Date: 2015-11-03 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Fiction; Novella; Thriller; Science Fiction; Urban Fantasy; Magical Realism; Short Stories; Historical Fiction
Description: The Gameshouse is an unusual institution. Many know it as the place where fortunes can be made and lost through games of chess, backgammon - every game under the sun. But a select few, who are picked to compete in the higher league, know that some games are played for higher stakes - those of politics and empires, of economics and kings . . . And now, the ultimate player is about to step forward. The Gameshouse is an unusual institution. Many know it as the place where fortunes can be made and lost though games of chess, backgammon -- every game under the sun. But a select few, who are picked
Publisher: Orbit

The Master

The Third Gameshouse Novella

Claire North

www.redhookbooks.com

Begin Reading

Meet the Author

Newsletters

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Chapter 1

We have come – at last – we have come to the end. You and I, we have played this game so long, and never once made a move.

Come now, come.

The board is ready; the cards are prepared.

The coin which was spun must fall at last.

Chapter 2

There is a story which is not a story told about a place which is not a place.

It is the story of the Gameshouse, where the great and the ancient go to play. Come, generals and kings, priests and emperors, you great factory men and you ladies of letters, come to the Gameshouse. Come and play for the mastery of a city, the conquest of a country, the wealth of a civilisation, the history of a palace, the secrets of spies and the treasures of thieves. Here our chess-boards are a grid which we lay across the earth; dice roll and strangers die; the cards fall and the coin turns, it turns, it turns, and when we are done, armies will be shattered, oceans will rise, and we will win and live, or lose and die. For it is not petty things that we play for in the Gameshouse, but life, time and the soul.

The curtain is parted, the music ceases and the player takes the stage.

Chapter 3

They call me Silver.

My real name was lost centuries ago, gambled against a barbarian king. I cannot remember my name now, but he who won it was a sometime lord of horses and lost his life in battle, never knowing that he was a piece on that field, played by another hand. When he died, the death of my name was sealed, and it is no comfort to know that he too is not remembered. Only she knows it now – she, the Gamesmaster, the woman all in white who guards the halls wherein we play – but she is above all things, and will not tell.

And so, having nothing more, I am simply Silver.

Of the players in the Gameshouse, only one is older than I, and she has no interest in these things.

(“I have seen the world change,” she murmurs, spiking thread through needle, needle through cloth. “But the game does not. I am a player, interested in the game, not the world, so what is your adventure to me?”

“What if I said I played for love?” I ask one night when I have had too much to drink.

She laughs, raising her head briefly from her work to look at me with chiding eyes. “Silver, you love only the game, and she is a cold mistress.”)

I have played many games for many prizes, but the greatest game must now begin.

Chapter 4

New York in summer. A city of two climates. Indoors, airconditioning lowers the temperatures to an Arctic chill; outside, the extraction fans add to the already shimmering heat until the air seems to melt in sweat-soaked, skin-slithering despair. I remember when New York was a colony on an island of mud, not deserving of even a few rolls of a lower league dice let alone a door to the Gameshouse. Yet there it stands, silver doors in a street where they do not belong. Lions’ faces, teeth bared, snarling at all who dare knock. Red brick above, a fire escape pushed awkwardly to one side as if the Gameshouse has transplanted itself into the architecture of this place, shuffling pre-established buildings a little to the left, a little to the right, to the confusion of the mortar around. Which, of course, it has.

The corridor inside hung with silk, feels old, smells old, and the closing door cuts off all the sounds of the city as if time had frozen upon a single second when no birds sang, no engines roared, no delivery boy shouted at the taxi that cut across his path, no siren soared, no door slammed in the city. Three weeks ago, this old place did not exist, and soon it will not exist again, and no one will remark on it, save those few players new enough to care.

The Gameshouse often comes to New York. It likes to be where the power is.

Come; follow me.

We move through corridors hung with white silk, smell the incense, hear the music, descend a flight of stairs to the club room where the newest players play, UV lights and champagne, cocktails with olives in, a fountain of ice, chess sets, backgammon and baduk, cards and counters, the usual paraphernalia of the lower league. New games too: Cluedo, Settlers of Catan, Age of Empires, Mario Kart, Mortal Kombat Whatever fought between a shrieking bishop and a deputy mayor. A judge, a police commissioner, a gangster, a congressman, a chief of staff, a general, a consulting doctor, a research fellow, a professor, a hit-man, a pharmaceutical king, an oil magnate, a seller of used cars and cheap cocaine – all the men and women who think they are someone, could be something more – they all come here as they have come through the centuries, across the world. They dream of passing through the doors which now open for me, and how many, I mused, will be played, rather than players? Most – perhaps all. That is one of the truths of the Gameshouse.

So much for the lower league; I do not slow my step for it. Next, the higher league: another hall, larger, where the ancient and the learned, the oldest players of the game, now gathered over TV screens and digital maps, plotting their next game. Why, there, one who wagered her good health on the price of gold and won – after some market manipulation – the excellent eyesight of the now-blind man who limps away. There, another who played battleships against an air force and lost his carrier in the first wave, now growing old and shrivelled as his life is forfeit. Why, she won a court case, he won a city; she won a state, he lost an oil rig and on, on the game winds, the game that covers the world, the game we tell ourselves we have played all these years for joy, all these centuries for joy, and which has, by our playing, changed the world in the Gamesmaster’s form for she…

She.

She is waiting for me.

I climb the stairs at the back of the hall, and no one bars my way. Usually two umpires – all in white, their faces veiled, their fingers gloved – stop trespassers, but not tonight, not me. She is waiting upstairs, as she has been waiting for so long.

She sits, her face covered, her arms in white, on a curved cream sofa beneath a shroud of silk. I have not seen her eat or drink or smile since she took the white, but she is still her, still after all this time.

She says, “Is it that time already?”

I find I do not speak.

She offers me water.

I find I cannot drink.

She says, “You look tired, Silver. You look old.”

“Not as old as I feel.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” she murmurs. “As long as the house endures, so can you.”

“Thank you; I have had my share of eternity.”

The gloved fingers of her left hand ripple along her thigh, just once, a pianist warming up with a scale. “So,” she says, “shall we?”

“Yes.” My voice is not my own; I speak again, louder, claiming the sound. “Yes.”

“You do not have to. Once you make this move, there is no going back, and I know you are not ignorant of what will come when you fail.”

“I will not fail.”

“Will you not? You have spent centuries preparing for this, but the house is mine, the players are mine and of the two of us, I was always the stronger.”

“I will not fail.”

“The house will have you if you lose. It will have your soul. I would be…saddened…to see that become your fate.”

“The house has me already, ma’am,” I reply. “I have been the house’s slave for almost as long as you.”

I imagine a smile behind her veil, and that imagination perhaps leads me to hear it in her voice. “Very well,” she says. “Then make your move.”

I draw in breath.

I speak the words.

“My lady of the veil,” I say, “my lady Gamesmaster, mistress of this house – I challenge you.”

Chapter 5

What is this?

Are these…

…tears?

I walk away from the Gameshouse and there is a hotness in my eyes.

What is this?

I taste the moisture on my lips and it is salty.

It cannot be sorrow, nor is it a useful response to fear. For so many centuries I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.

Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now.

I find the thought unhelpful, and walk away a little faster.

There have been only three challenges that I know of against the Gamesmaster.

The first was before my time and exists only in allegory and myth. I will not bother with its telling.

The most recent was in 1774, and none of us expected the challenger to win. Nevertheless, for nearly forty years the Gameshouse closed its doors, and the Gamesmaster and her rival fought the Great Game, setting assassins, spies, kings, diplomats, armies and faiths against each other until finally, in 1817, the challenger was defeated, his princes dead, his armies smashed, and he vanished into the white. Who he is now, no one knows. Death is simple and the Gameshouse does not grant it easily – rather, it eats its victims whole, and somewhere beneath the white veils that are worn by the servants of the house, I do not doubt that he lives still, slave to the bricks and stones of that endless place.

And the other?

Why, the greatest challenge was made before, in 1208, and the woman who challenged the Gamesmaster was…

…a player greater than any I have ever known.

For twenty years they fought each other, the Gamesmaster and the player, and by the end of it no one could say for certain who had lost and who had won. All that was known was that the player vanished, some said into the service of the house, lost to the white, others said no, no, not at all! She vanished into victory, she conquered the Gameshouse, but who can really conquer that place? She is not the player any more, they said, but rather the Gamesmaster. In victory she become her enemy, and perhaps in this manner, her success was her ultimate defeat, for she is no longer herself but only the Gamesmaster again.

Did she see it so? Could she see anything greater than the game? Could she see me?

The coin turns, the coin turns.

Let the game begin.

Chapter 6

We agreed terms long before I issued the formal challenge.

She said, “Assassins? No – too crude. Hide-and-seek? Too juvenile, perhaps. Risk – it’s been a while since I played Risk.”

I replied, “Risk lost its appeal with the onset of the nuclear age.”

The Gamesmaster sighed. “Very well: chess it is.”

Four weeks later, a player by the name of Remy Burke, a man who owed me a favour, sat down next to me in a bar in Taipei, put his elbow on the table, his chin in his hand and said, “Tell me you didn’t agree to play chess with the Gamesmaster.”

“I can tell you a hard truth, or a comforting lie,” I replied.

Remy let out a long, low puff of breath. “Silver,” he breathed, “the Great Game is one thing, but letting her play chess under Great Game rules is a death sentence.”

“It’s still only chess,” I replied. “We eliminate each other’s pieces and position our own until we are in a position to capture the king; there is nothing remarkable in this.”

“Except that you are the king.”

“And so is she.”

“And your pieces are going to be the fucking World Bank!” he hissed. “For bishop, read pope or ayatollah, summoning the faithful to crusade or jihad. For knight, read Mossad; for pawn, read the government of Pakistan, Silver! It’s not your death that troubles me here, though I am certain that you will die – it’s the death of every pawn, rook and queen the pair of you throw at each other as part of your game. Great Game rules mean you bring your own pieces to the table, and how long do you think it will be until she breaks out the big guns? Are you going to let countries fall, people die, economies crumble just to move a little closer to finding and capturing her for this game?”

I thought about the question a while, rolling the cold stem of the glass between my fingers. “Yes,” I said at last. “To win the Great Game: yes.”

He rolled back in his chair as if pushed in the heart, and for a moment he looked disgusted. I met his eyes and attempted to see my face in their reflection, my condition. Was there shame there? Did I feel a start of doubt at the lives that would be destroyed, the cities shattered, the countries overthrown, all for a game?

He turned his face away and I realised that I did not.

There are no cards dealt in the Great Game save those that you bring with you. There is no mercy either.

I fled through New York.

Fled in that it was my person, my body, which the Gamesmaster must capture if she is to win the Great Game. And not fleeing, not so much, in that already I was putting pieces into play. I called the police captain whose services I won over a game of blackjack; the admiral who swore he would do anything for me, anything at all, if I spared him his forfeit when the last card fell; the arsonist whose burns I helped to heal when, gambling his life against a powerful man’s skin, he stumbled on the final move. I called the FBI agents who had assisted me when I played Cluedo in a house in Oregon, and whose lives I had saved before Colonel Mustard could finish his work with the candlestick. I called the senior engineer in the traffic control centre whose husband had bet his fortune on a throw of the coin, and whose life I had rebuilt after the dime had fallen.

All these I called through a single number, for they were pieces which I had gathered in preparation for this moment, an opening move I had already prepared, and by the time I reached JFK airport and the chartered jet – one of nine – that would carry me to my next location, traffic in Manhattan was at standstill, protests blocked the bridges, fires were blazing in Brooklyn and FBI agents were conducting drug busts on East 39th Street, where the Gameshouse stood.

Or rather, where the Gameshouse had stood.

For within minutes of my leaving it, it was gone.

Chapter 7

Preparations made on a plane out of New York City.

In a lower league game of chess, you can see your king, the piece you must secure. In the Great Game, the board is the planet, the pawns are legion and finding your target can be as challenging as checkmate.

The pilot on this chartered plane, on which I am the only passenger, is Ghanaian. He lost his licence when the father of his fiancée discovered their liaison and called the ministry and screamed that his would-be son was a Muslim and a terrorist and a villain and had dared to sleep with his beautiful girl. I gave him his licence back, and a plane, and his wife lived in Paris, and his children were seven and nine and knew they were going to be astronauts or dinosaur hunters and had never asked why granddaddy didn’t visit.

“Where to?”

I sunk into the co-pilot’s seat, handed him a slip of paper. “There are coordinates for an island in the Atlantic.”

“What’s it called?”

“I’m not sure it ever had a name.”

“Father-in-law trouble?” he asked with a smile, a pain that he had made a joke.

“More like fiancée.”

“Oh man, you should never run away from love. If it has to end, it has to end, but don’t just leave things unsaid!”

“It’s not like that.”

“If you say so; it’s your life.”

We flew for three hours.

One thousand and eighty-nine kilometres off the coast of America, a senior officer in GCHQ (“sometimes the cards just don’t fall the way you want”) alerted me to a satellite re-tasking over my rough location.

I alerted a cybercommunity called “Big Brother Lives”. Their leader (“I can beat anyone at this game; you just watch me”) responded within twenty seconds to my message, and launched the DDoS attack against the responsible servers.

Forty minutes later we landed on an island with no name, little more than a basalt blip in the ocean, where I boarded the French coastguard vessel that was waiting for me and headed into the night.

The captain said, his face lit from below by the lights of his control panels, “I didn’t even know this place existed. What is it – a villain’s lair?”

“No – no hollow volcano, you see.”

“Then why is there a landing strip and no people?”

“It’s a long way from radar.”

“That sounds villainous to me.”

I smiled at the man, whose mighty beard and grubby cap declared that here was a man who served the oceans first and la belle France second. Poseidon was his god, the water was his lover, and Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité would be welcome on board only if they were willing to row. He didn’t know why he was here, and that was fine. The orders had come from higher up, from a man who had said, “Please don’t take my mind,” and whose mind I spared in exchange for favours yet to come.

“It has some lovely and rather unusual diving birds on it,” I said at last by way of comfort. “I don’t know how they got there since they are better at swimming than flying – yet there they are – nature’s hiccup.”

“Nature doesn’t have hiccups,” he replied seriously. “When she farts an island out of the bathwater, she does so deliberately.”

My cabin was below decks, a hammock in a space made for pipes, no air save hot blasts from the engines, noise without cessation, rocking that would throw you from your bed if you fought it, soothe you to sleep if you permitted yourself to sink into its embrace.

I had used some thirty per cent of my New York resources to escape the city, and deployed a GCHQ mole and an anarchist cyber group in my defence. She – my enemy, my lady of the veil – had tasked an NSA satellite to find me. Pawns played in an opening move, feeling out the shape of the board.

This was acceptable – I could be patient in the early days. The Gameshouse had shut its doors and now somewhere she walked the earth, and being as she was, so very mighty and so very skilled, I didn’t need to make any great efforts to find her yet; not until I was secure in my own position.

The more moves she made, the more pieces would be revealed, and the easier she would be to find.

I closed my eyes to sleep.

Chapter 8

Moves made from Ville de Valverde.

I set the FBI onto the NSA, attempting to trace the satellite that had tracked me down.

The NSA wasn’t having any of it, and within forty forty-eight hours my agents were reassigned to desk jobs in Dallas, torn away from their friends, their families, their careers and their utility as pieces. Pawn takes pawn.

I tried an alternative tack, pushing from GCHQ for intelligence, but the Americans simply ignored my requests. The Gamesmaster had her pieces well positioned in the NSA, and they deflected my assaults without a thought. Tactical stalemate.

This being so, I settled back for a little while to consider. Villa de Valverde is a capital city, population 1,691, little white houses on a little green hill. Walking round it took approximately twenty-five minutes before returning to the tiny room above a taverna which served as my headquarters, resolved to try another tactic. The more pieces I threw at the NSA, the more pieces I risked compromising, revealing my hand to the Gamesmaster.

Instead, I deployed a mercenary and his handler in Sri Lanka, flying them to the US to attempt to kidnap a likely NSA employee who might be in the Gamesmaster’s employ. This they succeeded in doing, and held him for all of twenty-two minutes before a SWAT team broke in and took them down.

Three hours later, the mercenary, pushed full of what chemicals I knew not, confessed to having received his orders from a man in Colombo who matched my description – which indeed he had – and I waited with baited breath for what doom might come.

Very little doom came indeed. Colombo remained distressingly uninteresting for nearly four days until finally a journalist for Al Jazeera knocked on the door of my double, asked if he could have an interview and, told no, simply shrugged and walked away. A pawn, sent to test whether there was indeed a king hiding in the city. The Gamesmaster was not willing to risk bigger pieces on unlikely outcomes yet. She was moving carefully, feeling out the board; a slow opening game.

