The Great Game Trilogy

by O. J. Lowe

  “He knew what’d happen,” Cyris replied, still staring at the man on the floor. His face had been pounded into something unrecognisable, he still lived but barely, his breathing shallow and laboured. “You think I acted irrationally? Maybe I should have spared him?”

  She twitched her lips in amusement. “No. I wholeheartedly approve. Sometimes a strong hand is needed.”

  Chapter Nine. Putting the Pieces Together.

  “Your mind will always be your greatest weapon. Everything else is superfluous.”

  First thing said to Nicholas Roper on first day of Unisco training.

  The twenty-third day of Summerpeak.

  He’d watched them take her out of the room on a hover-gurney, her face covered by a sheet. For that, he was grateful. He didn’t want to see her face again, had witnessed it as he’d entered the room, fallen to his haunches and just been unable to move, just wanted to purge the last thing he’d eaten, just sit there unmoving. Arnholt, bless him, had come to see what was happening and they’d exchanged words. Nick could see that his boss was just as rocked by the whole thing as him, the shock plastered across his face. If Arnholt hadn’t seen this coming, with all the resources at his fingertips, then it might be worse than they’d all thought.

  He’d ignored the calls and there’d been plenty of them, had taken all he had to vacate the room. He’d still be there now if management and the forensic service hadn’t made him leave, they’d moved him to another room with their condolences. Which was nice, he supposed. They’d have to be just as worried as he was, just as scared. Though theirs came from a professional point of view, they didn’t know how this would impact on their reputation, he didn’t care. Personally, he couldn’t care less about that right now. Nick was too busy grieving. Somewhere across not just this island but the kingdoms, the news would slowly be seeping out a beautiful, kind, talented woman had died and those who had known her would never get the chance to see her again. They’d never get the chance to say goodbye.

  They’d never get the chance to say goodbye. He found that thought perhaps the most distressing of all. He’d ordered a bottle of Serranian firebrandy from the hotel bar, had it delivered to his room but hadn’t drunk any yet. The bottle remained unopened, though he’d been tempted. He should. It’d calm his nerves. But at the same time, he didn’t want to be calm, he wanted to be with her. He should be with her, but he was here, and she was out there. Silent forever, never to make another sound or cast another smile. Already she’d be laid out on a cold slab in the mortuary alone. Alone. He was sure he must have wept, for his eyes were sore and wet, his nose clogged but more than anything he just felt numb. Like a part of him hadn’t just died but had been surgically removed.

  He didn’t know how long he’d sat there, it might have been hours, might have been minutes. He finally broke the top from the bottle and took a long drain, the liquid harshly burning the back of his throat. It felt good, he felt the fires twitching through his limbs. Feeling slowly returned to him although he realised now he was shaking, his hands trembling as he held the bottle. Gently he put it down and sighed.

  Now, he wasn’t entirely sure where he went. Now he was alone. Sorrow coursed through him, the thought echoing through his mind before slowly he stood. Gradually the ice turned to fire, hot anger burning through him as he turned and smashed the bottle against the wall, silvers of glass cutting into his hand, alcohol stinging the cuts. It felt good, the pain brought things back into focus. He drew a deep breath and closed his hand into a fist, felt fresh agony assault his system, but he didn’t make a sound, too busy thinking.

  He hadn’t slept as he made his way into Will’s makeshift office in the Unisco headquarters, he didn’t feel tired. Or hungry. He didn’t feel much, just numb in everything but his desire for answers. And if anyone had them, he’d guess Will was the top of the list. And if he didn’t, then he could get them. He wasn’t about to take no for an answer. Nick entered, saw the Vazaran slumped at his desk, head on his arms and sleeping. The last few weeks had been rough on all of them, he supposed. Especially Will. He’d been here late every night doing the job of three people and right now, he looked so peaceful. The sleep would do him good. Then again, Nick realised he didn’t care as he closed the door. Loudly. Okocha jerked awake with a start, mumbling out confused words.

