Redback

by Lindy Cameron

  Gideon rolled Rawley upright and he sat in a cross-legged position. She sat opposite him.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

  Gideon shrugged. ‘Show and tell is a two-way gig with us. You can come along and share, or Triko here will zap you with Zeus juice and we’ll take you anyway.’

  Rawley, still smiling, threw up his arms. ‘I’m all yours. Take me to your leader.’

  Gideon ducked her head. ‘That’d be me,’ she said.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chiang Mai, Thailand

  Sunday 10.30 pm

  Ari Carver looked nothing like Scott had expected, although he now couldn’t recall what that had been exactly. He was compact, thin-haired, bright-eyed and Australian. He hailed from the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, but had left Australia for good 22 years ago, he told Scott. He’d lived first in Tokyo, where he befriended and worked with fellow manga freak and techno-wiz Hiroyuki Kaga, and fell in love with Hiro’s brother Hiroshi.

  Hiro and Ari had created NiteScape and the Diamond Ninja Clan together. The success of the comics and then the original PC game versions, in Japan alone, made them a fortune which led to bigger premises, more designers, more games, bigger plans, wilder dreams and eventually the MindMap phenomenon which rocketed Nayazuki Firebolt into the seriously big time. Firebolt’s catalogue was eventually duplicated for game consoles and, with the advent of the internet, launched into cyberspace.

  But, after 15 years living constantly in a fantasy realm, Ari had decided to rejoin the real world. He returned to his other love, economics, and finished his PhD. Then he and his true love travelled the world for four years before moving to Thailand to live.

  ‘The Scapers and Mappers in Tokyo were also starting to freak Hiroshi out a bit,’ Ari explained. ‘They were kind of stalking us for a while.’

  ‘It is much more peaceful here in Chiang Mai,’ Hiroshi said, taking the tray of coffee from their Thai houseboy. ‘Nobody here knows Ari for what he was.’

  ‘Your home is certainly a haven from the world,’ Scott said from a deeply cushioned cane chair on the mosaic patio of the House of HiroshAri. Flickering candles in a multitude of stone shrines and statues scattered along the meandering garden paths, amongst rockeries and around the fishponds and small swimming pool, added to the harmony. In fact the whole house - an eclectic but oddly aesthetic blend of Thai, Japanese and Spanish - had kind of a Zen, Othello, feng shui vibe to it.

  Scott loved it, especially now that Kaisha had taken her chatterbox off to bed. ‘Sorry to bring us back to the bad old world outside your garden walls but I do need to know what Hiro’s message meant.’

  ‘Fire away,’ Ari said.

  Scott flipped open his notebook in which he’d transcribed Hiro Kaga’s last words, as recounted by Kaisha, but now amended with what he now thought was the correct information. ‘Hiro said: The game has been altered. Check source. Take Kaisha to Hiroshi. Convince Ari Carver, debt talks, he will explain everything. Make Scott understand the danger, and also the deception in their next actions.’

  Ari Carver looked like he was still at the Debt Talks in KL trying to understand the Indian who was translating the Chinese delegate. ‘That’s it?’

  Scott shrugged. ‘He did say, ‘it has started’ but Kaisha wasn’t sure if that was for me or not.’

  ‘Do you have any ideas yourself?’ Ari asked, with a look that said he was totally clueless.

  ‘Me?’ Scott was swamped with disappointment. ‘Given your reaction, I think my idea is now to go to bed and forget about this whole thing.’

  Ari laughed. ‘I need more info, Scott. You didn’t go to Tokyo to meet Hiro for nothing. And he must have had some idea why you were there in order to leave you that strange message.’

  ‘True,’ Scott nodded. ‘It is strange - and even ridiculous. It’s all segued into something far more sinister - or perhaps ‘far-fetched’ is more apt.’ And so he told Ari his story.

  ‘I wrote a story for the Washington Post a couple of years ago on how terrorists groups like al-Qaeda and other Islamic jihad organisations, as well as organised militants, insurgents and even wacko paramilitary groups in the US, had long been using the internet to spread their ideas, exchange information and attract recruits.

  ‘This year I thought I’d look at how legitimate governments - like the US, Britain, Israel and Australia - had belatedly latched onto the technology that all these terrorists and criminals had been exploiting for well over a decade.’ Scott could see Ari was interested.