On my ninth day in Villa de Valverde, my landlady asked me if I wanted to join her and her husband for dinner. She was seventy-three and had the energy of a twenty-year-old; he was eighty-one and relied on the twice-monthly medical drop from Santa Cruz to supply the drugs and oxygen that he needed to stay alive. She cared for him constantly with unflagging cheerfulness, and it seemed as I sat at their uneven wooden table in their tiny kitchen smelling of fish, that her great energy had been drawn, vampire-like, from him so that as one waned the other waxed, though her waxing was all, all of it, in love for him as she grew to fill the void that his decline created.

She cooked with divine inspiration, fish and beans and wine, prawns bigger than my fist, sauce to lick from the cracked blue plates on which it was served, and as she cooked she talked constantly, a merry litany of stories and adventures from the tiny island in the middle of the sea.

Many tourists, she said, many indeed but not so much, not so many as Tenerife and people said that was a bad thing, a tragedy, a shame, but she preferred it, it made it better, and what tourists you did get were a better class, not the kind to just sit on the beach but the kind who cared where they went, what they saw, yes, better, so much better. And you, Mr Vagar, what about you, you come here but you never seem to leave your room – is it not the sun, the climate, the people, the sea…?

Writing a book, I explained.

A book; how marvellous; what on?

Mathematics.

Mathematics! That sounds…very nice. What kind mathematics?

Decision theory. I used to study zero-sum problems, where the outcome of a decision by one agent led to an equal and direct loss of material in another. Now the times have changed – we look at asymetrical models of decision-making, stochastic outcomes, differential games and so on.

I see, she lied. And tell me, Mr Vagar…what’s it good for?

No malice in her question, nothing but genuine concern and interest. I opened my mouth to explain, to talk about outcomes and opportunities, models of human behaviour, and found my words had run dry.

The next evening after the table was cleared, she nudged her husband, subtle as an orca, and winked at me and said, “Do you play cards?”

I did.

She dealt three hands, an old game, a game of pairs and additions, and her husband took his cards in shaking hands and played each one slowly as if the little squares were almost too heavy to hold, as if frightened he would drop them, and he won – resoundingly, he won – though his breath wheezed in his throat and his eyes drooped as his wife wheeled him up to bed – and at the moment of victory I thought I saw a thing in his eyes that I had seen a thousand times before.

Not merely joy. Not merely satisfaction at a victory.

I saw in him, in his face like dried seaweed, power.

Power over the game.

Power over the world that was within the game.

Power over the players that he had defeated.

Power over this moment, this second of triumph.

Power over himself.

Our eyes met as he was turned away, and for the first time that evening, he smiled.

Two days later, lying on my belly on the single bed in my little room, a small, spotted, brown lizard edging ever closer to my right elbow, its curiosity aroused by my stillness, its tongue licking pinkly at the sizzling air, I saw my own face on an Interpol wanted list.

It had been a while coming – a big move, an obvious move, but more importantly, a move that demonstrated again the extent of her power.

I hired a boat and sailed south across a still, grey sea.

Chapter 9

Resources launched against Interpol; not an all-out assault, merely a little prodding around the edges.

Through an officer of the Bundespolizei, I requested more information. What was the crime of this unnamed criminal who had my features?

Theft, came the answer. Terrorism. Arson. (Did it matter?)

And what were the leads?

The criminal was probably in Europe. Links to cyber-terrorists. Links to paramilitary groups. Assumed dangerous.

And where had the request come from for his arrest?

Bulgaria, came the reply.

He’s wanted primarily in Bulgaria.

That was unwelcome news. Did the Gamesmaster own a piece of the Bulgarian mafia as well as a shard of Interpol? That applied pressure from both the legal and illegal ends of the spectrum of professional body-hunters.

I rifled through my memories, lists of contacts, names, gathered down the centuries in expectation of this moment. My resources in Bulgaria were thin but I eventually settled on a senior civil servant who had bet his all – his life, body, soul – with the wild overconfidence of a man who was never going to win and who, when the umpires came to collect, had kissed my shoes and cried out for mercy, and who had received back from me his life and his body – but not his soul.

“I can’t do it!” he hissed down the satellite phone. “I can’t ask those sorts of questions!”

“You can,” I replied calmly, feet dangling over the side of my boat, sun hot on my skin, salt in my mouth and on my tongue. “You will.”

Three days later, I docked in the village of Palmarin on the Senegalese coast. The water was the colour of oceans on maps, a perfect pale blue where the eye skimmed over it, fading to clear as you looked down to the sandy bottom below. On the beach, three boys in baggy shorts watched me approach, prodding the sand with long sticks, huddled beneath the shade of a palm tree, and when at last their patience broke they ran all at once, like a river through a dam, to dance around me and holler, “Money? American? Money?” and hop and pull nervously at my sleeves until their mother, swaddled all in blue, tushed and tutted and chased them away and called them vile creatures and said their father, God rest him, would be ashamed.

They laughed at that and ran back to the shade of their tree to watch for the next stranger with the stern intensity of a lighthouse.

“You’ll like it here!” exclaimed the woman who led me to the best supply store in town, owned, though she did say so herself, by her cousin who was the only honest trader I’d find in these parts. “We have sun, we have the sea, we have fresh fish and good drink – not like other places, not like Dakar or Mbour – there they only have noise and bad people.”

Her cousin, for all that he wore mismatching flip-flops and grinned as if tetanus had locked the muscles in place, was an honest trader who sold everything at a price barely above what it was worth, and threw in four bottles of clean water when I was done with a cry of, “Take, take; you’ll need it!”

At sunset I sat on a wicker chair by the sea, and drank palm wine and read a fourth-hand thriller which had sat on the counter of the store between the tins of dried fish and the stack of bicycle tyres, every size, and which quite possibly hadn’t been for sale were it not that the enterprising owner would have sold everything he could, even his mismatched flip flops, if there was some profit in it.

Goddammit, exclaimed the text in my lap, you tell those goddamn CIA punks to get their house in order!

I laid my book aside and watched the sea. The stars began to grow in the sky. I tried staring into the darkest part of the darkness, but the more I looked, the more stars I could see there. The wind turned cold off the water, and I enjoyed its touch.

My phone rang and I found myself briefly annoyed by the sound.

I let it ring nine times, then answered.

A voice, speaking fast in Bulgarian: my civil servant.

“Damn you,” he rasped “Damn you, now they’re after me, damn you to hell!”

“What have you learned?”

“That you don’t fuck with the fucking mafia! That you don’t fuck with the fucking mafia-run police! That you don’t fuck with the minister of the interior or senior judges; that you don’t fuck with this fucking stuff!”

“Tell me what you’ve learned.”

“That you don’t fuck with the SSLP! They’ve put a fucking hit out on you, straight from the top this comes, ten million euros to the first fucker to pick you off and you know, when I started asking…I think they put a hit on me too. I’m leaving. I’m fucking getting out of here before they get my wife and kids, fuck you, Silver, fuck you!”

He hung up on me before I could say anything more.

Twenty-two hours later, he was dead.

Chapter 10

An inspector in the Istanbul police (“win some, lose some”) filled me in on SSLP.

“Security Solutions and Life Protection,” he explained cheerfully down the phone. “Shit name for a bad insurance company. They’re mafia through and through. Joined the market few years back: money laundering, protection rackets, drugs – the usual. Recruited a lot of its muscle from old rivals, but also did a neat number with the kids. Opened wrestling and boxing clubs across the country, survival courses, community meetings, that sort of shit. Tea and cake for the mums, one-oh-one on how to fuck people over. Nice, traditional Hitler Youth stuff – get them young and they stay loyal till they’re old. That’s the theory at least – first generation are hitting their thirties about now so I guess we’ll see how good ‘loyalty’ is in a psycho!”

I pictured him, my hard-won piece, sitting with his feet up on his desk, a tulip glass of cool Turkish tea in his hand, rocking gently back in his chair, and in my fantasy he rocked now a little too hard and fell backwards, spilling both his tea and his casual attitude towards the people who’d put a ten-million-euro hit on my head, across the floor of his too-tidy office.

“Who runs it?”

“Georgi Daskalov, but he’s untouchable.”

“Where is he?”

“Not Bulgaria – shit, you think a guy like that would stick around in his own country?! Italy somewhere. Up by a big lake, you know the kind of thing. Hell, I’d like to live by a lake in Italy, but I guess some of us have to suffer for our sins.”

A secretary in the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (“whatever debts my husband owes, you forgive them; my skills are more useful to you than his”) confirmed Daskalov’s location.

“We all know who and what he is,” she sighed. “But even if we could prove it, what good would it do? Bulgaria would request his deportation and he’d be free within a week, or he’d just bribe or shoot his way through judges until someone stupid enough came along to let him go. You don’t get to touch men like Daskalov – the best you can hope for is damage limitation.”

“What would happen if I did take him down?”

“Maybe the whole thing would collapse. Maybe things would get better. Maybe someone else would take his place, and it’d just carry on regardless.”

“He’s a powerful piece in my enemy’s hand. Removing him might open up the board a little bit.”

“He’s a murderer, a human trafficker, a dealer in vice and drugs,” she corrected. “All the rest is talk.”

I set sail the following morning, heading north towards the Mediterranean.

Chapter 11

On my third day at sea, an email arrived in capital letters, marked “urgent”. It came from the Swiss cyberwarfare experts I’d acquired over a game of Diplomacy (seventeen months of hard play and at the end, as it always seems to, the game came down to an artillery exchange over Grozny and an ignominious retreat for my opponent into Siberia, surrender finally agreed six hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean after I’d sent in tanks).

It read:

At 22.33 GMT, your laptop was compromised. Destroy and evade.

The time was 23.08 GMT.

I threw my laptop overboard, made one phone call before throwing that into the water too, ripped out the transponder from my boat, shut down the radio, killed all running lights and made a sharp turn east towards land. From beneath a bench I pulled out three lifejackets and a box of emergency supplies, lashing them together with rope and throwing them, still tied to the ship, over the side into the water.

At 00.12 the first plane flew over, slow and low, its engine groaning like an overweight bee exhausted from the toils of life. It circled me once, twice, its lights popping in and out of thin cloud as it nailed my position, before it drifted upwards, out of earshot. At 00.32 two fighter planes took its place. I jumped overboard when I heard the jet engines, cutting the rope that connected my floating bundle of boxes and lifejackets to the ship with a knife and, clinging to this makeshift raft, kicked away from the boat. It seemed to take the fighters an inordinate amount of time to circle round for the kill. When the missiles struck, I was nearly two hundred yards away, but that was near enough for the heat to singe the back of my neck, for the force to slap me under, for the shockwave beneath the ocean – moving slower than the air – to then pick me up and spin me round, my tightly shut eyes burning against the half-glimpsed sight of burning fuel on the water, my mouth full of sea, my nose full of sea, my head full of foam. I clung to my raft and kept kicking away, and when the fighters circled back once, twice, three times, strafing what little remained of my boat, I pushed myself under my raft and held my breath until my eyes were going to burst from their sockets and my lungs were two shrivelled vacuums in my chest, and then I surfaced, and coughed and gasped and dived again, the busy world under the ocean illuminated by cobwebs of fiery light which drifted into the sea from the remnants of my boat until at last, their job done, the fighters turned away and the night was silent again.

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.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps sometimes – as in the case of Georgi Daskalov – the only reason needed for why every one of the seven cars he owned in the garage beneath his three-storey palace was upholstered in tiger, leopard, lion and bear skin was because he could. Because others wanted it, and he had it, and there an end.

We broke in shortly after 3 a.m. The security system he’d installed was valued at six million dollars, but the men who manned it had fallen victim to the twin Swarovski Alize vodka bottles they’d received in exchange for favours unnamed, each bottle clad in pink diamonds fit for a fairy princess, each cup thrown back with the gusto of champion wrestlers newly returned from throttling giants with their thumbs.

The security alarm went off as we slipped in across the upstairs patio, a silent alerted at police headquarters (who did not respond) as well as the security office (which responded groggily) but by the time the first sober man had pulled his Uzi from the wall, three of his colleagues were dead, and Daskalov was sat in his underpants on the end of his eighty-thousand-dollar bed, handcuffed and sulky. I let my men deal with the rest of the house as I sat next to him, balaclava over my face, pistol in hand, silk shifting beneath me, the smell of drink heavy in the room.

His underpants, being the only thing he now wore, were Lycra. I looked into his face and briefly wondered if we hadn’t caught a body double, a not-quite-Daskalov, or perhaps he merely liked the feel of synthetic fabrics against his nether regions and lamented to his friends that all this silk and gold, all this cotton and organic food, it wasn’t to his taste at all – but one did have to keep up appearances, didn’t one?

Then he said, not lifting his eyes from his study of the floor, “You’re fucking dead.”

“Mr Duskalov,” I replied in his language, “you recently put a hit out on a man to the sum of ten million euros. Last I heard, going price for such assassinations was fifty thousand. What’s so special about this target?”

“You hear me?” he asked louder. “You’re dead. Your wife is dead. Your kids are dead. Maybe you’re lucky – maybe you die first so you don’t watch, but I swear to you, they die, all of them, all dead.”

“I have no wife. I have no children, no family, no friends and no name. Do you know who I am, Mr Duskalov?”

For the first time he looked at me, and he did.

“You will lose,” he whispered. “You will lose.”

I radioed the commander of my little troop. “Tear the place apart,” I said, and it was done.

Chapter 18

Data salvaged from a mobster’s home.

Contacts, emails, photos, the names of friends, family, loved ones. Duskalov thought he was clever, thought he kept his business secure, but everyone makes mistakes, and he had made plenty.

We were in and out of his home in less than fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes after we departed, I watched the place where the mansion stood turn to a pyre of smoke and flame, hit by who-knew-what ordinance fired by who-knew-whom. If the Gamesmaster had hoped I was dead before, now she knew I was not, and her blowing up the place where I might be seemed more like a fit of pique than a sound tactical move.

Or perhaps no. Perhaps she was sending a message.

I have all the missiles in the world, she said, her words whispered in the remnants of velvet slippers and ancient masterpieces fluttering to the ground. How long do you think you can keep this up?

A series of quick moves.

Numbers traced, bank accounts accessed, payments followed. I deployed a firm of German forensic bank accountants and two police forces, and we found her accounts, the accounts through which she’d paid Duskalov the upfront to put out a contract for my head, five minutes and twenty seconds after she drained them completely.

We salvaged fifty-two of her most recent transactions – not a one of them for less than a million dollars – before the virus she’d implanted in the system wiped out all trace of it, and the servers of half the banks in Switzerland.

The next morning, I drank hot coffee and ate cold bread, and watched the Swiss Head of the Federal Department of Finance gabble to the journalists that it was just a blip, nothing more, normal business would resume within a few hours, do not be alarmed.

By the end of the day, we had traced forty-eight of the fifty-two transactions on the Gamesmaster’s account, and I turned two investment banks and three financial authorities loose on them, capturing eleven of the companies that the Gamesmaster had routed her finance through, and shutting down a further twelve.

At midnight, the Swiss banks announced they would need another day to get their systems up and running, and the finance minister resigns the following morning, though in practice she has done nothing wrong. By the time the dust settled, the Swiss economy had lost 1.3 billion francs and I had seized a mere seventy-three million dollars’ worth of the Gamesmaster’s assets. In the days that followed, I rounded it up to a neat ninety million, pushed a mayor out of office in Sao Paolo, destroyed two companies in Japan and pulled the plug on a computer laboratory in Mumbai, but it was merely a scratch against the surface, a gentle clawing at the Gamesmaster’s skin, and ultimately insignificant. Have I spent too many pieces in doing it?

Perhaps not. Neither she nor I were pulling out the big pieces yet, but we probed at each other’s defences to see what might give way.

Chapter 19

Places and moves.

In Istanbul, I drank salty ayran and heard the call to prayers and rode the ferry to the Black Sea, watched the translucent jellyfish pulse and wriggle in the clear waters beneath the prow. Not so long ago the waters had been clear, the fish fat and juicy; pollution had changed the ecology of this place. Once I’d played backgammon with a sultan on the Golden Horn, and when he’d lost he slapped me on the shoulder and said, “Sometimes the dice just don’t fall the way you want them to, eh?” and we’d had fresh fish by the sea and he’d told me that his dream was to capture Vienna, but even if the Roman Empire fell, there’d still be enemies, unless the world was in his hand and all people were one.

That had been in the early days, only a few centuries after my loss. Then I had played with the fire of a man scorned and cursed, and sweated and raged over every game, and lost a fair few to my own enthusiasm until habit and the cold turning of the years had diminished all feeling, all fury, all hope into no more and no less than the motion of pieces across the board.

