The Great Game Read online

  "–they roll," Fogg said, completing the sentence. He shrugged, looking suddenly uncomfortable. "Still. One never imagined–"

  "Not the fat man," Smith agreed.

  "Sure," Fogg said. He sounded sad. "Not the fat man."

  They drank in silence.

  Then: "Why are you here?"

  Fogg: "You know why I'm here."

  Smith, staring at him. Trying to read what was hidden in those deceptively innocent eyes. Saying, "I don't."

  Fogg snorted. "We need you," he said, simply.

  Smith said, "I find that hard to believe."

  "Do you think I want your help?" Fogg said. "You are a loner, a killer, you have problems taking orders and you just don't fit into an organisational structure!" eThe last one seemed to be the worst, for him. "And you're old."

  "So why are you here?"

  He watched Fogg, closely. Saw him squirm.

  "Mycroft left instructions," Fogg finally said.

  "That makes a little more sense," Smith said.

  "Unfortunately, the decision is out of my hands," Fogg said. "The fat man wanted you on the case."

  "Did he know he was going to die?"

  A strange, evasive look on Fogg's face; Smith filed it away for future reference. "I can't fill you in on the details," Fogg said. "You're not classified."

  That one made Smith smile. He downed the rest of his drink and stood up. Fogg, in some alarm, watched him get up. "Where the hell do you think you're going?"

  "I'm going to spare you the trouble," Smith said. "Sorry you had a wasted trip."

  "You what?" Fogg said.

  Smith said, "I'm retired."

  He turned to go. Fogg, behind him, gave a gurgled cry. "You can't just walk away!" he said.

  "Watch me," Smith said.

  He was almost at the door when Fogg said, "Alice."

  Smith stopped, his hand on the door, ready to push it open.

  He didn't.

  He turned slowly and stood there, breathing deeply. Old memories, like old newspaper print, almost washed away in the rain.

  Almost.

  He said, "What about her?"

  Fogg said, "She's dead too."

  Smith stood there, not knowing what to say. The fat man he could understand, could have lived with. But not her. He began to say, "Where?" but Fogg had anticipated him. "Bangkok," he said. "Two weeks ago."

  Two weeks. She had been dead and all that time he'd been tending the cabbage patch.

  He felt sick with his own uselessness. He opened and closed his hands, mechanically. It was still raining outside, the rain intensifying. He turned and pushed the door open, and a gust of cold wind entered and brought with it the smell of the rain. He blinked, his face wet. Across the road the old bee keeper was still standing, like a silent guardian, watching. Very little escaped him, still.

  Smith took a deep breath. The cold air helped. After a moment he closed the door and went behind the bar and drew himself another pint. Then he drew one for the thin man he had once sworn to kill.

  He left money on the counter, for the baroness, and carried both drinks with him into the common room and sat back down. He stared at Fogg, who had the decency to look embarrassed.

  "Same modus operandi?"

  "So it would appear."

  "Fogg, what in God's name is going on?"

  Fogg squinted, as if in pain. Perhaps the mention of God had hurt him. "I don't know," he said, at last. Resentful for having to make the admission.

  "Have there been others?"

  Fogg didn't answer. The rain fell outside. In the fireplace, a log split apart, throwing off sparks. Smith said, "How many others?"

  "You will be briefed," Fogg said. "In London. If you choose to come back with me."

  Smith considered. Bangkok. London. Two links on a chain he couldn't, for now, follow. And each one, rather than a name, or a climate – each one represented the end of one thread in his own life, a sudden severing that had left him reeling inside. Alice and the fat man. He had not seen, nor spoken, to either one of them for a long time, yet they were always there, the very knowledge of their existence offering a sort of comfort, a fragile peace. A peace he could no longer pretend to have.

  Yet he suddenly dreaded the return to the city. A part of him had been restless, longing to go back, and yet now that it was offered it came at a price that gave him no joy. The fat man, Alice, and a bloodied trail he feared to follow. There was a reason he had been retired, a reason all of them were there, in that village that could not be found on any map, running their little shops and tending their little gardens, pretending, even the bee keeper, that they were regular people at last, living ordinary lives.

  None of us are very good at it, he realised. And yet there had been comfort in the pretence, that forced withdrawal from the former, shadowy world they had inhabited. He needed to think. He needed the refuge of his library, even if for one last time.

  "I need a day," he said, at last. Fogg didn't argue. Not a death, Smith thought. Deaths. One two weeks before, the trail already growing cold, one here, and recent, but still, his would be a cold trail to follow, and a day would make little difference.

  Fogg stood up, draining the last of his pint. "I shall expect you at the club, first thing tomorrow," he said. And with that he was gone.

