Gamehouse 03 - The Master

by Claire North

  I was in the water for eleven hours.

  I didn’t move, but let the ocean do what it would with me, carrying me with the broken remains of my boat. A little bubble of warm formed around my submerged legs and waist; my arms shivered and shook where they clung to my raft of lifejackets. Above, the ocean stars turned, beautiful, a sight just for me, just for my weary eyes, a universe that no one else could perceive. In a little while, I felt burning across my back and shoulders, and for a moment the salt water where it seeped into my wounds was agony, and I screamed into the silence, until the antiseptic touch of the water against my skin was in fact a blessing, and the cold was a blessing, and the heat was a blessing, and the all things at once seemed to me a blessing, and I closed my eyes and thought how nice it was to be blessed and dozed a little, and woke dreaming of drowning and found my nose slipping beneath the water, and I thrashed and gasped for breath, and wondered if I was going to die in this place, and if she would miss me when I was gone.

  Probably not, I said, and then:

  That’s not what you’re playing for, I replied.

  What are you playing for? I asked.

  Vengeance? Pride? Justice? Love?

  I laughed at that.

  You’re so funny, I said. You’re so funny I could die.

  The sun rose quickly over the ocean, and there was no land beneath it as it climbed into the sky. How fast it went from a blessed relief to a torment, too bright, too pervasive, no shelter from its glare. Hell was an ocean, I realised. Hell was an endless sea. I wondered if there were sharks in this water and having wondered, imagined teeth tearing at my feet, my legs, my blood calling to them, no game yet invented which could tame Mother Nature.

  “This is a check,” I said. “You are a king and she has put you into check, nothing more.”

  “Nothing but the sea and the sharks,” I replied.

  “Where’s your wisdom now?” I asked. “Where’s your wit?”

  “Keenness and quickness of perception,” I intoned through broken lips. “Ingenuity. Humour, finding humour in the relationship between incongruous things. Wit: a person of exceptional intelligence.”

  “Tell it to the sharks,” I replied. “Tell it to the seas.”

  When the boat came, I thought it was a product of my laughing, bewildered mind until they called my name from the prow and I remembered that I had summoned it, the last thing I’d done before throwing my treacherous mobile phone and laptop over the side.

  They sent a diver into the water to help me onto the palette which they lowered over the side. Once on deck, they carried me, still in the orange litter, to their infirmary where an officer all in white, accent as tight as the little black hat on her head, asked me my name (which I could not remember), what day it was, if I knew what had happened.

  Eventually, I remembered the name by which I had summoned this boat, and how I had won it (a game of Monopoly – I bought the utility companies; she bought the high-end hotels, and utility companies, it turned out, were the better investment as tourism fluctuated in southern Florida) and drank the water that I was given, and lay on my belly while the medic dressed the burns across my neck, shoulders and back, and asked how I had received them.

  “Two fighter jets blew up my boat,” I replied. “I think it must have happened then.”

  She tutted and sighed and said, drink more water, and gave me something else to drink besides which made the world – for a little while – seem more peaceful than it had been in the morning.

  Chapter 12

  The boat was a cutter with the British Royal Navy and it deposited me in Gibraltar some ten hours after it had picked me up in the sea. I had no passport to be checked at customs, nor no contacts or proof of identity.

  I asked permission to phone my lawyer to see if he could get the relevant documents faxed over, and when they said yes, I dialled the piece in the admiralty who had so obligingly secured my rescue, and told him to get me freed, and that for this all debts were paid and his game was done.

  He nearly sobbed with relief when I said as much, and thanked me, thanked me, thanked me, and got it done.

  Alone, empty-handed, bandages on my back, I walked along the seafront of Gibraltar, a place that was neither one thing nor the other. The streetlights were pure English seaside, wrought black metal. British flags flew in the shops which sell obligatory sand buckets and bags of dried starfish; the Lord Nelson pub smelt of beer and chips, yet the Anglican cathedral had something of the Moorish about its curved arches and white walls, and the hotels that lined the seafront and chic marinas were pure Mediterranean slabs of functional tourism, square and turned into the sun. I walked until I found a tourist office; they stared at me, scalded skin, cracked lips, salt-washed hair, but politely directed me to the banks and buses.