As I settled into the cargo hold of a ship carrying tin towards Batumi, a car bomb detonated in Cheltenham, killing three GCHQ staff and seven strangers. Of the three, only one had been my piece, but I imagined the killers hadn’t been able to narrow it down so precisely and thus settled on eliminating the most likely suspects. My pieces were falling, and I was no closer to bringing the Gamesmaster down.

In a park in Vologorad, where stood a monument to the children who had died in war and who now played for ever in mutual delight, I launched a tentative assault against the sometime colonel, now general of the PLA who had replaced a deposed piece of mine in Beijing. A few careful enquiries revealed that yes, he had sometimes been seen to enjoy a game and yes, his fortunes had seemed to decline and then soar again, indicative, perhaps, of an outside party helping him through a difficult time. I circled round him slowly, slowly, a little poke at his finances here, a gentle exploration of his family life there, before finally setting a careful but thorough agent (yet not so thorough that he had not lost when we played mah-jong) in the Ministry of State Security against the general and his affairs.

Contacts unfolded, information blooming like a flower. I let it all come to me as I slipped through southern Russia, riding an ancient rusted bus and clattering, wheezing train along the banks of the Volga until my agent whispered that the newly formed general suspected something, and if I was going to strike, the time was now.

Go forth, I replied. Take him down.

In the operation that followed, the general, two colonels, a major, three senior politicians and their aides and, to my delight, a high-ranking delegate of the Communist Party who had been tipped for senior office, all tumbled, all fell, and were sent away either to prison or vanished into the unknown realms of re-education. How many had been in the Gamesmaster’s hand, I couldn’t say, but China certainly seemed a more hospitable place at their fall.

In wooden shack that served as a garage, in the middle of a forest of dark pine and lazy flies – fat things that sat like fluff in your hair and bumbled through the air like wind-blown feathers– I played dominos with Leonid and Oleg. A wood-stove burned in the corner of the room, and you could buy for a small consideration tins of salty fish, tins of beans, rice cakes, black bread, tins of fermented vegetables and, from a rack proudly displayed behind the counter, a shotgun, a fireman’s axe and a genuine – if you believed their oaths – Cossack’s sword which had been wielded in the greatest battles of the Crimea.

“Russians are getting soft,” complained Oleg as pieces spread across the table, a mathematical sprawl of battles won and skirmishes lost. “They’ve been blinded by foreign ideas. Everyone says, ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’, ‘tolerance’ but it is not ‘freedom’ if you’re being oppressed by people you don’t agree with, by capitalists and Jews. And ‘tolerance’. You want me to tolerate homosexuals? Why? They don’t respect me, they don’t respect my values, and my values say that all homosexuals are fucking child-molesting pigs, that they’re offensive in the eyes of God, and actively – yes, actively – want to destroy this blessed society I live in. You want me to tolerate them? They don’t tolerate me! They call me ‘backward’ and ‘redneck’ and other things and I say yes, yes! If ‘backward’ means I honour the traditions of my fathers, if ‘redneck’ means I love the earth and this land and would shed my blood for it, then I am all of this, and your ‘freedom’ is just a prison to put men like me in, but worse – worse! You, with your words and your talking, you want me to imprison myself. The only advantage we have is that they, those Jews and those faggots, they are too cowardly to take up arms. We aren’t. We believe in something more than they do. That’s why we’ll always win.”

I listened to his words, and watched him lay a bad piece on the table, and saw a way to win the game, and considered my hand and, very slowly, and very carefully, lost.

In the evening, Oleg slapped me on the back and said, “You’re all right, for a stranger,” and invited me to join him in the hot cabin in the woods, where burning rocks were carefully lowered into sizzling steam, and the air seared our lungs, and we lay naked on wooden planks and beat each other with birch branches, skin gleaming, oil and moisture and sweat, and where Oleg slapped his naked thighs and proclaimed, “This is what men do!”

When I left the next morning, hitching a ride on the back of a truck busy with squawking chickens, Leonid took me to one side.

“Oleg’s a good man,” he whispered, “but he’s never left this place. On this road, in this forest, he is a king. He’s frightened of what he’ll be if he goes somewhere else.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid?”

He shrugged. “I went as far as Kazan once, and stayed in the house of a Jew. He seemed all right. He liked to watch the TV too loud, but always turned it down when his wife came home. One day, I think, the world will be full of people; that is all.”

I thanked him for his hospitality, climbed up between a palette of chickens and waved goodbye as the truck drove on. Oleg and Leonid stood side by side, waving back until we were out of sight.

Chapter 20

Beneath the white arches and faux-chandeliers of Novosibirsk Trans-Siberian Railway station, I drank terrible coffee from a cardboard cup, knees cramped in a chair too low to sit in, and listened to the talk of two women waiting for their train.

He said that?

He said that.

Barbarian.

He thought it was funny.

Does he think it’s funny?

He thinks it’s funny.

It’s not funny.

No.

Guys like that think you’re a prude when you say no. You’ve led them on by looking like a woman, by being who you are, by being there, by being at all, they blame the women, because women are strong and men are weak and so if you say no…

…it’s your fault.

It’s your fault.

Or you’re saying “no” to be a tease.

Because you want to…

…though you don’t…

…in their minds…

…in their minds everyone wants to…

With them.

Because all of this, all of it, it’s always about them, isn’t it? You have no freedom.

Because you’re a woman. Hard-wired to look at a man and want him, hard-wired to be happy when they…so that’s it. That’s all we are. That’s where the logic leads. And me, I’ve looked at men and I’ve thought…but I’ve heard their voices, I’ve seen them laugh and smile, I’ve assumed they will say no because they can, because they will, because that’s life, but he…

Exactly. He doesn’t see you, just himself reflected.

It’s not funny.

No. It never was.

The trains in the station ran on Moscow time, three hours behind the local zone. A woman behind the ticket counter, her face collapsed like a muddy cliff, fossilised features revealed beneath the falling loam of her skin, grudgingly sold me a ticket to Krasnoyarsk. “Twelve hours,” she snarled. “No food on train.”

“That’s fine.”

Her lips curled downwards at this, as if to say that whatever my naïve assumptions now about my ability to endure twelve hours on the train, time would prove them wrong.

In the station toilet, a woman handed out grey toilet paper one sheet at a time, studying intently the faces of those who purchased this proffered good, wondering perhaps what manner of waste product we might produce and whether, as the consequence of a bad meal perhaps, or a hard night of drinking, we might come back for more paper in a moment, desperate and vulnerable, and if a tip would be on offer should she oblige.

I sat alone on the Eastbound 002M from Moscow and willed my eyes to shut.

They closed, they opened again. A sound, a terror, an unnamed fear.

Sleep, I said, for God’s sake, sleep.

You sleep, I replied. You leave yourself vulnerable and exposed, alone in the night with strangers. You sleep, if you’re so tired.

I laughed at that, and wondered when my own company had become so unpleasant to me.

A long time ago, I whispered. I started to hate you the day you started playing for the sake of the game, rather than the cause.

It’s not true, I replied. It’s not true.

It’s not true.

The train rattled on through the Siberian night.

Chapter 21

At Ulan-Ude, I sat on my bag in the car park outside the station and waited for my Mongolian visa to clear. An official in a dark uniform with shiny cufflinks inspected my passport, examined my face, examined my passport again, turning it this way and that as if some embedded secret might be found in reading the writing right to left, bottom to top as well as through more conventional means, before laying it aside and saying, “How did you get to Russia?”

“Through Georgia.”

“I didn’t think that was possible at the moment.”

“It is if you’re not Russian or Georgian.”

“What is the purpose of your trip?”

“I’m a teacher.”

“What do you teach?”

“History.”

“Why are you coming to Mongolia?”

“For the history.”

“What history?”

“All of it.”

“What bit of history are you interested in?”

I sighed, and considered any number of smart answers that would have slowed my journey before saying the two words that he needed to be said. “Genghis Khan,” I sighed. “I’m interested in Genghis Khan.”

The customs man perked up considerably at this. “You must visit Ulan Bator!” he exclaimed. “And take the bus to Tsonjin Boldog. They have a statue of the Khan there that is a hundred metres tall!”

I thanked him courteously as he returned my documents, and did indeed visit Tsonjin Boldog. The statue, a monstrosity all in metal, wasn’t a hundred metres, but was at the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere, which may have helped create an impression. The stern face of the Khan glared out from the back of his rugged, long-tailed pony, a golden whip encased in his fat-fingered hand, the whole edifice erected on a strangely European-looking visitor centre which proclaimed proudly that Mongolia was finally ridding itself of the shackles of oppression to become proud in its own identity, and the history of its Khans.

I caught the onward train that evening, heading south across open grasslands beneath an endless sky towards Beijing.

Two hours before we were scheduled to cross the Sino-Mongolian border, my phone rang.

The caller was a member of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service whose fealty I’d won in a game of Old Maid, and who, as the last pathogenic vector was eliminated from the field between us, threw her hand in with a shrug and a merry cry of, “Shucks, I guess this is a game-changer, yeah?”

“I’m a good player,” I replied. “I never sacrifice a piece unless I have to.”

Now she was on the phone and there was a satellite delay between us, but she kept to the point. “You in Mongolia?”

“What makes you think I am?” I asked carefully.

“Got a hit on you crossing the Russian-Mongolian border. Some bright spark thought you looked a little suspect, did some digging, now half the intelligence services of the world have got their guys descending on you, not to mention a whole bunch of folks I’ve never even heard of. Might not be you, might be a hiccup, but I figured if it was you, you should know that you’re probably fucked.”

“Thanks for the warning – I’ll call back.”

I hung up, threw my phones and my laptop out of the window of the still-moving train, gathered my bag and walked for three carriages before bumping into a Chinese tourist and his wife heading the other way, whereupon I stole his phone.

Eight minutes later, the train slowed for a long curve towards an ancient bridge, and as it dropped to near running speed, I creaked open a door between two interconnecting carriages, threw my bag onto the tracks and jumped out after it, rolling, knees to chest, as I fell.

Chapter 22

Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth. Her beauty changes with the eye of the beholder. To a man freshly flung from a still-moving train, it is flat, vast, terrifying, a desert of grass where you might roam for ever, still bleeding, still stinging, and see barely another soul. To a tired wanderer, it is a blessed place, rolling hills and dry shrub where you might start a fire, a warning of mountains in the distance, but an infinite space between you and them. To a thirsty man, it is a damned place, bare and infertile, until you find a little stream running down from a stony hill, when Mongolia becomes again the most beautiful place on this surface of the earth, a hallowed sanctuary from the intrusion of brutal men, an uninhabited wilderness built only for pilgrims and the sky.

I saw in Mongolia all these things, but mostly I saw danger. The irritating customs official on the Mongolian border had known someone, or said something to someone, which now put me in danger, and so I walked from the railway line only far enough to find a little cover, and on my purloined telephone called the only suitable piece I had in play within the Mongolian steppe.

Batukhan, when he answered, bellowed, “Who’s this? What do you want?”

“It’s Silver. I want you to make a move for me.”

He fell very quiet then, and breathed a long while before he said at last, “What do you need?”

“A pickup, and a lift across the Chinese border.”

“I’m very busy right now, very busy…”

“Your soul is mine,” I replied. “I won it and gave you your freedom where other men would have sucked you dry. Now I claim my debt.”

Silence again. Then an overdramatic groan, a flustered sound to cover the terror he would not permit himself to feel. “Tell me where you are.”

“I’d say about a hundred miles north of Erenhot.”

“That’s eleven hours’ drive from here!”

“Then I suggest you get going.”

He drove; I walked.

I walked with my stolen mobile phone turned off until it would be needed. I had crunched something in my ankle and, while it wasn’t unbearable, the discomfort slowed my pace. I could see no trees for miles save for a single scrubby thing of white bark and no leaves which hung in the far distance like a signpost to a hidden cemetery. I walked through a landscape of no roads, no fields, no farms, no people, only sky, until I came at last to a dirt track, no wider than the width of my left foot, near-overgrown save that the odd unnamed animal (my mind leapt to predators and creatures of sharp temperament) had kept it clear. Where there were animal tracks, there was some thin hope of water, so I followed it to a downward curve in the landscape I hadn’t observed coming, and then down a little more to a soft gully where a stream flowed and where, set to one side of the water, stood a low grey wall, half tumbled to obscurity, the land risen to meet its stones so now a man could climb over it in an easy step. Within, a few more broken walls, places where once words and names had been scratched into stone, gone, only an echo in the dust. I wandered through it as the sun began to set, until my eye caught a glimmer of metal beneath the earth. Kneeling down, I brushed away a little dirt to see the corner of a bell of bleached brass, ancient characters still visible on it, cradled by what at first seemed to be a mound of clay, but which, when I pushed a little deeper, I found to be a human arm, dry-grass bone shrouded in faded cloth, and following the line of this stick which still embraced the bell, I saw that the mound I had took for soil was in fact a skull, shrouded also in fabric, a second arm pulled across its face as if the unknown stranger in this place had pulled the cloth across his eyes to shield himself and his precious possession from a storm, and died just so, too weary to live longer.

I left the corpse and the bell, and sat by the stream instead, thumbing my mobile phone back on as the sun set so that Batukhan could find me in the dark.

Chapter 23

Batukhan, five foot two, smuggler, gambler, petty crook, dealer in used cars and bad horses, would-be player who lost on his very first game, (“I don’t know how I lost – perhaps it wasn’t me losing; perhaps it was just you who won?”) and whose life I acquired and spared, drove a monster of a truck with the casual ease of a teenager on a bicycle. One hand on the steering wheel, another gesturing in the air, a bad Chinese cigarette hanging out of his mouth, all windows down and the speed gauge hitting sixty miles an hour despite the total lack of roads as we bounced across the midnight steppe, he exclaimed:

“You’re in real trouble! Real trouble, Silver, like trouble I haven’t seen before, and I’ve seen trouble!”

“What kind of trouble?”

“The Chinese closed the border crossing three hours ago – no trains, no cars, no planes, no nothing! Then two hours ago, the Russians closed their borders too! The government is panic; everyone says we’re about to be invaded, the PLA sent helicopters into Mongolian airspace, denied it of course but we know what we saw – every pony-riding nomad’s on Sina Weibo these days anyway, posting pictures of special forces guys, armour, guns, the whole works, getting on the train and threatening to shoot anyone who looked even slightly Western, slightly like you! They stopped Dae Jang Geum to show a picture of your face – I nearly died! My mother was on the phone to me: ‘They’ve interrupted Dae Jang Geum,’ she was screaming, I tell you, screaming, ‘They’ve interrupted it, just when we were going to find out if it was exile or death – what am I supposed to do?’ ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘they’ll resume broadcasting in a second, just you wait’, – my mother, you see, my mother – but I love her, of course I do – your face on TV! You’re famous, you are.”

“I could do with anonymity.”

“Is this a game?” he asked abruptly as we bounced our way across a surge of stones. “Are you playing a game?”

“Yes. It’s a game – the game, in fact. She’s putting me in check again, removing options, forcing me to…” I hesitated. He was too frightened to hear the words left unspoken. What pieces could I sacrifice to protect myself? Was Batukhan more useful to me dead or alive?

“Well, it’s a disaster! My mother, my mother screaming – the government’s mobilising the army, do you know that? Not to catch you – at least, probably not to catch you – but because the PLA is massing on the south and the Russians are massing in the north and the border’s been closed and the mining companies are asking what’s going on and no one seems to know but it’s all about you, your game ruining my mother’s calm. And when she’s angry, I’m angry, and I have to take my anger out on someone, so if you’ve got someone you’re angry at, you should call them, right now!”

He slapped the steering wheel for emphasis, then clung on tight as a sudden, unseen lurch in the landscape bounced us in our seats. The motion seemed to knock the fury from his lungs, and for a while we rattled on in silence, our headlights tearing through the gathered dark like gunshots through silence.

“Can you get me across the border?” I asked at last.

“Sure – sure I can. I’m me, this is my country, these are my hills, I do anything.” Then, as a sullen afterthought he added, “I’m a player in these parts, I am. I’m a proper player.”

The words, no sooner spoken, fell dull into the night.

We drove on in silence.

His plan for getting me across the border was a travelling family who, as the eldest woman shuffled me into her yurt, proclaimed through her toothless gums that they were of the Baatuds, an ancient and noble people who had been destroyed by other worthless tribes down the centuries until only a few now, only a few, carried their sacred songs and stories, and would I like coffee?

Batukhan babbled at high speed outside with the woman’s husband, a dialect I didn’t know, and when it seemed that an agreement might never be reached, the old woman rose up and hollered at them both in the same language and they hung their heads, and that seemed to settle the debate.

“They’ll get you into China,” said Batukhan as the woman padded round me and pushed me onto what I suspected was her finest rug. “Any problem, you don’t call me, okay?”

And with that, he was gone.

Impressions of a family travelling through Mongolia.

