The Great Game

by O. J. Lowe

  The match was on in the background but neither Arnholt, nor Okocha nor Brendan were truly paying attention to it. They had too much on their minds. The mission the previous day had gone off without a hitch, there hadn’t been any collateral damage but some disturbing signs had been found in the post situation analysis. Such as one hostile being unaccounted for, they’d spied fourteen men entering the building across security footage, only twelve bodies and one prisoner had been accounted for. Okocha wanted so very much to believe that they’d made a mistake. Arnholt wasn’t having it.

  Then there was the second detail that they weren’t quite ready to release yet. Those who had been gunned down in the administrator’s office, those who had held the hostages had all had their weapons examined by Noorland and Leclerc in the aftermath. None of them had been packed with live energy cells meaning they couldn’t have been fired even if they’d wanted to.

  Okocha had been stunned when he’d heard that. Arnholt more so. If it got out that they’d basically executed a bunch of people who couldn’t really fight back, it wouldn’t look great. It’d tarnish what they’d thought to be a great victory. Some had possessed live weapons, that was something that couldn’t be disputed. In the corridors, the attack teams had run into them but beyond that, nothing. Okocha had been against concealing the information for the time being. Whoever had organised the attack knew and all it took was one rogue communication to make it look like Unisco was concealing things.

  “Something about this whole thing stinks,” Brendan said. “We still don’t have a motive. Despite what Wade thinks…”

  Okocha had read that as well. It was perhaps the most worrying part of the whole thing. Wade, when Aldiss and Harper had found him, had claimed that they’d come to his room and opened fire on his bed. They’d intended to kill him. They had killed Mallinson. Okocha didn’t know the man. Obviously, it was a tragedy that a Unisco agent had been killed in the line of duty but he couldn’t feel too sorry for someone who everyone said was a massive prick. It was his family that he pitied but by all accounts, they couldn’t stand the man either so how much pity they wanted was up for debate.

  How and why they’d made the choice to kill Wade, he couldn’t say and it frustrated him. He possessed one of the finest analytical minds in the company, even if he did say so himself, and it was eluding him. He couldn’t have given an answer if he’d wanted to and that stung a lot. The only possible solution was that someone had worked out who he really worked for. But that was supposed to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Had someone said something? Let something slip? Surely not.

  All options sounded just as ridiculous as the last but he was worried. If Wade had been compromised then everyone needed to be worried. With that in mind, Wade had made the decision to vanish to rest and recuperate in peace for a few days following his quitting of the tournament. He promised to be back before it finished but Leclerc had flown him out personally.

  “I wouldn’t discount everything that Wade has said,” Arnholt said. Although many people truly didn’t know he was the director of Unisco, it wasn’t perhaps as closely guarded a secret as most of the other identities in the agency. Okocha recalled the conversation with Phillipe Mazoud Crumley and Arnholt had engaged in. Mazoud was one of the biggest scumbags in Vazara and he could do a lot of damage with that information. Privately Okocha still believed that business with the kidnapping of his daughter wasn’t entirely worlds away from his role in the organisation. He’d just been lucky that Wade had… Could that have a link with it? Rocastle was unaccounted for. Rocastle who’d tangled with Wade prior to his capture. They’d found the remains of Wolfmeyer’s squadron in the ocean, four HAX’s settled on the floor but no trace of the prisoner transport nor the two missing pilots. Was it so unfeasible that Rocastle could have tried for some retribution on Wade. “I trust him implicitly.”

  “He’s also half blind and doped up on painkillers,” Brendan said. “His mind went wild…”

  “He was still competent enough to defend himself,” Okocha pointed out. “Director, Chief, this is just the latest in a line of incidents on this island that we can’t explain. So much has happened and despite everything we’re still in the dark. We’re all fumbling blind, not just Wade. We’re trying to grasp for something without knowing what it is we’re looking for. It’s not good.”

  “I spoke to Ritellia this morning,” Arnholt said, a look of intense disdain on his face. “Tried to get him to cancel the tournament. Told him about the bodies down below.”