  Only one bank in Gibraltar carried any resources that I could use, and those were limited, planted some twenty years ago when I was passing through in expectation of this day. My signature on the account got me access to the bank manager; my fingerprint permitted me into the vault. My safe deposit box hadn’t been updated for seven years – sloppy on my part, but I hadn’t pictured myself shipwrecked in this part of the world, let alone so early in the game. The passports within were all out of date, save for a Swedish one which was two months from expiry. The five thousand US dollars and five thousand euros within were still in currency, and the gun, I was relieved to find, hadn’t rusted inside its padded box.

  I bought myself a new laptop and three new phones, and took the ferry to Tanger-Med that evening.

  Tanger-Med is a half-excuse for a port in a half-excuse for a place. Billboards and helpful public information posters declare that soon – very soon – this place will be the greatest cargo hub on the Mediterranean. Tired men in grubby uniforms sit around on empty public benches smoking thin cigarettes, the ash flicked onto the empty marble floors of the empty passenger terminal. By the great wharves where the cargo ships dock, cranes crawl back and forth, yellow lights flashing, and lorries wait to be loaded by the fluorescent-clad labourers, but the cruise ships do not like to stop here, and the men and women who crawl off the passenger ferry in the small hours of the night have the looks about them of lost tourists, or itinerant workers who know that this is merely a place that is a stop on the way to somewhere better.

  I hired a car and drove through the dark through tree-clad mountains and agro-giant fields to Tétouan, windows down, the cold night wind keeping me awake while the radio played boy-band pop and the raised voices of pundits who could not keep silent in the face of the other’s foolishness.

  I arrived in Teétouan just after dawn and slept in the back of my car until a policeman knocked on my window to see if I was dead. When it transpired that I wasn’t, he shouted at me, telling me to get a hotel, to move on, move on already, and so I did and found myself at last in a shady room at the back of an old, cracked building where the flies stayed on the ceiling and the old woman in a black veil who ruled over it all muttered through her nicotine-stained teeth, “Good, good, good…bad, bad, bad…good, good, good…” as her gaze inspected and judged all about her.

  I slept.

  I had planned on sleeping only a few hours, and woke thinking I had done precisely that until the old woman told me I had slept an entire day, dawn to dawn, and it was bad, bad, bad, good, good, good that I had done so.

  “Sleep sleep wastes life!” she chided. “Doctor tells me I have slept for twenty-five years already, bad, bad, very bad. I love sleep. No one says stupid things; no one makes me cry when I’m sleeping, good, good!”

  Head craned awkwardly to see the green-flecked bathroom mirror, I peeled the dressing off my back to survey the damage. Light burns still scar, and even if they do not, they still hurt. I smelt no infection, saw no pus, applied ointment and, contorting myself like a praying mantis, wrapped myself in fresh dressings and skipped the painkillers.

  At last now – at last – I turned my laptop on.

  Chapter 13 />
  All things through the darknet, and carefully, so very careful. An email from a dummy account to another dummy account, which forwarded it to a lawyer in Dhaka who forwarded it to a company in Belarus who finally, at last, forwarded it to my cyber-experts in Switzerland.

  They were, to my surprise, still standing.

  We met on a message board where heroine dealers and credit card fraudsters conducted their trade.

  For sale – x 5000 credit card details with full names, addresses and DOBs, proclaimed the ads that popped up around us. Carefully collected over three years of hard work. No time wasters, please.

  How was I found? I asked my experts when they came online.

  NSA, they replied, then: it may not be safe for us to deal with your case any more. The NSA have been looking at our systems too.

  Advice? I asked.

