Evensong by John Love Read Free Book Online Page A

several years later, would never tire of telling Anwar about
    UNHQ’s ugliness, and what it signified. “Architecture,” he >would say, “was once described as frozen music. It is. But it’s also frozen hope.”
    Frozen hope. Anwar considered himself, and considered her. He knew which one the phrase fitted. And that’s what this mission’s about.
    He always preferred UNEX to the old UN. UNEX had a closeness of form and function: its outside accurately reflected its inside. It was an engineer’s construction, designed for results rather than idealism. The old UN was the opposite, a philosopher’s construction. Its membership was a microcosm of the entire world’s grudges and prejudices and conflicts. Its
    Charters and Declarations were impossible even before the ink had dried on them. UNEX’s aims were less ambitious but more achievable. Something like Make Things Better, Or At Least Less Bad. It didn’t compress easily into a slogan like Marek’s Justify Nothing, but it meant as much to Anwar as, presumably, Marek’s meant to Marek.
    So, despite the fact that the old UN was practically in his backyard, he joined UNEX. By that time Rafiq was Controller-General, and the difference between the two parts of the UN was becoming clear. He felt he’d chosen correctly. He had a hope, then, that UNEX really could make things better—a hope which had now become frozen in him. He’d carried on doing the specialised work for which he was frighteningly well qualified, but these days he did it automatically. Without pride. Without passion or mission or meaning.
    As the shadows continued to lengthen around him, he knew he’d at last found what he’d been looking for. It concerned her. She’s always out there. Always at the sharp end, putting herself up to be judged, fighting her case. Often viciously, but always openly.
    And it concerned him, too. He was her opposite: standing apart, coming out of his comfort zone to make simple in/out strikes (for which he was guaranteed success, against out-matched opponents), and then going back.
    He’d taken the easier, stealthier way. Looking back on it now, it carried almost a flavor of cowardice. She had more risk, more genuine risk, in any seven days of her life than he’d known in his seven years with the Consultancy.
    I’ve actually been like Marek, he thought. Marek’s comfort zone was the darkness of nihilism—he reached out of it to strike, then went back into it. I’m anonymous, like him. Marek and me at one extreme, Olivia del Sarto at the other. And Rafiq too, he’s like her—willing to try and do something, and be judged on it.
    Most of her life has been like that broadcast. Mine’s been arid, hers is real. I got this bodyguard assignment because I’m less valuable than people like Levin or Asika. And that’s all. But he shook his head violently, partly to clear it and partly to deny the thought. No, he wasn’t inventing pockets of darkness. Every instinct told him there was something more to this mission. She didn’t just want a Consultant as a personal fashion accessory to parade at the summit. Something was genuinely threatening her. Something beyond even the abilities of her own security people. She wanted a Consultant because nothing else could protect her.
    He would go to Brighton early. He would prepare and acclimatise. Her life is more valuable than mine. Hers has actually amounted to something.

THREE: SEPTEMBER 2060
1
    Anwar was not entirely unacquainted with Brighton.
    One of the UN’s VSTOLs had flown him from Fallingwater to a small private airfield on the Downs, where he was met by a car that took him into Brighton. The car dropped him on Marine Parade, at the gateway to the New West Pier at the end of which, two miles into the ocean, stood Brighton Cathedral. It was late September and the summit was more than two weeks away: October 15, for nine days. He’d spend the two weeks in briefings with Archbishop del Sarto and her staff. But