“Yes,” Gaetano whispered at the closing door,“we might.”
Olivia knew the four lines by heart, but still preferred to read them rather than recite them.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Each time she read them, the lines turned themselves inside out and presented another face to her. One of the faces was uncomfortably close to The Detail. Maybe Anwar already suspected it, when he tore that page out of his book for her. Maybe Shakespeare did too. Always ambiguous and multilayered, Shakespeare. Like the bastard of Rafiq and a Consultant.
She could have got her staff to search for a replacement book, but she didn’t. She searched personally, through dozens of antiquarian book dealers’ websites. One of the websites might even have been Anwar’s. She’d never know; most small business proprietors retained anonymity, and she had no idea of Anwar’s trading name.
She remembered exactly what he’d told her about his book, though: a replica of the Chalmers-Bridgewater edition of the Sonnets. Odd, because she hadn’t always noticed what he was saying. Then she remembered that that would have been after he’d said that thing to her in Brighton. She’d started to notice him a bit more after that.
Eventually she found a copy, ordered it, and had it express-couriered to her. It arrived in hours. On the inside title page she added an inscription You mistimed. O. Her writing wasn’t like Anwar’s, but large and upright with flourishes. She’d written it with a cheap marker pen that happened to be the first one within reach. The ink started to bleed into the weave of the paper almost before she’d finished writing, and she thought, Fuck, I should’ve got a proper pen; then it stopped, and what she’d written remained legible.
She’d go to his suite, on the floor below her apartments, and leave it on his pillow. No, that was too obvious. She’d give it to him personally. No, that was even more obvious. She’d ask Gaetano to give it to him. There was always Gaetano. Fuck, she thought again, these details. Why does everything have to be just so? While he’d been doing decisive things and made her mock him about almost turning into her, she was getting obsessive and almost turning into him.
Maybe literally, she thought sourly. He’s already pumped enough of himself inside me.
Anwar started to feel worse and worse about Proskar. He rehearsed uncomfortably to himself how he might try admitting to Gaetano that he’d behaved hastily and gone for an easy target; but Gaetano had already said as much, and admitting it to him wouldn’t do much practical good. The only thing that would, would be to find him. He could do something about that: he’d ask Arden to put UN Intelligence on it. But then, he thought, What if I was right about him, against all the odds, and I actually invited Marek back? Rather apt that Marek came from Croatia: vampires’ victims, it was said, had to invite them in.
But he knew he hadn’t done himself any credit in the last exchange with Gaetano, whereas Gaetano had; he’d shown control and restraint. And the next time they met, the following day, Gaetano showed exactly the same qualities and behaved as though nothing had happened between them. Anwar remarked on it, saying he was glad they could put other differences aside.
“We have to,” Gaetano said. “The summit’s getting closer. The preparations are mounting and I can’t afford to have baggage between us. But that isn’t why I asked to see you.” He handed Anwar the book. “She wanted me to give you this.”
Anwar looked at it, saw the title and the spine and the cover and the binding, and went cold. She could have left it on my pillow, or given it to me personally, but that would give away what she intended. I know what she intended.
She’d have had to trawl through innumerable dealers to find this. He knew, because he’d had to, to find his copy. And here she was, taking time to think of something that mattered to him, taking time—her own time—to get it. To get a toe in the door. To establish something they’d share. She’d thought to start a relationship, and he thought he’d laughed the idea out of existence, but she wasn’t afraid of his laughter. She wasn’t afraid of anything, and she’d never back down and never give up.
She’d just come back, again and again, each time more oblique and sinuous than the last. He should have remembered that about her.
Relationship. He spoke the word to himself, stressing the second syllable, and it tasted like copper in his mouth. His life was turning inside out. There was a rushing in his ears, which he remembered reading somewhere was what you heard when you started to die.
Relationship. He knew she was working on him. Sucking him into her. It would overturn his life, but his life was half overturned already. He half wanted it to continue, but sensed that she’d be worse, for him, than whatever they’d send for her.
Then he saw her inscription, and smiled without humour.
Several large corporations had a presence on the Cathedral Complex of the New West Pier—usually a boardroom and adjoining CEO suite. It was prestigious to have Board meetings, or to do entertaining or lobbying, at one of Europe’s premier business addresses. As a matter of course, Gaetano had had the companies on the New West Pier checked—maybe some of them were part of, or had links to, the founders or The Cell. He’d found nothing, but he got Anwar to ask Arden to do a deeper check. She called back with there sults, but first he briefed her on the events of the last few days.
From the wall of his suite, her projected image registered not only surprise, but genuine shock. “You tore a page out of a book for her?”
“Yes. And what about the results of your checks?”
Arden had found that years earlier Proskar did some freelance security work for a subsidiary of one of the Pier companies; neither that company nor its associates showed any traceable links to the Cell or the founders, and the security work was low-grade and short-lived. He’d been dismissed. His life really was chaotic then.
“And,” she said, “he’s now entered Croatia.”
“You know where to reach him?”
“No. He entered Croatia, then completely disappeared.”
“Just like...”
“Yes. Just like Marek used to do. If I was to find, despite all our checking and all the evidence, that you were right about him all along...” She made a face. “I need that like I need a third nostril.”
Anwar looked sharply at her image. She was half-joking, probably three-quarters joking, but it was not her usual kind of phrase.
Then she said, “We both have a lot to do,” and ended the call.
2
Arban Proskar was travelling legally on a genuine passport. He entered Croatia on October 8, and disappeared on October 9.
Also on October 9, late at night, Kiril Horvath turned his flatbed Land Rover onto the road that led out of Opatija, past the Villa Angiolina and up into the foothills of the Mount Ucka national park. Horvath was an illegal hunter; he hunted brown bears. They weren’t as big as grizzlies, but they were still very big: the biggest wild predators in the Croatian highlands, or anywhere in Europe. Conservation measures had rescued them from near-extinction, but they were still very rare.