The Great Game Read online

  He waited the man out. Peace finishing rolling, lit up the cigarette. Loose tobacco fell on the table. The man's hands were shaking. Disgraceful. "You do something you shouldn't have?" Peace said at last.

  Smith didn't answer. Watched him. Watched the room.

  He'd had trouble finding a table. He sat in the corner, his back to the wall, his eyes on the door. It was the way he always sat. Busy place. Was anyone watching him, in their turn? Was anything out of place?

  "Been a naughty boy," Peace said. He spat out tobacco shreds. Made to get up–

  Smith kicked the table from underneath, lifting it over – it hit Peace full in the face, sent him reeling back. Smith dropped behind the table as three shots rang out. Screams in the pub – he caught movement coming forward as everyone else moved back, towards the door or, if they were smart, stayed down. Two figures, guns drawn. He was getting sick of guns.

  "We just want to talk, Mr. Smith."

  The voice was cultured, sort of, a London accent, with only a hint of the continental about it. More agents of the Kaiser? Someone else?

  Smith said, "What about?"

  "About this year's harvest, Mr. Smith," the voice said. Smith drew his knife, softly. But he was cornered.

  "Who do you work for?"

  The voice laughed. "Whoever pays," it said.

  Smith shifted the table, keeping it between himself and the attackers, until he hit Peace's leg. Peace himself wasn't moving. He pulled on the leg, bringing the man's mass towards him. He could hear the two men coming forward. Tensed. "Really, Mr Smith. Do not make it more difficult than it needs to–"

  He grabbed Peace under the arms, pushed the table again so it fell down with a crash, and rose. Two guns fired. He felt the impact of the shots, Peace's body slamming him back as it was hit. He let it carry him, moved with the impact, discarded the body and came over the fallen table, blade at the ready.

  The first man had his gun arm extended, about to fire again. Smith's blade severed the arteries in the man's wrist and then with a half-turn, dancer's movement Smith's blade flashed again, moving across the man's neck. The man tried to gurgle, couldn't, and fell to his knees, blood pouring out of the wound.

  Another shot, but Smith wasn't where he'd been and the other man, searching for a target, clumsy with the gun, didn't respond fast enough and Smith was behind him, the blade against the man's neck, and Smith said, "Drop it."

  The man dropped the gun. Beside them, his partner expired noisily.

  "Be still."

  The man was very still.

  It was quiet in the abandoned pub. Landlord and patrons had made for the door and were all gone, abandoning drinks and cigars and conversation. Smith preferred it that way.

  He said, "Who sent you?"

  The man began to talk fast. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down and the man twitched every time it scraped against the knife. "We was paid to watch for you, is all," he said. "I don't know who wants you, mister. A man came. He was dressed well, he had money. He said, just bring him to me."

  "Alive?"

  "He wasn't strict on that score," the man said, and swallowed.

  "What did he look like?"

  The man shrugged, then regretted it. "He didn't give no name."

  Smith increased the pressure of the knife. "Not what I asked," he said.

  "Tall, black hair, foreign accent. He had a scar across his cheek."

  Smith went still at that. "What sort of accent?" he said at last.

  "Dunno, mister. Some European muck, like my partner's is – was." He swallowed again.

  "And Peace?"

  "Old Peace here was to tag you, is all. We figured we'd kill him when we was done so as to save the pay."

  "Sensible," Smith muttered. There was noise outside now, and the whistle of constables, and he decided it was time to go.

  "Do you want to live?" he said.

  The man swallowed a third time. "Very much, mister," he said.

  "Too bad," Smith said. He raised his hand and slammed it against the man's neck. The man fell. Smith arranged him comfortably with his back to the bar. He picked up the man's gun and put it in his hand. Then he went over to the man's fallen companion, picked up the man's hand, which was still holding a gun, and fired twice at the unconscious man. Blood bloomed over the man's chest and Smith nodded, satisfied. Outside the noise intensified and a voice, magnified by a bullhorn, called, "Step outside with your hands raised!"

  Smith surveyed the scene. With luck no one would remember the quiet gentleman who had sat in the corner. Then he slipped out through the back door, over the fence of the sad little garden, and was soon at the train station, just in time for the London one to pull in.

  SEVEN

  The train departed on time. He'd paid for a first-class seat and now sat alone in the small car, a cup of tea by his side.

  Smith liked trains. There was something soothing about their rhythmic movement, something vastly luxurious about the space one had, the ability to simply get up and walk and stretch – and that without mentioning the joys of dining cars, and sleeping compartments. He always slept well on trains.

  You could always get a cup of tea.

  And, of course, trains were wonderful for covert assassination.

  The second time he met Alice had been on a train. He had got on at Sofia and the train, on a leisurely night journey, was travelling to the port town of Varna, on the shores of the Black Sea.

