The Restoration Game (23 page)

My mind was all rockets and corpses. I walked briskly up Lauriston Place in sunshine on rain-shiny pavement and grabbed a banana and a
Grauniad
on the way. At the corner of Forrest Road I almost collided with the heart-breakingly pretty girl in the headscarf and long skirt who sold the
The Big Issue
there every Thursday and Friday.

“Oh! Sorry!” I said, fumbling with the paper and the banana while opening my bag for change.

“You go,” she said. “Now.”

“What?” I said.

Black eyebrows, untidied. Little wrinkles forming between them.

“Mr. Stewart see you at top of Chambers Street.”

Eyebrow flash and quick glance in that direction.

“What?” I said again.

Deep
wrinkles.

“You go! Now! Mr. Stewart waits to see you. Now!”

She thrust a copy of
The Big Issue
under my thumb, smiled, and stepped back, making quick, surreptitious little go-go-go flicks with her free hand.

I turned away, shaken, hoping she hadn't seen or hadn't taken in how I felt. This young woman had been spying on me! It felt like a personal betrayal of all the smiles and encouraging words and one-pound-fifty-pences I'd so graciously bestowed on her. A moment later I was ashamed of that thought. But I was still shaken. How many other unseen eyes did Ross Stewart have on me?

I hurried past our office door, almost turned then and there to go in, and then crossed carefully at the lights at the junction of Forrest Road and Bristo Place in front of the Traverse, waiting each time for the green man. Walked beside the smooth sandstone cliff of the National Museum and around the corner into Chambers Street. I glanced all around and saw no sign of Ross. I dawdled on a few paces towards the steps of the museum, and was overtaken by a tall man in blue one-piece overall and a pulled-down baseball cap.

”
There
you are,” he said, as if I were half an hour late already.

It was Ross—I realised I'd looked right through him while he stood on the corner bowed over a red-top and clutching a Subway paper bag.

“This way,” he continued, nodding diagonally across the street at a parked white van.

“Good morning to you, too,” I said, walking faster to keep up. “I'm due to start five minutes ago, and if you think I'm just going to hop into—”

“Oh, don't be a child, Lucy,” he said. “You know what this is about. There's no time to waste. The tanks are rolling
as we speak.”

“Tanks?”

Ross sighed theatrically as he stopped on the edge of the pavement to look both ways for a gap in the slow rush-hour traffic down Chambers Street.

“There's a huge Russian armoured column pouring through the Roki Tunnel. Beats me why the Georgians didn't think to blow up the exit, but there you go. The first engagements should be happening any minute now.”

We dodged and skipped between bumpers.

“Holy shit!” I said as I leapt onto the opposite pavement. “What about our troops?”

“‘Our’?” Ross shot me a puzzled look from under the peak of his cap. “Oh, the Americans. Don't worry, they're well out of it. Poolside in Tbilisi.”

“Well, that's—”

“Yes, yes. Fuck knows how long that'll hold. Putin's royally pissed off.”

He stopped by the side of the white van, unlocked the door, and hauled it open.

“Hop in,” he said, with a wave of his paper bag.

I balked, not because the setup was so ludicrously reminiscent of what every parent warns every child against.

“Where are we going?”

“Nowhere,” Ross snapped. “Not right now, anyway. The van's a good place to talk. Nobody looks twice at a van.”

He walked around the front and climbed in on the driver's side. I hesitated a moment, then climbed to the passenger seat and slid the door shut after a couple of inadequate tugs. Ross was already pouring black coffee from a thermos into two unwashed mugs. He slid one across the windshield shelf and cracked his Subway bag and its contents in half and passed me one portion of what turned out to be pork sausages with Worcester sauce in a baguette.

“I've had breakfast,” I said.

“Consider it an early lunch,” Ross mumbled around a mouthful of crust. He barely looked at me—he had the
Daily Record
open across the steering wheel.

As the baguette actually smelled very appetising all of a sudden (my breakfast having been a quick muesli and already twenty minutes ago) I tore into it and sipped hot black coffee with some gusto.

“What's all this about?” I said, after we'd both settled to a politer rhythm of chomping. “Why all the—”

“Oh, yeah,” said Ross, gaze still on the sports pages. “That. Sorry about the drama. Quick uptake re the gypsy lass, by the way. Good for you. Anyway.”
Chomp chomp, slurp.
“Bottom line is, you have to go to Krassnia.”

