The game master, p.21
The Game Master, page 21
“I don’t know that.”
“We do. We’ve tapped into heat and energy readings. This is the place.”
“So I should back off?”
“Chun has been on television basically threatening to use nukes against the United States, or anyone else that makes him unhappy. NORAD is on red alert. The president is contemplating a formal response. In the meantime, any intel you can gather will be worth its weight in plutonium.”
“So you want me to go in?”
“I want you to learn anything you can.”
“What am I authorized to do?”
“Anything it takes.”
“Anything?”
“You heard me.”
“This Game Master already knows too much. He could be a threat to national security. Possibly international security.”
There was a pause. “Anything.”
“Understood.”
If this was ground zero for an act of North Korean aggression, or even something worse, he wasn’t going to sit on the sidelines.
He wrapped a length of cord around his waist and then tied it to a grappling hook. He would follow after the sun set, as soon as he was sure it was safe.
BB might be the world’s best at playing games. But someone else was playing the Game Master. Which made him all the more certain his previous opinion was correct.
This was one game BB was not likely to survive.
70
The elevator doors opened.
BB stepped out. Linden followed.
Before they could react, the elevator doors closed behind them. They heard the engine churn into action. The cage rose. He wasn’t sure how far they had descended. He guessed the equivalent of eight floors, but it was hard to tell since the elevator had no intermediate stops.
“Guess we’re not going back any time soon,” Linden observed.
He agreed. “That’s not the way this game is played.”
The room was a white box. Almost a perfect cube, but he sensed it was somewhat longer than tall. The room was featureless, only stark white walls and a carpetless tile floor.
He spotted a closed door on the opposite side of the room, almost invisible because it was white and knobless, a diagram on the wall near the door, and a keypad.
“Looks like one of those rooms in Portal,” he commented.
“Did Dinky design that game?”
“No, but I’ll bet he played it.” He pondered a moment. “Do you suppose we’re going to find one of those portal-creating guns in here? Because that would be cool. Maybe we’re going to transport instantaneously from one room to the next.”
“Try to get your head out of games and back to reality.”
“Dr. Moore is working on teleportation.”
“Of subatomic particles. Not people.” Linden examined the keypad. “Same design as the one in Dinky’s office in Paris.”
“Because it came from the same company. And the same person.”
“Very likely. What do you suppose we’re supposed to do with it?”
“That I don’t know.” He surveyed the room. Other than the diagram on the wall, nothing stood out. “If this is a game of Clue, I’m holding no cards.”
“It’s bound to be a game. Everything else has been.”
“Funny you should say that.” He scrutinized the diagram on the wall. It displayed an elongated rectangle divided into thirty squares, three rows of ten squares each. Distinctive Egyptian markings dotted some of the squares.
He brushed his hand against the diagram. Perfectly smooth. No buttons.
“What is it?”
“A Senet board. Game played in ancient Egypt. A precursor of backgammon. Except that the squares are numbered. The ancient Egyptians never did that.”
“I remember reading that the Egyptians were the first to put numbers to widespread practical use. They had a complete system of written numbers well known even to the illiterate. They invented the zero—a brilliant conceptual leap. It’s one thing to envision quantities—they’re everywhere. It took a big-brained soul to conceive of the absence of quantity. To quantify nothingness.”
“Fascinating.”
“The base of the great pyramid is a square whose perimeter is equal to the circumference of a circle with a radius equal to the height of the pyramid. Ultimately, it all comes down to math. Mathematical ratios. Because the Egyptians believed numbers brought luck and victory.”
“Okay, now you’re starting to sound like a PhD.”
“About time you noticed.” She examined the diagram. “Surely we weren’t brought here just so you could play Senet.”
“I suspect there’s more to it.”
“This room is giving me claustrophobia. Way too white for my taste. I’m going to see if I can make the elevator return. I don’t see any point in—”
An abrupt whirring noise sounded. Like a hydraulic engine churning into play. A few moments later, the floor shook.
He crouched down, pressing one hand against the floor. Was this an underground earthquake?
The wall before him began to rise.
The unseen engine was not shaking the floor. It lifted part of the wall. Uncoupling it from the floor. What he had initially identified as a door was not a door. More like a curtain. It rose slowly, crinkling like a Venetian blind, revealing a translucent acrylic panel behind it.
His pulse raced, and he didn’t know why. “This is what in the gaming world they call the big reveal.”
“Meaning?”
“We’ve reached the boss level.” His voice dropped. “Which is not necessarily good news.”
“What do you suppose is waiting for us on the other side? Lady or the tiger?”
“Or both. A big surprise.”
“Darth is really Luke’s father.”
“That one’s been used.”
“Gandalf will return, after a costume change.”
“Hope this surprise is as pleasant.”
