Tangle's Game

by Stewart Hotston

  ‘Without you, she’d have peeled me like a banana.’ She smiled, a smile she reserved for oligarchs and billionaires from whom she wanted business but who weren’t sure she was the woman they wanted to work with. ‘You saved my life and now I feel like I should help you get back what Tangle owes you.’

  Neither of them mentioned that she’d been about to pay them before Ule had made her entrance. Stornetta gingerly felt the bridge of his nose while Haber wiped blood from his face and checked whether he could still move his knee freely.

  ‘You are exactly the kind of people I need. Capable, certain of what needs doing. Will you do it?’

  They didn’t move, but she could see umms and ahhs in the thrusting of hands into pockets, the refusal to meet her gaze for fear of agreeing to her terms too quickly.

  Holding up the drive so they could see it, she gave them the deal closer. ‘This will make a difference, but I don’t want some government telling me what I can or can’t do with it. I know you feel the same way. Come with me. Give me a chance to see what’s so goddamned important and I’ll settle Singh’s debts.’ They were almost there, and she wasn’t done. ‘I’m going to leave now. I’m already packed. We’ll be gone one night—you can get underwear at the airport.’

  She stood up, done. Turning to the fridge, just so she’d have something to talk to, she said, ‘Tatsu, buy me tickets for Tallinn. Earliest flight from Heathrow. I’ll need three. Business class, flexible return, international airline only.’

  ‘I assume you have passports?’ she added over her shoulder.

  The two men nodded and just like that they were taking her to Tallinn.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SHE MET THEM at Heathrow the next morning, having tended to their bruises and egos. Amanda had fresh clothes and the slenderest backpack she owned, on the assumption they wouldn’t be there more than a night. She hated waiting for luggage—she’d rather buy knickers at her destination than put anything in the hold. Amanda put Tangle’s book on the shelves among her others, but it looked out of place among her well-thumbed texts on financial engineering and collateralised debt obligations. She settled on wrapping it up again and posting it to an address chosen more or less at random in the village where her parents had a holiday home.

  They arrived at the airport after the morning rush hour. Transit through Heathrow passed with no detentions, poorly-lit interrogation rooms or menacing government agencies. To Amanda’s surprise Haber and Stornetta were waved through the electronic gates without a glitch.

  Amanda knew nothing about Tallinn other than it being in Estonia, and even that wasn’t definite in her mind until she looked on a map; it could have been in Lithuania or Latvia. She couldn’t even tell the three countries apart on a map.

  Haber and Stornetta were stopped at the entrance to the business lounge.

  ‘They’ve got business class tickets,’ said Amanda testily to the steward at reception who’d denied them entry.

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ said the steward non-committally. ‘We get this sometimes. The system has ruled them out.’

  ‘Their scores are too low, isn’t it?’ said Amanda, turning away without waiting for verification. ‘You two, come here.’ They hung back, looking uncomfortable. ‘What’re your scores?’

  ‘We don’t do that shit,’ said Haber dismissively.

  Stornetta looked a little more concerned. ‘What we do doesn’t really chime with the kinds of behaviour your lot look for in a good citizen. We ain’t bad people’—said with a straight face—‘but what’s normal for us ain’t for polite society, yeah?’ Amanda cursed for not thinking of it. ‘There’re loads of rich fucks who come through here no problem though, right?’ continued Stornetta.

  ‘They’ve probably got image consultants,’ said Amanda bluntly. Her gangsters weren’t in that league. With a breath she painted a smile onto her face and turned back to the steward. ‘They’re with me. They’ve got the tickets. I’m allowed in, aren’t I?’

  The steward nodded enthusiastically. ‘Ma’am, as a valued member of our frequent fliers programme, you’re welcome to go on to the first class lounge.’

  She pouted, a little disgusted with herself but not enough to stop. ‘Then could I vouch for these two? Please?’

  The steward eyed them as if they were about to crap on the floor in front of him, but smiled at Amanda. ‘Of course, Miss Back.’

