The Gameshouse

by Claire North

  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 marched 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 dozen, 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.

&nb
sp; A bank accepted my signature, details and fingerprints, and handed over fifteen thousand U.S. 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 U.S. 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

  The Great Game.

  The opening is done. We have made our moves, staked high, lost heavy. Now the board is open and we move slower, careful, wearing our enemy down, looking for the king, looking for the capture.

  This is the middle game.

  I consolidate my pieces in China; she focuses on the EU and U.S.

  Beijing is threatened with a trade embargo, accusations of cyber-terrorism, espionage, foul practice economically, foul practices against humanity.

  I activate the Union of South American Nations; she plays two of the big four oil companies. I launch environmental terrorists and an insurance broker in retaliation. She turns the Greek police against the head of the insurance company; I turn the interior ministry against the police. She unleashes a nationalist opposition movement against my minister; I play an orthodox patriarch and evangelical Christian TV station back at her.

  For a moment, all things hang in balance. Seven DEA agents are gunned down in Guatemala; an American intelligent network are arrested in Tunisia; the oil companies waver; the CEO of one, and deputy CEO of another stand firm, and I see that they are her pieces, the heart of her play, and one is killed by a cartel, the other in a road accident on a cliff by the sea. She kills the leaders of a terrorist group, shuts down the insurance company and the bank that was linked to it and, in an act of spite, kills my Greek interior minister with a car bomb that also murders his wife and eldest son, and leaves his twelve-year-old daughter without her right leg and suddenly alone in the world. I manage to salvage my patriarch by sending him on hermetic retreat to the Ukraine, but look back in sorrow as my evangelical TV channel is taken off air for “hate crimes”.

  All this takes five months.

  And as I move, I move, and the world turns.

  I smell sulphur in the hot springs of Greenland, listen to the erudite arguments of the overweight Icelandic IT men in their suits and furs. I ride the ferry through the great glacial valleys of eastern Canada, watch white beluga surface and dive in her sandy bays. From a balcony in Cape Town which looks south towards Robben Island and the sea, I launch a botnet attack against a series of servers in Oman which have been targeting me. From a grubby little hotel room in Malawi, where the bus never comes and the children have come too late to the library, all the books stolen by their fathers who have now forgotten how to read, I orchestrate the arrest of a man who looks like me, sounds like me, has nothing to do with me, but who is taken down by the Glasgow police as the face behind the irritating Interpol warrant she has served against me. And always, I move, and so does she.

  Twice she comes near to capturing me directly, once unleashing the full force of Egypt’s military as I flee across the Sinai desert, saved only from capture by a hastily deployed team from the Israeli Defence Force and a mechanic in the driver’s seat of my truck who could fix almost anything with duct tape and a hammer. The second time, she nearly gets me with a hit squad in Tehran, who swing through the window of my room and kick the door down in true commando-style, and are thwarted in their execution only by the humming of my refrigerator which has been so erratic in the night that it’s driven me to wakefulness. They shoot my bed rather than me, and I jump two floors out of the nearest window, landing in the lovingly tended rhododendron bush of my wealthy next-door neighbour with a crack and a splay of glass, and limp across the Iranian border into Iraq some eight hours later in search of urgent medical aid.

  The doctor whom I eventually called on for assistance tutted as she dressed my injuries. She was a higher league player, though only incidentally, finding herself increasingly drawn to the affairs of her own country over the machinations of the Gameshouse and dabbling only when she urgently needed something which she could find by no other means.

  “I heard the house has closed its doors,” she tutted, slapping ointment onto my face in thick, stinging dollops. “They say you’re playing the Great Game, and the Gameshouse will not appear again until the game is done. Is this true?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think you can win?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what will you do if you do win?” she demanded, swatting at the sole fly which dared hover nervously near the one light in the middle of the bare, blue medical room. “Have you thought about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I will destroy the Gameshouse.”

  “Why? It is the thing which sustains you, which gives you life; why would you destroy it?”

  I didn’t answer for a while. Then, “It destroys lives.”

  “It changes outcomes; that is all. That battles which are fought are fought between people, and would happen regardless of the house. The players merely change the result.”

  “No,” I replied. “What you’re describing is merely politics and death. I have played those games too, in some of the greatest battles that have ever be
en fought. I handed out rifles in the American War of Independence; I was there when the guillotine fell on the French king’s head. I saw Martin Luther King die, played Assassins in the halls of the Kremlin. There are ideas behind these events, notions that are sometimes as stupid as nation, race or creed. And sometimes there are ideas too which are as potent as liberty, brotherhood, justice. We will enslave philosophers and kings to our cause, sacrifice good people and bad to achieve victory, even if that victory is for a tyrant. All that matters is the win; the rest is nothing. That is the game; and do you know what I think? I think that the Gameshouse chooses the games we play, chooses the shape of human history, chooses which ideas will flourish and which will fall, and in playing, we serve it in creating an outcome that is not of humanity’s choice.”

  “Silver,” she replied, “I’m helping you now because of… favours… that are owed, but don’t fool yourself. There are thousands of players out there who depend for their very lives, for everything they have, on the Gameshouse existing. If the Gamesmaster tells them that your victory will mean their defeat, don’t imagine for a second that they won’t jump at a chance to take you down.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m avoiding them.”

  “You’re a good player but you won’t be able to hold out for ever. They’ll come for you—not just the Gamesmaster, but the whole house. I don’t see how you expect to win.”

  “I’m waiting for a mistake.”

  “The Gamesmaster doesn’t make mistakes,” she replied. “Not her. Not ever.”

  More moves; more chess.

  The first time I put her into check, it was in New Delhi—but by the time my SWOT team reached her address, she was gone, and all they found was a bomb which killed four of them, and a CCTV camera which showed the back of her retreating head as she fled for a car two hours earlier. A weak attack on my part, easily evaded by moving the king.