Gamehouse 03 - The Master

by Claire North

  I stopped, turned, faced him, clinging to my meagre bag, watching his hands, his face, his body. He held the gun but his features showed no expression.

  “Show me your face please.”

  He had already seen enough to make a decision, but I pulled my hat from my head, my scarf from my mouth. He considered all these, taking his time, a man confident in his skill set and his judgement, before saying, “Please face the wall. Do not turn around until ordered.”

  “Am I under arrest?” I asked.

  “Yes. You are under arrest.”

  “For what crime?”

  “Travel through a military zone.”

  It was a lie but one he turned out so easily that clearly it had been tried and tested a dozen times before, and not yet been found wanting. I hesitated, still facing him, and at my doubt, he raised the gun a little higher. “Please face the wall.”

  I obeyed.

  “Do you have a passport?”

  “Not on me.”

  “Where is your passport?”

  “In my hotel.”

  “Where is your hotel?”

  “Beijing.”

  “What is your name?”

  “David Fields.”

  “Please come with me.”

  “Why?”

  “You are under arrest.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The police station.”

  “May I call my embassy?”

  “At the police station. What is your nationality?”

  “Canadian.”

  “You may call your embassy from the station. Please come with me.”

  I considered my options and, remembering that a king may be put into check by a pawn, obeyed. He took my bag, handcuffed me and led me away, one hand on my arm, a simple man conducting a simple arrest.

  Chapter 24

  The police station had two cells, one office, and one other constable in it.

  On seeing me, he exclaimed, “What the hell is this?”

  My eager captor pushed me into a wooden chair that creaked uneasily beneath me and made no answer, stepping round his junior colleague instead to play with the computer, which was possibly even older and even clunkier than the one I’d borrowed in the mine manager’s office. I waited, listening to the hum of the fluorescent tubes overhead, the slow thunk-thunk-thunk of a broken extractor fan, smelling the bleach on the tiles in the tiny bathroom, the old cigarettes stubbed out in an aluminium ashtray. Finally the policeman found the picture he was looking for, and conferred with his colleague and at last straightened up, walked round the desk, pulled me by the arm to face the screen and said, “Do you deny that this is you?”

  I looked and saw my own face, beautifully rendered mug-shot style – though I had no memory of posing for the photo – and a list of crimes that range from the banal to the impressively imaginative.

  “It’s not me,” I replied. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Do you deny that this is your picture?”

  “I do. I do deny it. I would like to call my embassy. My name is David Fields. My embassy will confirm it.”

  Another debate ensued at this. Finally I was pushed back into my chair, and a phone was passed to me, the number already dialled. “You have two minutes to speak to your embassy.”

  I waited for the phone to be answered.

  “Hi,” I said in French to the attaché who eventually came on the line. “This is David Fields. I’m in a bit of bother.”

  The two policemen glanced at each other uneasily – French was clearly a language beyond their comprehension.

  “David…Fields, was it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can see your file right here, Mr Fields, sir.”

  “Could you get onto the relevant parties, please? I’m in…where am I?”

  “Huanshi Lu,” grumbled my captor, when asked in Mandarin.

  “You got that?” I asked the embassy.

  “Huanshi Lu – yes, sir. Are you injured in any way, Mr Fields?”

  “No. But you probably have less than three hours to get to me before I sustain terminal injury.”

  “I’ll be right on it.”

  “Pull out all the stops on this one – I’m in serious trouble.”

  “Absolutely, sir. We’ll have something with you imminently.”

  “There’s a danger they’ll try to move me.”

  “Procedures are already being activated, sir. We’ll have you out before you know it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “A pleasure, Mr Fields sir – a pleasure.”

  He hung up and the policemen, reluctantly put the phone back on the receiver.

  “Your embassy didn’t want to talk to us?” demanded the senior officer.

  “No,” I sighed. “You’re only pieces in this game, I’m afraid. My friends are going to look rather higher.”

  They threw me in the cells.

  I could hear the sound of voices on telephones for an hour after they locked me up, and praised inefficient bureaucracy for getting in the policemen’s way.

  After an hour the telephones stopped, and silence fell.

  I waited.

  After two hours and two minutes, the phone rang, just once.

  I couldn’t hear the conversation that followed, but when it ended, silence again.

  Then voices, raised in argument. Junior arguing with the senior. That took nearly twenty minutes. When they were done, the two policemen came into the cellblock. They now wore bulletproof vests, riot helmets, and carried guns.

  “Up!” barked Senior, and I got up.

  They handcuffed me, rougher than they had been, and pulled me from the station, turning the lights off behind them. They put me in the back of their one, unmarked, battered beige car, Junior keeping his gun trailed on me all the way, and in the dead of night, headlights rippling against dust, began to drive.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, and, “Shut up!” was the only reply I received.

  I sat in silence as the town receded behind us, and at last said, “Do you have orders to kill me?”

  “Shut up, shut up!”

  I looked sadly from one man to the next and saw terror, gut-clenching, soul-biting terror in them.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s only a game.”