  “Let me guess,” Okocha said, glancing over to the viewing screen. “He didn’t like the idea?”

  “Told me to get out of his office and stop scaremongering,” Arnholt said in a quietly outraged tone. “I’m lodging a complaint with the Senate first available opportunity about his behaviour. Anything else happens here, I’m lobbying to them to step in. It’s about all I can do now. Ritellia…” He sighed in resignation. “I really do dislike that man. How he got to be president of anything is a mystery to me. No, I think we’ve started the job now and we’re not going to stop them through other means. We need to see this through to the end. And there will be an end.”

  Brendan sighed. “I hate to voice this, Director. But maybe we’re just trying to make too much into this. Maybe it just really was a bad place to hold the tournament. These might be Vazaran things. You know what they can be like around here.”

  Okocha felt a stab of annoyance at the way Brendan had just dug at his heritage in the most casual way possible. He shoved it down. Starting an argument now would not be the best idea.

  “Yeah, I really do,” he said dryly. “I got some results back I wanted to run by you both, if you’ll allow me?”

  Arnholt nodded at him. “Go ahead, Will.”

  “Well, that tentacle that Wilsin and Roper recovered from Operation Monsoon…” Their unsanctioned shootout had been tagged that due to the nature of the events that had led to the whole thing, a quick action on Arnholt’s part to make the whole thing look legitimate should major action ever need to be taken. “… I got the results back from our lab. Inconclusive. They think it’s from some sort of giant squid, it matches the body shape…”

  “I’ve seen giant squid,” Brendan said. “Never one that big. It’d have to be bigger than this cabin to have part of a tentacle that size.”

  “Plus, it has a strange genetic makeup they haven’t ever seen before,” Okocha added. “I mean it. There’s stuff in its DNA that makes literally no sense to them. Talliver’s exact words to me.” If that was what Dean Talliver, a colleague and expert in natural biology had to say, then Okocha backed him. “It doesn’t look like any normal squid.”

  Arnholt sighed. “Terrific. It’s infuriating for Talliver of course but I can’t see that information affecting us too much in the long term. The door is closed.”

  “And yet doors can be opened again,” Brendan said. “At the very least, we should consider some sort of deterrent against whatever it was. I’ll talk to Talliver in the morning. It’s late where he is.”

  “And just an update of my examination into Reims,” Okocha said. “Remember you asked me to do it?”

  Arnholt gave him a smile. “I do. Please, speak.”

  “Okay, CEO is named Claudia Coppinger, one of the richest women in the five kingdoms, parents both dead, one daughter, father’s identity unknown. Daughter is a spirit dancer…” It was on the tip of his tongue to add that maybe Arnholt’s daughter knew her but he kept it professional. Arnholt doubtless already had had that thought run through his head. “… But the company itself is thriving. Reims is the parent company; their primary focus originally was software but they’ve gone into a lot of other business since then. Reims makes a stunning amount of credits every year.”

  He grinned nervously. “Believe me, I’ve never seen so many zeroes. It’s enough to make you envious. Some of the subsidiary businesses though, they’re in different markets. Auction houses. Antique dealerships. Ship builders. A
rchitects. Biochemistry. Medicine. Real estate. Spirit calling equipment. There’s even rumours that they moved into weapons design but I couldn’t confirm or deny that. It’s staggering. I’m surprised the whole place hasn’t collapsed under its own weight. All of this is before you consider what they did on this very island.”

  “Sort of enemy you don’t want to have,” Brendan said dryly. “I’m glad we didn’t declare war on them.”

  “There’s more though,” Okocha said. “And it’s weird. You’ve heard of Harval-Pek? Premier ship design and construction?”

  “They designed the HAX,” Arnholt said absentmindedly.

  “Owned by Reims. They’re one of the premier ship constructors in the five kingdoms. They have at least two workshops in every kingdom. At least. They churn out more than a thousand ships per workshop a year. Even with their workforce, they should be making huge profits. Everyone wants to use them. So why are they running at a massive loss?”