  Sitting in the airline’s business lounge warming herself on the glow of victory, Amanda brushed up on the basics. A couple hundred miles from St Petersburg, across the Gulf of Finland from Helsinki. Tallinn might have been the capital city, but it was hardly bigger than Manchester in England.

  She didn’t bother asking the other two if they’d been. They were too busy loading up on free booze and food. They were like graduates in the first few weeks of work, who didn’t know how to stop gorging on free stuff everyone else regarded as background noise.

  ‘This is the best curry I’ve had in yonks,’ said Stornetta. ‘And I spend loads of time up Mile End way.’

  Amanda didn’t really understand the significance of the statement, but the beatific look on his face, even on the third bowl, communicated just how serious he was.

  Haber took a more traditional approach, settling for a beef stew and dumplings with bread stacked on the side of the plate like a wall on three of the four sides.

  For her part, she didn’t enjoy the food in the lounge; everything tasted slightly metallic, as if regardless of the specific dish it had all been piped in together from a great distance so that the flavours, no matter how startling they should have been, felt flat and leeched away.

  Amanda checked her feeds, concluding she’d missed nothing in not going out with friends as their tedious in-jokes and bitching about jobs and partners surfaced. After that she caught up on work emails, which were by some bizarre stroke of fortune veering towards the benign rather than the catastrophic.

  A small plastic face appeared in the top right corner of her tablet, and a chat box opened beneath it.

  Interesting, wrote Amanda. The Info Sec group at work are supposed to have disabled anything other than their approved messenger options.

  Tatsu blinked. Their security is designed for an organisation of fifty thousand, it’s hardly adequate for those needs and leaves individual applications grossly insecure. They’re basically putting a blanket over the top of a picnic and hoping the ants don’t realise they can just walk in underneath it. Its avatar was hard to look at, the eyes slightly too far apart, the skin close to photorealistic but shiny and anaemic. If there was an ethnicity behind it she couldn’t identify it.

  Can’t you choose a proper ethnicity, something that doesn’t make my eyes water? she typed. She didn’t stop to let Tatsu consider. Who are the… but the keys stopped responding to her fingers.

  Don’t try to write anything like that down, wrote Tatsu. Not until we’re at our destination. Plenty of agencies watch for their name and we’re in a location where there’s heightened scrutiny.

  She nodded, tentatively testing the keys again, pleased to see they were working.

  So you’re coming with us, then? she wrote.

  You wouldn’t find them otherwise, replied Tatsu. I can’t just give you their address and hope for the best. The contract demands that I ensure you gain access to the device. To that end, I’ll be there to help with negotiations.

  It hadn’t occurred to Amanda that they’d need anything. Not that she’d thought it through. What will they want?

  They typically take payment in secrets. You may need to give them a password or information they’re looking for that you can provide.

  Oof. Career limiting decision, that, she wrote, rods of fear running up her back at the thought of betraying work.

  The choice of what you give them is yours, of course, replied Tatsu. I’d like to travel on your watch.

  You didn’t ask about my tablet, wrote Amanda, shifting in her seat, looking up and around with a cursory glance
in case anyone was watching her. Haber and Stornetta were discussing the football transfer season to her left, sitting closer to one another than she’d have thought two testosterone-fuelled bruisers would be comfortable with. The seat on her right remained empty.

  I’m not here. This is just a messaging system. So can I? I will be more help to you if I can be present.

  Sure. What do I have to do? she wrote.

  Nothing appeared on her tablet but her wrist buzzed and there, on the screen, was the pixelated green smiley face from her fridge.

  The flight was an easy three hours. Haber and Stornetta took the chance to eat again, picking at her plate when she couldn’t muscle up the motivation to eat the hot meal offered by the airline.

  The plane banked around over the city and she was surprised to see how much of it still stood; from the air the old city showing only minor scars of the conflict with the Russians which had ground to a stalemate half a decade ago.

  ‘Why here?’ she asked Tatsu, whispering at the face of her watch.