  ‘Not surprisingly I found that, in the last few years, the military establishments of a host of western countries have jumped on that same internet war wagon. Democracies the world over have launched new game platforms and online battle arenas like WarP and SEAL Recon in order to stem their falling recruitment levels. You know, encourage kids to play now and when they get to cannon-fodder age they can join up to get really shot at.

  ‘Games like the Australian Defence Force’s AttackSub and WarP and the UK’s new bomb-fest, United Knights, are specifically designed to recruit a new generation of killers - I mean, of course, soldiers.’

  Hiroshi looked shocked. ‘Governments are doing this?’

  ‘That’s nothing new, Oshi,’ Ari said. ‘Governments always ban, legislate or commandeer what they have not created themselves. It saves time, and makes money.’

  ‘You got that right,’ Scott continued. ‘What’s more, these blatant recruiting tools are actually competing in the global market place with real games, as in the ‘games you play for fun’. America’s Army, for instance, has over eight million registered players.

  ‘Anyway I started travelling around the world talking to Israeli pilots, British and Aussie SAS dudes, as well as Marines and SEALs back home and various contacts at the Pentagon.

  ‘Up here,’ Scott tapped his head, ‘my series was about how the virtual world has been hijacked by real-world warmongers - on both sides of the terror divide. And, specifically, how the leaders of the so-called free world had ironically followed their stateless and hated enemies into cyberspace to compete - in a sense - for the hearts, minds and lives of the world’s youth.

  ‘Then, on my way to Melbourne to meet with the WarP designers, I met a Kiwi with a strangely dodgy Firebolt game. It was on that flight that I discovered the absolute truth in the expression: ‘what goes around comes around’. You see the bad guys have travelled full circle, and are now following the recruiting innovations of the good guys.’ ‘Do you understand what he’s saying Ari?’ Hiroshi asked.

  ‘I’m getting there Oshi, and it’s giving me a bad feeling.’

  Scott reached into his satchel and pulled out the pirated Firebolt game.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Ari said. ‘Your dodgy game is GlobalWarTek.’

  Scott frowned and handed him the disk. ‘You mean you do know about this.’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure what I know,’ Ari said, and then called out to their houseboy. ‘Pippa, could you bring me out the TekBox please. And don’t forget to turn the power switch on this time when you plug it in.’

  ‘One time, one time only I forget,’ Pippa grumbled a moment later, as he placed the Firebolt TekBox on the coffee table. ‘And the time after that too,’ he added trailing the power cord after him as he wandered back inside.

  ‘So what do you think you might know, Ari?’ Scott asked.

  ‘The first part of his message was: “the game has been altered”. When Hiro came to visit us early last year he mentioned, in passing, how he had rejigged WarTek for a special customer.’

  ‘No, no,’ Scott shook his head. ‘This is not something Hiro Kaga would have done to his own game. Not unless he was seduced by the dark side.’

  Ari stood and walked around the patio furniture to lean thoughtfully against the back of Hiroshi’s chair. ‘Would 15 million dollars qualify as seduction?’ he asked.

  Scott laughed, ‘Only if it was offered by Mr Vader himself.’

  ‘Well I
don’t know who it was exactly, or if Hiro even told me their name, but I do recall it was some American company. Hiro did like a Director’s Cut of WarTek for their in-house staff development and team-building program or some such. He basically just made the game specific to them.’

  ‘Well, that is so not what this is. In fact this isn’t even a Firebolt disk,’ Scott explained. ‘It’s a pirate, and a dud one at that - I think. I got it from the Kiwi, who bought it in Cairo.’

  ‘Well now I’m really confused,’ Ari said.

  Hiroshi nodded. ‘Me, I’m bamboozled.’

  ‘I don’t get it. If this is about a pirate disk, why were you meeting Hiro?’

  ‘Because, the WarP guys I spoke to in Melbourne,’ Scott began.

  ‘Now they’re a couple of shit-hot game designers,’ Ari interjected.

  ‘Yeah, and they said that whoever did what was done to Global WarTek, must have had access to the original,’ Scott waved his hand, ‘stuff.’

