The Great Game

by O. J. Lowe

  “It sped death up, it would have been fatal on its own but it 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 from that injury.”

  “What the hells can do 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 that did this, 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 but the trace it’s still in progress,” Okocha said. “It takes time but I’m expecting it any minute now.”

  The console next to him beeped and he let out a yawn, did his best to cover it up and turned to look at the screen. Nick tried to peer around him, see what he had. “Huh.”

  “Huh what?” Nick asked, suddenly intrigued. “Huh good or huh bad?”

  “Huh interesting,” Okocha said, moving aside to reveal the image of 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 histories of 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, Mr Burak Hassan. They were friends. His first words as they came through the door were, I did it, I did it, I killed them.”

  “He in jail?”

  “He’s in an asylum,” Okocha said, carrying on reading aloud from the screen. “Deemed not mentally fit to stand trial. Those nine words are all he says now. Hasn’t said what sort of weapon was used or 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 that 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, slightly regretted it 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 that they’re connected, then they had to have gotten here somehow. They can’t have been here on the island all the time. We need to have a look at arrivals on the island about the time that 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 that the kills were at max forty-eight hours old and Sharon was killed on the twenty-second… Who knows what happened in that period…”

  “If we go back further then. It’s a, what half day flight absolute 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 for a full two minutes as Okocha sat watching him. He wasn’t just thinking about Sharon now but about everything else that had happened since this whole 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 leftover emissions producing an ion efflux residue exclusive to the craft based on the specifics of their engine and their output.

  A residue which was quantifiable and trackable via the satellites that orbited the five kingdoms, if you knew how. Which Okocha undoubtedly did, Nick noted, given his history in the role. “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 don’t ask for much, do you?” Okocha asked. That dry tone in his voice was starting to grate on him. 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 much in the long term.

  “Just a little peace of mind. Some closure. Plenty of 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. He could do it well. Anything to keep his mind off the yawning ache in his stomach.

  “Okay, anything else?”

  It had taken a good several hours to work back 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 he’d expected there to be. It had all been a simple logistical thing. More people could be transported by boat than by air and it was a lot 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 to come by air 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 start screaming. 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 to the island by boat,” Okocha eventually said. “You ever think about 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 were about to start bleeding if he stared at it much longer but he couldn’t pull away. “It wouldn’t be any cheaper to get here that way and it’d be a lot slower.”

  “Security would be tighter in the air though,” Okocha said. “How would you get a weapon through the aeroport checks?”

  “We don’t even know what this weapon looks like,” Nick shot back. “It might be one of those that you know when you see but I wouldn’t bet on it. Don’t forget there are very few instances of weapons like these on record. Who’s to say that it’d even be picked up by a scanner?” Okocha’s search on a different terminal had come up with a few more times a similar weapon had been used on a victim, none of them very recently. Most of them were more than five years old. Quite a few were older than ten. Interesting but hardly relevant. “You know, compared to blaster or knife crime. And anyway, those scans aren’t fool proof. They’re only considered good until some idiot manages to fool them. And I know it hasn’t happened yet, but there’s always a way. Probably has happened before now but we just haven’t heard about it.”

  Okocha said nothing.

  “You know, there sure are a lot of Reims flights incoming to this place,” he said. “Go figure that one out.”

  “Well they did pay for it…” Nick said, pausing midway through his sentence, his mind catching up with his mouth. “Hey, let’s have a look at the times on that. Was there one in on the day Sharon was killed?” Her name brought about a stab of grief in his gut, he allowed himself a moment to console himself.

  “Hold on…” Okocha hummed to himself as his fingers danced across the keyboard. “Oh yeah, there was actually. Landed in the morning, took off early afternoon. Two figures arrived and departed, in-kingdom flight so they didn’t have to show any documents. Trying to get images of them now…”

  Now visibly interested, Nick turned back and looked at Okocha’s screen, footage from the Carcaradis Island aeroport cycling through on fast record. All until suddenly it lit up like a firework display for a good several seconds before returning to normal to show the Reims ship in a hanger on its own. Only a few aeroport staffed lurked around, none of them really paying attention to anything other than their job.

  “Well that can’t be coincidence,” Okocha said. “Just like the hotel.”

  Nick leaned back in his chair, thinking about over what it might mean. Okocha was right, of course. There was not a way in the hells that this could be coincidence. Two men got off a Reims airship, nobody seemed to have caught an electronic glimpse of them, someone died and not long after, they departed. It screamed guilty.

  And the words echoed in his mind about there being plenty of Reims flights coming in and out. Surely if people were coming to watch from the company, it’d be easier for them to hire a few rooms and keep them there for the time being, rather than trafficking them in and out. And suddenly, he found himself thinking about all the other strange occurrences that had taken place on the island since the tournament had started.

  “Let’s have a look at all the dates that Reims aircraft landed and took off,” he said. “See what we can find.”

  This had started by being about Sharon. Somehow now, he had the feeling it was going to turn into so much more. That was something that simultaneously terrified and excited him. Maybe, just maybe they’d stumbled on something. Maybe they’d caught a break. And if it did crack the whole mystery wide open, then he hoped wherever Sharon was, she’d consider it something that they wouldn’t have been able to do without her death. It might console her.

  It wouldn’t him though. The price would always be too steep from a personal point of view.