There were fifteen of them. Grandpa Baatud (nominally in charge), Grandma Baatud (mistress of all she surveyed), two sons and their wives, a daughter and her husband and seven progeny. The eldest of this brood was a boy of fourteen, his face scaled red by the wind, who rode a brown and white pony and glared with a fire that his father lacked, daring anyone to deny his right as eldest, strongest, smartest – a little man in a tiny world. The youngest was a four-year-old who stared at me with astonished eyes and, over the course of the five days I spent with them, only once dared touch me, and having done so clung on, as if unbelieving that I might not dissolve before her. I let her cling; the strength of her arms around my leg reminded me of…something. Something distant which had faded. Something that might have been like trust, but more. Something more, which had vanished with my name.

They rode a mixture of ponies and sour-faced camels. They travelled with two yurts, which could be raised and lowered in a matter of hours, the fine-boned internal structure whisked away and the thick skins that covered it unfurled almost too fast to follow motion; yet the ropes that bound these goods to their animals’ flanks were bright blue, nylon-woven, and as she trotted along, one of the middle daughters, an eleven-year-old who looked at no one, finding no one interesting, kept checking text messages on a mobile phone which was recharged from a solar battery the size of a small frying pan. This heavy object seemed indulgent for just one teenager to use for her social needs as we travelled through this empty land, but lo, when we stopped for food on the second day, out it came and her brothers and sisters leapt to charge their devices while Grandma looked on and said it was the school holidays, and the children did miss their friends when away.

I said nothing, swaddled in a loaned jacket, hat pulled low against the glare of the sun, the grumbling camel beneath my folded legs burping toxic gases in sulky criticism of my presence on its hump.

We ate dishes enriched by camel butter, and drank hot cups of camel milk. The husbands and sons sang songs at night, tales of ancient battles and dead witches, whose contents I barely understood, while their children sat around to listen, the youngest agape, the eldest silent in the face of unappreciated repetition.

Once, a military fighter plane flew over, and during the three hours that followed, I heard engines higher in the clouds. One of the sons declared he knew it to be Chinese by the sound, having served in the Mongolian army, whereupon the second son laughed and said his brother couldn’t tell the difference between a vulture and an eagle, let alone a Chinese or a Russian jet, and he was to stop boasting about his time in the army, given he’d only served for three months before being dismissed as unfit for duty. Then the eldest son flushed red and said at least he’d served, at least he’d travelled, and an argument broke out between them, silenced at last by Grandma who proclaimed that they were giving her a headache and didn’t they know better than to put her into one of her moods?

It seemed they did, and they fell silent.

Grass dried, thinned, failed.

We swathed ourselves in bright fabric dulled by sunlight, wrapping it around our faces, our fingers, our clothes, barrier against the dust and the sun. My eyes burned, skin flaking from the lids. My face, even shielded, began to crunch to the lizard-like redness of my companions. I craved water, but drank only when they did, obeying their rules, knowing their rules had been formed to survive. The daughter stopped texting after a while; the dust took the inclination from her. I wondered what she might have said? DESERT SUCKS SO BORED ATM. CAN’T WAIT TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL

I laughed out loud thinking about it, and the convoy stared at me and I laughed no more.

On the fifth night, as the fire blazed in the centre of the camp, and the men sat round boasting of impossible deeds while camels churned and ponies slumbered, I saw shapes move on the edge of the dark and, fearing the worst, made to run. Then the shapes resolved into the form of the women and their daughters, moving against the edge of the starlight, and creeping further, I saw hands sweeping across the turning skies, and heard soft voices whispering secrets, and strained my ears to catch some few words of the truths being told there.

By this star you may find north, whispered a mother, and by that you may know how far you are from dawn in winter. When you head south, you will see this constellation grow brighter, and may count the hours by the turning of this light as it journeys through the heavens. Remember these lessons, they whispered, for one day you may find yourself lost and alone in this land, far from friends, and only the earth beneath your feet, the water of the rivers and the rains of the skies, the journey of the sun, the shriek of the eagle as it returns to its nest and the turning of the stars will guide you. Believe in these, believe in yourself, and you will always find your way home.

The next morning, without any ado, as we travelled in silence across a plain of yellow dirt, Grandpa Baatud half turned in his saddle to look back at me and said, “This is China.”

“Is it?” I looked for sign of life, a change in the land, an appearance of people, but the landscape was as empty as it had been, the sky as wide.

“Oh yes,” he replied merrily. “We’ve been in China for a while now. You can tell by the smell.”

I sniffed the air and smelt nothing new.

Two days later, we came to a village in the middle of yellow sand and white rocks whose name translated as something akin to “The Beginning of the Sun Near the Death Tree”, and whose inhabitants, all two hundred and twenty-nine of them, had the same sun-blasted, sand-scraped, wind-scrubbed features as my guides. I looked for signs of a police station and saw none. I looked for a military presence and saw none. I wrapped myself in my scarf, buried my face in my hat and asked in Mandarin if there was anywhere I could stay. Eventually, the mayor of the town, a man who had more than a little of the Mongol in him, put me up on his sofa, which was in his bedroom, which was his house, and refused any payment for his kindness.

Alone, in a nowhere place, in a nowhere land.

Grassland had yielded to dust. Desert is not merely a place of dunes but of dryness, of solid packed earth and dust, of stones and rocks and flatness that will not be dug, sky that does not forgive. I asked the ayor why there was a town here.

“There was copper,” he said sadly, “but that was a long time ago.”

So it had been; yet it was no more. I did not ask further.

The nearest town was four hours’ drive away.

I caught a lift on the back of a truck loaded with rubble.

“It’s all we sell,” explained the driver. “People seem to find a use for it. Why are you here?”

“Just travelling.”

“No one travels here,” he replied. “Here is death.”

“Everyone travels to death sooner or later,” I replied with a smile. “In one way or another.”

He stared at me in surprise, then turned away and looked for a brief moment like the loneliest, saddest man in the world.

The next town had a population of nine hundred and thirty-three, and a market on Thursdays, and the last gasping remnants of a mine nearby. It even had a guest house with four rooms and a visitor balcony. I sat on a wobbly plastic chair on the balcony watching the dust rise from the mine nearby, smelt chemicals on the air, heard the grinding of great machines tearing through the earth.

It had been over a week since the Gamesmaster plastered my face on Mongolian TV. Will she have the power to plaster it on China’s networks too?

I watched TV on a tiny black and white set in my little, roach-crawling room, and saw no evidence of this. One computer in the town had an internet connection, and after a great deal of bartering with the man who owned it (something middling in the mining corporation) I secured twenty minutes on it, watching the system crawl into reluctant life.

My face, it turned out, was not on the Chinese evening news, but the Interpol search warrant had somehow evolved into a thing that had both the Russian and Chinese police forces excited at the idea of finding me. The FBI, I was relieved to see, had yet to join in with this mania – clearly my control of that institution still exceeded the Gamesmaster’s.

Twenty minutes on a computer was not enough to wreck any real havoc against this exasperating move, so I deleted my internet history, shut down and moved on.

There was a bus to the next nearest town, population fifteen thousand. As we drove through the desolate landscape, I looked out of the window to see machines bigger than swimming pools crunching through solid rock, great axels like tearing teeth rending the earth into shreds, men walking along gantries within these creatures’ bellies, dust flying, flying all around, turning the windows of the cramped bus grey.

Ten miles outside town, the bus stopped at a road marking in the middle of nowhere, a place with no name, and a man got on. I looked at him and he looked at me, and I thought I recognised in him a thing that I did not like and looked around at my fellow passengers to see if anyone else had that instinct, and at least three or four had turned away.

On our arrival in the swollen red dusk, at a bus station that smelt of urine and rotting eggs, I got off, and the man who’d boarded ten miles ago got off with me, walked up behind me, drew a gun from the holster underneath his black padded coat and a badge from inside the pockets of his trousers and said, “Stop, please.”

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 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 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

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 US.

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 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 been 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.

Eight months later, I nearly caught her again, changing planes in Heathrow, and this time I unleashed the Metropolitan Police and UK Customs against her, grounding all flights and locking down British airspace. For two breathless hours, I thought, perhaps, perhaps I had her, but at the last minute she played the Home Office against me and in the ensuing bout I lost a police commissioner and a deputy head of the British Airport Authority, while she exposed a cabinet minister and a high court judge in her efforts to escape. The minister I removed with a carefully judged sex scandal; the high court judge was only four months from retirement so I let him live. She fled to where I knew not, and the game continued.

For three years, it continued.

Governments fall and economies decline. Banks shatter, computers fail, militaries rebel, borders close, deals collapse, pipelines run dry, satellites burn, men die, the world turns and the game goes on.

Lying alone on a cheap hotel bed in Addis Ababa, a bowl of peanuts and an empty beer by my elbow, I did a mental inventory of the things we had destroyed in the name of this game and found it extensive. Not merely the pieces sent to their death or prison, but the lives broken every time we played a killer, removed a judge, shredded a government, crippled a bank. We – she and I – were the parents of civil unrest and carnage, the consequences of our actions spread now so wide that the pundits had begun to call the time of our game, “autumn years”, as the hope of previous “spring” years now gave way to the savagery that preceded winter.

On a cargo ship crossing Lake Victoria, the flies crawling so thick above my mosquito net I could barely see the tiny porthole and its little circle of light beyond, I encountered the first attack against me by another player. Godert van Zuylen, who played a savage game without much finesse, launched a group of some fifty regional separatists against a governor I controlled in southern Turkey, killing the governor, setting the regional assembly on fire and prompting a crackdown far bloodier and greater than any I would have commanded. It was, as assaults against my position went, marginal, and ill-judged. It was, however, a disturbing sign, worrying enough for me to divert from my path and, with a small group of armed policemen, track him down to his apartment in Makassar, breaking into his rooms shortly before three in the morning and cable tying him, naked and gleaming with sweat, to the end of his bed.

He didn’t shake or beg or scream as I pulled off my balaclava and squatted before him. If anything, he sighed in disappointment, not at my actions, I concluded, but at himself, having been so easily discovered.

“Silver,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d waste the effort.”

“Godert,” I replied. “I was going to say the same about you.”

Even naked, exposed and on the edge of death, he had the old player’s pride. He had won too many victories, seen too many people fall before the power of his intellect, to believe that the same might happen to him now. “It’s not personal,” he explained. “My life is the Gameshouse – quite literally. If I cannot play, if I cannot win life, comfort and strength from weaker players, then I will die.”

“You’ve lived a very long time,” I replied, “and the Great Game has only been playing for five years. Surely you can wait another five for it to reach its conclusion without wading in against me?”

“You make it sound easy – five years is a long time for a man of my talents to be patient.”

“Right there I think is a measure of just how limited your talent is.”

He smiled, the smile of a man who, though he may seem weak, defeated, still knows he is strong. To a player of the middling sort, this confidence is a boon, a gift, for it empowers you to make decisions that others might flinch from, pushing pieces against positions that seemed – but are not – impenetrable. Van Zuylen was of the middling sort; his confidence was a lie, and would do him now good now.

I reached into my pocket. Pulled out a coin. It was small, faded and bore the head of a long-dead emperor on one side, an eagle on the other. The writing was almost worn away around the edges, but once proclaimed in ancient Latin the eternity of an empire which had fallen thousands of years ago. I rolled it around my fingers, and the smile faded from van Zuylen’s face.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked, as he watched the coin.

He nodded, once.

“Would you like to play a game?”

“Not with that,” he replied. “Not like this.”

“Did the Gamesmaster command you to turn against me, or was it your own idea?”

“Silver…”

“Come, come; I have, as you pointed out, expended a few slight resources in tracking you down. You owe me something in return.”

“I owe you nothing.”

“Then choose,” I said with a shrug, squeezing the coin tight in the palm of my hand. “Heads or tails.”

He shook his head, licked his lips, his confidence faltering. Above us, a fan spun slowly in the ceiling; in the room below, the TV was turned up too loud, a series of aiiiis and hi-yaahs proclaiming that the observer was a fan of martial arts movies, and doubtless minions were being crashed even now beneath a hero’s boot. In the street outside, a woman screamed at her faithless boyfriend; a cat shrieked in the dark.

“We turned,” he whispered. “She told us to and we did, of course we did: she’s the Gamesmaster; we’re…” He stopped, voice drying in his throat.

“We’re what?” I asked. “We’re the players of the Gameshouse? The great and the brilliant, the masters of the higher league? We’re great, we’re powerful; at our command civilisations fall and gods are made? Is that it, Godert?”

No answer. Confidence of the iron sort that van Zuylen’s was, when it breaks, it breaks entirely, a shivering, a shattering of strength.

“We’re pieces,” I sighed, when he did not speak. “All of us, every player in the house, we are pieces in her hands. You played the higher games, and she played you. And now she’s turning you against me, is that right?”

No answer.

The coin rolled between my fingers.

Then, “Everyone,” he hissed. “Everyone. The whole house. We’re all coming for you, Silver. Even the ones you trust. You think you’ve got friends? We’re players; we turn with the dice. I saw her two months ago and you know who was by her side? Remy Burke, the nearest thing you had to a brother. Even he’s turned against you; even he wants to live. She’s going to make you a slave. She’s going to put you in white and shackle you to the house, just like the umpires. Just like your wife.”

The coin stopped, poised on an edge between my index finger and thumb, and there it remained.

“Have you ever wondered what the Gameshouse is?” I mused. “Have you ever asked yourself what it is that the Gameshouse wants? We tell ourselves that the kings we have slaughtered, the armies we have defeated, the nations we have crushed – they were set on their path anyway, and we merely played the game, no more. But in 1914, I sat back in amazement as the game of diplomacy that had been so carefully played by such masterful adversaries for fifty years on the European board tumbled into carnage. How could this happen? I wondered, and then I looked again at the board, and I re-read the rules of the game and I saw that the dice were loaded. Millions have died in the course of our games, and we have changed the destiny of the world with our little sports. And for what? For a pattern on the board that only she can see; a future for humanity that only she can shape. We are pieces, Godert. We are nothing more than pieces.”

So saying, I straightened up and slipped the coin back into my pocket. “I was inclined to give you a chance,” I said. “Fifty-fifty odds. But you are a piece in the hand of my enemy, and I have played pawns to take you out of play.”

I turned, and walked away.

He began to beg as my hand touched the handle of the door – no, Silver, please, Silver, I didn’t mean, I didn’t want, I’ll never again…

I closed the door behind me on the way out, and the breeze-block walls somewhat muffled the sound of gunfire.

Chapter 28

A submarine sinks in the Antarctic. A passenger plane is shot down over Georgia. Mexico teeters on the edge of civil war. Extreme nationalists come to power in Spain, and start expelling and imprisoning its enemies. A religious war breaks out in Mali. Russia cuts off gas to the EU. Three suicide bombers kill two hundred and eleven US Marines in Washington State. Two prime ministers are assassinated, and a president dies under suspicious circumstances. The interest rate of the Federal Reserve drops to 0.1 per cent and six banks fold, taking with them two hundred and eighty thousand mortgages, five hundred and seventy-nine thousand pensions and, once all the investors they shatter are counted, nearly eighty thousand jobs.

Would these things – and more, so much more – have happened were it not for the Game?

Perhaps.

But probably not.

How long could I keep this up?

Not as long as her, perhaps. Every day that the game went on was another in which pieces were weakened, the board edging slowly in her favour.

I was tired. I was so very, very tired.

On the three thousandth and eleventh day of the game, more than eight years after it had began, I sat in the bar of the overnight ferry from Portsmouth to Saint-Malo and listened to the one singer on the stage belt out old Motown hits from beneath rhythmless flashing purple lights. At three a.m. the barkeeper disappeared, though the shutter was still up, and at four a.m. the two teenage boys in the arcade gallery next door finally gave up, their electronic guns falling silent, their slain digital enemies screaming no more. Only I remained, staring at nothing. I didn’t notice the music stop, barely noticed the singer reaching behind the bar to pour herself a whisky.

You take the ferry a lot? she said.

A bit, I replied. I travel.

Why do you travel?

My job.

What’s the job?

Consultant.

She smiled at that, drained her whisky down, her skin flushed from the exertion of so much song to such an unreceptive audience. The engine of the ferry shuddered and whirred, the ship bumped a little as we hit a swell, rocking the bottles on their shelves.

Consultant, she murmured. Hell – that could mean anything at all.

To my surprise, I laughed. Yes! I said. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly what it is. May I buy you another drink?

I don’t drink with passengers.

There aren’t any passengers here. There isn’t anyone here.

You’re a passenger.

No. Not really.

A moment – a silence – in which we waited for each other. She half smiled and turned away, and I put my hand on her arm, gentle, the lightest of touches and said, If not a drink, how about a game?

