said, Nothing.”

Anwar needed only the briefest of scans to ensure Gaetano wasn’t acting. “Then I know what to do next. We must go to the Conference Centre. I want to see the Signing Room. I want you to bring at least ten of your people, ones you can trust, and I want them armed. I want Proskar and Bayard kept away. And I want the Patel contractors there too, the ones who’ve been working there. And I want her kept away, by force if necessary. And I want...” 

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