The Great Game Read online

  The Great Game

  By D. R. Bell

  The Great Game

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2013 by D. R. Bell.

  This book is intended for personal use only, and may not be reproduced, transmitted, or redistributed in any way without the express written consent of the author. You can contact the author at [email protected].

  This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events portrayed in it are the work of author’s imagination. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, events or entities is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  PART 1: DON’T SPEAK WITH STRANGERS

  PART 2: TAKEN

  PART 3: NEW LIFE

  PART 4: INTO THE STORM

  COMMENTARY

  PREFACE

  “Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its

  excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.”

  — Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations

  A small piece of colored cement sits on my desk. My cousin chipped it from the fallen Berlin Wall back in 1989. The event that seemed destined to change the world. As a popular article claimed, it was nothing less than The End of History. Western democracy has won once and for all. No more conflicts over which society is the right path, no more games of great states, no more inefficient centrally controlled economies.

  Years later, it’s hard to be so sure. The building of Western-style democracies in many countries proved to be a challenge. Political, financial, and trade tensions persist. Despite good intentions, something is not quite working. And there are people and countries that are just waiting for the democracies to stumble. Perhaps things are not so clear-cut. Perhaps history has not ended yet.

  This is, of course, a work of fiction. The story is set in 2022. Like any story set in the future, it is entirely imagined. We can’t predict the future, we can only look at possible scenarios from our time. This book is about one such possibility. But what are presented in the story as facts of the time of writing are indeed facts in real life. And if some elements look hard to imagine, back in the early 1980s one would have been laughed at for suggesting that in a few short years people would be dancing on top of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union would be no longer.

  The name of the book—The Great Game—is derived from a term given to the strategic rivalry between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia. The term was later immortalized by Rudyard Kipling. It is used here as a moniker for struggle between great powers—a struggle where sometimes seemingly inconsequential characters may end up playing a prominent part.

  PART 1: DON’T SPEAK WITH STRANGERS

  “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning,

  without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

  — Franz Kafka, The Trial

  Wednesday, 4/20/2022, 11:46 a.m. CST, Beijing, China

  The man enjoyed his view of Southern Sea Lake in Zhongnanhai imperial garden. From all his blessings—prestigious job, immaculate house where they hosted parties for high-ranking party members, two children attending the most sought-after universities, sizable bank accounts—this view was the one thing that he looked forward to each morning. Looking out of the window of his corner office on East Chang’an Avenue, he felt a part of the elite poised to rule the world. Beyond the lake, the new World Industry Tower with its golden spire was towering over the old Wangfujing Cathedral. Which nineteenth century French painter said that train stations were the new cathedrals? He could not quite remember. No matter. The trade and industry towers were the twenty-first century cathedrals, right here, in Jicheng. The man liked to use the ancient name of Beijing, reminding himself that it stood here for over three thousand years.

  The phone buzzed, causing him to grimace. He was about to leave for a scheduled lunch with the minister. His secretary should have known better and just taken a message. The man turned away from the window, walked back to the desk and stabbed the speakerphone’s button with an impatient, “Yes?”

  The secretary said apologetically that the foreigner on the phone had insisted it was very important to let her boss know that John Tomms—he’d made sure she spelled it T-o-m-m-s—was calling.

  The man gasped. He knew this call would come one day, but it still momentarily stopped his heart.

  His secretary’s words brought him out of his paralysis. “Sir, should I put him through?”

  He picked up the receiver and forced out a strained, “Yes.”

  The voice on the phone said in slightly accented English, “Your secretary certainly guards the access to you well. I apologize for skipping pleasantries and jumping right into business, but we have a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Certain documents that we discussed before are being offered for sale to your counterintelligence bureau. You will have to do something about it.”

  “How can I?”

  “Find a way. How can you not? You know the consequences. Good-bye.”

  “Tomms” was right: he knew the consequences. Disgrace, arrest, likely a bullet to the head. He could try to run, might be able to escape, go undercover. Some of the bank accounts were numbered; he’d have money. But he wouldn’t be able to get his family out of the country without raising suspicion. No, he’d have to find out what was going on and stop it.

  He pressed the speakerphone’s button again. “Mei, please call the minister and reschedule the lunch. Tell him that I am very sorry but there is an emergency that I have to deal with. Cancel all my calls and appointments for the rest of the day. Get General Tsao on the phone. Tell him I must see him urgently.”

  Friday, 4/22/2022, 11:24 a.m. PDT, Seattle

  SeaTac airport shuttle train swayed gently as it made its rounds between the terminals. Two flight attendants in bright blue uniforms giggled and winked at each other while slightly nodding in the direction of a man that towered over them a couple of feet away. He was Caucasian, in his early forties, his face partially covered by designer sunglasses. Louis Vuitton bag hanging off his shoulder, unbuttoned expensive raincoat revealing a tailored suit. His muscular build and well-cared-for face combined to project an image of a college athlete that had become a successful, self-assured businessman. One of the girls smiled at him in an “I know it’s just a short ride but why not flirt a bit” manner.