“What?”
I cried, through a cloud of crumbs. “Why? When?”

“Krassnia,” Ross repeated, as if clarifying. “Because, um…that'll take a bit of explaining. When…well, ASA fucking P. Now is good.”

For a moment I had the crazy thought that he was about to turn the ignition key and we'd be off and I almost reached into my bag to check that I had my passport in it.

“Wait!” I said. “Uh, I mean—why do I have to go to Krassnia?”

As I asked the question I had a sinking feeling that I knew the answer. I wasn't far wrong.

“Lucy,” Ross said, frowning over the racing results, “the Russians have just let the world, and more especially the US, know that they are not going to be messed about with in their own backyard. The tanks are rolling and we don't know where they'll stop. They could roll all the way to fucking Tbilisi and string that smarmy bastard Saakashvili up from a lamppost. I don't think they'll go quite that far, myself, but—”

He shrugged, and turned a page noisily.

“Thing is,” he went on, “given that they're willing to do
this
, there is no fucking way they are going to sit idly by and watch a US-sponsored colour revolution take out one of their client statelets in Georgia. So, come September and assuming the whole fucking situation hasn't gone tits-up by then and we aren't in a guns of August scenario in which case all bets are off…we can expect the Maple Revolution to face a severe crackdown from the local security forces and/or Russian tanks on the streets of Krasnod. In terms of what's likely to be going on by then even if the worst doesn't happen, it'll be a sideshow to Ossetia and Abkhazia.”

“Abkhazia?” I hadn't yet heard anything about that region.

“Yeah, they're moving there too. Naval forces, Kodori Gorge, you name it.”

“So…” I said. “I guess the, uh, Agency is just gonna have to call the revolution off, right?”

Ross spluttered coffee.

“Call it off? The CIA couldn't even if it wanted to—which I doubt it does, given the chance to poke another sharp stick in Putin's eye, regardless of whether they expect the regime to give way. It's not like blood on the streets isn't a win, in terms of making the Russians look bad. But in any case…” He sighed, this time not theatrically but from the bottom of his chest. “It's unstoppable. We've got the Liberal Democrats, the unions, the NGOs, some fucking bunch of Enver Hoxha idolators—fuck knows where
they
crawled out from—all wound up and agitating their little hearts out about how the elections are going to be rigged or cancelled by the Social Democrats.”

“Did the game thing work?” I asked, momentarily diverted from my own worries.

“Did it ever fucking work,” said Ross. “It's not just turned out to be a safe space for organising, the whole legend and folklore stuff is bleeding into the nationalist mood on the streets. I've been sent mobile-phone pics of posters with what's-his-face, the once and future hero guy—”

“Duram,” I said.

“Yeah, that's the one.” Ross pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and thumbed through pictures. “Look.”

Sunny street, dusty trees, low-rise apartment buildings; couple dozen young people, possibly students, holding up A4 sheets, most with black-printed slogans in Krassnian and six with a blocky woodcut-type portrait of a bearded barbarian in a helmet with a nosepiece—

“Hey!” I said. “That's our
cover art!”

(Joe had been quite proud of it. He'd based it on a photo, from someone's holiday-snaps Flickr set, of the statue of Duram in Krasnod's main square.)

Ross took back the phone. He drained his mug and set it down above the dash.

“So you see why you have to go to Krassnia,” he said.

“I don't see anything of the kind!” I said, though as I've mentioned I had a shrewd suspicion. Ross just looked at me.

“You do see,” he said. “But if you insist…”

He peered out and upward through the windshield for a moment, as if checking the sky, and then leaned back shaking his head.

“Christ,” he said. “I'm getting fucking paranoid about all this. I keep thinking about
camera drones
…”

He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head again.

“All right,” he said. “Time to level with you, Lucy—”

“Can I just say that I instantly distrust someone who says that?”

Ross laughed. “So would I. But hear me out. Yuri told you what this thing is about, right? Not democracy, not the fucking pipeline, not even sticking it to the Russians. It's about getting our hands on—or to begin with, getting a
look
at—whatever's up there on Mount Krasny.”

