The Master by Claire North

Author:Claire North
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2015-11-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

The Great Game.

The opening is done. We have made our moves, staked high, lost heavy. Now the board is open and we move slower, careful, wearing our enemy down, looking for the king, looking for the capture.

This is the middle game.

I consolidate my pieces in China; she focuses on the EU and US.

Beijing is threatened with a trade embargo, accusations of cyber-terrorism, espionage, foul practice economically, foul practices against humanity.

I activate the Union of South American Nations; she plays two of the big four oil companies. I launch environmental terrorists and an insurance broker in retaliation. She turns the Greek police against the head of the insurance company; I turn the interior ministry against the police. She unleashes a nationalist opposition movement against my minister; I play an orthodox patriarch and evangelical Christian TV station back at her.

For a moment, all things hang in balance. Seven DEA agents are gunned down in Guatemala; an American intelligent network are arrested in Tunisia; the oil companies waver; the CEO of one, and deputy CEO of another stand firm, and I see that they are her pieces, the heart of her play, and one is killed by a cartel, the other in a road accident on a cliff by the sea. She kills the leaders of a terrorist group, shuts down the insurance company and the bank that was linked to it and, in an act of spite, kills my Greek interior minister with a car bomb that also murders his wife and eldest son, and leaves his twelve-year-old daughter without her right leg and suddenly alone in the world. I manage to salvage my patriarch by sending him on hermetic retreat to the Ukraine, but look back in sorrow as my evangelical TV channel is taken off air for “hate crimes”.

All this takes five months.

And as I move, I move, and the world turns.

I smell sulphur in the hot springs of Greenland, listen to the erudite arguments of the overweight Icelandic IT men in their suits and furs. I ride the ferry through the great glacial valleys of eastern Canada, watch white beluga surface and dive in her sandy bays. From a balcony in Cape Town which looks south towards Robben Island and the sea, I launch a botnet attack against a series of servers in Oman which have been targeting me. From a grubby little hotel room in Malawi, where the bus never comes and the the children have come too late to the library, all the books stolen by their fathers who have now forgotten how to read, I orchestrate the arrest of a man who looks like me, sounds like me, has nothing to do with me, but who is taken down by the Glasgow police as the face behind the irritating Interpol warrant she has served against me. And always, I move, and so does she.

Twice she comes near to capturing me directly, once unleashing the full force of Egypt’s military as I flee across the Sinai

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