The Restoration Game (36 page)

I skipped down the gangplank and found to my delight that the shopping started even before you'd got out of the pier's long shed. I picked up a Stewart & Cohen at a bookstall, plunged into a stall for a vintage clothes shop called Enygma, and bought a pretty skirt made from thin orange satin with vertical orange lace panels, like something recycled from a bridesmaid's dress that had traipsed down the aisle in the decades that taste forgot. It went very well with a rust-brown top with a boat-shaped cowl neck, which I bought too.

“Eat your heart out, Trelise Cooper!” I said to the girl at the stall as she folded them neatly into the bag. She smirked complicitly, then put her hand to her mouth.

“Actually,” she said, “I'm trying to get a job there.”

“Your secret's safe,” I said.

I walked out grinning and swinging the fat plastic bag. Above the shore streets rose a low hill, maybe a hundred metres high, called Mount Victoria. Diverted through two more secondhand bookshops and another clothes shop in Victoria Road, my ascent of Mount Victoria was longer and more laden than I'd expected. It was about two o'clock before I'd wended to its grassy summit, and stood amid the grooved steel circles of gun emplacements that had once guarded Auckland from the Imperial Russian Navy. In its spectacular obsolescence, as much as in its shape, the site resembled a hillfort or a henge. If our civilisation were to fall, I'd reckon on little more than a millennium until antiquaries and tomb robbers would be speculating on what great king lay buried here.

I sat on a stubby concrete obelisk and gazed across the choppy water at the Auckland CBD skyline. No crashing airliners could topple that front rank. Threats that loomed large now would pass, and perhaps more quickly than we thought—just as the Tsar's reach had, so soon after this fortification had been built. The city and the earth seemed alike solid.

And yet, and yet…there was another world beyond this, perhaps even a better world beyond death, as the death-defying Beryozkin had told his executioners. This world that seems so real is contained within another more real, which in its turn may be contained within a world that is more real still. I now knew that for sure, or at least to a high probability. I didn't know much else. Where does it end? Is it simulations all the way down?

Maybe it was that reverie of simulations within simulations that gave me the idea. At one level, it was an idea so cheeky, so snook-cocking, that it made me giggle. It would let me say to the unknown gods:
I know you're there! I'm on to you!

At another level, it was as improbable a method of making contact with another world as a cargo-cult tower is of making contact with passing aircraft.

I remembered seeing a sign for an Internet café in Victoria Road. There was no need to wait. I could do it now. I jumped up, picked up my shopping bags of books and clothes, and followed the zigzag path back down the grassy slope of Mount Victoria.

I contemplated using my command-level access to set up the implementation of my idea directly, but quickly decided that it was beyond my coding skills. Instead, I compiled a careful email, with several attachments, for Matt at Digital Damage. I knew he'd jump at the suggestion: he'd go for it first thing, when he came into work in a few hours, on the opposite side of the planet. When the email was complete I hesitated a moment. If I was right, this would change the world in ways I couldn't predict. The hell with it, I thought. The gods had dicked me about long enough. This was payback time.

And anyway, it almost certainly wouldn't do anything, beyond making Matt and a crowd of gamers smile: a little injoke, an Easter egg as the programmers call it, though I'm surprised they don't call that kind of code a Kinder Surprise egg, a chocolate egg the whole point of which is the snap-together plastic toy inside. (Particularly as so many programmers have a row of Kinder Surprise toys lined up on their desks.)

I hit Send, tilted back the plastic bucket chair, apologised to the guy behind me whose dreads I'd leaned into, rocked forward, and stared at the screen for a minute or two. At ten New Zealand cents a minute, this could have become expensive. I shook myself out of my contemplative trance and was about to log off when it occurred to me that I hadn't been properly online for almost a fortnight. I went back to my Google Mail account and found about five hundred messages in my inbox. I cleared the spam and other crud with a few keystrokes and set about ploughing through those that needed answers—starting with one from Sean, dated Monday, August 11, climbing down from his high horse and saying that of course I wasn't sacked and would be welcome back.