  He saw Arnholt’s eyebrows narrow. “Excuse me?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. I had a bit of a poke around, it seems that there’s been some massive orders been placed but there’s yet to be any payment. It’s like they’ve been built and left to gather dust.”

  “It’s unusual,” Brendan said. “But that one year of massive losses for a successful manufacturer doesn’t mean there’s any criminal activity. That sounds more like incompetence than insinuation.”

  “It’s not one year,” Okocha said. “Reims acquired Harval-Pek six years ago. These orders have been going in ever since then. And they’ve been running at a loss ever since. It’s not just HP either? Reims itself as a company are reporting mass profits. Everything that’s tied to them as a subsidiary isn’t. It’s suspicious.”

  “But it’s also nothing to do with us,” Arnholt said gently. “At the most it sounds like a tax matter.”

  “You or I have never run a business like that,” Brendan said. “The Reims CEO obviously has. She must know what she’s doing.”

  Arnholt leaned back in his chair and brought his fingers together in a pyramid thoughtfully. Brendan said nothing.

  “Maybe,” Okocha said. “That was all I was able to ascertain in a small amount of time. I didn’t want to hack into their database further without reasonable cause. I wouldn’t have minded finding out what these huge orders were.”

  He looked at Arnholt. “Do you want me to dig deeper?”

  Chapter Forty-Four. No Time for Regrets.

  “I’m not here to be underestimated. I’m here to try and get as far as I can, maybe even go and win. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  Weronika Saarth before her bout with Scott Taylor.

  The seventeenth day of Summerpeak.

  WHAT WENT WRONG?

  Five dead in hospital shooting in Quin-C adds to Carcaradis chaos

  Exclusive by Kate Kinsella.

  The Competitive Centenary Calling Challenge Cup was once more thrown into chaos two days ago as gunfire was exchanged in the halls of a Carcaradis Island hospital between terrorists and Unisco agents in a senseless attack that left five civilians dead and several more injured and terrified in the latest of several incidents that fully expose the folly behind the politics at the ICCC.

  Yes, Unisco can be praised for swift and decisive action in snuffing out a threat before it could really turn into a tragedy. But what hasn’t been mentioned as much is the way it was handed over to them without so much as a protest by a vastly understaffed Carcaradis Island constabulary that had neither the personnel or the equipment or the training to undertake such a rescue attempt. Nor has it been mentioned that such an action should not have needed to happen. Nor has it been mentioned that this is just the latest mishap to mar this year’s tournament so far and we aren’t even at the quarter finals yet.

  What makes this whole thing even more astonishing is that following the attack, Ronald Ritellia, 78, President of the International Competitive Calling Committee and self-proclaimed most important man in the five kingdoms refused to call the tournament off following such a brutal attack citing it as ‘unrelated to the incident at hand’ and how ‘it would be a travesty to deny the public what they so desperately want to see.’ Once again, Ritellia appears to not be living in the same world as we are, his own world filled with his impressive sense of self-importance, more credits than can ever be spent and questionable bedroom liaisons with shady women.

  Yes, you read that right, the woman seen on married Ritellia’s arm throughout most of the recent weeks of this tournament is none other than Reims executive and mother of one, Alana Fuller, 37. Reims, you might remember being the company that moved kingdom and sky to ensure that the tournament ended up in a quite frankly unsuitable location that has already seen natural disasters, murders, attempted kidnapping and domestic terrorism (Which this correspondent might add are just the off-field issues that have plagued the tournament). Indeed, Ritellia was not quite so casual when the ICCC building was nearly destroyed by an unknown figure, his exact words at the time being ‘if there was any justice, then the bastards would be strung up and their families made to pay for it.’