We played arcade games until the sun came up over Saint-Malo, an ancient town that had been destroyed and rebuilt, a strange mixture of medieval ideas and 1960s building materials. I was beaten at seven road races, died five times and only once managed to knock her out with my kung-fu special attack as we mashed controls and shrieked like children.

I haven’t had this much fun since…I don’t know when! she said.

Me neither, I replied.

The company – they have this policy. Always smile, always polite, always said please’ and ‘thank you’, nothing more. They’re scared that if you laugh, or if you make a joke, someone will take it the wrong way and sue them. Everyone’s so scared of being taken the wrong way, these days.

Yeah. I guess so.

Isn’t it good just to laugh, though? Isn’t it good just to have fun? To be silly, to be happy, to forget about it all for a while? Isn’t it good to stop thinking about the world, and the mortgage, and your lover and your worries, and just have fun and be free?

Yes, I replied, unable to look away from her eyes. Yes, it is.

A moment in which 2-D figures in capes and tunics kicked and punched their way across the screens around us, in which music played and high scores flashed, and I wondered if I could just walk away. Step off this ship into the ocean, straight down, sink beneath the Atlantic waves, away from the Gameshouse, away from the Gamesmaster, away from the noise and the numbers and the pieces and the field, away from the game. All things stopped.

When was the last time I had simply been me?

I can’t remember.

I can’t remember who I’d been before the game.

She says, “You look sad.”

I say, “It’s nothing.”

She says, “You want another game?”

She says, “Why are you crying? Are you okay? Why are you crying?”

“It’s nothing,” I reply. “You just brought back some memories. Come on – let’s play.”

We shot alien invaders and undead hoards, and I was resoundingly, joyously thrashed, and laughed a little at that, and kept on playing until the captain came on the Tannoy and said we were nearing harbour, and would drivers proceed to their cars, but not start the engines until asked.

She puts her plastic gun down, kissed me on the cheek said I was nice, it had been fun, maybe she’d see me another time, on the next ferry out, maybe.

Then she was gone.

Chapter 29

The time had come to castle.

In chess, this is the action of moving the king behind the protection of a rook, and hunting the Gamesmaster, I had the growing suspicion that she had already made this move, was fortified in some permanent base from which she could easily coordinate assaults against my still vulnerable, wandering self. Was castling safety or a trap? Perhaps both.

I had an ongoing project. As the game turned and pieces fell, I fortified one corner of the board, transformed it into a little castle of my own, quietly, quietly, so she wouldn’t see it until it was ready to play. I set it up in Kyrgyzstan, near enough to the Chinese border that I could call on PLA air support, if I needed it. Seven years it took me to get it into place, but still one piece was missing.

On the ninth anniversary of the commencement of the Great Game, the Gamesmaster launched an all-out assault on Jammu. In the fifteen hours in which battle raged, she poured the Indian army into the city, hunting me through every alley and down every dirty hole, and I launched mercenaries, separatists, criminals, idealists and extremists at her. The sound of gunfire blasted through the cold night, tracer bullets picking across the sky, and three times I made a break for the edge of the city, desperately seeking escape only to encounter tanks, squads of hard-faced soldiers, blockades, helicopters – the full might of India’s military – turned against me. The government said they were pacifying domestic extremism, and army trucks blared out commands to stay inside, co-operate, as men with faces hidden by metal helmets, shotguns in hand, went door to door looking for me.

In the end, my pieces merely held the line; it was the Pakistani military, acting on its own initiative, which saved me. They put fifty thousand troops on the Kashmir border, and enough of the Indian government believe the threat to pull back from Jammu, leaving eight hundred and seventy-one people dead, and a single, plain-clothes hit squad which managed to take out the convoy I was fleeing on as it heads down the Sunderbani Road.

I crawled from the wreckage of my overthrown vehicle to the sound of submachine gunfire, the scream of men, the smell of petrol, the splatter of flames and the dull pulsing of shrapnel embedded in my shoulder, and survived by hiding under the corpse of my driver long enough for the following convoy to arrive and draw the enemy off.

A man and a donkey helped me over the mountains between Sunderbani and Kotla Arab Ali Khan. I remembered very little of the end of the journey, and woke in a dentist’s studio to find a man with a surgical mask and the largest pair of tweezers I’d ever seen pulling bits of embedded metal from my torn flesh. He wasn’t a piece, wasn’t a player.

“I help people,” he said with a shrug. “That is my duty; that is what I do.”

I struggled to understand his words, and blamed fatigue for my confusion.

For two days I hid in the dentist’s basement living room, eating rice cakes and mutton, until at last he found me a mobile phone and I called in a piece in Lahore who owned seventeen hotels, one TV station and, most importantly, a plane, and who smuggled me onto a flight carrying frozen sheep sperm to Ho Chi Minh City.

Five days later, I was in the USA, arm in a sling, the lacerations to my face and neck fading to pink scars, and India is in turmoil. Like China before, I attempted to propel my pieces into the vacuum left by the fall of those pieces the Gamesmaster had expended on my capture – but this time, my every move was blocked, and I lost seven pieces to arrest and assassination before I was forced to conclude that the pieces she’d played in Jammu represented merely a part of her Indian assets, and I simply didn’t hold enough pieces to make the assault worthwhile in the subcontinent. The realisation was a bitter one: the Gamesmaster had unsuccessfully invaded Kashmir and still had pieces to play.

I couldn’t match that kind of power.

Cold and weary, I rode the Greyhound bus down Route 15, listening to the screaming of the baby, the snoring of the great fat salesman in the seat next to mine, and knew with an absolute certainty that her strength exceeded mine. I could not defeat the Gamesmaster – not on these terms.

I closed my eyes and considered other plans.

Chapter 30

A stop in the desert.

There was no town to the north, no town to the south. Sunlight and dust, as far as the eye could see. A sheriff in an oversized hat and brown shirt boarded the bus, asked folks to stay calm, walked down the aisle inspecting every face, stopp at my seat.

“Can I see your ticket, sir?” he said, his hand on the butt of his gun.

I showed him my ticket.

“Could you get off the bus, please?”

I got off the bus.

“Can I make a phone call?”

“No, sir, sorry.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, as the sheriff’s deputy took away my bag, found my six mobile phones inside, looked askance at me, and one by one pulled their batteries out.

“Nothing to be worried about, sir; we just need to take you to in.”

“What for?”

“Routine enquiries.”

“You just stopped a bus in the desert – that doesn’t seem routine.”

He smiled, a smile which proclaimed, not unkindly, that I was right and this was wrong, and there was nothing to be done about it save be civil in my obedience. Then the deputy found the gun at the bottom of my bag, and asked if I had a licence, and I said sure – at my destination. Let me call my lawyer, and I’m sure he’d sort it out.

That’s when they handcuffed me and put me in the back of the car.

Chapter 31

A dusty road in a dusty nowhere, where somehow, incredibly, people chose to live. We drove for two hours, passing through eight towns on our way, and one drive-through burger joint where the sheriff was greeted by name. He ordered a double with double of everything for himself, a single without the onions for his deputy and a cheeseburger and fries for me. I ate without complaint, hands still locked in front of me and, as we pulled away, asked again why they’d arrested me.

They just chuckled – a paternal amusement at youthful ignorance rather than a thing sinister unto itself – and said it’d all be sorted out in town, just be patient. I leant my head back against my seat and wondered if this was it, if this was how I died, and felt in my pocket for a little Roman coin which they hadn’t bothered to take away from me, rolled it between my fingers and wondered if things were desperate enough yet to give it a throw.

Then the road widened and widened again, and there were lights ahead where there should have been none, too bright, too colourful, an explosion of neon and traffic, declaring bigger, brighter, better. Low houses in grubby straight streets grew taller, whiter, burst up in a sudden leap of concrete and glass, and then grew brighter still, a thousand bulbs glistening above hotel doors, gold and brass on every handle, all real vegetation chopped down to be replaced by shimmering metal facsimiles, fountains lit from below and fireworks above, the stench of petrol fumes and the chatter of voices, aeroplanes circling overhead in a queue to land, the prostitutes and the punters jostling each other in the doors of restaurants and bars and of course, in the centre of it all, the casinos, the churning stomach of this city, for this was Las Vegas, impossible place in the desert, where impossible things almost never happened, and fortune and life was lost in the hope that the mathematics lied. It was a city of flesh and drink, of dollars, dollars, dollars, of loud, frantic hopes and smiles that stretched to the tips of every sunburnt ear, of quiet desperation and the little shuffling men that others avoided, lest their bad luck rubbed off and dragged them into the shallow dark places from which there was no escape. On a street corner, a lone voice proclaimed that vice would bring about the end of the world, and the police were already moving him on, young officers in ironed shirts that stuck darkly to their backs and armpits. Cabbies hurled abuse at each other from across the street, and that was fine because this was a city of winners and it didn’t matter how you won, what force you deployed or what loses you suffered, as long as you were victorious.

Into the heart of this place we went, riding the freeway to Frank Sinatra Drive, where billboards three storeys high proclaimed wonders of musical performance by last year’s pop divas, boxing bouts between had-been giants, celebrity glamour and the kind of life that you had only ever dreamed about – you, you little people, stuck in your little lives reading glossy magazines. This, said the signs, this was where the writers of those magazines came to get their inspiration, this was the heart of hope, the centre of your aspiration, so lay down your cash roll that dice and be the star.

So said every palatial casino/hotel we passed, but we didn’t stop at the front – but we drove through smaller streets to the back of one such giant to where a service door designed to admit two lorries at a time stood open, and men in white hairnets and rubber gloves shouted familiar abuse at each other and unloaded crates of fish on beds of ice, bottles of champagne and loafs of bread in their plastic packaging, boxes of oranges and bags of potatoes, flung from arm to arm like flimsy balls, before being sent down a service shaft to the unseen bowels below.

A few of these men glanced at us as the sheriff pulled up, but they’d worked there long enough and seen enough to ask no questions, expect no replies. They pulled me through a concrete maze of service corridors, past catering units banging food onto crystal plates, laundry rooms smelling of starch and soap, staff locker rooms stinking of sweat, maintenance offices with tools hanging from homemade racks on the wall, until at last we came to lift with a plain metal door and only one option for where it might go – up – and only two floors it could go to. As they pulled me inside, I felt the coin in the palm of my hand, and felt that this was it, the last moment, the final call, and stayed still and quiet between my captors, though my breath came faster than I could contain.

I wondered if I was ready to die, and discovered that I was.

I wondered if I was ready to become a slave of the white, a piece of the Gameshouse, for ever nothing, for ever no one, trapped beneath the veil, and found that the idea paralysed my very thoughts.

The lift rose a long time. When it stopped, we were inside a bookshelf. The bookshelf was pushed back, revealing itself to be no more and no less than a crude, painted thing, ugly in its pretentiousness, crude in its concealment of the lift. Beyond the bookshelf was an office. I counted twenty-three steps between the door and the single desk set in the centre of its pink marble floor. Water ran quietly down the back wall, a crinkled surface of polished copper and brass, flecked with green, draining into a small pool whose bottom was lined with polished pebbles of silver and gold. Down one side of the office ran more painted books; down the other was a window which looked out across the entire city, lit up at night in all its grid form, like a firefly net or, a chess-board.

Behind the desk, a chair of white leather was draped with a tiger’s skin. Opposite it, two far smaller leather chairs were bedecked with the remnants of slaughtered bear. Into one of these I was pushed, my hands were freed and, without so much as a “so long, sonny” my two captors turned and went back the way they’d come, and I was left alone.

I waited.

The city went straight ahead or left and right beneath me, a million lives clinging to the roads, red lights one way, white the other. A helicopter landed on the roof of a casino nearby, disgorging wealth in high heels. A police car whizzed by below, silent in the darkness. I waited. The desk in front of me was empty, save for a set of two bright green plastic dice, a single chip valued at five thousand dollars and a spikey-haired troll doll no bigger than my hand, its frock of straight pink hair shaved to no more than stubble against its plastic skull, a smile drawn on its already smiling face in red felt-tip pen.

I waited.

Silence in the office.

Water fell and I waited.

Did not move.

Felt eyes watching me.

Waited.

Want to talk about it? I asked.

No, I replied, squeezing my eyes tight. No. Just…No.

Behind the blackness of my eyelids, faces came unbidden. Van Zuylen, dead at the end of the bed. A dying man playing cards; a singer on the ferry from Saint-Malo. A doctor who helped out of duty; children laughing on a beach by the sea. Tracer fire over the city of Jammu; a hit squad shooting down at me as I fled through Tehran.

Go away, I sighed. Go away.

Two Chinese policemen gunned down in a nowhere place, in the desert near a town which produces nothing but rubble.

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

A pair of Russians cheerfully beating each other with birch in the woods, proclaiming hate as they smiled warmly over the dominos set. We believe in something more than they do. That’s why we’ll always win.

Dead pieces played for small gains. I’m fucking getting out of here before they get my wife and kids, fuck you, Silver, fuck you!

“Get on with it,” I snapped, and was surprised to hear my own voice ring round the room. “For God’s sake, just end it!”

I felt something bite into my hand and, looking down, saw the Roman coin I had been clutching all this time pressed so hard into the skin that it was starting to bruise; and then there he was, striding into the room from behind his ridiculous painted bookcases, white cowboy boots pulled up to his knees, pink shirt, white tie and a black suit. The suit was pinstriped, though so subtly as to be almost imperceptible to the naked eye. The thin threads of not-black that ran through the silken material were gold; threaded gold, I realised, as the owner of it perched, one leg across the corner of his own too-large desk, and beamed at me. I added up the value of the thin metal embedded in the silk and concluded it was probably worth more than a small house in downtown LA, and wondered if you could put it in the washing machine. I considered this question long and hard, as in thinking about it, I could avoid looking at the face of the man who wore it – the smiling, grinning face – until at last he said, “Have you gone and got blood on my chair?”

I realised that the wound in my shoulder was very gently bleeding, seeping through the fabric of my shirt.

“It’s okay,” he said as I made to cover the wound with my hand. “It’ll add a certain character.”

I closed my eyes tight, turned my head away, then opened my eyes fast and looked into the face I had longed not to see again.

“Hello, Bird,” I said.

“Hello, Silver,” he replied, then smiled and pressed one hand against his lips. The fingernails were long, brown, ragged, curving to the end like claws, though the rest of him was perfectly pressed and pampered. “Shit,” he chuckled. “I nearly called you by your real name.”

Chapter 32

There is a story told.

It is only one of many, but isn’t that always the case where the Gameshouse is concerned?

It is the story of a brother and a sister a long, long time ago. He was wild, brave, strong, adventurous; she was quiet, learned, studious and wise. They loved each other with the kind of tussling love that siblings have, and one day, as they were walking by the sea, they had an argument.

Said the brother, “People are savage, reckless, governed as the animals are. Instinct and the will to survive, power and the scent of blood– these are what drives people in everything they do. Love is power; kindness is selfish; society is a tool that is used by the strong to grow stronger, a system of ascendency and might, no more. Pierce through the pretty clothes of civilisation, and you will find blood beneath, just as it has always been, as it must always be.”

Said the sister, “I do not think so. I believe that humanity betters itself every day. We formulate laws to govern our behaviour, aspire to reach beyond ourselves in imagination and deed. We overcome our animal needs, our base emotions, and become creatures of reason, and in reason we find a definition of that which may be ‘good’.”

“Poppycock!” exclaimed the brother, though this being many thousands, thousands of years ago, he may have used a different word to convey his meaning.

“Very well,” she replied. “I will prove it to you!”

So a conflict ensued, the brother and sister each trying to prove their point, and in time they both grew old and they both grew great, and when they should have died they would not, for there was still this battle to be won, and as they were now both very powerful, they lived, gathering to themselves the means to victory, until, after a few centuries had gone by, it was almost as if they could not remember the point they had to prove. So it was that the sister withdrew to a perfect place, a house where logic, reason and the rules of law could be deployed by great minds to overcome any problem, and where the power of human thought could be shown to be greater than any petty emotional need. Some naïve philosophers argued that she was an embodiment of some sort of “order” or “law” or even finer notions as a “yin” which opposed a “yang”, but in truth, these were markers that spoke more about the men who applied them, than her.

“The house,” she once said, “proves that it is reason, intelligence and logical minds which shape the destiny of humankind.”

For his part, the brother retreated to a valley in the mountains and gathered to him the wild people, the dancing people, the people who fed on human flesh because they were hungry and drank blood because it was rich, and who learned hunting from wolves and lusted to be masters of the sun and moon, and screamed in the darkness when it could not be so, and raged at the world. Again, philosophers attempted to apply their ideas to him, calling him chaos and barbarism, but he just laughed.

“Take your proofs somewhere else! Can you prove love? Can you prove passion? Can you prove humanity? We are the wild things that need no words, and you shall never imprison us with your language.”