  It was still a few long moments before Okocha returned with the relevant information, Nick putting it up on the screen in front of them in double quick time.

  “Okay, so here are the dates,” Okocha said. “Let’s have a look through them, see if we can attach anything meaningful to when they were.” He ran a finger across his screen. “Ouch! I remember that all too well. That was when they attacked the hospital. Came in with one man, in-kingdom flight, left with one man shortly before the siege was broken by Agent Derenko and Wilsin’s teams.”

  “Two occurrences don’t make a pattern,” Nick said. “What else we got?” He ran his eyes down the list, drummed the desk with his fingers. He was starting to tire, his body ached with weariness and his hand throbbed from where he’d broken the glass earlier. “Just let me see… Oh crap!”

  He pointed to a date, grimaced and as Okocha saw it, he joined in. “Oh dear.”

  “Yeah. Starting to think this is a worrying pattern,” Nick said. He jabbed it with a finger, bringing the details up in front of him. “Arrived on the morning, one arriving passenger… The boss herself. Claudia fucking Coppinger. Ship left several hours later, minus Ms Coppinger… Where the hells did she go?”

  “Maybe she left by other means,” Okocha said. “Let me see…” He tapped away at the screen and several long moments later, a video of Claudia Coppinger appeared on it, replacing the flight details from Reims marked arrivals and departures. Nick studied it for several long moments, blinked several times and then swore loudly. It was like a light had been flicked on in his head and he cursed himself for not realising sooner.

  “Son of a bitch, that’s her!”

  “Who?!”

  “The woman who attacked Maddley the first time. The one who had an offer for him. I’m almost certain. The one who injured Wade.” He was almost jumping up and down on the spot.

  “Seriously, you’re realising this now?” Okocha said. “How have you not seen a picture of her before now? We passed them around not long since…” He tailed off. “Her face was covered. So how do you…”

  “It’s the way she holds herself,” he said. “You know how to tell the difference between a rich man and a poor man? A poor man lives on the streets. A rich man walks the streets like he owns them. And with women it’s even worse.” He pointed at the screen. “See that little twitch of the knee. Way she holds her shoulders back and stares at the world like it’s her own personal playground. Same body language. Don’t forget I saw a long-distance glimpse as well. I knew I’d seen her before somewhere!”

  He strode back and forth, pacing frantically all while still squinting his eyes at the video. “Will, it’s her. I’m telling you. They make us study body language at the academy. Because sometimes you can’t see their faces. I’m like ninety percent sure it’s her. But why? She wanted to make Maddley an offer. Why Maddley?” He’d wondered about this before. Why Darren Maddley out of all the callers on the island?

  Except… Maddley had said no. It had backfired on him. That was the only reason they knew about it. Because he’d said no, she’d tried to kill him and it had caused a disturbance. That had brought him and Wade to the scene. If he hadn’t said no, then she wouldn’t have tried to kill him, nobody would have been any the wiser.

  “Says she attended Maddley’s bout versus Sharon,” Okocha said. “So… Hold on…” He dragged up Maddley’s statement about the whole thing, they both quickly read through it and looked at each other. If it had answers, they weren’t going to be immediately clear. Nick had always heard that a tired mind was a focused mind and right now he was focused solely on the problem, his grief momentarily forgotten.

  There was even a little excitement in him, the thought that answers were just that little bit out of reach. He read the statement again, not sure what he was looking for. “Let’s see…” He started to read aloud in hopes of jogging his mind a little more. “… Condolences. Offers. New
world. Rage against the current one…”

  “Irony,” Okocha said. “Given she’s one of the wealthy in this one.”

  “Think she might want to be even more in the new one,” Nick said. “Why Maddley?”

  “He has that tragic family history,” Okocha said. “There is that.”

  “Doubt it but maybe. He did have that run in with Sharon extending out of that but they made it up. I was there. It was touching.” Remembering that was more painful than he wanted to admit.

  “Yeah but Claudia Coppinger wouldn’t have known they made up. She at least implied it once or twice…”

  “Maddley went into meltdown too,” Nick said. “Remember after the bout?”

  “Oh yeah, classic. There’s been a few of them here this time huh?”

  Nick laughed along, nodding in agreement until suddenly he wasn’t, the bobbing of his head stopping suddenly as another thought struck him.

  “Harvey Rocastle was working for Reims, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah? What he claimed to Mia Arnholt.”

  “Looking for them to sponsor talent on the spirit calling stage.”

  “Yeah?” Okocha was starting to sound bored, like he’d lost interest in this track of the conversation. Either that or he couldn’t work out where Nick was going with it. “What of it?”

  “I always thought that sounded a flimsy excuse. I suspected, given what came afterwards, he was after Mia Arnholt. Her brother was here; she might show up to support him. What he tried with her might have been an opportunist attack. Suspected but didn’t pay much creed to, anyway,” Nick added. He paused a moment. “What if, just humour me here. What if Rocastle was running the same deal to spirit callers as Coppinger offered to Maddley?”

  “I think that’s a pretty big assumption,” Okocha said. “And do you have proof?”

  Nick shook his head. “Not right at this moment. But it can be corroborated easily enough, I imagine. Consider she wanted to kill Maddley to stop him from talking. If someone did agree, she probably wouldn’t want them to be in touch with the people they know on a frequent basis. It might lead to awkward questions.”