The Master

by Claire North

“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 kickin
g 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.