  Don’t use the same computer twice, they said. And then, having thought about it a little while longer, they added, And never contact us again.

  At that, they disconnected, and that was fine. They were not running away from the game –their utility was done, a pawn which had been passed by another stronger piece, and which fell now from the board.

  Chapter 14

  The NSA was a problem.

  Twice the Gamesmaster had tasked it against me, and both times it had done sterling work. I had set a DDoS attack against it which had slowed it down, but to truly undermine its ability to get in my way, I needed to do something a little more distracting.

  I wandered through my mental lists of pieces at my disposal and settled on a big gun.

  I called a number in Washington DC and, when the phone was eventually answered, I asked to speak to the senator.

  Moves on the board.

  A US senator comes into information that the NSA has illegally been spying on US citizens on domestic soil, violating the privacy of good, ordinary Americans.

  The NSA denies.

  Civil rights groups stand up and say it’s an outrage, a horror.

  The NSA denies.

  Newspapers ask for evidence of the claims. (Al Jazeera, I note with a sigh, runs a largely accurate article slamming the senator, and I add it to the list of assets under enemy control.)

  The senator calls for an enquiry.

  The White House says such an enquiry would be counter to the security interests of the nation. (Is the White House also compromised, I muse, or is this just politics?)

  The senator begins to waver under this pressure.

  But this is the US, where fact is second to volume, and just as I think that this line of attack is going to fail, the fringes of the Republican right, God bless them, God keep them, rise up to a ferocious man and woman and proclaim, how dare the NSA violate our civil liberties? What happened to the constitution? What happened to freedom? How dare big government intrude into our private lives, how dare they? We’ve read thrillers; we know what these people are like; we know because we are the only people left in this country with sense!

  I watch all this from afar on NBS broadcasts and Fox News, and at the indignation of the right, the pundits rise again, righteousness in their voices, hunger in their eyes, and though my senator is shuffled to the back room and chided for having dared unleash such a shitstorm, your career over, your future over, never again, my son, the work is done.

  I don’t have the resources to destroy the NSA – or rather, I will not spare those resources yet – but I can make it much, much harder for them to catch me.

  Finally. A blow against the Gamesmaster. The board opens, just a little, a tiny peek, a sense of the flow of the game.

  Chapter 15

  The Moroccan-Algerian border was closed, and had been for nearly twenty years. I rode a cargo ship from Nador to Almeria, and as my senatorial crisis in the US unfolded, drove through southern Spain.

  Fried eggs in Sorbas. A child saw my white hair, my young face, kept young by many games won, many lives destroyed. Her face crinkled in suspicion and doubt, and finally she walked up to me, folded her arms and said, “Are you a monster?”

  “No,” I replied.

  Her face tightened to a crinkle around her nose as she considered this, before finally concluding, “I think you’re a monster!” and, laughing, she ran away before I could eat her up.

  Roadworks on the motorway between Puerto Lumbreras and Lorca. When a lorry’s engine burst in the heat in a one-lane corridor of diverted vehicles, the traffic stopped and we all got out of our cars to fan ourselves in the smiting summer heat, children running from car to car asking if anyone had water and playing hide-and-seek behind the ticking hot bonnets.

  “It’s always like this,” sighed the driver of the car behind mine. “People don’t dare say it, but I will – corruption. Corruption, corruption, corruption. In India, they protest against it; they have rallies, political prisoners against it; but here? Here we blind ourselves, we say, ‘No, it can’t possibly happen here, not to us, not in the EU!’ but I say, ‘Hey, wake up, wake up already – can’t you see that’s exactly why we do have it, why it’s everywhere, because we’re so smug and so self-satisfied that we don’t even bother to open our eyes to see it!’ Money rules this country, not democracy, not the people. We’re just little pieces moved around by big men, statistics and numbers ruled by capitalism and consumerism. You think you’re free? You’re just a wallet that spends, earns and dies – that’s the sum of your life. It’s disgusting, is what it is.”

