The Master

by Claire North

  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.