The Gameshouse

by Claire North

  I hired a car and drove through the dark tree-clad mountains and agro-giant fields to Tétouan, windows down, the cold night wind keeping me awake while the radio played boy-band pop and the raised voices of pundits who could not keep silent in the face of the other’s foolishness.

  I arrived in Tétouan just after dawn and slept in the back of my car until a policeman knocked on my window to see if I was dead. When it transpired that I wasn’t, he shouted at me, telling me to get a hotel, to move on, move on already, and so I did and found myself at last in a shady room at the back of an old, cracked building where the flies stayed on the ceiling and the old woman in a black veil who ruled over it all muttered through her nicotine-stained teeth, “Good, good, good… bad, bad, bad… good, good, good…” as her gaze inspected and judged all about her.

  I slept.

  I had planned on sleeping only a few hours, and woke thinking I had done precisely that until the old woman told me I had slept an entire day, dawn to dawn, and it was bad, bad, bad, good, good, good that I had done so.

  “Sleep sleep wastes life!” she chided. “Doctor tells me I have slept for twenty-five years already, bad, bad, very bad. I love sleep. No one says stupid things; no one makes me cry when I’m sleeping, good, good!”

  Head craned awkwardly to see the green-flecked bathroom mirror, I peeled the dressing off my back to survey the damage. Light burns still scar, and even if they do not, they still hurt. I smelt no infection, saw no pus, applied ointment and, contorting myself like a praying mantis, wrapped myself in fresh dressings and skipped the painkillers.

  At last now—at last—I turned my laptop on.

  Chapter 13

  All things through the darknet, and carefully, so very careful. An email from a dummy account to another dummy account, which forwarded it to a lawyer in Dhaka who forwarded it to a company in Belarus who finally, at last, forwarded it to my cyber-experts in Switzerland.

  They were, to my surprise, still standing.

  We met on a message board where heroin dealers and credit card fraudsters conducted their trade.

  For sale—x 5000 credit card details with full names, addresses and DOBs, proclaimed the ads that popped up around us. Carefully collected over three years of hard work. No time wasters, please.

  How was I found? I asked my experts when they came online.

  NSA, they replied, then: it may not be safe for us to deal with your case any more. The NSA have been looking at our systems too.

  Advice? I asked.

  Don’t use the same computer twice, they said. And then, having thought about it a little while longer, they added, And never contact us again.

  At that, they disconnected, and that was fine. They were not running away from the game—their utility was done, a pawn which had been passed by another stronger piece, and which fell now from the board.

  Chapter 14

  The NSA was a problem.

  Twice the Gamesmaster had tasked it against me, and both times it had done sterling work. I had set a DDoS attack against it which had slowed it down, but to truly undermine its ability to get in my way, I needed to do something a little more distracting.

  I wandered through my mental lists of pieces at my disposal and settled on a big gun.

  I called a number in Washington DC and, when the phone was eventually answered, I asked to speak to the senator.

  Moves on the board.

  A U.S. senator comes into information that the NSA has illegally been spying on U.S. citizens on domestic soil, violating the privacy of good, ordinary Americans.

  The NSA denies.

  Civil rights groups stand up and say it’s an outrage, a horror.

  The NSA denies.

  Newspapers ask for evidence of the claims. (Al Jazeera, I note with a sigh, runs a largely accurate article slamming the senator, and I add it to the list of assets under enemy control.)

  The senator calls for an enquiry.

  The White House says such an enquiry would be counter to the security interests of the nation. (Is the White House also compromised, I muse, or is this just politics?)

  The senator begins to waver under this pressure.

  But this is the U.S., where fact is second to volume, and just as I think that this line of attack is going to fail, the fringes of the Republican right, God bless them, God keep them, rise up to a ferocious man and woman and proclaim, how dare the NSA violate our civil liberties? What happened to the constitution? What happened to freedom? How dare big government intrude into our private lives, how dare they? We’ve read thrillers; we know what these people are like; we know because we are the only people left in this country with sense!