  “Sometimes roads break,” I pointed out.

  “Sometimes roads are broken,” he retorted. “Sometimes people break things. Sometimes countries are broken. Sometimes societies are broken. Sometimes people are broken so badly, they don’t even notice that’s what they are.”

  At Tarragona I stayed in a hotel next to a church, and woke with a start at 4 a.m. thinking the world was over, the game was over and I was done, only to open the shutters of my window and look down to see three monks, all in black, unlocking the gates of the church to go in and pray. I went back to bed, and did not sleep, and left at 7 a.m., a spread of cold meats and hard-boiled egg on my dashboard, the taste of oranges in my mouth.

  The customs booths were gone at Le Perthus, torn down by order of the EU, but the French flag still flew and policemen still glowered from stations by the roadway. I wound through the Pyrenees behind a slow but steady line of crawling traffic, turning off before Le Boulou to stretch my legs, eat some food, watch the mountains. Two vultures turned slowly overhead, riding the thermals higher into the sky. Thin white clouds formed and dissolved on the mountain tops, caught as if by a needle in the wind before being blown away into the empty blue sky. Sheer cliffs dropped down into river gorges, grey stone, black buzzards, dark trees clinging to every angle and edge.

  I sat and ate my lunch on an outcrop above a ruined monastery, where once hermits had fled from the world, and I was alone and could have stayed here, I thought, for ever.

  But the sun grew hot, and the wind was cold, and my meal was done, so I drove on.

  Chapter 16

  Preparations made as I crawled through southern France.

  I abandoned my car in Perpignan, and on the train to Montpellier I sat, laptop on my lap, phone tucked to my ear, and organised a military assault against Georgi Daskalov, head of a criminal gang which had put a ten-million-euro hit on my head, a piece that had been played by the Gamesmaster.

  I had no pieces in the Italian military, but a few in the Carabiniere.

  “I can seal the roads for you, keep eyes away,” said my most powerful, “but no way, no fucking way, not a chance can I take down Daskalov for you.”

  “That’s fine,” I replied. “You’re the wrong piece for the job anyway.”

  In the end, I settled on an ex-special forces team run out of Tampa, which touched down in Milan three hours before my train arrived.

  As we drove north towards Lake Como and the jagged Alps, I turned on my laptop to discover that 178 million dollars had been wiped from my assets. The move
had also taken 2 per cent off the value of the New York Stock Exchange, and looked to be a general attack against over thirty companies that I could have been affiliated with, and which in fact had crippled only seven that were mine.

  How had she found them? I had played plenty of pieces which might require paying, but hadn’t even begun to dent my carefully cultivated funds.

  Perhaps she hadn’t found them at all – perhaps it was guesswork. But no – the Gamesmaster didn’t strike out without purpose, she knew that somewhere within the companies she was now assaulting lay my assets. To defend or not to defend?

  I considered the state of my finances and let it go. In chess, you must learn to read which attacks matter and which are merely flourishes before the main event. 178 million wasn’t so much in the grand scheme of things and, if nothing else, I could now mark up the US Federal Reserve and Treasury Department as potential lines of investigation, should it come to it.

  We drove on, into the mountains.

  Chapter 17

  Two kinds of rich lived in Lake Como. Old rich that had fallen in love with the water and the mountains, with the long paths by sandy shores, the yachts beneath clear blue skies, the flowers that bloomed in every garden outside every mansion – a rich that had forgotten that it was rich, as long as it had owned and enjoyed the smell of magnolia, the sound of water by its gate.

  The second rich lived behind closed gates and high walls, on balconies above the eyeline of the gawping tourists. Like a poor man freed at last from a prison sentence, great leaps of imagination had been dedicated to the spending of money, and even greater feats of self-justification to explain that no, the water really did taste better when it emerged from gold-plated taps and yes, the quality of conversation was improved by at least one party holding a phone clad in diamond while they spoke.