  “Morning,” Nick said before acting apologetic. “Sorry, didn’t realise you were asleep.”

  “Knock next time yeah,” Okocha groaned. “Yipes.” He yawned loudly. “Bloody hells I needed that.” He felt a twinge of guilt. Not much but some. Okocha could sleep on his own damn time. Nick folded his arms and looked at him.

  “You look almost as bad as I feel,” he said, allowing some sympathy into his words. Okocha did look exhausted. “Almost.”

  “I know, right? Nick, I’m sorry for your loss.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d heard such sentiments and he nodded gratefully. “Thanks, Will. That means a lot. Now are you going to help me find her killer?”

  An audible groan slipped from Okocha as he let his head fall onto the desk again. “Nick, I’m not sure you should be doing this. Shouldn’t you be grieving?”

  “I’ll grieve when I’ve got an answer and someone’s dead.”

  “You know Arnholt won’t put you on this. It’s way too personal.” He didn’t look convinced as he said it. “And if you go off without orders, you’ll be in the shit?”

  “And do you know I don’t care?” Nick asked softly. “I’m not… Look just let me look at the evidence in the case. I know you can get hold of it. Let’s look over it, I’ll not abscond with it. I’ll be under your supervision all times.” He tried to grin at him, failed miserably, decided it wasn’t important. “Maybe we can find something that’s been missed.”

  “Well…” Okocha looked uneasy about the whole thing. That, Nick noted, was a problem. A rather big one. He couldn’t do this without him. Okocha might sympathise with him but if he was unwilling to anything then he couldn’t force him.

  “Go on. What harm can it do?”

  A sigh escaped Okocha’s mouth. “Okay, okay, we’ll have a look over it. But if you find anything, we take it straight to the director. No running off on revenge missions.”

  “Now would I do a thing like that?”

  “Well you look desperate enough to do anything right now,” Okocha said dryly. “I’m actually a bit worried about what might’ve happened if I’d refused to help you.”

  “Now who’s being melodramatic?”

  Okocha gave him a sarcastic smirk and folded his arms. “I’m going to ignore that. So where do you want to start?”

  The crime scene hadn’t revealed much, there’d been fingerprints all over the room but most of them belonged to either him or the victim. Thinking of her like that worked for the moment, made it easier. Looking at all this imagery reminded him of how he’d found her and the last thing he wanted was those memories troubling him now. He didn’t want to break down, wouldn’t do anyone any good. About the best thing he could do was stay focused on the professional aspect of the case. Some existed from the cleaning staff in the hotel, they’d been ruled out as suspects. There’d had been some sets of unidentified fingerprints, Okocha had run them against all known databases but come up empty. That troubled Nick more than he was willing to admit. Something about this whole mess troubled him. This didn’t feel like an opportunist murder, they’d had to have done some planning, to get in the hotel room without a trace spoke of professionalism. But the way it had gone down felt sloppy. No sign of forced entry. Had to have been two people. Deep fibre analysis of the carpet spoke of three sets of footprints in the room in the time frame of death, one of them belonging to Sharon, one of them leaving the impressions that implied a tall heavy man, the other being rather vaguer. Average height and slender-to-medium build were about the best they’d come up with.

  “Not much here, I’m afraid,” Okocha said. “Believe me I already looked over it. And there’s no ca
mera footage showing who went in there. It’s all been flashed out. But not in a way I’ve ever seen before. All very weird.”

  “Talk to me of the murder weapons,” Nick said. “Maybe there’s something there.”

  “Two injuries on her body,” Okocha said, bringing up a holographic rendition of the body. Nick was grateful to see the face had been blanked out, leaving it featureless. That was appreciated. What hadn’t been concealed was the damage to the back of the head, he found it painful just to look at it. Minus the blood and the gore and the smell of death, it looked like an egg that had been smashed half in at one side. “First injury which would have killed her was a kinetic blast to the back of the head, smashed her skull straight through and blew fragments of bone into the back of her brain which was already scrambled from the blow.” He cracked his fist against the desk suddenly. “Dead on impact. We all know what a blast like that does to a shielded person, into flesh at that range, well that’d be all she wrote.”