  Five miles outside the town, they pulled off the one, arrow-straight road onto a dust track that led nowhere at all. Two miles further on from that, they stopped, and Junior pulled me out of the back and pushed me into the glare of the headlights, and then pushed me further and a little further still, until I hovered on that dead place where light loses shape and spills into shadow. Then he forced me to my knees and levelled his gun against the back of my head, and shook and shuddered, and did nothing.

  Then Senior said, “Do it!” and Junior said, “No. I won’t,” and turned away.

  An argument ensued. Senior was, I realised, even more afraid than Junior, raging first about orders, instructions, their careers, before switching to wheedling, begging, cajoling, explaining that he had a family, that they had to do this for the family, that Junior didn’t know what it was like, what it would be like if he lost this job, everything, everything would go too.

  To which Junior said “I won’t kill a man.”

  “He’s a terrorist!”

  “No man deserves to die without trial. I have never killed a man in cold blood, and I will not start now.”

  “He has to die; you heard the orders!”

  “I refuse them. They are not my orders; they are not orders I recognise within the boundaries of the law.”

  “Do it!”

  “You do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I…he’s just…not while he’s just there.”

  At this, Senior fell briefly silent, and for a while the three of us remained there, a locked tableau of mutual terror.

  Then Senior said, “Give me the gun,” and took the weapon, and mar
ched up behind me and pressed the barrel against my skull, hand shaking, breath ragged in his throat.

  He was concentrating so hard on the act of murdering me that he didn’t see the laser sight as it flashed across the sand finding its target. Junior did, however, because he cried out a warning a fraction of a second before twin sniper bullets blew out his and his partner’s brains.

  Chapter 25

  They were special forces of some flavour or another. They had the black body armour, the black balaclavas, the silenced weapons, the exotic range of expensive tools and above all, they had the quiet demeanour of men who’d killed in terror and killed while calm and realised that, either way, there was a dead man on the floor and that was all the job required.

  They freed my hands, and as they secured the area I knelt by the body of Junior, who’d refused to put a bullet in my brain, and thought for a moment I might cry. Why? He had been a piece in another player’s hand, and his face, any semblance of humanity, had been obliterated when the bullet ripped through his skull. I was tired, I told myself. I was so very tired.

  “Sir?” said one of my rescuers. “We need to go.”

  I nodded, and didn’t move from the blood-splattered sand.

  “Sir?”

  Still I didn’t move. Someone caught me by the arm, muttered, “The shock…” in Cantonese under his breath and helped me to a truck. By white torchlight they gave me a brisk once-over, checking for injuries which I might have been too numb to declare. Finding none, they gave me a blanket, water, a couple of sweet biscuits to chew on, and their leader, his face hidden behind nylon and wool, patted me on the knee and called out over the roar of the engine in cheerful Mandarin, “Good evening, Mr Fields. The ambassador and the general send their regards and say to tell you that they can’t make moves like this all the time.”

  “I nearly thought they weren’t going to make it at all,” I replied.

  “They said you might say that, and to tell you that you were a fool to come to China. In the last ten days, the army has been purging senior officers by the dozens, the party’s in chaos, the police have been put on high alert and for twenty-four hours, the government genuinely thought that the air force was mutinying!”

  “You seem…happy about this.”

  He shrugged. “I’m just a man doing a job. I get a call middle of the night, get to some shithole in the middle of nowhere to rescue some man called David Fields – that’s my job – I do it, I get paid, I go home. The machinations of big men in high places are nothing to me – not while I’ve got my health, my apartment and my kids.”

  “That seems reasonable.”

  “Gotta know what you’re fighting for,” he replied brightly. “Gotta keep your eye on the important things in life.”

  The trucks drove for five hours, and when they stopped they were at an airfield in the middle of a yellow field above a brown river. A man in white shirt and flapping brown shorts ran towards us, owl sunglasses bouncing on his head, the sun rising behind his bald spot.

  “Unacceptable!” he snapped. “Impossible!” he added as the captain of our little band took him to one side. More cries of this ilk – ridiculous! Disgraceful! – resounded around the field as the men and I sat on the dusty ground or lounged against the side of the truck, waiting for his ire to pass. I said nothing. Sometimes a king has to hide behind more powerful pieces than himself.

  Cash changed hands, his fury abated and as the sun crawled towards midday and the fat river flies settled on our shoulders and backs, nuzzled in hair and wriggled towards the soft warmth of our flared noses, I heard the hum of an engine. A two-seater plane, white and wobbly as it bounced in off a westerly wind, no sooner landed than it had stopped, no sooner stopped than I was bundled into it. “Bye-bye!” sang out my rescuer cheerfully. “Have a nice trip!”

  They waved at me as we departed, a line of ex-special forces mercenaries, assassins and killers, sending me on my way, smiles on their faces, rifles on their backs.