And a dozen that didn't need answers—long, chatty emails from Alec, describing his wrap-up research, his leaving do, his flight to NZ, what he'd been doing since he'd got back, his folks, the dogs, the horse…my ears burned as I thought how I'd complained about his not replying to my texts. I fired off one embarrassed reply, hoping he'd see it before he saw me tomorrow, and then set about catching up with my friends' LJs and blogs—mainly, I think, to stop myself from banging my head on the table.

I dropped a ten-dollar note and two dollar coins on my way out, about five. I couldn't believe I'd spent two hours of this sunny, breezy afternoon indoors and online. When I arrived back at the foot of Victoria Road I saw the ferry leaving the pier. Too bad. I'd just have to have a chardonnay and a grilled fish at this bar-restaurant I'd just passed….

A glass or two later the sun had set. Darkness fell within fifteen minutes. The moon was upside down and too high in the sky. On the ferry back I stayed inside, but still looked out at the front at the lights of the CBD skyline and the winking warning beacon at the top of the Sky Tower.

I got back to the hotel about eight, dropped into bed, and slept for eleven hours. I was wakened by a text message from Alec. He said he couldn't get away from Queenstown for another couple of days, so why didn't I just fly there and he'd meet me off the flight at one?

I thought a few impolite things, and texted back to say I'd love to and was on my way.

Cue scramble. But booking was actually a doddle, and the trip to the airport and the flight itself uneventful (apart from my gawping at the mountains and the lake as the plane came in to land.) Alec wasn't there to meet me at Arrivals, but he hadn't texted again, so I expected to see him outside, probably (knowing him) just pulling in to the parking lot. I walked out of Arrivals at Queenstown with my head high, my hair down around the cowl collar of my new top, and the pretty skirt fluttering above my ankles.

That was when I heard the PA system paging Lucy Stone, and got the note:

Please tell Lucy Stone that Alexander Hamilton has been unavoidably detained with friends from the East.

That, and a mobile phone number that wasn't Alec's.

2.

There were several things I could do. One was to call Alec's number. I crossed that off the good ideas list. The next was to call the police. I filed that one under “last resort.” I could call Amanda and/or Ross. But neither of these could do anything unless they knew who was holding Alec and what they wanted.

Was it possible, was it possible at all, that the message was innocuous and that Alec was merely deep in a meeting with a bunch of Chinese or Japanese wool importers, and that the negotiations were so delicate or the negotiators so touchy that Alec couldn't possibly take time out from the meeting to text me?

Stop kidding yourself, Lucy.

My fingers trembled as I punched the numbers on my iPhone's screen keypad. The phone rang for so long that I expected it any second to go to voicemail. But it just went on ringing. I was on the point of checking that I hadn't rung the wrong number when the phone was picked up.

“Hello?” I said.

“Lucy Stone?” Male voice, Russian accent. I almost dropped the phone.

“Yes,” I said.

“You have something we want. We have something you want.”

“Yes,” I said, faintly. “Yes. What do you want?”

“We want what you found, Miss Stone.
All
of it. If you give us that, you will get
all
of what you want. If you do not, you will not get
all
of what you want. You will get only part, or parts, of what you want. Do you understand?”

I was sure he could hear my teeth rattle, but I was not as terrified as I had been.

“Y-y-yes,” I said. “How do I give it to you?”

“You meet us, and answer every question, and give us everything we ask for.”

It sounded like he expected some objection from me.

“Oh,” I said, my voice squeaking with relief, “I'm quite happy to do that. Where do you want to meet?”

“The café at the wharf. As soon as possible.”

“How will I recognise you?”

“
We
will recognise you.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. One more thing. If you attempt to use your phone, or otherwise contact anyone, we will know. If that happens, you will never get what you want. Not any of it. If anything untoward happens at our meeting—the same. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, more firmly this time. I felt I had their measure.

“See you very soon, Miss Stone.”

End of call.

I tugged my rolling case to the taxi rank and took a cab into town.

Queenstown's basically a resort, on the shore of a deep, narrow, long, freshwater lake, surrounded by high and jagged mountains.