  Usually he would have smiled back, perhaps started a conversation, but not this time. He cursed himself for not going straight to the gates. Misdirection was generally a good rule, except when it was not. He’d made a show of loudly interacting with the agent to buy a ticket to Los Angeles, hoping to send his pursuers to the wrong terminal. But of course on a day when nothing went as planned, he got stuck in a slow security lane, and the two operatives that had followed him managed to get their tickets and catch up. Now they were in the same shuttle car, openly watching him.

  He couldn’t let them see where he was actually going. Even though they would not be able to get on his plane, they’d know the flight number, and with their network, someone would be waiting for him at the destination. So he got off at the N gates stop for the plane to Los Angeles, although the flight he was planning to take would board in just over an hour from one of the C gates. The two agents dutifully followed. They’d gotten through security, which meant they did not have weapons, and neither did he. He thought he could take care of one of them, but taking on two was unwise. He had to separate them.

  Time for an old trick. The man stopped, put his shoulder bag on a seat, opened it and moved the papers inside, while blocking the view with his body. He scanned the occupants of a half dozen tables in the bar near the LA
departure gate. A family with small kids, two elderly women, a man in his thirties absent-mindedly sipping a beer, a young woman swaying to music on her headphones, an overweight middle-aged man loudly talking on his phone, another younger man looking at some papers. He couldn’t linger; he had to appear to know exactly what he is doing. He moved forward to one of the tables.

  Friday, 4/22/2022, 12:52 p.m. PDT

  “Any idiot can face a crisis.

  It is day-to-day living that wears you out.”

  — attributed to Anton Chekhov

  Mount Rainier came into view. Whenever David flew to Seattle, he tried to get a seat on the right side of the plane going north and on the left side coming back, so he could see the mountain. The view reminded him of Maui, his favorite vacation spot, with Rainier rising from the clouds the way Haleakala volcano rose from the ocean.

  It was early afternoon on Friday and the flight was not busy. An Asian man across the aisle was arguing with a flight attendant over changing seats without permission, and David wondered why it was such a big deal. No one occupied the seat next to him. A woman David’s age in the aisle seat tried striking up a conversation. He politely mumbled a response but did not reciprocate and avoided eye contact. David wasn’t good at casual small talk, and the woman’s loud manner and even louder dress turned him off. The woman gave up, put on video glasses, and became engrossed in some show. David thought that he should look into getting a pair of video glasses too. The first generation of glasses-based video devices did not do well, but the devices were making a comeback. The new generation’s electronics were built into optical frames and hard to detect.

  David reclined his seat and picked up the US News and World Report magazine that a friendly stranger had given him in SeaTac airport. The magazine’s headline read “Ides of March: Et tu, California?” The editors must have been fairly confident in their readers knowing the history of Ancient Rome. Although, the picture below was quite descriptive: dark-blue-colored states from Minnesota to Virginia cut off diagonally from red-colored states in the south and center of the country, and another dividing line separated the light blue-colored Pacific Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington.

  David stuffed the magazine into the pocket of the seat in front of him; he didn’t feel like reading it. He did keep the green manila folder that the magazine was in, figuring he could use it if he ever got his cluttered home office organized. He wished that he and Thomas Mann, the man who’d given him the magazine, had exchanged e-mails or phone numbers. It was nice to experience a bit of unexpected travel camaraderie.

  David looked at his watch, which annoyingly made him view his pulse and blood pressure in addition to displaying the time. They got delayed by a few minutes because a couple of passengers were late for the flight, but he was still going to land at LAX before 3:00 p.m. There was no point in going to the office today. Nothing was urgent enough that it couldn’t wait until Monday. Just before takeoff, he’d called his friend Jim and arranged to meet at four on the public tennis courts in Santa Monica. Jim had been laid off during the “reduction in force”—RIF’d as they called it—and was glad to get out of the house rather than searching the Internet for non-existing jobs. Engineers and programmers could still find employment, but for someone with a liberal arts degree it was tough. They would hit a few balls, have an inexpensive dinner out, and then David would go home and have a weekend to himself.

  David stretched in his seat, flipped through the music on his phone, mostly a collection of hits from the 1960s to the ‘90s, turned on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” and closed his eyes. He never got into wearable gadgets, preferring an old-fashioned hand-held phone instead. David pretended that he was performing the song in front of thousands. He was so lost in this daydream that he missed the flight attendant offering drinks until she was two rows away. David was thirsty but figured he’d have to wait until they landed.

  He was listening to “Glory Days” for the second time when the plane reached Los Angeles. David grabbed his carry-on and made his exit with the rest of the passengers.

