“She’s very particular about appearances,” Anwar said.
“She is, but it’s also about security. Shall we go in?”
I could get here, Anwar thought, through all the detectors. In a luggage trunk. I could dislocate my joints to bend into it. I’d go to near-death. A timed hibernation. No body-heat detectors would find me: surface temperature would be the same as my immediate surroundings. No heartbeat or breath detectors would find me: pulse and breathing would be almost nonexistent, and random. No scanners or imagers or DNA detectors would find me: my body would echo the texture and shape of its immediate surroundings.
Enough of that for now. I’ll add it to my overnight comments.
“Shall we go in?” Gaetano repeated.
The Main Hall, on the ground floor of the Conference Centre, was an interior space as large as that of the Cathedral. Anwar was transfixed. He’d expected a vast white and silver interior, with clean swooping lines, and that was exactly what it was. But the sheer scale was deeply impressive. And its style couldn’t have been more different from the UN General Assembly Hall in New York. As with the Cathedral, and the rest of the New West Pier complex,the inside contradicted the outside.
The Main Hall was where the scheduled sessions of the summit would be held. There were adjoining smaller rooms for spin-off sessions, coffee shops and bars, translators’ booths. Actually, the Conference Centre was bigger inside thantheCathedral,becausetherewasnofullupperfloor,only a mezzanine: a balcony running round the entire circumference, with doors leading off. These opened into further anterooms for breakout sessions, and included the large room being refurbished for the signing ceremony. The contractors could be neither seen nor heard.
Anwar stood for a moment, memorising the lines of sight and tying them in with Gaetano’s briefing.
“Let’s go back to the New Grand. She’ll be waiting. And please make sure she gets back by four. She cancelled several meetings to do this.”
“She cancelled meetings?” Anwar asked in surprise. “Just to go into Brighton with me and collect a book?”
“I hope you don’t misinterpret what’s passed between you.”
“No. I know about her appetites. Everybody does. And,” he added, “don’t misinterpret my accepting this mission. It’s because of what she stands for, not her personally.”
5
Olivia was waiting in the reception of the New Grand.
Gaetano had suggested she didn’t wear her normal clothes. Not really a disguise, he’d said, just dress differently so your identity isn’t so obvious. She did, and it totally altered her.
She wore flat loafers instead of her customary heels, so she appeared even smaller than usual. She had on very little makeup. She wore a sweater and jeans—though the jeans were black and expensively cut—and her famously-coiffed blonde hair, which normally she wore so it softened the slight sharpness of her features, was pulled back off her face and tied in a ponytail.
Anwar thought she looked too natural. He preferred her in her structured and tailored and madeup mode: her Formal Normal look, as he’d privately taken to describing it. Also, she made him feel overdressed. He was wearing another of his expensive linen-blend suits, with a contrasting shirt of dark woven silk.
They took the maglev from Cathedral to Gateway—nobody appeared to give them a second glance—and walked out of the Pier onto Marine Parade, from where they descended the steps to the seafront.
“Do you know,” she asked suddenly as they walked along the shore, “how many Churches and religious centres there are within walking distance of where we are now?”
“Unaccountably, Rafiq’s briefing didn’t include that.”
“Loads of them,” she went on, as though she hadn’t heard him. “There’s St. Paul’s, West Street—Old Anglican. St.Mary’s, Preston Park—Catholic. The Middle Street Synagogue. The Buddhist Centre in North Laine. The Quakers’ hall in Meeting House Lane. The Al Quds mosque in Seven Dials.” She turned and looked up at him, straight-faced. “I like to know where they all are. If they go fundamentalist, I can tell them I know where they live.”
“If you add all of them together and multiply them by ten, they still wouldn’t be a tenth of what your Church done—” he looked back at the New West Pier “—over there.”
“Yes,” she said simply, and unhelpfully. She knew where he was going, but she wasn’t going to help him get there.
“The money for this…”
“I told you. Originally the founders. But now the Church has moved beyond needing their money. It has plenty of its own. And they don’t like it.”
They walked along the seafront. The mast-rigging of the small boats drawn up on the beach thrummed in the wind. They walked past the arches Anwar had walked past yesterday, and past some arcades with games. There was one where things popped up and you had to knock them down with a rubber mallet, only for others to pop up, also to be knocked down. She watched it for a while.
“Remind you of fundamentalists?”
“Yes,” she hissed, “and they’re filth! Scum! I hate their beliefs more than I love mine.”
“I only meant,” he said mildly, “how they pop up somewhere else if you...”
“Theocrats, creationists, racists, homophobes, all of them! The death of dialogue. ‘If you don’t agree with me, you’re better off dead.’ Knock them down in one place, they pop up somewhere else.”
“I don’t like their beliefs either, though it may not matter to you. But they’re not all filth. Or scum.” The words had a strange echo for him, of the greeting he would sometimes exchange with Levin. “Some of them just want certainty.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“Don’t hate them so much. It makes you ugly.”
“If I didn’t hate them so much, I wouldn’t be who I am! And what business is it of yours if something makes me ugly?”
“You’re right, it isn’t. But if you hated them less and understood them more, maybe even more people would support you. Including some of them.”
She looked up at him sharply. “I didn’t expect that. I thought you were just a Consultant.”
They climbed a stairway up the embankment to road level, just before the old Palace Pier. They walked across Marine Parade and into East Street, which led upwards, away from these a front. It was busy and crowded, a mix of shops and restaurants, mostly upmarket. There was the usual doppler effect of approaching and receding conversations, and the usual mix of smells: things being cooked, substances being smoked. Still nobody appeared to give them a second glance.
He spotted Gaetano’s people. He liked how they worked: discreetly, keeping a distance, constantly changing their patterns. She didn’t seem to see them, but he knew she’d assume they were there somewhere.
Ahead they could now see the original Royal Pavilion in Pavilion Gardens with the Indian Gate. The New Anglicans, careful as always, had made sure the original Royal Pavilion and the New West Pier were never in direct sight of each other.
Leading off East Street on the left was the Lanes district, with small esoteric shops selling bespoke interiors, designer clothes, antiques and curios and books. It was an area of narrow alleyways, sometimes called twittens and catcreeps. The walls were patchworks of old brick, flint, cobblestone, and stucco. The Lanes had been the original fishing village of Brighthelmstone.