  Smith had been on board to dispose of a Bulgarian diplomat by the name of Markov. He had taken his time. A train offered a perfect shelter for a quiet murder. It stopped often, each station offering a quiet getaway. The Bureau had agents waiting at stops along the route. They would provide him with the means to disappear, if he chose to use them.

  But Smith preferred to work alone.

  The diplomat had been of the anti-Caliban faction, and as such a threat to Her Majesty's government. Bulgaria was an important asset for the lizardine court, its Black Sea ports offering strategic opportunities against the Russians on the one hand, the Ottomans on the other. Varna itself, their destination, was a bustling port town crawling with British Navy and Aerofleet personnel. Markov had links to anti-Calibanic groups, some of which used violent means. Verloc, in his day, had been a prominent member of several such groups – though he, of course, worked undercover for the Bureau.

  Some of the time, at least.

  Markov took ill shortly after dinner. Smith had sat two tables down from him, eating a simple meal of smoked salami, bread and the red wine this country was famed for. He had not expected Markov to take ill, and was concerned. As Markov, about to retch, departed from the car, a new figure appeared in the doorway and Smith's breath caught in his chest.

  She wore a blue dress, just as she had in Venice. A white flower behind her ear this time. She was smiling and her smile widened when she saw him. She came and sat opposite him and signalled to the waiter to bring another wine glass and then said, "Why, Mr Smith, fancy meeting you here."

  "Alice," he said, softly, the food forgotten. Her glass arrived and the waiter filled it and she raised it up. "Cheers," she said.

  Markov had expired later that night, of apparent food poisoning.

  He drank his tea. He couldn't really believe she was dead. They had spent that night together and got off at Varna and then hadn't seen each other for six months. The fat man had warned him about her, Alice of the blades and of the poison, who yet liked neither, who often said a "Honesty is a gun"… Alice of the grin that said she knew what she was doing was wrong, but that she liked doing it, nevertheless… He wasn't even sure who she really worked for. You couldn't tell, with any of them. They were shadow pawns in a shadow world, switching sides, owing allegiance to no one. Mycroft knew that, was philosophical about it. "If you were honest people," he once told Smith, "you would be of no use to me."

  Now Smith sat and worried about the latest development, as the train chugged along, heading for the capital. He longed to see London
again, walk its streets, hear the calling of the whales in the Thames… He began to toss a coin absent-mindedly, heads, tails, heads, tails. The coin bore the profile of Queen Victoria, the lizard queen. Heads, tails…

  It had been a message, he decided. He knew the man with the scar on his cheek. He never did things by half. Sending amateurs after him had been a message… a warning?

  So the French, too, were interested.

  But why him, Smith? Did they suspect him of being behind the killings?

  Or did they believe him capable of following the chain?

  If so, they will be following him. Watching.

  Well, let them.

  The world was large and fractured and there were too many factions at play, and always had been. Nothing had changed. The game remained and he, Smith, was back in it, playing.

  With a small smile he sat back, his head against the comfortable stuffing of the seat, and closed his eyes. He wasn't as young as he used to be, and it had been a long night. He fell asleep, still smiling wistfully.

  He'd first met the man from Meung in Paris, in the seventies. Tension ran high at that time between the Quiet Council, France's ruling body of human and automatons, and the lizardine court.

  Smith was in Paris on a defection. A senior French scientist wanted to change sides and Smith had been given carte blanche on the operation. "Do whatever you have to do," the fat man had told him, "but get him across the Channel alive."

  Only the whole thing had turned out to be a trap, and Smith found himself locked inside an inn outside Paris, and the inn was on fire. When he stared out of the window, through the metal bars, he saw the man from Meung for the first time. The man looked up at the window, and laughed. Then he climbed on his horse and rode away.

  They called him the man from Meung not because he came from Meung-sur-Loire but because, when he was only twentyfive, the young man who was to become the Comte de Rochefort had killed forty-six people there, in one night. They had been a group of conspirators, plotting against the Council, and the young man, who had gone deep undercover with the group, proceeded to assassinate them one by one over the course of the night. It had come to be known as the Second Battle of Meung-sur-Loire.

  But Smith did not know it that night, staring out of the window while the smoke billowed through the inn and the fire spread, and roared, and he fled desperately from room to room, seeking an escape…

  They had met again in Mombasa in seventy-one. That time, Rochefort was after a British courier and, also that time, it was Smith who had the upper hand. He had not been able to kill the man but had given him the distinct scar he still bore.

  Like Smith, Rochefort despised guns. His was a silent method, a personal one. Like Smith, he preferred to kill at close quarters, with a knife or with bare hands and, like Smith, he was very good at it.

  Smith woke up feeling refreshed just as the train was pulling into Charing Cross. He had not been disturbed throughout the journey. No further attempts on his life, so far. He almost felt disappointed.