  The pilot was a woman with hair cut tight to the back of her neck and a conversational flare that started with “good morning” and finished with “please don’t touch anything, thank you”. The sun moved around us as we headed south, and through the changing cloud cover I saw land the colour of pus, factories pumping thin spreads of grey into the sky, roads of locked red lights, rivers that barely seemed to flow. I half closed my eyes against the glare of the sun, and when I opened them again the land had grown green and mountains rose like fins from a puffer fish. In the heat and dry air of the cabin, sleep came easily, and when I looked again, the sun was red to my right, vanishing into a grey haze before it could reach the horizon, and below the lights of towns and cities glowed like yellow living tumours, fibrous tendrils of road and river reaching out between each nodule to connect the whole.

  We landed on a little airstrip halfway up a mountain, the air clear and cold, a single shack by a single road guarded by a single truck. An old woman shuffled into the half-gloom of falling night as our engine stopped; she smiled and bobbed at me, gave the pilot a hug, a babbling tenderness in her greeting that my stony companion seemed to little deserve, and shuffled us inside. She fed us soup of cabbage and noodles, plied me with tea, chatted to the pilot about the weather, the news, the TV, the radio, the rude woman she bought eggs from at the bottom of the hill, and when our bowls were empty said, “You’ll be wanting something for the road, yes?” and pushed rice cakes and a hot flask into my hands, and like that, we were pushed back out into the night, and my pilot hauled me back into the passenger seat and the refuelled plane back into the air.

  We flew on, low, into the night. I wondered if radar would detect us as we swung slowly around the peaks of mountains, hugged the sides of river valleys, dipped in and out of low, threatening cloud. I wondered if anyone cared. I had played my hand well when I called the Canadian Embassy as David Fields. My eyes closed of their own accord as we flew on towards the sea.

  Chapter 26

  My pilot woke me as the sun was rising over the airstrip, and I jumped.

  The engine was silent; the tarmac was empty. A flock of birds, heads turning upwards with the coming dawn, fled for the skies as I roused myself in my cramped corner.

  “Taipei,” she explained simply. “Twenty miles that way.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I just did my job.”

  “No – you did more. Thank you.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t tell me where you’re going,” she said as I slipped, weak-kneed and stiff-backed, to the ground. “I don’t like knowing that sort of stuff.”

  Twenty minutes later, she was in the sky again, and I watched her go as the sun rose.

  A taxi took me to Taipei, no one bothering to check my passport.

  A bank accepted my signature, details and fingerprints, and handed over fifteen thousand US dollars, no questions asked, in various notes.

  I converted one thousand then and there and bought myself a night in the nearest five-star hotel I could find. From my room, I had a view across the city, all light, noise, glass, concrete, traffic, the blare of horns, the rush of people, the mountains blue in the distance, Taipei 101 obscenely huge against the diminished enormity of its neighbours, spiking the sky.

  I had a bath, a large meal and, as was my wont, stepped outside to buy the best laptop and satellite phone I could find.

  China was in turmoil.

  At the UN, the Mongolian government screamed violation of its airspace, its ground-space, violation of treaties, of rights, of dignity, of – of most things, not that the UN particularly cared, China being what she was.

  More interesting, in Beijing the government rocked, shaken to its very core. Senior generals, admirals, air marshals, spies, civil servants, ministry men, policemen, media magnates, news stations, governors, mayors – how many, how many of the great and good had suddenly proven to be unsound? Troops mobilised without orders, borders shut down, strangers searched, all seemingly with a purpose yet no direction.
Terror – now terror had set in – for how much of her own government, wondered those few apparatchiks of Beijing who weren’t obviously compromised, but how much had been suborned to this…whatever-this-was. To this purpose unknown.

  Purges followed.

  Arrests, exiles, even a couple of executions, for if there is one thing a military will not tolerate, it’s a breakdown in command structure. Human rights movements cried foul, financiers shifted uneasily in their boardrooms, governors fell and elections were cancelled. The US State Department issued a communiqué to the effect that, while it wasn’t interested in China’s domestic affairs, it hoped– for the sake of regional security – that a solution would be found to this problem sooner rather than later. The Russian ambassador was recalled to Moscow for urgent talks. Two army units threatened mutiny. A prime minister fell.

  All this I watched, first from my room in Taipei, then a room in Singapore, then an internet café in Manila, then on my laptop in Hawaii and finally, as the few strong men left standing crawled their way to the top of the broken podiums of power, and men who’d been too weak to be of much note now eyed up newly vacated positions, I watched it all with distant curiosity from my apartment in San Francisco.

  The Gamesmaster had ripped China apart in search of me, and I didn’t need to do anything now but watch the pieces fall. The system would self-correct, and in doing so a great handful of the Gamesmaster’s assets would be wiped from play. In expending so many resources on my capture, she had lost control of Beijing, and the field was open now for my pieces to take control, assuming I had enough pieces in play; assuming the investment was worth my while.

  I considered the matter for two lazy days in San Francisco, making no moves, playing no pieces, merely pondering the board.

  On the third morning, I reached a conclusion and set the pieces in motion.

  Chapter 27