  THREE

  He had almost forgotten the book. The package from London. He had been expecting a slim volume of poetry, ordered from Payne's, the newly rebuilt shop on Cecil Court. It had been destroyed some years previous in an explosion. He had not been a part of that particular case, which had been attributed to the shadowy Bookman. He took the package, unopened, with him as he walked back to his place. Behind him he could hear Fogg's baruch-landau starting with an ungodly noise, smoke belching high into the air as it wheeled away, back towards the city.

  On a sudden, overwhelming need he turned back. He went down the high street and they were all watching him, the retired and the obsolete, former friends, former foes, united together only in this, this dreaded, dreary world called retirement. He ignored them, even the old bee keeper, as he came to the church, the book still held under his arm.

  Fogg had looked offended at Smith's evocation of God. Faith was no longer all that popular, a long way since the day of the Lizard King James I, when his authorised – if somewhat modified – version of the Bible was available in every home. That man Darwin was popular now, with his theory of evolution – he had even claimed, so Smith had heard, that it was proof the royal family and their get, Les Lézards themselves, were of an extraterrestrial origin, and couldn't have co-evolved on the Earth. It was not impossible… Rumours had always circulated, but that, just like the Bookman investigation, had been Mycroft's domain, mostly: he, Smith, was in charge of field work, dirty work, while the fat man sat in his club and ran the empire over lunches and cigars.

  Too many unanswered questions… His life had been like that, though. He seldom got the answers. His, simply, was to be given a task, and perform it. How it fit into a larger picture, just which piece of the puzzle it turned out to be, was not his concern. Above him was the fat man and above the fat man was the Queen, and above the Queen, he long ago, and privately, had decided, there must be one more.

  God.

  Unfashionable, yes. Not a god of churches, not a god of burning bushes like in the old stories, or a science god like in the new books Verne and Wells and their ilk had been writing. A god he couldn't articulate, that demanded little, that offered only forgiveness. Something above. Perhaps it was less god than a reason for being. For Smith believed, despite all the evidence, that there had to be a reason.

  He went into the church. It had stopped raining when he left the pub, and the sun, catching him unawares, had come out. A momentary brightness filled the church garden, and a bird called out from the branches of a tree. The grass was wet with rain, and it was quiet. He stepped into the church and stood there, inhaling its dry air of ageing books and candles. Thinking of the fat m
an. Thinking of Alice.

  He was chilled when he got home. His boots were covered in mud and his face was wet. He went inside and shut the door. The house was small but he had large windows in the continental style and so he didn't bother with the gaslight. You didn't get much sunlight in England but at least he caught the most of it. The last of last night's coal was glowing dimly in the fireplace, and he prodded it with the poker, half-heartedly, and left it to die.

  He sat in the armchair by the window. The room was full of books. What was it the fat man had liked to say? "Guns and swords will kill you, but nothing is more dangerous than a book."

  The fat man had been obsessed with the Bookman, that shadowy assassin who had plagued the empire for so long. But he was no longer around, had become inactive, possibly killed.

  Possibly retired, Smith thought. Those had been glorious days, in the service of the empire, going across the world, across continents and countries – on Her Majesty's secret service, they used to call it: deniable, disposable, and often dead.

  Shadow men and shadow women doing shadow work. But the Bookman had always stood out amongst them, the consummate professional, the shadow of shadows. Mycroft had told him, once, that he suspected the Bookman to be of the same mysterious origins as Les Lézards. Smith didn't care. To him it was the work that mattered, and he prided himself on doing his job well.

  Rows of books lined the room. They made it seem less austere, a warmer place. There were bookcases, a rug the colour of dried blood on the floor, an armchair with more holes in it than a compromised agent, a low table where he put his tea and his books to read and where the package from London now sat, waiting to be opened.

  He reached for it.

  It came in the same plain brown wrapping paper all the books arrived in and he tore it carefully, expecting to find Orphan's Poems, that slim, contraband collection of poetry, by an almost-unknown poet, that Smith had been trying to locate for some time. Instead, he discovered he was holding a worn copy of the Manual.

  For a moment he just stared at it. It was exactly as he remembered it: the plain blue covers, the stamp on the front that said, simply, Top Secret – Destroy if Found. The same smell, that was the very smell of the place, the very essence of the trade, for Smith: of boiled cabbage and industrial soap, the smell of long echoey corridors with no windows, of hushed voices and the hum of unseen machinery; the secret heart of an empire, that had been the fat man's domain.

  He opened it at random.

  A gentleman never kills by stealth or surreptitiously.

  The words spoken, so long ago, at that training centre in Ham Common. The instructor turning to them, smiling. He was missing two fingers on his left hand, Smith remembered. Looking at them, evaluating their response.

  Saying, at last, "But we are not gentlemen."

  It was still there, in the book. The manual of their trade, written as a joke or as a warning, he never knew which, but always circulating, from hand to hand, passed along from operative to operative, never openly discussed.

  This is what we do. This is what we are.

  And added, by hand, as an addendum: To do our job, even we have to forget that we exist.

  He knew that handwriting. He turned the book over in his hands. Opened it again, on the title page, which said only, and that in small, black letters, Manual.

