Evensong

Arden had no detailed proof that he’d been one of theirs at the time of Black Dawn, but all her instincts suggested it. His particular role had probably been to destabilise Balkan politics, or to provide misdirection while they destabilised politics in more important areas. He was notable only because his agenda and philosophy were unlike anyone else’s. That would have been his value to them. He didn’t kill as many people as other terrorists, particularly the religiously-motivated ones, but he killed them more unexpectedly.

And he went back. At the UN Embassy in Zagreb, with passers-by. At Fallingwater, with Rafiq’s family. He went back, shot them in the head to make sure they were dead. How could you survive that, Laurens, and still come back here?

But that was as far as that particular route took her. Interesting historically, but Marek was dead.

She considered their other instruments.

Richard Carne was one of their minor functionaries. One of many. He’d been in London to address the Johnsonian Society. Only a short trip from there to Brighton. He wouldn’t have been privy to his employers’ detailed plans for Olivia, but possibly he’d heard something—enough to make him want to take a stroll round the famous New West Pier. Maybe he just wanted to see the Cathedral and Conference Centre where it would happen. He wasn’t doing detailed planning; those he worked for would have done that long ago. Maybe this was just idle curiosity, and genuine coincidence.

Or was it? Maybe they’d sent Carne deliberately. Or maybe they’d known he’d go to Brighton anyway. Either way, they’d known Anwar would want to question him personally, and they’d known Carne would defeat Anwar in the questioning. Not just defeat him, but leave him reeling.

She’d studied exhaustively what Carne had told Anwar. Hines had told him similar things. So had the five like Carne and Hines who she’d questioned. But, even though she hadn’t been present, there was something about Carne’s questioning to which she needed to return. Park it for now. It might surface when I stop looking for it.

At the end of the first day, Anwar was with Olivia in her bedroom. He slept there now, and would do until the summit was over. The day before the summit began, he had decided to go to full close-protection mode.

“I’ll take the sofa,” he told her. “Don’t worry about these chocolate wrappers, I’ll move them.”

She didn’t answer.

“And the bits of paper. And the discarded clothes.”

Fuck you the ginger cat meaowed from somewhere underneath the sofa.

“You know, I always imagined you more with a Siamese cat.”

“Why?” she asked, reluctantly. She’d have preferred to avoid conversations with him about anything except security matters.

“A better fashion accessory. Similar shape and similar eye colour.”

She said nothing, which was what she should have done the first time.

Fuck you the ginger cat meaowed again.

Zaitsev’s suite, like Anwar’s, was on the floor below. Zaitsev’s security people were there constantly, in shifts. Anwar’s temporary identity would have made it plausible for him to be visiting her bedroom; her reputation for coming on to any male within reach of her pheromones was well known. But Anwar, after the brush with Zaitsev and his minders at the reception, preferred not to be seen there.

He didn’t like her bedroom. The untidiness. And the dark voluptuous colours, which he liked on her dresses, but which were overpowering and intrusive as decor. He’d come to like the customary silver and white, and this was the only interior on the New West Pier—at least the only New Anglican interior―that didn’t have those colours.

He watched her sleeping. As usual, when she’d finished with sex or when (as he now knew) she had nobody else in bed with her, she fell asleep quickly and slept soundly. Her appetite for sleep, like her appetites for food and sex, came on suddenly and overwhelmingly, to the exclusion of everything else.

She isn’t real, he thought bitterly. Her appetites. Her mood swings. Her initial failure to notice him. Then she did. Then she wanted an involvement but maybe didn’t, then she didn’t but maybe did.

He wasn’t real either. His motives changed in response to hers, always the opposite and (like hers) maybe secretly containing the reverse of the opposite. Containers and contents. But his motives, he could explain. They were the products of his obsessiveness and self-absorption, which in turn were the products of his occupation. How could he explain hers? He couldn’t. She wasn’t real.   

7

The summit droned on. It was the second day, October 16. The proceedings should have belonged in an atmosphere of dark wood and dust motes, not in this huge white-and-silver space with curving pearlescent walls and cool citrus air and perfect acoustics. It really was a very good venue. It got cooler and fresher and more pleasant as the proceedings got more contentious.