This was how The Dead could step outside the world and perceive it as nobody else could: by ramping up their senses, for surveillance or combat. Sights and sounds and smells crowded Anwar. Each one was separate and distinct, and each one was already matched, in his memory, to a name and a face and a profile and an identity. More information than he wanted or needed. He powered down his senses, and saw and heard and smelt what everyone else did. The cool pleasant citrus air returned to his nostrils and the individual conversations sank into the background murmur.
It was now only a few minutes before 10:00, and the Signing Room was full. Delegates crowded into the main part, standing. Occasionally, spotting a photo opportunity, Zaitsev would smile or wave at someone, glancing to camera as he did so.
The media were at the back of the room, the other end from the panelled theatre set. Quite close, Anwar remembered, to where he’d put his bucket during his stay there. Cameras, mikes, lights were all angled towards the top table and the illusion of rectangular panelling behind it.
At one minute to 10:00 the top table party nodded to each other, and the room fell silent. Zaitsev took a deep breath and, exactly as 10:00 came around, smiled and began.
“Welcome,” he said. “It’s an unexpected path that has brought us here. A few days ago the path we’d chosen seemed impassable. Then we took another, and we’ve arrived at a place none of us would have thought possible.”
Humility, not triumphalism. A mere messenger, carrying something of greater import than his mere self. But Anwar noted the careful modulation of the voice, and the slight contrivance of the near-rhyming of Impassable and Possible.Still a good actor.
He continued, “You all know what happened yesterday: the new direction we took, and the Statement of Intent to confirm that new direction and our unanimous commitment to it. If you’ll permit me” (who’s going to forbid you? Anwar thought) “I’ll read out the summit’s official communiqué.”
He cleared his throat; looked around the room portentously; and began.
“The following communiqué on the United Nations summit on Water Rights was issued today,October 20,2060.
“The United Nations summit on Water Rights was convened by the Secretary-General and was held at the Conference Centre, New West Pier, Brighton from October 15 to October 19, 2060. Delegates unanimously agreed that the previously published Agenda should be set aside, and the following Statement of Intent was adopted by all those present:
“Brighton, October 20, 2060. We the undersigned—”
An explosion of dust and fragments, a tearing and rending of structural members, and the wall burst open. Not the wood-panel theatre-set wall whose construction Anwar had witnessed, but the original pearlescent white wall at the other end of the room.
Arden at last knew what she was looking for. But she hadn’t found it yet, and there wasn’t time. It was buried somewhere in Anwar’s questioning of Carne: not the transcript, that was just words on a screen, but the recording of his verbal report. It was probably some chance remark, maybe even an aside, which had slipped past her unnoticed. Anwar’s memory enabled him to reproduce not only the words, but the way Carne had spoken them.
She’d been playing it back for nearly two hours, since he last called her. Nothing. She played it back again, and there it was.
Carne’s voice was copied exactly by Anwar: not just every word, but the inflection of every word. It was almost mimicry. That’s what she should have listened for. Not the words, but one word. And how Carne had said it.
“They annihilated Levin. Then Rafiq sent Asika, and they annihilated him too.” They annihilated Levin (strong emphasis on the second syllable) then they annihilated Asika (no emphasis). As if it meant something different, something less than they’d done to Levin. Consistent with “there wasn’t enough left of Levin...”
Annihilate: Destroy completely. Reduce to nonexistence. Nullify or render void. Eradicate, erase, exterminate; extinguish, kill, obliterate.
“...what our employers did to Asika. And what they did to Levin, which was worse. And Levin’s face, when he realised he couldn’t defend himself. There wasn’t enough left of him to make into an exhibit, like the one they’d made of Asika.”
The one they’d made in that villa in Opatija.
What was done to Asika was merely physical. What was done to Levin was spiritual. Deeper, more absolute.
“Fuck.” She occasionally swore mildly, but she’d never spoken that word before. It felt strange, forming her lips over the f and her palate and tongue over the ck.
At last she’d found it. Hiding in plain sight, and she hadn’t seen; or in plain hearing, and she hadn’t heard. She’d only found it when she’d lied to Anwar to avoid telling him about Rafiq and herself, and now there was no time.
She flicked open her wristcom.
Anwar moved to the centre of the suddenly-emptying Signing Room, to stand between her and what had burst out of the far wall.
It was Levin. Except it wasn’t, anymore.
Levin would have greeted him with Muslim Filth. Levin would have had some clever one-liners to which Anwar would have thought up rejoinders too late. Levin wouldn’t have had a face like an unmoving theatrical mask, or eyes like dead, brilliant jewels.
Ridiculously, his wristcom buzzed. He cancelled it.
Levin wore a shirt and trousers of silver-grey, and thin gloves of the same material. Maybe woven monofilament. Or maybe a similar composition to Rafiq’s VSTOLs, which always seemed quietly indestructible.
They both ramped up their senses, and went to full combat mode. This time Anwar ignored the microscopic weave of fabrics or the particle-level building-blocks of colours or the body odours beneath perfumes, and funnelled everything towards Levin.
A kind of relativity: time and thought moved normally for them, but for everyone around them they were a flicker.
The Patel contractors hadn’t only built the fake woodpanelled wall, they’d built a replica of the original pearlescent wall. A perfect, seamless replica. At the other end of the room. Levin was already there when Anwar ordered the old panelling ripped out. Already there, in the wall three feet away, when I was crapping in my bucket.
Broadcasters, camera crews and delegates were crowded at the far end. When Levin burst out he didn’t just scatter them, he killed them. He was so fast that nobody got in a shot, except Gaetano. He hit Levin once in the throat, normally a killing shot, but Levin didn’t notice.
With his senses ramped up for combat, Anwar saw all this in what for him was normal time. Relativity: everyone else in the room, except Levin, was wallowing in treacle-time. Screaming in deep bass notes. Thinking at geological speed. Or dead.
Two of Zaitsev’s guards were moving in strange animated slow motion to cover him. The other three, moving with equal strangeness, went to face Levin in the centre of the room but he killed them without breaking step as he hurtled— flickered—towards Olivia at the top table. Everyone assumed the target was Zaitsev, who was now pushed under the table and covered by his two remaining guards. Olivia was standing behind the table, her mouth open in an O that seemed too big for her face.