  The rest of the page, rather than being blank as he remembered, was inscribed by hand. It didn't take long to read it.

  Smith–

  If you receive this then I am dead, and our worst fears have been confirmed. You may remember my concerns over the Oxford Affair in eighty-eight. I believe our venture into space has played into the hands of unseen forces and now the thing I feared the most has come to be.

  If that is so – if I am dead, and you receive this in the post – then we are not alone.

  Trust no one.

  Beware the B-men.

  Trace back the links, follow the chain. Begin with Alice.

  Be careful. They will be coming for you.

  M.

  Smith stared at the note. He closed the Manual softly, put it on the table beside him. Stared out at the wan sunlight. It came as no surprise to know the fat man had not trusted Fogg. Smith had warned, repeatedly, of his suspicion of the man; it had seemed beyond doubt to him that the man was a mole, an agent of the Bookman. But the fat man never did anything, preferring, perhaps, to keep Fogg close by, to watch him.

  And now Fogg was acting head.

  Well, what was it to Smith? He was retired. The actions of the Bureau were no longer his concern. He was too old, too jaded to think the shadow world they all inhabited was the be-all and end-all of politics. They were engaged in a game – often deadly, often dreary, but a game – while the real decisions were made above their heads, by the people they spied on. There had been moles in the organisation before, just as the Bureau, in its turn, had agents working inside the agencies of both opponents and friendlies. He himself had turned several agents, in his day…

  It was a game, only now Alice and the fat man were both dead.

  FOUR

  It was a soft sound, like leaves falling on the roof, only they weren't leaves at all. Smith opened his eyes and stared at the darkness. The sound came again, furtive, soft: the sound of rats sneaking, a vaguely disturbing sound that gnawed at the edges of consciousness.

  In the darkness of the room, he smiled.

  He'd sat up in his armchair through the afternoon, thinking. He'd first met Alice in Venice, in sixty-five it must have been. The year of the Zanzibar Incident, though he had not been involved in that particular affair.

  The Bureau had sent him to the Venetian Republic, the lizards negotiating a secret treaty with Daniele Fonseca, the republican leader, against the Hapsburgs. It was baby-sitting duty for Smith, watching the British envoy from the shadows as the treaty was negotiated. And it was Venice, in the spring, and he met her one night when Hapsburgian agents attacked his envoy and Smith, outnumbered, had scrambled to save the man.

  She had stepped out of the shadow, a young girl, glowing – so it seemed to him, then, romantic fool that he was – in the light of the moon. Her long white legs were bare and she wore a blue dress and a blue flower behind one ear. She smiled at him, flashing perfect white teeth, and killed the first of the would-be assassins with a knife throw that went deep into the man's chest, a flower of blood blooming on his shirt as he fell.

  Together, they eliminated the others, the envoy oblivious the whole while to the covert assassination attempt, then disposed of the bodies together, dragging them into one of the canals and setting them adrift, Alice's blue flower pinned to the leader's chest. It had been the most romantic night of Smith's life.

  Later, when the envoy was safely asleep in his bed, Smith and Alice shared a drink on the balcony of the small, dank hotel, and watched the moonlight play on the water of the canal…

  Now he listened for the smallest sounds, that soft patter on the roof, the drop of a body, then another. The fat man had warned him but somehow, Smith always knew the day would come, was always waiting for it, and now he was ready.

  He slid a knife from its scabbard, tied around his ankle. He had spent some of the afternoon, and a part of the evening, sharpening this knife, his favourite, and cleaning and oiling various other devices. Cleaning one's weapons was a comforting act, an ingrained habit that felt almost domestic. It made him think of Alice, who preferred guns to knives, and disliked poisons.

  The things the mind conjures… He'd often argued with her about it, to no avail.

  Smith disliked guns. They were loud, and showy, the weapon of bullies and show-offs. A gun had swagger behind it, but little thought. Smith preferred the intimacy of killing, the touch of flesh on flesh, the hissed intake of breath that was a mark's last. He liked neatness, in all things.

  Then everything happened very quickly and almost at once.

  The windows broke inwards – a loud explosive sound – shards of glass flyi
ng through the air, showering the floor and furniture.

  Something heavy slammed into the front door, and the back one, sending both crashing to the ground, as dark figures came streaming through, and Smith found himself grinning. A single candle had been left burning on the bedside table and now it died with a gust of cold wind, and the house was dark.

  Five pouring in from the front. Five more from the back. And there'd be others outside by now, forming a ring around the house. They wanted him badly. He was almost flattered. And they wanted him alive – which was an advantage.

  He killed the first one with a knife thrust, holding the body gently as it dropped down to the floor. Black-clad, armed – he took the man's gun out of its holster, admiring its lightness, and fired once, twice, three times and watched two of them fall, one rolling away. When they fired back, destroying the bedroom, he was no longer there.