“You’ve torn a page out of a book for her?”
“Yes.”
When he’d recovered from what seemed like genuine surprise, Gaetano said, “I’ll warn you again, don’t imagine things she didn’t intend. She’s no good at relationships.”
“Neither am I.”
“So what did you say to her in Brighton?”
“Something about hating people less and understanding them more. It’s one of the few times she’s actually noticed me.”
“Is that where she got this idea for an Outreach Foundation?”
“Yes. I was talking about how she treats her political and religious enemies, but she widened it into building relationships...Relax, I don’t mean those kinds of relationships, and I don’t mean with me.” He gave Gaetano only her fallback position; not her primary one, which he’d laughed into nonexistence. “Relationships generally. She said she wants to start noticing people and valuing them. God knows, I had no idea that what I said would lead to that.”
“I don’t like it. If you harm her...”
“I know. You said all that before. I haven’t forgotten.”
3
Early evening in Brighton was early morning in Kuala Lumpur; the beginning of the following day. Arden Bierce had been working through the night.
She’d been reading and re-reading transcripts: of Anwar’s questioning of Carne and Hines, of her own questioning of the five others like Carne and Hines, of Anwar’s conversations with Olivia and Gaetano, and of her report to Rafiq given from Opatija as she stood over Asika’s remains. Something was in there, hiding in plain sight.
In the villa at Opatija, she’d hoped that Asika had been killed by a swarm of opponents and not a single opponent. But a single opponent was what she sensed then and still felt now.
Even Levin couldn’t have done that to Asika without suffering damage himself. In fact Levin couldn’t have done it at all, because Asika was better. And it was academic anyway, because Levin was as dead as Asika. Carne and Hines had told Anwar, and five others like Carne and Hines had told her: Levin died first, then Asika. But what they’d done to Levin was worse. There wasn’t even enough of him left to make a corpse. And they all remembered his face, when he realised he couldn’t defend himself. So what have they got that kills Consultants? How and where did they make it, or create it?
She had originally joined UN Intelligence as a field officer. She proved effective, not because she was particularly ruthless but because she understood people instinctively, whether colleagues or opponents. With colleagues, she established good working relationships and sensed what they needed from her. With opponents, she sensed what made them tick and how they’d act or react.
UN Intelligence was a source from which Rafiq drew many of his personal staff, and she was quickly promoted. She was the obvious choice for her present role, as the staff member with responsibility for The Dead. Only she could instinctively know what made them tick. Or Rafiq, who was even more impenetrable.
But after the meeting with Anwar, she wasn’t so sure about Rafiq. The meeting still worried her. Rafiq had told her beforehand how he would play it, how he would try to tease ideas out of Anwar by pretending to be struggling to understand these new opponents. She was unconvinced then, and remained unconvinced now, about how much he was acting. She sensed something in him which, in anyone else, might almost have amounted to uncertainty.
She’d never met Olivia del Sarto, or spoken to her directly, but she knew all about her. Why weren’t she and Rafiq closer? They stood for similar things. They should be natural allies. She was about to park that question for later, but then thought, Didn’t Anwar ask him that too?
Anwar. She rarely made errors of judgement, but her near-offer to him after the meeting was an error. Not a crucial one, but she wished she hadn’t made it. Or maybe it wasn’t an error, and her instincts were correct. It had made Anwar tell her, by the strength of his denial, how Olivia was sucking him into herself.
She normally ran relationships with Consultants by giving them space, by not crowding them. She always felt that she needed to find Anwar some extra space, for the way he worried about his lack of ability compared to some of the others. And for his obsessiveness, his insularity (he was solitary but not lonely), and his need for routine and a comfort zone, all of which were now being torn to pieces by this mission as it got more complicated and far-reaching than even Rafiq had suspected.
Or maybe Rafiq was still holding something back. It wouldn’t be the first time. Surely he’d have picked someone other than Anwar, if he’d known how this mission would turn out. Unless he knew something else about it. And Rafiq knows everything. Doesn’t he?
Anwar had told Rafiq of a detail that he sensed and that bothered him, a final detail that might overturn everything. She had also felt something, first at Opatija and again more recently, when it almost surfaced in Anwar’s questioning of Carne and Hines, and her own questioning of the others like them. She didn’t yet know what it was, or even if it was the same thing Anwar had sensed. But she felt that it, too, might overturn everything, and she would work until she found it.
Her style of work was careful and reflective and thorough, like that of Anwar. But she had something he’d never had: her empathy, her instinctive feeling for people. Though she suspected, because of how this mission was turning on him, that he might acquire it.
Or it might acquire him.
4
Anwar left the New Grand and walked back across the Garden to the Cathedral. Early evening was turning into night, and the night air carried the astringent scent of witch hazel to counterpoint the smells of damp earth and grass.
He entered the Cathedral. It was almost empty, with just a few worshippers in the pews. He only needed a glance, and an assessment of their positions and postures, to confirm that they were worshippers and nothing more. The Cathedral air was cool and still, with the usual hint of citrus.
He walked to the front of the pews, in the space before the altar where he’d fought Bayard and Proskar and six others and where she’d ridiculed him. He looked up at the silver cross on the altar. Like all New Anglican crosses it was plain and unadorned, with no figure of Jesus nailed to it. A cross, not a crucifix.
He felt a movement in the air, and ramped up his senses. He knew, before he turned around, that she had entered and was walking towards him. The air she displaced was her shape.
He didn’t know how to greet her after what had happened between them. But she solved it for him, to the surprise of the few worshippers.
“Fucking autistic retard.”
“Velvet bag of shit,” he replied.
They sounded like he and Levin had once sounded, greeting each other. Muslim filth. Jewish scum.
“About what you left for me,” she said. “I liked reading it again. But you tore a page out of a book.”
“Yes.”
“Nobody’s ever done something like that for me, except maybe Gaetano.”
“Tell me, why do the New Anglicans only have plain crosses and not crucifixes?”
He was steering her away from what happened in the Boardroom by getting her to talk about what she knew best. That suited her, too.
“We don’t do guilt and pain and misery, that’s for the Catholics. We do affirmation and aspiration. We don’t deny that they nailed Jesus to a cross, but we don’t need to wallow in it.”