“‘The secret of the Vrai,’” I said, mimicking Yuri's accent.

“Please don't use that phrase,” Ross said. “But yes, that's what this is about. The idea was, we get a friendly regime in place, one that isn't watched over by the RSB—a security apparat inherited from Soviet times and still joined at the hip to the Russian FSB, who are basically still the same bloody chekists, the same fucking institution as the KBG and the NKVD and the OGPU and all the way back to the Cheka, and whose power—apart from anything else—is pretty blatantly flaunted by a former dyed-in-the-wool KGB man's having been president and now prime minister of Russia. Now, the top people in the Krassnian RSB may or may not know what the secret is, but they do know that there's something very dangerous there and that it has to be
kept
secret—the Zone is still in place, still guarded.”

“Guarded?” I said. “Who by?”

“A small contingent of former MVD border troops.” The story is that there's an area of radioactive contamination, and for all I know everyone involved believes that. It might even be true. Anyway, uh…Well. Now what the plan was, was that after the Maple Revolution the new regime—which, in the nature of the case, will include certain people who are, let's say,
obliged
to the Agency—would be willing to let us send someone in to have a look. Someone who has enough Vrai blood to be safe, and who is totally and completely reliably one of us. “That person”—he looked away for a moment, as though embarrassed, as he damn well should have been—”is you.”

Like I said, the suspicion that this was the case had begun to darken my mind, but having the suspicion confirmed still took my breath away. And what came rushing in, like the air after I'd got my breath back, was fury.

“How long have you planned this? And who's ‘us’? And just when were you figuring on
telling
me?”

“Your mother and I—”

“My
mother?”
I cried.
“She
was in on it? Oh, fuck! This is just so, so sick.”

Sick was how I felt. It was as if the Other Thing had all along been lurking right in my own family, and was now right here in the cab of the lorry, somewhere behind Ross's shoulder. I pulled away, huddling against the door. I knew I was scowling at Ross with the exact outraged sulky expression of the Cheerleader in
Heroes
confronting the latest lie or betrayal from Horn-Rimmed Glasses Guy.

“Your mother and I,” Ross repeated, rolling over my outcry like a tank over plasterboard, “agreed to a request to this effect a long time ago.”

“How long ago?”

Again with the looking away. “A few years ago.”

“What? When I was just—”

“Yeah, yeah, when you were just an annoying teenager.”

“Wait, wait, wait! A request? From the CIA?”

“Well, not exactly,” said Ross. “From…another agency of the US government. One that has…well, let's just say one that has a legitimate and pressing interest in unusual phenomena with military potential, even if the phenomenon is just, uh, an anomalous deposit of radioactive ore. Especially a phenomenon that's currently in the Russian near abroad, and that Russia can keep us from finding out anything about, and that Russia might someday figure out a way to find out about. And maybe use, you know? I mean, if this thing is as powerful or as significant as
some
of the stories imply, like, say, a stargate as Yuri sometimes thinks, then—it's the sort of thing you do
not
want to risk the other guy getting his hands on first. So the idea came up of using a US citizen who has enough Vrai blood—or the right genes, to state the case properly—to go in and have a look. And you were the only one who fitted the bill. Believe me, they checked. There are only a handful of Krassnian US citizens, and none of them have both Vrai ancestry and political reliability. You're unique. Of course the actual mechanics of the insertion hadn't been decided then. That was only finalised—we thought—when the Maple Revolution was pencilled in.”

“‘The actual mechanics of the insertion!’” I said, this time in jeering mimicry of Ross. “Gee, thanks. Why can't Amanda do it? She fits the spec just as well as I do, or better.”

“She's far too well known and traceable to get in, even with a false ID. You aren't.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe I would have done what you want, if you'd asked nicely. But what's the urgency of doing it now?”

“You mean, doing it before the Russians clamp their grip on all of Georgia's breakaway border provinces?” said Ross. “I would have thought that's—”

“No, no,” I said. “I get
that.
But what I don't understand—well, there's several things I don't understand. You say the Russians might find out what's there, but they've had over half a century to come up with something and they haven't yet? Why not? And why don't
they
just send in some loyal person with this mysterious Vrai gene or blood or magic red hair or whatever the fuck it is? And why don't you, I mean our side, send in, I don't know, a drone or something?”