  It is often easy to be dispassionate when it doesn’t concern you and nobody exemplifies that more than the gargantuan figure in the sporting world, but what he doesn’t seem to realise is that given his efforts to bring the tournament here, any sort of controversy DOES concern him. Any person who dies here on this island while the tournament is on SHOULD be laid at his feet. And this is something that he MUST realise rather than spouting off his own philosophy of greed. When Maxwell Brudel, 26, and Darren Maddley, 20, and even renowned Unisco investigator Stelwyn Mallinson, 44, do not come home to their families because of incidents beyond their control, it is time to question whether the right decision was made.

  And what about the tournament itself so far? For the first time in its seventy-year history, it has been held in Vazara and has it been a success so far? From a competitive point of view, it has often flattered to deceive on some scales. It often feels like there has yet to be a standout competitor on show, someone truly deserving to win it at this point. Of course, it is still early days yet. With both Wade Wallerington and Sharon Arventino tipped as early favourites, both have gone out by now, Wallerington, 33 retiring due to injuries suffered in the terrorist attack on the ICCC building and Arventino, 28 falling two days ago to exciting newcomer Theobald Jameson, 22 in a performance that looked far more like she had her mind more on her upcoming wedding than the bout at hand. Arventino was involved in controversy earlier on in the tournament when it was claimed she had deliberately thrown a bout with her brother to enable him to reclaim a point. Both she and half-brother Peter Jacobs, 20 insisted that the rumour was false.

  At the time, retired ICCC official Boudwjin Kacar, 71, called for an inquiry into Ms Arventino, an action that was never followed up on. Because after all, the ICCC aren’t amiss to having a pretty face front and centre of the action. A shame that the controversy arose in this bout because it is largely believed by the public on the ground at Carcaradis Island that it was probably one of the best bouts of the tournament so far.

  Of course, you never completely flee the past and if Jacobs was involved in any sort of fix earlier on in the tournament it has not benefitted him in the long run, following his defeat to Katherine Sommer yesterday in a defeat where she showed the difference in class between the two of them. Ms Sommer, 26, said after the bout that ‘she was happy to make it through to the next round and she wished her opponent luck in the future,’ thanking him for a good bout. With the future Mr Sharon Arventino, Nicholas Roper, 29 still in the tournament and promoted to favourite ahead of his bout in three days’ time versus Blake Reinhardt, 36, it might be questioned whether Sommer cannot just go all the way but win the whole thing but one thing is certain, we all await the chance to find out.

  Today, relative unknowns Scott Taylor, 22 and Weronika Saarth, 24 will walk out to try and take one step closer on the road to making th
eir name a part of history. Given the way the tournament has unfolded so far (and I use that word in every sense of the term), one can only hope that it is not a history permanently scarred by controversy, by being more trouble than it was worth and by the stubbornness of a man who should long since have left office.

  Our hearts go out to the families of all those who will never come back from this island. If they were to be asked if it were worth the tournament continuing, I’m sure they would reply in the negative. It is to those people that Mr Ritellia needs to open both his ears and his heart to. Not the money men. Nor to his co-conspirators, who at times appear to be little more than sycophantic yes men, lackeys of the highest order or, even worse at the other end of the scale, men and women actively working against him to further their own ambitions. Not even the empty space where his own shrivelled conscience should be. But the people. Nothing is more important than the people and to proclaim otherwise is to set yourself on the first steps of a stony path that will break your feet.

  Should Ritellia wind up crippled by his own actions, it is unlikely that many in the spirit calling world would shed too much of a tear for him. Gross megalomania and alleged corruption charges can do that for your popularity and the man who sailed into office on the crest of a wave looks ever closer to leaving it in disgrace. Only time will tell. But this correspondent for one, thinks it can’t come quickly enough.

  “I’m glad I’m not Ritellia this morning,” Sharon said, lifting her eyes up from the article. “She goes to town a bit on him, doesn’t she? I don’t think you can blame everything bad that happened here so far on him. Tempting as some people might find that to be.”

  Pete said nothing. Just took a gulp of his juice and swilled the contents slowly around his mouth, letting it dribble down his throat without really tasting it.

  “You’re still upset I can see.”