Thus it was, when I first met Bird. His people beat me as they dragged me through the valley because they could, and because I could not stop them, and because there were no laws save strength and blood. They threw me at his feet, and as I begged for my life he tutted and said if I was too weak to win it, I was too weak to have it.

He said, “Why do you want to live at all, being such a wretched little thing?”

I replied, “My wife. The Gameshouse has taken my wife.”

He said, “So?”

I said, “Ask me anything, any service, anything at all, I’ll be yours, I swear it; I’ll be yours for ever…” but he dismissed this offer as insignificant, unwanted, uninteresting, and his people howled with delight and made to cut out my heart, my tongue, peel off my flesh, until an idea struck him that seemed to entertain, and from a bag full of teeth and little ground bones, he pulled out a small Roman coin.

“You like games, do you?” he asked as I lay begging at his feet. “She who runs the house – she likes games. She finds they impose patterns on the world, make order where there is only chaos. Let’s play a game, you and I. I throw this coin, and if it lands on a certain side, you live, and if it doesn’t, you die. You can pick which side gives you life – not that choosing makes a difference.”

So I chose, and tossed the coin.

The coin turns, the coin turns.

Empires rise, empires fall, and only the turning remains.

Chapter 33

He said, “Would you like something to drink? Have a Ritz sidecar. Cointreau, cognac – I usually charge five hundred bucks a glass in the bars downstairs, but for you I’ll do it free, for old time’s sake.”

He didn’t wait for me to answer, but produced a handful of bottles from a drawer, a couple of cocktail glasses and, beaming at his own cleverness, a little purple umbrella. I watched him mix the drink, chuckling as the ingredients combined. He downed his in a single gulp. I didn’t touch mine; it sat on the table between us.

“Ain’t you gonna drink it?” he asked, his accent a thick California drawl, and before I could speak, he grabbed it from in front of me, shrugged, said, “Hell of a waste,” and drained my glass down too, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. This done, he slung himself into his office chair, boots up on the desk, legs crossed, arms folded across his belly, and beamed.

“So,” he said at last. “How long’s it been? You took your sweet time getting round to challenging the bitch.”

“I wasn’t ready before.”

“Looks to me like you ain’t ready now!” he replied brightly. “Getting blood all over my shit, that is.”

“I…didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Where else would you expect to see me? In the fucking mountains, freezing my balls off? The wild tamed civilisation, Silver, the wild got into civilisation’s veins – this is the place; this is where it’s at. You okay to walk? Walk with me.”

I walked with him, hobbling behind as he swept across the thick red carpets, the marble halls, past the mirrors of polished bronze, the bell boys and card sharps, executive hosts and VIP managers, gamblers, tourists, drunks and hopefuls of the hotel. Subordinates shuffled out of his way, middlemen tried to smile, then looked away. He beamed at all who passed him by and they faltered, feeling perhaps the thing that lay behind the smile, the power, the joy. We swept through the backstage corridors above a concert hall where a woman with two stars over her breasts, one over her groin and very little else, suspended by a wire seven feet above the stage, spun and spun in the white light of the follow-spots.

He beat me, he mistreat me, but that’s okay, he’s my guy…

Below, three thousand people stared in wonder, their faces sparkling in reflected light while oiled, muscle-bound dancers pounded and thrust their way through a routine, faces contorted into grimaces of pain, feet stamping, skin bulging, sweat mixing with grease down the sides of their thick, tanned necks.

I want it hot hot, she sang. I want it now now. I want it more more.

Bird let me watch for a moment, then pulled me on, dragging me by the sleeve like a kitten playing with its prey. In the lift, a man and a woman were tangled in a drunken embrace, fingers clawing at each other, pulling at clothes, skin, hair. I turned away; Bird watched, chuckling to himself, and they didn’t care.

Onto the fifth floor, through crystal doors and down corridors of silver and blue, we came to a quieter lounge, a long bar of polished titanium white and black marble floors, where tables were laid out for the greatest and the grandest to play their games. Dice tumbled and cards fell; a hundred thousand dollars were lost and the loser shrugged; stacks of chips dragged into the house’s hand as the high rollers sipped champagne, three hundred dollars a glass, and caressed the thighs of paid-for strangers, and rolled fortunes away like children throwing stones at a bucket.

Down again, down to the bright light where everything beeped, buzzed, banged, twiddled and turned, where the tourists wore Hawaiian shirts and high shorts, and the regulars wore sweat patches which had embedded themselves into stiff crumples of yellow, and the hostesses swayed at the hips as they walked, and bent down to whisper in the ears of familiar faces, buttocks out, breasts down, lips wide and eyes innocent, another roll, sir, your luck will turn…

On a balcony above it all, like an emperor inspecting his troops, we stopped, and Bird threw his arms wide in triumph and pride. “Roulette!” he exclaimed, stacks moving across the green surface of the tables. “Slot machines!” Wheels turned, wheels turned, and the house won. “Blackjack.” The cards fell; the player lost. “Twenty-one, baccarat, the roll of the dice.” The dice rolled, the dice rolled, and the house won. “The turn of the coin and look at them! Just look!”

I looked around a hall plastered with light, a brightness almost too bright to look at, hear the pinging of the machines, the chattering of the tables, the cries of the winners, the sighs of the loser, and as he chuckled again, “Look, look,” I strained my eyes to see what it was that his broad grin and wide arms took in.

“They’re smiling!” hecried. “They’re smiling, they’re laughing, look at them! They’re going to be fucking broken – I’m going to fucking break them, rinse them dry, take their fucking souls and they’re gonna love me for it all the way. Do you see it, Silver? Do you see?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see.”

“Do you see this victory?” he asked, face burning with joy. “The banks bet big and countries fall; the numbers grow and the numbers shrink but people – the clever, clever people, reasonable, rational people – they don’t play the numbers, they don’t play the maths, they just play greed. Lust! Lust and blood, that’s all there is, all there ever was. Behind every smile there’s only sex and need, in every gift there’s a debt that will be paid, power that will be reaped, this world, these people, they are the wild things, the savage things, just like I always said, just like I promised – I was right! There is no reason; there is only the fire and the dark!”

“No,” I breathed, watching the slots turn and turn again on the floor below. “You’re wrong.”

He hit me. The slap, open-handed and hard, was so sudden and unexpected that it pushed me off my feet, sent me falling to the floor, and there he was, stood over me, the king of the mountain, the lord of the wild things. “Stop me,” he breathed, and as I made to stand up, he kicked me, knocking me down. “Stop me,” he repeated louder, and though some people saw, everyone turned away, no help coming, no one who dared to care. I reached up and he stood on my hand, ground his heel into it until I whimpered with pain, then bent down, his face hot next to mine, holding my head up by the hair. “Stop me,” he whispered. “They say you’re the one of the greatest players who ever lived, one of the smartest men alive. Go on. Use your words; use your wisdom and your wit. Reason until I stop.”

I tried to speak, couldn’t, only pain and breath left.

“You play for vengeance,” he breathed. “And now you pant and beg and bleed, and nothing can save you except chance and blood. You’re an animal too.”

So saying, he let me go, turned his back and I hauled myself onto my uncertain feet, leaning across the railing of the balcony to gasp down breath.

A while we stood there, he staring at nothing while I watched the slots. Three cherries in a row; two pineapples and a raspberry; bonus, bonus, bonus! The wheels turned, and the house won. The house always wins, and still the players play.

Then Bird looked back, and he was smiling again, a glitzy cowboy in a millionaire’s suit. He caught my hand, pushed something into it before I could say no, holding me tight by the wrist. I felt a thing, warmed by flesh, which he closed my fingers around, still smiling, still looking into my eyes.

“You’re gonna lose,” he breathed,. “It’s a shame, after all the time you’ve wasted, but you can’t beat her; you ain’t got what it takes.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Sure I do. I’ve watched players for ever – I know when they don’t have the heart for it and, Silver, you lost your heart a long time back. I can help you; I can give you what it takes to bring her down.”

His hand around my wrist, his fingerspressing over my fingers.

“In exchange for what?” I asked.

“If you win, you get the Gameshouse.”

“No: I destroy it.”

He tutted. “And what a waste that would be! You take it, you make it what people really want. No more boards, no more brains, just the joy, just the money, just the blood – you get it? You burn the chess sets and you put in fruit machines. You smash the baduk board and build me a roulette table. And in the higher league, for the ones who get that kinda luck, you make sure when they give the chamber a spin that the ammunition is live; and when the cards fall and the forfeit is the guy’s soul, you see to it that the whole house is there to take a piece, to eat him raw. You promise me that and I’ll help you take the Gameshouse. Or say no and I’ll let the bitch chain you to her fucking wall.”

He pulled his hand away from mine. I looked down. A dice lay in my hands, small, polished, perfectly square, carved from yellowing bone. Bird’s face was open with curiosity, waiting to see what I’d do. I closed my fist tight around it, let my eyes sink shut, feeling its warmth.

I opened my eyes, handed him the dice. “Thank you for your offer,” I said. “But the answer is no.”

Surprise flickered across his features but he took the dice, slipped it back into his jacket pocket. “Your decision,” he said with a shrug. “Stupid for a player.” A flash of a grin across his face. “But then, that kinda just proves my point, don’t it now?”

I turned away, feeling suddenly tired, in pain. He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t move, but as I headed for the door, he called after me.

“Silver!”

I stopped, not looking back.

“Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is. Remember that when you change your mind.”

I walked away.

Chapter 34

The day my funds dropped to their last hundred million dollars, I crossed the border between the US and Canada on a tour bus of enthusiastic Argentineans who ooohed and aaahhed as we rattled across the Thousand Islands International Bridge, craning their necks to see the waterways wriggling below, the snow-capped forests all around. Our guide, as we entered Canada, stood up and proclaimed:

“Canada is famous for maple syrup and moose!” and everyone applauded.

In Montreal I ate chips with melted cheese, and as the winter snows began to thicken, crunched through knee-high piles to the bus station to catch the coach northeast, following the river to Quebec, then on into timberlands and the north.

The ferry to Tadoussac was delayed by bad weather, but eventually edged its way across the fjord into a town whose already-white houses were now turned whiter by the thick winter. The sun, when it peeped across the bay, was pale and brief, uneasy to be caught rising and fast to set. The main road through the town was silent save for the great lorries, loaded with timber in one direction, petrol in the other, growling past the little houses in the dead of night.

I found her in a little house above the bay, away from the rest of the town in a thicket of pine trees. The light was on in the living room, the stove was hot in the kitchen, but she still wore two woollen jumpers over her dressing-gown and, when she answered the door, she took a moment to recognise me through the hats, scarves, gloves, coats which shrouded my figure.

“Oh,” she said, as realisation dawned. “I wondered when you’d turn up.”

She made omelettes, cracking each egg in the fingers of one hand, no need for knives. I huddled near the stove, while a curious black and white cat rolled around my legs and, finding that I wasn’t hugely interested, jumped into my lap to enforce the need for attention.

“I like it out here,” she explained, pushing a plate across the table. “When the Gameshouse closed its doors, I concluded it wouldn’t be long until we came under pressure, particularly the older players. Remy’s gone over to her side, you know?”

“I know.”

“It surprised me: I thought he was one of yours.”

“The endgame’s coming,” I replied. “I’m losing ground.”

She nodded, without expression, pouring ketchup into a round puddle on the side of her plate. “I thought you might be; figured you’d call.”

I smiled uneasily over my fork, studying her face. Thene, beautiful Thene, she had put on a mask so many centuries ago and, though the mask was gone, its impression remained on her skin, unchanging, unflinching, unreadable. She had survived in the higher league more than most, playing slow, careful games, building her resources, and yet, being so cold in her demeanour, it was as if the rest of the house had lacked the emotional involvement to ever truly challenge her. She provoked no fear, no envy, no dread, no rage, but was merely all that she was – a player. In those words were the be-all and end-all of her existence, and the rest was merely frost on a winter’s morning.

“We struck a bargain, a long, long time ago,” I said. “Before you knew what the game was. I need to invoke that bargain now.”

“I know. I realised a long time ago what our deal would entail. The Gamesmaster plays, plays the players, using us to shape the world, and by our actions we did that – we created kings and destroyed ideas, launched rebellions and pushed society towards change; change of her choosing, that is. But then I looked a little closer and saw another game running behind it all, and you, Silver, were pulling the strings, gathering players into your hand, pieces you were waiting to play. I have only one move I will make for you – our bargain gave you only one move you could play – but I will play the part well and true, otherwise what is the purpose of the game? So.” She laid her knife and fork down carefully at the side of her plate, locked her hands together, elbows below, chin above, leant forward. “What is this lie you need me to tell?”

Chapter 35

Endgame.

I was going to lose, and as losing men sometimes do, I staked my defeat on one final gamble.

I set the board up near Jengish Chokusu, in the snow-capped mountains where no road ran, no tourists wandered, no miner dug, no adventurer came. For days a man could walk in this place and find no sign of life, and yet, in this same ridge of nothing, some forty years ago, the Soviets had built bunkers against invasion in a place where no army would reach, paranoia outweighing strategic sense.

To these bunkers I went, walking for days on end to find them, and in this place I set up my tools: the cameras, explosives, data networking, bugs, traps and locked doors. I play a unit from the Kyrgyz military, deploying three hundred men into the bunker and the mountains around it. A training exercise, my piece told them – nothing more. Then I permitted one of the soldiers to catch me in the edge of his photo frame, as he took a selfie on this tedious exercise to send back to his wife.

The photo I intercepted and enhanced and, after two months of preparation, forwarded it to Thene.

“Contact the Gamesmaster,” I said. “I know you know how. Tell her you found this – make the lie plausible. That’s all.”

“The Gamesmaster is a hard woman to lie to.”

“I know. That’s why I chose you.”

Two days later, a message came from Thene.

It’s done.

The IP address from which those words were sent disappeared immediately after. She had made her move and I had made mine, and all there was to do now was wait.

Three days later, the invasion began.

She played Russian special forces, sneaking them in via helicopter in the dead of night. They killed seventeen of my men before the alert was issued and the sky lit up with flares, forcing the invaders back.

The next day, she played a larger unit of Russian operatives, backed up by a team of Chinese mercenaries, but my troops were ready, and a small arms battle raged in this nowhere land, snipers on ridges taking potshots at each other as men fell from cliffs and died in valleys.

On the third day, she launched MiGs against my positions, and the commander of the Kyrgyz unit desperately radioed his headquarters, asking what was happening, what was going on – but she’d jammed his kit, the soldier’s phones, and in a frantic meeting in the middle of the mountain, the unit concluded that, alone and isolated, all they could do now was fight.

They dug in, securing positions in and around the bunker, which she could not penetrate.

On the fourth day, she air-dropped in artillery, which took a further eight hours to be manoeuvred into firing positions. They started firing at seven-thirty p.m.. I took them down with a unit of Chinese fighters launched out of Xinjiang, slipped under Kyrgyz radar while my pieces looked the other way.

On the fifth day, she dropped in Russian, Uzbeki, Chinese and Tajik special forces, a groundswell of troops for the first time outnumbering my defenders. For two days, my men held out, but by the end of the week, they were down to a hundred and twenty-seven men and supplies were running low.

Now I unleashed the full force of the Chinese military and government which I had been so carefully nurturing since she chased me through Mongolia. I bombed her positions, sabotaged her planes, assassinated those pieces who she’d played to muster such forces against me, airdropped supplies to my men, unleashed viruses against the satellites and telephones she was using to coordinate this strike and in one bloody night of fire and dust, reduced her forces back down to a mere two hundred men.

The next day very little happened.

The next day, very little again.

On the tenth day of battle, the Indian air force succeeded in dropping two hundred and fifty men, supplies, mortars and heavy weapons into the valley below my bunker, while unknown separatists simultaneously blew up my airfields in Xinjiang, assassinated two of my generals and, in a stroke of beauty, launched an all-out assault on the government offices of Ngari near the Indian border, diverting Chinese attention (and my pieces) away from our quiet, undeclared Kyrgyz war.

Within twelve hours, she had pushed my troops back into the bunker itself, yielding all the positions they’d held outside. Four hours after that, the unit was down to fifty men who debated whether to surrender or fight to the death. Thirty surrendered – twenty swore they would die fighting.

Eight hours after that, the twenty who were left alive, were still fighting, pushed deeper and deeper into the bunker. I detonated booby traps as they withdrew, helping them on their way, sealing off corridors and butchering enemy men who came after them, until at last they were in the lowest part of that place, in the darkest corner from which there was no way out, and the enemy stood at the doors and said:

We can kill you all now with a couple of grenades. You have nowhere to run. Be smart – surrender.

They answered with gunfire and died in a flash.

When the smoke cleared, the bunker was taken. Hundreds of men were dead, the mountain shattered from within. In China, rebels raged through the westernmost towns; in Russia, fighters burned on their runways, while in Kyrgyzstan the Gamesmaster’s troops opened the very last door to the very deepest part of the bunker and found looking back at them my camera and network server, and six pounds of C-4.

