Its colour was distinctive, too. It wasn’t the usual rather vulgar Ferrari orange-red, but a beautiful deep dark red. Like her dress. By now it was only three cars behind him, and he could make out Gaetano’s face behind the windshield. He’d never talked about cars with Gaetano before, but a Ferrari Octavian would seem about right for him. As fast as the Cobra. Maybe even faster. Certainly more conventionally beautiful.
Gradually, coming out of Seven Dials, the traffic thinned. The buildings lining either side of the road were less densely packed, and the road itself was faster and wider. Time. Anwar floored the accelerator, and the Cobra did what it had always been designed for, both in its original incarnation and in its replica form.
The car chase that followed was something whose irony wasn’t lost on Anwar, and probably wasn’t on Gaetano either: it was a repeat of the Cobra-Ferrari Wars at Le Mans in the 1960s, though this one lasted only a fraction of the time. The Ferrari was at least as fast as the Cobra, and Gaetano was a driver of almost equal ability to Anwar. He couldn’t quite catch Anwar, but Anwar couldn’t quite lose him either.
In this fashion, though only for a few short miles, the two cars hurtled out of Brighton in the direction of the Downs. Then Anwar thought, Why do I need to lose him?He slammed on the brakes, downshifted the gears, and did a handbrake turn, so the Cobra was facing the Ferrari as it came round a bend.
He’d stopped right on the edge of Devil’s Dyke. In the small car park overlooking its northern slopes. He smelt the damp earth and grass, the same smell from before. They both got out of their cars and walked slowly towards each other. I always knew I’d come back here before I left Brighton. I never thought it would be like this.
“I’m done here,” he said to Gaetano. “I’m going to the Downs to pick up a VSTOL back to Rafiq. You should go back too. We don’t need this.”
“I can’t,” Gaetano said. “Not now.” There was something wrong about his voice, something thick and choked. He made an odd, swift movement inside his jacket.
“Don’t go for the gun,” Anwar said. “Or the knife. I’d be quicker.”
“Then...”
“Not combat, either. I’d win. And it’d be an anticlimax after the Signing Room.”
“Why did you do it?” Gaetano’s eyes were red-rimmed. Anwar knew what she’d meant to him, but he couldn’t for the life of him imagine Gaetano actually shedding tears.
“I can’t tell you. And you wouldn’t believe me anyway. Go back now. This belongs to another time.”
“I’ll hunt you down,” Gaetano said quietly. “For the rest of my life, and yours. I’ll never stop. I will find you.”
“I know you will. But it won’t be me.”
JUNE 2061
She knows Gaetano is coming. Now. This evening. It will be either here in her flat, or in Rochester Cathedral. She doesn’t want it to be in the Cathedral.
She decides she won’t go there tonight. She’ll miss Evensong.
And Gaetano isn’t the only one getting closer. There’s also Michael Taber. She remembers her conversation with him after last week’s Evensong, and thinks wryly, He’s too clever. Surely Deans of Cathedrals aren’t supposed to be like that. Only people in positions like Rafiq are supposed to be like that.
Rafiq. She thinks of her meeting with him, at Fallingwater, on October 22, 2060.
“I’ve done your bidding. I completed the mission. I avenged your family. Now I want out of the Consultancy, and I want you to do this last thing for me.”
“Are you sure about this, Anwar?”
“Yes. I can’t remain as I am.”
“We can make you look like her on the surface, but you won’t be her.”
“Surface will be enough.”
Rafiq paused, and considered yet again. The whole idea was so insane he kept going over and over it, trying to find reasons for refusing. Psychologically he’s blown to pieces. He’s no use to me now, he’ll never recover from what he’s done. We’ve put a fortune into him, but sometimes with Consultants you just have to take the hit and let them go. Like Adeola Chukwu, when she became Adeola Chukwu-Asika. Also, he was never really one of the top ones, even now. And…what he said. I owe him.
“Our surgeons will brief you fully, but I can give you some of the details.”
“Please. I’m good at details.”
“They can’t make you exactly her size: too many major bones to shorten. You’ll be a little taller than she was, but the resemblance will still be close. Your enhancements will be reduced. You’ll keep some of your abilities, but not enough to face people like Gaetano. The surgery will take weeks, and so will the physiological and psychological adjustments. And we can’t give you her mind, or soul, or identity. That’s gone, Anwar. We only do bodies.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Or do you really think that looking like her will somehow make you turn into her?”
“No. I don’t think that.” “Then why do you want this?”
“So I can go to churches she went to, looking like her. Walkinplacesshewalked,lookinglikeher.Walkinherworld for a while, rather than live without her in mine.” He wasn’t consciously paraphrasing Jim Weatherly’s old song, but he recognised the words when he spoke them. They fitted.
She has left the front door of her flat open so she can hear them when they enter the hall and walk up the stairs. She expects there will be more than one. Gaetano, certainly, and perhaps Proskar and two or three others.
She is still shabbily dressed. Her cheap blue jeans are faded and frayed. Her blonde hair is lank and greasy, not coiffed and swirled to hide the sharpness of the features Rafiq’s surgeons have recreated so closely.
And all this time she hasn’t been able to bring herself to wear a skirt or dress. Anwar has been remade to look like Olivia. Does that mean Anwar could get an erection if he stood in front of a mirror and looked at his remade body? He could, if the remaking hadn’t been so thorough, and if he still had a penis. But Rafiq’s surgeons have thoughtfully given him a clitoris.
Anwar is long gone. She knows she has to keep thinking of him in the third person. And Olivia, too. She’s neither, and both. She doesn’t know where her identity resides.
Or where she resides. She has been drifting from one seedy flat to another, from Evensongs at one church to another, but she has always wanted Rochester Cathedral to be her final destination. She remembers that Olivia liked it, and liked the quiet understated companionship of the Old Anglicans. She remembers that Olivia told Anwar that, once.
The irony isn’t lost on her. The ones who wanted Olivia dead, the ones Anwar had fought and defeated, are now satisfied. The ones who loved Olivia, who fought along side Anwar to protect her, are the ones coming for her this evening. Or coming for me, whoever I am.
She thinks, how would Anwar feel about all this? He’d loved a woman who’d been abducted and force-fed the soul of a man—an unspeakable man—and the man’s soul started to revert back to the woman’s. And now Anwar is a man’s soul inhabiting the surgically-replicated body of that woman, and knowing, because the body is only a replica, that he’ll never turn into her.