‘Today,’ said Carver, ‘is the festival of Pentecost, or Whit Sunday as it is traditionally known in the Anglican Church, when we commemorate the appearance of the Holy Ghost among the apostles and its bestowal of the gift of tongues. I shall only be giving one reading, from Acts, if that is acceptable to you, sir, and will be using the traditional King James version. I find the poetry of the language far outweighs any loss of comprehension.’
Carver looked at Gushungo, who nodded his assent.
‘Very well,’ Carver continued, ‘then let us now begin our worship.’
In the road outside the house, Zalika Stratten started walking.
Carver read the words from his service book: ‘May grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.’
‘And also with you,’ the congregation of eight replied, with a far greater intensity than the mumbled responses Carver was used to from his British churchgoing.
The next item in his book was referred to as the Prayer of Preparation. The Gushungos and their staff seemed to know it by heart, joining in as he declaimed, Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name; through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, Carver mused. Now there was a line. How many people in the room could even pretend that their hearts were unsullied?
They moved on to the Confession, and Carver wondered what the Gushungos thought of when they told God that they had sinned against him and against their neighbours in thought and word and deed. Did they believe that? How could they then go right back and sin all over again? Perhaps the words were a sort of expiation, wiping the slate of atrocities clean and freeing the Gushungos to go back and commit more.
He read the collect for Pentecost, the special prayer dedicated to that day. It asked God to give his people ‘the right judgement in all things’. Carver was about to act as judge, jury and executioner. Never in his life had he been in such close, intimate contact with his targets so soon before their deaths. Even for someone without much religious feeling there was something very special about the act of joining together in prayer. It made them all complicit, in some way he could not quite define. It made the cold finality of what he was about to do all the more stark in its cold-blooded calculation.
Zalika was at the front door now. She pushed it gently and it swung open noiselessly on hinges oiled earlier that morning by Tina Wong. Zalika was equally soundless as she made her way across the marble floor, heading for the stairs.
The reading for the day was taken from Acts, chapter two, verses one to eleven. It spoke of the Holy Ghost entering the building where the apostles were gathered. Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
Carver felt like a ghost himself, slipping into this house and falling upon its inhabitants. He was quite calm now, dispassionate, the nerves having begun to vanish as soon as he set about his business.
When the reading was done, he led them all in the Creed, that confident declaration of a belief he could not quite share. It spoke of Jesus coming again in glory to judge the living and the dead. As he read those words from the service book, Carver happened to look up for a second and catch Moses Mabeki’s eye. There was a look of utter contempt on his face – the look of a man who had long since abandoned any concept of right and wrong in favour of calculation and expediency.
Carver was making his calculations, too. Very soon now he would have to find a way of killing Mabeki, independently of the rest. He assumed the guards would be carrying guns. If they were not, he would need another weapon. There must be a corkscrew behind the bar; held between the knuckles with its point slashing at Mabeki’s skin, it could be a useful weapon. The curtains had tie-backs; wrapped round a neck and pulled tight they would serve to strangle him. Wherever Carver found himself, there were always weapons to be found if he looked hard enough.
He was thinking this even as he brought the Creed to a close with an invocation of ‘God the giver of life’, and at that point even he could not deny the sacrilege, even the obscenity, of what he was about to do. But that knowledge did not stop him, any more than the Confession altered the Gushungos’ behaviour.
Now they were beginning the prayers that led to communion itself. Carver found himself laying a hand on the pyx filled with wafers, the chalice and the cruet of wine, to consecrate them. He led them all in the Lord’s Prayer, almost wincing as he said some of the words: ‘forgive us our trespasses… lead us not into temptation… deliver us from evil’.
Once they’d all intoned ‘Amen’, Carver said, ‘We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.’
And the Gushungos, their bodyguards and their servant-girls replied, ‘Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.’
Carver opened the pyx and looked very carefully at the small round communion wafers inside it. He picked out one of the wafers, said, ‘The body of Christ,’ and popped it into his mouth. It was arid, flavourless, and stuck like a cream cracker to the roof of his mouth, forcing him to prise it away with his tongue.
Carrying the pyx, Carver stepped forward to the Gushungos’ two chairs. The old man was sitting with his eyes closed and his hands held out, slightly cupped, in front of him.
‘The body of Christ,’ Carver repeated, placing another wafer into Henderson Gushungo’s hands.
‘Amen,’ Gushungo murmured.
He lifted his hands to his mouth and consumed the wafer. And from that moment, the President of Malemba, the Father of the Nation, the most notorious dictator in a continent filled with psychopathic leaders, was, irrevocably, a dead man.