  ‘Stuff?’ Ari echoed. ‘Is that what I was doing all those years? So, I tell you Hiro rejigged WarTek, but you say he wouldn’t have done this to his own game, but that whoever did, needed the programming protocols.’

  ‘In a word, yes.’

  ‘I’m starting to feel like we’re playing ping pong here, Scott. If you don’t think Hiro was responsible for whatever the hell this is, then what? Did you think Firebolt had a saboteur?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess that was what I was thinking,’ Scott said. ‘Which would explain why he was murdered, well, better than anything else explains it; unless of course his death was always part of the plot, the one with a capital P.’

  ‘The one you have yet to explain,’ Ari pointed out.

  ‘Sorry, but you’ll see what I’m raving about when the game fires up. That’s if you ever get any power to your TekBox. Doesn’t it have a battery?’

  ‘Pippa,’ Ari shouted, then added, ‘The battery is dead.’

  ‘Plugging in now, Ari man, and switching the switch,’ Pippa called from somewhere far away.

  ‘I swear that boy is mad,’ Ari smiled. He inserted the disk and flipped up the TekBox screen.

  ‘Okay, get ready,’ Scott said. ‘Because this version of WarTek, as far as I can get into it, appears to contain an elaborate plot to assassinate real-world figures and overthrow actual governments.’

  ‘But that’s what WarTek is about.’

  ‘No Ari. I’m not talking about assassinating the fictitious President of a country that kind of resembles the whole of North America, or the President of an imaginary United Europe. This version of the game seems to be a training manual for the assassination of, say, the actual President of the USA, the Prime Minister of England, the King of Denmark.’

  ‘The King of Denmark?’ Ari exclaimed. ‘Who has anything against the King of bloody Denmark?’

  Scott smiled. ‘Ditto the French Foreign Minister, the Swiss President, the entire House of Saud.’

  ‘Bloody hell, you mean it’s not even a Muslim versus Christian plot with a capital P?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know what kind of plot it is. It still might just be a huge hoax, a conspiracy theory, a bored-university-student prank - but I kinda doubt it.’

  The three men sat so they all had a view of the screen but, as Scott didn’t need to see the game’s epic movie prologue for a nineteenth time, he watched Ari instead and waited for his reaction.

  The man simply frowned and said, ‘Oh. Bugger.’

  Scott laughed. ‘Man, you Aussies are masters of understatement.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m Jewish too; so inside I’m also throwing up my hands and shouting: oi vay, what the fuck is going on here?’

  Hiroshi, leaning in from the other side, asked, ‘What is that strange three-eyed wizard man with the beard doing in this not-wizardy game?’

  ‘That, my love, is the question,’ Ari said. ‘Isn’t it Scott?’

  ‘Oh yes. That and exactly what the wizardy man is holding.’

  ‘The globe or the book?’ Hiroshi asked.

  ‘The book,’ said Scott.

  ‘And does the word on his obviously magical tome have significance beyond this game?’ Ari queried. He clicked on the book, which in turn opened up the next screen.

  ‘Oh it has significance all right,’ Scott declared. ‘It was actually ‘the word’ that drew my attention to the wizard and his book because, as you know, none of them should be in a kosher version of GlobalWarTek. And in my opinion, none of them should be in any mass-market game.

  ‘What’s also weird is that even the WarP guys in Melbourne couldn’t get beyond Level 2 of the game within the game. In fact they were unable to figure out if that’s all there is to it; or it needs a password to go further.’

  ‘Rashmana,’ Hiroshi read, as Ari guided the misplaced magician through a level of WarTek that by rights should also not exist. ‘What is this Rashmana?’

  ‘The Rashmana is the manifesto, the skewed Koranic-Bible, the guiding principle…’ Scott waved his hands around. ‘I’m not really sure about its politically correct designation, but basically the Rashmana or ‘Words of Kúrus’ are the teachings of a long-ago Middle Eastern mystic dude. This Kúrus converted to Islam by way of Christianity picked up in Tibet. I mean it’s that much of a mish-mash apparently. It’s kind of an extension or - depending on your point of view - a subversion of Islam; a bit like the Moorish Science Temple of America or the Nation of Islam in the States, but with a bit of the East thrown in for good measure.