  “How does someone get a kinetic disperser across an island and into a hotel room without anyone noticing?” Nick asked. “I mean they’re not easy to hide?”

  “We’ve been asking around,” Okocha said. “But so far nobody remembers seeing anything. They’re drawing a blank.”

  “Yeah that’s helpful,” Nick said. “Really is.” He saw the look on Okocha’s face and felt a bit guilty. “Sorry, I know you’re doing your best. But… Come on, I need to find them.”

  There, he’d said it. He’d let it slip. He meant to find them and that was that, he didn’t need Okocha knowing it. He tried to put his mind to it. Seeing the hologram was a little distracting. Kinetic disperser wounds all followed a similar pattern, narrowing them down to a single weapon would take more time than they had. “What about the other wound?”

  Okocha hit a few buttons and the holographic image of the woman rotated, showing the entry wound across the chest. If he bent down and screwed his eyes up, Nick could see the exit wound on the other side.

  “It sped death up, would have been fatal on its own, but appears to have been a superfluous injury added post-head trauma,” Okocha said. “Weapon is unknown, appears to have been hot enough to cauterise on impact. Very little bleeding.”

  “What the hells does that?” Nick asked. “That doesn’t seem possible. What did they use, an oxytorch?”

  “Wouldn’t have produced a neat wound like this,” Okocha said, reaching his hand into the hologram. Nick fought the urge to wince as he waggled his fingers in the wound. “This was a straight in and out job, very little resistance to the entry wound. If it had been an oxytorch, there’d be a whole lot more damage to the surrounding area, it wouldn’t have been as neat, it’d have had to have melted its way inside through flesh and muscle. You know how easily flesh burns? The room would have stank like a bacon factory.”

  “Nice,” Nick said. “Well I didn’t notice that. So, what sort of weapon does it?”

  “Coroner couldn’t identify it,” Okocha said. “I think that’s worrying personally. When the weapon can’t be identified, we all need to sit up and take note.”

  Nick nodded, folded his arms and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Okay, okay. So maybe look at it from a different angle.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You run a trace for similar sorts of wounds in murder victims recently? If it’s that uncommon, then maybe we can narrow down a link.”

  “I did,” Okocha said. “This is where it gets interesting.” He pushed another button, more images materialised in front of them, two badly dismembered bodies. “This happened a few weeks ago in Latalya.”

  “Serran, right?”

  “Yeah, just at the base of the Trabazon mountain,” Okocha said. “It has a nice waterfront; they trade with Vazara a lot. Anyway, these two guys were found cut up in a cellar. Wounds were cauterised instantly, looked a lot like what we see on Ms Arventino here. Same weapon or similar.”

  “That does warrant a huh,” Nick said thoughtfully. “So, what’s the connection here? The two guys who died have a record? Anything to warrant violence?”

  “Just drunken disorderly. And get this, they caught the guy who did it according to this.” Okocha pointed to his screen. “Weird huh? They were found in the home of the guy who did it, Burak Hassan. They were friends. His first words as they came through the door were, ‘I did it, it was me, I killed them.’”

  “He in jail?”

  “He’s in an asylum,” Okocha said, reading aloud from the screen. “Deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. Those nine words are all he says now. Hasn’t said what sort of weapon was used, how he did it or even why. Just that he did. Doesn’t even eat unless he’s fed. He’s pretty much a vegetable.”

  “So probably not our killer then,” Nick said sarcastically. “Will, we’ve not seen a weapon like this before. You think it’s really possible two of them exist?”

  “Well you never know,” Okocha said. “I mean this is just the most recent example. If we go back further…”

  “I’m not interested in the past,” Nick said, regretted immediately the way he’d said it. “I meant to say, I want to know about the present. So, if we take it that they’re connected…”

  “Perhaps a false conclusion but go on.”