I detonated the explosive from my room in Tokyo, watched the screen go black. I turned to the men and women in the room, the spies, hackers, cyber-terrorists and cyber-experts, the forensic accountants and military advisors, special forces and retired generals whom I had gathered, the greatest assemblage of pieces that I could muster, and said:

“Did we get it?”

They conferred for a little while, their screens still hot with rolling data. Then an accountant from Maine put his hand up and said, “Yes.”

Chapter 36

Every battle has an alternative history.

As men screamed and died for a nameless mountain in Kyrgyzstan, I and my assembled team gathered data.

First, we were based in Yushu, but by the third day of the battle, enough of the Gamesmaster’s soldiers had been identified, by unit or uniform, to pinpoint the pieces which had deployed them. As the vast majority of pieces she was playing were being deployed from Russia, we had headed north to Changji, only to change our minds and divert south when the spies and satellites I’d placed over the battlefield detected Indian troop movements to the south. By the tenth day, we had identified thirty-two of her pieces – generals, spies, prime ministers – and by the eleventh, had full access to their communications and finances.

On the thirteenth hour of the eleventh day, and for the first time in ten years, I heard her voice.

It was a phone call to a self-styled colonel of a mercenary band heading into the conflict zone. She said:

“Leave none alive.”

By the morning of the twelfth day, when the last of my troops fell, we had tracked that call – and a dozen others – back to a single point. The accountants ransacked the transactions leading to the bank of every mercenary and captain she threw against us, every helicopter pilot and every paid-for bullet, and even as our plane touched down in Tokyo, they confirmed what all other sources suggested: the Gamesmaster’s orders were coming from Japan.

When the last bomb went off in the last room of the bunker, we had data on every single man who’d died, every piece that had been played, every command issued.

And, as the dust settled over the dead of the mountain, an accountant from Maine turned round, raised his hand and said, “I think I’ve found the debit card she’s been using to pay for her mini bar.”

I looked at the screen that he looked at, looked at the last transaction, noted that it was twenty minutes ago and five miles away and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

Chapter 37

Racing through Tokyo in a convoy of trucks.

What do I feel?

Bright lights, tall buildings, treeless streets. Glass and steel, the taste of salt in my mouth.

I have orchestrated the deaths of over seven hundred men, and from their deaths an accountant has managed to trace a mini-bar bill that may or may not be the place of residence of the Gamesmaster.

She castled several years ago, fortifying herself at the top of a tower in Tokyo from which all things are coordinated. In attempting to break down my castle in Kyrgyzstan, she has revealed her position. Safety or a trap? Castling can be both if you are careless with your positioning.

Lights in the streets of Tokyo. Katakana, hiragana, imported characters and exported words. Mitsubishi, Nissan, Sony, Honda: once upon a time these were samurai clans which were turned to merchant manufacturing when the old order fell. Then the Americans came after the Second World War and declared death to all zaibatsu, the corporate conglomerates. Now the youth of Japan compete with a mania that borders on disease to get lifelong positions in these companies, and economics shake and technologies change, and the world turns and everything is different, and everything is just the same.

Someone asks if I am all right, and I don’t understand why.

“You’re breathing fast, sir. You’re breathing very fast.”

Am I?

Perhaps I am.

I close my eyes, breathe slowly. A player never shows their feelings, never reveals their hand. Only the board; only the game. The rest is distraction.

I counted up the pieces I had in play.

Thirty mercenaries in the trucks behind mine, dressed in police uniform. Another twenty armed men on their way, played through an arms dealer I’d won in Iwaki.

In my pocket, I rolled a coin round and round between my fingers. Flak jacket over my shirt, gun on my hip, we broke every speed limit, jumped every red light, and someone said, will it be a problem? and I supposed it might be so I phoned a policeman I’d won…a long time ago…and told him to ignore it, to seal the area around Ikedayama Park, nothing in, nothing out. Someone else said, will she run? so I phoned an arsonist I’d won in Nagoya, gave him the clear to bomb the air traffic control tower at Yokohama, grounding all flights, perhaps even – if we were lucky – sealing Japanese airspace. I let the Chinese secret service unleash the computer virus they’d been sitting on since I seized control of their agency, slicing servers in half across Japan and, eleven minutes after its execution, plunging Tokyo into darkness as it shut down relays in the power grid. I gave the go to every assassin who’d been waiting for the signal, every hitman and petty thug I’d kept in reserve, unleashing them on all of the Gamesmaster’s pieces who’d been identified from Kyrgyzstan. No mercy. Leave none alive.

I tried saying the words out loud, tried matching the tone of her voice as she had spoken them, but nothing in my voice could make the words sound like her, make the words sound like me.

“Leave none alive,” says a voice, and I find it suddenly impossible to imagine it is me.

Who spoke them, then?

That other fellow, the other man there, the one sitting with a gun at his hip, a coin in his hand, that man – what shall we call him? He lost his name so long ago, sold his heart, auctioned his soul and to become – here it is, here it comes…

A player.

Not a person at all.

I rolled the coin between my fingers as we drove through the darkness of electrically broken streets until we came to the only building that still shone brightly in the night. Moriyoshi Tower, forty-nine floors of it, named for a heroic prince who fought valiantly and died betrayed. A glass spike to the sky: the pillar of wealth and vanity, it had its own generators, still shining bright, all the brighter for the darkness of the city that surrounded it. Looking up at it, I thought it was a very beautiful place to castle a king, and wondered if she liked the views.

A fixer gave me a quick rundown – shops for the first five floors, then offices, then restaurants, then more offices, then at the top a hotel so luxurious that it didn’t even bother to have a website listing: you either knew about it or you weren’t connected enough to afford it.

“Can you access their cameras?” I asked. “Can you see inside?”

She could not.

“That doesn’t bode well,” I sighed, unclipping the safety from my holster. “Even if it isn’t a surprise.”

We went inside.

Shops, still open. No one buying; faces pressed to the glass, looking out; people talking, pointing, marvelling at their suddenly black, suddenly silent city. We – thirty armed policemen, assault rifles and helmets – were almost unremarkable in the dead quiet of the sudden urban night, for if the power had failed, of course but of course it made sense that policemen had come.

We moved by, looking for a way up. Around, ads still blared to the uninterested eye, the newest phone, the latest computer, the smartest watch, the trendiest clothes, the most expensive glasses, the biggest films, the loudest books, the sweetest drinks, the richest foods.

Come buy come buy, said the walls.

You need the latest.

You need the best.

You need to be the latest, the best.

Hot hot, now now, more more!

I felt a prickling in the corner of my eyes and wondered what it was. At the unmarked lift to the hotel, a man in white gloves stepped forward exclaiming, “No! This is exclusive! You cannot come up here!”

One of the mercenaries hit him across the side of his face with a rifle, and five men piled into the lift. I stayed behind and when the bomb on top of the car detonated four floors up, I turned to the survivors and said, “We’re taking the stairs.”

On the twelfth floor my phone rang, announcing the arrival of reinforcements. I deployed them remotely, sealing off the ground floors of the building, putting a helicopter overhead to shoot down anyone who attempted to flee into the skies. On the fourteenth floor, another phone call alerted me to the bombing of Yokohama air traffic control. Seventeen people were missing, presumed dead; more information not yet forthcoming.

They started shooting at us on the twenty-third floor.

Initially I couldn’t see who “they” were, as my mercenaries pushed me bodily out of the stairwell, already a killing ground. Only three corridors later, as we searched for an alternative route up and gunfire blared behind us, did I catch a glimpse of “them” – men in black suits, black ties, white shirts, who wielded sub-machine guns with a quiet professionalism and made no other sound as they blasted at us.

Their tactics were poor, their teamwork almost non-existent, but with a relentless force of numbers and a reckless disregard for their own safety, they kept coming– five dead, ten dead, fifteen dead or injured – and still they kept firing, kept pushing against us, until we were pressed between the killing ground of the stairwell and the bloodstained corridors of the tower ahead. I took the assault rifle off a man who fell by my side, a bullet to the femoral artery, dead in four minutes, and kept firing as the corridors filled with the stench of cordite and the thin, sickly traceries of smoke. My ears sang with the high shrill of cells dying from the volume of noise, and when someone threw a grenade at me, I was saved only by the weight of the dead man by my side, which absorbed most of the force of the blast. His blood ran down my face, stuck my hair together in clumps, stained my hands, and still the enemy kept coming.

“With me!” I grabbed four men, peeling away from the rest to make a break for the lift banks. One died when a door behind us opened to reveal a young man, barely seventeen years old, his face twisted with fear that he had forced to become rage, who leant out to spray us with bullets, and who died a few seconds later from a gunshot to the head. Another, less glamorously, pulled a muscle when he tripped over the body of a dead laundry woman, caught fleeing in a burst of wandering bullets that tore her stomach out and left her, nameless soul, sprawled across the field of battle.

We found a bank of lifts, and entering, climbed up through the access shaft in the ceiling to carefully remove the explosives wired up to the cable base, before pressing “up”. As the doors closed, five men, alerted perhaps by some unseen controller, came running towards us and a bullet took out my limping soldier before the doors closed.

He didn’t die quickly. He didn’t groan or shout or scream, but sat on the floor of the elevator, one hand over the wound to his chest, breath coming pink from his lips, a look of surprise, more than pain on his face. We three, the three left standing, looked at each other uncertainly before one man squatted down to give his colleague the shot of morphine that hung from a chain round his neck. He said, “Thanks,” and didn’t seem to understand that he was dead and the lift was his coffin.

The lift stopped with a shudder between floors, two storeys short of its destination. We didn’t wait for what would follow, but prised the doors open, wriggled out on our bellies onto the small box of floor above us. The last man pulled his feet free a moment before the explosive fired somewhere higher in the shaft, severing the cable of the car and plunging the elevator and its wounded prisoner forty-seven floors to their destruction.

I looked around the floor we’d crawled into. A reception area for a hotel. Glass fish-bowls held crystal stones and no fish. Clocks showed the hour in Moscow, New York, London, Beijing, Singapore, Cairo. TV screens down one wall blared out the news – crises here, disasters there, outbreak of disease, collapse of fortunes, broken, broken, broken, until the ads played, women with impossible smiles, men with impossible bodies, more, more, more, now, now, now, want, want, need.

A single receptionist stood behind a curving desk of crystal and aluminium. She was crying silently, back stiff and straight, a red silk scarf around her neck, a perfectly white cuff at the end of each sleeve. Were it not for the tears, she could still have looked like the perfect professional, waiting to meet guests. She stayed standing as we, bloodstained and armed, pass her by looking for stairs, and she bit back the sobs in the pit of her throat as we departed.

A black city outside, corridors of blue within. Doors were locked shut, nothing moved. A service trolley, soft towels and fragrant soap, sat in the middle of the corridor. In a corner, an ice machine spat white cubes onto the floor, something broken inside, the internal parts groaning, clunking with the strain. The sound of gunfire was distant now, men dying below.

We found stairs, started to climb. Two men with semi-automatic pistols burst from the floors above us, but we had come too far to die at the hands of amateurs and took them down before they could fire a single shot. Forty-seventh floor; forty-eighth; forty-ninth. A helicopter circled somewhere nearby, but the odds were high that it was mine, prowling the skies, waiting for someone to be foolish enough to cross its path. I pushed open the door to the highest floor with the muzzle of my gun, stepped into a corridor like any other, blue lights, potted plants, black marble floor. At the end of the corridor, a pair of double doors opened to a place unknown. White light shone beneath it, and then quickly went out. We moved forward. No one stopped us.

At the door, one man took a position to the left, the other to the right. I listened and heard nothing inside, threw a flashbang in anyway just in case, and the second after it burst, I was inside too.

A penthouse suite, a few lights burning, one above a desk strewn with papers, one next to a wall covered with screens. Three men on the floor, their eyes shut, their hands over their ears, guns at their feet – they died quickly, not knowing how.

Scenes of a life lived. A newspaper lay open on a sofa. A cup of coffee cooled on the crystal table, now flecked with bits of brain and blood. A white dressing-gown had fallen in a pile by the door, ready to be cleaned. A pair of high-heeled shoes, another of trainers, lay in a tatami-clad nook where visitors could remove their boots and put on slippers. There were no slippers to be seen. The wall of screens in one corner of the suite showed camera feeds, some from the hotel, some from other places: unknown walls, unknown corridors of power. I looked, and saw dead men filling the stairwells, frightened men – so few now – scurrying for shelter as the last of the bullets flew below.

Another pair of doors – black, metallic – stood a little ajar, leading from this room to another. We edged towards it, pushed the doors open, saw a room bigger than the first, couches and a low aluminium bar, a winter coat casually thrown across one of the stools, a chess-board set out on a table by the long glass window, the position halfway through a game, white winning. Not a soul in sight. Slowly, keeping to cover as we moved, we advanced, another set of doors ahead. I saw a shadow move across the line of light beneath the door and raised my hand to command a stop.

We froze, waited.

Waited.

Silence.

Even the helicopter outside was silent, an absence that frightened me more than any bullet.

I glanced at my two surviving men, and saw that they were afraid.

Saw that they sensed the thing we dare not name.

Silence.

Something behind us clicked.

The door we’d entered through, locking shut from behind.

The door ahead rolled a little ajar. I didn’t see the hand that pushed the grenade through, but I guessed at it and ducked behind the bar, hands over my ears, eyes tightly shut. The blast rocked the bottles above my head, knocked a half-drunk cocktail from its perch, spilling peach juice and vodka across the floor in front of me. The second grenade was nearer and I heard one of my men scream, and someone start to fire and I peeped my head up long enough to see the men coming through the door – not aimless men in suits, but professionals in masks, body armour, steel-capped boots, assault rifles raised, centres of gravity low. One of my men got four shots off, taking down two of his attackers before a bullet caught him in the throat. The other was already dead, skin ripped from flesh by the concussive force of the explosions that greeted us.

I rolled up from behind the bar and started firing, happy now in the thought that the only people I could hit were enemies. Glass popped and burst, couches puffed their upholstery into the room, filling it with falling foam, and I think I killed two of them before a man I hadn’t even seen, moving behind an overturned table which had once been adorned around the edges with the lacquered shape of dancing birds, got a shot off which slammed into the centre of my vest and knocked me to the ground.

Chapter 38

Bits and pieces.

I lay in bits on the ground, while pieces slotted into place around me.

They took my guns, my knife, my phone.

They pulled off my flak jacket, inspected their handiwork – the bullet embedded in the vest and the vast purple bruise already flowering above my heart. They picked me up and carried me through rooms of the hotel. Two men in body armour, helmets and boots, and a third who walked before, his face hidden by a balaclava, an assault rifle slung over his back.

They deposited me on a floor of clean tatami mats in a room smelling of incense. I rolled onto my back, turned my head either side, saw candles burning in long troughs of water that ran round the walls, a hundred little floating points of light, saw orchids in full bloom at the feet of a little shrine, no icons, no images except the flowers, the candlelight, a woman kneeling before it, head bowed like one in prayer. Her head was covered with a veil of white, her robes were white, white gloves covered her hand and she was silent, still.

I lay where I was and looked at the ceiling – faux wooden beams and panels – and listened to nothing at all.

The gunfire had stopped.

The city was dark and strangers were dead. How many had we slaughtered to come to this moment? How many lives had we destroyed?

I felt something in my pocket, a thing that my captors had not removed.

A tiny Roman coin.

Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is.

I waited.

Then the woman said; “I’m very sorry it ends like this. I truly am. You were a great asset in the game, while it lasted, but even the best pieces must sometimes be sacrificed.”

She didn’t turn her head, didn’t raise her voice, but stayed contemplating the candlelight. I looked up at the three armed men, too marked by death to be in this flower-scented place, and thought I recognised in one of them a certain bulk, a certain height, a certain aging about the eyes that reminded me of a man I’d once known. He pulled a gun from his holster, levelled it at my head and I, lying on the floor, started to laugh.

I laughed, and couldn’t remember when laughter last had passed my lips.

I laughed at this moment and the way it was going to end. I laughed at the path that had brought us here, her and I, at the things which had then seemed so serious, and now meant so little. I laughed, and no one laughed with me, and caught by the solemnity of their silence I stopped laughing, tears rolling through the blood on my face, and looked up again into the masked features of the man who was going to kill me and wheezed, “Mercy.”

Silence.

He did not move.

“Mercy.”

He held the gun in a two-handed grip, pointed it at my head and did not move.

Then she spoke, my goddess, my lady all in white, my enemy, my love, she, the Gamesmaster, who still would not turn her head to look at me as I died, and she said, “The game is not merciful.”

I half turned my head to see her better and, seeing that she would not move, I looked back again at my executioner, met his eyes, knew them, knew him, and said, “I know.”