The most impressive range is called the Remarkables, as if the first Europeans had staggered down here from the
Lord of the Rings
landscape of the Cook Mountains with nothing left but a mouthful of surprise in their last barrel of adjectives. The harbour is a U-shaped bay between the main shore and a small, wooded headland which is now a public garden, and behind which lies a minor arm of the lake.

The wheels of my case went bump-bump-bump over the timbers of the quay. Small boats and speedboats and jet-skis bobbed at their moorings or cut across the lake. A steamship, gleaming with polished brass and hardwood, lay hard by an adjacent pier. I headed for a corner of awnings and tables. Not many people were around—off-season, midweek. A young couple in cagoules, sipping tea, heads together over a map. A middle-aged man, staring into the distance through the smoke of his cigarette. A woman arguing with a six-year-old. I walked to the counter, watching out for men in suits, men in black, men like Mormon missionaries with shoulder holsters.

I ordered a coffee and carried it out in a yawing saucer. As I passed the cagoule couple's table, the young woman looked up from the map and said, “Oh, hi, Lucy!” in such a friendly tone that for a blank moment, as I turned so fast that the coffee slopped and stung on the back of my hand, I thought she might be one of the Russian or Polish girls from my old Starbucks crew.

“Please, come and join us,” the man said, in just as friendly a tone, and as Russian an accent.

At the same moment as I recognised his voice as the voice on the phone, I recognised the mountains on the map. They weren't the Remarkables. They were the Caucasus.

I laid the cup and saucer on the table, and sat down opposite the couple.

“Ask anything you want,” I said.

The man smiled. “No, Lucy. You tell us what you know.”

“I'll tell you something I know,” I said. “You're not from the
Mafiya.
You're not from the FSB or the RSB.”

“And if we are not?” the man said.

“You're bluffing about what you threatened to do.”

“Really?” said the woman. “You may underestimate us.”

I glared back. “I don't underestimate you,” I said. “I know there's an agency darker and scarier than the one my mother used to work for.”

“And you're less scared of it than of Russian gangsters or spies?” The young man's Russian accent thickened with his sarcasm. “The black sites are such that the threat of them can terrify gangsters and spies. You wouldn't wish for anyone to be a ghost prisoner.” He jerked his head to the left, in the general direction of the airport. “There is an aircraft fuelled, cleared for takeoff, waiting.”

“Now you're talking,” I said. “I can believe that.” I leaned forward. “Look, there's no need for any of this. Like I said, I'm quite happy to tell you anything. You could have just
asked!
”

“Why did you flee, then?” the woman asked.

“I didn't want to have this discussion except in a safe place,” I said. “I mean, you're the guys who tried to hit me with rods from God.”

“It was thought at the time that the recording had fallen into enemy hands,” the man said.

“The only recording is on my phone,” I said. “You're welcome to it.”

“It is not the only recording,” the woman said. “You emailed it yesterday, to an IP address in England.”

“Scotland,” I corrected, automatically. “To the games company I work—used to work—for.”

“Yes, Lucy, we know that,” the woman said. “What we don't know is, why?”

“I thought it would be amusing,” I said, “to have the actual Krassnian secret in the virtual secret place that's the goal of the Krassnian game.”

“Amusing?” the woman snapped. “
Amusing
?”

The man frowned. “How would it get in the game?”

“It would get included in the daily updates that go out to beta versions of the game,” I said. “That one would have gone out about, oh, over twelve hours ago.”

They both looked shocked.

“You mean it's already out there?” the man said.

“Yes,” I said. “But don't worry, nobody who sees it is going to take it seriously, and nobody who takes it seriously is going to look for it there. It's hidden in plain sight.”

“‘In plain sight,’” the woman said savagely, “for you to reveal at your whim or discretion—or when you're told to.”

“Told to?”

“By whoever you're working for. Such as, for instance, those Russians you mentioned.”

There's only one right response to that, and it's the one I made. I laughed in their faces.

“Do you know who I am?” I said. “Do you know who you are dicking about with?”