  He ignored Okocha’s comment and the sarcasm in his tone. “If we assume they’re connected, then they had to have gotten here somehow. They can’t have been on the island all the time. We need to have a look at arrivals on the island about the time Sharon was killed. Within a period of two days.”

  “I’m not sure,” Okocha said. “I mean, okay, they were found on the ninth, assumed the kills were at max forty-eight hours old and Sharon was killed on the twenty-second… Who knows what happened in that period…”

  “So, go back further then. It’s a, what half day flight minimum from that part of Serran to here, assume that they got on a flight immediately after killing the men and framing Hassan, it’d still be late on the tenth, early eleventh by the time they got here. Earliest. We need to check it all out. Has to be something.”

  “Wow, you want anything else while we’re at it?” Okocha asked dryly. “That still has to be hundreds of people. Conservative estimate. Probably closer to thousands maybe.”

  Nick leaned forward in his seat, his face screwed up in concentration as he thought things through. He rested his elbows on his knees and mused it over as Okocha sat watching him. He wasn’t just thinking about Sharon now but about everything else that had happened since this tournament had started, the terrorism at the hospital, the attempted kidnapping, the murders, the attacks. So many isolated events to sort through. Isolated events across the same background. Something started to stir in the deep recesses of his mind, the gestation of an idea that sounded better the more it started to take shape.

  “Ion emissions,” he said eventually.

  “Really?” Okocha asked, just as dryly as his previous comment. “You spend all that time thinking and you come up with ion emissions? Identifying the ion emissions of a ships engine drive is not going to…”

  “Compare any ships that departed the Latalya area with any that arrived in this area,” Nick said. “See if we can get a connection.”

  The reason most commercial companies used the slower, blimp-like methods of air travel was simply a matter of cost, their engines were smaller, more efficient, they worked with the air currents instead of against it, supporting rather than straining. When it came to fuelled aircraft, mainly used by industrial and private companies as well as the military for transport and travel, the engines were large, they used a great deal more fuel and produced a lot more energy, the resulting emissions producing an ion efflux residue exclusive to the craft based on the specifics of their engine and their output. A residue quantifiable and trackable, given the right equipment “And while we’re on it, correlate any sort of data for ships departing or arriving this island since the tournament started. Both commercial and private.”

  “You do
n’t ask for much, do you?” Okocha asked. That dry tone in his voice was starting to grate. He clenched his fist together, ground his teeth and tried to suck it up. It was quite an effort, he had to admit. Why couldn’t he understand how desperate things were here? He didn’t need this constant questioning. Unfortunately for Nick, what he did need was Okocha’s help and kicking off about the way he did things wasn’t going to help.

  “Just a little peace of mind. Some closure. Justice. That all sound okay to you?”

  He just about managed to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. If Okocha could do dry, Nick could do sarcasm. Anything to keep his mind off the chasm in his stomach.

  “Okay, anything else?”

  It had taken a good several hours to work across the data, considering most of the people who had arrived at the tournament for the start had come by boat, there’d been more air traffic coming and going than expected. It had all been a logistical thing. More people could be transported by boat than by air and it was cheaper for the ICCC who’d laid the boats on to the island. The same number of people coming by air as by boat would have been vastly more expensive. That said, it felt like the number of people who could afford air travel was rising. Several hours of gazing at incoming and outgoing aircraft via the spectrometer, cataloguing each into its own ion grouping, and he was ready to scream. This was the part of Unisco work that nobody ever spoke about. It wasn’t all fights and shootouts. Sometimes you needed to think as well.

  “Maybe they came by boat,” Okocha eventually said. “You ever think that?”

  “Thought they stopped laying on cheap boat travel after the knockout stage started,” Nick replied, not taking his eyes off the screen. His eyes felt like they’d start bleeding if he stared at it any longer, but he couldn’t pull away. “It wouldn’t be any cheaper to get here that way, it’d be a lot slower for sure.”