  I watch all this from afar on NBS broadcasts and Fox News, and at the indignation of the right, the pundits rise again, righteousness in their voices, hunger in their eyes, and though my senator is shuffled to the back room and chided for having dared unleash such a shitstorm, your career over, your future over, never again, my son, the work is done.

  I don’t have the resources to destroy the NSA—or rather, I will not spare those resources yet—but I can make it much, much harder for them to catch me.

  Finally. A blow against the Gamesmaster. The board opens, just a little, a tiny peek, a sense of the flow of the game.

  Chapter 15

  The Moroccan-Algerian border was closed, and had been for nearly twenty years. I rode a cargo ship from Nador to Almeria, and as my senatorial crisis in the U.S. unfolded, drove through southern Spain.

  Fried eggs in Sorbas. A child saw my white hair, my young face, kept young by many games won, many lives destroyed. Her face crinkled in suspicion and doubt, and finally she walked up to me, folded her arms and said, “Are you a monster?”

  “No,” I replied.

  Her face tightened to a crinkle around her nose as she considered this, before finally concluding, “I think you’re a monster!” and, laughing, she ran away before I could eat her up.

  Roadworks on the motorway between Puerto Lumbreras and Lorca. When a lorry’s engine burst in the heat in a one-lane corridor of diverted vehicles, the traffic stopped and we all got out of our cars to fan ourselves in the smiting summer heat, children running from car to car asking if anyone had water and playing hide-and-seek behind the ticking hot bonnets.

  “It’s always like this,” sighed the driver of the car behind mine. “People don’t dare say it, but I will—corruption. Corruption, corruption, corruption. In India, they protest against it; they have rallies, political prisoners against it; but here? Here we blind ourselves, we say, ‘No, it can’t possibly happen here, not to us, not in the EU!’ but I say, ‘Hey, wake up, wake up already—can’t you see that’s exactly why we do have it, why it’s everywhere, because we’re so smug and so self-satisfied that we don’t even bother to open our eyes to see it!’ Money rules this country, not democracy, not the people. We’re just little pieces moved around by big men, statistics and numbers ruled by capitalism and consumerism. You think you’re free? You’re just a wallet that spends, earns and dies—that’s the sum of your life. It’s disgusting, is what it is.”

  “Sometimes roads break,” I pointed out.

  “Sometimes roads are broken,” he retorted. “Sometimes people break things. Sometimes countries are broken. Sometimes societies are broken. Sometimes people are broken so badly, they don’t even notice that’s what they are.”

  At Tarragona I stayed in a hotel next to a church, and woke with a start at 4 a.m. thinking the world was over, the game was over and I was done, only to open the shutters of my window and look down to see three monks, all in black, unlocking the gates of the church to go in and pray. I went back to bed, and did not sleep, and left at 7 a.m., a spread of cold meats and hard-boiled egg on my dashboard, the taste of oranges in my mouth.

  The customs booths were gone at Le Perthus, torn down by order of the EU, but the French flag still flew and policemen still glowered from stations by the roadway. I wound through the Pyrenees behind a s
low but steady line of crawling traffic, turning off before Le Boulou to stretch my legs, eat some food, watch the mountains. Two vultures turned slowly overhead, riding the thermals higher into the sky. Thin white clouds formed and dissolved on the mountain tops, caught as if by a needle in the wind before being blown away into the empty blue sky. Sheer cliffs dropped down into river gorges, grey stone, black buzzards, dark trees clinging to every angle and edge.

  I sat and ate my lunch on an outcrop above a ruined monastery, where once hermits had fled from the world, and I was alone and could have stayed here, I thought, for ever.

  But the sun grew hot, and the wind was cold, and my meal was done, so I drove on.

  Chapter 16

  Preparations made as I crawled through southern France.