By the time the wall rose half the height of the door, he could see two knees pressed against the other side of the acrylic barrier. He bent down to get a better look.
“No.” He pounded on the acrylic surface. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Kadey was on the other side. She looked much as she had in the last photo sent to his phone. She was gagged and her hands were tied behind her back, connected to another rope restraining her feet. Hog-tied. Like a choice steer at the rodeo.
She looked terrified. But she was alive.
She stared at him with pleading eyes. He knew she recognized him.
Her eyes quickly darted to her mother.
She expected her mother to save her. If she was to be saved at all.
Some wounds never healed.
He had never felt so frustrated in his entire life—at least not since the last time his daughter was in danger. And he’d failed to save her.
#
Kadey was kidnapped on the last day of her junior year of high school. The FBI explained that the news stories about him—and the large purses he’d won—made him a target. They didn’t have to tell him how slender the chances were that she would be recovered alive. Instead, they emphasized how important it was that he follow their instructions to the letter, without deviation.
“These are the rules of the game,” they’d explained. “If you want any chance of victory, you have to obey the rules.”
And so he did. The kidnapper, who was never caught, held Kadey for eighteen unendurable days. They finally found her bound and abandoned in a filthy unused horse stable not far from the University of California at Davis campus, bruised, blood-stained, virtually catatonic. She had never seen her abductor’s face. She only knew two things.
First, that she had endured almost unbearable fear and misery on a daily basis.
And second—that she had endured those horrors because her father refused to pay the ransom.
Kadey spent more than a month in the hospital. And it was a good deal longer than that before she spoke to him. By that time, his marriage to Linden was a shambles. The divorce proceedings were well underway. He was leaving town. But he hoped to speak to his daughter again before he left.
He found her at home. The conversation did not go well. She threatened to walk out three times in the first ten minutes.
“Honey, you must know that I love you. More than anything. More than anything in the world.”
“But not enough to come across with the cash, right?” She lifted her hand to twist a lock of her hair around a finger—or tried. The kidnapper had cut her hair in patches. She’d been forced to trim it almost to the scalp just to make it look halfway normal. “He told me that all you had to do was put the money in a bag and he’d release me. But you never did it. Never even thought about it.”
“Kadey, I thought about it every day.”
“Not hard enough.”
“I talked to the FBI about this repeatedly. They said if I paid the ransom, the kidnapper would have no reason not to kill you.”
“He had no reason to let me live. Or to treat me kindly. All you did was make a madman madder.”
“Maybe it was a mistake. I don’t know. But I did what I thought was right. I did it because I was afraid of losing you.”
“That’s what you say. But I’m just not feeling it. In fact, I never have.”
“Kadey, don’t say that.”
“You’ve never exactly been a hands-on parent, have you? More interested in your own weird little world than your family.”
“That’s not remotely true. You’re my girl—”
“You know nothing about me. You don’t know what I like, what I don’t like. You don’t know who my friends are.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Okay, name two of my friends.”
He stuttered a moment, then fell silent.
“You know what, Daddy? I might be able to forgive that, if you’d at least paid some attention to me when I needed you. But you didn’t.”
“Sweetie, I did what the FBI told me to do.”
“If they’d told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?”
“Kadey. Listen to me.” He reached out to her, but she slapped his hands away. He sounded desperate, even to himself. “I listened carefully to everything they said. And I did some reading and research of my own. I calculated the odds—-”
“What?” Her voice soared. “You calculated the odds? You were playing a game! Again. My life is on the line, and you’re playing some damn game.”
“That’s not true. Honey—”
She turned her back on him and headed toward the door. “All you know is games. You go through your whole useless life amusing yourself.”
“Kadey, I would do anything for you.”
“Would you?” Her voice turned thin and shrill. “Is it true that while I was a prisoner, you played in the regional chess qualifying tournament?”
He didn’t answer for several moments. “The FBI said I should continue to go about my public business as usual. To avoid giving signs of desperation that might invite additional demands.”
“I was a captive, daddy!” she screamed. “I was dirty and tired. He slapped me around almost every day. And you played a chess tournament!”
She slammed the door behind her.
“Kadey!”
#
That was the last time they spoke. They had not seen one another for eight years. Until now.
But she was on the other side of an acrylic partition, bound and gagged.
Kadey tried to talk. Unfortunately, he couldn’t understand a word she said. Her eyes were red and she was obviously panicked. But he knew she was a tough girl. Always had been. She’d held out this long. She could last a little longer.
Then he spotted the water.
A large faucet on the other end of her closet, just behind her, gushed.
Kadey squirmed as the water trickled over her knees. Apparently it was cold. Maybe if she could stand up . . .
That was when he noticed. The rope binding her hands and feet together was strapped through some kind of mooring mechanism. He could see how to release the pin to free her. But she couldn’t possibly reach it.
