Bayard still bore the red abrasion at his throat caused by Anwar’s Verb. Or Adverb. “How’s Proskar?” Anwar asked him. He’d meant it genuinely, but Bayard didn’t take it that way.As he left with Gaetano he murmured to Olivia, while smiling at Anwar,“Inferior. Only the inferior ones get bodyguard duties, and they don’t like it.”
There were several dishes, all Thai. Including Anwar’s particular favourite, a Thai green curry. It had a thin consistency, like dishwater. It didn’t look appetising, but when cooked properly, as this was, it had a delicate aromatic taste.
“How did you know I like Thai food?”
“I asked Rafiq. Or rather, I got my staff to ask his staff.”
They finished the meal quickly, and without much conversation. He watched her while they were eating. She was small and immaculate. Her dress was similar to the one she wore earlier: like a ball gown, with a fitted bodice and floor-length bell skirt. This one was also velvet, but purple. Perhaps indeference to the occasion, she wore evening gloves.
And she ate like a starving tramp: far more, and far more voraciously, than he did. Her appetites, he remembered. She must be one of those irritating people who never seem to put on weight.
“Mm, I do like food.”
“Yes,” he said, “I think it’s here to stay...Why did you say they aren’t people?”
“The same reason you aren’t. You were made like you are, you never had to work at it. And you move in and out of the world, with an ID that isn’t your real one.”
“Wasn’t this evening supposed to be a briefing about them?”
“It was, but I changed my mind. You’re scheduled to see Gaetano tomorrow at nine. He’ll brief you. Until then, I’ve told you enough.”
He shot her an irritated glance.
“Don’t worry, there’s time. We have more than two weeks before the summit. And whoever-they-are won’t do whatever-it-is until the final day.”
He didn’t like her tone, and told her so.
“I don’t like yours. What, you thought this was going to be simple and tidy? In and out, like your other missions?”
“I hope Gaetano will be more informative than you...”
“He usually is.”
“...because I have trouble buying what you’ve said. Dark forces threatening you? So dark that even Rafiq doesn’t know about them? So threatening that you question whether a Consultant can protect you? And then you describe them as if they don’t really exist. As ‘whoever-they-are.’ As if you don’t need protection at all.”
“Why don’t you like being a bodyguard?” she asked, as if she hadn’t been listening.
He wanted to press the point, but decided not to; he’d rely on Gaetano’s briefing. “Because we’re seen by the person we’re protecting, and by others around them. It compromises our identity in the outside world.”
Another sideways look. Her next expression began to form, like a delayed echo, and he guessed it correctly. Mocking. “And what is your Identity In The Outside World?”
“Antiquarian book dealer. When this is over I may need to change it, or change my appearance. Another reason we don’t like bodyguard duties.”
“Antiquarian…”
“Book dealer, yes. Tomorrow, after I’ve seen Gaetano, I’m going into Brighton to pick up a book.”
“Ah. Then I think I’ll go with you.”
“Why?” He was genuinely surprised, and immediately wary.
“Every time I go into Brighton, Gaetano insists on surrounding me with his people. In the next few days it’ll be even worse. Tomorrow will probably be the last chance I’ll get just to walk around Brighton without being surrounded. After all, I’ll have a Consultant...Relax,” she added, as he shot her a suspicious glance, “that’s all it is. Sometimes things really are no more than they appear on the surface.”
She was looking at him differently, as if she actually noticed him. Not as a person, he suddenly understood, but as the latest implement to scratch an itch which had begun somewhere in her velvet darkness.
Her other set of appetites. They do come round quickly. He started to get up.
Just then, they were interrupted.
3
At 10:00 p.m. in Brighton, it was 5:00 a.m. in Kuala Lumpur; the morning of the following day. Rafiq stood on the lawn in front of Fallingwater. He sometimes came there to watch the sunrise, when he had things to think about. He was apparently alone, but his security was all around him at a discreet distance.
Apart from his concerns over Asika and Levin, he also had an organisation to run. Today would be a big day. He was in the final stage of his restructuring of UNIDO. It was a brutal restructuring; Yuri Zaitsev, the Secretary-General, had openly questioned it. Also, Rafiq had precipitated a crisis by refusing to sign UNESCO’s year-end operating statement until more rigorous performance goals were set. Both issues would produce internal conflicts which, although he would win them, were likely to be bloody.
He took out a cigarette. As nobody else smoked indoors neither did he, even in his inner office. Where, he remembered, he’d left his lighter. Arden Bierce, who had also been at a discreet distance, came up to him and gave him hers. She didn’t smoke, but always carried a lighter when she was with him.
He watched the sunrise. Dawn. Black Dawn. He remembered the marquee which had stood here ten years ago. It wasn’t just my family. It was others. Empty places at other tables, empty halves of other beds. And it’s still unfinished business.
“Thanks for the light. And thank you for attending the funeral.”
“Thank you for not asking how it went.”
He saw she was doing that thing which people do to stop crying: clenching the face, compressing the lips, breathing in through the nose, looking upwards as if gravity might slow the tears. To his relief, she succeeded.
He lit his cigarette and handed back her lighter. He inhaled. A filthy and antisocial habit, he knew, but he never smoked more than one or two a day, and he wasn’t a lifelong smoker; he’d started only ten years ago.
“I told Chulo he should wait until he retired before having a family, but... You know, of all of them Chulo was the only one I really felt comfortable with.”
She nodded but said nothing.
“I listened to your report,” he added.
Still she said nothing, for a while. Then it all came. “Who are they? Why would they do this? And how could they do it, to Chulo? And where’s Levin?”
“I think,” he said slowly, “that maybe they were just trying out. Maybe they killed Levin to get us to send someone even better…We’ll get the rest of it, Arden. Our forensics and intelligence are the best in the world, just as the Consultancy is the best executive arm in the world. They’re chasing down those questions you asked, and dozens more like them. We will get the rest of it.”
She nodded. She knew he’d come out here to think about Asika and Levin and UNIDO and UNESCO, but she knew he’d also been remembering his family. Now even more people had died trying to catch the man responsible, and he had sent them. She could read it in his face. She didn’t often see him like this, and it distressed her.
Rafiq was ruthless and cunning, but he inspired personal loyalty. People who worked for him—those he hadn’t discarded or ruined—knew that within the constraints of his labyrinthine political agendas he still, usually, tried to make things better. Not perfect, but better. His compact with The Dead stated that they should serve the office of the Controller-Generaclass="underline" not the individual, but the office. In reality, they served the individual. And now the nineteen deadliest people in the world (No, she thought, eighteen. Or is it seventeen?) were facing a new and apparently unknown opponent. One which had already done something unthinkable.