The Master

by Claire North

  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 ‘backw
ard’ 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 litt
le 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.