He wondered how long it would take the water in that tiny chamber to rise over her head. He guessed she had about ten minutes. Maybe not that long.
Ten minutes and it would be too late. Ten minutes and he’d have failed to save his daughter. Again.
71
Chun saw pyramids out the window of his private jet.
There were perks to being the man with the military at his fingertips. Like being able to get a top Egyptian official on the phone any time he liked. He didn’t give the functionary any more information than was necessary. All this civil servant needed to know was that he was entering Egyptian sovereign soil. He was bringing a small coterie of armed troops, and they were planning an assault on Egyptian soil.
“I am not planning an invasion. I will bring five men at most. A security detail. We will fly into Alexandria. We will drive directly to our target.”
He could sense the hesitation over the phone. “I will need to get clearance.” The foreign attaché, a man named Aziza, had a nasal voice. He did not sound as if he had taken action on his own initiative in his entire life. “Regulations do not permit the importation of firearms—”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes sir, but diplomatic envoys must be cleared in advance—”
“I don’t have time for bureaucratic nonsense.” He paused. Perhaps a better approach would be to create a persuasive narrative. Problem was, he did not have much time. “You must understand. This man Ogilve. The one your government has given free rein in Alexandria. He has taken something from me. And I want it back.”
“We do not have an extradition treaty—”
“And that is fine. I don’t want to take him.” I don’t want to bring him back alive, at any rate. “I just want what belongs to me.”
“You must understand. Mr. Ogilve has favored-nation status, as does his country.”
“I understand that your infant government has accepted a great deal of money. But surely it was not your intent to create a haven for international criminals.”
“If you wish to file charges, you should contact—” His voice broke off suddenly. “Just a moment.”
The line was silent for the better part of a minute. Then a different voice spoke.
“General Chun? This is Colonel Hallasie.”
At last. One of his own men. He had not spent so much time placing agents in foreign governments for no reason. Hallasie had proven invaluable in this rebel-based government of amateurs and students. And now he would be invaluable again.
“I speak for the national domestic security force. We understand your request and find it entirely reasonable. We hope you recover what belongs to you.”
Ah, the sweet joy of advance planning. On a level only he could manage. With the assistance of a key advisor. “Thank you, Colonel.”
“We would only ask that you keep your operation . . . low profile.”
“Understood. I will do my best. I see no reason why it should stray from the grounds of the so-called excavation.”
“Good. We cannot provide official backup.”
“Nor do I request it.”
“But we can make sure there is no interference. No one traveling in or out. I think that would be best for everyone.”
“I heartily agree.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?”
“Yes. I have an emissary named Rani, currently in Alexandria. I want her to meet me when I land. Can you arrange passage for her?”
“Gladly.”
“I will send you the details.” He texted the message, then signed off.
The plane would land soon. In no time at all, he would see Ogilve. And this Game Master. And perhaps others as well.
Ogilve might anticipate his arrival, given the resources at his disposal. But Ogilve always underestimated him. The men he would leave surrounding the site would capture Ogilve when he made his escape. And anyone else who might attempt to depart.
At last, his plans approached the final phase. Everything was about to change. Never again would the Arduous March destroy a child’s life. Never again would anyone suffer brutality, poverty, starvation, rape, intentional cruelty. In the future, there would be no need for another like him.
It did not matter if millions died. Or even billions. What mattered was what would rise from the ashes.
72
“We have to do something,” BB said. “Look how fast the water is rising.”
It was already halfway up Kadey’s shins.
He pounded on the acrylic panel. He wasn’t nearly strong enough to break it. It barely even registered his pounding. But he wanted her to know he was trying to save her. It was important that she know. That she understood that he would do anything for her, that it had never been any different.
His daughter stared up at him, a desperate expression on her face. He had no trouble reading that tell.
He was failing her. Just as she expected him to do.
The keypad on the wall buzzed. The LCD panel glowed red.
He forced himself to turn away from her, focusing his attention on the diagram on the wall. “Everywhere we go, we confront games. Almost as if someone was testing us. No—playing us.” He ran everything he knew about Senet through his mind, hoping to tumble across a solution. “Senet goes back at least five thousand years. Senet boards were found in King Tut’s tomb. Magnificent boards with adjustable tables made from rare woods and encrusted with ivory.”
“Sort of like your gold-plated SCRABBLE set?”
“But not as cool. Ramses II was depicted playing this game in a famous tapestry.”
“Neat.”
“But Senet wasn’t just for the ruling class. Anyone could—and did—play the game. Even people who couldn’t afford a board could draw the diagram in the sand and use rocks for tokens.” He was babbling, and he knew it, but he hoped he might stumble across the solution to saving Kadey. “The game had mystical significance. Each of these squares was called a house. Homes to the various gods. The movement of players across the board symbolized the movement of souls through the world of the dead.”
