Evensong

Something’s threatening her, Anwar thought suddenly. Something beyond the abilities of her own security people, so she wants one of us. And whatever it is, it’s specific to the summit, because she only wants me for the nine days.

“You’ve just assigned Miles Levin. Are our missions connected?”

“You know I can’t answer that.” Rafiq knew that they genuinely weren’t connected, but even if he’d said so he doubted that Anwar would believe him. Anwar had a tendency to look for pockets of darkness in everything.

In fact, Anwar had only asked about Levin to buy some time while he tried to think it through. She isn’t asking this as a whim, and Rafiq doesn’t grant whims. He must owe her. Or the New Anglicans, or their political and financial network.And for a lot more than just a conference venue. Do I cite the compact and refuse? Or find out what it is?

“Why did you ask me to do this?”

“I really don’t know. I just had an instinct that you would be the right one.”

Pause.

“I need Offer and Acceptance. Will you do it?”

“Yes.” As he spoke, Anwar heard a succession of doors closing, and others opening, all the way to England. 

TWO: SEPTEMBER 2060

1

In seven years Levin had carried out fifteen missions for Rafiq. None of them compared, even remotely, to this. It was why he’d been preoccupied when he met Anwar. If only I could have told him…It was heaven’s gate. It would take him to Croatia to locate Parvin Marek, the only person ever to evade The Dead.

“I don’t aim to destroy society,” Marek once wrote, after one of his atrocities, “but to demonstrate that it has already destroyed itself.”

Rafiq had given him a detailed briefing, but Levin already knew most of it. The case had always affected him deeply, particularly its later events.

Ten years ago Parvin Marek led a terrorist movement called Black Dawn. It wasn’t a mass movement, and had no interest in becoming one. It wasn’t religious, or even conventionally political. It was nihilist. It had no goals or aims, only methods; its slogan, sprayed over derelict buildings, was

“Justify Nothing.” The group consisted of Marek and seven others, who operated as one-person cells. They rarely met or even talked to each other, and had long ago cut all ties to family and friends. The Croatian authorities knew who they were but not where, which made them almost unstoppable.

Marek himself was quiet and withdrawn, an absence of all qualities except action. He didn’t shout, threaten, exhort, or inspire. He only did. What drove him was the Marxist dialectic seen through the dead eyes of nihilism. Society was an illusion, a mere theatre: religion, culture, values, art, politics, all merely a mask for economic forces. Destroy the economic forces? Impractical. But destroy the mask, and the economic forces will be uncovered and die.

Black Dawn attacked random civilian targets: stores, airports, stations, even schools and hospitals. They took no hostages because they had no demands. They were unique, not because of the numbers they killed, but the nature of their killing. Religious fundamentalists killed more people; but they had reasons, however insane, and would say so. Black Dawn had none, and said nothing.

The culmination came in 2050 when Marek bombed the UN Embassy in Zagreb, killing twenty Embassy staff and seven passersby. Before leaving, Marek went back and shot dead two people lying on the pavement who, he noticed, were still alive. Later he issued a statement saying that the bomb had been designed to explode outwards as well as inwards, to kill passersby as well as Embassy staff. Justify Nothing, his statement concluded.

The Croatian authorities formally requested UN assistance. They had never been able to locate Marek and the other seven, but UN Intelligence did. Two Consultants (not Levin or Anwar; this was before their time) accepted amission from Rafiq. In one night they took the seven, alive, and gave them to the authorities. Marek,remarkably,evaded them, but Black Dawn was broken.

It still wasn’t enough.