  I abandoned my car in Perpignan, and on the train to Montpellier I sat, laptop on my lap, phone tucked to my ear, and organised a military assault against Georgi Daskalov, head of a criminal gang which had put a ten-million-euro hit on my head, a piece that had been played by the Gamesmaster.

  I had no pieces in the Italian military, but a few in the Carabiniere.

  “I can seal the roads for you, keep eyes away,” said my most powerful, “but no way, no fucking way, not a chance can I take down Daskalov for you.”

  “That’s fine,” I replied. “You’re the wrong piece for the job anyway.”

  In the end, I settled on an ex-special forces team run out of Tampa, which touched down in Milan three hours before my train arrived.

  As we drove north towards Lake Como and the jagged Alps, I turned on my laptop to discover that 178 million dollars had been wiped from my assets. The move had also taken 2 per cent off the value of the New York Stock Exchange, and looked to be a general attack against over thirty companies that I could have been affiliated with, and which in fact had crippled only seven that were mine.

  How had she found them? I had played plenty of pieces which might require paying, but hadn’t even begun to dent my carefully cultivated funds.

  Perhaps she hadn’t found them at all—perhaps it was guesswork. But no—the Gamesmaster didn’t strike out without purpose, she knew that somewhere within the companies she was now assaulting lay my assets. To defend or not to defend?

  I considered the state of my finances and let it go. In chess, you must learn to read which attacks matter and which are merely flourishes before the main event. 178 million wasn’t so much in the grand scheme of things and, if nothing else, I could now mark up the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department as potential lines of investigation, should it come to it.

  We drove on, into the mountains.

  Chapter 17

  Two kinds of rich lived in Lake Como. Old rich that had fallen in love with the water and the mountains, with the long paths by sandy shores, the yachts beneath clear blue skies, the flowers that bloomed in every garden outside every mansion—a rich that had forgotten that it was rich, as long as it had owned and enjoyed the smell of magnolia, the sound of water by its gate.

  The second rich lived behind closed gates and high walls, on balconies above the eyeline of the gawping tourists. Like a poor man freed at last from a prison sentence, great leaps of imagination had been dedicated to the spending of money, and even greater feats of self-justification to explain that no, the water really did taste better when it emerged from gold-plated taps and yes, the quality of conversation was improved by at least one party holding a phone clad in diamonds while they spoke.

  Or perhaps not. Perhaps sometimes—as in the case of Georgi Daskalov—the only reason needed for why every one of the seven cars he owned in the garage beneath his three-storey palace was upholstered in tiger, leopard, lion and bear skin was because he could. Because others wanted it, and he had it, and there an end.

  We broke in shortly after 3 a.m. The security system he’d installed was valued at six million dollars, but the men who manned it had fallen victim to the twin Swarovski Alize vodka bottles they’d received in exchange for favours unnamed, each bottle clad in pink diamonds fit for a fairy princess, each cup thrown back with the gusto of champion wrestlers newly returned from throttling giants with their thumbs.

  The security alarm went off as we slipped in across the upstairs patio, a silent alert at police headquarters (who did not respond) as well as the security office (which responded groggily) but by the time the first sober man had pulled his Uzi from the wall, three of his colleagues were dead, and Daskalov was sat in his underpants on the end of his eighty-thousand-dollar bed, handcuffed and sulky. I let my men deal with the rest of the house as I sat next to him, balaclava over my face, pistol in hand, silk shifting beneath me, the smell of drink heavy in the room.

  His underpants, being the only thing he now wore, were Lycra. I looked into his face and briefly wondered if we hadn’t caught a body double, a not-quite-Daskalov, or perhaps he merely liked the feel of synthetic fabrics against his nether regions and lamented to his friends that all this silk and gold, all this cotton and organic food, it wasn’t to his taste at all—but one did have to keep up appearances, didn’t one?

  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 not. 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.

  A
t 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 São Paulo, 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 grubby 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.