  He stopped by a restroom. While washing his hands, David looked in the mirror and fell into a habit that went back to his childhood: he would take his time studying himself in front of the mirror, as if to make sure that he actually existed and wasn’t just a ghost, a figment of his imagination. Mid-thirties, carefully combed hair, dressed in dark gray slacks, wrinkled bluish shirt, navy blue jacket. He was conscious of his slightly crooked nose that never looked right after that bicycle accident twenty-plus years ago. Secretly he’d often wondered if changing his appearance would help. Maybe adding tattoos, growing a beard, or wearing an earring. But none of that felt natural. He wished he could stand out by other means, like being an athlete or an intellectual or even a master of social situations.

  David marched across the terminal and the LAX loop to the parking structure where he’d left his car during his trip to Seattle. His 2009 Honda Accord was the first brand new car he bought when he got his job after college. It was starting to show its age. He hadn’t replaced it earlier because he and Judy had been saving money for the house, and now he couldn’t afford to. Most cars had jumped up in price following the 2019 crisis.

  The parking cashier said, “One hundred twenty dollars.” David pulled out his phone to pay, but the cashier silently pointed to a handwritten sign: “Phone payments not available, use CC or cash.” As David handed over his credit card, her phone rang. She answered, turned away from him, and started chatting and laughing.

  David said, “Excuse me, can I have my card and receipt?” She gave him an indifferent look and continued talking. David pulled a few times on his right ear, and then he caught himself and took a couple deep breaths. Finally, she returned his card and a printout, and he drove off.

  Traffic heading north on Sepulveda Boulevard was light. Eight-dollar gas had its advantages. People were walking, carpooling, bicycling, or just staying home. A gigantic billboard on the corner of Sepulveda and Manchester showed California Senate’s majority leader confidently looking south, ostensibly into a bright future. The sun was rising from the ocean behind him. David thought that unless some cataclysm took place, the sun would be setting, not rising. But whoever made the billboard did not bother with such details.

  He had just enough time to stop off at his place in Culver City, change clothes, and grab a tennis racket. But he needed to buy tennis balls. Didn’t want to burden unemployed Jim for that. David turned left on Manchester Avenue into a Big 5 parking lot. He moved with speed, but when he reached the cashier’s line, the one person ahead of him took forever. David looked at his watch—3:14. He was on the verge of running late. Finally, he paid $5.99, including the twenty percent luxury goods city tax, and hurried out of the store to his car.

  The parking lot was half full, but as luck would have it some idiot in a dark blue Lincoln Navigator was idling right behind his car. The Asian-looking driver wearing a beige jacket had his window down. His arm, with a huge chronometer watch on the wrist, reached out to adjust the side mirror.

  David went around the Honda and started to say, “Excuse me, sir, but would you mind—” He never had a chance to finish. He was grabbed from behind. The rear door of the Lincoln swung open, and he was unceremoniously thrown into the back seat. Whoever pushed him climbed in next, and David found himself squeezed between two bulky men.

  The door slammed closed, and the car sped out of the parking lot.

  Friday, 4/22/2022, 3:15 p.m. PDT

  The Lincoln raced west on Manchester. The man in the front passenger seat turned around and asked, “What did Julius tell you?”

  David was too stunned to do anything, except stammer out, “Wh-what?”

  This man was Asian as well, probably in his thirties, with combed-back hair, wearing a light black jacket, large aviator sunglasses, and a white T-shirt. For whatever reason, the voice sounded familiar. He patiently repeated, as if David were feeble-minded, “What did J
ulius tell you?”

  Something hard—perhaps a gun—pushed into David’s side, and the voice on his left growled, “Answer the man.” The voice had a Mexican accent, although in Los Angeles it didn’t seem like an accent at all. David started raising his arm to his right ear, but it was grabbed and pinned down. He stole a quick look to his right and saw a beefy guy with a shaved head. The guy wore a Lakers T-shirt, and some kind of a snake tattoo peeked out on his neck.

  David had never had a gun or even a knife pointed at him before. His heart was thrashing in his chest like a bird trapped in a house. Years ago, David had read Ryu Murakami’s In the Miso Soup, where a deranged psychopath murders Tokyo’s sex workers. The scene that stuck in his mind was that of a woman letting loose her bowels when being killed. For some reason that became one of his ultimate fears, and it plagued him now with the bizarre thought: I hope my bowels won’t let loose if they shoot me.

  The last three years had given David a number of shocks, but nothing like this. Drawing on coping methods he’d learned, he took a deep breath but couldn’t subdue the tremor in his voice when he finally replied, “This is some kind of mistake. I don’t know anyone called Julius.”

  Both men in front laughed. The one in the passenger seat sounded like a bad imitation of a straight-to-Blu Ray movie, saying, “We can do it the easy way or we can do it the hard way. We have your travel bag. It’s in the back of the car. We know you were talking to Julius in Seattle; we know he gave you papers.”

  The car made a hard right turn on Lincoln Boulevard and raced north, swerving between lanes. Traffic was still light. David’s mind continued to spin: They have me confused with someone else? Or is this about the Air Internet project? He did talk to engineers in Seattle; he did get some papers and some computer files. They were in his carry-on together with his computer. But he didn’t recall anyone named Julius at the meeting. Maybe he just missed the name. There were at least a dozen people there.