  It’s a grey zone. Multiple sovereign actors mixing it up together on the northern edge of Europe, within NATO but in a state of chaos, even now.

  ‘It’s a part of NATO? Why didn’t anyone stop the Russians, then?’

  I cannot say, wrote Tatsu. The strategy by the Russians was slow, focussed on the twenty-five percent of the population who were ethnic Russian already living within the country. They funded the church, so called Old Believers, provided Russian passports and built schools in towns and villages where the main language was Russian. What was NATO to do when they provided militia to protect their own people? Shoot civilians on the streets of a country during peacetime? There is no mandate to interfere with a country’s internal affairs.

  ‘You make geopolitics sound like it’s personal,’ replied Amanda.

  The smiley face on her watch dimmed for a moment. She felt like she’d said the wrong thing.

  Humans can decide something and destroy each other in the narrow quest to achieve that goal. I cannot process what would drive you to such actions when so many see their agency crushed as a result of such arbitrary aspirations.

  ‘Welcome to men fighting over power,’ said Amanda out loud.

  Haber gave her a puzzled look, but when she didn’t respond, went back to staring out the window.

  The airport was to the south east of the city, a long east-west runway that ended at the edge of a moss-coloured lake. The terminal was T-shaped. Amanda took in the orange wooden walls and bright blue pitched roof and was reminded most of a Hollywood version of the Arctic: a Disney interpretation of alpine chalets and fjord huts peeking through the snow. Inside was equally idiosyncratic and, by some distance, the least sterile airport she’d ever visited. There were table-tennis tables, bright rainbow coloured seats, a free gym with showers. They passed a café decorated in chrome and bleached brown wood with as much chic as anything in London. There was none of the despair she associated with travel, crowds of people watching their lives pass by while they waited for the real show to start.

  ‘I’ve been all over the world with work,’ she said to Stornetta as they waited in the taxi line. ‘This is the first airport where I think I wouldn’t mind being stuck.’

  ‘It’s trying too hard,’ said Stornetta with a sniff.

  ‘Ah, don’t be so miserable,’ said Haber, slapping him on the back. ‘Would ya rather be here or at Stansted?’

  Stornetta shrugged but didn’t disagree.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked a short, grey-haired taxi driver with a stereotypical Nordic accent.

  Reading from her watch. ‘Kumu?’ She looked up to see him nodding.

  ‘You sure? Nothing really to see there now. The art was mainly moved into the old town during the, ah, troubles? They never brought it back.’

  The drive took less than half an hour, but they were stopped twice by roadblocks manned first by the Estonians and then by men who didn’t identify themselves but whose international standing was eased by the passage of two hundred Euros.

  ‘How come you got actual Euros on you?’ asked a suspicious Haber after they were waved through the second checkpoint and driving through the broken-down gate around the back of the museum.

  ‘I travel a lot,’ said Amanda. At the look he gave her, one of shock as much as obvious embarrassment, she continued. ‘You asked.’

  The museum was half covered in scaffolding, plastic sheets covering damage yet to be repaired several years after the shooting had stopped. The rest of it appeared in decent shape, an elegant glass curve rising up five stories and surrounded by trees, water and grassland on all sides. A little to the north ran the motorway into the city, the traffic reduced to a gentle hiss no louder than the wind in the trees. Whoever had chosen the site had sensitivities for which Amanda’s heart was grateful, and as the other two sorted themselves out, stretching and talking to the taxi driver, she stood and stared at the Kumu. The glass was bookended by soft grey stone that would sit starkly against the snow in winter. To their left, running in an arc behind the main building, white wedges rose like a ring of teeth from the ground. The museum was sunk into the side of a hill, the offices in the retaining walls now abandoned and shattered by mortar fire, earth spilling out like flesh from an exit wound.

  From where the taxi had stopped they looked onto a switch back of white stone path down to the main entrance in front of which was a large plaza that must have once been beautiful. Small sections of it survived, but much of it was pitted, broken. Amanda ached at the sight of such beauty rendered so carelessly into entropy’s callous grasp.