His finger tightened around the trigger, and he fired.

The first shot killed the soldier who stood to my left; the second killed the soldier to my right. They fell, too astonished to scream, but one of them was still breathing so he put two more shots into the man’s head, kicking the rifle away from his crawling fingers. Now the Gamesmaster was on her feet, face still hidden, body thin and stiff, a rippling in her robes as they settled about her.

The man in the mask looked at her, and me, then pulled the ammo from his gun and threw it away. He unclipped the helmet from his head, tossed it across the room, pulled the mask from his face to reveal dark brown hair, a face that had lived too long, travelled too far, forgotten what it was to be itself. I could name that face, had met it a dozen times before, played a few friendly games with it, helped it once, saved it even, given it cause to doubt and reason to rejoice, and it was the face of Remy Burke, sometime player, piece in the Gameshouse’s hand. How long had I fought to reduce her forces to that point where she would have to call on his? How many years had I spent positioning the board for just this moment, to be certain that his hand was on the gun?

Decades.

Centuries.

As long as he had been alive.

Remy Burke: a piece in my hand. The last piece I had to play; the last move I had to make.

He looked down at me and said, “My debt is paid.”

I nodded, an effort from the floor.

He let the mask fall to the ground, looked once more at the Gamesmaster, did not look at me and walked away.

Silence in the house.

She stood; I lay. Groaning with effort, I rolled onto my belly, pulled the gun from the holster of the nearest dead man, held it close to me.

She did not move.

I crawled into a sitting position, levering my body backwards until it was propped against the wall. One of the corpses was bleeding slowly, a pool seeping into the mats of the room, sticking to the bottom of my thighs where I brushed the red liquor. Blood on my hands was drying to sticky brown streaks. Blood on my face was crisping to an itchy coat. I tried rubbing some of it away, but that only spread the crimson, didn’t clear it.

In this state we remained, she and I, waiting.

I looked for words, and found none.

She waited.

I raised the gun to her, and nothing moved beneath the veil, not a shimmer, not a sound.

I lowered the gun again, letting it fall into my lap.

She waited.

At last I said, “Give her back to me.”

A pause, a moment while she considered the question. Then: “No.”

I raised the gun, two hands around it now, steadying the shot. “I have won,” I breathed. “I won the game. The house is mine to command. Now give her back!”

Her head tilted gently to one side. “No,” she repeated, confidence rising in her voice. “There are only two outcomes from this situation. You can kill me and the house will be yours to do with as you will. Or you can put on the white, take up my office and I will be free to go elsewhere, and the house will be yours still and you will belong to it. These are the only choices.”

My arms were shaking, the gun gripped too tight. I looked inside for the laughter that had been there a moment ago, and it was gone.

“You must become the Gamesmaster.” Her voice was soft, calm as she moved nearer, squatting down a little in front of me. I thought I saw the shape of her face through the veil, but perhaps I only imagined it, imposed some long-faded half-dream of what I thought she had once looked like on that empty white. “The Gameshouse shapes humanity. We are the soul of reason, the pinnacle of intellect; through the game we excel ourselves. You have excelled yourself, Silver. You have achieved an intelligence – and through that intelligence, a power – that exceeds that of the house itself. You must become the Gamesmaster; this is how the house grows, how humanity evolves.”

“I don’t want to be the Gamesmaster.”

“Then kill me and burn the house – but know that there will always be a game, and there will always be those who play it. While the one called Bird is still alive, there must be a centre that fights him, a force to oppose his madness.”

I lowered the gun, finding it now too heavy to hold, couldn’t look at her white veil, turned my face away. “I just want her back,” I said. “The house can do whatever the hell it wants.”

“It cannot be love,” she chided, so close now, her face level with mine. “Not after all this time.”

“Can’t it? Maybe you’re right. After a few hundred years, after I’d walked round the world, slaughtered men, butchered kings, burned philosophers as heretics and made prophets out of madmen – after I lost my name – I think I began to forget the meaning of certain words. Guilt; grief; remorse; revenge; regret; happiness; joy; sorrow; love. They became merely…attributes…to be played on a piece to achieve a victory, and that victory was more powerful and more addictive than any opiate. To win – to be smarter than anyone else, and to win – that is the greatest joy a player has, truly, when all other joys are lost. Maybe that’s the reason we’re here now. To prove to you, who was always so much smarter than I, that now I’m a player worthy of your affection. Or maybe because playing you is the only victory worth achieving.”

A sense of a smile behind her veil, her hands open wide for me, though her arms were pressed in tight, like a bird unsure if the offered morsel is food or poison. “Not the only victory,” she breathed. “There is still one game greater than all the rest. This game we play now – it shapes the players of the next, prepares them to fight the adversary.”

“Bird?”

“Bird,” she agreed. “Take the Gameshouse, take the white, guide humanity to something better. You know him better than most; you can see what he is, how…obscene…the world would be if he was allowed to roam free, Silver.”

Her fingers reached out, brushed the side of my face. I flinched, drawing in breath, then grabbed her fingers tight before she could pull them away, held them to me, felt that strange, burning thing inside me that had lost its name, a thing that might have been grief, might have been something wonderful.

“Do you remember my name?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me?”

“No,” she replied, so soft, so very kind. “That is not the game we are playing.”

I closed my eyes, unable now to look at that white nothing, the not-woman, not-human, not-thing that stood before me. Then I heard fabrics move and opened my eyes again, and she had lifted up her veil and was smiling. She smiled at me, and the tears fell across my face to see her, and I couldn’t look away as salt dripped off the curves of my cheeks.

“Silver,” she murmured, “when I defeated the Gamesmaster, when I made the house my own, I never thought of you as anything more than a piece. I want you to understand that, now that we are at the end.”

I wept without noise. She smiled and I wept, and was all that there was between us for a little while.

I said, please…

But she lowered her veil, pulled her fingers from my hand, turned away.

Please, I said, and found that the rest of the words could not come with the sound. Please, my love, please, my wife, please, have mercy, have mercy.

(Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is.)

But she was cold and white, unreachable, lost to me a long time ago.

“I love you!” I said, choking on the sound, kneeling at her feet with a gun in my hand. “Please: I love you!”

You love the game, she replied. That is all.

No, no, I love you, I love you, you, always you, all this I did for you, I did to set you free, to bring you back to me…

No. That isn’t why you played. Perhaps once you played for love, but now you only play for the win. If you loved me, the choice would be easy. Take the white; set me free.

Silence.

I knelt at her feet and had no more words, no more sounds, no more feelings. Where had I been, and how had I come to this place? It seemed to me that memory was a distant thing, a film played about someone else’s life, a stranger I did not know. I remembered the skin burning on my back as I half drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, could conjure up the taste of camel milk in my mouth, smell fish frying on a sandy beach, hear the laughter of children and the last breath of dying men, but in this moment, at this time, it was as if I watched these events, godlike, from far away, a ghost on a cloud witnessing the unfolding of other people’s lives, impassive as the air. Only this; only this moment was real.

“Do you want to be free?” I asked, and she did not look at me. “Say it: say that you no longer want to be Gamesmaster and I’ll take your deal. I’ll wear the white, play the game, and you can go and live your life somewhere else, and die in some other place, and there will be no more games played by you or with your life. Say that’s what you want and I’ll do it. I will.”

“You won the game,” she replied. “You are what the white requires to further the game.”

“Not you, dammit!” I shouted. “Not the Gamesmaster, not you! You, you my wife, you, the woman I married: if there is any piece of you left inside then tell me, tell me you want to be free and I’ll do it, I’ll be the Gamesmaster, but you tell me!”

Silence.

A silence heavier for the fact I had been screaming before.

Again, weaker now, I said, I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

The words died on my lips.

Silence.

I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up the picture of a man whose life I had once dreamed was my own. He was so young, lost so far in my memory, and he had sworn, before the game, that he loved his wife too. How had that love felt? Was it the love of a beautiful victory on a complicated board? Was it the ecstasy of snatching success from defeat? Was it the thrill of a heart pumping as you wait for your opponent to walk into your trap, to make the decisive to move? Was that love?

“I love you,” I whispered, and even as I said the words, I realised I wasn’t sure what they meant. Not now; not like this.

I pressed the gun against my own heart, finger against the trigger.

She – the Gamesmaster – turned and said, “No. You are too good a player for that to be your move.”

And of course she was right.

My wife is dead, and I gave up on grief a long time ago. My friends faded, the world changed, the coin turned and only I remained. I lowered the gun.

Climbed to my feet.

Legs shaking, lungs hurting, gun at my side.

She waited.

“I lost my name,” I said, “and am only a player. My wife is dead also: only the Gamesmaster remains.”

So saying, I raised the gun, pointing towards her, and as I did, something small and metal slipped from my jacket, rolled to the ground. We stared at it, she and I, startled by the appearance of a thing so remarkably clean in this room coated in blood. Then slowly, keeping the gun still trained on her, I bent down and picked it up.

A little Roman coin.

(The coin turns, the coin turns. Everything changes and everything stays the same.)

My eyes went up and I imagined I felt her gaze meet my own from behind the veil.

“You wouldn’t,” she breathed. “Not like this.”

I pressed the coin tighter in my fingers. “You tell me that the game goes on, no matter what I do. I could kill you and destroy the Gameshouse, and Bird will have won a victory – maybe not the war, maybe not that – but for a while, I imagine, the blood would flow and the fires would burn and the only word on men’s tongues would be greed and war, until another Gamesmaster came, another figure all in white to restore the balance of things. Of course, by then, I’d probably be dead, my life run out without the Gameshouse’s halls to play in, so maybe I wouldn’t care. Maybe Bird would set his men on me and have them eat me whole, as they would have all those centuries ago, because flesh is rich and no one told them no. It is not a pleasant future that you present me, but at least you are dead and I am free.”

She said nothing, eyes still fixed on the coin. I held it up between thumb and forefinger for her to see more closely, then crushed it back down into my fist, squeezed it until I thought skin might bleed. “Or I take the white,” I went on. “Become the Gamesmaster, the guardian of reason, of logical outcomes and rational thought, the ultimate utilitarian for whom the death of millions is merely statistics, pieces on the board…and the old, unfamiliar words as truth, hope, justice, love…merely patterns of human behaviour to exploit for a more reasoned end. In theory the idea is appealing: I see why you took the offer. But you see,” – my finger tightened against the trigger – “the Gameshouse killed my wife. She was wonderful; she was simply wonderful. And the Gameshouse made her a monster, so in love with the game that she would rather die than be set free. I loved her. I loved her. But I find in this present circumstance, constrained as I am by the rules of the game, that I no longer know what mercy is.”

I pinched the coin between thumb and index finger, balanced it on top of my closed fist.

“You wouldn’t,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t.”

“I see nothing but bad choices,” I replied.

“You are a player: you choose between bad choices all the time.”

“What would you have me choose now? To kill my wife? To kill myself? To let the game go on? What could you live with?”

“There is no guilt in the game, only the board…”

“There was me!” I screamed, voice cutting through her words, gun shaking in my hand. “There was me! You took the white and I was left behind; you read the board but you didn’t see me!”

The coin wobbled on top of my fist, ready to fall; she raised her hands, steady, calm, spoke quickly. “I see you, Silver, I see exactly who you are. You are a player, a great player, there is no higher aim. The house, the game, the game, everything calculated, logic, reason, intellect, every move, every piece – we play the game, we calculate the vectors of the human soul and by playing, we make it better. We make people better.”

“No,” I replied. “We make them pieces or we make them players. That isn’t better.”

“It is – but it is. It is rational where rage isn’t, logical where love is not; I never loved you.” The words fell and I flinched, but the coin was still balanced on my hand, the gun still ready to fire. Her voice rose, higher, begging: “I never loved you; you were just a piece, so shoot me, shoot me, just shoot me but don’t do it like this, don’t decide on…on a whim! On chance!” She spat the word, veil billowing about her face with fury at the sound.

I smiled, remembered someone else’s words. “Luck is sometimes merciful; the game never is.”

Her hands were shaking but her voice, when she finally spoke, was stunned and cold. She said, “You won’t do it. I never loved you; only the game. You are a player. You won’t do it.”

I smiled again, stared into the empty whiteness where a person should have been, and for a moment saw myself stood there, dressed in that same veil. The image seemed laughable: why did I need a veil, who had burned away every piece of my soul so long ago? What was there that is human about me left which I could possibly need to hide?

(A memory of the ferry to Saint-Malo. Why are you crying? Why are you crying?)

(A policeman, gunned down in the dark. They are not my orders. They are not orders I recognise within the boundaries of the law.)

(Thene, her black and white cat coiling around a stranger’s legs, looking for attention. Who was that stranger, smiling at her there, eating omelettes with too much syrup? He had my face but no name, but if I concentrate it seems to me that I remember and…)

… there. There is he is. He reads a book on the beaches of Palmarin while children dance around him asking for money, money, American, money?

He crosses the Mongolian steppe with a family that knows itself to be the centre of the world, listens to the mothers whisper stories of the stars.

There is a man fleeing from the fighting in Jammu eating noodles with a pilot and her mother as he flies to Taipei playing dominos with strangers in Russia sat watching the waterfall in the mountains of Spain.

There he is, this man without a name, and as I look at him from this distant, cold place where now I have come, it seems for a moment that I am him, and he is me, and that after all, he does have a name.

“My name is Silver,” I said, softly at first, then again, a little louder. “My name is Silver.”

I raised my head again, looked straight into the whiteness where my wife’s face should have been. “I am a player. I am also something else.”

I slipped my thumb under the little coin, felt its weight on top of the nail.

“You won’t do it,” she breathed. “You won’t.”

I smiled, and was content. “My love,” I replied, “how little you know about people.”

I let the coin fly.

Chapter 39

The coin turns, the coin turns, the coin turns.

When it lands the world will change, and the house will fall or the house will stand, and she will live or she will die, and I will wear the white, or diminish and die of mortal old age.

Sometimes life deals a bad hand, and the prize was not worth the price you paid. Sometimes there is nothing in a choice.

The coin turns, the coin turns, the coin turns.

I am Silver, who played the Gameshouse and won. Did love, if love was a thing I felt, lessen or increase the odds of my success? Would a colder man have taken fewer risks, or sacrificed fewer lives, if he was not led by some nameless passion in his heart? Or is love only weakness, which reason shall erode, has eroded, has driven wholly from my heart?

I look inwards and I see only memories and deeds, and they too begin to fade.

A player has no need to be a person.

A player has no need for a name.

The coin turns.

There are greater games yet to be played, and the pieces we move across the board of this existence will not feel our white fingers touch them, will not know that their will was ours, their lives at our command, until maybe the very last, when they look back on their lives and wonder why. Why the currents of their lives pushed them left when they could have gone right.

They will call it chance, the people of this world, and for the most part they will be mistaken.

For the most part.

The coin turns; where it falls, nobody knows.

The coin turns, empires rise and empires fall, men live and men die, babies scream and dead men sigh; the world changes but people are always and are never the same.

The coin turns, the coin turns.

I am Silver.

I choose humanity.

The coin turns.

MEET THE AUTHOR

CLAIRE NORTH is the pen name of Catherine Webb. She currently works as a theater lighting designer and is a fan of big cities, urban magic, Thai food and graffiti-spotting. She lives in London. Find her on Twitter as @ClaireNorth42.

By Claire North

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Touch

THE GAMESHOUSE (EBOOK NOVELLAS)

The Serpent

The Thief

The Master

Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette
Digital.

To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.

Sign Up

Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters

Copyright

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Copyright © 2015 by Claire North

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Redhook Books/Orbit

Hachette Book Group

1290 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10104
www.HachetteBookGroup.com

Redhook is an imprint of Orbit, a division of Hachette Book Group.

The Redhook name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

First ebook edition: November 2015

ISBN 978-0-316-33605-5

E3

Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Welcome
4. Chapter 1
5. Chapter 2
6. Chapter 3
7. Chapter 4
8. Chapter 5
9. Chapter 6
10. Chapter 7
11. Chapter 8
12. Chapter 9
13. Chapter 10
14. Chapter 11
15. Chapter 12
16. Chapter 13
17. Chapter 14
18. Chapter 15
19. Chapter 16
20. Chapter 17
21. Chapter 18
22. Chapter 19
23. Chapter 20
24. Chapter 21
25. Chapter 22
26. Chapter 23
27. Chapter 24
28. Chapter 25
29. Chapter 26
30. Chapter 27
31. Chapter 28
32. Chapter 29
33. Chapter 30
34. Chapter 31
35. Chapter 32
36. Chapter 33
37. Chapter 34
38. Chapter 35
39. Chapter 36
40. Chapter 37
41. Chapter 38
42. Chapter 39
43. Meet the Author
44. By Claire North
45. Newsletters
46. Copyright

Navigation

1. Begin Reading

2. Table of Contents