  But they'd be watching, he knew. Rochefort was too smart to get on the train alongside Smith. Most likely he hadn't even been at Market Blandings, had arranged the attack from a distance and was even now waiting in London, in an anonymous hotel somewhere, with his agents on the ground, waiting for Smith to make his move.

  It was odd, Rochefort warning him like that. Smith could not say that they liked each other, he and the Frenchman, but over the years a mutual respect had developed, as they fought across continents in the shadow game, the Great Game. The only game there was. What interest did the Quiet Council have in the deaths of Mycroft and Alice? Who else had died? How many people, and where, and why, and by whose hand?

  He didn't know, but he was going to find out.

  The train came to a halt, and he left his compartment and went down the steps to the platform. People swarming all about the great station, the trains belching steam, the cries of sellers offering candied apples and roasted nuts and sizzling sausages and birds in cages and mechanical toys and portraits done on the spot, and a little pickpocket went past him, going for it when Smith grabbed his hand, giving it a tweak, and the boy squeaked. Smith could have easily broken the delicate bones of the boy's fingers, but didn't.

  "Run off with you," he said, a little gruffly, and the urchin, giving him a look of hurt dignity, did exactly that, not looking back.

  London.

  What did the old bee keeper used to say, in his own active days in the field?

  Ah, yes.

  The game is afoot.

  Smith smiled as he remembered; he began to walk towards the exit, about to enter again the world he'd left behind.

  It felt good to be back.

  EIGHT

  There are a number of respectable old establishments along Pall Mall. There's the Drones Club, of course, and the Reform Club (of which Fogg was a member) and then there was Mycroft's old place, the Diogenes. Whereas the Drones was a lively place, its members numbering amongst the younger, and more energetic, of the aristocracy (both human and lizardine), the Diogenes was a place of quietude, where no noise was tolerated and where members moved little, spoke less, and ate plenty. As to the Reform Club, Smith disliked it. He disliked all members-only clubs. It would not be true to say Smith had sympathies to the views expounded by that man, Marx, whose own watering hole, the Red Lion pub in Soho, he nevertheless found much more congenial. Smith did not hold strong opinions, as a rule. To do so would be to compromise one's efficiency as a shadow agent. Yet something in him disliked wealth, and its display. Surely, he had fewer qualms when disposing of a member of the rich than of the poor. Long ago, Smith had learned to accept his own little idiosyncrasies. All agents had them. You had to learn to do the job regardless. It was telling, though, that the only times he had visited any such gentlemen's clubs had been in pursuit of a particular member within, and that he never left a job uncompleted.

  At the corner with Waterloo Place there was the Athenaeum, a large, imposing building and another club, where Smith had once done an excision on a visiting politician. At any rate, he did not aim for any of the clubs, but rather for an unmarked, and rather drab, door in the side of a building along the Mall, said building being a small, red-brick establishment, with no sign, but clearly belonging to a trade of some sort.

  And trade, on the Mall, was as good as being invisible.

  It had begun to rain by the time he reached the building. The rain revived him, but he was glad to find shelter. The door opened as though on its own. In some uneasy moments Smith had the feeling the building was somehow alive, and watching. He knew that, in reality, the door was watched by human operators deep inside the building, and that, upon recognising him and establishing that he had clearance, the door was opened for him. The door, otherwise, never opened. Yet still, despite the knowledge, the feeling persisted, as if the Bureau itself was somehow alive.

  He went inside and the door shut behind him noiselessly. He found himself in a quiet corridor. Small windows set in the wall allowed only a modicum of grey light in. The corridor smelled of industrial cleaning products and the windows were grimy with dirt. When he walked along it his feet squeaked on the bare floor.

  He followed the corridor to its end. A simple second door blocked the way. He waited, and presently there was the sound of gears and steam and the door opened onto a small lift. He stepped inside and the door closed behind him and he began to descend.

  The Bureau was cold and quiet. He went past the cipher room and the door was closed and he could hear faint voices behind. He ran into Berlyne in the corridor, Berlyne rubbing his hands together, muttering, "Damn cold, old boy."

  Smith said, "Where is everyone?"

  Berlyne shrugged. "All about," he said mournfully. "You here because of Mycroft?"

  Smith wasn't fooled. Berlyne had been longer at the Bureau than anyone. There was little he didn't know, or had a hand in.

  "I'm here to see Fogg."

  "Yes, he
did mumble something to that effect, come to mention," Berlyne said. "He'd be in his office."

  "What's going on, Berlyne? Are there any leads?"

  Berlyne shrugged again. "Harvester," he said, not without affection. Smith flinched.

  "I retired," he said.

  Berlyne shook his head. "Yet here you are," he said. "No one ever retires."

  It was said he had a string of ex-wives in the colonies, that he could never afford to leave his salaried post. In his youth he was a promising agent, but an encounter on a South Pacific island changed him, made him mournful and jumpy, and he had had to be retired to a desk job. The file on that encounter, as on most Bureau missions, did not exist.