  ‘The latest exponent of the Rashmana is a man, actual identity unknown, who calls himself Dárayavaus, son of Kúrus. The ‘son’ thing is interesting given Kúrus has been dead several centuries longer than Elvis; that’s if you believe all those rumours about his passing. Anyway Dárayavaus, in turn, has some kind of holy Emissary as his front man. Rumour has it that this Emissary is the ‘reborn’ terrorist and arms dealer, Jamal Zahkri al Khudri, but that’s never really been confirmed.

  ‘The really big worry about all of this, especially given what this version of GlobalWarTek seems to be about, is that the Rashmana is also the party platform of Atarsa Kára - one of the world’s budding and nasty new terrorist groups.’

  ‘Can I say ‘bugger’ again?’ Ari asked.

  ‘Be my guest,’ Scott laughed. ‘Hiro said we had to ‘check source’. Any idea what that means, now? And please don’t say soy or ketchup, like Kaisha did.’

  Ari laughed then shook his head slowly, until he caught Scott’s look of disappointment. ‘I’m not saying ‘no’. I’m thinking. I’ll work on the disk tonight and check the subroutines. I’ll also play this part of the game and see if I can get further into it than your genius WarP boys.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Scott said. ‘Level 2 is embedded with quotes from the Rashmana, some in Arabic, some transliterated into English or French. I lost track of the ones we tried as possible passwords.’

  ‘And globes,’ Hiroshi said. ‘Everyone has globes.’

  ‘What?’ Scott asked.

  ‘Look,’ Hiroshi pointed, ‘there and there, him and him. Why does this bother me?’

  Ari smiled, ‘Because you are easily bothered, Oshi.’ He flexed his fingers. ‘If I can’t find any clues that answer your source question, then first thing in the morning I’ll call an old friend at Firebolt and see if she knows who Hiro’s special client was. Because it’s my guess that this pirate disk is a perversion of the game Hiro did for that British-American company; and that they are the source - intentional or not. Although, given the content of this disk, I’d say not.’

  Scott felt incredibly relieved. ‘Thanks so much for helping me out with this guys.’

  Hiroshi clasped Scott’s hand. ‘My friend, how could we not when you are seeking my brother’s murderer?’

  Scott smiled. ‘Well, don’t get your hopes up on that, as it’s unlikely I’ll be able to point the finger at the guilty person. But I will do my damnedest to find out why Hiro was killed.’

  ‘Then
Oshi and I are at your disposal,’ Ari said.

  ‘Thank you. Now, depending on what you find tonight, I plan to leave tomorrow to fly home to the States. When Kaisha and I got here on Friday I sent what I already knew to one of my contacts at the CIA, to see what the Agency knew about this; if anything.’

  Ari sat back and crossed his arms. ‘You have CIA contacts and yet you’ve come to us for help?’

  Scott laughed. ‘The last time I went to the CIA with info - as in, you know, offered them stuff before I wrote my story - they pretty much told me to get lost until I had concrete facts rather than a journalist’s gut feeling. So now I just use my contacts - and I have a few at the Agency, and in the FBI - to get, as well as give information.

  ‘The contact I gave some info to this time, also happens to be my ex-girlfriend. Laura rang me this morning and asked me to meet with her in Texas, where she’s apparently been seconded to a Homeland Security investigation into the bombings there.’

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chiang Mai, Thailand

  Sunday 11 pm

  Gideon returned to the street table with four bottles of Singha and placed them all in the centre of the table. The Picot Bar, which ‘Steve’ Rawley had no reason to believe hadn’t been chosen at random for their debrief, was in a side street off Ratchmankha Road inside the old city walls. As it happened, the establishment was directly beneath the first-floor residence permanently leased by Back Door and often used as a Redback hangout in Chiang Mai. This was a detail that hadn’t even been revealed to Jana Rossi, yet.

  As for Alan Wagner, Triko had volunteered to take him back to his hotel, help him pack, and run him out of town - for his own safety. At the very least he was going to strongly suggest that Alan and his cameraman Bob change hotels until they could get the next stagecoach out of Dodge.

  ‘Righto Rawley,’ Gideon said, ‘who are you really and what the hell were you lunatics doing on Laui Island?’

  ‘You first,’ Rawley said. Gideon just handed him a beer and waited, so he shrugged, ‘You did say this was a two-way gig.’