“A better fashion accessory. Similar shape and similar eye colour.”
She said nothing, which was what she should have done the first time.
Fuck you the ginger cat meaowed again.
Zaitsev’s suite, like Anwar’s, was on the floor below. Zaitsev’s security people were there constantly, in shifts. Anwar’s temporary identity would have made it plausible for him to be visiting her bedroom; her reputation for coming on to any male within reach of her pheromones was well known. But Anwar, after the brush with Zaitsev and his minders at the reception, preferred not to be seen there.
He didn’t like her bedroom. The untidiness. And the dark voluptuous colours, which he liked on her dresses, but which were overpowering and intrusive as decor. He’d come to like the customary silver and white, and this was the only interior on the New West Pier—at least the only New Anglican interior―that didn’t have those colours.
He watched her sleeping. As usual, when she’d finished with sex or when (as he now knew) she had nobody else in bed with her, she fell asleep quickly and slept soundly. Her appetite for sleep, like her appetites for food and sex, came on suddenly and overwhelmingly, to the exclusion of everything else.
She isn’t real, he thought bitterly. Her appetites. Her mood swings. Her initial failure to notice him. Then she did. Then she wanted an involvement but maybe didn’t, then she didn’t but maybe did.
He wasn’t real either. His motives changed in response to hers, always the opposite and (like hers) maybe secretly containing the reverse of the opposite. Containers and contents. But his motives, he could explain. They were the products of his obsessiveness and self-absorption, which in turn were the products of his occupation. How could he explain hers? He couldn’t. She wasn’t real.
7
The summit droned on. It was the second day, October 16. The proceedings should have belonged in an atmosphere of dark wood and dust motes, not in this huge white-and-silver space with curving pearlescent walls and cool citrus air and perfect acoustics. It really was a very good venue. It got cooler and fresher and more pleasant as the proceedings got more contentious.
Olivia stayed to the first coffee break, then discreetly left. So did Anwar. She went across the Garden, into the Cathedral, and up to the Boardroom where she attended a series of routine meetings. So did Anwar.
The meetings in the Boardroom were beginning to drag, and Anwar made a decision.
Olivia was surrounded by colleagues and her normal guard of three trusted people in addition to Anwar. Proskar—who,at last, Anwar had learnt could also be trusted—had entered, not as a guard but as a participant in the meeting.
Anwar made eye contact, mouthed, “Thirty minutes,” and raised an eyebrow. She nodded.
He went back to the Conference Centre. The summit didn’t sound like it was going any better than when he’d last been there, but he wasn’t presently concerned with the summit. He managed to sidle through the main auditorium relatively unnoticed and mounted the staircase to the mezzanine. He walked along it, trailing his arm along the balcony rail, until he came to the Signing Room doors, which he opened and entered.
There were three of Gaetano’s staff, a woman and two men. They were heavily armed. They were sufficiently awake to train their weapons quickly and easily on the opening doors, though they’d probably been hours doing absolutely nothing. The Signing Room was pristine and undisturbed. The fake wall panelling looked as out of place, against the original curving silver and white walls, as it always did. But nothing had happened; no disturbances, no intrusions.
Their conversation with Anwar was lively and polite. Such monotonous duties, even in shifts, might have made them casual or resentful or careless, but they were none of these things. Anwar had never seen any traditional Meatslab tendencies among Gaetano’s people. They were never sloppy.
It was the second day of the summit. Anwar had visited the Signing Room on the first day, and planned to visit it on the third and fourth and beyond, at least once a day. It meant he’d be leaving her for a few minutes, but he’d have to do it. The Signing Room had a special resonance for him. Although, the way the summit was going, it might not be needed.
Six thousand miles and seven hours away, Arden Bierce was about to call Anwar and ask for another eidetic account of his questioning of Carne. She didn’t. Not because he wouldn’t be able to do it, but because she wouldn’t learn any more. There was nothing he’d left out the first time. It wasn’t a matter of finding something he’d overlooked. Anwar remembered everything and overlooked nothing: that was how he’d been made. This was about interpreting what he’d remembered, and that was her territory, and she’d have to go over it again and again. Until then, she couldn’t go to Anwar. Not during the summit.
She tutted irritably; not something she did often. Keep looking for it, she told herself, until it finds you.
8
The summit moved on to its third day, October 17. Olivia only attended the morning session for a few minutes, and so, consequently, did Anwar.
It was descending into chaos. The breakout sessions for mediation weren’t working. Members were adopting extreme >positions. Nobody was prepared to take a decisive first step until everybody else was. The usual standoff, which he’d heard Olivia describe contemptuously as, “I won’t put anything right until you put everything else right.” It struck a chord with him. It was the same attitude he’d often heard Rafiq describe in equally contemptuous terms. They both stood for its opposite: making some things better while you can.
The detail of it was something Anwar would normally have found absorbing, but he blanked it out. He’d also have found the delegates absorbing, but he blanked them out too. Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans. All at a strange economic and political cusp which in time would make America and Europe irrelevant. Maybe even China and India.
But the delegates weren’t within his compass. They weren’t what he was looking for. Or guarding her from. If they were, Gaetano would have found out and would have told him. He had to trust Gaetano to watch the known people, all checked and double-checked, and Gaetano had to trust him to look for the others, either unknown, or known but with something inside them that hadn’t been seen before.
There were hundreds of faces and names, each with a profile detailing individual history, background, and minutiae of behaviour. He carried them all in his memory. Nothing, so far. He was used to analysing microscopic deviations from normality, and hadn’t seen any yet. It was beginning to worry him. Days were piling up, with no sign of any move against her. He had the abilities (maybe) to stop it when it came, but not the temperament to wait when it didn’t come. He didn’t like things so open-ended.
He was pleased when she left and returned to the Boardroom, allowing him to follow her out discreetly.
Back in the Boardroom she took a succession of internal meetings on the Outreach Foundation. This time Anwar, who’d parked himself in one of the adjoining rooms—the one where he’d questioned Carne—did listen. He found it absorbing. It proceeded smoothly and efficiently, closing point after point, steadily building a whole corporate edifice. The senior New Anglican officials impressed Anwar almost as much as Olivia herself. Even her Finance Director, whose unwise attempt to slip something past her he still remembered, was smart and well-prepared. They all were.