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.
If this was done by a single opponent, then she knew of only four or five people in the world who could have done it. Four or five out of eighteen. And they were all accounted for, except Levin. But Levin couldn’t have done this without leaving traces. Levin probably couldn’t have done this at all, not to Asika. But Levin was unaccounted for. Either this had happened to him too, or he’d turned.
No. None of The Dead had ever turned. It was unthinkable. Their enhancements weren’t only physical but psychological. Even moral. Necessary when giving them such abilities. Then maybe there was another explanation. Maybe, whether or not Levin had turned, they had something else which did this to Asika. And probably to Levin too.
Something that kills Consultants. Something like Consultants, but better.
As chilling as this was, it also suggested an organisation, which in turn suggested lines of enquiry: how and where they did it, who they paid, how much it cost. Who are these people? She couldn’t imagine how they’d been unknown to Rafiq before now. But if there was an organisation, UN Intelligence would find it. She’d been whispering all this into her wristimplant as she picked her way around the villa. It would form her report to Rafiq, and she wouldn’t edit it, even the Rafiq knows everything remark. A bit stream-of-consciousness, maybe, but Rafiq trusted her first impressions.
Strange to say this about someone with his abilities, but Asika had always seemed to her like a gentle man. Quiet, courteous. His laughter was soft and reflective; never loud, and never aimed at a target. People felt comfortable around him. It wasn’t strange, of course. His abilities were exactly why he could be like that. To her knowledge he’d never killed or seriously injured anyone. In twenty-seven successful missions over nine years. He’d have retired soon.
No traces on his body. Maybe whoever did this wore frictionless material. Or was made of frictionless material. Or I’m over-imagining. Trying to draw conclusions, not from evidence but from the absence of evidence. She parked it for later, when she’d be able to consider it more dispassionately.
Anwar’s mission will be simple, compared to this. She liked Anwar. He’d never actually made a move for her, though he did sometimes flirt mildly. Asika was married and had never made any move. Levin had, occasionally. The last time was two years ago, at a retirement party, coincidentally for one of the two Consultants who’d broken Black Dawn. She’d reciprocated (Offer and Acceptance) and found herself over a table, where he took her lavishly and thunderously.
Table. Tables, sofas, chairs. She tried to look at the polished wood floor without looking at Asika’s body, to find the ghosting of furniture-shapes where the light hadn’t been able to touch the wood. She thought she saw ghostings in clusters, like the stone-white sofas and armchairs at Fallingwater, but in her present state she could be over-imagining. Still, this place must have had furniture of some sort. Where did it go, and when? Something else to be parked for now.
“One character no longer in search of an author.” If they knew Asika’s identity in the real world, how many other Consultants’ identities did they know? All of them, if Levin had turned and told them. And if Levin hadn’t turned and told them, if Levin was dead somewhere, how did they know Asika’s identity? Maybe Rafiq’s decision to let him run his business in person, rather than anonymously online, had backfired.She’d warned Rafiq at the time that it was ill-advised. Asika’s cover stories,involving absences to work on UNICEF projects,were painstaking and thorough; Rafiq had thought there were enough failsafes to conceal what he really did, but perhaps there weren’t.