  A man was sweeping dirt with a broad-headed broom, bent and elderly, a cap on his head covering his features in shadow.

  ‘Such a shame, yes?’ said the taxi driver, who’d come around to stand next to Amanda.

  ‘Why would they do this?’ she asked, feeling sudden meaningless.

  ‘Russians wanted to control what our eyes could see. We would never surrender to such smallness. Much of the treasures we loved are safe. One day they will return.’ He sounded so sure of himself she turned to stare.

  Having been paid he departed, leaving them alone at the top of the rise overlooking the museum.

  They know you’re coming, buzzed Tatsu. Amanda covered her watch face with a woollen sleeve and led the way down. The janitor ignored them as they walked past, his eyes only concerned with spilled earth and broken rubble.

  If the outside was desolate, a reminder of how mankind ruins with planning that which it creates on impulse, the moment they stepped through the doors the atmosphere changed to one of vital industry. Heads looked in their direction, young people, men, women and all inbetween moved about, hugging tables and workstations beneath what remained of those pieces and installations the authorities hadn’t moved in the first flush of battle with Old Believer militia.

  ‘Are these new?’ asked Haber, staring at the shattered remains of a marble torso around whose feet a head and pieces of limb had been reverentially laid in offering.

  ‘It’s a symbol of rebirth,’ said a young woman with spikey orange hair. She was wearing two parts of a royal blue three-piece suit, the jacket discarded and a canary yellow shirt covered by a well-cut waistcoat.

  Haber stared at the installation a second time, as if looking for it to transform its meaning in the wake of her words. ‘Rebirth of what?’ he asked eventually, looking up to meet her gaze.

  ‘The people. The nation.’ The woman stood alongside him and shared his view of the remains. ‘It is bullshit.’ Done with it, she turned to Amanda, leaving Haber to stare at the back of her head. ‘This isn’t a gallery anymore. You have come to the wrong place, tourist.’

  It was an accusation, with distaste and hatred in it.

  Ask for Satoshi Nakamoto, wrote Tatsu on her wrist.

  We’re going to have to work out a better way to communicate, thought Amanda, not believing for a minute she was being directed to find the legendary and fictitious b
lockchain inventor. She castigated herself for not asking earlier, she’d had plenty of time.

  ‘I’m looking for Satoshi Nakamoto?’ she said, trying to sound as if she knew them and just needed to be pointed in the right direction.

  ‘Satoshi Nakamoto,’ said the woman, folding her arms in disbelief. ‘Do they know you’re coming?’

  ‘What does that matter to you?’ asked Amanda, mirroring the woman’s attitude.

  ‘I’m Lisandra. We’re all busy here, none of us have time to answer the inane questions of tourists. If you want art, go to the Palace, they’ve got the Eve by Köler hosted there.’

  ‘The what?’ asked Amanda, and Lisandra rolled her eyes. ‘Look, I don’t care about your art. I’m here because I was told Satoshi could help me with a problem. I’m sorry about’—she gestured around—‘all this, but I’ve got my own crap to deal with.’ She noticed an older woman, somewhere north of sixty, watching their conversation from the foot of a curved staircase that ran along the inside of the outer wall.

  ‘So you’re just going to wander around Kumu until you find them? What if they’ve got their own tasks? What if they say no to you? What will you do then?’ Lisandra looked Amanda up and down. ‘You’re not one to take no for an answer, are you?’

  Haber and Stornetta stood off to one side, flanking the statue, watching without any sign they were going to join the conversation.

  Amanda realised she’d taken the wrong path with Lisandra; that the young woman, probably not yet twenty, was too angry to be bullied or cajoled. She was a gate they weren’t passing unless someone helped them. Amanda considered apologising, but suspected any peace offering she made now would be thrown back in her face.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ asked the older woman, taking a step toward them. She wasn’t Estonian; she wasn’t even European. Her heritage was Pacific rim, her accent west coast America.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Lisandra a touch too loudly, her voice echoing around the floor and briefly drawing the attention of half a dozen other people up and down the arc of the interior.